Laramie

Since this month is a Potpourri Month, I thought it might be fun to look at the career of stuntmen on television. I’m calling this one “Propourri” because you have to be well trained to do these types of stunts.

Left to right: stuntmen Bob Miles, Bob Herron, Whitey Hughes, actor Michael Dunn, stuntman John Hudkins, Bill Shannon, and actor Quintin Sondergaard. Photo: famousfix.com

A stuntman or stuntwoman is a person who performs dangerous action sequences in a movie or television show. They have usually had extensive training to do these perilous moves safely. Sometimes they are hired as a team with a stunt crew, rigging coordinator, and special effects coordinator.

Stuntmen like Evel Knievel are daredevils who perform for a live audience. If someone fills in for a specific actor all the time, they are stunt doubles. So, what type of stunts do these professionals perform? Sometimes it’s car crashes, explosions, fights, or falls.

The first stuntmen to entertain audiences were performers who traveled around, often in circuses. Later these types of performers worked with Buffalo Bill and in shows that celebrated the Old West.

Today we are going to concentrate on television performers. Currently, stunt professionals must be certified to obtain the insurance producers need to obtain.

The Academy of Television Arts and Sciences now awards Emmys for stunt coordinators but there is no Oscar for this work.

Life-threatening injuries are not uncommon in this work and sadly, deaths do still occur. While most of my research found stuntmen killed in movies, I only found one relating to television. In 1985, Reid Rondell was killed in a helicopter explosion filming Airwolf.

I thought it would be fun to look at the careers of a few stuntmen from the golden age of television. Most of these men made their money in films, but all three of them had successful careers working on television shows as well.

Whitey Hughes

Whitey Hughes was born in 1920 in Arkoma, Oklahoma. He grew up on a farm, so in addition to working with plows and horse teams, he learned to break horses with his father. When he was sixteen, the family moved to Los Angeles. After graduating from high school, Whitey became a Screen Actors Guild member in 1947.

Whitey began his movie career in 1946. During the fifties, he worked on a lot of western films. Hughes said that in the early part of his career, he often had to be a double for the leading lady. (We’ll come back to this subject later in the blog.) He did stunt work for a variety of actresses including Anne Baxter, Rita Hayworth, Barbara Hershey, Virginia Mayo, Stephanie Powers, and Lana Turner.

Speaking of women, one of the roles, Whitey loved best was being the husband of Dotti; they were married for seventy years.

During the fifties, Whitey worked on a lot of westerns including Cheyenne. In the sixties, you would see him on Rawhide or as Kurt Russell’s double on The Magical World of Disney. If you want to see him in action, the best show to watch would be The Wild Wild West; his crew did some amazing things on that show and Whitey coordinated the stunt work for 1965-1968.

The eighties found him in Fantasy Island, Wonder Woman, and BJ and the Bear while in the nineties he was part of Little House on the Prairie and The Fall Guy. His last work was in a movie in 1998. In 2009, Whitey died in his sleep. It is good he died peacefully; I can’t imagine the toll that this type of work took on his body for fifty years.

Hal Needham

Hal Needham was born in 1931 in Memphis, Tennessee. He served as a paratrooper in the US Army during the Korean War. After the war, he worked as an arborist doing tree-topping services. He was also the billboard model for Viceroy Cigarettes while he was trying to establish his career in Hollywood.

Hal’s first big job was the stunt double for Richard Boone on Have Gun, Will Travel. From 1957-63 he was in 225 episodes. During the sixties, he would show up in many television series including Laramie, Wagon Train, Laredo, The Wild, Wild West, Star Trek, Gunsmoke, Big Valley, and Mannix.

Hal was the highest-paid stuntman in the world. That seems fitting because during his career he broke 56 bones, broke his back twice, punctured a lung, and lost a few teeth.

Needham was responsible for wrecking hundreds of cars, fell from many buildings, was dragged by horses, perfected boat stunts and was the first human to test the car airbag.

He revolutionized the work of stuntmen and worked to get his craft recognized and appreciated. He mentored up-and-coming professionals.

His career transitioned from a stuntman to a stunt coordinator to a second unit director to a director. In all, he would work on 4500 television episodes and in 310 films, according to imdb.com. He made his directing debut on a movie he wrote called Smokey and the Bandit with Burt Reynolds and would go on to direct Hooper and The Cannonball Run for Reynolds among other series and films.

