TO LIVE AND DIE IN LA - 1985

A movie with a great pedigree. Directed by Bill Friedkin who gave us 'The French Connection' action is coordinated by one of the very best stuntmen in the business BUDDY JOE HOOKER....everyone remembers the classic freeway sequence....let's take a look...enjoy

Transcript

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Hello and welcome to this week's look at action and stunts on film and television. This past week we celebrate the birthday of one of Hollywood's greatest stunt men. Buddy Joe Hooker has thrived ever since doing a job for Hal Needham on the movie Beau Gest in 1966. Having had the great pleasure of meeting him earlier this year, everything that they say about him is true. He's a wonderful individual with a remarkable mind and an encyclopedia of amazing stories. In nineteen eighty-five, he was given a remarkable job from director William Friedkin to coordinate the vehicular action on his movie To Live and Die in LA. We start with the trailer and a brief segment from Buddy Joe Hooker himself about his experience on the movie. To live and die in LA was about uh two weeks from finishing principal photography, and there was not a chase sequence in the movie. So Billy wanted to, as an afterthought, do a chase sequence. So he said, um, look, let me tell you something. You know, I did the French Connection. If we do this Chase sequence and we spend a month, we spend uh whatever amount of money, and it doesn't turn out better, it will not be in my fucking movie. We're all over the place. He taught me so much about you know how to shoot chases because he wanted to see, you know, the actors do as much as the driving as possible because he was into this objective, subjective camera coverage where he wanted to see what the character was doing, going against traffic, and then he wanted the audience to feel what the character was doing. And he says, Look, why don't we just have these cars that are supposed to be coming head on, you know, space them apart and have them be stationary and then run our actors, they can drive themselves, and our camera car going with them, and who will ever know that those cars aren't moving? And damned if it didn't work. I mean, I've used that so many times after that. And also, I got to drive the car, chase this train, and at the last minute dive in front of his train and live through it. So I got to, you know, complete one of my dreams. Billy always insisted on everything being as real as possible. One day, Billy says, uh, hey look, he says, uh, I'd like to see a rehearsal of the uh burn. And they're putting like a gallon of rubber cement all over me because of the colors and how big the flames get when you ignite the person. The flames just blossom into these beautiful reds and oranges and yellows. So we did the exact thing that you saw on screen as a rehearsal, just so Billy could see it. But to be able to do five films with a director like that and end up being his friend is like something that you wish for your whole career. You know, after that, in the stunt world anyway, there was kind of a lull of things to do. You know, we had car chases and this and that, but as far as all of us were concerned, we were interested in something new. Buddy brought together an extraordinary team of stunt professionals to create the action on the screen. Apart from the amazing freeway sequence in the film, also has a performance by a stunt man, Dar Robinson, who not only doubles actor William Peterson but also plays a CIA gunman, trying to silence him later on. Darr, who by this time had not only become a bit of a high fall king, but also had developed in conjunction with his stunt engineer Kai Michelson the decelerator, a device that allows him to put on a harness where cables are passed through it. With the aid of pistons and compressed air, his fall is controlled, allowing him to stop feet from the ground. He'd used it previously on the Burt Reynolds movie Stick and would use it later on that year for director Richard Donner on Lethal Weapon. A movie dedicated, of course, to his memory. Here, in To Live and Die in LA, William Peterson's character needs to let off steam every once in a while. He's not like your average cop who drinks or takes on tricky women to unwind. Oh no, this guy jumps from bridges in an attempt to get perspective. Dar convinced Buddy and the director to write this invention into the script, which he did. The character jumps from the bridge, Dar doubles him, and the decelerator does the rest. The other major action sequence in the movie is the extraordinary freeway sequence. Now we've all seen car chasers before, and William Friedkins is no stranger to a car chase as we all know. His car chasing French connection is still regarded as one of the finest in cinema. But here, in order to escape his pursuers, Peterson must drive the wrong way on a freeway to try a last ditch attempt to shake off the gunman. Filmed on the Terminal Island Freeway near Wilmington, the stretch of freeway was closed for four hours at a time to allow Buddy Joe Hooker and his team to create the chaos required for the big screen. These delays, although essential for the sequence, apparently caused the production to go a million dollars over budget. A particularly crucial moment in the sequence happens at the very end, when a semi-truck must jackknife across two lanes of traffic. Now, jackknifing a truck isn't a simple thing to do. You see it happen often enough on these motorway police documentaries, but it happens so quickly that all control is often immediately lost. For those who don't know, a semi-truck will jackknife when the trailer pushes against the cab, the unit at the front, and shoves it, causing the cab to fold itself in on the cable connections directly behind the cab. Now the trailer then slides horizontally along the carriageway. Now every HGV driver wants to prevent this, but when you're asked to do it on purpose, you have to think about this in a very different way. Stunt man Tommy Huff is behind the wheel of the truck, and in order to swing the trailer around, Buddy works with the stunt riggers to add an additional set of wheels behind the trailer that can be pulled by a vehicle in front of it. Now the idea is that the truck hits its mark and the vehicle that's attached to the extra set of wheels speeds off bringing the trailer round. So it's very clever and it's a wonderful end to this sequence. The actors got to do a fair bit of driving too, although it was under controlled conditions. Nowadays we have pods on top of cars for the stunt driver to control while the actors deliver the lines below, but here the car is mounted on a trailer on a gimbal, which allows the car to respond to William Peterson steering at the driver's seat. The result is very convincing, and it's all done in camera for real. So that's it for now. Join us again on Friday when we take a deeper dive into this classic. Until then, it's bye for now.