Hal Needham, 1931–2013

By his own reckoning, Hal Needham fractured a total of 56 bones in his career as a Hollywood stuntman, puncturing one lung and breaking his back twice. But despite the risks, he often redid his stunts time and again, knowing he’d be paid for each attempt. “If you had a good friend who was a camera operator, he’d say, ‘Damn, I missed that,’” he said. “And I’d say, ‘That’s fine by me.’”

Needham was born the son of sharecroppers in rural Arkansas, said The New York Times. He served as a paratrooper in the U.S. Army and was working in California as a tree pruner when a fellow ex-paratrooper offered him a part in a stunt for the 1950s TV show You Asked for It. Needham had to jump from a low-flying Cessna and knock his friend off a horse. Having pulled that off, he was offered a job on the Jimmy Stewart movie The Spirit of St. Louis, in which he hung by his ankles on a rope from a biplane. “I said, ‘Wow, look at all the money I made—I think I will change jobs,’” he recalled. “And that’s how I decided to be a stuntman.”

Over four decades in Hollywood, Needham “leaped off boulders, jumped from planes, tottered off balconies, and plummeted from towers,” said the Los Angeles Times. He once tried to teach John Wayne how to fake a roundhouse punch on the set of The Undefeated—“a lesson for which the Duke did not thank him.” Wayne cornered Needham in a bar after filming, held him in a headlock, and upbraided him for showing him up in front of the crew. Once that was settled, “the two remained friends until Wayne’s death.”

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In 1975, Needham “transitioned from Western movies and entered the world of car stunts,” said NPR.org. He soon landed a job directing his close friend Burt Reynolds in Smokey and the Bandit. A high-speed road trip across the U.S. gave Needham the idea for The Cannonball Run, a 1981 comedy starring Reynolds that was a box office hit despite critical scorn. Needham took out a newspaper ad in Variety featuring the worst reviews of the film—alongside a picture of himself sitting on a wheelbarrow full of cash.

Needham was never introspective about his perilous choice of career. Asked in 2011 about what went through his mind when he saw one of his death-defying stunts on TV, he chuckled. “I got a residual coming,” he said.