Stuntwomen Read online

  STUNTWOMEN

  STUNTWOMEN

  The Untold

  Hollywood Story

  MOLLIE GREGORY

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  Copyright © 2015 by Mollie Gregory

  Published by the University Press of Kentucky

  Scholarly publisher for the Commonwealth, serving Bellarmine University, Berea College, Centre College of Kentucky, Eastern Kentucky University, The Filson Historical Society, Georgetown College, Kentucky Historical Society, Kentucky State University, Morehead State University, Murray State University, Northern Kentucky University, Transylvania University, University of Kentucky, University of Louisville, and Western Kentucky University.

  All rights reserved.

  Editorial and Sales Offices: The University Press of Kentucky

  663 South Limestone Street, Lexington, Kentucky 40508-4008

  www.kentuckypress.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Gregory, Mollie.

  Stuntwomen : the untold Hollywood story / Mollie Gregory.

  pages cm. — (Screen classics)

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-0-8131-6622-3 (hardcover : alk. paper) —

  ISBN 978-0-8131-6624-7 (pdf) — ISBN 978-0-8131-6623-0 (epub)

  1. Women stunt performers. 2. Women in the motion picture industry—California—Los Angeles—History. I. Title.

  PN1995.9.W6G744 2015

  791.43'6522—dc23

  2015025673

  This book is printed on acid-free paper meeting the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence in Paper for Printed Library Materials.

  Manufactured in the United States of America.

  Member of the Association of

  American University Presses

  Character gives us qualities, but it is in the actions—what we do—

  that we are happy or the reverse. . . .

  All human happiness and misery take the form of action.

  —Aristotle

  Contents

  Preface

  Introduction: Opening Shots

  I. The First Stuntwomen: 1910–1960

  1. The Rise and Fall of Female Stunt Players in Silent Movies

  2. Blackface and Wigs: Men Take over Stunts

  3. Television: More Stunt Work—If You Can Get It

  II. Taking on the System and Fighting for Change:

  1960s–1980s

  4. Stunt Performers Organize

  5. Social Turmoil Brings New Opportunities for Women and Minorities

  6. The Women’s Movement and Female Action Heroes

  7. Disaster Movies and Disastrous Stunts

  8. Stunt Safety and Gender Discrimination

  9. Danger, Drugs, and Death

  10. Breaking the Code of Silence

  11. Women’s New Attitudes and Ambitions

  12. Julie Johnson’s Day in Court

  III. New Professionals in Better Times: 1990s–2000s

  13. High Falls

  14. Stunt Fights

  15. Car Stunts

  IV. The Digital Age: 1995–2010

  16. Computer-Generated Imagery and the Future of Stunt Work

  17. Controversy and Progress for Stuntwomen

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Selected Bibliography

  Index

  Preface

  Before I wrote this book, I didn’t realize that being athletic is as much a gift as having a musician’s perfect pitch. Whether athletes are male or female, that physical talent shapes and leads them, and they ignore it at their peril. I learned that many stunt performers in movies past and present were champion gymnasts, acrobats, riders, or swimmers. I learned that dealing with physical challenges is a skill and that taking risks builds self-confidence. A great stunt person is an athlete and an actor who has a quality known as heart—a blend of courage and endurance. They have guts and grace.

  The story of stuntwomen is a classic come-from-behind, risk-it-all saga. Their arena is one that few know—a community of gifted athletes whose work makes movies thrilling. Like all stunt performers, stuntwomen risk injury or even death, but over the years, they have also faced institutional discrimination, unequal pay, and sexual harassment. The professional environment has improved, but the ultimate praise for a stuntwoman is still the same: “She hits the ground like a man!”

  I never expected to write this history. Then, stuntwoman Julie Ann Johnson asked me to write a book about her life in the business and to include other stuntwomen in it. As she extolled the joys, sorrows, professional pride, prejudices, and hair-raising stunts, I was hooked. I began to interview stuntwomen, and I realized the combination of action, women, and the movies was a largely unexplored topic that was more than just enlightening. Eventually, a book about a few stuntwomen became an action-packed history of the profession.

