Stuntwomen Page 10
In the summer of 1975 Kathleen Nolan ran for president of the Screen Actors Guild on an independent ticket—the nominating committee had refused to recommend her. Even her strong supporter Charlton Heston had told her, “President is not a job for a woman.”43 After a noisy and malicious campaign, Nolan won by a landslide on November 3, 1975. “Irish Street Fighter Wanted SAG to Be Part of the Cultural Revolution,” one headline cheered.44
A year later at the Democratic National Convention, a chance meeting revealed the crux of the women’s struggle in Hollywood, and a remedy. Nolan was backstage in the green room with Mayor Richard J. Daly of Chicago, a few other politicos, and lobbyist Tom Boggs (brother of another female pioneer, journalist Cokie Roberts). In walks Barbara Jordan, the first African American congresswoman from the Deep South. “A young woman was offering coffee or tea,” Nolan recalled, “and Barbara Jordan said in her incredible voice, ‘I will do that. I will pour my own.’ Then she explained. ‘They say we’re making tremendous progress. We will never make the progress we are after until things change for her.’ She put her arm around me. I was blown away because she’s this powerful presence. Mayor Daly asked, ‘What did you mean by that?’ Jordan said, ‘She represents the women that appear on screen, and we are what we are perceived to be. Until things change for her, they will not change immeasurably in the United States for any of us.’ She was talking about the influence of film and television,” Nolan said. She was pointing out “that roles and attitudes on screen have to change before anything else will change. That stuck with me, ‘We are what we are perceived to be.’”45
In the volatile 1970s actresses depicted women who took charge of their own lives. Audiences had not seen that for a long, long time. One example was Black Belt Jones, which offered a surprising and comic view of these changing perceptions. When four badass guys in a pool hall ridicule and threaten Sydney, played by Gloria Hendry, she wipes them out and leaves them on the floor.46 According to Gloria, director Robert Clouse came up with the idea for another pivotal scene that wasn’t in the script—what she called “the bit about the dishes.”47 In that scene, Sydney’s boyfriend (played by Jim Kelly) gets a call from a friend in trouble. He takes out his gun, ready to go help, and Sydney expects to accompany him, as usual. He’s on the phone and doesn’t see her checking her revolver, but her presence distracts him. He waves an arm and orders Sydney, “Do those dishes or something.” She gives him a look—click!—do those dishes? She takes aim and fires a few shots into the china on the kitchen counter. Shattered bowls and plates fly into the air. “They’re done,” she says. The message: when demeaned, don’t do the dishes—blast them off the drain board.
These hilarious scenes blew away the image of acceptance and obedience. Action roles in the 1970s changed the view of women onscreen and off, and they had a cumulative effect. We are what we are perceived to be.
6
The Women’s Movement
and Female Action Heroes
Who’s getting screwed the most?
—Dave Robb
Film critic Molly Haskell’s influential book From Reverence to Rape examined “good girls and bad girls”—the enduring, conflicting, damaging images of women. “The big lie perpetuated on Western society is the idea of women’s inferiority,” she wrote, “a lie so deeply ingrained in our social behavior that merely to recognize it is to risk unraveling the entire fabric of civilization.” She indicted the movie industry, which “was dedicated for the most part to reinforcing the lie.” She wondered “how women will break through barriers of a commercial cinema more truly monolithic in its sexism than it ever was in the old days of Hollywood.”1 Stuntwomen were a microcosm of that larger issue. How could they prevail against the challenges they faced? Fortunately, recognition was the watchword of the 1970s.
The social and political tidal wave set off by the modern women’s movement roared ashore in the 1970s. It swept up women’s expectations and ambitions, influenced entertainment, and changed social attitudes. It reinforced and broadened the civil rights laws established in the 1960s—the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, Title VII to prohibit employment discrimination, and Title IX to level the playing field for girls in sports. On the tennis court, the “Battle of the Sexes” slammed the message home in September 1973 when Billie Jean King beat Bobby Riggs in a “man’s” game.
