They risk their lives for above-average salaries, hurling themselves off cliffs, leaping onto charging horses, enduring punches and dynamite blasts. They ski off mountaintops, steer into oncoming traffic, leap from fire escapes, and burst through plate glass windows, sometimes with their clothes ablaze. They get thrown from bucking broncos, kicked out of speeding vehicles, and occasionally find themselves dangling from the wings of aircraft.
They are stuntmen and stuntwomen, the people who substitute for leading actors in highly dangerous filming situations—with the hope that audiences don’t notice the abrupt shift in onscreen performers. When a stunt works perfectly in front of the cameras, stuntpeople are exhilarated. But when things go wrong, the results can be terrifying and tragic.
For decades in old Hollywood, the names of stuntpeople were unknown to moviegoers. But eventually word got out that it was stunt legend and future second-unit stunt coordinator Yakima Canutt and not John Wayne who leapt from galloping horse to galloping horse in John Ford’s Stagecoach. And that 1970s stuntman Dar Robinson doubled for Steve McQueen in Papillon just as Rick Sylvester stood in for Roger Moore in several James Bond entries.
On rare occasions, film stars performed their own death-defying stunts. The 1920s genius Buster Keaton was known for his astonishing in-camera stunt work, which included grabbing hold of a speeding car and riding on the handlebars of a motorcycle. Keaton was worshipped by Hong Kong’s extraordinary Jackie Chan, who performed equally mindboggling stunt miracles on screen throughout the 1980s and ’90s—all without the assistance of body doubles.
Film historian Max Alvarez jumps into a multimedia journey through a century of remarkable cinema stunts. Participants learn the secrets of Harold Lloyd’s legendary clock-dangling stunt in Safety Last and the behind-the-scenes stunt miracles of Vic Armstrong in Raiders of the Lost Ark, among other historic revelations. And Alvarez recommends not to try any of these stunts at home.
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