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fibula-rasa · 8 months ago

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How’d They Do That?

Special Effects & Stunts of Silent Cinema - Part 2

This is the second installment (here's the first) of an open-ended series where I try to highlight and illustrate the work of special effects and stunt artists of silent filmdom. Using articles from contemporary fan and trade magazines, I’ll make gifs or dig up images and/or video clips to accompany the descriptions of how the sequences were executed.

My notations will be bracketed and highlighted in a different color. Hope you all enjoy! Fair warning: this is a long read.

Risking Life and Limb for $25

[from Photoplay, November 1927]

By Dick Hylan

True tales of “stunt” men and women. You cannot afford to miss a single paragraph of these thrilling yarns. There’s one towards the end of the story that alone is worth the price of admission. Read—and don’t jump—this story

DUST—the crash of six-shooters—the thunder of horses’ hoofs on hard ground—the roar and rumble of an onrushing train—the shrill call of man to man—and out of the dust and roar ride thirty men to board the speeding train. Jesse James and his men are on the loose and heaven help the poor working girl!

The horses are alongside the train—and the dirty deed is done. No one seemed to notice that the train was going thirty miles an hour when the men “transferred” from horse to car and engine. No one seemed to care that underfoot the ground was dangerously uneven. No one seemed to worry about the wheels rolling over the steel rails. Nasty wheels that would cut, mangle and kill anything getting under them.

And closest to these wheels, riding the brake beams under the oldest and most dilapidated coach Fred Thomson could find for his latest feature, “Jesse James,” was one man. As Thomson climbed down out of the engineer's cab he saw him.

[Jesse James (1927) is unfortunately considered lost and I was not able to dig up any stills that depict a train-specific stunt. However, here are a few promotional images of Thomson and his amazing horse, Silver King from the film.

Thomson was a stunter turned star whose popularity at the time of this article rivaled Tom Mix. Like Jesse James, the majority of Thomson’s films are now presumed lost and only one film featuring Thomson in a cowboy role is extant: Thundering Hoofs (1924).]

“Mason! What the devil are you doing under there? That's one stunt I don’t remember the script calling for. What's the idea?” He really seemed put out about it. Those brake beams were old and rusted and liable to fall apart.

“Aw, Boss. don't get sore. I didn’t have anything to do on that scene and wanted to get a good look at you crawling into that cab from your horse.”

And so I first saw “Suicide” Buddy Mason, stunt man extraordinary. Like the mail-carrier who went walking on his day off Buddy liked to be in the middle of things. Later I talked to him.

[Buddy Mason was a stunting legend working as a stunt performer/double and stunt coordinator from the 1920s into the 1970s. That’s impressive longevity for the profession!]

“Who are stunt men,” I asked him. “And have you any standard by which stunt men are judged—by other stunt men?”

“Nope. It’s just—well, when you get so they call you by your first name when you come into the hospital, then you belong.”

READ on BELOW the JUMP!

Their creed might be Nietzsche's famous line, “Be hard. Live dangerously.”

It was Winnie Brown, most famous of feminine “stunt men,” who once defended a director like this: “Can't nobody run that man down to me. He treated me whiter than any director I ever worked for. You remember the time I was doing that stuff on a trestle in one of Mix’s pictures? Say, every time I made that jump he had an ambulance waiting right there on the bank for me. That’s the kind of a guy he is.”

Photo caption: Winnie Brown — stunt woman. Some directors are so kind to her that they have ambulances waiting for her after she takes a jump

[Winnie Brown appears to be one of those unsung heroes of the stunt world. There’s very little biographical information out there about her, and none of the films I could confirm her work in (as stunt rider, stunt double, or actor) are extant or accessible for gif making. That said, I’m planning an addendum to this post with a profile of Winnie from a 1922 issue of Photoplay, so stay tuned!]

AN author will have a nightmare and wake up with it still in his mind. He'll put it in his next script and think it’s fine. And it is because when the time comes to do it the casting director for Fox or First National or M-G-M will just take down the telephone and call Al Wilson.

“Hop over to the studio, kid. You’re due to take a dive out of a flaming aeroplane with a parachute which won't open for company.”

And Al will hop—and dive—and then the nurse will say, “Hello, Al. Back again?”

