Stuntwomen

by Mollie Gregory

  Stacey Carino, making it work out. (Courtesy of Stacey Carino)

  The stuntwoman in the trunk of the Jag, Stacey Carino, had only two years’ experience at the time. She had been a competitive gymnast and a teacher in Cleveland, Ohio, until she took a ski trip with friends. She didn’t know how to ski, so she climbed to the top of the hill and then fell all the way down. One of her friends said she should go into stunts. Stacey looked it up on the Internet and found a stunt school in Seattle that operated in the summer—three weeks of spinning cars, climbing rocks, and learning how to fight and fall off horses. Then Stacey moved to Hollywood and got to hang from a crane.8 After that, she worked on a TV series that was a standout for women behind the camera: Crossing Jordan (2001–2007).

  Although the power of stunt coordinators stems from their ability to hire, they often have a lot to teach rookie stunt players. Mary Albee, a stunt coordinator and second-unit director since the 1990s, has employed many people, among them stuntwomen Stacey Carino and Luci Romberg on Crossing Jordan.9 Both said it was awesome to work for Mary. Luci was very tense and didn’t want to screw up. “It was one of my first jobs,” she said. “I had to get shot and fall down, but I was so anxious. Mary was making fun of me like, ‘Are you nervous?’ so then I learned to relax a little more.” One day, Stacey forgot to bring her stunt bag to the set. “Mary really drilled me,” she said. “She scared the crap out of me. We laugh about it now. I realized she was looking out for me to make sure I was prepared.” Luci was amazed at how few female stunt coordinators there are. “Jill Brown and Mary are the only ones I’ve worked for—and that’s crazy!”

  Luci Romberg’s stunt work led her to the art of freerunning. (Courtesy of Brady Romberg)

  Whether that number will increase is anyone’s guess. Will Luci or Stacey become coordinators? Maybe—if they want it enough. Luci certainly showed her determination at an early age. As a three-year-old, she decided to climb a neighbor’s fence. She was halfway up when the woman next door rushed over to her and cried, “Little girl, let me help you!” Luci said, “I don’t need help. I’m tough.” Her parents were college athletes, and she grew up playing sports with her brother and sister. Luci was a champion gymnast at Texas Women’s University when a former teammate, stuntwoman Natascha Hopkins, talked her into trying stunt work.10 On January 1, 2005, Luci’s mother drove her from their home in Colorado to California. Her first real stunt was doubling an elderly woman as a tractor-trailer going thirty miles an hour jackknifed. Luci and stuntwoman Jennifer Caputo did a barrel roll under the semi. “We hugged the ground, rolled together, and, yes, we did it five times.”11

  Female coordinators may become more common in the future, but hardened stuntwomen are skeptical. One with twenty years’ experience snapped, “Someday I’m going to coordinate a show and hire thirty-eight girls and two guys.” Thirty-year veteran Annie Ellis said, “We want a fair shake at stunt-coordinating. Women are camera operators, grips, producers—women, women, women! They’ve smashed through that glass ceiling. But in stunts we have not.”12

  Mary Albee, Jill Brown, Shauna Duggins, and Melissa Stubbs have regularly been hired to stunt-coordinate or direct the second unit on TV series and films. Since the late 1980s, it is estimated that only about twenty to thirty other women have stunt-coordinated. The reasons are both simple and complicated.

  In 2008 SAG listed 8,079 stunt people; only 1,499—less than 19 percent—were female. It’s still an old boys’ network in which talented stuntmen are mentored and trained; talented stuntwomen usually are not. Thus, the typical stunt coordinator is a six-foot-one, forty-year-old guy, not a five-foot-six blonde. In addition, the longtime hiring system of the stunt business remains intact. Hiring often involves a series of reciprocal favors. For example, thirty people are needed for a nondescript (ND) scene of a scuffle; the coordinator confers with the director and hires the stuntmen he trusts, who are often the same guys he owes favors to. The power to hire determines the distribution of work; it is the currency of the business. When a hundred women, not four or ten, have the power to hire, to reciprocate, to be part of the chain, then the players in the system will begin to change. “Because we don’t coordinate many shows,” one stuntwoman said, “we’re not hiring and we can’t say, ‘I’ll hire you on this movie, because you hired me on that one.’ This industry is unique. You’re the boss today; tomorrow you work for the person you hired yesterday. When only a few women are the boss, it’s hard to return that favor.”

  A lot of the reciprocal hiring by coordinators involves the large category of stunts called nondescript, which would seem to encourage or even require the use of female and minority stunt performers. But a few years ago, a stuntwoman and a friend were in New Orleans when they came across a film crew preparing to shoot a chase scene of a bus driving erratically and sliding down a street. She was delighted to see about thirty old friends on the public bus, stuntmen and coordinators she knew in Los Angeles. But her friend was shocked because, in his experience, most people riding buses in New Orleans are not white men. “There were two black guys, an Asian guy, and a couple of minority women,” she said, “but it didn’t represent a true picture of bus riders in a southern city.”

