Johnny Hangtime (2 page)

M
om is what you'd call an overprotective single parent. Well, that's not really fair. I mean, how many moms have to deal with a son who would willingly jump off the Empire State Building? But even when I was a little kid, her favorite expression was “Be careful.”

Be careful to chew your food well or you'll choke. Be careful to wash your hands or you'll get germs. Be careful stepping off that escalator. Be careful not to talk to strangers. Be careful of everything.

I get tired of hearing it after a while. Sometimes I just don't
want
to be careful. Sometimes I just want to cut loose. Maybe that's part of the reason why I got into doing stunts in the first place.

Mom begs me to stop stunting just about every day. But she has never
insisted
that I stop. So I keep doing it. Besides, I know we need the money.

Stuntmen are paid by the gag. The more dangerous the gag, the more you get paid. It can range from $25 for a simple stunt all
the way up to thousands of dollars.

For instance, once I had to do a stair fall. That's when you fall down a flight of stairs. It was simple. I wore lots of padding under my clothes, on my elbows, knees, ribs, and behind. The stairs were carpeted, and I didn't get hurt. I was paid $100. It would have been $150 if it had been metal stairs with no carpet, because that's more dangerous.

Roland messed up the first take and we had to shoot the stair fall again. So I got paid
another
$100. As it turned out, Roland kept having trouble with the scene, and he insisted on shooting it over and over again. So I fell down the stairs a dozen times that day and earned $1,200. It was a great day.

Sure beats getting a paper route, I'll say that much.

Anyway, I give all the money I earn to Mom. She's a secretary and doesn't get paid much. My dad died three years ago, and he didn't leave us anything. In fact, after he died, Mom had to pay off his debts. Dad didn't have any insurance. He said he didn't believe in it.

I wasn't going to bring up my dad, but I guess I just did. This is as good a place as any to tell you about him.

 

My dad, Joe Thyme, was crazy. Or so people say anyway. I was only ten when he died, so my memories of him are of things we did together when I was little. But people have told me stories.

Dad grew up on a ranch in Texas, and he was so sure he was going to become a famous Hollywood actor that he dropped out of high school and moved to California. As it turned out, he was a terrible actor. He took a job as a grip, which is a guy who carries stuff around on a movie set.

One day, he was working on a western and the director needed a guy to get shot and fall off a horse. They didn't have enough stuntmen.
Dad had grown up with horses his whole life and loved horses, so he volunteered.

“I been fallin' off horses since before I could walk,” he claimed.

He did the stunt, and everybody saw that while Dad couldn't act, he was great at falling off a horse. He told me, in fact, that throwing his body around was the only thing he was
ever
good at. The next thing you know, Dad was a professional stuntman.

He met my mom around the same time. Mom says she has a thing for unusual men. The two of them fell in love, got married, and had me.

Soon Dad was getting punched, kicked, set on fire, thrown through windows—all the usual gags. I remember he would come home at night and soak in a hot bath for an hour to ease his aches and pains before dinner.

I've been told my dad would do
anything
. If they needed a guy to get run over by a truck, he would volunteer. If they needed somebody to get shot, he would be the first in line. If one of the other stuntmen said a gag was too dangerous and refused to do it, Dad would take it on. He had a reputation in the industry for being fearless and a little crazy. People used to say my dad was indestructable.

So I guess doing stunts is in my genes. I remember when I was a very little boy I used to look out the second-floor window of our house and think about jumping out. There was a concrete sidewalk below the window, so it was too dangerous.

But then, one day, some workmen were fixing the streets. They parked a dump truck with a big pile of sand in it right outside my house. When I looked out the window and saw it, I couldn't resist. I climbed up on my windowsill and jumped out.

Mom and Dad were downstairs. Mom caught a glimpse of my body dropping into the truck and totally freaked out. She came rushing
outside, where she found me dusting the sand off my pants. Mom was furious and warned me never to do anything like that again. But Dad had one of those secret “That's my boy!” looks on his face.

When Mom wasn't around, Dad and I used to have these crazy contests. Dad would jump off a ladder, and I would jump off a moving bicycle. Then I would jump off the roof of the car, and Dad would jump off the garage. I would climb a tree and jump off a branch, and Dad would top it in some way.

“Be a man!” Dad would taunt me. “If you were a
real
man you could do it.”

Dad was bigger and stronger than me, naturally. I never beat him, though I kept trying.