The golden age of the stunt men is passing. That is why it is well to write this brief saga now. To sing a little of the song of their amazing deeds, their mad courage, and their inevitable laughter. Nor is it well to forget that some of the greatest stunt men in the world are high salaried stars, such as Tom Mix and Douglas Fairbanks.

But the progress of photography is rapidly writing the epitaph of the stunt man. The magic double exposure of the Williams process and other inventions in trick photography and development of film are fast rendering it unnecessary to subject any man to the long chances of “stunts.”

[With the privilege of hindsight, we know that optical/photographic effects did not in fact put stunt workers out of a job. Although, the technological developments that progressed out of The Williams Process have made formerly dangerous stunts much safer and impossible stunts possible. To learn more about The Williams Process, you can check out the first part of this series: How They Do It]

So, before they pass, let’s chronicle a few tales by which to remember them.

The average life of the stunt man in motion pictures is under five years. He either gets killed or he gets a little sense and quits.

When you've talked to a few of them you'll realize that they are the kind you like to have around when a fight is brewing, but that they have more nerve and less sense than any other man you've ever met. Few quit.

The greatest stunt man who ever lived—he is dead now and the manner of his death, of which I will tell you, is a typical page in stunt history—was Gene Perkins. The fraternity itself, and such directors as specialize in stunt pictures, seem to agree on that. He was twenty-four when he was killed and had been in the game a little over four years.

THE secret of Perkins’ greatness lay in his amazing ability to figure out a stunt ahead of time, calculating it perfectly according to time and distance, and in the icy clear-headedness which enabled him to carry it out to the hairline the way he had planned it. His nerves—he had none.

Clarence Brown, the director who has just finished “The Trail of ‘98” and who has put on a heap of thrilling stunts in his day, told me a lot of things about “Perk,” particularly the day he asked him if he’d jump into the top of Nevada Falls in Yosemite National Park.

Now Nevada Falls is seven hundred feet high and the water in the stream just before it pours over the cliff, from which drop no man could possibly return alive, dashes and whirls along over jagged rocks at a perilous speed.

Brown and Perkins went to the river bank and shouted at each other above the roar of the falls.

“Can you make it, Perk?” Brown asked. “I want you to jump in here,” indicating a spot some forty feet from the edge of the falls, “and go as near to the edge as you think safe.”

“Just a minute and I'll tell you,” said Perk.

He broke the branch off a tree and threw it into the water at the spot the jump was to be made. His eyes narrowed as he watched it intently.

“Sure, I can do it,”’ he said. “When I get here,” he pointed to a spot only two feet from the brink, “throw me a rope and try not to miss me. That water looks cold.”

According to Brown he did the thing with the perfection of a machine.

“I'll never forget the first time Perk ever worked for me,” Brown went on. “When I saw him I thought he was the coolest looking person I’d ever seen. His self-control was astounding. His eyes were like ice, yet they were always smiling.

When the Doctors Call You by Your First Name, You’re a Real Stunt Man

“I wanted him to jump out of a fourth story window. It was a night shot. We stalled around most of the afternoon waiting for it to get dark enough to shoot and about dusk I decided we could do it. I went looking for Perk and found him shooting craps with some of the boys. ‘All ready, Perk?’ I said. He looked at his watch. ‘Excuse me a minute while I telephone,’ he said. I heard him behind me talking over the phone to his wife. ‘I’m sorry, honey,’ he said, ‘I’m going to be a little late for supper. I got to jump out of a fourth story window and then I’ll be right along home.’”

Yet Perkins was killed doing something Clarence Brown begged him not to do, warned him against.

“He had a hankering to play around with aeroplanes and used to ask me questions about them,” said Brown, who was himself an aviator during the war. “The advice I gave him was to stay out of them and he'd stay healthy.”

In telling me of Gene Perkins’ last stunt, Brown brought out clearly that greatest of all dangers to the stunt man—the other fellow. You've probably heard a hundred people say about automobile driving, “I don’t worry about myself. It’s what the other fellow is going to do that bothers me.”

[I wasn’t able to positively identify which films the Nevada-Falls or the fourth-story-window appear in. However, I believe that the Nevada Falls shoot may have been a film Clarence Brown was an assistant director on. Every performer in this article required quite a bit of research as stunt performers were practically never credited unless they also had a role in a film.

