R.I.P. Hal Needham, legendary stuntman and Smokey And The Bandit director
Stuntman-turned-movie director Hal Needham has died, at the age of 82. Needham broke into TV and movies in the late 1950s, doing stunt work in such films as Pork Chop Hill, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, How The West Was Won, Donovan’s Reef, Major Dundee, In Harm’s Way, The War Lord, Hells Angels On Wheels, Little Big Man, and many others. His big break, in terms of steady work, came in 1957, when he was hired as Richard Boone’s stunt double on the Western TV series Have Gun—Will Travel, where he also served as stunt coordinator.
Needham fell off horses, propelled himself onto the roofs of moving stagecoaches, got into fistfights, and did car and motorcycle stunts. For 1973’s White Lightning, one of the first movies he made with his frequent collaborator Burt Reynolds, he launched a speeding car from land onto a floating barge. And he quickly became one of the most in-demand and, by his own proud reckoning, the “highest-paid stuntman in the world.” Needham credited his quick rise to the fact that “I’m not a specialist… I went up the ladder so fast because I could do it all.”
Also by his reckoning, Needham broke a total of 56 bones doing stunt work, once breaking his back, cracking six ribs, and puncturing a lung doing a single stunt involving a car rigged to turn over on the 1974 John Wayne movie McQ. Recalling the experience in an interview with Terry Gross, to promote his 2011 memoir Stuntman!, Needham said, “The next thing I knew I was upside down, backwards, going backwards across a desert floor about 30 feet in the air and I said, ‘Boy, there’s going to be some kind of wreck here any moment.’ And there was.”