Being the predictably tragic tale of a pair of world-class stuntmen who competed to see who could fall farthest. First published in Empire Magazine, May 2016
On the morning of September 21, 1978, a thousand-strong crowd gathered before the 22-storey-high Kincaid Tower in Lexington, Kentucky, drawing as close as it could to a huge, billowing airbag tethered near the building’s base. The city had for several weeks enjoyed the novelty of Hollywood being in town. Lexington’s modern skyline, with its plentiful supply of half-built office blocks, including Kincaid Tower, had attracted the location scouts for Steel, a now mostly forgotten vehicle for Lee Majors and George Kennedy set in the construction industry.
After the film had wrapped, only days before, the gathering rubberneckers thought the circus was over, the main event of interest having already taken place. Six weeks earlier, stuntman A.J. Bakunas, doubling for Kennedy, had flung himself from the ninth storey of Kincaid Tower. It had been a story notable enough to make the “and finally...” slot on the local news that evening. But, the press had been informed at short notice, the stunt was to be repeated. There was to be a piece de resistance. The ninth floor, 130 feet up, was no longer high enough. The fall was now to take place from the very top of the tower: the 22nd floor, 323 feet from the ground. Bakunas had received news that veteran stunt performer Dar Robinson had, in California just three weeks earlier, broken the world record for the highest fall with a 311-foot drop — a record previously held by Bakunas himself. It was a record he was now determined to reclaim. This was an even bigger story.
On the building’s roof, Bakunas gave a TV interview to Steel star Majors: itself an event that would have been unthinkable just a few years before, when stunt performers were figures whose existence was, nominally at least, an industry secret, and who didn’t even receive screen credits for their risky work. But it was all part of the game these days. The new breed of stuntmen that Bakunas represented were now mini-celebrities in their own right. Not only were they now allowed to be photographed next to the stars they doubled, but they were also being interviewed by them for TV.
“Go on back and keep preparing, because I want to keep you around,” Majors said at the conclusion of the TV spot, slapping Bakunas on the shoulder as the smiling stuntman walked out of frame. Then, turning to the camera, the actor wrapped things up. “Well, it should be exciting. But one thing I’d like to know: are world records worth the risk? It’s obvious to A.J. Bakunas that it is. We’ll see.”
A few hours later Albert John Bakunas, movie-star handsome and oozing the quiet courage typical of his trade, climbed to the scaffolding-clad viewing deck. He stepped out onto a girder and lowered himself into a hanging position. And then, early in the afternoon, Bakunas, who was a few days shy of his 28th birthday, did what he had done dozens of times before. He paused, he centred himself. He listened for the crackle of a walkie-talkie.
And when finally he heard it, he pushed himself backwards and fell into thin air.
It is not known who performed the first high fall for Hollywood’s action-hungry cameras. It certainly wouldn't have been anyone who would have recognised themselves as a ‘stuntman’.
Back in the earliest days of the silents, any half-risky action was performed by common-or-garden extras willing to fling themselves through sugar glass windows or topple off a shop frontage for an extra couple of dollars on top of their five bucks-a-day pay. It was a self-selecting group liberally populated by chancers, the insane and hopeless drunks.
According to John Baxter in his magisterial history of the nascent industry, Stunt: The Story Of The Great Movie Stuntmen, one of the earliest recorded high falls was performed by a Native American who went by the name of ‘Eagle Eye’. During the filming of D.W. Griffiths’ epic Intolerance, Eagle Eye’s fighting skills had impressed the director and he was asked if he would mind leaping into a waiting hay cart. Eagle performed the gag perfectly, only to find himself careening away in the cart led by the panicked horse, and was, it is reported, not seen again until the next day.
What Eagle Eye’s story illustrates — apart from the importance of a modicum of foresight in stunt work — is that the history of falling goes hand in hand with the history of landing. The earliest fall guys used whatever was available to break their fall. In some cases large rugs or carpets would be held out by stagehands, but both they and the stagehands were unreliable. Nets of the kind used by tightrope walkers were cumbersome, difficult to rig and required massive ground clearance, often ruining a shot. So these proto-stuntmen improvised.
