January 29, 2013 • 39 mins
They get blown up, shot, drowned and thrown out of windows on the silver screen - and we don't even know their names. Stuntpeople are the unsung heroes of the movie industry. Learn the ins and outs of the stunt world and how one becomes a stunt person.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by the twenty twelve Toyota Camry.
Speaker 2 (00:03):
It's ready.
Speaker 1 (00:04):
Are you.
Speaker 3 (00:06):
Welcome to Stuff you should know? From HowStuffWorks dot Com?
Speaker 1 (00:16):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, There's
Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and this is stuff you should know.
Speaker 2 (00:22):
Well, Jerry had an itchy trigger finger today, you hear
in there.
Speaker 1 (00:25):
Yeah, she's ready to go home.
Speaker 2 (00:26):
Yeah, she's like, come on if you want to go.
Speaker 1 (00:30):
You guys aren't my entire life.
Speaker 2 (00:32):
I know we like to think we are, but that
is we're like zero point one percent of Jerry's life. Yeah,
she's giggling in there. She's quite the adventurer.
Speaker 1 (00:40):
Uh. How you doing, man?
Speaker 2 (00:42):
I'm great, man, I'm ready to jump from a tall
building or roll a brand new car.
Speaker 1 (00:46):
Man. Sorry, that's what I was gonna ask you. So,
I guess you did the intro for us.
Speaker 2 (00:52):
Go ahead, let's pretend like that didn't happen.
Speaker 1 (00:54):
No, it's fine, okay, you were just doing what The
theme from The Fall Guy starring Lee Majors nineteen eighties
awesome TV show with probably the best truck ever featured
in a TV show.
Speaker 2 (01:07):
That gmc man, The thing is sweet Yeah. You know,
dudes recreate that truck if you if you google it,
there's a lot of guys that have like made that
truck for themselves.
Speaker 1 (01:15):
For a good reason too. It's a cool truck.
Speaker 2 (01:17):
Yeah, And it's interesting that the fall Guy points out
a couple of The show itself points out a very
important things as far as stuntman go. One is that
he had to moonlight as a bounty hunter, and that's
kind of one of the things we'll learn is that
there's not a lot of work out there and to
go around, you know, like it's tough to make it
as a stunt man.
Speaker 1 (01:38):
Yeah, you get punched.
Speaker 2 (01:40):
And b He's if you look at the lyrics to
that theme song man, he is really salty about not
getting the glory and the girls, mainly the girls and
the glory.
Speaker 1 (01:50):
He he uh. Well when he winds up in the hey,
it's only hey hey hey.
Speaker 2 (01:56):
Uh So the song complains about not getting glory or when,
and that is one of the hallmarks though, of the
stunt person, is to remain anonymous.
Speaker 1 (02:05):
And to be bitter about it.
Speaker 2 (02:07):
I guess so very few stunt people you've ever heard of, Well, yeah.
Speaker 1 (02:10):
They're the Academy of Arts and Sciences. They give out
the Academy Awards.
Speaker 2 (02:17):
Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
Speaker 1 (02:18):
Yeah, they don't have a category for stunt people. Nope,
never have And the reason some people give is because
they like to maintain the anonymity and the illusion. Sure
that's provided by stunt people filling in as doubles for stars.
Speaker 2 (02:34):
Yeah, but you can win a What Will See Award.
Speaker 1 (02:36):
You can win an Emmy for Best Stunt Coordinator.
Speaker 2 (02:40):
True, or the Stunt Award. They had their own Stunt Awards.
Speaker 1 (02:43):
Oh yeah, the Taurus World Stunt Awards.
Speaker 2 (02:46):
Yeah, you can win a Tory.
Speaker 1 (02:47):
They took a hiatus. I saw that there was twenty
ten and then they're having stuff for twenty twelve. Couldn't find
anything about twenty eleven. Really, Yeah, so if you know
what happened to the Taurist World Stunt Awards for twenty eleven,
we are curious. Interesting, let us know.
Speaker 2 (03:05):
So thanks for listening.
Speaker 1 (03:07):
So anyway, well let's talk about the history of stunt people.
They pretty much have only been around as long as
you've had motion pictures, right, Yeah, there wasn't much of
a need for him before then. I mean maybe for
like a show or something like that like a wild
Bill Hickcock show, we call them stunt men, but really
(03:29):
you kind of want to differentiate because you can also say,
all right, so people who ride horses on standing up
on a horse's back, that's a stunt person. Yeah right.
A guy who like is in the X Games, those
extreme sports kids, sure that all the kids are into
these days, that's a stunt. These are by, you know,
technically stunt people. What we're talking about are movie stunt people, sure.
(03:53):
And the whole point to their craft isn't to like,
you know, do a five to eighty on a bike
unless somebody asks them to. What they want to do
is create what you would just take for granted, like, oh,
that guy just got clocked, right, No, he didn't actually
get clocked. That was a stunt man who knows what
he's doing, and that was a carefully choreographed scene that
(04:14):
just flew right past you. But it's still your brain
still just absorbed it as that man just got punched,
even though they didn't really happen.
Speaker 2 (04:21):
That's right, And we will probably slip into the word
stuntman here and there instead of stunt people. Of course,
there were tons and tons of stunt women but we'll
say stunt person's or stunt man, and like, luckily there
are women now. In the back in the day, they
would dress men as women to do stunts many times. Yeah,
there's a lot of cross dressing back in the day,
(04:43):
there was until they decided, hey, women are people too,
and they can act and do stunts just like guys.
Speaker 1 (04:48):
Caan, we could put them in danger just as much
as well, exactly, so, so there wasn't much call for
stunt people for movies before movies just by definition. Sure,
don't be ridiculous, but right out of the gate when
we started making movies, we started needing people to do stunts.
And the earliest people who were doing stunts were actually comedians,
(05:08):
slapstick comedians like Buster Keaton had a very famous.
Speaker 2 (05:12):
Early stunt Steamboat Bill Junior. Is that what it was in, Yeah,
the very famous you've probably seen it in like you know,
Hollywood Legends of screen clips and things like that on AMC. Yeah,
it is the famous shot where the front facade of
a house falls down and on well would have been
on Buster Keaton, but he is saved because the attic
(05:33):
window or attic door was open, so it just falls
all around him, and there was some careful measuring in place,
because if he would have been off by a few inches,
he would have been dead.
Speaker 1 (05:42):
Yeah, and that was a real thing, Like the earliest
stunts were nothing but the real thing. Like apparently, if
you had I don't know, somebody hanging from the construction
the skeleton of a steel skyscraper, yeah, you needed that shot.
That's what the guy did.
Speaker 2 (06:02):
Yeah, and they ed the Grabster wrote this one, of course,
and Ed points out that back in the day before
they were like, you know, before they called them stunt men,
they were just like, let me go find someone crazy
enough to go do this exactly, and that guy, that
guy craft Service, looks crazy enough to do it, and
let's go see if he wants an extra twenty bucks.
Speaker 1 (06:21):
Yeah, and he does. Yeah, because beck, you know, in
nineteen oh two, twenty bucks was a lot.
Speaker 2 (06:26):
Sure.
Speaker 1 (06:28):
So as the film industry grew and grew early in
the twentieth century, we went from just nothing but slapstick
comedies to things like westerns and action flicks, and all
of a sudden, those people who really can ride on
the back of a horse standing up became stunt people
as well. And as stunts became more and more complex.
(06:51):
The idea of having somebody whose job and specialty was
to just do the stunt and make it look like
the act to the star sure was doing it started
to really develop.
Speaker 2 (07:04):
Yeah, and then flash forward even more the sixties and
seventies is when things really came to their own as
far as stunt technology developing. Things like squibs, which we
will talk about for gunshots and air rams.
Speaker 1 (07:22):
Is that what they're called. Yeah, it's like a like
a hydratic lift. Yeah, it's pneumatic, just shoots you up
into the air like with a human cannonball.
Speaker 2 (07:31):
Right.
Speaker 1 (07:32):
But like so if somebody, if a grenade blows up
by somebody.
Speaker 2 (07:36):
And you see the dude fly through the air and
he was on a ram, that's right. And then other
things like airbags and and you know, more technology with
cars with the roll cages, Like it just got more
and more complex, right, And now of course you have CGI,
which replaces a lot of stunts in many cases.
Speaker 1 (07:54):
Not necessarily to a better effect. Like all I have
to say is Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Yeah, where
it was like they suddenly cut the drawings of Harrison
Ford swinging on a lasso.
Speaker 2 (08:08):
He's famous for doing his own stunt.
Speaker 1 (08:09):
Snow he didn't do him in Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.
Speaker 2 (08:11):
Well, it's because he's eighty nine years old. Then he
would die.
Speaker 1 (08:16):
He was awesome in Bruno.
Speaker 2 (08:19):
I didn't see that. Was he hairs borders in that?
Speaker 1 (08:21):
Yeah? For about two seconds?
Speaker 2 (08:23):
Did they do like gay jokes to him or something?
Speaker 1 (08:26):
They didn't even get that far?
Speaker 2 (08:27):
Okay, yeah, did he just shut it down?
Speaker 1 (08:29):
Yeah? Always hilarious. But anyway, so stunts like the I
guess throughout this progression of the field of stunt people,
safety has gotten better and better, is what I think
we were just trying to say. To the point now
where they're not even used it's c GI. Yeah, but
there's there's always going to be room for stunt people.
(08:51):
Oh yeah, and the fact that it's gotten safer is
much better. But there's still there's an element of risk
to it no matter what it's Grabs points out. If
a stunt didn't present some sort of risk, there'd be
no need for stunt people at all, as actors would
do it. Yeah, but the actors can't always do it.
Speaker 2 (09:09):
That's right, And when you want to call them a
stunt person is when they either have a specific skill
that they're really good at, like fake martial arts or
I mean real martial arts, but fake hitting and kicking,
or fake.
Speaker 1 (09:23):
Marshal arts like chew kwong like stuff you just made up.
It's a lot of like just front kits in the air.
Speaker 2 (09:29):
That's what you practice, qong sword fighting, stage combat, like
we've talked about stuff like that. They are trained to fall.
They are trained to you know, safely fall. I guess
I should point out. And it just basically it's a
safety factor on one hand, and it's a financial factor
on the other because you can't have your main actor
(09:51):
actress going down with a broken leg, yeah for four weeks,
so you put your stunt person in there and keep
your actor all license safe in their trailer.
Speaker 1 (09:58):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (09:59):
Or you want to be shooting two things at once,
so you have your second unit out there shooting the
fast cars whizzing by in the car chase. Then you
have your first unit shooting the actor inside the car
driving a lot slower and acting like it's really fast.
Speaker 1 (10:16):
But shouting and like moving the steering wheel back and
forth a lot. Yeah, maybe there's somebody rocking the car.