  Stunt communities are found wherever movies are made—Canada, Australia, China, France, Great Britain, India, and Japan. But this book is about the American film industry, located primarily in New York and Los Angeles. I interviewed sixty-five stuntwomen and a few stuntmen. The oldest worked in the 1930s; the youngest began in 2005. My questions covered their personal backgrounds; their best stunts (hilarious or scary) and how they were done; professional conflicts, such as race or sex discrimination; and what they’d like to change about the stunt business. Occasionally they went off the record, but 98 percent of the information they provided was available for publication (with a few exceptions for clarity, quotations from these interviews are not cited in the notes).

  These interviews chronicle a history of individuals in a unique line of work. At some point, I became fascinated by the attitudes that shape our beliefs, expectations, and legends, all of which are reflected by the stunt community. Since the advent of motion pictures at the end of the nineteenth century, audiences expected to see men jump from moving cars or drive wagons over cliffs. Back then, no one imagined that women could do the same—and more. When women performed such stunts onscreen, they confounded all expectations of proper feminine behavior. Their exploits opened a new view of the modern woman and her astonishing possibilities. In fact, stuntwomen have been a source of inspiration since The Perils of Pauline in 1914. They’ve traded punches in knockdown brawls, crashed biplanes through barns, and raced to the rescue in fast cars.

  Stuntwomen begins in the era of silent films. Before World War I, athletic actresses played famous action heroines in serial dramas that brought audiences back to theaters week after week. In those years, women also wrote, directed, edited, and produced movies. Then, almost overnight, movies became big business. Men pushed in for the profits, and except for popular actresses such as Mary Pickford, women were eased out—and that included stuntwomen. Donning wigs and dresses, stuntmen took over their jobs. Ignored and marginalized, a few stuntwomen (maybe ten or fifteen) performed from the 1930s into the 1960s. But men dictated what these women were and were not allowed to do. The struggles of this pioneering generation of stuntwomen went on for years.

  Then, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the movie business changed dramatically, and so did America. Activism by women and minorities increased, and a public clamor against discrimination and injustice exploded. Boosted by that dynamic decade, young women’s attitudes began to change: they had aspirations, not just hopes; their mothers often worked outside the home; some of their fathers supported their unusual career choices; and more stuntwomen became members of the Screen Actors Guild. By the 2000s, stuntwomen had won
some recognition and respect. However, they still face daunting challenges, such as a fair distribution of stunt work and the consequences of digital visual effects.

  Stunts are an engine of the movies. Onscreen, a stunt—called a gag—seems like a spontaneous physical feat, but it is actually a carefully planned set of actions, and that’s the art of it. In the early 1800s a gag was defined as a joke, an invention, or a hoax; then it became a theatrical term; and by the 1920s, a gag was a daring or showy feat that involved skill or cunning. Another meaning of a gag was a false story told for gain, which is, in a way, what stunts are. They create an exciting action that appears to be more spontaneous or dodgy than it actually is. And when a stunt person dons a costume—a disguise—to surreptitiously replace or “double” an actor, the gag enhances the movie star’s reputation.

  What is a stunt? In the interviews, veteran stunt performers offered vivid examples, but a stunt is more than just a daring act; it’s a significant contribution to the story as a whole. A stunt has character, conflict, and resolution. It can be a woman swimming in the ocean when a shark attacks or hanging from a hot-air balloon 200 feet in the air or leaping over a 9-foot wall to freedom. Is a rider on a horse galloping through a meadow a stunt? It is when the meadow is full of gopher holes and it’s a challenge just to stay in the saddle. Only an expert can make that look easy. These represent actual stunts in movies, carefully planned and performed by stuntwomen with the skills required to achieve great moments on film.