To the traditional soap operas and female-oriented daytime programming, TV networks quickly added slates of “women’s programs” in prime time. TV executives recognized that women constituted a wider, more diverse audience than previously supposed, and this promised new viewers and bigger advertising revenues. The first programs for women were “soft” shows and comedies such as Honey West (1965–1966), That Girl (1966–1971), and The Mary Tyler Moore Show (1970–1977), featuring more independent heroines.2 Soon the networks whipped out female-driven action series: Police Woman (1974–1978), Get Christie Love (1974–1975), Wonder Woman (1976–1979), Charlie’s Angels (1976–1981), The Bionic Woman (1976–1978), Private Benjamin (1981–1983), and Cagney & Lacey (1982–1988). Jeannie Epper, Julie Ann Johnson, and newcomer Rita Egleston doubled the leads in Wonder Woman, Charlie’s Angels, and The Bionic Woman. “Today, people forget that era,” Jeannie Epper said. “There were many women’s roles in television, and that meant more stuntwomen worked.” Most of them didn’t become major stunt performers, “but they were all important,” said Rita Egleston. “They contributed to the range of what women did. The Stuntwomen’s Association had about fifteen members, and some of the new girls had different skills like circus trapeze work. If they were good, if they hung in, put up with the bullshit, had a good attitude and some people skills, they had a better chance in the ’70s.”3
Audiences never seem to tire of watching women in jeopardy. Weekly episodes of these new TV series, studded with beautiful, take-charge action heroines, mirrored the old silent movie serials. Shows of the 1970s owed much of their popularity to the talents of stuntwomen, who were the descendants of daring serial actresses from decades ago. Now, adolescent girls were glued to their TV sets, engrossed in the exhilarating world of female action stars.
When twenty-two-year-old Rita Egleston saw stuntwomen being interviewed on local television, her life took a new direction. “One of them was Jeannie Epper, and that’s when I decided,” she said. Rita had grown up in Los Angeles and was very good at sports. Her mother, a teacher raising three children alone, had no money to spare, so Rita was fortunate to win a scholarship to Occidental College, where she played intercollegiate sports. Later, while taking a judo class, “I was suddenly thrown, found myself airborne, and knew that I loved flying,” she recalled. “It was a brief moment in the air—but, oh, what a cool feeling.” In the future, she would be in the air quite a lot. A serene, five-foot-eight blonde, Rita didn’t know anyone in the movie business until she found a stunt school run by Paul Stader, the swimmer who had worked with Lila Finn on The Hurricane in 1937. Now a respected stunt coordinator, Stader taught Rita what she needed to know to work in front of the camera. “Fighting is one thing,” she said, “stunt fighting is another. Back then, it was mainly for guys, but Paul taught us how to throw a punch and make it look real.” She learned that sports and stunts are quite different. Jeannie Epper agreed: “A stunt performer has to adapt to constantly changing situations and surroundings,” she said, but “as an athlete, you practice the same routines a million times, which does not directly translate into being able to react quickly to changes on set. Stunt performers are challenged every day—different scenes, people, vehicles, or circumstances.”4
Rita worked the graveyard shift at a Seven-Eleven and hustled stunt jobs during the day. Stader recommended her to double Linda Lovelace, who had starred in the infamous X-rated Deep Throat. The new film was tamer—a comedy titled Linda Lovelace for President (1975). The stunt involved jumping from an energetically trotting burro into the open door of a moving bus, a mini-version of Polly Burson’s leap from a galloping h
orse onto a train. Rita’s next job was more demanding: doubling for star Lindsay Wagner on the new TV series The Bionic Woman. “Jeannie Epper doubled Lindsay on the two-part sequence of Six Million Dollar Man,” Rita said, “the show that introduced The Bionic Woman, which was a midseason replacement series. . . . After Six Million wrapped its season, their crew switched to Bionic Woman, various people were replaced, and I came on the show. Doubling superheroes was mainly running and jumping,” Rita remembered, “leaping tall buildings in a single bound—falling frontward and backward.” Rita, Jeannie, and others performed these free falls twenty years before safety concerns and new technology led to the use of wires and harnesses.