“In the early days they would use sawhorses with two by fours put across with mattresses stacked over the top of that,” says John Hagner, a Utah-based retired stunt performer who doubled for Walter Pidgeon in Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea, among many others, and is founder of the Hollywood Stuntmen’s Hall Of Fame. “Then there was a famous stuntman working in the ’20s and ’30s called Richard Talmage. He invented a canvas-sewn mattress, which was packed with stuffing. We still call them Talmage pads.”
The next breakthrough in what stuntmen call the ‘catcher’ came by accident. A catastrophic fire at a packaging factory in New York saw panicked workers leaping out of fourth-storey windows into piles of cardboard boxes, many surviving falls that should have killed them. Over in Hollywood, the stunt industry took note.
“The secret was in the way they were stacked,” says Hagner. “If you stack them close together then they don’t really cave in so you’re going to have a hard landing. But if you put them about four inches apart they give way. When I did my first fall back in 1960, I used cardboard boxes and a couple of Talmadge pads and I fell 38 feet. Back in those days you never really fell any higher than 40 feet or 45 feet.”
While the technology of the high fall developed, the profession of ‘stuntman’ slowly established itself. The first wave emerged from the two-reel comedies churned out by Mack Sennett — the term for an individual stunt, a ‘gag’, has its roots in these early days when the desired response was more likely a belly laugh than a gasp. But by the ’60s the industry was, according to some of its members, moribund, ripe for a revolution and at the centre of this seismic shift would be three men: Hal Needham, Burt Reynolds and Dar Allen Robinson.
“Things went crazy for a while,” says director Richard Donner, whose Lethal Weapon was the apotheosis of the stunt-oriented action pictures that dominated the industry through the 1970s and well into the ’80s — and which is dedicated to Dar Robinson who worked on the movie’s spectacular falls. “It was like what you see with CGI these days. It has to be bigger and more ambitious than the last movie. Everybody wanted to do something wilder and more difficult than the guy before, and the studios felt that that was going to make their picture that much more salable and profitable with audiences. They were relatively safe and smart in the beginning and then they lost control of it. It got too big.”
Dar Robinson, who Donner employed to conceive and perform many of Lethal Weapon’s spectacular falls, was the outlier of the new, inventive and highly competitive stuntman. A former trampoline champion, he had made his high-fall debut doubling for Steve McQueen in Papillon (1973), diving 100 feet into water. As much an engineer as a stunt performer, he was mesmerised by the beauty and simplicity of the high fall. “Dar was a genius at the high fall,” says Donner. “A total genius. He had many totally new rigs which he had invented. He made falls totally magical.”
Frustrated with the height limitations presented by cardboard boxes and Talmage pads, Robinson began to look for ways that the high-fall could be modified, and along with his stunt engineer Ky Michaelson, found the solution in acres of stitched nylon and powerful air compressors.
“Dar and Ky had a lot to do with the invention of the airbag,” says Hagner. “It emerged in the late ’60s after which they started to go to 80 and then over 100 feet. Essentially it’s a giant nylon bag which is vented and inflated. When you land the air is forced through the vents breaking your fall.” Using the new airbag, Robinson and other stuntmen could break the 100-foot barrier, performing falls from heights unimaginable only a few years before.
And stuntmen were suddenly everywhere. Movies like Smokey And The Bandit (1977) and The Cannonball Run (1981) — each essentially two hours of pipe-rolls and gasoline eruptions strung haphazardly together, untroubled by the demands of narrative — led to a public obsession with the men and women who delivered this incomparably violent spectacle. Animal (1977), The Death Cheaters (1976), and The Stunt Man (1980), as well a brace of films about motorcycle showman Evel Knievel, all scored hits at the box office, while on television Lee Majors’ The Fall Guy (1981-1986) would deliver weekly stunt-jags to a public hungry for more and more outrageous risk-taking. Stunts even became divorced from story altogether, with TV specials like Stunt Wars presenting them for their own sake.