Mom used to come home from work and ask me what I did after school.

“I jumped off the fence,” I'd say.

“Why did you jump off the fence?”

“Because Dad did.”

“If Dad jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge, would you do that too?”

Mom and I stopped, looked at each other, and laughed. One time, for a movie, Dad
did
jump off the Brooklyn Bridge.

Every so often, Dad would take me with him on a movie set so I could see what he did for a living. People always gathered around and asked, “Are you going to be a stuntman like your daddy when you grow up?”

 

I didn't get into stunting until after Dad died. That happened when I was ten. Dad was shooting an adventure movie at Niagara Falls, and he took me along. They needed a stuntman to drive a motorboat over the falls.

It wasn't any ordinary boat. At the push of a button, wings
popped out of the boat and it was converted into a plane. Instead of plummeting over the edge of the falls, the script called for the boat to sprout wings and fly away. It was pretty cool.

All the other stuntmen on the set turned down the gag. Dad had a pilot's license and he, of course, accepted the job.

Everything went smoothly except for one thing—the wings never popped out of the boat.

I never had the chance to say good-bye to him. I watched as Dad plummeted over Niagara Falls. It was horrifying.

Ever since the accident, Mom hasn't mentioned Dad in front of me. If I bring him up, she changes the subject. There are no pictures of him around the house, none of his awards or trophies to remind us of him. I guess the memory would be too painful for Mom.

Pieces of the boat were found all over the Niagara River after the accident. A week later, the clothes Dad had been wearing were found stuck on a rock outcropping several miles downstream. His body was never recovered.

Every so often a rumor pops up that Joe Thyme is still alive, but I try to ignore it. It's like sightings of Elvis Presley. People just don't want their heroes to die.

O
kay, Johnny, we're ready for you,” Roland bellowed through his bullhorn. “This is the Big Girl scene, everybody. Take one. Roll camera!”

Picture this: I'm standing on the Statue of Liberty's head. You read that right. Lady Liberty. One of the largest statues in the world, the grand old symbol that welcomed to America millions of tired, poor, huddled masses yearning to breathe free. I doubt that any of them were yearning to climb inside the statue's head to defuse a bomb planted in there, but that's what I have to do for this scene.

You see, in
New York Nightmare
, these terrorists find out that the copper skin of Liberty appears to be strong but is actually quite thin and light. It
had
to be. The statue was designed and built in France. It needed to be taken apart, shipped to America by boat, and reassembled like a gigantic jigsaw puzzle.

The leader of the terrorists tells his comrades that the Statue of Liberty is just an iron skeleton covered by 350 copper plates, each
the thickness of a silver dollar. The whole thing is held together by rivets. The head was constructed separately from the rest of her body, so the neck is a weak point. One good blast would blow Liberty's head right off.

These terrorists (I had gotten to know the actors playing them and they were actually very nice guys) plant a powerful explosive inside Liberty's head so they can blow the symbol of America to smithereens. And here's the kicker: They decide to blow up Liberty on the Fourth of July, right in the middle of the fireworks!

“If
that
doesn't get us on the news, what will?” the leader of the terrorists asks his buddies.

It's a stupid plot, I know. I don't write these scripts, I just do as I'm told.

 

The wind was whipping up off New York Harbor, and I waited for it to settle down before doing the gag. The hardest part about being a stuntkid is the waiting. Once I'm ready to begin, I'm able to wipe everything else out of my mind and focus on what I have to do. But as I stand there waiting I start thinking, “Am I crazy? Have I totally lost it? What am I doing up here?”

Roland was starting to lose his patience, but he knew that in a situation this dangerous you don't want to take any chances.

“Johnny!” Roland finally hollered. “As you Americans say, ‘Give me liberty or give me death!' But give it to me before tomorrow!”

Roland and I had gone over the script line by line. We had already shot the scene where I climbed down a rope ladder from a helicopter onto Liberty's head. My job now was to climb inside a window on her crown, grab the bomb, climb back out on the crown, and fling the bomb as far as I could into New York Harbor.

The fireworks would be edited in later, but a half a second after
I let the bomb go, the pyrotechnic crew would set off a bright orange explosion. Then Roland will cut to some ordinary kids watching the Fourth of July fireworks. They think the explosion is part of the show, and they
ooh
and
ahh
over it. They never realize that a national catastrophe has been narrowly averted.