Speaker 2 (10:22):
What's that called uh, poor man's process. Yeah is yeah,
so when you I guess we should say this. When
you're in a car, you either have a camera rig
on your car where it's the real car with cameras
attached to it. We've done that, or the cars on
a process trailer, which means a lot of these shots
you see with someone driving and you're like, they're not
even paying attention to the road.
Speaker 1 (10:41):
Yeah, it's because the.
Speaker 2 (10:42):
Car is sitting on a trailer being pulled by a.
Speaker 1 (10:44):
Truck, right, Or it's got a little rock to it, a.
Speaker 2 (10:46):
Little rock to it, or you do the poor man's
processes when the car is not going anywhere.
Speaker 1 (10:51):
And you have PA's pushing on the outside.
Speaker 2 (10:52):
Pushing on the outside, little tricks with lighting to make
it look like headlights going by.
Speaker 1 (10:57):
We've done that.
Speaker 2 (10:58):
It's really neat in the end to look get a
scene that's poor Man's process and think, wow, they're really
not even moving and it looks so good.
Speaker 1 (11:05):
See if you can pick it out and the stuff
you should know TV series they can probably pick it up.
So yeah, it's financial. It makes sense. Also, one of
the other reasons people use stunt people is they come
with a set of skills that the average actor doesn't.
Speaker 2 (11:20):
Have a particular set of skills.
Speaker 1 (11:22):
Exactly that makes them very dangerous to you. And so
you can either hire a stuntman who looks like your
star to carry out like a combat scene.
Speaker 2 (11:32):
Or sort of look like your star, or you can teach.
Speaker 1 (11:34):
Your star, you know, spend all this extra money and
time to training the star to this skill in a
crash course. So it just most of the time it
makes sense to just hire a stunt person.
Speaker 2 (11:44):
Yeah, And you know, chances are these days you're gonna
get a mix in a big action movie. You're gonna
get a mix of all three. You're gonna get some CGI,
you're gonna get some stunt people, and these days you're
gonna get real actors doing some of the real fake fighting.
Speaker 1 (11:57):
Doesn't Tom Cruise do a lot of his own stunts?
Speaker 2 (11:59):
Yeah, I gotta list to the vectors who prefer to do.
I don't mean to jump the gun, No, the Cruise
is famous for that.
Speaker 1 (12:04):
I was reading this and I was like, I wonder
if I would do my own stunts. I would do some.
I would say, sure, I want to learn how to
sword fight. Teach me that's something I want to know,
and I'm certainly not going to shell out for it
myself ever, so let's go ahead and learn. Now that's
a good point.
Speaker 2 (12:20):
I would do my own stunts.
Speaker 1 (12:22):
It depends the heights. No way I would do that.
Speaker 2 (12:25):
I would jump off. So California state law. And of
course they shoot movies all over the place now and
the union rules in Hollywood have really made it pretty
safe these days. But you're still going to find injuries
and your occasional death on set, which is really awful. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (12:44):
Well, there always have been pretty much from the beginning,
deaths and injuries.
Speaker 2 (12:49):
Howard Hughes.
Speaker 1 (12:50):
Yeah, the movie Hell's Angels, which we must have talked
about in the Hell's Angels podcast. I'm sure we did,
because I think we talked about the origin of the name,
which was from there combat. It was, you know, that's
what they think the fighting hell. I think that was
one of the theories. But there were three, maybe four fatalities, yeah,
(13:10):
because they were doing like real dog fights with airplanes
and there are a lot of crashes. Yeah, so that
was a movie where people died.
Speaker 2 (13:17):
Yes, very famously, The Twilight Zone, the movie Jennifer Jason
Lee's father Vic Morrow and two little Vietnamese kids died
when a helicopter crashed into the water where they were
crossing a river. That's on YouTube, by the way.
Speaker 1 (13:35):
I know it's pretty awful.
Speaker 2 (13:36):
It is, and I saw it recently because I was
just curious. I'd always wondered how it went down in
my head, because I've heard the story since the movie
came out, since I was a kid, and I always wondered, like,
exactly what was the logistics and how did that go down.
Speaker 1 (13:49):
It's pretty bad to watch, it is, because it just
goes totally out of control.
Speaker 2 (13:53):
It does, so I would not recommend that, but you
do have to enter your age, by the way to
watch that video. Yeah, and on set, the AD is
ultimately responsible the assistant director for everyone's safety. And in fact,
on our own little TV show, when we had fake
guns on set just as props. Yeah, like we didn't
(14:15):
even use them in the scene, but just to have
a fake gun on set, the AD has to announce
to the whole crew and show them the gun. Say
it's fake, it's not real. Look at the barrel. There's
no bullets, there's no nothing. It will not be fired.
We will not be shooting blanks or dummy cartridges, and
it's just you know, even on a stupid, little silly
show like ours, you got to be really careful with
(14:37):
that stuff.
Speaker 1 (14:37):
Yeah, so chuck. Because of this incredibly high risk profession work,
the stunt people must be paid out the yin yang true. False.
Speaker 2 (14:50):
Well, they make a good rate, but like we said earlier,
there's not a ton of work for the amount of
stunt people trying to get work. Oh okay, that was
when I used to work out in la as A Pa.
I would always try and talk to the stunt people
when I worked on jobs where they had stunt people,
because they're just really interesting. Yeah, and to say the least,
(15:12):
and they would usually bemoan the fact that there's not
a ton of work, and you know, they're all kind
of scrapping for the same piece of cheese. But that's
like everyone in the film business, sure, from crew to
the lead actor. You're you're all after that same piece
of cheese.
Speaker 1 (15:26):
We've worked with some stunt people too.
Speaker 2 (15:29):
Yeah, you'd be surprised when you need to call in
a stunt person. I worked on this one commercial where
the was just like bad traffic on the highway that
the shot was and cars had to just sort of
pull over to the side while another car came through.
All the cars that pulled over to the side of
the road had to have stunt drivers. I was like,
I could do that, but then I'd be taking bread
(15:50):
off the table at a stunt person.
Speaker 1 (15:52):
Right, and the whole production was shut down.
Speaker 2 (15:54):
That's true.
Speaker 1 (15:56):
Okay, So the most stunt people, you say, because there's
just so little work for so many people. It's not
a high paying job. A lot of people do it
for the love of it.
Speaker 2 (16:07):
Right, Yeah. I mean you can make money if you're
experienced and get tons of work, obviously, but right I'd
say those are the few and far between.
Speaker 1 (16:15):
But you'd have to love it because the hours are
usually very, very long. Yeah, to do a stunt is
not You don't just walk up and get in the
car and drive it and all of a sudden it
flips and there's an explosion and you're hoping for the best.
Like when you see a stunt, these things are rehearsed
over and over again. Say for a car chase, they'll
(16:35):
go through the entire car chase, but they'll do it
at a low speed so that it's choreographed, rehearst and
everybody knows what's going to happen when that takes a
very long time. If you need to flip a car,
you need to do measurements. The pyrotechnics guys are probably involved.
There's a lot of standing around, there's a lot of practicing,
there's a lot of measuring, there's a lot of talking.
(16:57):
And then if say you're doing something like it in water,
you're probably standing in water the whole time. So you're
doing that for fourteen hours. Yeah, it sounds like some
you would have to love your work to do this.
Speaker 2 (17:09):
Yeah, it's definitely not a glory job, especially factoring in
the anonymity factor.
Speaker 1 (17:14):
Right, when you do all this and you do it
absolutely perfectly, no one notices.
Speaker 2 (17:20):
That's the goal.
Speaker 1 (17:21):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (17:21):
In fact, one of my biggest pet peeves is when
you do notice and you see that one shot of
the dude with a wig on, it's supposed to be
Clint Eastwood, right, Yeah, just disappointing.
Speaker 1 (17:32):
So you're saying the second unit director handles this. The
second unit director is in charge of shooting stunts, but
the person who's in charge in like of the stunts themselves,
is the stunt coordinator. Yeah, and that person hires the
stunt people, plans the stunts, oversees the stunts, execution, does everything,
but actually sets up the camera and all that, or
(17:54):
handles the camera shooting it. Right.
Speaker 2 (17:57):
Yeah, it's basically it's like a film crew is broken
up into many departments, and that's just sort of its
own little department headed by the coordinator. Gotcha, Like they'll
have a budget to work with and all that kind
of stuff, just like any other department.
Speaker 1 (18:09):
So let's talk about how they do some stunts.
Speaker 2 (18:12):
Okay, and actually the second unit director a lot of
times is a former stunt person or stunt coordinator.
Speaker 1 (18:18):
Right, it makes sense.
Speaker 2 (18:19):
It comes in handy. Sure, let's talk about stunts without fire.
Speaker 1 (18:24):
How about punches?
Speaker 2 (18:26):
How about them? Stage fighting man something we have not
learned yet.
Speaker 1 (18:30):
That's pretty much a must if you want to become
a stunt man. That's less than one is, go take
stage fighting courses. Yep.
Speaker 2 (18:38):
Learn how to sell a punch as the giver and
as the receiver without looking corny and hoki and fake
like pro wrestling.
Speaker 1 (18:44):
Right, But it's very much similar to pro wrestling, especially
if you've ever seen somebody throw a punch in pro
wrestling and you can hear the skin slap. Yeah, that's
because that person was actually just punched. Yeah, the key
is they weren't punched very hard, certainly not as hard
as there the jerk of their head would would say.
Speaker 2 (19:02):
Yeah, you've got camera angles and you've got sound effects,
and through the art of movie magic, it looks like
a good knockdown, drag out brawl.
Speaker 1 (19:11):
Right, And if you've got it like a really good
stunt coordinator, there'll be like a punch that's sold and
the person who's being punched is on a ramp, so
they fly through the air.
Speaker 2 (19:21):
Yeah, that's awesome, all right. Gunshots. We talked about squibs.
A squib is basically you're gonna have a chest metal
chest plate with a squib on the front of it,
right to protect your body. And it's it's it's basically
a little blood packet that's rigged electronically to explode when
(19:43):
it's supposed to.
Speaker 1 (19:45):
And so the plate in between the squibbing and chest
protects you. Sure, and maybe you are in charge of you,
the stunt man are in charge that you have a
little button, Yeah, maybe to explode the charge or there's
somebody else doing it remotely and it's pretty awesome. Releases
theater blood opens a hole in the shirt. Yeah, pretty awesome.
Speaker 2 (20:04):
It is very awesome.
Speaker 1 (20:05):
This I didn't realize though, how they make bullet holes
in like like a wall, like stuck a wall. Yeah,
I thought this was pretty ingenious. They drill the hole
ahead of time and then they cover it up with
like putty or paper or something and paint with a
squib in there. Yeah, and they blow that squib out
(20:26):
and it makes a bullet hole.
Speaker 2 (20:27):
It's pretty cool.
Speaker 1 (20:28):
It's ingenious. It's simple, it seems like, but it's very ingenious.
