Hal Needham (1931–2013)

Guy tries to be a movie hero ("Boys like macho. And they like speed") but it is sweaty and selfconscious and then underneath that he's a prick and a villain and then underneath that there is something really weird at work.

Needham, who started as a stuntman and then made pals with Burt Reynolds, who wanted to be a tough guy, and then directed Smokey and the Bandit and bought a NASCAR team and became a typical Hollywood sleaze, presents himself hamhandedly (and heavyhandedly and cackhandedly, show more every bad kind of handedly you can imagine, which is sad given that he's going for coolhandedly) as a badass, and it is true that if you think people deserve wealth and fame for blowing themselves up and strapping themselves to rockets and the like, he earned his keep. But then he constantly undermines it without even meaning to--talking about the way he kept his first wife's kids away from their dad, or the way he drove Burt Reynolds to Utah to get away when he was wanted for questioning in a murder, or how everyone who ever disagreed with him was a moron and an asshole and a couple of choice words from Needham left them pissing in the wind (this narrative structure I always thought of as particular to medical people, but I guess movie people take themselves just as seriously), and it doesn't take much to recognize a stone narcissist psychopath, though given Needham's seeming discomfort with himself I think he was made by Hollywood rather than born that way, kind of even more scary.

And the cracks appear in weird places. This book has so much lowhanging fruit for deconstruction that you almost wonder if Needham placed it there intentionally so that when the pointyheaded intellectuals criticized his rickety lifestory-self-presentation he could eyeroll and dismiss. There's this bit about him and some other stunt dude injecting themselves with this and that so they could work on rolled ankles, and then the other guy wants Hal to inject him and Hal's like "I couldn't do it. I don't know why." Just this little moment of penetration anxiety and then back to tech specs talking tough through gritted teeth (this guy literally got his start doubling John Wayne).

Or when him and his friend rig up a shower with a tarp in the place they're staying in Prague and then he goes with this weird belligerence "They could see our heads and feet. Big deal." What??? Or after he starts up his stuntman agency, the endless parade of stuntmen under his charge who pull something off imperfectly or whatever, and Needham adds a little twist to the "alla buncha morons" story by categorizing them in terms of his ability to offer them continued Hollywood teat: "He made my B team"; "He would never be one of 'Hal's Guys.'" I don't want to dwell on this too long, because not being able to face what you are is heartbreaking and I didn't know the guy anyway so who am I to say, but everything about this book screams "deeply repressed same-sex attraction"; the weird puerility about women; the insecure namedropping of square-jawed friends like Chuck Yeager and the dude who broke the sound barrier on land and the fighter pilot who couldn't keep up with ol' Hal in the sky and the "negritos" who could track every man alive but not ol' Hal; the way him and Burt Reynolds lived together and Burt is constantly calling him cutesy things like "Roomie" and they bring women back to impress them and the women are always duly impressed but somehow never sleep with, and suddenly I realize that the other thing that's never mentioned along with sex is drugs, which come on, you lived with Burt Reynolds in the Seventies and ….? Deeply repressed.)

In light of all this bizarro stuff the run-of-the-mill terribleness of the prose can go without much comment, but allow me to single out two things: First, the constant jolty tense shift when he tries to drop campfree he-man one-liners on us: "They said it couldn't be done. Count me in." "He wanted to know if I could really pull it off. You bet." Second, the guy doesn't know a pronoun from the Hal Needham doll with rockem sockem action: "I tied the rope to a tree. Then I secured the rope and let the rope down into the Canyon. Burt grabbed the rope." This could have been like a two-and-a-half-star movie if they cast someone charming as the main dude and gave us some insight into the weird underlying trauma of blowing yourself up for a living--Pushing Tin partially salvaged by more explosions. But Needham doesn't know thing one about writing and clearly had neuroses that he never really touched (besides the gay thing, he never had a dad, which is sad and makes me glad that at least John Wayne and Burt Reynolds loved him), and there is endless weirdness but mostly this is a trashy Republican bootstraps story that reminds you that celebrities are (seemingly all!) deeply solipsistic and stupid and evil. show less

Legendary stuntman Hal Needham, writing in a straightforward let-me-tell-you-a-story style, tells the story of his rise from rural poverty in Arkansas to fame and fortune in Hollywood. Along the way you learn a great deal about how movie stunts were done in the sixties and seventies, about the famous stars that Needham worked with (Richard Boone, John Wayne, and Burt Reynolds in particular), and about the quality that Needham shares with successful race car drivers and test pilots: an show more off-the-scale level of confidence in his own skills and his ability to make split-second, life-or-death decisions.

Nobody is going to mistake this book for the likes of Ernest K. Gann's Fate Is The Hunter, Mike Cherry's High Steel, or Dennis Smith's Report from Engine Company 82 -- subtle, deeply reflective memoirs about how it feels (and what it means) to do incredibly dangerous things for a living. Needham's worldview is a straightforward one that emphasizes action over reflection, prefers directness to subtlety (this is, after all, the guy who directed "Megaforce") and celebrates the financial rewards of hard work.

Stuntman is akin to listening to a guy who's lived a long, varied, interesting life (paratrooper, tree surgeon, stuntman, movie director, NASCAR team owner) spinning yarns in a bar. Some of the stories go on too long, some of them are more interesting to the teller than the listener, and some of them have no real point. Most of them, though, are funny or gripping or both -- more than enough to leave you glad you bought him a round or three. show less

I couldn't put the book down. I got the book this afternoon, started reading it this evening, and now it is 2 in the mornng.

Hal Needham has a straightforward, understated first-person writing style that brings the reader with him into the middle of terrifying action sequences. But it is told so matter-of-factly that you believe he's willing to do things no sane person even contemplates.

Jump off an airplane to land on another stuntman riding a horse below? He makes it sound difficult, yes, show more but not impossible, if you know what you are doing, and are not afraid of heights. Or of getting hurt.

Free-climb a sheer cliff, and then use your own body, braced against a couple partly buried rocks to brace the rope for the three people following you-- He makes it sound almost reasonable.

He starts his story with his childhood as a sharecropper's son in Arkansas, then to his business trimming trees, which led to his first job as a stuntman. Part of the job of a stuntman is to get hurt - to get the wind knocked out of you, and accumulate scrapes and bruises for a fee. Then there is the possibility of getting really hurt, or not surviving at all, for a higher fee.

Car stunts, cowboy stunts, high falls, fights. He takes us behind the scenes on the movie sets, introduces us to the actors, directors, and stunt coordinators. And he breaks down some of the gags- how they were done, and what he changed to some of them to make them safer, and hurt less. Because yes, they do hurt. He introduced the use of airbags for the landing surface on high falls, after being the first human to try out an automobile airbag.

He got the film crew out of Czechoslovakia when the Russians invaded - I had just read about this same event in Robert Vaughan's autobiography. This had more details of how he made it happen.

And through the book, his no-nonsense approach to stunts and to life make fascinating reading. show less

A fascinating look at the career of this stuntman and director. The stories come fast and furious. This isn't a conventional autobiography. For instance he mentions he's been married three times but I only think two of the wifes were mentioned. There's plenty of stories here about Hollywood royalty. I wonder if this was transcribed at a bar. It has that sort of relaxed storytelling style. Not that there's anything wrong with that. A fun read.

Highly recommended!

This was provided through the show more early reviewers program. show less