Stunts

When people today ask me what I wanted to be when I was a kid, I have a pretty standard joke I deliver that goes like this: “Back when I was a kid, I wanted to be a professional breakdancer when I grew up. I gave that up to become a professional ninja, which I later gave up to become a professional skateboarder.” Of course I didn’t really consider any of those things to be a viable vocations … they were all just fads I went through, activities I really enjoyed. Actually, my fate was sealed the first time I sat down behind my dad’s TRS-80 Model III, typed something on the keyboard and watched the computer “do something”. I knew that’s what I wanted to do for a living.

And while my friends and I had all the same goofy dreams about wanting to be rock stars and scientists and astronauts later in life, the first thing I can remember really really wanting to be when I grew up was a stunt man.

For just about as long as I can remember, I’ve been interested in “behind the scenes” stuff. I love a good DVD commentary that gives details about how a movie was made. I love the documentary series Classic Albums, that details the making and recording of some of the greatest rock albums of all time. Heck, I love documentaries in general — anything that gives me insight as to the “story behind the story” is enjoyable to me. I love reading biographies and autobiographies. I love reading books about magic.

In 1980, CBS aired a special called SPFX: The Empire Strikes Back, a documentary hosted by Mark Hamill that showed how many of the special effects in the second installment of the Star Wars saga were created. This was a decade before CGI would become commonplace in films. When the snowy Wampa knocked Luke off his Taun-Taun, it was actually done by physically whacking Mark Hamill with a Wampa-shaped arm attached to the end of a stick. When one of the rebel’s snowspeeders exploded after being shot, it was actually a model with explosives attached to the back. Yoda was a puppet. Luke’s X-Wing Fighter wasn’t lifted out of the swamps by using the force; they used a crane. Cloud City was, in reality, just a painting. The sounds of lasers being fired were actually recordings of Ben Burtt hitting telephone wires with a metal wrench. Learning these secrets didn’t take away from the movie for me; in fact, they greatly added to it! To this day when I watch The Empire Strikes Back I think about that old SPFX special.

When SPFX: The Empire Strikes Back aired on television, I recorded it on our VCR. There were other, similar specials that aired around that same time frame. There was also, in 1980, The Making of Superman: The Movie, where I learned more about bluescreen technology and how they made Superman fly. In 1981, the documentary The Making of Raiders of the Lost Ark aired. A few years later a couple of Return of the Jedi documentaries aired. My VHS tape ran out of space during the closing credits of Classic Creatures: Return of the Jedi.

While I loved all those Star Wars documentaries, they were filled with things I couldn’t do. I couldn’t make fantastic background images using a bluescreen with our home video camera. I couldn’t do stop motion photography. I couldn’t use explosives and blow things up. Looking back, maybe that’s why I liked the Raiders of the Lost Ark documentary so much; because it was filled with things I could do. I could stage fights with my friends after learning how to fake a punch. I could leap from my bed onto a pile of dirty clothes, jump over things by launching myself off of my mini-trampoline, and dream up adventures that took place not on other planets but my own. Those are things I could do, and did do.

For several months I practiced diving, rolling, and other goofy exercises that I thought might come in handy. In my bedroom I had a chair with a back that slid down over two poles. I found that if I raised the back and precariously balanced it atop the two poles, I could “fly” into the chair, knocking the back off and sailing through the two poles like a punted football. My neighbors had old mattresses for jumping and I would practice flipping out of trees and landing flat on the mattresses, arms spread wide to distribute the energy, just like the guys in the movies did. I practiced taking a punch and, when no one else was around, practiced punching myself.

The following summer, my mom, sister and I made our (at least) yearly trek down to Snow, Oklahoma to visit my mom’s family. According to the web, the population of Snow is only 311 people, although I suspect anyone living there could give you a more accurate number at any given time depending on “who’s gone to the city for the day” and “who has company in from out of town”. My childhood visits to Snow were quintessential “fish out of water” experiences. Back home I had a computer and cable television. In Snow, they had fishing poles and ticks. During this particular visit they also had some sort of potluck dinner for the whole town. After eating, my sister and I went outside to go play with all the country-folk and I must’ve started doing some sweet stunt moves or something because I remember kids gathering around and asking me to do more. At one point I was diving in between two strips of barbed-wire, landing in the dirt and doing a shoulder roll. The other kids loved it. One of the kids asked me if I was going to be a stunt man when I grew up. I looked at him dead in the eye and said, “Yes. Yes I am.”

Of course I didn’t. The closest I ever got was a few years later when I recorded my own “television show” named Stunts using my parents’ new color video camera. The camera had to be tethered to our VCR in order to work, so all of my home movies took place within 25′ of our living room. (Technically the VCR itself was portable, but I was not allowed to take it anywhere, and I doubt I could have physically carried it myself.) In Stunts, I pulled out all my best moves. I had a “fight” with a ghost from Ghostbusters where I flailed around the living room, jumping off the coffee table and landing on a bean bag. I pulled the recliner around and flung myself into it hard enough to flip the thing over backwards. At one point I smeared ketchup all over my face and explained how squibs and blood capsules worked. It should be noted that Stunts was mostly filmed while my parents were out of the house; I doubt they then, or now, would condone flipping and jumping around on the furniture either on or off camera.

Unfortunately, Stunts never made it to syndication and was canceled shortly after the pilot episode was recorded. The rest of my home movie tape is filled with Star Wars-inspired movies, breakdancing footage, and clips of me doing skateboarding tricks. There are a few goofy shows that the neighborhood kids and I recorded and a few clips of my friends Jason, Terry jumping off my mini-trampoline and doing karate kicks in the air. And then the shows are over; the curtains close and the tape turns to snow.

Time to get back to that dream of sitting behind a computer keyboard …