The wild bunch, up close

Stuntmen recount feats of daring, timing, insanity

Darrin Prescott, shown at far right on ''Bedazzled'''s set, calls ''the ability to turn off [your] own self-preservation'' invaluable. (stuntgirl.com)

The Full Burn: On the Set, at the Bar, Behind the Wheel, and Over the Edge with Hollywood Stuntmen
By Kevin Conley
Bloomsbury, 214 pp., illustrated, $25.99

For all their dazzle and derring-do onscreen, Hollywood stuntmen and stuntwomen generally prefer toiling in anonymity. It doesn't do their employers any good, after all, for moviegoers to be conscious of who that is doubling for Harrison Ford when Indiana Jones slides under that cargo truck he's just leapt onto from a horse in "Raiders of the Lost Ark," or who is threading that motorcycle through oncoming freeway traffic in place of Carrie-Anne Moss in "The Matrix Reloaded."

"Despite the high-profile nature of such gags," explains Kevin Conley in "The Full Burn" ("gags" being the preferred term for stunts among stuntmen, dating back to the Keystone Kops), "a good portion of the art of the stunt lies in its invisibility. For most in the trade, anonymity is part of the professional code."

Conley, a correspondent for GQ magazine and author of "Stud: Adventures in Breeding," has a penchant for infiltrating and explaining high-testosterone subcultures. His briskly entertaining and informative new book grew out of a 2003 feature in The New Yorker. In it, Conley visits the St. Petersburg, Fla., set of "The Punisher," where he watches stuntman Mike Owen get blown up and flung 30 feet into the Gulf of Mexico, and a complicated chase scene in which a motorboat pops loose from a trailer hitch mid-chase and crashes down on the Ford pickup speeding behind it.

The New Yorker piece doubles as the vivid opening chapter of Conley's book, from which he moves on to profile several top stuntmen, sketch some history of the profession, and observe other eye-popping stunts being executed. We meet Terry Leonard, the battle-scarred stunt legend who performed the Indiana Jones truck scene and now works behind the camera as a second-unit director. "Most people like to think they treat their bodies like a temple, whether they do or not," Leonard tells Conley, running through the catalog of concussions, broken bones, and other injuries he sustained performing stunts. "I treated mine like a South Tucson beer bar."

The "Matrix Reloaded" motorcycle double was Debbie Evans, whom Conley labels "the Meryl Streep of stunts" for her five Taurus World Stunt Awards. The prominent computer-generated imagery in that film led many viewers, including some professionals, to assume the motorcycle scene wasn't real. "Well," Conley quotes Evans telling a doubting fellow stuntman, "there were four lanes of cars making lane changes, and one of them hit me, and that was not a CGI car."

Conley introduces us to members of two distinguished stunt families, the Rondells and the Eppers, among them the pioneering stuntwoman Jeannie Epper, whose story includes tales of comic wardrobe malfunctions during her days doubling for Lynda Carter in the "Wonder Woman" TV series.

Family ties aren't unusual in the stunt business. When Conley tells Gary Hymes, second-unit director of "The Punisher," how much he'd liked a scene in another film Hymes had worked on, "The Untouchables," in which a baby in a carriage rolls down train-station steps, Hymes turns proud papa. "That's my oldest boy, Collin!" he tells Conley. "He was eighteen months old at the time, and he loved it."

A childlike love of daredevilry is one of four common characteristics of top stuntmen. The others are athleticism, an ability to ignore pain, and an intense attentiveness to timing and physics. "Stuntmen at work resemble nothing so much as a group of incredibly fit structural engineers, calculating stress and recoil and impact velocity," writes Conley. "They take risk seriously and do everything in their power to eliminate it." The best 300 or so of them, according to Conley, earn annual incomes in the mid-six figures.

If the book has a weak spot, it's the next-to-last chapter, in which Conley sheds his reportorial remove to sample firsthand the stunt that provides the book's title and author photo. The gag involves him being doused with gasoline and lamp oil and set on fire, and Conley acknowledges choosing it because "it required a high degree of professionalism but none of it on my part. For a full burn, it was okay that I had about as much talent as a candle."

Give Conley credit for having the guts to go through with it, and for having top-tier second-unit director Dan Bradley volunteer to set it up. Grant that Conley's first-person perspective on experiencing a full burn adds something to readers' understanding of what stuntmen go through. But after seven previous chapters focused on skilled stuntmen, the exercise comes off feeling self-absorbed and anticlimactic.

Conley is back on track for his final chapter, which focuses on Bradley shooting the climactic chase scene in "The Bourne Ultimatum" and on Bradley's role in developing cutting-edge equipment keeping real stunts competitive with computer-generated imagery.

The rise of CGI, Conley notes, threatens to render stuntmen obsolete. The portraits he draws so deftly throughout "The Full Burn" make clear what a loss that would be.

Bill Beuttler is an Emerson College publisher/writer in residence.