A precision-level driver with twenty-five years of stunt experience, Kym Washington (who doubles Whoopi Goldberg) has only been injured twice. “Flying a car, spinning a car, being in midair—there’s nothing like it. In stunts you do things you never thought you’d do. How often do you get the chance to do a reverse 180 in the middle of Wilshire Boulevard and crash into a police car?” It can be fun, but even experienced stunt performers are not immune to accidents or incompetence. On an episode of Rescue 911 (1989–1996), Kym drove an out-of-control car that was impossible to stop. “I drive into the median, the car goes up and airborne, sails over the oncoming traffic lanes. It’s supposed to land on a flatbed truck, a shot that was inserted later by dropping the car from a crane.” Kym’s car went over the traffic, but it landed nose first on the pavement, crunching the grille and hood. “It caused my torso to contract,” she said. “Right after it I was fine, but the next morning I couldn’t stand up. They stuck me in a neck brace for four months.” The car had not been properly weighted to keep the back end down. Kym said, “On every stunt you have to know what’s being done. You have to look out for yourself and never totally trust somebody else.”
By 2003, May Boss had fifty years of experience. Before retiring and concentrating on her golf game, she agreed to do one last gag—a car hit on the movie Hulk.2 “They sort of glossed through the stunt,” May said. “I wasn’t going to drive much, just be hit. They wanted someone my age because the director needed a close-up in the main cameras. They did not tell me I was going to be hit head-on and then back-ended.” May went to San Francisco for the big shoot, which was being directed by Ang Lee of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon fame. After she was introduced to Lee she went to wardrobe, where she was padded up for the hit. Back in the intersection, the assistant director said, “Now, May, we only have two cars. That means you only get two takes.” May wasn’t worried. She got into the car, and the director yelled, “Action!” May recalled that after she got moving, “I look up and see a cable car is tearing down the hill right at me. ‘Oh, man, I’m going to wear the engine in my lap.’ I did a header right into it, a real cruncher, and right after that a car rear-ends me—makes an accordion out of me and the car! When they eventually pried me out of the car, Mr. Lee ran up and hugged me. I’d never been hugged by a director, I didn’t expect it. He’s kind of reserved and such a big name. That was pretty nice.”
Donna Evans had eighteen years’ experience when she was injured doing an unusual car stunt on Gloria (1999). “I broke my nose on that show!” she said. The first shot called for her to swerve off the freeway. The second shot required her to jump the car down a “stairway” constructed of concrete railroad ties embedded in a sloping embankment. “Those stairs looked like they’d been built for the fifty-foot woman,” Donna said. A plywood ramp was placed at the top of the embankment, so Donna would have to come in fast to start bumping the car down those ties. At the last minute they decided to add an extra bump on the ramp to increase the lift of the car. “That’s when I asked for a shoulder harness,” she said, “because I’d be coming off the ramp with force. But they were losing the light. I agreed to go ahead” without the harness. She roared off the ramp and down the embankment, but the car got stuck in one of the railroad ties. Her face slammed into the steering wheel and she broke her nose, but that didn’t stop her from finishing the ride. “I got unstuck, kept going down those ties one after another, bang, bang, bang. The blood’s running down my nose, and I’m trying to suck it up because a bloody face might ruin the shot.” Somehow she got through it, but there was still one more shot to do. The crew told Donna to go to the hospital. “They were going to put in one of the guys,” she recalled. “I said, ‘I’ll finish the shot.’ They said, ‘You’re kidding.’ I told them I didn’t need my nose to drive.”
Like careening cars, motorcycle stunts have been winners since the silent movie era. In 1917 serial heroine Helen Gibson gunned her bike onto a train station platform, went full speed through an open boxcar, and then emerged onto the flatcar of a moving train.3 Few remember the fearless Helen Gibson today, but Debbie Evans, her sister Donna, and a few other stuntwomen have performed some amazing stunts on motorcycles.
