Doing a few shows doesn’t make a person a stunt coordinator, but considering the size of the rock they had to roll uphill to do the work at all, the following women on Lynn’s list deserve recognition: Mary Albee, Joni Avery, LaFaye Baker, Christine Anne Baur, Liza Coleman, Kerri Cullen, Shauna Duggins, Jeannie Epper, Donna Evans, Glory Fioramonti, Cindy Folkerson, Sandra Lee Gimpel, Marian Green, Jennifer Hewitt, Sonia Jo Izzolena, Donna Keegan, Alison Reid, Debbie Lynn Ross, Lynn Salvatori, Jodi Stecyk, Melissa Stubbs, Betty Thomas.24
Hollywood bestows both mighty and modest awards. The Academy still declines to award an Oscar for stunt work, but other new entries in the twenty-first century do recognize stunts—the World Stunt Awards, the Emmys, and the SAG Awards. Another celebration of stuntwomen came about because the women proposing it just wouldn’t quit.
Three years after LaFaye Baker was seriously injured while doing a motorcycle stunt, she learned that Martha Coolidge was preparing to direct Introducing Dorothy Dandridge (1999), starring Halle Berry. “They were looking for women in key positions,” LaFaye said, and “second-unit director Eddie Watkins recommended me.”25 LaFaye had co-coordinated before, and she got the job—making her the first African American woman to stunt-coordinate a show of that size. The HBO special won several awards, including the Emmy and Golden Globe. LaFaye did coordinate other shows, but “it’s hard,” she said, “for women to get that job. I learned networking and establishing relationships are crucial to success as a stunt coordinator.”26
In 2005 LaFaye and stuntwoman Jadie David cofounded Diamond in the Raw, a nonprofit foundation to educate at-risk teens about professional opportunities in the entertainment industry. Then, in 2008, Jadie and LaFaye formed the Celebrity & Stuntwomen’s Awards “to recognize unsung heroes—women behind the scenes in the industry.” Stunt coordinator Mary Albee received its Special Achievement Award in 2009.27 Her acceptance speech went directly to the heart of the matter: “First I would like to recognize the stunt coordinators that came before me—Donna Garrett, Jeannie Epper, Julie Ann Johnson, and Sandy Gimpel—and I want to congratulate the stunt coordinators working today. For the rest of you talented women, I pose a challenging question—why is it that on shows I still hear these words—‘I’ve never worked with a female stunt coordinator before.’ Get to work, ladies.” A year earlier Albee had written:
At least it’s no longer a shock to see a woman as the stunt coordinator. It’s more acceptable in the corporate world now for women to be in positions of power, and I believe that’s translating to the film industry. Kids coming out of college are used to working with women, minorities and multinationals without prejudice, without the limitations of the past. Directors today may be just out of film school and they don’t have a problem working with women. That change didn’t come from within the industry, it’s from the way they grew up and what our attitudes are nationally. In the movies or on TV today women don’t have to be heroines, they can be heroes.28
Mary Albee, Julie Ann Johnson, and Jadie David at the Diamond in the Raw Awards, 2010. (Courtesy of Julie Ann Johnson)
It is true that times have changed and will continue to change, but women as stunt coordinators—that’s still a chasm to be crossed.
17
Controversy and Progress
for Stuntwomen
The more fearless you are in what you do, the fewer regrets you’ll have.
—Jadie David
For a few weeks in 2000, it felt as if the 1970s had returned. Many of the stuntwomen on the set of the remake of Planet of the Apes were too young to recognize the resemblance, but they knew what had happened was wrong.1 A blast from the “bad old days” came thudding into the present when a stuntman was assigned to double a woman. “That [movie] was a bad experience from the get-go,” one stuntwoman said. “People got injured right and left, like broken ankles, or wranglers doing stunt work when they’re not supposed to, things like that. Then a stunt coordinator replaced a woman with a man, and when someone complained, he threatened to fire all the stuntwomen.”
To double Helena Bonham Carter, who played the ape Ari, a number of terrific stuntwomen were interviewed: Simone Boisseree, Eliza Coleman, Leigh Hennessy, Gloria O’Brien, Eileen Weisinger, and Darlene Ava Williams.2 Body type, size, and weight were important, as was the structure of the double’s face because of the facial prosthetics involved. Two doubles were selected: Simone Boisseree and Eileen Weisinger. Simone, a horsewoman, gymnast, and all-around stuntwoman, doubled Carter in the riding scenes; Eileen is also a versatile stuntwoman but doesn’t do horse work. The other stuntwomen could double the actress as needed.
