Up Till Now (13 page)

I took a lot of pride in the fact that I did all of my own stunts. Except for those truly dangerous stunts that require a stuntman with experience, that’s something I’ve done throughout most of my career. Over the years I’ve done a lot of fighting, tumbling, running, jumping, car stunts, and unique tricks. I’ve always believed that doing the physical work, the stunts, is part of the actor’s job—but it has to be done safely. The safety of the star is always foremost in every-one’s mind. Not because they love you, but if you hurt your left pinky and can’t make the next shot, it’s going to cost the producers a lot of money. So generally they don’t let the star do anything unsafe.

The reality is that even the most basic stunts can be very dangerous. On
Gunsmoke
I played a bad guy involved in a shoot-out with a deputy sheriff. According to the script, just before the shooting started one of my fellow bad guys was supposed to grab me around the neck and use me as a shield. In the story I was shot and my life was saved by a Quaker family; I convinced the family that I was the good-guy victim—until their beautiful daughter fell in love with the deputy.

In this instance no one promised this story was going to make me a star.

The actor playing the other bad guy was a big man, who looked crazy. That’s why they hired him, because he looked crazy. As it turned out, he looked that way because he was crazy. When we started shooting he grabbed me around the neck and actually started strangling me. I couldn’t breathe. This was truly the serious actor’s nightmare: I was going to die—on
Gunsmoke
. I grabbed him by the thumb and yanked him around. I was literally fighting for my life.

A similar thing happened many years later—when I saved Oddjob’s life. Harold Sakata, who had created the memorable James Bond villain Oddjob in
Goldfinger
, was working with me in a low-budget film entitled
Impulse
, a title that had been changed from
Want a Ride, Little Girl?
I played your basic homicidal maniac, who is forced to try to kill a young girl after she sees me killing an old prison buddy. Harold was a huge man with no neck, he was just shoulders and a head. In this particular scene he chased me through a car wash and I managed to escape by climbing up onto a roof; when he walked by below me I threw a lasso over him and yanked him up. As he’s being strangled I jump off the roof, hit him several times, then escape.

The stunt coordinator rigged Harold with a harness under his shirt which was connected to a steel cable. To the camera it appeared that I was pulling him up by the rope, but in fact he was being lifted by the cable. We practiced it several times, rope, pull, up, looks good. Then we rolled cameras.

I dropped the loop over his head and yanked him up. I jumped down to the ground and looked at him dangling three feet in the air, struggling to get loose. He was making terrible choking sounds. Boy, I thought, I hadn’t realized he was such a good actor. He sounds like he’s really choking. I punched him rat-tat-tat in the gut a few times and took off. And as I started running a thought struck me: Wait a second, he’s actually choking. In real life one would probably have screamed, “Help!” but as this was on a movie set I yelled, “Cut! Cut!” and ran back to help him. Harold weighed about three hundred pounds but somehow I managed to lift his body enough to reduce the
pressure on his trachea, enabling him to breathe, and then held him up until they cut him loose. I don’t know where I got the strength, but I broke my finger holding him. Because we were filming on a tight schedule I didn’t want to stop to see a doctor, so my finger never healed correctly.

The most serious injury I’ve ever suffered doing a stunt took place when we were filming an episode of my series
T.J. Hooker
in Hawaii. We were shooting a fight scene on the top of a hill overlooking, I believe, the North Shore and the Pacific Ocean. It was about a thousand-foot drop off the edge straight down into the ocean. Now, I admit it, I’m afraid of heights. It’s a very odd sensation; I can fly an ultralight or pilot an acrobatic airplane or a glider, I’ve parachuted and I’ve been skydiving, I’ve stood alone on a plateau—but if I’m standing on the third floor of a hotel looking down I can lose it. I’m terrified I’m going to fall.

This scene had been carefully choreographed by the stunt coordinator. We’d rehearsed it several times: the villain and I are fighting on the top of this hill, he knocks me down, and I roll to the precipice, right to the edge, then he takes a sword—a sword!—and slashes at my head. His sword comes down just to the right of my head, I move my head to the left, then he slashes to my left and I move my head to the right. Right-left, right-left. Got it? Got it.

