Stuntwomen Page 8
In these years, two other changes affected all stunt performers: the end of secrecy surrounding the use of stunt doubles, and the advent of stunt coordinators. Steve McQueen and other stars broke the old studio-enforced code of silence. Loren Janes, who doubled McQueen for twenty-three years, recalled: “I’d be on the set wearing a long coat so no one saw I was doubling him until I took it off to do the stunt—all because he told everyone he did the stunts. After Nevada Smith [1966] he said to me, ‘You tell everyone you do it and that’s it.’ Roydon Clark doubled James Garner for years and around that time Garner told everyone, ‘I wouldn’t get on a chair without my stuntman.’” And so, stunt players began to be credited for their work.
Meanwhile, the position of ramrod or gaffer became known as stunt coordinator. “Directors, assistant directors, and others hired stuntmen,” Loren said, “but in the 1950s that job started being called the ‘ramrod.’ A director hired a stuntman as the ramrod and asked him, ‘Who do we hire for this?’ The ramrod told him and the director hired the men. In the mid-1960s, a ramrod became a ‘stunt coordinator.’ He managed the stunts and hired the stunt people. The first time I was called a stunt coordinator was on The Sand Pebbles in 1966. We were in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and China for eleven months. The director, Robert Wise, told me what he wanted. I found the stuntmen to double the stars and worked out the stunts we needed. Back then, coordinating wasn’t as complex as it is now.” Nor was it as powerful. Today, stunt coordinators break down the script, design and budget the stunts, and hire the players. It is a multifaceted job that requires managerial skills, creativity, stunt experience, and knowledge of cameras and special effects, as well as a balance of action and people skills. A coordinator must make the stunts exciting while ensuring the safety of cast, crew, and stunt players.
Around this time, the great Polly Burson said yes to a dreadful movie. She was fifty years old, she needed the money, and she’d been hitting the ground for twenty-three years.27 She had coordinated the female roles in Westward the Women, but that one job meant nothing; the position of stunt coordinator was not open to her or any other woman. “I think it was Julie Johnson’s first big action picture—as big as it was,” Polly said scathingly. Neither Polly nor Julie knew the film had ever been released. “I believed the scuttlebutt,” Polly said, which was “that it was [financed with] Mafia money from Florida and they didn’t take out any taxes. My checks were always good, but some of the crew’s—those checks were hot!” The low-budget movie starred James Caan, Stephanie Powers, Sammy Davis Jr., and Aldo Ray. Finally released as Gone with the West, it is, by any standard, a terrible movie.28
The “somersault thing” in the Polly Burson–Julie Johnson fight scene. (Courtesy of Polly Burson)
Unofficially, Polly and Julie coordinated a great stunt sequence in that terrible movie. They called it “the fight to die for.” It takes stunt knowledge to create a fight that tells a story through physical actions, and it takes talented stuntwomen to execute the stunt so that every punch looks real. That’s the essence of a gag—it’s a trick, and it’s an art. “The fight started in a bedroom above a saloon,” Polly said, “went out the door, down the stairs, into the bar, onto tables, through a window, down on the street, and ended up in a water trough. I have a photo—I’d thrown Julie over in a somersault thing and you can’t tell who’s who except I’ve got my legs and arms in the air.”
In a room above a saloon, Aldo Ray’s character is lounging in bed with Little Moon (doubled by Julie) when his jealous girlfriend (doubled by Polly) bursts in and literally flies at her rival.29 “That’s when Polly hit her knee on the side of the bed,” Julie said. “I heard the impact.” (Polly’s knees had already taken a lot of punishment jumping on and off horses.) In the next setup, Polly punches Julie and throws her to the floor. Julie staggers to the landing, where she falls into a breakaway railing and onto the stairs below. Polly leaps over the railing and hits the stairs; they both roll down, clobbering each other. Polly slams Julie into a breakaway table, tosses her into the “somersault thing,” and breaks a chair over her head. When Julie gets to her feet, Polly’s punch gives her the momentum to crash through a big breakaway window.
