Welcome to the 7 Levels of Tubi - I am your host Jordan Smith…your poet Virgil on this journey into the underworld of publicly available streaming movies. Joining us this week are Tim, Erica, Kyle, and Bekah.
Last show we were left, desperate and bereft, in the caverns of Conspiracy. This week we’re looking for redemption and a little “what does it all mean” alongside the gum-snapping, pill-popping, big living Sonny Hooper. Join us, won’t you?
Darby Allin is a professional wrestler with All-Elite Wrestling and has a penchant for the truly awe-inspiring - in many cases terrifying. He’s a true risk-taker in and out of the ring and very comfortable with extreme and what are *perceived* to be extreme chances. A few weeks ago at AEW Revolution he performed a dive off a ladder in the ring from about 18 to 20 feet in the air and went through a pane of sugar glass suspended across six chairs, striking the ringside mat pads at whatever death-defying speed.
And while it looked like a crisis and while it looked like a horror show Darby was palling around in the post show presser, not minding at all the 12(!?) stitches and rapid deceleration costs that came as price tag for putting his name alongside one of the most historic moments in recent (say 50 years?) wrestling history.
Allin was not just throwing himself off something that tall for the hell of it - though he has really made it into something to see one of his more aggressive matches - there was a massive moment to live up to, this was Sting’s last match.
The performer Steve Borden gave decades of life to this character and all involved in his final match had decided - months before - to make it a spectacular end.
There is not much that these small, insular performance communities deny each other. The family of professional wrestling is definitely one of those “warts and all” worlds and more than a little Black Swan by its nature. I imagine movie making and stunt work are very much the same.
An entertainment spectacle like wrestling (or movies) can only flourish when your audience suspend disbelief, the action looks spectacular, and the roles are performed well. You need a blend of all this and more to get the viewers to squint at the screen and say, “Yes, I can see it - I can get into this.”
That means sometimes - a lot of times - alright most of the time and within a certain tolerance for risk you get to claim that…you have got to do what you have got to do.
Hal Brett Needham was an American stuntman, film director, actor, writer, and NASCAR team owner. He is best known for his frequent collaborations with actor Burt Reynolds, usually in films involving fast cars, such as Smokey and the Bandit, Hooper, The Cannonball Run and Stroker Ace.
Needham’s job - and the job of his entire stunt legion during this era - was to bring that series of pro-wrestling tricks and alchemy to the movies. By the time Needham was directing big movies like Smokey and Hooper he’d already made major contributions to the arms race nature of stunts on film. In one of his first major gags Needham dropped 15-20 feet from the undercarriage of a flying plane doing about sixty miles an hour to knock a rider from a moving horse all because a TV viewer “wanted to see it.”
Hal Needham's Six Greatest Stunts
Needham and Hooper Stunt Coordinator Bobby Bass on behind the scenes production and set safety.
Hooper and its immediate predecessor Smokey and the Bandit (the referenced “100 million dollar” hit of pompous director character Roger Deal) were the apogee of late 70’s new stunt Hollywood. Needham’s formula was innovative, daring, and entertaining at a time when Hollywood was increasingly turning to epics and just getting a taste for the blockbuster on blockbuster on blockbuster formula of the future.
At some level, the world around these performers (and the America Hooper was made in) created these performances.
The “Faustian Bargain” at the heart of all this stunt miraculousness was that Hal Needham grew up a poor Arkansas sharecropper’s son and that flat-out sucked. Driving fast and taking chances in Hollywood paid pretty damn well and that was alright - keep the good times rolling. What do you expect?
Never turn down a gag.
“Behind the Stunts” dissects the work in Hooper and Needham’s larger place in Hollywood
Just a couple years later, on another Reynolds car picture, Needham and Bass would push the now familiar accelerator to the floor with life-altering consequences.
Cannonball Run Lawsuit - Heidi Von Beltz Paralyzed
A secondary stunt person - riding along as passenger and smoke machine operator in a barely held together Aston Martin with no seatbelts - was crippled for life when the second, more aggressive, take of a stunt went wrong. Heidi Von Beltz was an aspiring young performer - new to the business and dating Bobby Bass himself when she was enlisted in the stunt and therefore, in the eyes of the court assumed the risks associated with the work she was being paid to do.
The court would go on to award Von Beltz somewhere in the neighborhood of four million dollars in a subsequent settlement - reflecting a percentage breakdown of the burden of negligence shared between the parties. Regulations surrounding the stunt industry would be changed for the better as a result and Heidi was proud of that for the rest of her life but the moment itself remained unalterable.
Everyone had made their choices.
Likely, wherever you personally wind up thin slicing the burden of responsibility for life and limb - the actual line will go on being a very malleable border for the performers.
People and performers in all these pursuits will go on making choices - placing their lives in the hands of people they trust the most (often themselves) in pursuit of the most memorable performance, the next paycheck, or even just the next gag.
You can get in touch with 7 Levels of Tubi to share your own journeys down the rabbit hole, suggest a starting point for a one-off episode, or just to tell us what you’ve been checking out on the platform.
We’ve all become fascinated with the highs and lows of Tubi - join us, won’t you?
“I'll tell you EXACTLY what your life is worth. Your life is worth fifty thousand dollars, that's the price you put on it when you got behind this wheel!” - Sonny Hooper (Burt Reynolds)
7 Levels of Tubi is a production of Franklin Street Creative. You can contact the show at 7LVLOT@gmail.com
7 Levels of Tubi: Hooper