Hollywood stuntman and film director who scored huge successes with Smokey and the Bandit and The Cannonball Run
Upset by the critical response to his work, the stuntman turned film director Hal Needham, who has died aged 82, took out advertisements in Variety and other trade papers. They featured quotes from negative reviews for his movies including Smokey and the Bandit (1977) and The Cannonball Run (1981), alongside a wheelbarrow overflowing with dollar bills.
Needham made a point. His rumbustious 1977 directorial debut had grossed over $100m – an enormous return on its modest budget. He was still milking that particular creation some 20 years later, producing and directing a series of television movies, including Bandit Goes Country and Beauty and the Bandit.
These and other films, many of which starred Burt Reynolds, were seen by an audience of hundreds of millions worldwide, yet few reference books acknowledged his 45-year-long career — an unjustified omission, if only because of his exceptionally rare transition from stuntman to Hollywood director.
Needham's career began with aeroplane stunt work on the Charles Lindbergh biopic The Spirit of St Louis (1957) and on the small screen as stunt double for Richard Boone on the western series Have Gun, Will Travel (1957-63). The son of a sharecropper, he grew up in rural Arkansas, and had moved west in his mid-20s, having worked in various manual jobs, including logging, and serving as a paratrooper during the Korean war from 1952. His first photographic exposure was on billboards as Viceroy cigarettes' answer to Marlboro Man.
His career as stuntman and later stunt co-ordinator, then second unit director, specialising in car chases and action sequences, encompassed hundreds of television episodes, including the popular series Gunsmoke (1962-65), as Reynolds's double, The Virginian, Star Trek, Dan August and Kodiak. At the same time he frequently appeared as a bit-part actor.
Scores of feature films on which he worked ranged from The Big Country (1958) and Major Dundee (1965) to The Undefeated (1969), Blazing Saddles (1974) and Chinatown (1974). He worked most frequently with Reynolds, but also with John Wayne and James Stewart and doubled for Boone, Clint Walker and Gary Lockwood on a regular basis.
Apart from his numerous TV roles, he was an extra in features from McLintock (1974) onwards, including playing a kidnapper of Popeye Doyle (Gene Hackman) in French Connection II (1975). On television he specialised in westerns, plus series such as Ironside, Charlie's Angels and Fantasy Island.
Such massive experience and exposure over a 20-year period – as well as his close friendship with the then superstar Reynolds – led to his directorial debut, Smokey and the Bandit, based on his own story of an easy-going, womanising "good ol' boy", who transports Coors beer across state lines, causing mayhem along the way. The film's boisterous good nature relied on Reynold's charm and sterling support from Sally Field as the romantic interest and Jackie Gleason as the hard-done-by sheriff, Smokey.
Unsurprisingly, it spawned a sequel, Smokey and the Bandit Ride Again (1980), then a third disastrous cinema outing, which Needham did not work on and with Reynolds appearing only in a cameo role. In the interim they had collaborated on Needham's best movie, Hooper (1979), with Reynolds opportunistically cast as an ageing stuntman who wants to stage a death-defying feat – partly to impress a young rival and his girlfriend (Field) and partly to confound an obnoxious producer.
The stunt – a leap across a chasm in a jet-fuelled car – provides the climax to a movie sharp also on character. The stunt was in fact an echo of one devised by Needham for Smokey. For Hooper, Needham put a 25,000 horsepower rocket engine into a car and "flew" it across a 430ft chasm – without a driver.
Other movies were less successful. Kirk Douglas and Arnold Schwarzenegger co-starred in the spoof western The Villain (1979; released in the UK as Cactus Jack), which was followed by the TV movie Death Car on the Freeway (1979) and a television feature Stunts Unlimited (1980), which was also the name of a company formed by Needham and others to supply stunts to major studios.
He and Reynolds had their biggest commercial hit in 1981 with The Cannonball Run, a frantic crash-laden comedy about an illegal coast-to-coast race, with an all-star cast including Dom DeLuise, Roger Moore, Farrah Fawcett, Jackie Chan and Sammy Davis Jr. Its worldwide success led to an inferior sequel, Cannonball Run II (1984), notable only for the last screen appearances – among many celebrity cameos – of Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra.
Between those films, Needham directed the action movie Megaforce and then Stroker Ace, and subsequently made the little-seen Rad and the lively comedy Body Slam, as well as an episode of the successful television series B.L. Stryker (1989), with Reynolds well cast as a sassy private detective.
Needham did little actual stunt work after Foul Play in 1978, but continued as a second unit director on films including Take a Hard Ride (1975) and Gator (1976), and turned up frequently on television as himself in series such as Cybill (1995) and in documentaries on a variety of colleagues from Chan to Martin.
After his reprisal of the Smokey films, he directed one further TV movie, Hostage Hotel (1999), starring Reynolds. In 2011, he published an autobiography, Stuntman!: My Car-Crashing, Plane-Jumping, Bone-Breaking, Death-Defying Hollywood Life, and the following year he was awarded an honorary oscar.
Needham is survived by his third wife, Ellyn Wynne Williams.
• Hal (Harold) Needham, stuntman and film director, born 6 March 1931; died 25 October 2013.
Source: http://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/oct/27/hal-needham
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