In a battle sequence between the apes and the humans, Ari was supposed to be thrown into the air, and Simone was called in to do the stunt. However, when she arrived at the makeup trailer, she was told that the young stuntman sitting in her chair would be replacing her because “he did tumbling.” Other women on the set “did tumbling,” and they were concerned about how Simone had been treated. One was trampoline champion Leigh Hennessy, who had jumped ninety-five feet off a building in Charlie’s Angels (2000). “Simone had been called to do a stunt, hadn’t been alerted she wouldn’t do it, and basically she’d been dismissed. Looking back, there are lots of ways to make a situation controversial, and this small issue turned into a big issue.” Additional facts about the stunt surfaced later in the day. “It turned out to be just a ratchet!” Leigh said, amazed. “Simone could do it, I could do it, other stuntwomen there could do it. We were gymnasts, we were in the original interviews, and a ratchet is a fairly simple stunt. We say you’re ‘going for a ride.’ The challenge for the stunt person is whether the rigging has been done properly. You’re in a harness attached to a cable and on a cue you’re jerked off your feet into the air.” This ratchet stunt was a little different because when the big ape tossed Ari into the air, she was supposed to do a flip. “You have to have skill,” Leigh said, and “it helps to have acrobatic experience, but you don’t need to be a college-level champion gymnast.”
“At the end of the day, the coordinator has to get the shot,” another stuntwoman cautioned. “He’ll use a woman, but not if he has to dial down the stunt.” On the set, news spread about the ratchet that “women couldn’t handle.” A couple of women in the crew said the stunt didn’t look very hard and they didn’t understand why a guy was doing it. “I told them the coordinator just decided to use the new kid instead of Simone,” Leigh said, “but that was against SAG rules—it wasn’t right to put a man in arbitrarily for a woman.” Leigh had worked for the stunt coordinator, Charles Croughwell, on Deep Impact (1998) and Inspector Gadget (1999).3 “I got along well with him,” she said. “Maybe he thought Simone couldn’t do a ratchet because she was more of a horsewoman.”
By evening, it had become a politically hot issue. Leigh called Bonnie Happy, president of the United Stuntwomen’s Association (USA). Bonnie contacted Jadie David, a charter member of USA who was now working for SAG as a stunt and safety representative. Both women had been in the front lines of the battle over men doubling women. Jadie suggested that Bonnie get in touch with Sandy Kincaid, a SAG national director with experience in interpreting and enforcing contracts; she also worked closely with the Stunt and Safety Committee.4 Bonnie called Sandy not to make a complaint but merely to clarify SAG’s current policy. That led to a rumor that the stuntwomen were “complaining” to the guild.
“There were five of us,” Leigh said. “One stuntwoman was dating the assistant coordinator and one was dating the stunt double for Mark Wahlberg, so those two girls were safe. But three of us were not safe and essentially we were fired.” Stunt people are not fired in the usual way; they just don’t get called back to do another stunt. For those working on a daily contract, theoretically the contract terminates at the end of the week; a stunt person on a weekly contract usually works to the end of the production. “In this case, we didn’t get a new call time to come in to do a stunt,” one stuntwoman said. “Day after day
you keep asking, ‘When do I come back,’ and finally you realize you’re not on the show anymore. That’s what happened to some of us on Planet of the Apes.” No one had filed a complaint with SAG, even though a rookie stuntman had replaced a seasoned stuntwoman.
Leigh Hennessy was a member of the Stunt and Safety Committee, and she eventually did call the guild. She was referred to Anne-Marie Johnson and Gretchen Koerner, active board members at the time. “They are strong advocates for women’s and minority rights,” Leigh said. “They’re the women I want to be when I grow up.”5 Since this was 2000, not 1975, SAG responded promptly (the guild was also just a few weeks away from negotiating its next theatrical contracts). Mary Albee, Jeannie Epper, Jadie David, and others formed an ad hoc committee to work with Johnson and Koerner to turn what had been merely a policy into a rule. For that significant change, USA inducted Jadie David and Anne-Marie Johnson as honorary members. Essentially, the rule states that when trying to find a double for a minority actress, for example, a stunt coordinator has to call SAG, which checks its database to find a stuntwoman of the same minority as the actress. If one can’t be found, then the job can go to a woman of a different minority race or, if necessary, to a Caucasian woman; only after exhausting those options can a man double a woman.