Speaker 2 (20:31):
Well, especially when you watch a movie. Ideally you're getting
lost in the movie, not paying attention, but if you
watch like a John woufilm or something, yeah, and you
see just like a wall get riddled with bullets. Just
think about all the time, Yeah, it took to set
up all those squibs.
Speaker 1 (20:45):
And like what if the actor trips in the middle
of it, You're just like, we have.
Speaker 2 (20:49):
To do it again, Yeah, which is no good. And
in fact, big stunts they go with many mini cameras
on stunts that you don't or can't recreate because of
either danger or money. Yeah, And like some of the
shots have, like, you know, a dozen more camera shooting
right time.
Speaker 1 (21:04):
Which makes a lot of sense, of course, and Grabster
points out that another reason why you don't want to
do a big take like that more than once is
because every time you do, the danger for the stunt
person multiplies. Yeah, and I was like how, and then
I thought, oh, well doing it more right, and your
your chances of injury or increased the more you carry
out the more times you carry out a dangerous act.
(21:25):
So yeah, that's how it multiplies.
Speaker 2 (21:27):
Getting back to squibs, these days, a lot of directors
are opting for CGI blood and uh and bullet wounds.
But supposedly Quentin Tarantino and this is out. By the
time this comes out.
Speaker 1 (21:40):
Jango and Change, I can't wait to see it.
Speaker 2 (21:42):
Supposedly he had one real squibs and the blood like
they're supposed to be the bloodiest, nastiest squibs that hollywould
have seen in years.
Speaker 1 (21:52):
Is that right?
Speaker 2 (21:52):
Yeah, it's supposed to be pretty awesome.
Speaker 1 (21:54):
Huh. Yeah, have you seen a machete? Yeah that was
pretty bloody. Yeah that was though I agree it was,
but it was still pretty blank.
Speaker 2 (22:03):
They also blanks if you were firing a gun on set.
It is probably a blank, you would hope. So it's
not the same as a dummy cartridge. No, a blank
actually fires gunpowder, has gunpowder and fires what's called a wad.
It's like paper or wood or plastic. But it does
not obviously have shot or a bullet.
Speaker 1 (22:25):
No, but there's sometimes when the bullet explodes, bits of
metal can end up being shot out as well. Yeah,
that's how Brandon Lee died when they were filming The Crow.
Speaker 2 (22:34):
Yeah. His was actually an accident. There was a bullet
lodged in the barrel that they didn't know about.
Speaker 1 (22:39):
What I thought, Okay, well then I'm thinking of somebody
else who like was messing around with a gun.
Speaker 2 (22:44):
That was man, I can't remember anything, put it to
his head.
Speaker 1 (22:46):
Yeah, pulled the trigger and like the water, like the
gases or something killed them.
Speaker 2 (22:51):
Yeah, that was I can't remember his name, but it
was on a TV show set and he like goofing
around put it to his head as a joke. So
you should never mess around with blanks. No, very dangerous.
Still No, but there was a bullet in the Yeah,
there was a bullet. They got the guns mixed up
and there was a real bullet slug lodged in the
barrel that they didn't know about, so it fired a blank,
but it ejected that other thing and Brandon Lee died.
Speaker 1 (23:14):
Wow, I didn't know that.
Speaker 2 (23:15):
Yeah, man, it was one of the biggest oops is
probably in Hollywood history.
Speaker 1 (23:20):
Yeah, you know, I guess you could call it that.
Speaker 2 (23:22):
And I think he they thought he was still acting
and continued to roll cameras for a bit afterwards. Oh gee,
even Yeah, very sad tragic. Are we to falling?
Speaker 1 (23:34):
Yeah, which he'll do I won't do.
Speaker 2 (23:36):
Yeah, I'll jump off of stuff. I've always done that.
Speaker 1 (23:38):
Well, they use these huge, huge air bags right.
Speaker 2 (23:41):
Well, back in the day they did, and if you
and if you're doing a fall today, they still will sometimes,
but generally these days they have like a bungee type contraption.
Speaker 1 (23:49):
I would still demand an air bag. Yeah, they apparently
also for shorter falls, they'll take some cardboard boxes and
they'll cut the sharp corners off. Yeah, and then you
jump onto that. Did you do that when you were
a kid.
Speaker 2 (24:03):
No, no, no, I always would jump into water.
Speaker 1 (24:06):
I would jump like onto the ground off of like
the credenza or whatever. And now I'm like, I wouldn't
even do that. It's dangerous.
Speaker 2 (24:14):
Falls used to be the thing, Like I'm sure you
remember as a kid, falls were a really big deal
for stuntmen and Dar Robinson, remember that guy. No, he
did the Sharki's Machine fall. Okay in Atlanta and the
Burt Reynolds movie. Nope, it's very famous fall out of
the Peachtree Plaza hotel.
Speaker 1 (24:30):
I was up in Toledo at the time.
Speaker 2 (24:32):
It was still it was released in Toledo in Toledo
Sharky's Machine one.
Speaker 1 (24:36):
Yeah, uh off the off the Waist Hotel.
Speaker 2 (24:39):
He went through a window of the Peachtree Plaza and
uh into onto an air bag. And it's just it
was one of the famous early falls, and or not
early falls, but one of the famous falls.
Speaker 1 (24:49):
What Florida did he jump out of?
Speaker 2 (24:50):
Oh man, I can't remember.
Speaker 1 (24:52):
Was it pretty high?
Speaker 2 (24:52):
Yeah? I mean it was over over like one hundred
and fifty feet in Oh wow.
Speaker 1 (24:56):
Yeah, that's nuts.
Speaker 2 (24:57):
That's pretty cool.
Speaker 1 (24:58):
But see, so imagine planning that stunt. How many times
they measured everything to figure out where the air bags
needed to go, and then they probably supplemented it with
additional airbags and if they loved the guy at all
they did all this.
Speaker 2 (25:11):
Yeah, stuntman. When you go to talk to one, if
you're on set, you'll be disappointed by the fact that
they aren't these crazy dudes like you want them to be.
They're actually really sensible because they want to work and
earn money, so they want to be really, really sure
that no one gets hurt. It's a little more boring
than you would think talking to them, sure, but they
are a little nuts.
Speaker 1 (25:30):
Yeah, well you'd have to be at least a little
What else, chuck fire? How about fire?
Speaker 2 (25:36):
I just saw Anchorman the other night, Remember when they
had the street brawl that got on fire just walks by.
Speaker 1 (25:43):
Yeah, that's a pretty serious stunt, Like when you are
when you set yourself on fire. Yeah, and there's a
lot of safety precautions, but even still, it's you're on fire,
whether you like it or not.
Speaker 2 (25:55):
Yeah. You're wearing all kinds of fire protective clothing and
fire retardant and then you're smeared with the flammable gel.
Speaker 1 (26:01):
Yep. You have a hood on that protects you yeah
as well, and there's an oxygen tank in there, so
you're basically just completely wrapped in this outfit. Yeah, but yeah,
the flammable gels on and they liked you and then
film you and you're going, oh, it's always the wavy.
Speaker 2 (26:21):
This kind of looks the same.
Speaker 1 (26:22):
And then the people run over and put you out
with fire extinguisher.
Speaker 2 (26:26):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (26:27):
But they time it very closely as well. Oh, I'm sure,
because I think it's kind of like, well, if we
go twelve seconds, he actually will catch on fire, so
we can shoot for eleven.
Speaker 2 (26:36):
Eleven point five. Right. Explosions are a big deal obviously
these days. There's so many explosions in movies. Sometimes they
cheat a little bit what's called a technique called force
perspective to make it look like the actor is closer
to the explosion. And if there's an explosion, you're probably
also going to be propelled with the air ram that
we're talking about. It's almost called a Hollywood trope at
(27:01):
this point. The explosion in the dudes flying like twenty
feet in the hear.
Speaker 1 (27:03):
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, that was big in a commando.
Oh yes, there are a lot of air rams used
in Commanda.
Speaker 2 (27:10):
Many more than I can count.
Speaker 1 (27:13):
That was such a good movie.
Speaker 2 (27:15):
Car chases and crashes.
Speaker 1 (27:17):
Yeah, they use rams as well. They may be attached
to the car. So if a car needs to flip,
you see people like going up on a ramp or whatever. Yeah,
and I'd probably use that if you're just trying to
stay on two wheels. But if you're trying to flip,
there's usually a ram that pushes the car, pushes it
off the ground and it flips, or if you haven't
coming out of the rear, it'll make it jump really high.
Speaker 2 (27:40):
Oh true. Like in Hooper, I don't know.
Speaker 1 (27:43):
All these movies you're talking about.
Speaker 2 (27:45):
Oh dude. Hooper was the stuntman movie with Burt Reynolds.
Speaker 1 (27:47):
I didn't see it.
Speaker 2 (27:48):
Oh my god, how neat am very famous stuntman turned director.
Speaker 1 (27:52):
Directed, founder of The Cannonball Run.
Speaker 2 (27:55):
Well yeah, and director of the movie The Cannonball Run
and Smoking the Bandit and Hooper. Hooper was about an
aging stuntman Burt Reynolds, who was challenged by the up
and comer Jan Michael Vincent. And of course there's the
love relationship with Sally Field choosing that too. And it
was good. It was like the best. It's sort of
the best stunt movie ever because it was about stunts, huh.
(28:16):
And he had a rocket car and that one that
was a big rocket car jump. It was the big climax.
Speaker 1 (28:20):
I did not see Hooper?
Speaker 2 (28:22):
Did you need to see Hooper?
Speaker 1 (28:23):
What was I watching back then?
Speaker 2 (28:26):
What were you? You're probably watching TV and stuff, I guess, Yeah, Hey,
it was a little before your time. And like I
said earlier, stunt drivers, it's not all like a lot
of this stuff you're gonna see on TV's stunt driving,
even though you might not think it's necessary.
Speaker 1 (28:43):
Yeah, apparently it does just pull off of a.
Speaker 2 (28:45):
Sometime sometimes not. How do you become a stuntman Josh.
Speaker 1 (28:49):
Uh, Well, apparently, as far as Grabanowski says, you basically
have to start off as an extra on the set.
Speaker 2 (28:57):
That's not necessarily true.
Speaker 1 (28:58):
Okay, if you want, and if you want to go
from the absolutely from zero to stuntman in the slowest
way possible, then you would start out as an extra
on the set. You have to be a screen act
you have to be a member of the Screen Actors
Guild in most cases. Yeah, and when you're hanging around
the set, you identify who the second unit director or
stunt coordinator is and you hand them your headshot.
Speaker 2 (29:22):
This ad painted a path to becoming a stunt person
that we've kind of laughed at. It is not the
only path, but one thing is for sure. To become
a stunt person, you need to get to know someone
else in that department. And that's really with every film department.
