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Stuntman!: My Car-Crashing, Plane-Jumping, Bone-Breaking, Death-Defying Hollywood Life
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About Stuntman!: My
Product Description The classic no-holds-barred memoir from Hollywood's most legendary stuntman -- an inspiration for Brad Pitt's character Cliff Booth in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood -- is "full of incredible stories as told by a real man of action" (Arnold Schwarzenegger). Yep that's me, Hal Needham, on the cover doing a fire stunt. When you're on fire you don't dare breathe because if you do, you'll suck those flames right down your throat. I was Hollywood's highest paid stuntman so I should know. I wrecked hundreds of cars, fell from tall buildings, got blown up, was dragged by horses, and along the way broke 56 bones, my back twice, punctured a lung and knocked out a few teeth...I hung upside down by my ankles under a bi-plane in The Spirit of St. Louis, jumped between galloping horses in Little Big Man, set a world record for a boat stunt on Gator, jumped a rocket powered pick-up truck across a canal for a GM commercial, was the first human to test the car airbag-and taught John Wayne how to really throw a movie punch. Life also got exciting outside of the movie business. I had my Ferrari stolen right from under my nose, flew in a twin-engine Cessna with a passed out pilot, rescued the cast and crew from a Russian invasion in Czechoslovakia, and once took six flight attendants on a date. I owned the Skoal-Bandit NASCAR race team, the sound-barrier breaking Budweiser Rocket Car and drove a souped-up, fake ambulance in a "little" cross-country race called The Cannonball Run, which became the movie I directed by the same name. Oh yeah, I also directed Smokey and the Bandit, Hooper and several other action/comedy movies that I liked a bunch. I was a sharecropper's son from the hills of Arkansas who became a Hollywood stuntman. That journey was a tough row to hoe. I continually risked my life but that was the career I chose. I was never late to the set and did whatever I had to do to get the job done. Hollywood's not all sunglasses and autographs. Let me tell you a few stories... From Publishers Weekly Needham worked more than 40 years in Hollywood as a stuntman who filled in for John Wayne, Jimmy Stewart, Dustin Hoffman, and Burt Reynolds. Given the exciting and dangerous jobs he performed wrangling horses, staging fights, doing "high falls," and crashing cars, Needham has plenty of material, and he writes like a guy telling stories at a bar, laying out one anecdote after another about 1960s and '70s directors and big-time actors. Of course, as a thrice married, hard-living stuntman who was not only Reynolds's stunt-double but also his best friend, Needham has his share of fun and not-so-dirty little secrets that he doles out in a playful prose that makes it obvious that no matter how serious he took his job, he knew how to enjoy life. Indeed, Needham's personal life—bootlegging alcohol (he grew up in Arkansas), racing a car cross-country—has informed his work as both stuntman and director of such movies as Smokey and the Bandit, Stroker Ace, Cannonball Run, and Hooper. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved. From Booklist An absolute must for fans of books about moviemaking, this autobiography of one of Hollywood’s most acclaimed stuntmen—not to mention one of the most financially successful directors of the 1970s and early 1980s—is guaranteed to keep readers glued to their seats. Needham, who broke into stunt work in the late 1950s, was the stunt coordinator for the television series Have Gun—Will Travel for six seasons. Moving to the big screen, he worked on movies directed by some of Hollywood’s heavyweights (Wilder, Penn, Frankenheimer, Schaffner) and starring some of the movie business’ biggest names (Wayne, Douglas, Hoffman, Hackman, Sinatra). In the seventies, he segued into directing, launching that career with the wildly successful, if critically reviled, Smokey and the Bandit (which, he reminds us, was beaten at the box office that year by only one movie, Star