So, what I was able to unearth as Jean/Gene Perkins filmography includes:

Around the World in 18 Days (1923, serial, presumed lost)

Stunt double for Bill Desmond

Perkins’ fatal accident occurred on this shoot in Riverside, CA (described below)

Citations: Camera, 20 December 1922; Motion Picture News, 6 January 1923; Exhibitors Herald, 13 January 1923; Screenland, April 1923; Photoplay, August 1925; Cinelandia, February 1928

The Vanishing Dagger (1920, serial, presumed lost)

Production title was “The Fallen Idol”

Perkins also served as assistant camera

Citations: The Moving Picture Weekly, 31 May 1919; Exhibitors Herald, 7 June 1919

Do or Die (1921, serial, presumed lost)

Filmed on location in Havana, Cuba

Citations: The Moving Picture Weekly, 21 May 1921 & 18 June 1921; Canadian Moving Picture Digest, 15 June 1921

The Storm (1922, extant at UCLA and EYE Filmmuseum)

Citations: Camera, 7 January 1922; Motion Picture News, 3 June 1922]

Noomis took the car up about a mile and brought it down hill so that he would crash the gate at a certain speed. Naturally, he couldn't see until he’d crashed through the gate, what was being done the other side of it. And the gate was just on the land side of the apron. When he did see it, it was too late to stop. The engineer of the ferry boat had made a mistake and was three automobile lengths away instead of one. The car and Leo shot into space, did a beautiful one and a half gainor, and came down in forty feet of black and dangerous water. Fortunately the centrifugal force of the thing threw the driver out of the car and they fished him out more dead than alive.

[Nomis is yet another legend of stunting. As mentioned above one of Nomis’ specialities was automobile stunts, but he was also one of the most skilled aviation stunt performers from the 1910s until his untimely death in the 1930s. It was in an accident during an aviation stunt for The Sky Bride (1932), due to unsafe working conditions created by the film’s director, Stephen Roberts. In a tragically ironic turn, at the time of filming Nomis was head of the newly-formed Associated Motion Picture Pilots (AMPP) union—the primary goal of which was to increase safety regulations.

Unfortunately, as Nomis’ career was so expansive and he was uncredited for most of his work, I was unable to identify which film is associated with the Fort-Lee-Ferry mishap described here.]

The same sort of a mistake on the part of the “other fellow” cost Perkins his life.

“I TOLD him,” said Clarence Brown, “to stay on the ground. Told him he was all right as long as he did his stuff alone. His sense of timing and distance was so perfect and his body control was so fine that he had a pretty good chance to pull through most of his stunts. But he didn’t listen. They never do. One day he did a stunt from a rope ladder hanging from a plane. The pilot was supposed to swoop down and let Perk drop to the top of a freight train. He swooped too low. The ladder banged Perk against the side of a freight car at seventy-five miles an hour—and Mrs. Gene Perkins was a stunt window, that’s all.”

It’s a funny thing how a man wants to see his family carry on the tradition of his work. Gene Perkins had a kid brother whom he tried to break in as a stunt man. But after a few months the kid lost his nerve and went back to—a clothing store! He’s still alive.

As a stunt man Tom Mix has no superiors and few equals. The man doesn't know the word fear, is as inventive as the devil when it comes to figuring out safe ways of doing dangerous things, and has a positive genius coupled with extraordinary physical strength, for getting himself out of tight places. The thin vein of philosophy, which is the foundation of Tom’s character, colors even his viewpoint on stunts.

“If you do it,” he said, sitting on the edge of his beautiful tiled swimming pool in the reddest bathing suit I have ever seen, “it's easy. If you don’t, it’s a mistake—and you'll either not worry about it or have plenty of time to figure out what went wrong while in the hospital.

“FUNNY thing—the hard one is always easy and the easy one hard. That sort of sounds tail first, but looking back over some fifteen years of these things I know it’s true. The reason being that you get prepared for the hard ones. You get arranged a whole lot before you do ‘em. But some fool little easy one comes along and throws you clean out of the saddle. A horse that advertises he’s bad ain't near as hard to ride as one of these meek lookin’ cayuses who on limbers himself in a onlooked for manner.

“Sure, I’ve had a few funny experiences with stunts, and one or two the lady novelists might call hair-raisin’. Had to fall offa bridge into a river in Florida once and didn’t find out until I was shakin’ hands with ’em that the darn river was more full of alligators than water.

“Another that comes to my mind had to do with an aeroplane. Say, ain’t you the feller who plays football for Stanford?”