In 1977 Gabriel Toys debuted the Hal Needham Western Movie Stunt Set with a cardboard saloon movie set, lights, props, a movie camera, and an action figure that could break through a balcony railing, break a table and crash through the window. They have become highly collectible.

Needham owned a NASCAR race team. He also set a Guinness World Record as the financier and owner of the Budweiser Rocket Car which is now on display at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum.

He also managed to win both an Emmy and an Oscar. Reynolds and Needham were close friends; Needham lived in Reynold’s guest house for 12 years and their relationship was used as the basis for the plot in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.

Bob Herron

Bob Herron was born in 1924 in California. When his parents divorced, he moved to Hawaii with his father. The swimming and high diving he did there was a boost to his stunt career. His mother married Ace Hudkins who was a supplier of horses to the movie industry. Herron helped his stepfather in this business before enlisting in the Navy.

In 1950 he began doing stunt work. His first job was on Rocky Mountain with Errol Flynn and he was shot off horses. This would be a piece of cake compared to his role in Oklahoma Crude where he fell 55 feet from the top of an oil derrick into a stack of boxes.

In the sixties, he began his stunt work on television. He was in Gunsmoke, I Spy, I Dream of Jeannie, The Man from UNCLE, The Girl from UNCLE, Star Trek, Mission Impossible, Get Smart, and Bonanza. He doubled for Ross Martin in The Wild, Wild West. During the seventies, he appeared on Petrocelli, Little House on the Prairie, Marcus Welby, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, The Rockford Files, Kojak, and Charlie’s Angels among other shows. He was still going in the eighties doing his stunts on Hart to Hart, Magnum PI, Remington Steele, the Dukes of Hazzard, Matt Houston, Airwolf, The A-Team, and MacGyver. Despite being almost seventy, he continued in the nineties on shows like Father Dowling’s Murder Mysteries, The Wonder Years, and Murder She Wrote.

I did smile a bit to see shows like I Dream of Jeannie and The Mary Tyler Moore Show on this list. The Jeannie episode is one where she brings her great-grandfather to Cocoa Beach to show Tony how to desalinate water and the Mary episode is one where Sue Anne falls in love with someone who doesn’t return the feelings. I guess it proves you never know where a stunt person will show up.

I don’t know how he managed to survive sixty years performing dangerous stunts but he must have been in amazing physical shape.

I did promise to come back to men having to double for women in the forties and fifties. Thankfully, that is no longer the case, and women’s numbers are increasing among the 3400 stunt performers in SAG.

Former gymnast Shauna Duggins did the hard fighting work in Jennifer Garner’s show Alias. Because pay is determined by union contracts, stuntwomen do not suffer from the pay discrimination that sometimes shows up in the industry. Stunt performers are paid a minimum of $1005 for one day of work and they can negotiate higher pay based on their experience.

Shauna Duggins and Jennifer Garner
Photo: broadwayworld.com

Duggins was at the University of California Davis when she first thought about being a stuntwoman. She learned more about martial arts and spent hours working out in gyms after graduation. In 2000 she auditioned for stunt work in The X Files as Krista Allen’s double and got the job. Then she was in Charlie’s Angels for Kelly Lynch and Cameron Diaz.

It was after that movie that she got the role on Alias where she worked for five years. To protect these women, SAG has a 24/7 hotline for performers to phone if they feel they have been the victim of sexual abuse.

In 2018 Duggins won an Emmy after twenty years in the business. Her advice to young women who decide to make this their career: “train as much as you can in various skills. Go to different gyms with stunt performers, train with all of them and just learn from each other.”

I’m glad we took some time to learn about the tough and dangerous job these performers do. It was so interesting to learn a little bit about some of these industry stars.

Russell Johnson was born in Pennsylvania in 1924. He had six siblings. His father died from pneumonia when Russ was only 8, and his youngest brother died the following year. He was sent to Girard College, a boarding school for fatherless boys located in Philadelphia. He struggled early in his education, being held back for a year. In high school he made the National Honor Society.

In 1943, he married Edith Cahoon. They would divorce in 1948.

During World War II, Johnson joined the Army Air Corps and received the Purple Heart after his plane was shot down in the Philippines in 1945. Johnson flew 44 combat missions in the Pacific Theater. Once the war was over, Russ used his GI Bill to enroll in the Actors’ Lab in Hollywood to study acting. While there he met Kay Cousins, and they married in 1949 and were married until her death in 1980.