If you want to be in a wardrobe, you should
get a job as a BA and start hanging out
(29:42):
with the wardrobe people. If you want to be in makeup,
start hanging out with the makeup people. And that's just
how it works in Hollywood. There's no degree. You can
get a film degree, but come on, let's wasted money.
Just go to work on the set. You get to
know the people in the department and then start bugging
them a little bit when they're not busy. Stunt coordinators
are a little testy. There's a lot on the line,
you know. Sure, so you know, if you're a new
(30:04):
pa on set, don't run over to the stunt coordinator
start bugging them right away. Pick and choose your time
and then give them your headshot and then give him
your headshot.
Speaker 1 (30:12):
But yeah, what you're saying is that it's apprentice based.
Speaker 2 (30:16):
It is.
Speaker 1 (30:17):
Basically there are schools.
Speaker 2 (30:20):
One recommended driving school, the Rick Seaman Stunt Driving School.
There's also the International Stunt School that sounds pretty serious,
and this is where you can learn to do some
of the stuff. But it's not like you exit with
a degree and then show up and say, now i'd
like to do stunt work.
Speaker 1 (30:34):
Right, all the rest of you are fired. I have
a degree from the International Stunt School.
Speaker 2 (30:40):
And Grabster points out that you should have a large
area of specialty rather than one thing.
Speaker 1 (30:45):
I thought that's a very good point.
Speaker 2 (30:47):
Yeah, but that's not necessarily true. I've talked to some
stunt dudes that say, eventually you would like to have
a wide range of skills, but a good way to
get in is to have one really specific skill that
you're great at. And you might get back call like
this guy's good with wirework or water work and or
he's a hell of a driver, or a really good
(31:08):
motorcycle guy, yeah, or a great skier if you're doing
like what was that for your eyes only?
Speaker 1 (31:15):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (31:15):
Is that the one that heard ski Chase?
Speaker 1 (31:17):
Never say never again?
Speaker 2 (31:19):
I know it's definitely Roger Moore.
Speaker 1 (31:20):
Okay, I think it's for your eyes only, all right.
Speaker 2 (31:22):
But it helps to have these skills, Like a lot
of stunt people are former motorcycle motocross racers or car
enthusiasts or you know, how to stand stand forest back riding. Yeah,
so a lot of them had these skills just anyway,
and they're like, hey, I can I've been driving dirt
track for twenty years as we'll make some money.
Speaker 1 (31:42):
Yeah, film me.
Speaker 2 (31:45):
There's books out there, are they? So you want to
be a Stuntman? By Mark Aspitt.
Speaker 1 (31:49):
Oh, that's a great name for a book like that.
Speaker 2 (31:52):
The Full Burn by Kevin Conley, Fight Choreography, The Art
of Nonverbal Dialogue by John Kring, and then Hall Needham's
biography stunt Man with a.
Speaker 1 (32:03):
Exclamation had to be had to be you got? You
said you have a list of actors that do their
own stunts.
Speaker 2 (32:12):
Yeah. I think most people know this, people like Jason Statham,
famous for doing his own stunts.
Speaker 1 (32:16):
Huh. I see Zoe Bells on there. I thought she
was a stunt person.
Speaker 2 (32:20):
Well she is, and she was in Death Proof though
as an actor, right, And they were like, I guess
they include her now because she did that awesome hanging
onto the hood scene.
Speaker 1 (32:29):
I was watching that earlier and it is just not
it's pretty cool. It's like she's when she's hanging on
it looks like by belts or whatever. Yeah, and then
she's she's kind of sliding still across the hood.
Speaker 2 (32:42):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (32:42):
All it would take is like half an inch, and
then all of a sudden she's gone too far and
she's off the side of the car.
Speaker 2 (32:49):
Yeah, that was it. She's one of the best in
the business apparently.
Speaker 1 (32:52):
Man, that's scary.
Speaker 2 (32:54):
Burt Reynolds used to do a lot of his stunts.
In fact, he got injured pretty bad. That led to
some bad health problems on set. Oh yeah, though not
City Heat. The Clint Eastwood movie Burt Lancaster.
Speaker 1 (33:06):
He used to do his own stunts. He's a tough guy, yeah,
the movie Tough Guys.
Speaker 2 (33:10):
Yes, in that Yeah. Yeah, I don't think we mentioned
been hurt either. That's one of the famous stunts ever,
The Chariot Race.
Speaker 1 (33:15):
Yeah, you want to tell him about it?
Speaker 2 (33:18):
Go ahead, what do you got.
Speaker 1 (33:19):
Oh, well, there's a stuntman named Joe Cannutt and he
was doubling for Charlton Heston and during the Chariot Race,
this big, long, intense race. Yeah, he falls off the
chariot and is about to be run over. But in
true stuntman fashion, grabs it. It's being dragged. Yeah, pulls
(33:39):
himself back up and continues on.
Speaker 2 (33:42):
And I think that made it on screen.
Speaker 1 (33:44):
Yeah, it's in the movie. But that was a real thing,
Like it wasn't a planned stunt, Like the guy saved
his own life.
Speaker 2 (33:51):
That's awesome, Dad, Harrison Ford, you mentioned as far as
the ladies go, Angelina and Jolee and Cameron Diaz are
the right known for doing stunts. Arnie arts in Niaga
and Jackie Chan very famous for doing his own stunts.
And it makes a difference, man, when you can tell
it's Tom Cruise on the side of that mountain.
Speaker 1 (34:11):
Man, that was scary. Is that really him?
Speaker 2 (34:14):
Yeah, Emily worked on that shoot on there, just that
segment in Moab, the rock climbing segment, and that's when
famously Tom Cruise was like four hours late and flies
in on a helicopter and like the whole crew was
waiting around all day for him.
Speaker 1 (34:27):
I hadn't heard that, and then yeah.
Speaker 2 (34:29):
I mean famous in my family. Yeah, and now I
guess famous to the podcast community.
Speaker 1 (34:34):
Yea Cruise is not punctual.
Speaker 2 (34:37):
Well he wasn't that day.
Speaker 1 (34:39):
Wow stunts.
Speaker 2 (34:41):
Have you seen Haywire the Soderberg movie. Uh uh, it's
about uh assassin. Assassin's basically it's an action movie, Soderberg's
take on an action movie. But Gina Karana was a
former mixed martial artist and she she's awesome and does
her own stunts. What's her name, Gina Carano.
Speaker 1 (35:01):
I don't believe I know her.
Speaker 2 (35:02):
She plays the lead. I'm she I think that was
her first like legit movie. Oh gotcha known for mixed
martial arts. But yeah, she does her own stunts.
Speaker 1 (35:09):
She's b a hey wy hey, I'll check it out.
Speaker 2 (35:13):
I got nothing else.
Speaker 1 (35:14):
I don't either.
Speaker 2 (35:15):
Pretty straightforward.
Speaker 1 (35:16):
If you want to learn more about stunts, you can
type stunts into the house stuff works search bar. And
I said search bar, which means it's time for listener.
Speaker 2 (35:26):
May Josh, I'm gonna call this things we I guess
say a lot. Oh no yeah, like no, no, no,
that's not in there.
Speaker 1 (35:36):
Okay.
Speaker 2 (35:36):
Everyone says like, though I know.
Speaker 1 (35:38):
But I've people have pointed out here they're like, you
guys say like a lot. And I've started to notice
And when I say it when I hear the podcast,
I don't hear when I'm saying it. Only later on
when I can't do anything about it.
Speaker 2 (35:50):
Don't don't beat yourself up. Everybody says that, like there
are articles written in the New Yorker about the use
of the word like in the twenty first century. Okay,
so you're part of that crowd. No, you're not millennial.
Speaker 1 (36:04):
I'm not. I'm an aged person.
Speaker 2 (36:09):
Sorry, he's wrong with me today, Guys, Before I start,
I feel like I should get out my adoration of
the podcast. Always listen as I'm walking my dog, Chloe
keeps me entertained for hours. I love that you guys
are still going strong, and I'm very thankful. I have
comprised a list, however, of words and phrases used most
often in the show, besides obvious ones like Chuck or
(36:30):
Josh or search bark. Let's hear them in no particular order.
A boy to being a bout a boom.
Speaker 1 (36:35):
Sure he left off the bon Jovi.
Speaker 2 (36:39):
Oh, she we'll talk about this later, or we'll get to.
Speaker 1 (36:42):
That, and then a lot of times we don't.
Speaker 2 (36:44):
Yeah. I feel like I say that a lot.
Speaker 1 (36:45):
I think it's hilarious when we say that we're going
to talk about something later and then we forget.
Speaker 2 (36:50):
To yeah, or I say all the time. I think
we should point out and she didn't put them in here,
but I'll go ahead and throw my own on there.
Oh yeah, I'm making air quotes. Yeah, I E E G. Yeah,
that's one of yours. That's a good band name, and
that's usually me. Sure, that's not just a sweat. You
(37:13):
just don't go out sweat a lot because of me.
That's a stand up guy. I don't remember her saying
that a lot. Do you say that a lot? All right,
I'm gonna take at you with that one, Katherine on
the up and up.
Speaker 1 (37:25):
I don't know that's c a of course we say
that a lot, definitely.
Speaker 2 (37:29):
People always ask it what it means.
Speaker 1 (37:30):
We never tell.
Speaker 2 (37:31):
They never tell. And then have you seen the movie? Ironically?
Speaker 1 (37:36):
That's about right.
Speaker 2 (37:36):
Yeah, And those are ten things that we say a lot.
And that is she says she thinks these are great
comforts her and she smiles, and that is Catherine Phillips.
Speaker 1 (37:45):
Thanks a lot, Katherine. That's pretty cool. Somebody's out there
like writing lists of things we say.
Speaker 2 (37:52):
It's nicer to hear people say like I take comfort that.
And except for the emails when we get.
Speaker 1 (37:56):
Like you guys always say this and it's John Travolta
taking against the task. If you want to take the task,
whether John Travolta or anybody else, or you just want
to say, hey, here's a list of things I noticed
because the podcast or whatever. You can join us on Twitter. Actually, first,
(38:19):
before we sign off, let's remind everybody that we're going
to be on the TV again the TV. Yeah, Saturday
night on Science Channel at ten pm would be the
premiere of another Stuff you Should Know episode.
Speaker 2 (38:31):
You can watch us each and every week.
Speaker 1 (38:32):
Yeah, TV show Stuff you Don't You Should Know TV
show ten pm.
Speaker 2 (38:36):
Or get it on iTunes the following day. Yeah, on Sunday.
That's right, Chuck, Just go to iTunes and type of
Stuff you Should Know?
Speaker 1 (38:41):
And two it comes off all right. So now we'll
sign off, right, yep. You can get in touch with
this on Twitter at SYSK podcast. You can join us
on Facebook dot com slash Stuff you Should Know, and
you can send us a good old fashioned email too.
Stuff Podcast at Discovery dot com.
Speaker 3 (39:01):
For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit
HowStuffWorks dot com.