Finally it was time to shoot. My problem was that I had to be at the very edge of this cliff. So I laid down on my back about eight feet from the edge and crawled backward so I could get to the edge without looking down. I was truly frightened. I could have been attached to a cable, but I didn’t want to do that; instead another stuntman was holding my leg. We went through the action in slow motion, “You’re going to my right, I’ll go to my left. Raise the sword. You’re going to my left, I’ll go to my right. Okay, let’s do it, and please, let’s get it right the first time because I don’t want to be here any longer than I have to.”

All right, ready, roll film, action. Now, I have never been certain whether I was to blame or if it was the stuntman’s fault. I went one way, he went the same way and he slashed me right in the forehead.
I started bleeding. I mean, really bleeding. The stuntman was mortified. “Oh jeez,” he said. “We gotta get you to a hospital.”

“I’m not going anywhere. I’m never going to be able to get this close to the edge again. Just patch me up and let’s get this done.”

“But there’s a flap of skin...” “I’m not moving. Push it back, tape it down, and put my hair over it.” They stopped the bleeding and wiped off the blood. The second stuntman was still holding my leg. I hadn’t moved.

And then I noticed the first stuntman glaring at me. Now that I was okay he was free to get angry at me for messing up the stunt; I’d made him look bad, he’d hurt the star. And then he picked up the sword again...

When we finally finished shooting the scene I said, “Drag me out of here.” Because I was still too terrified to move.

I couldn’t possibly even guess the number of stunt fights I’ve had in my career. I was actually pretty good at it. The key, I learned early, was knowing how to fall. And I’d learned that taking judo lessons. The proper way to fall is to expand your arms so that your entire body hits the ground at the same time. That spreads the energy of the fall. That’s what professional wrestlers do. It makes a great thumping sound too. If you want to roll when you hit the ground you’ve got to hit the ground with a curved arm so you’re actually a hub. You roll on your arms and there’s no pain whatsoever.

Stunt falling requires a lot of training because you have to be able to sense where your body is in space, which enables you to anticipate the impact and properly distribute your energy. And when done correctly it looks painfully real. In the movie
Showtime
with Eddie Murphy and Robert De Niro, I played myself as T.J. Hooker teaching real cops standard TV cop procedures. In one scene I was supposed to show Eddie Murphy how to leap over the hood of a car—but I decided to make it look as if I hurt my back showing him how to do it without getting hurt. The first time I did it I rolled across the hood and fell behind the car. As I got up crew members were running over to me—it had looked so real they thought I was hurt and had stopped shooting.

People do get hurt in stunt fights. Actors get excited and lose their sense of space and have hit stuntmen. A lot of stuntmen are afraid of actors because they get crazed. Even I’ve gotten hit by other actors in fights. I always keep my punches short. As long as the camera is behind you the punches only have to travel six inches to look real. Once I became a leading man I don’t remember ever losing a fight. While making
Star Trek
I was fighting all the time; I’d fight two men, three men at a time, and I would beat all of them. I was a very tough stunt fighter, as long as I had morality and the script on my side.

I was such a good stunt fighter I’ve even fought with myself on several different programs and movies. On
Star Trek
, for example, we occasionally ended up with two Kirks battling it out. In a movie called
White Comanche
I played half-breed Indian twin brothers who had to fight to the death. In those instances one of me was a stunt-man whose body vaguely resembled mine and we shot over his shoulder. So perhaps I could have played both Caesar and Brutus in the Julius Caesar musical I wanted to make in
Free Enterprise
.

In fact, I was such a good stunt fighter that I almost got myself badly hurt. When my daughters were teenagers the four of us went to a go-cart track. They were very pretty young women and naturally they attracted teenage boys. As my girls rode along these boys were zipping back and forth, trying to cut them off, doing anything to get their attention. I was riding behind my daughters, trying to protect them. I was being the old bull, protective of the herd, trying to keep these young bucks from cutting in.