That’s when a disagreement ensued. According to Julie, “a stuntman told me how to go through the window. He’d made advances to me, I’d said no thank you, and now he insisted I fall through the window a certain way. It felt really wrong so I told Polly and she said in a loud voice, ‘You’ll break your bloody neck if you do it that way. We’re too high off the ground. That ass wants to make you look bad ‘cause you turned him down.’ Polly said the best way to hit the window and survive was to run at it, hit the pane with my right shoulder and land flat on my back outside on the boardwalk.” After Julie breaks through the window, Polly pitches through the open space and lands nearby. Julie lurches up, but Polly brings her down with a flying tackle. Julie kicks Polly, puts her in a headlock, punches her hard in the face—bam! bam!—and knocks her into the water trough, but Polly drags Julie into the trough with her.
Odds are almost no one saw that remarkable stunt fight, but in 1969 millions saw True Grit. “I loved John Wayne,” Polly purred. “I doubled the girl, Mattie, played by Kim Darby.” Written by Marguerite Roberts, it was directed by the dour Henry Hathaway.30 The film preserves a lasting vision of Polly riding a horse named Little Blackie hard and fast, plunging into a river, and swimming across it. As Polly recalled, “The SPCA was standing there” to ensure the animal’s safety. “They’d only let me ride a horse once into that cold water. They didn’t give a damn if I got in and froze stiffer than a plank.”31
Polly Burson and Little Blackie in the cold, cold water. (Courtesy of Polly Burson)
But in Polly’s opinion, the best thing that happened on True Grit was this: “Robert Duvall and his gang are at the top of a hill holding me down as the girl, Duvall’s got his foot in my back, I scream, he gets mad at something, Mr. Hathaway gets mad and says to Duvall, ‘You owe me an apology.’ Duvall says, ‘I don’t owe you a damn thing.’ Mr. Hathaway says, ‘You owe my crew an apology.’ Duvall yells, ‘I don’t owe them anything either!’ Three women were up there—the hairdresser, the script girl, and me. Mr. Hathaway says, ‘You owe the women an apology.’ Duvall says, ‘Fuck the women.’ The hairdresser raises her hand and says, ‘Me first.’” Polly whooped with laughter. “Even Mr. Hathaway laughed—he hollered—and believe me, he didn’t do that very often.”
The increasingly visible struggles of women and minorities to obtain stunt work coincided with two unexpected opportunities in film and television. In different ways, both revealed the best-kept secret in the business: stuntwomen of any color were tough and competent. Their athletic performances in the rebellious 1970s helped change the image of women on television and in the misnamed, short-lived, but effective blaxploitation movies.
5
Social Turmoil Brings
New Opportunities for
Women and Minorities
We are what we are perceived to be.
—Congresswoman Barbara Jordan
Of all the obstacles stunt performers faced—real and metaphorical—the most difficult ones were those faced by African American women. In the TV series Get Christie Love (1974–1975), stuntwoman Jadie David had to jump over a nine-foot wall. “I didn’t think I could do it until they sicced this huge dog on me. I was surprised how fast I got over that wall, but the goddamn dog came right over behind me!”1
Four years earlier, Jadie had been a college student studying to be a nurse. Having grown up in Burbank, California, near the Equestrian Center on the edge of Griffith Park, she often took breaks from her studies to ride horses in the park. “A man used to ride by me sometimes,” she said, “and one day he stopped to say he needed a tall black woman who could swim and ride a horse to double an actress in a film. He did give me a job on the movie—I hate the name of it—The Legend of Nigger Charley. Isn’t that amazing? Back then people didn’t think about a title like
that. For a scene in it Denise Nicholas and Fred Williamson were to jump off a rock, swim to shore, and fall in love, or whatever.”2
The man in Griffith Park, Bob Minor, became a friend and influenced Jadie’s career. He had been a record-holding track athlete in college and later won bodybuilding titles, including “Mr. Los Angeles, best chest, best back, best arms.” He had been working out at the California Gym when someone asked him if he’d ever considered stunt work. “I had not,” he said. “That seemed kind of far out of my reach.” But he looked into it, joined stuntman Paul Stader’s gym in Santa Monica, and even took acting classes. By 1970, at age twenty-six, he had a whole new set of ambitions. “Being an African American, I knew the opportunity was there and I had to try to take it.”
