Stuntman!: My Car-Crashing, Plane-Jumping, Bone-Breaking, Death-Defying Hollywood Life

When I first picked up my brand-new copy of Hal Needham’s STUNTMAN!: MY CAR-CRASHING, PLANE-JUMPING, BONE-BREAKING, DEATH-DEFYING HOLLYWOOD LIFE, the first thought that flashed inside my mind was, “Oh, fuck, now I actually have to read this shit.” My second was the profound realization that the cliché was true: Those who ignore the lessons of the past are forever doomed to repeat them.

Our story begins six years ago (-ish), back when I was still a young, bright-eyed, Canadian writer working for a local company that specialized in publishing books you’ve never read. Having grown accustomed to my being the most obscure working author in North America, I was shocked when my fourth book, URBAN LEGENDS, ignited a firestorm of media interest.

Over the course of three months, I received a staggering total of six interview requests, the last of which came from an older, much more mature and cynical American reporter looking to do a feature story on the book’s subject for his big-city weekly newspaper. Since I tend to come across as a babbling idiot over the phone, I agreed to answer his questions via electronic mail, which I proceeded to do with startling wit and insight.

What I did after that, though, would forever change the course of my life as I know it. Or at least that’s what I’d say if I were pitching this as a nonfiction book proposal. While the actually overall effect of that next action on my present state of being is somewhat debatable, there’s no question that if I hadn’t done it, you wouldn’t be reading this right now.

Something about the questions the guy asked compelled me to enter his name — Rod Lott — into that new Google thingie everyone was talking about at the time (whatever happened to it?). There wasn’t a lot to be found, but what I did find got my complete attention.

Turned out this Lott guy not only had a last name just one letter of the alphabet away from my own, but he was also the publisher of a zine called HITCH. I had never heard of it before, but my imagination was instantly delighted by its website and its promises of articles devoted to the films of Andy Sidaris and to watching the entire POLICE ACADEMY series in one sitting.

It was as if I had discovered a long-lost, pop-culture-bullshit brother.

In the past, I might have left it at that, but I was undergoing a personal metamorphosis at the time and decided for once to reach out to a possibly sympathetic human being. It didn’t hurt that I figured if I played my cards right, I might score a couple free magazines in the process.

So I sent an e-mail to Rod telling him how cool I thought his operation seemed and how I’d love to pitch some article ideas his way. He responded positively and told me to go ahead. It took me only five minutes to compile a list of five suggestions, but I spent another half hour trying to think of just one more to add to the list. At the time I had — on a whim — decided to buy a cheap copy of THE CANNONBALL RUN on DVD purely to listen to its director defend his atrocity, and — absent of any inspiration — I decided to write “The Films of Hal Needham” as my final idea.

The resulting article appeared in what turned out to be the last ever issue of HITCH (which I prefer to assume was just a coincidence). Since then, Rod and I have still only ever communicated to each other via e-mail and social-networking sites, but have still managed to grow close enough to develop the kind of weird private jokes you typically only share with people you’ve actually met.

Thus, a few weeks back, I received an e-mail from Rod informing me that Needham, the man who first brought us together, was publishing an autobiography. Reading this, I immediately went to Amazon, pre-ordered a copy, and responded to Rod’s e-mail to say that the Bookgasm review was already taken care of.

It was a brief, amusing exchange, exceptional only for not featuring any references to actresses we’ve enjoyed “watching” in the past (a major recurring theme in our correspondence), but when the book actually arrived in the mail, I realized that my whimsical gesture had genuine consequences and would require actual follow through.

Sadly, it turns out that Needham is only a slightly better memoirist than filmmaker, which he pretty much acknowledges by essentially ignoring his career behind the camera in favor of the titular profession that first made him famous. Anyone who buys STUNTMAN! looking for behind-the-scenes stories about MEGAFORCE or RAD are going to come away severely disappointed, while those who want to hear about the stunts he performed on such forgotten movies as THE DEVIL’S BRIGADE, THE UNDEFEATED and LUCKY LADY aren’t going to be quite as disappointed, but will probably get a bit bored by page 200.

Truthfully, many of Needham’s stunt-related anecdotes are quite entertaining. It’s just that a certain sameness starts to dull their impact after a while, especially since he is clearly incapable of the kind of personal introspection required to elevate a memoir away from the lowest level of mere narcissistic self-promotion. Whatever dark reasons compelled him to become the master of one of the world’s most dangerous professions go completely unexplored in favor of a constant stream of macho braggadocio, which is fine in small doses, but ultimately exhausting over the course of a 300-page work.