LaFaye Baker is a five-foot-three whirlwind of high spirits and action. Her previous jobs included elementary school teacher and probation officer at a boys’ camp facility. One of the few African American stuntwomen, LaFaye cut a career out of the granite of physical danger and racial prejudice. She did falls, car work, and, her favorite, fire burns. Because she had showed the producers footage of her motorcycle stunts, she wound up in a 1996 music video, Ready or Not, doing a stunt that was billed as a “very easy motorcycle jump.” On a narrow uphill road in a canyon, she revved the high-powered Enduro dual sports motorcycle, hit a small hidden ramp to gain some height, landed back on the road, and sped off. She did it three times—no problem. On the fourth take she came up the hill and, without warning, met a wall of smoke—an addition no one had bothered to mention. “I couldn’t see the ramp. The only thing I recalled about the road ahead was a drop on the left and another on the right of Latigo canyon. I hit the ramp, but I was a little to the left. My chin hit the speedometer. I broke both jaws at the joints and fractured my mandible.” She was on the ground, still unaware she’d been hurt. “I could move my arms and legs, but they said blood was coming out of my mouth. I felt something was wrong with my teeth and screamed, ‘No more pretty teeth!’” The production was deep in the canyon. Fortunately, they had a helicopter on call, and LaFaye was airlifted to UCLA Hospital. She had a broken nose and facial nerve injuries, and it took ten hours of reconstructive surgery to reset her jaw. Today, she has three screws on each side of her face and a plate in her chin. But that didn’t stop her from getting back into the stunt game. “I was like a football player on the injured reserve. I had to reclaim my spot. I’d worked so hard to be a stunt person, I wasn’t about to give that up.”4
LaFaye Baker, founder of the Diamond in the Raw Action Icon Awards. (Courtesy of LaFaye Baker)
To newcomers, driving looks easy and fun, and they clamor to do it. But veterans like Shauna, LaFaye, Donna, and Tracy know better. “Oh, man, it’s so much pressure because a lot can go wrong,” Donna said. “If you’re not a proficient stunt driver, you can literally take out a crew.” Only through experience can stunt performers learn to adapt quickly to the inevitable last-minute changes. “You’re told it’s a simple kick,” Donna said, “but soon you’re in spike heels, you’re at this angle, your foot doesn’t really bend that way, but they want it to bend that way. Then they want you to hold a chain saw in one hand and grab the rabid dog with the other. They always complicate everything.”
“That’s what stunts are!” exclaimed Christine Baur, who started out with the crazy Baxley Bunch. “They tell us, ‘You’re driving the Ferrari, we only have one, you can’t wreck it, but when you get near that cliff, we want you to slide the car sideways and stop two inches from the edge.’” Enter the wardrobe department to add to the stuntwoman’s difficulties. In Hellhole (1985) Christine rode a 1200 BMW motorcycle, a big touring bike. The stunt coordinator, Sandy Gimpel, had hired six stuntmen and twelve stuntwomen—one of the few times there were more women than men. “I’m only five-four,” Christine said. “My legs are short, and I had a passenger on the back—a big gal, stuntwoman Laurie Creach. We were in Malibu, riding up hills on a twisty road. I made a big turn, came back down, stopped the bike for a beat, took off again. That was great until wardrobe put me in a tight miniskirt, fishnet stockings, and, I swear, four-inch high heels. That woman said to me, ‘Isn’t it going to be a fabulous look on the motorcycle? So Malibu!’ I stared at her. I couldn’t ride a motorcycle in four-inch heels. Naturally, I had to do it anyway. ‘So Malibu?’ Moron. It’s like, ‘Let’s put the actress in lingerie because she’ll look so hot when the car hits her!’ What is that about?”5
Hitting a pedestrian is a traditional car stunt that has been refined for decades,
but it comes down to this: see the Buick hit the pretty girl in the bikini. It’s a thrill with salacious undertones, and it’s a much bigger crowd-pleaser than hitting a guy in overalls. Kimberly Shannon Murphy—a tall, blue-eyed blonde who is a gymnast, acrobat, and dancer—did a radically different kind of car hit in the science fiction movie I Am Legend (2007).6 “To do stunts,” she said, “you need to be able to go with whatever happens.” Kimberly was playing a pedestrian on the street who is caught in a trap: “I’m in a full harness ready to do a ratchet and be tossed into the air. I lean back, the ratchet yanks me forward and up over the cars. But when the trap springs, it drops a big tarp like a bag over me. I can’t see anything. Special effects tested it with a dummy, but they wanted the movement of someone struggling inside the bag.” She knew she might get hurt, but she trusted the riggers; otherwise, she would never have done it. “I went over the hood of one car, was thrown into the windshield of a van, breaking the glass, and I couldn’t see what was coming at me before it happened. I just had to suck it up and hope for the best. I ended up swinging upside down on a ledge, blind, covered in the tarp.” She credits stunt coordinator Vic Armstrong and George Aguilar, who gave Kimberly her start—both of them part of the New York stunt community. “They’d been stuntmen, they know their stuff. They understand what you’re going through.”