Jadie David, about to become a stuntwoman. (Courtesy of Jadie David)
To stay in shape, Minor rode in Griffith Park. “I saw this cute girl,” he recalled, “but she acted stuck up like she thought she had it going on.” He had just been hired to double football player Fred Williamson in a western. “I rode up to her like a guy in a sunset. ‘Hey, little girl, do you want to be in movies?’ She said, ‘Yeah, right.’ I said, ‘I am doing a movie.’” She didn’t believe him, but he managed to wangle her name and number, and she was hired. “And that’s how I met Jadie.”3
Minor recalled their swimming scene in detail. He and Jadie, doubling for Williamson and Nicholas, were supposed to swim to shore, where they embrace and kiss. “That’s when the director always says ‘Cut!’ and the actors come in,” Minor explained. “Stunt people do the rough stuff, not love scenes. Jadie and I are on the beach, but the director’s still rolling camera and I don’t hear ‘Cut.’ I didn’t know what to do, so I gave Jadie the biggest kiss. And we’re kissing and kissing before I hear, ‘Come on. . . .’ Everyone started laughing. The director had said he wasn’t going to holler ‘cut,’ but it was nice, two stunt people on the beach kissing, a scene I’ll never forget.”
Outgoing Bob Minor, confident and ready to work. (Courtesy of Bob Minor)
Jadie hadn’t known what to expect on her first movie. “I thought I was acting,” she said, “but that wasn’t my job.” She took the kissing scene with good humor: “Here’s the new girl, let’s do the whole kiss, a little joke. If it had been malicious, I would have picked that up.” When the production wrapped, Jadie realized “they were going to pay me to have fun!” She abandoned her plans to be a nurse.
Sweet Sweetback’s Baadassss Song and Shaft were box-office hits in 1971, and they were among the first films made by and for African Americans in this era.4 At the time, the film industry was interested only in making movies for the masses, which were perceived as white. Jadie’s athletic skills and the changing times made her career possible. “That was the beginning of the black exploitation film era,” she said. “There was a need for someone like me, and people started giving me jobs.”
Before that time, black stuntwomen hardly seemed to exist at all. Back in 1954, Joyce Jones, an actress in New York, had been hailed as “the only Negro stuntwoman in television.” According to Jet magazine, Jones took on “tough TV roles other girls refuse. She has been pistol-whipped, shoved down stairs, kicked from a ladder and beaten in a bar room.” Jones said the secret to being a “stunt girl” was “learning how to fall. ‘You’ve got to be completely relaxed at it.’”5 In the 1920s stuntwoman Winnie Brown had said the same thing—“fall limber.”
A year after the Jet article on Joyce Jones, the civil rights movement gained traction. Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama. The cultural upheaval and the demonstrations that followed in the 1960s and 1970s (soundtrack by Bob Dylan, the Four Tops, Ray Charles, Motown, and the Beatles) mushroomed and enveloped other causes and groups such as voting rights, freedom riders, the Black Panthers, and Vietnam War protesters; these issues merged with the galloping influence of the new women’s movement and the national debates over race and sex discrimination. The appalling assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy had fired up the social stew of shock, unrest, and opposition. All over the country, people expressed the frustration later heard in Paddy Chayefsky’s movie Network (1976): “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore.” These turbulent times racked up divisions, bloodshed—and opportunities.