Naturally, the statue will be unharmed, but the force of the explosion is supposed to knock me off the crown and onto Liberty Island.

 

The wind was beginning to die down. I paused to take a deep breath before the gag. What a view you get from up there! It was dark outside, but I could see, in the distance, the Brooklyn and Verrazano bridges, and the lights of lower Manhattan. I wasn't nearly as high as I had been for the Empire State Building gag, but being surrounded on all sides by water made it feel more treacherous.

Liberty was flooded with lights, and as I looked down, I got a view of her that very few people have ever seen. Her head was about ten feet across, but I had to be careful not to wander too close to the edge or I'd fall off—right into those massive hands. Each one must have been sixteen feet long. Her fingers alone looked to be twice as tall as I am.

Roland signaled me again, so I figured I'd better stop sightseeing and do the gag.

“Meet you at Pizza Hut!” I shouted to Roland.

That's a little superstition Roland and I have. Before one of the first stunts I ever did, I was nervous and Roland tried to relax me by saying he'd take me out for pizza as soon as we were finished. Ever since then, one of us usually says, “Meet you at Pizza Hut!”—or some other fast food joint—before each gag.

I got down on my hands and knees and eased myself backward
into the window of the crown. I grabbed the fake bomb and climbed back out the window.

There are seven spikes sticking out of Liberty's crown. Roland, who knows just about
everything
about
everything
, told me they represent the seven continents and seven seas. The script called for me to climb out on the spike directly above Liberty's right eye and heave the bomb off. That's what I did.

The blast set off by the pyrotechnic guys was bigger than I thought it would be. I could feel the heat from the explosion. It made me stagger back a bit, which was fine because it would make the scene look more realistic. Next, I had to fall.

The Statue of Liberty is 151 feet high from toe to torch. Her head is lower than the torch, so it's about a 100-foot drop from the crown. Then there's the base of the statue, which is 65 feet high itself. So I was looking at a 165-foot free fall. No helmet. No parachute. No bungee cord. No hidden wires. No nothing.

Falling 165 feet isn't such a difficult fall, really. I've done it plenty of times. It's over before you know it. Falling 300 feet is far. When you're about to make a 300-foot fall, that's when you wonder if you've seen your last sunset, eaten your last meal, hugged your mom for the last time.

 

In the stunt world, we call a fall a
bump
or a
brodie
. Apparently, there was this nut named Steve Brodie who jumped off a bridge back in the 1880s. I don't know if he survived or not. After that, jumping from a high place came to be called “pulling a Brodie.”

Anybody can pull a Brodie. It's doing it without getting killed that's the hard part. And as we stunt guys say, the difference between
killed
and
skilled
is just one letter.

Just like with the Empire State Building gag, we used an air bag to cushion my landing. The type of bag we used on Liberty Island is made of nylon and about the size of a large swimming pool. There are vents called
breathers
on the sides. When you hit the bag, air is forced out the breathers so the stuntman doesn't get hurt.

That is, if you
hit
the air bag. If you miss it by a foot, you could break every bone in your body. Naturally, you've got to aim for the center of the bag. You do that the instant you jump. Human beings aren't like cats. We're not very good at mid-course corrections.

It's important to learn how to land correctly. You can't land feet first, because the impact will snap the large bones in your legs like twigs, or drive them into your pelvis. Also, if you land on your feet and bend your knees, there's a good chance your knees are going to come up and smash you in the face, which is no fun at all.

For a front fall, the trick is to keep your head down and eyes on the landing spot. At the last instant, you pull your head up and spread your body out.

You never want to fall with a forward somersault, because you might break your neck. Rolling on one shoulder is okay. This is called a stunt roll. It spreads the impact across your whole body instead of putting it all on one part.

But the script called for me to do a back fall. This is harder than a front fall because you can't see the air bag. You have to trust your instincts.

 

I staggered back off Liberty's spiked crown and gave a little push with my toe to clear the statue. All was silent, but within a second the rush of air roared in my ears. I felt myself tilting a little too far backward, which is dangerous. I didn't want to land on my head. By
bringing my hands down closer to my legs, I shifted my center of gravity and kept my body nearly horizontal. That's how I landed, spread-eagled in the middle of the bag with a
whoosh
.

“Cut!” Roland yelled. “Beautiful! Don't move a muscle, Johnny! Not one muscle!”