The 100-Year Road to Oscars Recognition

In Henry King’s Jesse James (1939), Jesse and Frank, that is Tyrone Power and Henry Fonda, which is to say their stunt doubles, ride their horses over a cliff and tumble 70 feet into the Lake of the Ozarks. One of the horses was killed, the other injured.

The American Humane Society condemned the “most barbarous crime” and descended on the Hays office to demand that the motion picture industry enforce a strict set of protocols for the humane treatment of animals. Never again would the life of a horse be so recklessly and cruelly endangered.

The stunt men? They were okay, not that anybody asked.

The incident gives a fair sense of the relative value of horseflesh and below-the-line talent in classical Hollywood cinema. Though stunt men and women had lent their skills, bones and sometimes very lives to the cause of motion picture entertainment, the contributions of the risk takers, daredevils and fate tempters was usually unbilled and little acknowledged.

It was not until the early 1970s that the credit line “stunt coordinator” began to appear regularly in screen credits. A measure of restitution will be offered at the 2028 Academy Awards ceremony when, at long last, an Oscar will be presented for best stunt design. That’s one reason why The Hollywood Reporter is highlighting the best movie stunts of all time, a “what if” filling in a nearly century-long gap of recognition at the Oscars.

Like a lot of Hollywood job specialties, the work of the stunt person is a mix of art and science, balletic grace and precision engineering (the other key element, guts, is a necessary but not sufficient qualification). As any stunt coordinator or conscientious director will tell you, the trick is to make the stunt look dangerous but not be dangerous. 

After the wildcat ways of the nickelodeon period gave way to the assembly line machinery of the studio system, stunt people — out of a sense of professionalism not to say self-preservation — embraced their vocation as serious business. During the production of Passage to Marseille (1944), Harvey Parry of Warner Bros. preferred to call his crew of 22 stunt men “safety engineers,” explaining that “the performance of dangerous feats now emphasizes science and planning rather than daring.” The job description never caught on but the ethos did. Risk needed to be tempered by smarts. Unfortunately, the balance was not always correctly calibrated.

The job of stunt performer seems to have sprung spontaneously from the rough and tumble action sequences demanded by the madcap silent screen — think Don Lockwood in Singin’ in the Rain (1952) volunteering to risk his skin for his first chance before the camera. In 1914, an Italian-born daredevil named Eddie Polo, a veteran of circuses and variety shows, elevated the stunt man to star status and educated moviegoers to the tricks of the trade. Polo billed himself as “the greatest stunt man in films, the man who has thrilled more millions with my daring feats than any other actor in pictures.” Starring mainly in two-reelers and serials, riding horses over cliffs, diving from great heights into water, and driving cars into ravines, he reportedly spent “as much time in hospitals as before the camera.” Retiring from daredevilry in 1930, he died in 1961 at age 86. 

To scan the trade press of Hollywood’s Golden Age is to come across a distressingly high number of “Stunt Men Hurt” and “Stunt Men Killed” headlines. The lore of silent cinema is replete with tales of hair’s breadth escapes and fatal mishaps of the equestrian, automotive and aerial kind.

Given the insane antics cooked up for the silent screen, it’s amazing the body count wasn’t higher. In 1922, John Stevenson was killed while doubling for Pearl White, the star of The Perils of Pauline serials. After a stunt woman refused to perform the stunt for less than $500, Stevenson volunteered to imperil himself. He was to leap from the top of a Fifth Avenue bus barreling northbound and grab the girder of the elevated 72nd Street Station of the Columbus Avenue L. As the bus sped under the station, Stevenson — outfitted in White’s costume and a blonde wig — leapt for the girder. He missed and plummeted to the pavement.