Rita Egleston. (Courtesy of Jonathan Exley)
Lindsay Wagner and her Bionic Woman stunt double Rita Egleston. (Courtesy of James Marchese)
A backward high fall is against every instinct. “The next time you’re at the top of a staircase,” Julie Johnson said, “turn around, hold onto something, look back down the staircase and think of falling backwards. It takes a lot of mental concentration. Mental tells the physical what to do.”5 To double superheroes, Jeannie and Rita had to perfect the backward high fall. In the editing room, the footage was then played backward to achieve the illusion of the superhero leaping from the ground to the top of a building. Rita would stand at the top of a structure, her back to the edge, and jump off, looking up as she went down. To perfect the illusion, Rita had to get her takeoff and landing just right, which wasn’t easy. “I fell into boxes or airbags,” she said, “but going backwards you want to land feet first. If you pull your feet up too soon, the camera will show that. The falling time is only a few seconds before landing, so I kept my feet down until they actually touched. Then I sat backwards, which puts you into a roll and the safety pad takes all that energy. If you stick it, land on your feet, you run a good chance of messing up your back.” The stunt was tricky, and Rita was new at it. She had to know where she was in the air, but she couldn’t look down. Soon her body automatically knew how long she would fall and when she would land. The fall was usually about thirty-five to forty feet; at sixty-five feet, the illusion didn’t work. “As I stepped backwards from a sixty-five-foot height,” Rita explained, “I traveled out from the building until gravity took over and pulled me straight down. When that fall was reversed in editing, it looked like I’d jumped straight up and then magically traveled over to where I landed.” Rita doubled Wagner until the series ended in 1978.
Stuntwomen faced other challenges besides staged fights and free falls. “I spent three years in that Wonder Woman costume not eating,” Jeannie Epper said, laughing. She never liked being in the air, but she mastered the backward and forward jumps and did them for years. Jeannie’s leaps and landings for shapely Lynda Carter as Wonder Woman had to be done with “grace and ease.” Jeannie couldn’t just jump over a fence; she had to do it “with style, do it with heart, have a good attitude, never settle for the mediocre—and that’s what separated the girls from the women!”6 “When you’re working with actors,” she said, “you have to really watch them because they’re not trained, but some of them are really athletic. Lynda Carter did a lot of the fight work herself, but today she wouldn’t be allowed to do as much. Sometimes we take our wonderful job for granted. When I look back at that Wonder Woman costume, and I have for several decades now, I know it was an unbelievable experience to wear that costume. Kids wanted to touch my lasso or my wrists or the bracelets. They didn’t care if you’re Jeannie Epper or Lynda Carter. To them, you are Wonder Woman.”7
The purpose of using stunt doubles is to protect the precious stars from injury and to protect the studios from costly production delays. A double is selected for her resemblance to an actress, based mainly on height and body type. If the star is five-foot-eight and the stuntwoman is five-foot-one, that might not work, but it did in Thoroughly Modern Millie (1967), when acrobat Paula Dell doubled the notably taller Carol Channing. “When you’re going through the air,” Paula explained, “your height doesn’t matter!”
Doubles are also chosen for their particular skills. For example, if the lead character is a race-car driver, the double must have driving skills; if the lead has to ski in just one scene, a second double is hired to hit the slopes. Doubling requires acting ability, observation, and an instinctive knack for imitating how another person moves. When she was working on Wonder Woman, Jeannie Epper noticed that when Lynda Carter ran, “her arms kinda flail up a little bit. I had to train myself to run like a girl.”8 Jeannie, who also doubled Kate Jackson and Tanya Roberts in Charlie’s Angels and Linda Evans in Dynasty, said a good stuntwoman “will stay on the set to study the physical style and emotional motivation of the actress she will be doubling, just as a good actress will study the stunt for which she will receive credit.”9
Jadie David, who regularly doubled Pam Grier, noted that Rita Egleston “walked, talked, and moved just like Lindsay Wagner. She studied her, took on her characteristics. You must do that. I was amazed how Rita could be Lindsay.”10 Julie Johnson doubled Doris Day in Caprice (1967), and the first time she put on a gray suit and blonde wig she amazed even herself when she looked in a mirror. “I was so surprised! I looked just like her, I moved like her. You become the person you double. It’s eerie.”
A constant obstacle for stuntwomen was men’s urge to protect them. That relic from the past cast doubt on women’s capabilities and judgment as professionals, restricted the stunts they were allowed to do, and limited their income. The notion of protecting a woman can be commendable, but not when it’s a ruse to replace her. “It had nothing to do with protection,” May Boss stated plainly. “These guys wanted to do the stunt.” Sometimes even the male stars stepped in as protectors. For McLintock! (1963), starring John Wayne and Maureen O’Hara, Polly Burson was hired to do a stair fall for actress Yvonne De Carlo. “I’d just done one the day before,” Polly snapped, “no carpeting, badly constructed stairs, and I skinned myself from rear end to teakettle. On this fall the steps were carpeted, a piece of cake. But Duke [Wayne] wouldn’t let me do it! I asked why, because he was going to cost me money. He said, ‘Somebody’s foot might kick your breast or your neck. You’re not doing it.’ He really felt he was protecting me.”