“Check. But what about the aeroplane?”

“You know I used to play a lot of football in—— ”

“Great. Come up for our Big Game and I'll get you a ticket if you wear your purple suit. Better wear a red one and root for us. What about the aeroplane?”

“That? It was kinda funny. We were workin’ up at Mt. Whitney, which as you probably know is the highest spot on North America. Well, there’s to be a rope hangin’ down from the aeroplane and I’m supposed to climb down it and do some triflin’ service for the hero-ine, the nature of which plumb escapes me for the minute, and climb back up.

“WELL, we dope it out careful. The rope has a series of knots in it as big around as your two fists, which makes climbin’ up and down it what appears to be a comparative simple proposition. I’m to do this on one plane and the cameras are in another. We arrange a set of signals whereby I can let the other plane know if anything untoward happens, and he can signal the pilot in my plane.

“And I remarks to my pilot, ‘And if you get the signal that I can’t get back up, you head right for the ocean and drop me off.’ The ocean ain’t but about an hour or so away, so I figure we’re all set. An ocean is a darn sight softer place to land than a mountain.

“Well, I don’t have any trouble gettin’ down. But when I start up things take on a different aspect. There’s considerable wind blowin’ up there, what with the speed we’re makin’ and the natural velocity in those parts. I get hold of the knot up higher and start to pull myself up and, by gosh, the wind just blows the rope out behind me like a tail and I haven’t got any knot to set down on like I figured.

“I stewed around quite a spell, tryin’ it out several times, but every time the wind coppers my bet. Oh yes, I’m forgettin’ to mention that I’ve got a loop at the end of the rope which I put my leg through, so I can set there pretty comfortable while we’re travellin’. But once I’d started up and the trouble began, I discover my arms are gettin’ pretty tired. So I finally figure out that the only thing is to pull myself up with one hand quick and reach under quicker with the other and hold that consarned rope down so I can set on it. I tried it and it worked. And that was all there was to that. I got up all right.

[Tom Mix was one of the biggest western stars of the era and, as he was a star as well as a stunter, his career is much better documented than others profiled in this article. However, a significant portion of Mix’s career was spent at Fox, so due to the Fox Vault Fire of 1937, most of his nearly 300-films are now presumed lost.

While I couldn’t track down the films he described above, Mix performed similar stunts in Sky High (1922):

In the wide shots, the leg loops on the rope that Mix described are visible.]

“ANOTHER time, somebody—may be it was me—gets the bright idea of havin’ me grab a rope ladder hangin’ down from the plane when I’m on horseback.. Don’t sound very dangerous, but the first time we try it out, it just naturally scares the poor hoss to death and he mighty near gets himself and me both beheaded.

“So we decide to hang a big cable between two cliffs—one of ’em about 500 feet high and the other about 300—and put the plane on the cable with pulleys. That does away with the noise of the engines and I think I can manage the hoss all right then. We allow enough sag, according to our mathematics, to get the plane just close enough to the ground for me to grab onto the ladder.

“Well, when I see the thing comin’ I figure out that maybe it’d be a good idea to get my leg through the first rung of that there ladder, so that when I arrive on the other side I'll be in a position to start grabbin’ something to hold onto.

“So when I make the jump, I do it that away. Which, as it turns out, is mighty close to a fatal and certainly a right uncomfortable error. Either our calculation is off about forty degrees or that cable develops more sag, because we're a heap closer to the ground than we expected to be. I can’t get my leg out and the darn thing just drags me right along the ground for quite a spell, before they can stop it.

“OF course it wasn't exactly dangerous, but it sure burned me plenty. That ground was so hot when I finally got up it had burned off everything but my boots, including considerable hide.”

[When I first read through this article, I thought that the set-up for this stunt would be distinctive enough for me to identify the film—but no! While I’m not the biggest Mix fan, the stunts in his extant films are always ambitious!]

He gave me one of his friendly irresistible grins.

“Had a funny one happen once with a train. It was up at Colorado Springs. The stunt was like this. I’m on top of the train when it comes to a low tunnel. You can see for yourself that’s no nice place to be. So just as it goes roarin’ in, I’m to grab the tell tales hangin’ outside and swing myself up a little and hold on. We had it fixed so that the engineer would just go inside the tunnel and then back right out and I could drop down again.