  Are stunts important? They are more than that. They are fundamental to the mystery, excitement, and thrills provided by action movies, and stuntwomen help create that experience. John Steinbeck once wrote that entertainment is one of the major endeavors of life. “That’s the business of Hollywood,” a friend of mine (a vice president of business affairs at Warner Bros.) added. “We work here to bring delight. We’re the delight makers, and humans have a need for it. It’s not as stringent as our need for food, but it’s an absolutely necessary part of life. It’s the roses of the bread and roses.”

  So, in that vein, I believe the story of stuntwomen is central to the magic of the movies. Their firsthand accounts of trials, victories, determination, and excellence are an indispensable part of the history of entertainment, just as their successes against the odds are part of the history of women. Stuntwomen are the roses.

  Introduction

  Opening Shots

  For the first fifty years of movies, stunt performers secretly doubled the stars in action movies. In the late 1960s they began to come out of the shadows and receive credit for their work, but many more years passed before stunt players were deemed eligible for industry awards.1 Their status changed in May 2001 when billionaire Dietrich Mateschitz, CEO of the company that makes Red Bull energy drink, came up with the idea to honor stunt performers and funded the Taurus World Stunt Awards. “He also wanted to create a foundation for injured stunt people,” said Jeannie Epper, who had been doing stunts since she was a child. “That’s what hooked me. I agreed to serve on the board.”

  The categories of the Taurus World Stunt Awards included best coordinator, best fire work, best specialty stunt, best high work, and best overall stunt, but each year, men won most of the awards. Most women were still denied access to positions of power such as stunt coordinator and second-unit director. That incensed stuntwomen, including Epper, who understood their outrage. “But being on the board,” she said, “I knew we had to strike at the right time.” That time finally came in May 2007 when sixty-six-year-old Epper, a five-foot-eight-inch blonde, became the first woman to win the Taurus World Stunt Lifetime Achievement Award. The live outdoor show, staged on the Paramount lot, was surrounded by tall movie sets designed for stunts—running, falling, jumping, rappelling. Jeannie was introduced as “the mother of all stuntwomen, a groundbreaker, a legend, and ‘our Wonder Woman’”—a role she had doubled for years. Film clips showed her in action: riding, slugging it out, being clobbered with a bar stool. In a shot of her as Wonder Woman, she seemed to leap from the ground to the nose of a plane—her back straight, arms up, right leg raised in a graceful arabesque. In fact, it was a perfectly executed backward high fall; the footage had been reversed in editing. As the clips played, Jeannie, in voice-over, said that, as a woman, she had felt “a lot of opposition, but my dad told me if you commit and do your homework you will make it in this business.” The lights went up, and from both wings of the stage a procession of gowned, stately women emerged until there were almost a hundred of them. Respected stuntwoman Debbie Evans stepped out and handed Jeannie the glistening twenty-six-pound, thirty-one-inch Taurus statuette. “I’ve always been proud to be a stuntwoman,” Jeannie told the audience, “but never more than right now.” After trying to juggle the award and her notes, she turned to Debbie and said, “Here, take this thing. My Wonder Woman days are kind of over.” Evans, a motorcycle champ who’d been teased in school for her muscle-bound arms, hefted the award in one hand as if it weighed next to nothing.

  Many different kinds of stuntwoman were there that night, including Julie Ann Johnson, an impatient firebrand who was not onstage with the other women; she was applauding in the audience. Both Jeannie and Julie had performed in hit TV action shows in the 1970s, and Julie had been one of the first women to serve as stunt coordinator of a major TV show. Both women were raised in Southern California, and both their dads had encouraged their athletic abilities. As kids, they were a handful: Jeannie jumped from trees to bulldog her sister—knocking her off her horse. Julie leaped from the garage roof and broke her wrists. They had a lot in common, but they were quite different, too. An only child of divorced parents, Julie lived with her mother and stepfather, who never turned down a cocktail. Jeannie grew up with five brothers and sisters in a close-knit stunt family. Julie knew nothing about stunts and had no support system, but she excelled in many sports. Thanks to one of those skills, she aced her first stunt. Could she leap over an ironing board? Easy—she’d been a long-jump champ in high school.

