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

Tall tales of moviemaking dripping with testosterone

Growing up in the 1970s, I enjoyed the movies directed by Hal Needham: Smokey and the Bandit, The Cannonball Run, and their sequels, for example. At the time, Burt Reynolds was the biggest box office star in the world. Needham’s films help make Reynolds a star, and vice versa. Before becoming a director, however, Needham had a long career as a sought-after stuntman and stunt coordinator for Hollywood productions, Westerns in particular. He even owned a ranch where stunt horses were trained. In 2011, two years before his death, Needham published his autobiography Stuntman! Not surprisingly, Needham’s memoir depicts a life not unlike those larger-than-life movies he made with Reynolds, full of fast cars, fast horses, fast women, and lots of booze.

Stuntman! is mostly a film-industry memoir, but the first chapter and a half do cover Needham’s life before making movies. He grew up dirt poor in Arkansas, literally the son of a sharecropper. As a youth, he and his brother often had to hunt and fish for the family dinner. After his family moved to St. Louis, he enlisted to fight in the Korean War but was never sent overseas. Following his discharge from the service, he moved out to Los Angeles on a whim. In a lucky stroke, he managed to parlay his work as a tree trimmer into a career as a stuntman.

Needham was best friends with Reynolds and lived in Burt’s house for a while. Don’t expect a lot of behind-the-scenes looks into the lives of celebrities from this book, however. Burt is a bit of a shadow figure in this narrative; Needham reveals more about the personalities of Richard Boone and John Wayne. Almost all of the stories in this book take place on movie sets. Needham relates the stunts he orchestrated and performed in various films. At times it reads like a how-to manual for stuntmen: This is how you flip a car. This is how you stage an epic fall. This is how you jump out of a low-flying airplane. In his free time, Needham, who’s known for his car chase films, engages in other automobile-related activities like attempting to break the speed of sound in a rocket car, racing across the country in the real cannonball run, and owning his own NASCAR team.

Needham is about as macho as they come. He’s basically the Burt Reynolds character from his movie Hooper. He’s likable enough as a storyteller, but he’s got some ego on him. Anything anyone can do, he can do it better, and every idea he has is genius. He never admits to making a mistake. Every woman wants him. The relentless self-aggrandizing becomes tiresome after a while. He’s the Baron Munchausen of redneck good-ol’-boys. Also, as a man’s man, Needham has to be the world’s greatest partyer. He drinks at every occasion, and often drives or operates other heavy machinery while drunk. Some of his drinking stories are funny, but you can’t help thinking he’s the drunken jackass who’s weaving all over the lane next to you while you’re just trying to make it home safe.

With the possible exception of the first Smokey and the Bandit, none of Needham’s films would be characterized as smart, and this book doesn’t come across as very smart either. But Needham’s movies were good dumb fun, and so is this book. One of the reasons I enjoy the action movies of 1960s and ‘70s is because of the authentic pre-digital stunts. There was no faking it back in Needham’s day, and by his account, safety was not priority one. This book is a good nostalgia trip through that era. In today’s movies, so many action scenes are digitally created or enhanced, and action movies have become tiresome as a result, which begs the question, Where’s the next Hal Needham when we need ‘im?