“It comes off accordin’ to schedule up to the time I grab the tell tales and start hangin’ on and the train goes into the tunnel. I’m fairly peaceful in my mind, bein’ as I expect him right back. But the engineer had ideas of his own, I guess. He stopped on the other side of the tunnel to fill up his pipe and give his engine a nice drink of water and wind his watch, and all the time I’m hangin’ on to that damn tell tale, thirty feet above a lot of railroad ties and little sharp rocks and steel tracks. Naturally I’m not hankerin’ a whole lot to fall onto that kind of a bed.

“IF I’d known he wasn’t comin’ back, I could have swung myself up onto a rope we had stretched across, but I'm a confidin’ son-of-a-gun and by the time I realize this engineerin’ gent is operatin’ on his own, my arms are too tired to make the pull. And just about that time I hear the train start back, my arms is beginnin’ to give out and it dawns on me that I’m goin’ to hit the middle of that track just about ten seconds previous to a large amount of train.

“Well, there wasn’t nothin’ for it but to jump then, so l’d have time to get out of the way, and I did. I reckon I must have missed that train all of six inches. And my legs was black and blue to the knees for weeks and I got a lot of blood vessels down there that haven’t resumed friendly relations with the rest of my carcass since.”

[Obviously the stunt gone wrong did not appear in The Great K & A Train Robbery (1926), but the shot of Mix running off the top of a moving train and grabbing the tell tales is very impressive and is followed by a cut to him climbing down.]

For thrills, no picture in years has caused so much comment as Paramount's great aviation spectacle, “Wings.”

And a lot of that stunt stuff was done by regulation United States Army air pilots. They did things any stunt man would be proud to call his own and merely remarked in passing that it was “all in the day’s work.”

The particular officer who qualified for admission to the inner circle was one Lieutenant Rod Rodgers. This young gentleman went up in an army plane filled with the sort of explosives which produce an effect of a plane bursting into flames. In his mouth he carried a quantity of the kind of stuff actors use to make it look like they’re bleeding to death. The idea was that when he got up to 6000 feet he was to turn on a mechanical camera which operated itself and which was located just in front of the pilot in the cockpit. He would then pretend to be hit by a bullet, allow the blood to gush from his mouth, let go the stick, and kick the plane into a tail spin with his foot. While the mechanical camera ground on and on, he would come down out of control.

The shot recorded by the camera is one that is picking audiences out of their seats and according to aviators is about the toughest stunt on record—to sit limp and useless while your plane tail spins toward the earth, knowing that at the last moment you must right it or see “Finis” written across your record.

IT isn’t in the picture, by the way, but the studio has the film and a few people have seen it—the moment when Lieutenant Rogers peeped over the side and saw that he was only 500 feet above ground. He came out of his trance, grabbed the stick and pulled it back against his waist and made one remark, which subtitle registered on the screen in amazing fashion and can be compared to those seen—not written—in “What Price Glory” and “The Big Parade.”

It was on “Wings” also that Dick Grace, for several years a famous air stunt man, had his neck broken. He wore during these “crash” sequences, a wide leather belt, reaching from the place where he sat down right up under his arms. Then he was encircled by a series of very strong steel springs, so that it was hoped when he crashed he would be protected.

Photo caption: Immediately after the crash in “Wings,” Dick Grace (center) was photographed with his aeroplane. Later, it was discovered that his neck was broken!

HE wasn't. In one shot, where he had to turn a plane completely over on its back, and land, the stunt apparently came off fine. Grace climbed out of the wreckage, had his picture taken, and only then collapsed. It was discovered at the hospital that his neck was broken.

But what's a little thing like a broken neck to a stunt man? He started right on over to Honolulu, with his neck still done up in all sorts of steel braces, to try and hop across the Pacific from Honolulu to San Francisco in advance of the Dole flyers. He crashed trying to get off the island, but he is still flying, and back in Hollywood ready for more work.

They’ve got some funny expressions in this stunt game. One of them that stopped me was when Buddy Mason first pulled the expression “yucca-nutty.” He remarked that a certain stunt man was yucca-nutty and I had to holler for help.

[Like Mason, Dick Grace was a prolific legend of stunting who survived his career. Pretty impressive considering Grace was an aerial specialist. Grace was a founding member of the AMPP and served as president in the 1930s.]