  One stuntwoman analogized the progress in civil rights—or the lack thereof—to a pendulum, swinging from bad to better to worse. She thinks sex discrimination and racism are “at an all-time high, and I have thirty years in this business.”

  “The Screen Actors Guild could do more to help,” said Annie Ellis. “Our SAG contract with the producers states that people in a crowd must reflect ‘the American Scene,’ a variety of men and women, African Americans, Asians, Hispanics. Then, if you look up ‘minority groups,’ which one leads the list? Women! I’ve tried to get ND work, but the coordinators said there’s nothing for me because ‘it’s an army thing.’ Well, it happens that a lot of women are in the army! They’re in the police force! There are women in SWAT! Coordinators should be forced to hire more women and minorities.”

  Resistance to hiring women for ND work is still an active attitude. When a scene in Alias needed ten guards, Shauna Duggins had to fight the same battle that “great stunt coordinators like Gregg Smrz and Jeff Habberstad had fought because most directors, producers, and coordinators still want the guards to be men. For a scene without guards, like [one with] six ND club-goers, we’d ask for four women and two men. In other crowd scenes, I’d say, ‘I want to ratchet the girl and she’ll hit the deck in her little skirt and high heels!’ When a girl takes a hit in a crowd scene, it has impact.” But, she added, a lot of men don’t like to see a woman take a hit like that.

  To explain the resistance to giving ND work to women, just follow the money. “Nondescript work really supports the men,” one stuntwoman said. In 2013 the SAG minimum daily rate was $859. On a two-day job for three people to stage a fight on a broken-down truck, each will earn $1,718, plus health and pension benefits. The work brings other advantages, too. Rookies gain experience from every stunt they do, and they can learn from the older stunt performers they work with. In addition, they can make contacts, which are crucial to freelancers—and all stunt people are freelancers. To stunt players, hanging out all day in an ND crowd and getting to know the stunt coordinators is as important as schmoozing at dinner parties is to writers and directors. That’s where the deals are made.

  The crowd work on the film Titanic (1997) was an exception. “That was the first and last time I worked with many ND stuntwomen,” said high-fall expert Nancy Thurston. “Women from the Czech Republic, Hungary, England, Spain, South Africa, and the U.S. were jumping off the side of the ship. One great movie for women on ND work—out of how many?”

  Jadie David nailed the consequences when most nondescript work goes to men: “They’re the ones who will get the most experience, and that experience is what qualifies them for the next job.” Because ND scenes often involve people in a car or a crowd, it’s very hard to identify anyone by gender—it’s just a mass of
bodies in a huge blur of action. “That’s how people get away with paint-downs and men doubling women,” Jadie said. In her career, Jadie has dealt with all the roadblocks to equal employment, and once she joined the fray, there was no way to stop. “If you didn’t participate you were going to be left out anyway, so you had to jump in, and it wasn’t all about you getting more work, it was about helping make things better for everybody.”

  Like sexism in the stunt business, race is still an issue with muscle. In 1991, of the more than 4,500 male stunt performers, 4,016 were Caucasian and 277 were African American.13 In 1994 Jadie David and stuntman Marvin Walters cofounded the Alliance for Stunt Performers of Color, a subcommittee of SAG’s Equal Employment Opportunity Committee. The group addressed the “underemployment problems” of all ethnic minorities. It also compiled statistics showing that some studios and independent production companies had been “engaging in unfair hiring practices . . . [such as] men stunt doubling for women.”14

  Five years later, in September 1999, Walters charged film and television producers with a continuing “pattern of discrimination.” He said, “When you have paint-downs, you’re taking jobs away from African Americans.” The alliance wanted SAG to “face the issue” and enforce its nondiscrimination clause. That summer, SAG members filed a dozen complaints about paint-downs. “Underemployment among minority stunt workers is a ‘huge issue,’ said SAG spokeswoman Katherine Moore. ‘Only about 6% of stunt work last year [1998] went to African Americans, compared to about 80% for whites.’”15 For women of color, who faced gender discrimination as well, the impact was much greater.16

  Stuntwoman Chrissy Weathersby Ball hadn’t experienced many race-related problems—until she moved to Los Angeles in 2000. “It is humbling and very hard to watch someone painted down in front of you,” she said. “Sometimes it is necessary, but usually it isn’t. That’s the golden question we all struggle with.” At first, she agonized about it. Should she protest? “I did my job, but it was very frustrating.” Her ninety-five-year-old grandmother, who had lived through segregation, told Chrissy to focus on her work; the rest would evolve and change. “My grandmother was the first African American public school teacher to get a contract in the state of Colorado. I appreciate my opportunities more because many were not there for my grandmother.”17

  Along with race and gender discrimination comes the issue of sexual harassment. “If more women coordinated shows,” Lynn Salvatori said, “men wouldn’t have the power to get away with that, and women wouldn’t have to depend on those guys for jobs.” Sexual harassment is not as rampant today as it once was, but it’s still an issue. Not long ago, Lynn heard from some women who “were very upset about a guy who insisted they try on harnesses. He made them strip to their underwear, saying, ‘I have to see how it fits under the clothes for wirework.’ They don’t officially report it because anyone who talks of sexual harassment can get blackballed.”