“Get the wigs off men” had been a slogan, a battle, and a goal since the 1970s. It had taken SAG and dozens of stuntwomen thirty years to override the entrenched custom of men doubling women. The controversy on Planet of the Apes had some positive effects. It exposed weaknesses in the SAG policy, brought about change, and made it known that a man doubling a woman was no longer acceptable.
Three years later, a stuntwoman who had fought in the trenches walked onto Stage 27 at Sony Pictures. Dan Bradley, stunt coordinator and second-unit director of Spider-Man 2 (2004), had hired Julie Ann Johnson to test flying sequences and double Rosemary Harris, who was playing Peter Parker’s aunt.6 “She was delightful,” Julie said, “and it was simply wonderful for me to work again.”
Julie had been suspended from hot-air balloons, balconies, and roofs; she had leaped through breakaway windows. But, as it turned out, the most dangerous thing she’d done was complain about unsafe stunt vehicles and widespread drug use in the industry. When Spelling-Goldberg Productions failed to rehire Julie in 1980 to coordinate the fifth season of the TV series Charlie’s Angels, she sued. A jury awarded her $1.1 million in 1987, but Spelling-Goldberg appealed. Five years later, in June 1992, the court of appeals ruled against her, based on a technicality that had changed the statute of limitations in wrongful-termination cases. That little bomb had been buried in another case, Foley v. Interactive Data Corporation. “No one realized in reading Foley that it was going to destroy Julie’s case on appeal,” said her attorney Richard Grey.7 “Never in thirty-five years of practicing law have I seen anything like that happen,” he claimed. “It was outrageous, unbelievable. I tell this story often to prospective new clients—don’t expect justice out of the judicial system because bad things can happen beyond your control. The result for Julie was unbelievably bad, worse than Murphy’s Law.”
Julie survived, but not as a stuntwoman. She was blacklisted from 1985 to 1998, when she finally began to work again—in Mystery Men (1999) and The Animal (2001). Then in 2003 Julie was on Sony Pictures’ Stage 27 doing a type of stunt that was completely new to her—wirework. She was in a harness, suspended by cables, about forty feet above the studio floor. “That doesn’t sound very high,” she said, “but when you’re hanging by these thin cables with no safety net and looking down at that hard floor, it’s high!” By that time, computers were largely in control of these elaborate, sometimes dangerous stunts. A keystroke on a computer keyboard could fly Julie up and down with amazing speed or sail her around the three-story building on the huge set. In one scene, Julie found herself on the ledge of the building. Above her, a statue of an angel was perched under the roof. “They called the facing of that building the ‘war wall,’” she said. “I was waiting for the test, and suddenly I was catapulted about fifty feet straight up.” She swung past and barely missed the angel, then jerked violently to a stop. “It took the wind right out of me. Scary as hell. Someone at the computers below said, ‘Oops, sorry, are you okay?’ I gave thumbs-up, but my rib cage felt pulverized. Port-a-pits had been left on the floor. I was glad to see the pads, but a fall would still kill me if I didn’t hit them just right.”
When Julie declined to do a forty-foot fall, stuntwoman Leigh Hennessy was hired. In the end, the fall was canceled, “but I got to hang out with Julie Johnson!” Leigh said. “It was quite an honor. She’d been one of the founders of the first stuntwomen’s association. I’d heard about her lawsuit and how much she’d suffered to pave the way for younger women like me. She stunt-coordinated when almost no women had. I’m coordinating, too, but so few women do.” Despite coming from different generations—Julie had started in the business in 1965, Leigh in 1995—they had much in common. Both had helped revise SAG contract language about men doubling women; both had worked on Charlie’s Angels—Julie on the TV show, Leigh on the movie remake; Leigh is a high-fall artist (Teaching Mrs. Tingle [1999]), and Julie’s high work included straddling the wing of a biplane and the skid of a helicopter high above the San Fernando Valley in The Cat from Outer Space (1978). Both of their fathers were great influences. Leigh’s dad was her sports coach and trainer; Julie’s was an athletics coach who taught her all about sports. Most of all, they shared the bond of their unique profession—once a stuntwoman, always a stuntwoman.8
“It’s like we’re in a sports league. We’re in the same NFL,” Sophia Crawford said of the connection. “We can meet, talk, look at each other, and know exactly what that person is going through. We share the same conflicts, challenges, pressures of work, age, wardrobe—all the different factors we experience as women in stunts. We’re part of an elite group, a small, tough group, and it unifies us.”
