When he offers troubled Vietnam vet “Lucky” his heavenly protection, ordinary light through ordinary glass provides Cross with a halo of jewelry-commercial lens flares. Peter O’Toole’s Eli Cross, that’s “Eli the Terrible” to friends, wears an eyepiece around his neck like a crucifix, though he identifies as an all-powerful being unaffiliated with the divine: “If God could do the tricks we can do, he’d be a happy man.” His control seems to extend beyond the Kliegs and the cranes. If the lithe blue devil on the poster didn’t clue you in, The Stunt Man is thinly veiled Faust. It would be the first Sisyphean slip on the hill toward production and a forecast of fate already sealed. As a result, Columbia passed on his script for coloring outside the lines of any definable genre. Rush, a graduate of UCLA’s first film program who cut his teeth on Air Force training films and AIP motorcycle movies, saw more to it than that. Columbia Pictures wanted a straight-ahead action movie. The 1973 novel on which it was based, by New Yorker staff writer Paul Brodeur, was enough of a Rorschach test to attract filmmakers as far afield as Arthur Penn and Francois Truffaut.
#Where did the stuntman bob minor attend school movie
It cost Richard Rush ten years and two heart attacks to answer them with The Stunt Man, the story of an escaped convict hiding out in plain sight on a movie set as the blackmailed plaything of an omnipotent director who travels exclusively by crane-mounted hand of God. To paraphrase The Stunt Man’s own egomaniacal caricature of ‘70s swinging-dick directors, the only thing any self-respecting audience truly wants to know is how they found a monkey tall enough to play King Kong. It’s a bunt of a joke by any standard – the Waffle House crowd cares more about car chases than character work – but it’s also a profound misunderstanding.
Klein recounts their questions in Kentucky-fried cornpone, wondering how they flipped this car or jumped that ravine. Tragically, the audience only raised their hands for Hal Needham, director of Hooper and one of the greatest stuntmen to ever fall down. He attended a college screening shortly after it opened and stuck around to expound on his feature-length Peter Bogdanovich impression.
Comedian Robert Klein sometimes does a bit about his role in Hooper, the stuntman movie that unsuccessfully sued The Stunt Man to be called The Stunt Man.
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