Finally I herded my daughters off the track and these three teenaged boys came over to us and started acting like young adolescents. Now I know that eighteen years old is an interesting age for boys, emotionally they’re still kids, but they’ve got the physical presence of men. Of course, having teenaged girls I didn’t quite understand that. So I stood up to those kids, demanding, “What do you think you were doing with my daughters? You keep that up you’re going to kill somebody.”

“Yeah? Who’s gonna stop us?” Obviously they were real wiseguys. I wasn’t going to take that from these... kids. I took a bold step
forward. And suddenly I thought, I can take all three of these guys. I’d been fighting stuntmen for decades. Just a week or so earlier Leonard Nimoy and I had taken six stuntmen. Just the two of us. We’d beaten six tough men. In my mind I began to plan my strategy, so when I went into action I wouldn’t make any missteps. As Kirk I’d often done a fighting stunt in which I leaped into the air with a double-scissor kick and pushed off against a stuntman’s chest. He would reel backward into a wall which knocked him out cold, while I hit the ground and rolled, then hit the second bad guy with an elbow and then...

Wait a second, I realized. That’s pretend. Then I remembered Newton’s third law: For every action there’s an equal and opposite reaction. If I actually leaped into the air and pushed off against some-one’s chest, absolutely nothing is going to happen to him but I’m going to fall onto the floor. So if I tried to do that to these kids, they were not going to go reeling backward and be knocked unconscious. I was going to end up on the ground and they were going to kick me. And I would get hurt.

That certainly wasn’t a good idea. So instead I began thinking about employing diplomacy. Kirk had often been called upon to use diplomacy to prevent one world from...

I do remember the most truly dangerous stunt I ever did. For real. What I don’t remember is why I did it. We were making an ABC Sunday Night Movie called
Disaster on the Coastliner
. The
Coastliner
was a train set on a collision course by a deranged engineer attempting to avenge the accidental deaths of his wife and daughter—and among the passengers were the vice president’s wife and daughter. We were filming on a deserted stretch of track in Connecticut. I played a con man with a heart of gold plating. In a key scene I had to stand on top of a speeding diesel locomotive and fight a stuntman while a helicopter was trying to swoop down and rescue me. When I read the script I thought it was an impressive stunt, but I didn’t know how they intended to do it.

When we started filming I asked the director, “How are we going to do this? Are we going back to the studio to do a green screen?”
When he admitted he hadn’t figured it out yet, I suggested, “Well, why don’t we do it in real life?”

It was let’s-put-on-a-play-in-the-barn, boys and girls, time. I have no idea what I was thinking when I said that.

His face lit up. “Really?” “Yeah. Sure, why not?” Why not? Because I could have gotten killed, that’s why not. But listening to myself talk I started getting excited. “Here’s what we’ll do. The train’ll go five miles an hour and I’ll get up on top and you can get some close-ups, then you can speed up the film and it’ll look like a real fight.”

“Really?” I think he was as stunned as I should have been. But there was a difference between the two of us. I was the one climbing up on top of the train. He was the sane one. “Okay,” he said enthusiastically. “Let’s do it. You go ahead and climb up there.”

The problem, I quickly discovered, was that this was a diesel engine, meaning there was no smokestack, nothing to which we could attach safety cables. It’s aerodynamic, flat. The only way I could be attached to a safety cable was to run the cable down the side of the engine through the window. But then we realized if we did that and I fell the cable would just drag me alongside the train. A bad second choice. So we couldn’t use safety cables. I decided to do it anyway.

Really? The director was thrilled I was willing to do this stunt. Finally I got up on top of the train. Admittedly, I was scared. As it rolled along at five miles an hour the director was in a car driving alongside with three cameras in it. We shot the whole fight scene. I took a deep breath when I got down to the ground. “How was it?” I asked the director.

He frowned. “Well, it looks like we’re going five miles an hour.” Then I heard myself thinking, Hey, I’m the star. Stars don’t get hurt. And then I heard myself saying to him, “Okay, let’s try it again. We can go a little faster.”

Now why would I say that? Why would I risk my life for a Sunday Night Movie? What could I have been thinking? Directors had been shooting similar scenes since the early days of film without it being necessary for an actor to stand on top of a moving train. There were
many ways of getting that shot. “Really?” the director said enthusiastically.