SYSK’s Summer Movie Playlist: How Stuntmen (and -women) Work

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1:01John Polk story on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, everybody. Back to the Stuff You Should Know summer movie playlist, and this one is from January 2013. It's our How Stuntmen and Women Work episode. I think your socks are going to be knocked off by how hard these people work for our movie viewing enjoyment. You enjoy, too. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com.

1:38Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and this is Stuff You Should Know. Well, Jerry had an itchy trigger finger today. Did you hear her in there? Yeah, she's ready to go home. Yeah, she's like, come on. 3, 2, 1, go. You guys aren't my entire life. I know. We like to think we are, but that is... We're like 0.1 % of Jerry's life. She's giggling in there. She's quite the adventurer. How are you doing, man? I'm great, man. I'm ready to jump from a tall building or roll a brand new car. Man! Sorry. That's what I was going to ask you, so I guess you did the intro for us.

2:14Go ahead. Let's pretend like that didn't happen. No, it's fine. Okay. You were just doing what? The theme from The Fall Guy starring Lee Majors, 1980s awesome TV show with probably the best truck ever featured in a TV show. Yeah, that GMC man, that thing is sweet. You know dudes recreate that truck. If you Google it, there's a lot of guys that have made that truck for themselves. For good reason, too. It's a cool truck. Yeah, and it's interesting that The Fall Guy points out a couple of, the show itself points out a very important thing as far as stuntmen 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 to go around.

2:58It's tough to make it as a stunt man. Yeah, you get punched. Yeah, and B, if you look at the lyrics to that theme song, he is really salty about not getting the glory, and the girls. Yeah, mainly the girls. And the glory. When he winds up in the hay, it's only hay The hay hay So the song complains about not getting glory or women And that is one of the hallmarks, though, of the stunt person Is to remain anonymous And to be bitter about it I guess so Very few stunt people you've ever heard of Well, yeah, the Academy of Arts and Sciences They give out the Academy Awards, the Oscars Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Yeah they don't have a category for stunt people.

3:45Nope. Never have. And the reason some people give is because they like to maintain the anonymity and the illusion that's provided by stunt people filling in as doubles for stars. Yeah. But you can win a what was the award? You can win an Emmy for Best Stunt Coordinator. True. Or the stunt award. They have their own stunt awards. Oh, yeah. The Taurus World Stunt Awards. Yeah. You can win a Tory. They took a hiatus. I saw that there was 2010, and they're having stuff for 2012. Couldn't find anything about it in 2011. Really? Yeah. So if you know what happened to the Taurus World Stunt Awards for 2011, we are curious.

4:25Interesting. Let us know. So thanks for listening. So anyway, 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 them before then. No. I mean, maybe for like a show or something like that, like a Wild Bill Hickok show. Oh, I guess I see your point. You can call them stuntmen. But really, 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 is in the X Games, those extreme sports kids that all the kids are into these days.

5:07That's a stunt. These are technically stunt people. What we're talking about are movie stunt people. And the whole point to their craft isn't to do a 580 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 no he didn't actually get clocked that was a stuntman who knows what he's doing and that was a carefully choreographed scene that just flew right past you but it's still your brain still just absorbed it as that man just got punched even though that didn't really happen 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 persons are stuntmen 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 um there's a lot of cross-dressing back in the day there was until they decided hey women are people too and they can act and do stunts right just like guys can we can put them in danger just as much as well exactly so um 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 needed people to do stunts.

6:27And the earliest people who were doing stunts were actually comedians, slapstick comedians. Like Buster Keaton had a very famous early stunt. Steamboat Bill Jr. 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 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.

7:05Yeah, 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 like the construction, the skeleton of a steel skyscraper. Yeah. You needed that shot. And that's what the guy did. Yeah, and 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 stuntmen, they were just like, let me go find someone crazy enough to go do this. Exactly. And that guy at craft service looks crazy enough to do it, and let's go see if he wants an extra 20 bucks.

7:43Yeah, and he does. Yeah. Because back, you know, in 1902, 20 bucks was a lot. Sure. um so as the the film industry grew and grew early in the 20th century um 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 um and as as stunts became more and more complex the idea of having somebody whose job and specialty was to just do the stunt and make it look like the actor, the star, was doing it started to really develop. Yeah, and then flash forward even more, the 60s and 70s 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, is that what they're called?

8:44Yeah. It's like a pneumatic lift. Yeah, it's pneumatic now, I think. It just shoots you up into the air, like with a human cannonball. Right. So if a grenade blows up by somebody. And you see the dude fly through the air. He was on a ram. That's right. And then other things like airbags and more technology with cars, with the roll cages. It just got more and more complex. Right. And now, of course, you have CGI, which replaces a lot of stunts in many cases. Yeah, 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 to drawings of Harrison Ford swinging on a lasso.