“Well, it’s like this,” Buddy said kindly. ‘‘All this furniture you see busted over guy’s heads in pictures is made of yucca, which is the lightest wood in the world. You know—yucca is a plant that grows in the California hills. Of course it don’t amount to much, but if you get beaned with enough yucca chairs, in time it begins to make a few dents in what you like to call your brain and then you get yucca-nutty. That's the explanation for a lot of things that happen in Hollywood.”

Another expression which Buddy applies to his pals in the great industry of stunting is “crash-goofy busters.” Which is self-explanatory and descriptive.

[I feel like I haven’t been living my life to the fullest because I have no reason to incorporate the phrases “yucca nutty” and “crash-goofy busters” into my regular vocabulary.]

Photo caption: Greta Garbo and Jack Gilbert after a smash-up in “Love.” Jack uses no doubles for this dangerous work

I asked Buddy what was the worst stunt he’d ever done and after some meditating he unbosomed himself about as follows:

“The amateur gets hurt the most, of course. A boob thinks it’s all easy, and that there’s no technic to the game. Thinks that nerve is required and that’s all and that it’s an easy way to make money. We've got a pretty good scale of prices now—a certain stunt is worth so much, some other one is worth so much more. If an outsider comes in and works for less, he gets told where to head in at. We haven’t the slightest objection to new men coming in. But it isn’t fair to cut prices.

“WELL, the worst smash I ever had was in one of the old serials. I was supposed to drive a motorcycle through the guardrail of a bridge and land on top of a freight train passing under the bridge. They had part of the roof of one of the freight cars cut out and covered with thin laths and cardboard. In the car, beneath the opening made in the roof, were mattresses for me to land on. Everything went fine except the engineer got the speed bug and went faster than he was supposed to and I didn’t quite hit the hole. I landed half in it and about half on the good strong roof of the car and drove the handlebars of the motorcycle up through my ribs. I bounced into the car after that, but I missed the mattresses. All I got was a broken shoulder, five broken ribs, and a dislocated hip. And they say football is a rough game.”

[What an awful accident! There isn’t enough context here for me to identify the serial, but if any of you remember seeing an outrageous stunt like this please shout it out!]

Buddy told me another one about a pal of his, named Bobby Dunn, who was working on a Keystone comedy. They wanted Bobby to dive out of an eighth story window of a fashionable apartment house on Wilshire boulevard. He was to land in a mortar box. The only difference between that particular mortar box and the common one seen in front of buildings when the walls are being plastered was that this one held milky water and was four feet deep instead of one foot. It had been sunk three feet deep into the lawn so that it looked like the regular ones.

BOBBY took one look at the layout and said it couldn’t be done. The box was too close to the wall of the building. From such a height it would be practically impossible to land that close. Somebody took him around to the back of the building and talked persuasively to him. During the course of the conversation several drinks changed hands—from the persuader to Bobby. Finally, Bobby went back and took another look. This time it didn’t look nearly so dangerous. Again they repaired to the back yard and discussed the matter over a bit of liquid refreshment. When they returned this time, Bobby said it was one of the simplest things he’d ever been asked to do and he could do it any time they were ready.

He did. The tank being so shallow, Bobby had to cut his dive very flat. He did that, too, cutting it so flat that he skipped right out of the tank and landed out in the middle of the street on his face. If you have ever thrown flat stones on a lake, you know how Bobby Dunn skipped out of that mortar-box diving tank.

[At the time of writing, I haven’t identified the film featuring this stunt, but since I’m a pretty avid silent comedy fan, I’ll update the post if/when I come across it!]

Which reminds me of one Anita Loos told. She always has a pet story based on fact for every imaginable situation. I had asked her what she knew about stunt men. She laughed. How that little brunette can say gentlemen prefer blondes I don’t know.

[Content warning for this section: Loos’ story here is a racist characterization of Native American actor and stunt performer Eagle Eye. Eagle Eye, while not as fete-d as his white colleagues, had an impressive resume and his career is slightly better documented since he was also an actor. His specialty as a stunter was big falls. Eagle Eye reportedly made a 200-foot drop for the film The Fatal Black Bean (1915, presumed lost).

Photo of Eagle Eye (right) with Wallace Reid and Loretta Blake in At Dawn (1914) from Reel Life, 5 December 1914

If you want to skip the racist bit, the gifs of the falling stunts from Intolerance will be at the end of the anecdote.]