Stevenson was not the only sacrifice to the star system. While doubling for the silent matinee idol William Desmond, stunt man Jean Perkins was killed while jumping from the top of a speeding train to grab a rope ladder dropped from a plane swooping in from above. He managed to grab the ladder but the plane spun out of control and he died in the crash. William Desmond was bad luck all around: stunt man Max Marks was also killed doubling for him in Strings of Steel (1925) when a rope broke during a fight scene and Marks fell to his death from a balcony. “The God of the silver screen is a Moloch demanding human life!” wailed the fan magazine Screenland.

Aviation stunts racked up a huge toll in men and machines. Mustered out from the Great War, veteran pilots — still hooked on the adrenaline rush of aerial combat — reenacted their exploits for the screen in rickety biplanes that seemed to have been stitched together from string and paper mache. The pay grade varied depending on the risk — a blazing airplane spinning to earth was worth $15, a blazing airplane spinning into the sea earned a payday of $40, and so on. “A deluxe parachute jump with a delayed opening costs the producer $40,” the Film Weekly reported cheerfully in 1931. “If the stunt man delays too long, the money goes to his widow.”

In Wings (1927), Lafayette Escadrille veteran William Wellman set a standard for the choreography of aerial combat — thrills aplenty and nobody killed in action — but not all directors were as careful with the lives of their pilots, hence the defiant title of the 1931 memoir by famed stunt flyer Virgil “Dick” Grace, I Am Still Alive. (Grace’s heart-stopping specialty was moving from plane-to-plane mid-air; somehow, he managed to die of natural causes in 1965.) Not so lucky was Roy Wilson, a veteran of over 65 aerial sequences, who was killed during the filming of Columbia’s War Correspondent (1932) when his plane went into a tailspin at 2,000 feet and cracked up on the ground.

Ironically, Wilson had earlier survived the deadliest stunt assignment in industry history, the aerial acrobatics for Hell’s Angels (1930), the dream project of the megalomaniacal Howard Hughes. The ad-pub boys used the stunt man body count as a selling point (“4 Million Dollars and 4 Men’s Lives!”). Photoplay celebrated “the thrilling romantic story of how Howard Hughes tossed fortunes and human lives into the making of Hell’s Angels.” The stunt men were not commemorated in the film’s credits.

In 1937, safety conditions and pay rates improved when stunt people came under the aegis of the Screen Actors Guild. Studio executives, who seemed to have thought of stunt people as props rather than performers, resisted the move, but SAG insisted that stunt men belonged in the fold, classified as extras “except when performing some special stunt.” Horsemen got an uptick in pay from $5 a day (for rider and horse) to SAG rates of $11 a day; trick riders got $35 a day. Stunt men returned the favor: when the Chicago mob tried to muscle in on the guild, SAG president Robert Montgomery, who served from 1935 to 1938, stood firm against the gangsters. They threatened to mess up his pretty face — with acid. Stunt men acting as Montgomery’s bodyguards provided pro bono protection.

Of course, the hall-of-fame model for the stunt profession is the legendary Yakima Canutt, who is to stunt people what Chuck Yeager is to jet pilots. A world champion rodeo rider, Canutt came to Hollywood in 1924 and enjoyed a career as a leading man in westerns before the talkie revolution (his voice did not match his image) forced a transition into full-time stunt work. He was “simply the very best there ever was at what he does,” said Charlton Heston, whom he taught charioteering for Ben Hur (1959). Canutt was just as adept at vertical stunt design.

As second unit director on Where Eagles Dare (1968), he mapped out the ascent of a team of sure-footed mountaineer-stunt men and one swaying cable car into the clouds of the Austrian Alps. Watching from a safe distance closer to sea level, star Clint Eastwood joked that the film should have been called Where Doubles Dare. Canutt’s rule of thumb for the aspiring stunt performer: “Never stop breathing,”  advice he kept until 1986, when he died at the age of 90.

World War II was a fallow period for stunt work. Perhaps the authentically death-defying exploits screened in the newsreels satisfied the audience appetite for danger. Perhaps too the spectacle of able-bodied men being risked on the backlot when they were needed elsewhere left the impression of a waste of a vital human resource — though many stunt men were ineligible for military service due to broken bones and other infirmities acquired in the line of their civilian work.   