9:30He's famous for doing his own stunts, though. He didn't do them in Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Well, that's because he's 89 years old. And he would die. He was awesome in Bruno. I didn't see that. Was he Harrison Ford was in that? Yeah, for about two seconds. Did they do like gay jokes to him or something? They didn't even get that far. Oh, okay. Yeah. Did he just shut it down? Yeah. Awesome. It was hilarious. But anyway, so stunts, I guess throughout this progression of the field of stunt people, safety's gotten better and better is what I think we were just trying to say. Sure. To the point now where they're not even used.

10:08It's CGI. Yeah. But there's always gonna be room for stunt people. 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, as Grabster points out, if a stunt didn't present some sort of risk, there'd be no need for stunt people at all. That's true. The actors would do it. But the actors can't always do it. That's right, and when you want to call in 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. Fake martial arts, like Chu Kwong, like stuff you just made up.

10:49It's a lot of just front kicks in the air. That's what you practice. Chu Kwong. Sword fighting, stage combat, like we've talked about, stuff like that. They're trained to fall. They're trained to 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 or actress going down with a broken leg for four weeks. So you put your stunt person in there and keep your actor all nice and safe in their trailer. 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.

11:31then you have your first unit shooting the actor inside the car driving a lot slower and acting like it's really fast. But shouting and moving the steering wheel back and forth a lot. Yeah. Maybe there's somebody rocking the car. What's that called? Poor man's process. Yeah. 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 car's on a process trailer, which means a lot of these shots you see of someone driving, and you're like, they're not even paying attention to the road. Yeah.

12:04It's because the car's sitting on a trailer being pulled by a truck. Right. So it's got a little rock to it. A little rock to it. Or you do the poor man's processes when the car's not going anywhere. And you have PAs pushing on the outside. Pushing on the outside, little tricks with lighting to make it look like headlights going by. We've done that. It's really neat in the end to look at a scene that's poor man's process and think, wow they're really not even moving and it looks so good yeah see if you can pick it out in the Stuff You Should Know TV series they can probably pick it out 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 have a particular set of skills 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 sort of look like your star.

12:55Or you can teach your star, spend all this extra money and time training the star to this skill in a crash course. So most of the time it makes sense to just hire a stunt person. Yeah, and chances are these days you're going to get a mix in a big action movie. You're going to get a mix of all three. You're going to get some CGI. You're going to get some stunt people. And these days you're going to get real actors doing some of the real fake fighting. Doesn't Tom Cruise do a lot of his own stunts? Yeah, I got a list of actors who prefer to do it. Oh, okay. I didn't mean to jump the gun. No, the cruise is famous for that.

13:27I 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. I would do my own stunts. It depends. The heights? No way. I would do that. I would jump off of something. So California state law, and of course there's 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 in your occasional death on set, which is really awful.

14:06Yeah. Well, there always have been, pretty much from the beginning, deaths and injuries. Howard Hughes? Yeah, the movie Hells Angels, which we must have talked about in the Hells Angels podcast. I'm sure we did, because I think we talked about the origin of the name. Which is from the air combat? It was, yeah, that's what they think. The fighting hellcat. I think that was one of the theories. But there were three, maybe four fatalities. Yeah. Because they were doing real dogfights with airplanes, and there were a lot of crashes. Yeah. So that was a movie where people died. Yes, very famously, The Twilight Zone, the movie.

14:43Jennifer Jason Leigh'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. I know, it's pretty awful. 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 exactly what was the logistics and how did that go down. It's pretty bad to watch. It is. Because it just goes totally out of control. It does. So I would not recommend that. But you do have to enter your age, by the way, to watch that video.

15:22I saw. 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, we didn't 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've got to be really careful with that stuff.

16:00Yeah. So, Chuck, because of this incredibly high-risk profession work, some people must be paid out the yin-yang. True or false? 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. And that was when I used to work out in L.A. 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, to say the least. And they would usually bemoan the fact that there's not a ton of work and they're all kind of scrapping for the same piece of cheese.

16:41But that's like everyone in the film business, from crew to the lead actor. You're all after that same piece of cheese. Yep. We've worked with some stunt people too. Yeah. You'd be surprised when you need to call in a stunt person. I worked on this one commercial where it was just like bad traffic on the highway, 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. Wow. Yeah, I was like, I could do that. But then I'd be taking bread off the table of a stunt person. Right.

17:14Which is not good. The whole production would shut down. That's true. Okay, so 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, right? Yeah. I mean, you can make money if you're experienced and get tons of work, obviously, but I'd say those are the few and far between. 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.