Key to the sudden emergence from the shadows of the stuntman as a new kind of countercultural star was the friendship between stuntman Hal Needham and peak A-lister Burt Reynolds. Needham, a former paratrooper and tree-climber, had met Reynolds when he doubled for the then-unknown actor on the set of TV series/Riverboat. The two forged an enduring friendship, Needham living in Reynolds’ pool house for well over a decade. By 1970, Needham had become increasingly unhappy with what he saw as the cliquish way the industry was run, with a few dozen senior stuntmen at the head of the venerable Stuntman’s Association of Motion Pictures ruling the roost, doling out work to the junior members and, as Needham saw it, holding both them and innovation in check. So he rocked the stunt business by splitting from SAMP and founding his own group, Stunts Unlimited.
Originally composed of just over a dozen young, ambitious stunt performers handpicked by Needham and co-founders Ronnie Rondell and Glenn Wilder (Dar Robinson remained affiliated with SAMP), Stunts Unlimited prided itself on the technical innovation and scale of the stunts its members would attempt. And typical of the kind of new hungry talent that Needham sought to cultivate as a potential inductee was A.J. Bakunas.
Born in Fort Lee, New Jersey, Bakunas had been a high-school pole vault champion and then gym instructor before moving to Hollywood and breaking into the stunt business, making his debut in Sidney Lumet’s Dog Day Afternoon (1975). He’d also worked on Walter Hill’s gang-war movie The Warriors (where he can be briefly spotted as a roller skating gang member in the movie’s ‘rest-room rumble’). “Some people say I'm crazy to keep doing stunts. I don't think it's any crazier than working eight hours a day in a stuffy office,” he had once said.
Though both organizations placed safety to the fore, the split was a controversial and in some quarters unpopular move, and it injected a new edge of competitiveness and one-upmanship into a business that until then had been pleasantly collegiate. “I don’t know whether it was really good for the industry or not,” says Richard Donner. “I think there had been animosity, maybe some jealousy. There was a sense of the two organisations competing with each other for a while, who had the biggest pair of cojones. I think we’re well past that now.”
After Needham’s directorial debut Smokey And The Bandit proved a major money-spinner, he and Reynolds saw an opportunity to propel the stunt performers themselves from industry secret to attraction in their own right. The Stuntman, a flimsy screenplay about a fading fall guy’s friendship with a hungry new rival, was rewritten for Reynolds and became Hooper (1978), to be directed by Needham. “Because there didn’t have to be any continuity, Hooper would have any stunt I could dream up,” Needham wrote later, showing an admirable disregard for the hapless screenwriters. “Car jumps, fights, explosions and high falls.” And, keen to cement Stunts Unlimited as a new industry force, Needham incorporated the company into the screenplay and featured its logo in the film.
Key to what there was of a plot was a high fall from a helicopter, performed by Reynolds’ title character as part of the film’s increasingly risky game of one-upmanship with his young rival (Jan-Michael Vincent). It was no accident that the planned gag would establish a new record — as it does in the script — and further burnish Stunts Unlimited’s reputation for groundbreaking work, as well as publicising the production. Though like most stunt performers he could turn his hand to anything, Needham was primarily a car-crash expert. But he knew a young guy who was a rising talent in the field of falling down, or at least who wanted to be: A.J. Bakunas. Doubling for Reynolds, Bakunas performed the stunt flawlessly, tumbling from the hovering chopper 232 feet into a waiting airbag and crashing into the record books at the same instant.
In the newly competitive business, it’s easy to understand why Robinson would see a younger stunt performer breaking world records using the very airbag technology he’d helped develop as a challenge to be met. So on September 2, 1978, at California theme park Knott’s Berry Farm, with cameras from NBC’s Super Stunt II rolling, he did just that: leaping 311 feet from a helicopter onto a 60-by-120-foot airbag and beating Bakunas’s fall by 80 feet.