The 1950s expanded opportunities with casts of thousands clashing swords in widescreen spectacles, helicopter stunt work for aerial shots, and a weekly need for cowboy stunts for television westerns (cf. pretty boy stuntman Cliff Booth in Bounty Law in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood). Among the nonfictional beneficiaries of the television boom was stunt man turned actor Jock Mahoney, whose advice to apprentices was not as cryptic as Yakima Canutt’s: “Know your limitations and fight the urge to do the stunt one more time.”

The stunt game changer was the 11-minute car chase in Peter Yates’s Bullitt (1968), in which stuntmen Bud Ekins and Loren Janes skid Steve McQueen’s Ford Mustang GT through the rollercoaster topography of the streets of San Francisco. The edge-of-the-seat virtuosity of that single scene inspired a flood of can-you-top-this demolition derbies, including but not limited to The French Connection (1971), Vanishing Point (1971), Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry (1974), Smokey and the Bandit (1977), and Cannonball Run (1981), the latter two by stuntman turned director Hal Needham. It was around then (the big spike comes in 1973-1974) that the designation “stunt coordinator” became a standard credit line in Hollywood action adventures. (Bud Ekins, for example, is not listed in the credits for Bullitt, but he is for William Friedkin’s Sorcerer [1977].)

The 1970s remain the great age of cinematic car chases and smash-ups. Unlike later fast and furious vehicular franchises, automobiles still had to obey the laws of Newtonian physics and directors tended to favor continuity editing, long takes and a fidelity to the 180-degree line.

The grimmest reminder of the consequences of carelessness and incompetence was the tragedy that unfolded during the filming of Twilight Zone: The Movie (1982), when actor Vic Morrow and two Vietnamese-American children were killed by the rotor blades of a helicopter that lost control and plunged to earth. Though, amazingly, the fatal scene was not considered a stunt because no stunt performers were involved, the aftershock had a profound effect on the profession. Safety rules were tightened (scenes involving planes and helicopters needed to file a detailed flight plan with the FAA) and the event remains a vivid institutional memory. Stunt people not alive in 1982 were mentored by people who were and taught that theirs is a dead serious business.

Indeed, death was still very much an occupational hazard: the acclaimed stunt flyer Art Scholl was killed during the filming of Top Gun (1986) and Dar Robinson, long hailed as Hollywood’s premiere stuntman, was killed during a motorcycle stunt for Million Dollar Mystery (1987). Both films include a dedication line to commemorate the stuntmen killed in action, a show of respect that has become customary. 

Today, besides the ever-present dangers to life and limb, stunt people face a new professional challenge from digital technology. Now that seeing is no longer believing, the flesh and blood pros operating in the material world can be switched out for pixels and greenscreen. Traditionally, the best proof of real danger in cinema was always the single-take, well-focused long shot, where the viewer can see that it is indeed Steve McQueen riding a stolen Nazi motorcycle and his stunt double Ekins crashing into barbed wire in The Great Escape (1963).

No longer. When I first saw Tom Cruise dangling from atop the Burj Khalifa in Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol (2011), I just assumed the sequence was the product of really good FX because no insurance company would underwrite the risk and no star would be crazy enough to tempt fate no matter how secure the rigging. Likewise, in The Fall Guy (2024), a film about a stunt man showcasing outrageous stunts directed by former stunt man David Leitch, I also assumed the real risks were taken by computer software until the post-credit sequence confirmed the real world stunt work.

Increasingly, I suspect, pre-release publicity and behind the scenes peeks at the production will provide a seal of certification to stamp the stunt as the real thing — as will the well-deserved Oscar presented by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

The full list: The Best Stunts of All Time, Over Nearly 100 Years of the Oscars