When Kimberly did that wild car hit in I Am Legend she had only two years’ experience, but she had been a member of Anti-Gravity for longer than that. The celebrated New York group is composed of professional athletes who perform unique combinations of athletics, acrobatics, and aesthetics.7 Kimberly credits her family for her success: “I wouldn’t be nearly as tough had it not been for my dad, a marine in Vietnam. He had four daughters, and in his mind we were all marines. We grew up very hard core. Crying was not allowed. My mother taught me mental toughness.” Stuntwomen need that kind of toughness. “Stunt people don’t go to work, get our wardrobe, do the stunt, and go home,” Kimberly said. “It’s a twelve-hour day, and finally at some ungodly hour you throw yourself off the balcony. You need to be tough, you have to be prepared for anything.”
“To go against a car,” New York stuntman Vince Cupone said, “you’re going head-to-head with 2,000 pounds of metal. It doesn’t give too much. When a stunt guy does that, he’s well padded. But that’s just for the hit itself. Even if a woman without pads applies perfect technique going into a car and gets up on the hood right, she still has to deal with hitting that windshield, and then she’s going for a ride—up and over the windshield, spinning in the air, and she’s going to land where she’s going to land. At that point, technique doesn’t matter. You’re simply an object flying in the air. When you come back to the ground and you’re not padded, that’s the scary moment because the ground doesn’t give either.”8
A conventional pedestrian hit involves a stunt person and a car. But like everything else in stunts, each hit is different. When Nancy Thurston was hired to do a car hit on the TV series Nash Bridges (1996–2001), the first question she asked was, who’s driving the car? “You want someone with experience, who maintains the speed, someone like Dwayne McGee. The stunt coordinator, Merritt Yohnka, said I’d be doubling a counselor and I could pad up. That’s rare.” Nancy got to the set early so that she and the coordinator could look at the car, a newer Mustang without a hood ornament. Her previous car hits had been “accidents”—the driver slams on the brakes and the pedestrian spins off to the right, left, or front. “I asked [the coordinator] if he needed me to go off a certain way. He said, ‘Oh, no, you go over the whole car, it’s not stopping.’ . . . That stunt was a new one for me.” Nancy and stunt driver Dwayne McGee (Glory, Zoolander) practiced at different speeds and settled on fifteen miles per hour, even though she had once cracked a windshield doing a near miss at eleven miles an hour. In the scene in question, the counselor (Nancy) and a boy are walking across a pier. The bad guys in the car intend to run over the boy, but he jumps out of the way, and they hit the counselor instead. Dwayne came toward Nancy at a steady speed; she got up on the car, hit the windshield, went over the roof, and flipped off the back. “How you get off the car is different every time,” she said. “It depends on the driver holding his speed or if your clothes catch on something. On this one, having aerial awareness saved my life. When I came off the back end, my head was low, my feet were high. I was coming to the ground fast, but I rolled just right and landed. After they yell ‘Cut,’ they ask, ‘Are you okay?’ and you do a thumbs-up. Instead of jumping up, I lay there a moment, fully aware my gymnastics had saved me. Some things you don’t mind doing over—not car hits.”