17:51Like when you see a stunt, these things are rehearsed over and over again. Say for a car chase, they'll go through the entire car chase, but they'll do it at a low speed. Right. So that it's choreographed, rehearsed, and everybody knows what's going to happen when. Yeah. 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. And then if, say, you're doing something in water, you're probably standing in water the whole time, so you're doing that for 14 hours.

18:28It sounds like you would have to love your work to do this. Yeah, it's definitely not a glory job, especially factoring in the anonymity factor. Right, when you do all this and you do it absolutely perfectly, no one notices. That's the goal. Yeah. 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 that's supposed to be Clint Eastwood. Right. Yeah, just disappointing. So you were saying the second unit director handles this. The second unit director is in charge of shooting stunts, but the person who's in charge of the stunts themselves is the stunt coordinator.

19:07Yeah. And that person hires the stunt people, plans the stunts, oversees the stunt's execution, does everything but actually set up the camera and all that or handles the camera shooting it, right? Yeah, it's basically 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. New year, new goals, and in this economy, a better money plan is more necessary than ever. I am Matt. And I'm Joel. We are from the How to Money podcast, and every week we help you to spend smarter, save more, and make sense of what's going on out there.

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21:39Once that gets resolved, then there comes empathy as in compassion. If you want this to be the year you stop powering through pain and start understanding what's underneath, listen to The Mailroom on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your favorite shows. So let's talk about how they do some stunts. Okay. And actually, the second unit director a lot of times is a former stunt person or stunt coordinator. Right. It makes sense. It comes in handy. Sure. Let's talk about stunts without fire. How about punches? How about them? Stage fighting, man. Yeah. Something we have not learned yet.

22:18That's pretty much a must. If you want to become a stuntman, that's lesson one is go take stage fighting courses. Yep. Learn how to sell a punch as the giver and as the receiver without looking corny and hokey and fake like pro wrestling. 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. Right. It's certainly not as hard as the jerk of their head would say. Yeah, and you've got camera angles, and you've got sound effects, and through the art of movie magic, it looks like a good knock-down, drag-out brawl.

22:59Right, and if you've got a really good stunt coordinator, there'll be a punch that's sold, and the person who's being punched is on a ram, so they fly through the air afterward. Yeah, that's awesome. All right, gunshots. We talked about squibs. A squib is basically you're going to have a metal chest plate with a squib on the front of it to protect your body. And it's basically a little blood packet that's rigged electronically to explode when it's supposed to. And so the plate in between the squib and your chest protects you. Sure. And maybe you are in charge of, you the stuntman are in charge.

23:40You have a little button. Yeah, maybe. To explode the charge. or there's somebody else doing it remotely. And it's pretty awesome. It releases theater blood, opens a hole in the shirt. Yeah. Pretty awesome. It is very awesome. This I didn't realize, though, how they make bullet holes in like a wall, like a stucco 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, and it makes a bullet hole. It's pretty cool. It's ingenious. It's simple, it seems like, but it's very ingenious.

24:20Well, especially when you watch a movie. Ideally, you're getting lost in the movie and not paying attention, but if you watch a John Woo film or something, and you see a wall get riddled with bullets, just think about all the time it took to set up all those squibs. And what if the actor trips in the middle of it, and you're just like, we have to do it again. Yeah, which is no good. And in fact, big stunts, they go with many, many cameras on stunts that you don't or can't recreate because of either danger or money. And like some of these shots have like, you know, a dozen or more cameras shooting.

24:51Right. At the time. 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. Yeah. Your chances of injury are increased the more times you carry out a dangerous act. So that's how it multiplies. Getting back to squibs, these days a lot of directors are opting for CGI blood and bullet wounds. But supposedly Quentin Tarantino, and this is out by the time this comes out.

25:29Django. Django. Man, I can't wait to see it. Supposedly, he had 100 % real squibs, and the blood, like, they're supposed to be the bloodiest, nastiest squibs that Holly would have seen in years. Is that right? Yeah, it's supposed to be pretty awesome. Have you seen Machete? Yeah. That was pretty bloody. Yeah, that was bad, though. I didn't like it. I agree it was, but it was still pretty bloody. They also have 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.

26:06It's like paper or wood or plastic. But it does not obviously have shot or bullet. 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. Yeah, his was actually an accident. There was a bullet lodged in the barrel that they didn't know about. What? I thought, okay, well then I'm thinking of somebody else who was messing around with a gun. That was, oh man, I can't remember his name. He put it to his head and pulled the trigger and the water, the gases or something killed him. Yeah, that was, I can't remember his name, but it was on a TV show set and he goofing around put it to his head as a joke.