Speaker 1 (39:12):
Brought to you by the twenty twelve Toyota Camry.
Speaker 2 (39:15):
It's ready, are you
Brought to you by the twenty twelve Toyota Camry.
Speaker 2 (00:03):
It's ready.
Speaker 1 (00:04):
Are you.
Speaker 3 (00:06):
Welcome to Stuff you should know? From HowStuffWorks dot Com?
Speaker 1 (00:16):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, There's
Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and this is stuff you should know.
Speaker 2 (00:22):
Well, Jerry had an itchy trigger finger today, you hear
in there.
Speaker 1 (00:25):
Yeah, she's ready to go home.
Speaker 2 (00:26):
Yeah, she's like, come on if you want to go.
Speaker 1 (00:30):
You guys aren't my entire life.
Speaker 2 (00:32):
I know we like to think we are, but that
is we're like zero point one percent of Jerry's life. Yeah,
she's giggling in there. She's quite the adventurer.
Speaker 1 (00:40):
Uh. How you doing, man?
Speaker 2 (00:42):
I'm great, man, I'm ready to jump from a tall
building or roll a brand new car.
Speaker 1 (00:46):
Man. Sorry, that's what I was gonna ask you. So,
I guess you did the intro for us.
Speaker 2 (00:52):
Go ahead, let's pretend like that didn't happen.
Speaker 1 (00:54):
No, it's fine, okay, you were just doing what The
theme from The Fall Guy starring Lee Majors nineteen eighties
awesome TV show with probably the best truck ever featured
in a TV show.
Speaker 2 (01:07):
That gmc man, The thing is sweet Yeah. You know,
dudes recreate that truck if you if you google it,
there's a lot of guys that have like made that
truck for themselves.
Speaker 1 (01:15):
For a good reason too. It's a cool truck.
Speaker 2 (01:17):
Yeah, And it's interesting that the fall Guy points out
a couple of The show itself points out a very
important things as far as stuntman go. One is that
he had to moonlight as a bounty hunter, and that's
kind of one of the things we'll learn is that
there's not a lot of work out there and to
go around, you know, like it's tough to make it
as a stunt man.
Speaker 1 (01:38):
Yeah, you get punched.
Speaker 2 (01:40):
And b He's if you look at the lyrics to
that theme song man, he is really salty about not
getting the glory and the girls, mainly the girls and
the glory.
Speaker 1 (01:50):
He he uh. Well when he winds up in the hey,
it's only hey hey hey.
Speaker 2 (01:56):
Uh So the song complains about not getting glory or when,
and that is one of the hallmarks though, of the
stunt person, is to remain anonymous.
Speaker 1 (02:05):
And to be bitter about it.
Speaker 2 (02:07):
I guess so very few stunt people you've ever heard of, Well, yeah.
Speaker 1 (02:10):
They're the Academy of Arts and Sciences. They give out
the Academy Awards.
Speaker 2 (02:17):
Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
Speaker 1 (02:18):
Yeah, they don't have a category for stunt people. Nope,
never have And the reason some people give is because
they like to maintain the anonymity and the illusion. Sure
that's provided by stunt people filling in as doubles for stars.
Speaker 2 (02:34):
Yeah, but you can win a What Will See Award.
Speaker 1 (02:36):
You can win an Emmy for Best Stunt Coordinator.
Speaker 2 (02:40):
True, or the Stunt Award. They had their own Stunt Awards.
Speaker 1 (02:43):
Oh yeah, the Taurus World Stunt Awards.
Speaker 2 (02:46):
Yeah, you can win a Tory.
Speaker 1 (02:47):
They took a hiatus. I saw that there was twenty
ten and then they're having stuff for twenty twelve. Couldn't find
anything about twenty eleven. Really, Yeah, so if you know
what happened to the Taurist World Stunt Awards for twenty eleven,
we are curious. Interesting, let us know.
Speaker 2 (03:05):
So thanks for listening.
Speaker 1 (03:07):
So anyway, well let's talk about the history of stunt people.
They pretty much have only been around as long as
you've had motion pictures, right, Yeah, there wasn't much of
a need for him before then. I mean maybe for
like a show or something like that like a wild
Bill Hickcock show, we call them stunt men, but really
(03:29):
you kind of want to differentiate because you can also say,
all right, so people who ride horses on standing up
on a horse's back, that's a stunt person. Yeah right.
A guy who like is in the X Games, those
extreme sports kids, sure that all the kids are into
these days, that's a stunt. These are by, you know,
technically stunt people. What we're talking about are movie stunt people, sure.
(03:53):
And the whole point to their craft isn't to like,
you know, do a five to eighty on a bike
unless somebody asks them to. What they want to do
is create what you would just take for granted, like, oh,
that guy just got clocked, right, No, he didn't actually
get clocked. That was a stunt man who knows what
he's doing, and that was a carefully choreographed scene that
(04:14):
just flew right past you. But it's still your brain
still just absorbed it as that man just got punched,
even though they didn't really happen.
Speaker 2 (04:21):
That's right, And we will probably slip into the word
stuntman here and there instead of stunt people. Of course,
there were tons and tons of stunt women but we'll
say stunt person's or stunt man, and like, luckily there
are women now. In the back in the day, they
would dress men as women to do stunts many times. Yeah,
there's a lot of cross dressing back in the day,
(04:43):
there was until they decided, hey, women are people too,
and they can act and do stunts just like guys.
Speaker 1 (04:48):
Caan, we could put them in danger just as much
as well, exactly, so, so there wasn't much call for
stunt people for movies before movies just by definition. Sure,
don't be ridiculous, but right out of the gate when
we started making movies, we started needing people to do stunts.
And the earliest people who were doing stunts were actually comedians,
(05:08):
slapstick comedians like Buster Keaton had a very famous.
Speaker 2 (05:12):
Early stunt Steamboat Bill Junior. Is that what it was in, Yeah,
the very famous you've probably seen it in like you know,
Hollywood Legends of screen clips and things like that on AMC. Yeah,
it is the famous shot where the front facade of
a house falls down and on well would have been
on Buster Keaton, but he is saved because the attic
(05:33):
window or attic door was open, so it just falls
all around him, and there was some careful measuring in place,
because if he would have been off by a few inches,
he would have been dead.
Speaker 1 (05:42):
Yeah, and that was a real thing, Like the earliest
stunts were nothing but the real thing. Like apparently, if
you had I don't know, somebody hanging from the construction
the skeleton of a steel skyscraper, yeah, you needed that shot.
That's what the guy did.
Speaker 2 (06:02):
Yeah, and they ed the Grabster wrote this one, of course,
and Ed points out that back in the day before
they were like, you know, before they called them stunt men,
they were just like, let me go find someone crazy
enough to go do this exactly, and that guy, that
guy craft Service, looks crazy enough to do it, and
let's go see if he wants an extra twenty bucks.
Speaker 1 (06:21):
Yeah, and he does. Yeah, because beck, you know, in
nineteen oh two, twenty bucks was a lot.
Speaker 2 (06:26):
Sure.
Speaker 1 (06:28):
So as the film industry grew and grew early in
the twentieth century, we went from just nothing but slapstick
comedies to things like westerns and action flicks, and all
of a sudden, those people who really can ride on
the back of a horse standing up became stunt people
as well. And as stunts became more and more complex.
(06:51):
The idea of having somebody whose job and specialty was
to just do the stunt and make it look like
the act to the star sure was doing it started
to really develop.
Speaker 2 (07:04):
Yeah, and then flash forward even more the sixties and
seventies is when things really came to their own as
far as stunt technology developing. Things like squibs, which we
will talk about for gunshots and air rams.
Speaker 1 (07:22):
Is that what they're called. Yeah, it's like a like
a hydratic lift. Yeah, it's pneumatic, just shoots you up
into the air like with a human cannonball.
Speaker 2 (07:31):
Right.
Speaker 1 (07:32):
But like so if somebody, if a grenade blows up
by somebody.
Speaker 2 (07:36):
And you see the dude fly through the air and
he was on a ram, that's right. And then other
things like airbags and and you know, more technology with
cars with the roll cages, Like it just got more
and more complex, right, And now of course you have CGI,
which replaces a lot of stunts in many cases.
Speaker 1 (07:54):
Not necessarily to a better effect. Like all I have
to say is Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Yeah, where
it was like they suddenly cut the drawings of Harrison
Ford swinging on a lasso.
Speaker 2 (08:08):
He's famous for doing his own stunt.
Speaker 1 (08:09):
Snow he didn't do him in Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.
Speaker 2 (08:11):
Well, it's because he's eighty nine years old. Then he
would die.
Speaker 1 (08:16):
He was awesome in Bruno.
Speaker 2 (08:19):
I didn't see that. Was he hairs borders in that?
Speaker 1 (08:21):
Yeah? For about two seconds?
Speaker 2 (08:23):
Did they do like gay jokes to him or something?
Speaker 1 (08:26):
They didn't even get that far?
Speaker 2 (08:27):
Okay, yeah, did he just shut it down?
Speaker 1 (08:29):
Yeah? Always hilarious. But anyway, so stunts like the I
guess throughout this progression of the field of stunt people,
safety has gotten better and better, is what I think
we were just trying to say. To the point now
where they're not even used it's c GI. Yeah, but
there's there's always going to be room for stunt people.
(08:51):
Oh yeah, and the fact that it's gotten safer is
much better. But there's still there's an element of risk
to it no matter what it's Grabs points out. If
a stunt didn't present some sort of risk, there'd be
no need for stunt people at all, as actors would
do it. Yeah, but the actors can't always do it.
Speaker 2 (09:09):
That's right, And when you want to call them a
stunt person is when they either have a specific skill
that they're really good at, like fake martial arts or
I mean real martial arts, but fake hitting and kicking,
or fake.
Speaker 1 (09:23):
Marshal arts like chew kwong like stuff you just made up.
It's a lot of like just front kits in the air.
Speaker 2 (09:29):
That's what you practice, qong sword fighting, stage combat, like
we've talked about stuff like that. They are trained to fall.
They are trained to you know, safely fall. I guess
I should point out. And it just basically it's a
safety factor on one hand, and it's a financial factor
on the other because you can't have your main actor
(09:51):
actress going down with a broken leg, yeah for four weeks,
so you put your stunt person in there and keep
your actor all license safe in their trailer.
Speaker 1 (09:58):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (09:59):
Or you want to be shooting two things at once,
so you have your second unit out there shooting the
fast cars whizzing by in the car chase. Then you
have your first unit shooting the actor inside the car
driving a lot slower and acting like it's really fast.
Speaker 1 (10:16):
But shouting and like moving the steering wheel back and
forth a lot. Yeah, maybe there's somebody rocking the car.
Speaker 2 (10:22):
What's that called uh, poor man's process. Yeah is yeah,
so when you I guess we should say this. When
you're in a car, you either have a camera rig
on your car where it's the real car with cameras
attached to it. We've done that, or the cars on
a process trailer, which means a lot of these shots
you see with someone driving and you're like, they're not
even paying attention to the road.