“Basically, you stand in the road and get hit by the car,” Chrissy Weathersby said brightly. “I didn’t say that to my mom, and anyway, I didn’t know what to expect. Jeannie Epper gave me a bunch of pointers, but you can’t practice a car hit. You just do it.” Chrissy did her first car hit in The Brave One (2007), where she doubled Zoe Kravitz (playing Chloe), who had just been rescued from a pimp by Jodie Foster (playing Erica). As the two women walk down the middle of the street, the enraged pimp barrels after them in his car. Erica fires off a few shots and kills the driver; the car veers, Chloe looks back, and bam! The car hits her. Chrissy described a basic car hit: you “go up on the hood, hit the windshield, and the momentum throws you off the side or the back.” The secret, Chrissy said, is that “the car doesn’t really hit you, because at the last second you jump up on the hood. If you don’t, the car can take you under it. If you make your move too early you have egg on your face—it looks like you jumped on the car, not like it hit you.”9
The exuberant Chrissy Weathersby Ball. (Courtesy of Michael Helms)
That same year, Chrissy felt lucky to work on Grindhouse, writer-director Quentin Tarantino’s action ode to stunts of the 1970s consisting of two story-connected features titled Planet Terror and Death Proof. “He [Tarantino] understands it’s hard for women and even harder for minority women to get experience,” she said. He also understands stunts. In the films, Jeff Dashnaw, Terry Leonard, Buddy Joe Hooker, and others represent different generations of stuntmen who had designed or performed “old-school,” 1970s-style fights and car chases.10 Zoe Bell and Tracy Keehn Dashnaw serve up a remarkable stunt sequence in Death Proof, with Tracy using her considerable driving skills to protect Zoe, who is lashed to the hood of a white 1970 Dodge Challenger. “Zoe was vulnerable out there,” Tracy said, “especially when she was hanging onto the front grille or the windshield wipers. I felt very mother-hennish.” At times, Zoe’s struggles on the hood kept Tracy from “really seeing ahead as I raced down the road.” Chasing the Challenger is the mean, squirrelly Stuntman Mike (played by Kurt Russell, doubled by Hooker), who uses his “black charger,” a Chevy Nova, to assault the women’s car. He sideswipes it, rear-ends it—it’s all sport to him. But when he slams into the Challenger, Zoe flies off the hood and into a field. Then the fun’s over, but not for Tracy’s character, Kim. She shoots Stuntman Mike in the arm; he dives into his car and takes off. Roles reversed, the women chase after him with Zoe riding post, straddling the window. He runs them off the road, they run him off the road; they rear-end him and then T-bone him. His car flips over. They drag him and the steering wheel he’s clinging to out of the car and take turns punching him, but he remains standing until Zoe delivers the kick that finally takes him down. It’s brutal, but also very satisfying; their onscreen revenge is the perfect payback.11
Above: Buddy Joe Hooker, Quentin Tarantino, and Tracy Keehn Dashnaw. Below: The car chase sequence in Deathproof (2007). (Courtesy of Tracy Dashnaw)
The Grindhouse features, jammed with 1970s-style stunts, were released a decade after movie gags had become “new school” and stacked with visual effects. But some traditions never die. To figure out how a car sequence will go down, stunt drivers and coordinators still hunch over a table and play out the sequence with little toy cars. The toy cars were brought out for the giant production of The Matrix Reloaded (200
3). “There were seventy stunt guys and four or five girls,” said Annie Ellis, and she was one of them.12 She spent four months on a naval air base on Alameda Island, near Oakland, California, where they had built a long freeway set with eighteen-foot walls for the car sequences. On a film that big, planning and filming the action sequences is a huge undertaking that requires juggling thousands of different pieces. Annie began to make her maps. “I’m a continuity freak,” she said. “The second units kept asking me, ‘Scene 56A—what car was I in? Which way were we going?’ Let’s say a car is jumped off a bridge, goes with traffic, turns around and goes against traffic. Two months later on the freeway set no one remembers which car they were in. I did maps—color or make of car and the drivers’ initials. Basically, it’s about the color. If the white van is next to the hero car in a certain spot and weeks later they want the actors in the hero car to look back, a white van should be there. Soon script supervisors on both second units are calling about the cars in a scene. I went to my maps: ‘Red car here, blue car here, limo there.’ I was one of the stuntwomen; I wasn’t paid to do maps. It should be part of continuity or coordinating. It should be a whole new job.”
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