  Julie’s career started when she doubled Doris Day in Caprice (1966). The production manager said, “You’ll be hanging from a rope ladder with a stuntman about forty feet in the air.” At the location, Mammoth Mountain, stuntman Freddy Waugh assured her the stunt would be “a piece of cake.” Wardrobe outfitted her in ski attire and boots, and she was taken to a snowy area where the rotor blades of a hovering helicopter beat at the stiff wind. The sliding door of the helicopter had been lashed open; a rope ladder bolted to the cabin wall trailed from it, flapping against the struts. An assistant director yelled, “The copter will come down, you’ll get on the ladder, and the copter will go up to about 400 feet.”

  “Four hundred? I was told forty!”

  “Nah!” he shouted. “Those office guys don’t know.”

  This was Julie’s welcome to the world of stunts, where the players quickly learn to expect the unexpected.

  Freddy hooked a leg on one rung of the ladder, then attached himself to it with a spring-loaded carabiner lock. He reached for Julie, who flung a leg through the lowest rung and grabbed the ladder’s side rail. Someone fastened a pair of skis to her boots. “We’ll go up about twenty feet,” Freddy said. He was cabled to the ladder; Julie was not. “He better hold on to me,” she muttered. When her boots and skis left the ground, the sudden weight pulled at her, and she gripped the ladder. They swiftly rose to 100 feet. The draft of the helicopter rocked the ladder, and Julie felt herself slipping. “I can’t hold on!” Freddy shouted at the pilot. “Down! Down!” But the pilot couldn’t hear him. Finally, they were back on the ground, and a special effects guy rushed out. “I can’t hold her,” Freddy said. “Hook her up.” When it was done, she straddled the bottom rung, Freddy put his arm around her, the camera rolled, and the helicopter lifted off again. Tied by cables, they both felt more secure as the copter swooped up and down and circled 400 feet over the mountain. Back on the ground, a relieved Julie flopped flat on her back in the snow. But if they
had to go again, she’d jump at the chance. She was exhilarated.

  Forty years later, at the 2007 Taurus World Stunt Awards, Julie congratulated Jeannie. Over the years, the two had had their differences, but their friendship endured. “I was so happy for Jeannie the night she won, happy for all of us,” Julie said. “We’d really gone a distance since we did Wonder Woman and Charlie’s Angels. We did more than just survive. I hope stuntwomen today will preserve the power we acquired for them, and pass it on.”

  Quietly, and mostly unrecognized, American stuntwomen have been passing it on for a century—since silent movies began. Back then, women were considered too delicate to survive the hazards of the voting booth, but in the movies they dodged speeding cars and dived eighty feet off bridges. Those images were inspiring. They gave women ideas and opened up possibilities. Decades passed, and their early exploits were overlooked and forgotten, but the uncommon courage of these stunt pioneers established an essential place in movies for daring women with exceptional physical skills. How had that come about? That amazing story began only because actresses wanted to be in motion pictures.

  I

  The First Stuntwomen

  1910–1960

  1

  The Rise and Fall

  of Female Stunt Players

  in Silent Movies

  I used to shoot at her feet with real bullets. Didn’t bother her none.

  —George Marshall

  Helen Gibson’s strong, handsome face and dark hair gave her the look of someone who would try anything. In 1915, while in her early twenties, she was doubling for the star of the hit serial The Hazards of Helen. In one stunt she was supposed to leap from the roof of the station to the top of a moving train. Years later, she called it her most dangerous stunt. “The distance between the station and the train was accurately measured,” she said, and she had practiced the jump several times while the train was standing still. But for the shot, the train would be picking up speed for about a quarter of a mile. “I was not nervous as it approached and I leaped without hesitation,” she recalled. She landed safely, but the rocking motion of the train rolled her straight toward the end of the car. Just before being pitched off, “I caught hold of an air vent and hung on.” Then, with a sense of the dramatic, Gibson let her body “dangle over the edge to increase the effect on the screen.”1 She brought the same strength and flair to scores of other action scenes.