Speaker 1 (10:41):
Yeah, it's because the.
Speaker 2 (10:42):
Car is sitting on a trailer being pulled by a.
Speaker 1 (10:44):
Truck, right, Or it's got a little rock to it, a.
Speaker 2 (10:46):
Little rock to it, or you do the poor man's
processes when the car is not going anywhere.
Speaker 1 (10:51):
And you have PA's pushing on the outside.
Speaker 2 (10:52):
Pushing on the outside, little tricks with lighting to make
it look like headlights going by.
Speaker 1 (10:57):
We've done that.
Speaker 2 (10:58):
It's really neat in the end to look get a
scene that's poor Man's process and think, wow, they're really
not even moving and it looks so good.
Speaker 1 (11:05):
See if you can pick it out and the stuff
you should know TV series they can probably pick it up.
So yeah, it's financial. It makes sense. Also, one of
the other reasons people use stunt people is they come
with a set of skills that the average actor doesn't.
Speaker 2 (11:20):
Have a particular set of skills.
Speaker 1 (11:22):
Exactly that makes them very dangerous to you. And so
you can either hire a stuntman who looks like your
star to carry out like a combat scene.
Speaker 2 (11:32):
Or sort of look like your star, or you can teach.
Speaker 1 (11:34):
Your star, you know, spend all this extra money and
time to training the star to this skill in a
crash course. So it just most of the time it
makes sense to just hire a stunt person.
Speaker 2 (11:44):
Yeah, And you know, chances are these days you're gonna
get a mix in a big action movie. You're gonna
get a mix of all three. You're gonna get some CGI,
you're gonna get some stunt people, and these days you're
gonna get real actors doing some of the real fake fighting.
Speaker 1 (11:57):
Doesn't Tom Cruise do a lot of his own stunts?
Speaker 2 (11:59):
Yeah, I gotta list to the vectors who prefer to do.
I don't mean to jump the gun, No, the Cruise
is famous for that.
Speaker 1 (12:04):
I was reading this and I was like, I wonder
if I would do my own stunts. I would do some.
I would say, sure, I want to learn how to
sword fight. Teach me that's something I want to know,
and I'm certainly not going to shell out for it
myself ever, so let's go ahead and learn. Now that's
a good point.
Speaker 2 (12:20):
I would do my own stunts.
Speaker 1 (12:22):
It depends the heights. No way I would do that.
Speaker 2 (12:25):
I would jump off. So California state law. And of
course they shoot movies all over the place now and
the union rules in Hollywood have really made it pretty
safe these days. But you're still going to find injuries
and your occasional death on set, which is really awful. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (12:44):
Well, there always have been pretty much from the beginning,
deaths and injuries.
Speaker 2 (12:49):
Howard Hughes.
Speaker 1 (12:50):
Yeah, the movie Hell's Angels, which we must have talked
about in the Hell's Angels podcast. I'm sure we did,
because I think we talked about the origin of the name,
which was from there combat. It was, you know, that's
what they think the fighting hell. I think that was
one of the theories. But there were three, maybe four fatalities, yeah,
(13:10):
because they were doing like real dog fights with airplanes
and there are a lot of crashes. Yeah, so that
was a movie where people died.
Speaker 2 (13:17):
Yes, very famously, The Twilight Zone, the movie Jennifer Jason
Lee's father Vic Morrow and two little Vietnamese kids died
when a helicopter crashed into the water where they were
crossing a river. That's on YouTube, by the way.
Speaker 1 (13:35):
I know it's pretty awful.
Speaker 2 (13:36):
It is, and I saw it recently because I was
just curious. I'd always wondered how it went down in
my head, because I've heard the story since the movie
came out, since I was a kid, and I always wondered, like,
exactly what was the logistics and how did that go down.
Speaker 1 (13:49):
It's pretty bad to watch, it is, because it just
goes totally out of control.
Speaker 2 (13:53):
It does, so I would not recommend that, but you
do have to enter your age, by the way to
watch that video. Yeah, and on set, the AD is
ultimately responsible the assistant director for everyone's safety. And in fact,
on our own little TV show, when we had fake
guns on set just as props. Yeah, like we didn't
(14:15):
even use them in the scene, but just to have
a fake gun on set, the AD has to announce
to the whole crew and show them the gun. Say
it's fake, it's not real. Look at the barrel. There's
no bullets, there's no nothing. It will not be fired.
We will not be shooting blanks or dummy cartridges, and
it's just you know, even on a stupid, little silly
show like ours, you got to be really careful with
(14:37):
that stuff.
Speaker 1 (14:37):
Yeah, so chuck. Because of this incredibly high risk profession work,
the stunt people must be paid out the yin yang true. False.
Speaker 2 (14:50):
Well, they make a good rate, but like we said earlier,
there's not a ton of work for the amount of
stunt people trying to get work. Oh okay, that was
when I used to work out in la as A Pa.
I would always try and talk to the stunt people
when I worked on jobs where they had stunt people,
because they're just really interesting. Yeah, and to say the least,
(15:12):
and they would usually bemoan the fact that there's not
a ton of work, and you know, they're all kind
of scrapping for the same piece of cheese. But that's
like everyone in the film business, sure, from crew to
the lead actor. You're you're all after that same piece
of cheese.
Speaker 1 (15:26):
We've worked with some stunt people too.
Speaker 2 (15:29):
Yeah, you'd be surprised when you need to call in
a stunt person. I worked on this one commercial where
the was just like bad traffic on the highway that
the shot was and cars had to just sort of
pull over to the side while another car came through.
All the cars that pulled over to the side of
the road had to have stunt drivers. I was like,
I could do that, but then I'd be taking bread
(15:50):
off the table at a stunt person.
Speaker 1 (15:52):
Right, and the whole production was shut down.
Speaker 2 (15:54):
That's true.
Speaker 1 (15:56):
Okay, So the most stunt people, you say, because there's
just so little work for so many people. It's not
a high paying job. A lot of people do it
for the love of it.
Speaker 2 (16:07):
Right, Yeah. I mean you can make money if you're
experienced and get tons of work, obviously, but right I'd
say those are the few and far between.
Speaker 1 (16:15):
But you'd have to love it because the hours are
usually very, very long. Yeah, to do a stunt is
not You don't just walk up and get in the
car and drive it and all of a sudden it
flips and there's an explosion and you're hoping for the best.
Like when you see a stunt, these things are rehearsed
over and over again. Say for a car chase, they'll
(16:35):
go through the entire car chase, but they'll do it
at a low speed so that it's choreographed, rehearst and
everybody knows what's going to happen when that takes a
very long time. If you need to flip a car,
you need to do measurements. The pyrotechnics guys are probably involved.
There's a lot of standing around, there's a lot of practicing,
there's a lot of measuring, there's a lot of talking.
(16:57):
And then if say you're doing something like it in water,
you're probably standing in water the whole time. So you're
doing that for fourteen hours. Yeah, it sounds like some
you would have to love your work to do this.
Speaker 2 (17:09):
Yeah, it's definitely not a glory job, especially factoring in
the anonymity factor.
Speaker 1 (17:14):
Right, when you do all this and you do it
absolutely perfectly, no one notices.
Speaker 2 (17:20):
That's the goal.
Speaker 1 (17:21):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (17:21):
In fact, one of my biggest pet peeves is when
you do notice and you see that one shot of
the dude with a wig on, it's supposed to be
Clint Eastwood, right, Yeah, just disappointing.
Speaker 1 (17:32):
So you're saying the second unit director handles this. The
second unit director is in charge of shooting stunts, but
the person who's in charge in like of the stunts themselves,
is the stunt coordinator. Yeah, and that person hires the
stunt people, plans the stunts, oversees the stunts, execution, does everything,
but actually sets up the camera and all that, or
(17:54):
handles the camera shooting it. Right.
Speaker 2 (17:57):
Yeah, it's basically it's like a film crew is broken
up into many departments, and that's just sort of its
own little department headed by the coordinator. Gotcha, Like they'll
have a budget to work with and all that kind
of stuff, just like any other department.
Speaker 1 (18:09):
So let's talk about how they do some stunts.
Speaker 2 (18:12):
Okay, and actually the second unit director a lot of
times is a former stunt person or stunt coordinator.
Speaker 1 (18:18):
Right, it makes sense.
Speaker 2 (18:19):
It comes in handy. Sure, let's talk about stunts without fire.
Speaker 1 (18:24):
How about punches?
Speaker 2 (18:26):
How about them? Stage fighting man something we have not
learned yet.
Speaker 1 (18:30):
That's pretty much a must if you want to become
a stunt man. That's less than one is, go take
stage fighting courses. Yep.
Speaker 2 (18:38):
Learn how to sell a punch as the giver and
as the receiver without looking corny and hoki and fake
like pro wrestling.
Speaker 1 (18:44):
Right, But it's very much similar to pro wrestling, especially
if you've ever seen somebody throw a punch in pro
wrestling and you can hear the skin slap. Yeah, that's
because that person was actually just punched. Yeah, the key
is they weren't punched very hard, certainly not as hard
as there the jerk of their head would would say.
Speaker 2 (19:02):
Yeah, you've got camera angles and you've got sound effects,
and through the art of movie magic, it looks like
a good knockdown, drag out brawl.
Speaker 1 (19:11):
Right, And if you've got it like a really good
stunt coordinator, there'll be like a punch that's sold and
the person who's being punched is on a ramp, so
they fly through the air.
Speaker 2 (19:21):
Yeah, that's awesome, all right. Gunshots. We talked about squibs.
A squib is basically you're gonna have a chest metal
chest plate with a squib on the front of it,
right to protect your body. And it's it's it's basically
a little blood packet that's rigged electronically to explode when
(19:43):
it's supposed to.
Speaker 1 (19:45):
And so the plate in between the squibbing and chest
protects you. Sure, and maybe you are in charge of you,
the stunt man are in charge that you have a
little button, Yeah, maybe to explode the charge or there's
somebody else doing it remotely and it's pretty awesome. Releases
theater blood opens a hole in the shirt. Yeah, pretty awesome.
Speaker 2 (20:04):
It is very awesome.
Speaker 1 (20:05):
This I didn't realize though, how they make bullet holes
in like like a wall, like stuck a wall. Yeah,
I thought this was pretty ingenious. They drill the hole
ahead of time and then they cover it up with
like putty or paper or something and paint with a
squib in there. Yeah, and they blow that squib out
(20:26):
and it makes a bullet hole.
Speaker 2 (20:27):
It's pretty cool.
Speaker 1 (20:28):
It's ingenious. It's simple, it seems like, but it's very ingenious.
Speaker 2 (20:31):
Well, especially when you watch a movie. Ideally you're getting
lost in the movie, not paying attention, but if you
watch like a John woufilm or something, yeah, and you
see just like a wall get riddled with bullets. Just
think about all the time, Yeah, it took to set
up all those squibs.