The powerful exchange between movies and audiences, which both reflected and influenced social reality, triggered new onscreen stories. Real stories about black women and men had not been seen since the work of Oscar Micheaux (1884–1951), who directed and produced forty-four films between 1919 and 1948. But in mainstream movies, black actors were usually relegated to roles as porters, slaves, servants, laborers, dads, moms, or friends of the stars. By the 1960s, some mainstream films featured a few black actors: Take a Giant Step, Raisin in the Sun, Lilies of the Field, To Kill a Mockingbird, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? Other movies made by or about African Americans included One Potato, Two Potato; Nothing but a Man; The Split; The Riot; Slaves; and The Cool World.6
In April 1971 Melvin Van Peebles’s Sweet Sweetback’s Baadassss Song, an insolent little movie that made big money, caught the industry’s attention. Black Americans “were laying claims to the screen for the first time.” These films “gave black people a sense of self, which had been stolen from them. . . . It was the first time a black could make it to the end of the movie without being killed by white folks,” said Van Peebles. “Just like Sweetback—he gets away!”7 Shaft and others followed—Super Fly, Black Caesar, Uptown Saturday Night, Friday Foster, Let’s Do It Again. Many of these movies with predominantly black casts were labeled blaxploitation films, a controversial term. In Isaac Julien’s documentary Baadassss Cinema, actor, director, and producer Fred Williamson explains that the term blaxploitation came from middle-class black organizations such as the NAACP. “But who was being exploited?” he asks. “Actors were being paid, audiences got to see things they’d longed for, so I don’t understand where the term fits.” For decades, low-budget films of all types had been the turf of entrepreneurs looking to make money by exploiting some taboo—sex, nudity, violence—but many so-called blaxploitation movies were stylish and fresh.
The social turmoil of the 1970s had an impact on stuntwomen. Gloria Hendry had stage and screen roles to her credit, including being the first African American to play James Bond’s girlfriend in Live and Let Die (1973). But for some of her roles she felt “put down by the theater community and by my family. The teachers, the mothers, the organizations, the churches were tired of ‘these stereotypes.’ They were right,” she said, “but we were beginning to make our own stars, our own movies, the door to filmmaking was wide open and that was brand new! It was so exciting. Some movies were on the periphery of society’s no-no’s, but part of that was, ‘How dare you make a career out of acting?’ Women still couldn’t do things like make more money than a man, and college for us was a privilege—but acting?”8
Until this time, the business of stunts had been a closed white shop. Some white actors still performed in blackface, but it wasn’t cool anymore. A few African American men had done stunts in the 1960s: Wayne King, Eddie Smith, Marvin Walters, Calvin Brown, Ernie Robinson. They were joined in the 1970s by stuntwomen Peaches Jones, Jadie David, Evelyn Cuffee, and Louise Johnson, as well as by Henry Kingi, Richard Washington, Alan Oliney, Bob Minor, Tony Brubaker, and Jophery Brown, followed by Greg Wayne Elam, Wayne King Jr., and Henry Kingi Jr.9 They were hired because the 1970s blaxploitation films made money, and the stories by writers such as Richard Wesley, Ernest Tidyman, and Jack Hill changed movie roles. Hill created characters that stuntwomen could double, such as Coffy, who sought revenge for her sister’s death, and Foxy Brown, “a woman who can handle herself in high society,” Hill said. She “knows the street, too, can discuss philosophy and hit someone with a bar stool!”10 Pam Grier brought style and vigor to the heroines she played, and Jadie David doubled her.11 “Coffy was my mom, Foxy was my aunt,” Grier
said. “They were independent women.”12 When trouble was brewing, Coffy and Foxy didn’t wait around to be rescued; they saved themselves, saved others, and got payback, too. Their characters’ motivations echoed not only the silent movie serial The Hazards of Helen but also An Auto Heroine (1908) and remakes of that story by Mary Pickford and Mabel Normand, who portrayed women willing to take action to save someone in need.13
Left to right: Jadie David, Pam Grier, Bob Minor. (Courtesy of Yolanda Minor)
Bob Minor, who stunt-coordinated Coffy and Foxy Brown, recalled that “Jack Hill was always a fair man. He wanted to give an African American a chance to coordinate Coffy, and with a lead like Pam Grier, he figured the combination would be good.” Those movies had fight scenes galore, and some were real brawls. “I was the one with the short hair that goes to Foxy and starts the fight,” said Jeannie Epper. About thirty-three then, the sullen, tough-looking Jeannie makes the move that drags a dozen women into the melee, punching, kicking, and breaking up furniture. “Fights are like a big play day,” Jadie rejoiced. “You’re not really putting your life on the line, but in Foxy Brown Jeannie got hit over the head with a picture frame that wasn’t scored properly and she ended up getting some stitches.”14