They were certainly unified when Jeannie Epper became the first woman to receive the Taurus World Stunt Lifetime Achievement Award in 2007. On the stage that night, stuntwomen were recognized collectively and publicly. These days, stuntwomen win Taurus and SAG Awards, but Mary Albee observed, the awards “may not be about recognition as much as they’re about perceptions, such as the sense that some women coordinators do actually exist.”
Besides awards, acknowledgment can take other forms that are just as meaningful. Before Stacey Carino dangled from a crane on Alias in 2005, she had been a teacher with a normal lifestyle. When she told her parents she was moving to Hollywood, where she didn’t have a place to live and didn’t know anyone, “that did not appeal to them,” she recalled. “They’d heard about Hollywood and drugs and rock and roll. My dad, [who worked] in engineering sales, was not in favor of my move at all.” About three years later, her father was having lunch with some clients, and one of them mentioned that his son was in Hollywood. “My dad said his daughter was there doing stunts. A laptop was on the table. The client pulled my name up on the Internet Movie Database and said, ‘My gosh, she’s worked on this show, that show, and my favorite, My Name Is Earl.’ My dad was astonished. He didn’t know the IMDb website; he just knew I was here doing something weird—stunts. He called me right after that lunch, telling me what they’d said, like, ‘Oh my gosh, it’s so cool.’ I could tell he was finally the proud dad.”9
In the movie business, dressing rooms symbolize status, respect, and recognition. At best, the stunt people are usually relegated to one or two small rooms, and sometimes they are downright insulting. But War of the Worlds (2005) was different.10 When Stephanie Finochio (a participant in the “vicious” Rescue Me fight) and the other stunt players converged on the film’s various locations, they were asked if they wanted separate trailers or one big room. “To be asked what we’d like to have—that doesn’t happen often,” she said. “We began joking about a big room with a big-screen TV, a couple couches, a card table, and everyone kept adding to it
because being asked what we wanted was so rare it was funny. The next day we were led to a big room with a big-screen TV, couches, a card table, a dartboard, a Play Station, plus separate dressing rooms for the men and the women! That was a first for me and for most of us. Big actors get big trailers. We’re the stunt people. We’re important to a movie too, but this time we were treated that way. And on that show we got to hang out with stunt people from all over the world!”
Affirmation can also come from a surprising or kind gesture. “Few leading women are five feet tall and black,” said New York stuntwoman Nicole Callender, “so I don’t do a lot of doubling, but I can double kids, and that’s not open to my five-foot-ten stuntwomen friends.” War of the Worlds was on location in Newark, New Jersey, where Nicole and another stuntwoman from Los Angeles were waiting on a street. A short distance away, Steven Spielberg was talking to an assistant director. “The LA stuntwoman was very talented and amusing,” Nicole said. “She’d brought a camera on the set, which is not permitted. We shouldn’t take pictures of the stars, but we can take pictures of our own work. She handed me the camera, glanced back, then faced me and held out her arm. ‘Line it up so I look like I’ve got my arm around Steven Spielberg.’ I laughed, started lining it up, and the next thing I knew, Mr. Spielberg was walking toward us. I froze. I got ready to be fired. He stopped in front of us. ‘I’m sorry I messed up your picture. Here, let me help you.’ He put his arm around the girl and let me take the picture. For a moment I wanted to hand the camera to someone else and get in the picture, but I didn’t want to ruin it for her. When would she have this chance again?”
“Being acknowledged can travel through generations,” Jadie David said. “Women had no voice and now they do.” After performing stunts for twenty-four years, Jadie badly injured her back and had to rethink her options. In the 1990s, after working for the Screen Actors Guild, she supervised safety programs at Paramount Pictures. “My mother’s family was from Texas,” she said, “and her uncle, born in the early 1900s, went through really hard times as an African American. In his old age he played dominoes with friends, and one day he told them, ‘Can you imagine what I went through as a kid? And now look at my grand-niece—she can actually shut down a movie if she has to.’ For him, that was awesome. I felt special that a member of my family was proud to have come that far. Families know the past, but recognizing what occurs in the present is part of the achievement—when they can see the distance traveled. What we do has consequences to the past and future generations.”
Stuntwomen Page 28