Speaker 1 (20:45):
And like what if the actor trips in the middle
of it, You're just like, we have.
Speaker 2 (20:49):
To do it again, Yeah, which is no good. And
in fact, big stunts they go with many mini cameras
on stunts that you don't or can't recreate because of
either danger or money. Yeah, And like some of the
shots have, like, you know, a dozen more camera shooting
right time.
Speaker 1 (21:04):
Which makes a lot of sense, of course, and Grabster
points out that another reason why you don't want to
do a big take like that more than once is
because every time you do, the danger for the stunt
person multiplies. Yeah, and I was like how, and then
I thought, oh, well doing it more right, and your
your chances of injury or increased the more you carry
out the more times you carry out a dangerous act.
(21:25):
So yeah, that's how it multiplies.
Speaker 2 (21:27):
Getting back to squibs, these days, a lot of directors
are opting for CGI blood and uh and bullet wounds.
But supposedly Quentin Tarantino and this is out. By the
time this comes out.
Speaker 1 (21:40):
Jango and Change, I can't wait to see it.
Speaker 2 (21:42):
Supposedly he had one real squibs and the blood like
they're supposed to be the bloodiest, nastiest squibs that hollywould
have seen in years.
Speaker 1 (21:52):
Is that right?
Speaker 2 (21:52):
Yeah, it's supposed to be pretty awesome.
Speaker 1 (21:54):
Huh. Yeah, have you seen a machete? Yeah that was
pretty bloody. Yeah that was though I agree it was,
but it was still pretty blank.
Speaker 2 (22:03):
They also blanks if you were firing a gun on set.
It is probably a blank, you would hope. So it's
not the same as a dummy cartridge. No, a blank
actually fires gunpowder, has gunpowder and fires what's called a wad.
It's like paper or wood or plastic. But it does
not obviously have shot or a bullet.
Speaker 1 (22:25):
No, but there's sometimes when the bullet explodes, bits of
metal can end up being shot out as well. Yeah,
that's how Brandon Lee died when they were filming The Crow.
Speaker 2 (22:34):
Yeah. His was actually an accident. There was a bullet
lodged in the barrel that they didn't know about.
Speaker 1 (22:39):
What I thought, Okay, well then I'm thinking of somebody
else who like was messing around with a gun.
Speaker 2 (22:44):
That was man, I can't remember anything, put it to
his head.
Speaker 1 (22:46):
Yeah, pulled the trigger and like the water, like the
gases or something killed them.
Speaker 2 (22:51):
Yeah, that was I can't remember his name, but it
was on a TV show set and he like goofing
around put it to his head as a joke. So
you should never mess around with blanks. No, very dangerous.
Still No, but there was a bullet in the Yeah,
there was a bullet. They got the guns mixed up
and there was a real bullet slug lodged in the
barrel that they didn't know about, so it fired a blank,
but it ejected that other thing and Brandon Lee died.
Speaker 1 (23:14):
Wow, I didn't know that.
Speaker 2 (23:15):
Yeah, man, it was one of the biggest oops is
probably in Hollywood history.
Speaker 1 (23:20):
Yeah, you know, I guess you could call it that.
Speaker 2 (23:22):
And I think he they thought he was still acting
and continued to roll cameras for a bit afterwards. Oh gee,
even Yeah, very sad tragic. Are we to falling?
Speaker 1 (23:34):
Yeah, which he'll do I won't do.
Speaker 2 (23:36):
Yeah, I'll jump off of stuff. I've always done that.
Speaker 1 (23:38):
Well, they use these huge, huge air bags right.
Speaker 2 (23:41):
Well, back in the day they did, and if you
and if you're doing a fall today, they still will sometimes,
but generally these days they have like a bungee type contraption.
Speaker 1 (23:49):
I would still demand an air bag. Yeah, they apparently
also for shorter falls, they'll take some cardboard boxes and
they'll cut the sharp corners off. Yeah, and then you
jump onto that. Did you do that when you were
a kid.
Speaker 2 (24:03):
No, no, no, I always would jump into water.
Speaker 1 (24:06):
I would jump like onto the ground off of like
the credenza or whatever. And now I'm like, I wouldn't
even do that. It's dangerous.
Speaker 2 (24:14):
Falls used to be the thing, Like I'm sure you
remember as a kid, falls were a really big deal
for stuntmen and Dar Robinson, remember that guy. No, he
did the Sharki's Machine fall. Okay in Atlanta and the
Burt Reynolds movie. Nope, it's very famous fall out of
the Peachtree Plaza hotel.
Speaker 1 (24:30):
I was up in Toledo at the time.
Speaker 2 (24:32):
It was still it was released in Toledo in Toledo
Sharky's Machine one.
Speaker 1 (24:36):
Yeah, uh off the off the Waist Hotel.
Speaker 2 (24:39):
He went through a window of the Peachtree Plaza and
uh into onto an air bag. And it's just it
was one of the famous early falls, and or not
early falls, but one of the famous falls.
Speaker 1 (24:49):
What Florida did he jump out of?
Speaker 2 (24:50):
Oh man, I can't remember.
Speaker 1 (24:52):
Was it pretty high?
Speaker 2 (24:52):
Yeah? I mean it was over over like one hundred
and fifty feet in Oh wow.
Speaker 1 (24:56):
Yeah, that's nuts.
Speaker 2 (24:57):
That's pretty cool.
Speaker 1 (24:58):
But see, so imagine planning that stunt. How many times
they measured everything to figure out where the air bags
needed to go, and then they probably supplemented it with
additional airbags and if they loved the guy at all
they did all this.
Speaker 2 (25:11):
Yeah, stuntman. When you go to talk to one, if
you're on set, you'll be disappointed by the fact that
they aren't these crazy dudes like you want them to be.
They're actually really sensible because they want to work and
earn money, so they want to be really, really sure
that no one gets hurt. It's a little more boring
than you would think talking to them, sure, but they
are a little nuts.
Speaker 1 (25:30):
Yeah, well you'd have to be at least a little
What else, chuck fire? How about fire?
Speaker 2 (25:36):
I just saw Anchorman the other night, Remember when they
had the street brawl that got on fire just walks by.
Speaker 1 (25:43):
Yeah, that's a pretty serious stunt, Like when you are
when you set yourself on fire. Yeah, and there's a
lot of safety precautions, but even still, it's you're on fire,
whether you like it or not.
Speaker 2 (25:55):
Yeah. You're wearing all kinds of fire protective clothing and
fire retardant and then you're smeared with the flammable gel.
Speaker 1 (26:01):
Yep. You have a hood on that protects you yeah
as well, and there's an oxygen tank in there, so
you're basically just completely wrapped in this outfit. Yeah, but yeah,
the flammable gels on and they liked you and then
film you and you're going, oh, it's always the wavy.
Speaker 2 (26:21):
This kind of looks the same.
Speaker 1 (26:22):
And then the people run over and put you out
with fire extinguisher.
Speaker 2 (26:26):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (26:27):
But they time it very closely as well. Oh, I'm sure,
because I think it's kind of like, well, if we
go twelve seconds, he actually will catch on fire, so
we can shoot for eleven.
Speaker 2 (26:36):
Eleven point five. Right. Explosions are a big deal obviously
these days. There's so many explosions in movies. Sometimes they
cheat a little bit what's called a technique called force
perspective to make it look like the actor is closer
to the explosion. And if there's an explosion, you're probably
also going to be propelled with the air ram that
we're talking about. It's almost called a Hollywood trope at
(27:01):
this point. The explosion in the dudes flying like twenty
feet in the hear.
Speaker 1 (27:03):
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, that was big in a commando.
Oh yes, there are a lot of air rams used
in Commanda.
Speaker 2 (27:10):
Many more than I can count.
Speaker 1 (27:13):
That was such a good movie.
Speaker 2 (27:15):
Car chases and crashes.
Speaker 1 (27:17):
Yeah, they use rams as well. They may be attached
to the car. So if a car needs to flip,
you see people like going up on a ramp or whatever. Yeah,
and I'd probably use that if you're just trying to
stay on two wheels. But if you're trying to flip,
there's usually a ram that pushes the car, pushes it
off the ground and it flips, or if you haven't
coming out of the rear, it'll make it jump really high.
Speaker 2 (27:40):
Oh true. Like in Hooper, I don't know.
Speaker 1 (27:43):
All these movies you're talking about.
Speaker 2 (27:45):
Oh dude. Hooper was the stuntman movie with Burt Reynolds.
Speaker 1 (27:47):
I didn't see it.
Speaker 2 (27:48):
Oh my god, how neat am very famous stuntman turned director.
Speaker 1 (27:52):
Directed, founder of The Cannonball Run.
Speaker 2 (27:55):
Well yeah, and director of the movie The Cannonball Run
and Smoking the Bandit and Hooper. Hooper was about an
aging stuntman Burt Reynolds, who was challenged by the up
and comer Jan Michael Vincent. And of course there's the
love relationship with Sally Field choosing that too. And it
was good. It was like the best. It's sort of
the best stunt movie ever because it was about stunts, huh.
(28:16):
And he had a rocket car and that one that
was a big rocket car jump. It was the big climax.
Speaker 1 (28:20):
I did not see Hooper?
Speaker 2 (28:22):
Did you need to see Hooper?
Speaker 1 (28:23):
What was I watching back then?
Speaker 2 (28:26):
What were you? You're probably watching TV and stuff, I guess, Yeah, Hey,
it was a little before your time. And like I
said earlier, stunt drivers, it's not all like a lot
of this stuff you're gonna see on TV's stunt driving,
even though you might not think it's necessary.
Speaker 1 (28:43):
Yeah, apparently it does just pull off of a.
Speaker 2 (28:45):
Sometime sometimes not. How do you become a stuntman Josh.
Speaker 1 (28:49):
Uh, Well, apparently, as far as Grabanowski says, you basically
have to start off as an extra on the set.
Speaker 2 (28:57):
That's not necessarily true.
Speaker 1 (28:58):
Okay, if you want, and if you want to go
from the absolutely from zero to stuntman in the slowest
way possible, then you would start out as an extra
on the set. You have to be a screen act
you have to be a member of the Screen Actors
Guild in most cases. Yeah, and when you're hanging around
the set, you identify who the second unit director or
stunt coordinator is and you hand them your headshot.
Speaker 2 (29:22):
This ad painted a path to becoming a stunt person
that we've kind of laughed at. It is not the
only path, but one thing is for sure. To become
a stunt person, you need to get to know someone
else in that department. And that's really with every film department.
If you want to be in a wardrobe, you should
get a job as a BA and start hanging out
(29:42):
with the wardrobe people. If you want to be in makeup,
start hanging out with the makeup people. And that's just
how it works in Hollywood. There's no degree. You can
get a film degree, but come on, let's wasted money.