Out in Lexington, Kentucky, Steel was still in production when Bakunas received the news that his hard-won world record had only lasted a few months. And only weeks after Robinson’s jump Bakunas decided to retrieve his crown.
“A.J. was using two airbags,” says John Hagner of the Kincaid Tower fall that would kill Bakunas. “One was sewn into the other, so there was an outer bag and a slightly smaller inner bag. The outer bag gave way and the inner bag didn’t hold him — it was nowhere near enough to break his fall on its own. That’s why he went straight to the ground.”
Dr Jud Chalkley was acting as medical advisor to the production and had voiced his objection to the second fall being performed at all. “At first they said everything was fine,” he recalled years later. “Then there was this oh my gosh moment and we got word that the airbag had ruptured.”
Chalkley, who was on hand at The Good Samaritan Hospital’s emergency room when Bakunas was admitted, remembers him arriving, conscious, but horrifically injured. “I remember he grabbed my arm with a look of desperation,” he said. ”I could see the fear and the recognition that he was looking to me to help him.” Tragically it would prove that Chalkley and the emergency room team were powerless to do much at all.
Despite hitting the faulty airbags at a velocity of around 90 miles per hour, and having shattered both hips and both shoulder blades, it was the stuntman’s massive internal injuries that sealed his fate. “The deceleration caused tremendous damage to his lungs,” said Chalkley, who operated on Bakunas overnight, transfusing more than 15 pints of blood in an attempt to control the haemorrhaging. “The individual lung cells had actually disintegrated as a result of the impact. He had so many problems, we just tried to correct what we could correct.”
Bakunas died at 9.45 am the next morning. His father, who had been on hand to witness his son at work for the first time, was at his bedside. “I had told the director, I had told the producer and I had told A.J. that I didn't think it was a good idea,” remembered Chalkley. “We had the film in the can. I’m still disappointed in myself that I couldn’t have done more to prevent the jump from happening.”
Though his death had little effect outside the stunt industry, the subsequent catastrophic accident on the set of The Twilight Zone (1983), in which actor Vic Morrow and two children were killed when a helicopter destabilized by a pyrotechnic effect crashed into the set, led to safety reforms and a messy court case that put director John Landis in the dock, dampening much of the fervour that had gripped the action industry for the previous few years.
Before his death in a motorcycle accident during a minor stunt on the set of Million Dollar Mystery in 1986, Dar Robinson continued his radical technical innovations, one of which was the ‘descender’, or ‘decelerator’, which ironically made the need for the airbags he had also helped develop less necessary. Essentially a highly reliable pneumatic break, it allowed stunt performers to use thin wires for high falls, and for directors to shoot downwards into the fall, until digital technology meant they would remove the wire entirely.
Robinson’s record was finally broken at a promotional event for The Vegas World Hotel in 1984, when stuntman Dan Koko was paid $1 million to jump 326 feet from the building’s roof (though the achievement is unofficial, as Guinness World Records ceased recording it for a time after Bakunas’ death). Then, in 1997, Danish stuntman Stig Gunther jumped 343 feet from a crane into an airbag, a height that remains unsurpassed to this day.
“Dar once told me he wanted to do 1,000 feet,” says John Hagner. “If there was anybody who could have figured a way to do it, and do it safely, it would have been him.”
Sadly Dar Robinson will never get the chance. In November 1986, while performing a relatively simple motorcycle ‘drive by’ shot on low-budget thriller Wheels Of Steel, he lost control of his bike, plunging off a 40-foot ravine and fatally impaling himself on a cactus limb. Compared to Bakunas’s death it was a strangely low-key end for a man who had made a living pushing the envelope of stunt work. “There’s no such thing as a ‘small’ stunt,” says Richard Donner, “Anything those guys do has the potential to go wrong, even when they plan it every which way, like Dar always did.”
Donner would dedicate Lethal Weapon to Robinson’s memory. But it’s hard to watch its spectacular falls and not to think of it as a memorial to Bakunas too. And to a strange moment in time, nearly forty years ago, when two men dreamed of taking the business of falling down to ever greater heights.
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