  Happily, women’s attitudes—and some men’s—have changed. “Now it’s about you handling it yourself,” said Sandra Lee Gimpel, a stunt coordinator and second-unit director since 1980. “It’s the way you conduct yourself, the way you look at them. They back down fast. I told a guy, ‘You don’t want to mess with me.’ You want that message to get around because guys tell other guys, ‘Don’t mess with her. She’s a fourth-degree black belt.’ And I can take them down.”

  One reason for the scarcity of female stunt coordinators has nothing to do with the system: mothers with small children can’t work eighteen-hour days on location for three weeks. Donna Evans, winner of two World Stunt Awards, has young children.18 “The challenge of stunt-coordinating sparks my creative side in a different way than stunts,” Donna said. She coordinated the TV series Freaks and Geeks (1999) because “a brilliant producer thought the moms [of the teenaged actors] would feel better if a mom set up the stunts for the kids and made sure no one was hurt. Stunt-coordinating is time-intensive; they always give you rewrites at the last minute, you’re away a lot, and I had to make a choice. My career is on hold until my children are older. By then, the window of opportunity may have closed—but maybe not!”

  Women everywhere balance motherhood and work, but most jobs don’t require them to jump off a building lit up like a torch. After performing a stunt like that, stuntwomen go home and make dinner. For Nicole Callender, balancing her roles as stuntwoman, wife, and mom is like “moving mountains on a daily basis to make it all happen. When I started to work I was amazed at the attitudes about wives and mothers. There’s a taboo about refusing a job just because you had a baby, and there are assumptions, like, ‘You had a baby so you’re not coming back.’ I was on Strangers with Candy [2005] eight weeks after a C-section. Nor do they want to hear, ‘Let me check with my babysitter.’ I know it’s better for women today. I also think you have to make it that way.”

  Nicole Callender, looking forward to making more changes. (Courtesy of Nicole Callender)

  “Women need both careers and family,” Debbie Evans said. “When I got married, the guys said, ‘Marriage and this business don’t work.’ I said, ‘Yeah, maybe for you.’ My husband and I have been married twenty-five years. Then they said, ‘When you have kids, you won’t work anymore.’ I had kids, and guess what? I still worked! As I get older I guess I’ll hear my career’s over. We’ll see about that. I love passing those barriers they set.”19

  Zeal is both admirable and necessary when the obstacles are erected by those in your own camp. One long-standing issue is that women often don’t hire other women. That subject came up in a 1993 interview of stuntwomen Jeannie Epper and Linda Fetters-Howard. “Look at Thelma and Louise,” Jeannie demanded. “That was about women, but they had a male stunt coordinator.” Linda cited A League of Their Own (1992), directed by Penny Marshall. “You had, basically, an entire female cast,” she said. “She [Marshall] hired a guy.”20 Jeannie and Julie Johnson had tried to convince female producers and directors to hire stuntwomen as coordinators. “We thought they’d look at our body of work,” Jeannie said, but “that didn’t happen a lot. Of course, women directors don’t get that much work. They’re just as forgotten as we are.”21 The numbers bear that out. Dr. Martha Lauzen’s research into women’s employment in the TV industry revealed that in 2013–2014, women directed 13 percent of the TV shows (up from 12 percent in 2012), produced 43 percent (up from 38 percent), wrote 25 percent (down from 34 percent), and edited 17 percent (up from 16 percent); the percentage of female cinematographers decreased from 3 percent to 2 percent. Overall, women’s employment in these positions has been virtually unchanged since 1997. According to Lauzen, “44% of television programs employed 4 or fewer women in the roles considered. Only 1% of programs employed 4 or fewer men.”22

  By 2005, stuntwoman Lynn Salvatori had coordinated fifteen movies and TV series. “At that time, Shonda Rhimes ran Grey’s Anatomy,” Lynn said, and “I’d worked with the woman who line-produced.” The show needed someone to coordinate a stunt with a motorcycle. “‘Do you ride motorcycles?’” they asked Lynn. “I said, ‘Every weekend.’ I sent in my credits. They hired a guy to coordinate, and he hired me for the stunt because the production wouldn’t pay for two people. I coordinated myself, I rode the motorcycle, but he [got credit for] the show. That happens at lot.” From 1999 to 2005, Lynn tracked who was hired to stunt-coordinate shows about women. Of the 263 films and 35 TV shows on her list, only 22 women had stunt-coordinated. For example, Callie Khouri wrote the screenplay and directed Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood (2002); there were female executive producers, and the movie had a cast of women. Yet “they hired a man to stunt-coordinate,” Lynn said. “On that show, a top stuntwoman, Donna Evans, doubled Sandra Bullock, and she could easily have handled the coordinating.”23