“YOU probably remember the battle scenes in ‘Intolerance’,” she said. “Well, during that sequence somebody had to take a particularly hard back dive off one of the high battlements. Of course nets were spread to catch the diver, but who knows much about nets? They have been known to give way or to be some place else when most needed. The stunt man who was to do the trick was an Indian named Eagle Eye. Eagle Eye was a good stunt man, but he had to be full of firewater before he could perform. A minister had been after him for six months to give up drinking, and after a long life and with 364 other days in the year, Eagle Eye had to choose the day before this big stunt to get religion and sign the pledge. The pledge meant no firewater and no firewater meant no stunt.

“D. W. Griffith, who was directing, ran around wild-eyed to find another stunt man. He couldn’t find anybody who would tackle it, so he finally went to the minister and prevailed on him to get a special dispensation from Mencken or somebody so that Eagle Eye could imbibe just once more for the good of his art and do the stunt. And he did.”

MOST of Doug Fairbanks’ great stunts are simply feats of athletic prowess. There is no great element of danger in them. They take infinite skill, training, practice, but they either can be done or they can’t. They are what I should call legitimate stunts and require the skill of a great athlete and not the peculiar angle of the stunt man.

I caught him between a couple of them. He had just finished leaping from his horse which was going at full speed. And he came right back to ride into a mob of milling, long-horned cattle where a slip of the horse’s foot would have meant as nasty a death as anyone could conceive. But you didn’t feel any sense of danger in them at the moment because of the perfection of Doug’s work.

I stopped him just long enough between the two to ask one question.

“What's the most difficult thing you’ve ever done before a camera?” said I.

“Make love,” said Doug, and went on with his horses and cattle.

Up until recently Fred Thomson, whose fame and popularity as a western star are growing by leaps and bounds, did all his dangerous work. Fred, as you doubtless remember, was champion all-round athlete of the world several years and he figures he has a better chance than a less trained man. Regardless of Fred’s feelings in the matter, Paramount officials have recently forced him to use a double for the more dangerous stunts in order to protect the large amount of money invested in the picture. (I can’t help wondering what they call dangerous—those train wheels looked very mean to me.)

Thomson keeps this stunt man on a regular salary, whether he works or not. The reason Fred gives is that said stunt man will do anything at all times and the kid would go out between the Thomson pictures and get all busted up.

Photo captions: Above: Ralph Forbes about to be crowned with a Yucca chair. Below: Harry Carey plays a human torch. Both in “The Trail of ‘98”

One of the most dangerous stunts ever attempted was in “The Trail of ‘98” and was pulled by Harry Carey. After they had saturated Carey’s clothes with kerosene, the hero—Ralph Forbes—smashed a lighted kerosene lamp over his head. This immediately turned him into a living torch. He had to dash across the room, onto a balcony, and leap ten feet onto the floor of the dance hall below. You can see quite plainly in the picture that Carey did this thing himself. They had every foot of the route he had to cover manned with fire extinguishers and if the fire burned through his heavy underwear he was to holler and they would instantly put the fire out—if it didn’t put Carey out first.

[I don’t know if it’s true that Carey did these stunts himself but I’m amazed they let a movie star perform all that!]

AN odd commentary on the perverse nature of all things is the death of three men on his big Alaskan story. It was reported that they were killed in a stunt. As a matter of fact they were killed repairing a safety device.

A big cable had been extended across the river and these four men went out in a boat to repair the tell tales which were to furnish protection for the actors who had to come down the river in light boats. The man up on the cable fell when it broke under him, hit the side of the boat and tipped it over. Three of the men could swim and the fourth couldn’t. He hung onto the boat and was saved while the others tried to swim ashore and were drowned.

Joe Bonomo is a well known stunt man who broke into pictures with a heart-breaking experience. Joe was a circus man for years, an acrobat and diver and horseman. He heard a lot about the big money his brothers of the celluloid were making so he decided to have a crack at it himself.

He answered an advertisement, which is one of the first things young girls are warned against in a big city. The producer he encountered was Jewish and belonged on Poverty Row though this was in New York.

“It’s all very well, Mr. Bonomo,” he said, “you should sit there and say you are a stunt man. How should I know? If you are a stunt man, for me you should do some stunts.”