Reading STUNTMAN!, it’s difficult to determine whether or not his disinterest in the personal details of his life (we learn, for example, that he’s been married three times, but are told only the names of two ex-wives) is because he believes they are secondary to the myth he wishes to perpetuate, or because he was so obsessed with his career, he simply didn’t have enough of a personal life to document.

Whatever the reason, this lack of depth renders Needham as one-dimensional as the characters who populate his films, which is itself interesting, because it suggests that their inherent cartoonish is less the result of incompetence or design, but instead a direct reflection of his simplistic worldview.

Though he only very briefly mentions MEGAFORCE as a dismissive afterthought, reading STUNTMAN! goes a long way to understanding how that infamously expensive flop came to be. It’s easy to imagine the only thought he put into the production was in making the ridiculous vehicles that defined its bizarre existence. Everything else — such as character and plot — simply didn’t matter.

Then again, it would be wrong of me to claim that there is no room for romance in Needham’s reminiscences, since he’s clearly in love with his former roommate of 12 years, Burt Reynolds. In fact, were it not for their “friendship,” Needham likely never would have become a director, since he was only able to get SMOKEY AND THE BANDIT off the ground when his pal (and then the biggest movie star in the world) agreed to star in it.

It’s in describing his time with Reynolds that the disconnect between Needham’s perception and observable reality becomes most apparent. To any sane, mature reader, they come across as selfish, overpaid children, but in the author’s eyes, they’re lovable rascals who can’t be bothered to live by society’s priggish rules. Once again, this goes a long way toward suggesting that juvenile films like THE CANNONBALL RUN and STROKER ACE are actually much more sincere than their deservedly negligible reputations would suggest.

In her much, much, much better memoir, THERE ARE WORSE THINGS I COULD DO, Adrienne Barbeau describes how miserable she was on the set of CANNONBALL RUN, as she desperately tried to find an actual character to play in a role defined by her breasts, on a set run by a good ol’ boy who seemed to care more about throwing a party at the hotel after work than shooting a decent movie.

Her portrayal of Needham actually synchs up quite nicely with his own, the key difference being that in her book, he’s an asshole who let the film’s spoiled star treat everyone terribly, while in his, he’s a fun, easygoing director lucky enough to work with a superstar in his prime.

It’s this refusal to even acknowledge the existence of his potential faults that probably disturbed me the most about STUNTMAN!, turning what would otherwise be a lighthearted look at a somewhat neglected part of Hollywood history into an occasionally misplaced vanity project. You get the very real sense that the reason Needham ignores much of his directorial career is because as successful as the SMOKEY and CANNONBALL films were (financially, if not artistically), the rest of his work consisted of out-and-out flops like THE VILLAIN and BODY SLAM.

Perhaps the most galling of the book’s omissions is his failure to mention Heidi Von Beltz, the aspiring model/actress/stuntwoman who became a quadriplegic following an accident on the set of CANNONBALL RUN. Despite describing several instances of stuntmen being hurt via improperly supervised stunts on other people’s sets, countless instances of times where his direct intervention prevented such accidents from occurring, and several moments where he heroically saved stuntmen and actors left in dangerous situations, he refuses to acknowledge the one time he truly fucked up at the expense of another human being.

And it’s this lack of honest humility that ultimately keeps STUNTMAN! from being the book it could have been. Reading it is like listening to a gregarious old-timer telling stories about all of his wild times while he chugs down boilermakers at the bar. It’s fun for a bit, but soon, you can’t ignore the sad reality that for all of his accomplishments, he’s still just a lonely old drunk destined to tell the same stories over and over again.

Your mileage may vary.

Oh, and because Rod specifically asked me to mention what Needham had to say about a certain busty blond actress he used to enjoy “watching” when he was younger, here it is in its entirety: “A deal was put together for me to direct STROKER ACE, starring Burt Reynolds and Loni Anderson. It was the story of a happy-go-lucky NASCAR driver.”

There you go, Rod — see what you can do with that in the shower tonight. —Allan Mott

Buy it at Amazon.

Related posts:

1. The View from the Bridge: Memories of Star Trek and a Life in Hollywood
2. PostSecret: Confessions on Life, Death, and God
3. The Snake Charmer: A Life and Death in Pursuit of Knowledge
4. Sweet Money Girl / Life and Death of a Tough Guy
5. The Stewardess Is Flying the Plane!: American Films of the 1970s