Just go to work on the set. You get to
know the people in the department and then start bugging
them a little bit when they're not busy. Stunt coordinators
are a little testy. There's a lot on the line,
you know. Sure, so you know, if you're a new
(30:04):
pa on set, don't run over to the stunt coordinator
start bugging them right away. Pick and choose your time
and then give them your headshot and then give him
your headshot.
Speaker 1 (30:12):
But yeah, what you're saying is that it's apprentice based.
Speaker 2 (30:16):
It is.
Speaker 1 (30:17):
Basically there are schools.
Speaker 2 (30:20):
One recommended driving school, the Rick Seaman Stunt Driving School.
There's also the International Stunt School that sounds pretty serious,
and this is where you can learn to do some
of the stuff. But it's not like you exit with
a degree and then show up and say, now i'd
like to do stunt work.
Speaker 1 (30:34):
Right, all the rest of you are fired. I have
a degree from the International Stunt School.
Speaker 2 (30:40):
And Grabster points out that you should have a large
area of specialty rather than one thing.
Speaker 1 (30:45):
I thought that's a very good point.
Speaker 2 (30:47):
Yeah, but that's not necessarily true. I've talked to some
stunt dudes that say, eventually you would like to have
a wide range of skills, but a good way to
get in is to have one really specific skill that
you're great at. And you might get back call like
this guy's good with wirework or water work and or
he's a hell of a driver, or a really good
(31:08):
motorcycle guy, yeah, or a great skier if you're doing
like what was that for your eyes only?
Speaker 1 (31:15):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (31:15):
Is that the one that heard ski Chase?
Speaker 1 (31:17):
Never say never again?
Speaker 2 (31:19):
I know it's definitely Roger Moore.
Speaker 1 (31:20):
Okay, I think it's for your eyes only, all right.
Speaker 2 (31:22):
But it helps to have these skills, Like a lot
of stunt people are former motorcycle motocross racers or car
enthusiasts or you know, how to stand stand forest back riding. Yeah,
so a lot of them had these skills just anyway,
and they're like, hey, I can I've been driving dirt
track for twenty years as we'll make some money.
Speaker 1 (31:42):
Yeah, film me.
Speaker 2 (31:45):
There's books out there, are they? So you want to
be a Stuntman? By Mark Aspitt.
Speaker 1 (31:49):
Oh, that's a great name for a book like that.
Speaker 2 (31:52):
The Full Burn by Kevin Conley, Fight Choreography, The Art
of Nonverbal Dialogue by John Kring, and then Hall Needham's
biography stunt Man with a.
Speaker 1 (32:03):
Exclamation had to be had to be you got? You
said you have a list of actors that do their
own stunts.
Speaker 2 (32:12):
Yeah. I think most people know this, people like Jason Statham,
famous for doing his own stunts.
Speaker 1 (32:16):
Huh. I see Zoe Bells on there. I thought she
was a stunt person.
Speaker 2 (32:20):
Well she is, and she was in Death Proof though
as an actor, right, And they were like, I guess
they include her now because she did that awesome hanging
onto the hood scene.
Speaker 1 (32:29):
I was watching that earlier and it is just not
it's pretty cool. It's like she's when she's hanging on
it looks like by belts or whatever. Yeah, and then
she's she's kind of sliding still across the hood.
Speaker 2 (32:42):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (32:42):
All it would take is like half an inch, and
then all of a sudden she's gone too far and
she's off the side of the car.
Speaker 2 (32:49):
Yeah, that was it. She's one of the best in
the business apparently.
Speaker 1 (32:52):
Man, that's scary.
Speaker 2 (32:54):
Burt Reynolds used to do a lot of his stunts.
In fact, he got injured pretty bad. That led to
some bad health problems on set. Oh yeah, though not
City Heat. The Clint Eastwood movie Burt Lancaster.
Speaker 1 (33:06):
He used to do his own stunts. He's a tough guy, yeah,
the movie Tough Guys.
Speaker 2 (33:10):
Yes, in that Yeah. Yeah, I don't think we mentioned
been hurt either. That's one of the famous stunts ever,
The Chariot Race.
Speaker 1 (33:15):
Yeah, you want to tell him about it?
Speaker 2 (33:18):
Go ahead, what do you got.
Speaker 1 (33:19):
Oh, well, there's a stuntman named Joe Cannutt and he
was doubling for Charlton Heston and during the Chariot Race,
this big, long, intense race. Yeah, he falls off the
chariot and is about to be run over. But in
true stuntman fashion, grabs it. It's being dragged. Yeah, pulls
(33:39):
himself back up and continues on.
Speaker 2 (33:42):
And I think that made it on screen.
Speaker 1 (33:44):
Yeah, it's in the movie. But that was a real thing,
Like it wasn't a planned stunt, Like the guy saved
his own life.
Speaker 2 (33:51):
That's awesome, Dad, Harrison Ford, you mentioned as far as
the ladies go, Angelina and Jolee and Cameron Diaz are
the right known for doing stunts. Arnie arts in Niaga
and Jackie Chan very famous for doing his own stunts.
And it makes a difference, man, when you can tell
it's Tom Cruise on the side of that mountain.
Speaker 1 (34:11):
Man, that was scary. Is that really him?
Speaker 2 (34:14):
Yeah, Emily worked on that shoot on there, just that
segment in Moab, the rock climbing segment, and that's when
famously Tom Cruise was like four hours late and flies
in on a helicopter and like the whole crew was
waiting around all day for him.
Speaker 1 (34:27):
I hadn't heard that, and then yeah.
Speaker 2 (34:29):
I mean famous in my family. Yeah, and now I
guess famous to the podcast community.
Speaker 1 (34:34):
Yea Cruise is not punctual.
Speaker 2 (34:37):
Well he wasn't that day.
Speaker 1 (34:39):
Wow stunts.
Speaker 2 (34:41):
Have you seen Haywire the Soderberg movie. Uh uh, it's
about uh assassin. Assassin's basically it's an action movie, Soderberg's
take on an action movie. But Gina Karana was a
former mixed martial artist and she she's awesome and does
her own stunts. What's her name, Gina Carano.
Speaker 1 (35:01):
I don't believe I know her.
Speaker 2 (35:02):
She plays the lead. I'm she I think that was
her first like legit movie. Oh gotcha known for mixed
martial arts. But yeah, she does her own stunts.
Speaker 1 (35:09):
She's b a hey wy hey, I'll check it out.
Speaker 2 (35:13):
I got nothing else.
Speaker 1 (35:14):
I don't either.
Speaker 2 (35:15):
Pretty straightforward.
Speaker 1 (35:16):
If you want to learn more about stunts, you can
type stunts into the house stuff works search bar. And
I said search bar, which means it's time for listener.
Speaker 2 (35:26):
May Josh, I'm gonna call this things we I guess
say a lot. Oh no yeah, like no, no, no,
that's not in there.
Speaker 1 (35:36):
Okay.
Speaker 2 (35:36):
Everyone says like, though I know.
Speaker 1 (35:38):
But I've people have pointed out here they're like, you
guys say like a lot. And I've started to notice
And when I say it when I hear the podcast,
I don't hear when I'm saying it. Only later on
when I can't do anything about it.
Speaker 2 (35:50):
Don't don't beat yourself up. Everybody says that, like there
are articles written in the New Yorker about the use
of the word like in the twenty first century. Okay,
so you're part of that crowd. No, you're not millennial.
Speaker 1 (36:04):
I'm not. I'm an aged person.
Speaker 2 (36:09):
Sorry, he's wrong with me today, Guys, Before I start,
I feel like I should get out my adoration of
the podcast. Always listen as I'm walking my dog, Chloe
keeps me entertained for hours. I love that you guys
are still going strong, and I'm very thankful. I have
comprised a list, however, of words and phrases used most
often in the show, besides obvious ones like Chuck or
(36:30):
Josh or search bark. Let's hear them in no particular order.
A boy to being a bout a boom.
Speaker 1 (36:35):
Sure he left off the bon Jovi.
Speaker 2 (36:39):
Oh, she we'll talk about this later, or we'll get to.
Speaker 1 (36:42):
That, and then a lot of times we don't.
Speaker 2 (36:44):
Yeah. I feel like I say that a lot.
Speaker 1 (36:45):
I think it's hilarious when we say that we're going
to talk about something later and then we forget.
Speaker 2 (36:50):
To yeah, or I say all the time. I think
we should point out and she didn't put them in here,
but I'll go ahead and throw my own on there.
Oh yeah, I'm making air quotes. Yeah, I E E G. Yeah,
that's one of yours. That's a good band name, and
that's usually me. Sure, that's not just a sweat. You
(37:13):
just don't go out sweat a lot because of me.
That's a stand up guy. I don't remember her saying
that a lot. Do you say that a lot? All right,
I'm gonna take at you with that one, Katherine on
the up and up.
Speaker 1 (37:25):
I don't know that's c a of course we say
that a lot, definitely.
Speaker 2 (37:29):
People always ask it what it means.
Speaker 1 (37:30):
We never tell.
Speaker 2 (37:31):
They never tell. And then have you seen the movie? Ironically?
Speaker 1 (37:36):
That's about right.
Speaker 2 (37:36):
Yeah, And those are ten things that we say a lot.
And that is she says she thinks these are great
comforts her and she smiles, and that is Catherine Phillips.
Speaker 1 (37:45):
Thanks a lot, Katherine. That's pretty cool. Somebody's out there
like writing lists of things we say.
Speaker 2 (37:52):
It's nicer to hear people say like I take comfort that.
And except for the emails when we get.
Speaker 1 (37:56):
Like you guys always say this and it's John Travolta
taking against the task. If you want to take the task,
whether John Travolta or anybody else, or you just want
to say, hey, here's a list of things I noticed
because the podcast or whatever. You can join us on Twitter. Actually, first,
(38:19):
before we sign off, let's remind everybody that we're going
to be on the TV again the TV. Yeah, Saturday
night on Science Channel at ten pm would be the
premiere of another Stuff you Should Know episode.
Speaker 2 (38:31):
You can watch us each and every week.
Speaker 1 (38:32):
Yeah, TV show Stuff you Don't You Should Know TV
show ten pm.
Speaker 2 (38:36):
Or get it on iTunes the following day. Yeah, on Sunday.
That's right, Chuck, Just go to iTunes and type of
Stuff you Should Know?
Speaker 1 (38:41):
And two it comes off all right. So now we'll
sign off, right, yep. You can get in touch with
this on Twitter at SYSK podcast. You can join us
on Facebook dot com slash Stuff you Should Know, and
you can send us a good old fashioned email too.
Stuff Podcast at Discovery dot com.
Speaker 3 (39:01):
For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit
HowStuffWorks dot com.
Speaker 1 (39:12):
Brought to you by the twenty twelve Toyota Camry.
Speaker 2 (39:15):
It's ready, are you
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