Paula Dell in the air, doubling Carol Channing in Thoroughly Modern Millie (1967). Ted Delrayne is at the bottom, Russ Saunders is catching, Ray Saunders is spotting, and Darryl Ferges is on the hit board. (Courtesy of Russ Saunders)
Newcomer Jean Coulter got a job on the TV miniseries Captains and Kings (1976). One scene took place on a magnificent staircase. “I was wearing some dinky outfit,” Jean said, “and I had to fall down about forty hardwood stairs with no pads on my legs or elbows. The actor, Vic Morrow, was supposed to hit me at the top of the stairs, but he didn’t want to. He was a fine actor and a nice guy. When you’re standing on a staircase it’s hard to start a fall if you’re not pushed, because you can’t look like you’re going for it. Vic couldn’t bring himself to hit me. I kept telling him it was okay. Finally he hit me!” she cheered. Afterward, Jean suffered from the lack of padding. “I had huge lumps on my legs and elbows,” she said. “They looked like an egg was under my black and blue skin.”11 In the 1970s actresses’ alluring costumes tended to be tight and skimpy, so even a small pad would show, and Jean’s scanty costume simply didn’t allow it.
In contrast, stuntmen are rarely asked to take hits in their underwear. Fully clothed, they wear pads underneath, and no one knows the difference. An amusing and telling example occurs in the opening credits of Hooper (1978): a stuntman gets ready to go to work; he puts on form-fitting pads that cover practically every inch of his body and walks out wearing a jacket, shirt, pants, boots, and helmet. But the wardrobe department dresses women “in shorts or negligees, not to mention high heels,” Julie Johnson said. “Then they tell us to fall down a flight of stairs. Even when a scene calls for long pants they’re usually too tight to allow padding. We’re made more susceptible
to bruises, rug burns and splinters than the boys are.” When the costume consists of a short skirt and a tank top and the gag “require[s] the body to be mashed and mangled, I’d say ‘shoot the rehearsal,’” Julie advised. “That’s your most spontaneous take, and on a lot of stunts I don’t want to do a second take unless I have to. You don’t want to do stair falls twice, you don’t want to do car hits twice.”12
Stuntmen would agree. “There isn’t a stuntman in the world that would look forward to the work stuntwomen do, because they go down flights of stairs in a bathing suit,” said New York stuntman Vince Cupone. “The men pad up, padding protects you a lot, but nine times out of ten women don’t have that luxury. I know several girls that have done car hits in tight dresses with nothing protecting them from that car except technique. Not only do they work in spite of their wardrobe, they’re in a completely macho field where they have to constantly prove themselves,” he said. “They don’t have girl-to-girl communication because most stunt coordinators are not women. Stuntmen and coordinators understand as best as we can what the women face. A good coordinator will try to protect them, but at the end of the day, they’re not padded. They’re not protected.”13
Julie’s wardrobe was not the only problem on the TV series Starsky & Hutch (1975–1979). Producers, directors, and crews had fresh ideas and eagerly churned out the action, but they often didn’t realize that even simple stunts could be dangerous. Julie’s stunt involved a “near miss”—a car was supposed to almost run her down. “The director kept saying the near miss didn’t look close enough,” she said. “His camera was in the wrong place. To see how close the car was to me, the camera had to face the car, but he had it on the other side.” Julie suggested that when the car got close, she could turn and dive onto the hood. “The director agreed, but he still wanted the driver to come in really close. He was a new director. They were all nervous and hyper, trying to make a name. As I dove for the hood of the car, the right front fender tagged my leg, the impact spun me off the hood and set me on my butt on the ground. They got the shot, but my leg started to swell up, and by the time they drove me to a hospital, it was the size of a telephone pole. I had a huge hematoma on my shin. The doctor said, ‘Lady, I don’t know what your legs are made of, but this leg should be shattered in a million pieces.’” Ignoring the grim compliment, Julie went home on crutches.