SO Joe, who is a trusting soul, complied. He went out and jumped off a skyscraper, dived off liners, changed wings on an aeroplane and did various other things on which he prided himself. All the time the camera was grinding. But Joe didn't think anything of that.

The producer told him he’d done very well and he would let him know later if he wanted him. He took Joe’s telephone number. And that was the last he heard of it until he saw himself and all his stunts in a two-reeler in a Broadway house.

He is still trying to collect.

[Joe Bonomo was a strongman turned stunt performer, who also acted. His film career petered out slowly after the advent of sound. Bonomo moved on to become a fitness instructor, publishing multiple books on the topic. At the time of this article, he likely would have been working as a stunt performer on The Trail of ‘98, discussed above.

Joe holding Louise Lorraine aloft in The Great Circus Mystery (1925, serial, presumed lost)]

Janet Ford, Universal’s stunt woman, has the same philosophy as Mix. She says, “Stunts? If you do them they are easy. I’ve been lucky so far and always done mine so I think they are easy. The only time I’ve ever been hurt was once down in San Diego. I had to swim about two hundred yards and then do a drowning act right under the camera. Guess I was too realistic about it because it scared an old man who was on the pier at the time. He thought I was going down, so jumped in after me and grabbed me around the middle to save me. For sixty-five years old that baby was strong, because in addition to crabbing the scene, he broke four ribs for me.

“YES, I like the game. We are hitting the high spots of life all the time. That is, nothing we do is commonplace, it is always at top speed. And I’ve noticed that it’s generally the cocksure amateur who gets panicky and takes a smash up. That’s especially so among the women ‘stunters.’”

[Janet Ford’s filmography is tough to pin down not just for the same reasons as other stunters, but because there was a contemporary actress with the same name. Ford performed stunts for over a decade starting in 1920, with a specialty in aquatic stunts. There isn’t enough context here for me to identify the film from this anecdote, but I do know that she doubled for Virginia Valli in The Storm (1922, extant at UCLA and EYE Filmmuseum) and for Virginia Brown Faire in Shadows of the North (1923, presumed lost) citation: Picture-Play Magazine, March 1925

Photo of Lord from Picture-Play Magazine, March 1925]

Yes, some of them talked sane enough—for a time. But talk to them long enough and you find that a wheel is missing somewhere.

That they do not look upon life as do the rest of us.

They seem to be divided into three classes: 1. Those in the game for the money; 2. Those who see in this a chance to “break into the movies”; and 3. Just the plain nut who does it.

And some of the tales you hear of them are pathetic. At least they would be if they weren’t comic.

Here’s just two short ones for a final fade out.

A stunt flyer was sent for not long ago and asked to take a bad crash for one of the larger studios. He was to nose dive into the ground from 4,000 feet. He said:

“Sure, I’ll do it—for three thousand dollars. It’s a hospital job and I have to take care of my wife while I'm laid up.”

They paid him the money, he gave it to his wife, took the crash, and went to the hospital for six months. When he got out his wife had run away with another stunt man and the three thousand!

Freddie “Speed” Osbourne raced a motorcycle off a cliff for a news reel. A parachute—but let J. B. Scott the camera man who took the pictures of the stunt tell it.

He saw it.

“OSBOURNE was to race his motorcycle up to the edge of the cliff and then he and the whole works were to go over the edge. He had a parachute attached to his back and was to open it when about thirty feet from the take-off. This would give it time to open and let him down safely.

“About the time ‘Speed’ should have pulled the parachute the motorcycle developed carburetor trouble. Instead of pulling the ’chute, the nut reached down and primed the carburetor.

“By the time he straightened up he was out in the air. He crashed and busted himself all up. I was the first one to him and his shin bones were sticking straight out through his boots. All he said was, ‘Cut those damn boots off, will you, Scotty?’

“He’s still in the hospital and spends his time figuring out how he can make that jump in a Ford coupe!”

[British Pathe’s youtube has the clip of Osbourne performing the stunt. It almost seems impossible he survived this!

youtube

The incident happened on 24 November 1926 and Osbourne had just finished filming airplane stunts for a film. Unfortunately his stunt career isn’t well documented, but Osborne/Osbourne was an aviation stunt specialist as well as a motorcycle stunter.]

I was properly impressed and still inquisitive.

“Scotty, you’ve talked to this bird a lot. Can you tell me for what under the sun he does things like that?”

“Sure,” said Scott. “For twenty-five dollars.”