Johnson’s big-screen career began in 1952. He was a friend of Audie Murphy and would appear in three of his films in the early 1950s. He was in a variety of movies throughout the 1950s, mainly westerns and sci fi classics such as It Came from Outer Space.

Russell began receiving roles on television in 1950. In the 1950s he would be seen on 28 different shows. In 1959 he was offered a role in a western, Black Saddle. Johnson was Marshal Gib Scott. The show was on for one season.

During the 1960s, Russell’s television work increased, and he appeared on 39 series including The Twilight Zone, Route 66, Ben Casey, Laramie, 77 Sunset Strip, Outer Limits, and Big Valley. In 1964 he was offered the role of The Professor on Gilligan’s Island, replacing John Gabriel who was a teacher in the pilot. Roy Hinkley was a genius who made complex inventions from the simple materials he found on the island. As we have learned, most of the cast of Gilligan’s Island was typecast after the show was cancelled, and they had a hard time getting other roles. Johnson discussed this circumstance in a later interview: “It used to make me upset to be typecast as the Professor . . . but as the years have gone by, I’ve given in. I am the Professor, and that’s the way it is. . . Besides, the show went into syndication and parents are happy to have their children watch the reruns. No one gets hurt. There are no murders, no car crashes. Just good, plain, silly fun. It’s brought a lot of joy to people, and that’s not a bad legacy.”

Although he had trouble at first, he did go on to appear in 45 different shows from 1970-1997, including That Girl, Marcus Welby, Cannon, McMillan and Wife, Lou Grant, Bosom Buddies, Dallas, Fame, Newhart, ALF, and Roseanne. He had a recurring role on Owen Marshall, Counselor at Law from 1971-1973.

In 1982, Russell married for a third time. He married Connie Dane, and they were married until his death from kidney failure in 2014.

In 1993, he published his memoirs, Here on Gilligan’s Isle.

Like so many of the tv icons in the 1960s—Barbara Eden, Adam West, Butch Patrick, David Cassidy, Maureen McCormick—Russell struggled with his alter ego, eventually accepting his role as the Professor. While being tied to one character for 50 years makes it tough to get the roles you want, it’s hard to be critical of a personality that gives such pleasure to decades of viewers and makes you a household name for half a century. Being given the chance to portray a character that America loves is a hazard of the business but is certainly better than never receiving a starring role.

You Never Know Who Might Show Up

With a show like Gilligan’s Island, you would assume it would be almost impossible to have guest stars. After all, they are on a deserted island. Except for the native people who might be living there, where would stars come from? Amazingly, Gilligan’s Island featured many guest stars over the years. Let’s look at a few of them.

Vito Scotti appeared on four different episodes playing Dr. Boris Balinkoff, mad scientist, twice, a Japanese sailor, and a Japanese soldier who does not believe World War II is over.

Mel Blanc could be heard portraying a parrot several times and a frog.

Hans Conried visited the island twice as Wrongway Feldman, an incompetent pilot who had crashed on the island years before.

Kurt Russell was a modern-day Tarzan.

Richard Kiel, a Russian agent, pretended to be a ghost to scare the castaways off the island so he could have the oil rights. When the cast turns the tables and acts like ghosts, he didn’t stick around long.

Zsa Zsa Gabor was a rich socialite who falls in love with the Professor.

Larry Storch is a robber hiding out on the island and pretending to be a doctor.

John McGiver was Lord Beasley Waterford, famous butterfly collector.

Don Rickles is con man Norbert Wiley who is hiding out on the island. He kidnaps Mrs. Howell and later Ginger, planning on getting ransom for each castaway. After the Professor puts him in jail, Ginger convinces them to let him out for a party. Norbert steals jewelry and other items from the castaways and leaves the island.

Phil Silvers crashes onto the island as Herbert Hecuba, arrogant movie producer. He orders everyone around like they’re his servants. He is not impressed with Ginger’s acting ability, so the castaways write and perform a play to show off her talents. In the middle of the night, Hecuba takes off with their play, claiming it as his own back in the US.

Sterling Holloway is an escapee from a prison and the owner of a pigeon. The Professor thinks he can get a message back to the States through the pigeon, but when Birdy finds out he is paroled, he sends the bird off first.

A variety of actors played natives on the show. In all, there were 54 guest stars given credit on the show.

In addition, Bob Denver, Tina Louise, and Jim Backus all had guest starring roles playing people who were look-alikes for Gilligan, Ginger, and Mr. Howell.

I guess it’s a good lesson to always keep up appearances because you never know who might show up when you’re stranded on an island.

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