Monday, October 22, 2012

the man who fell to earth


The script called for the character to attempt suicide by jumping from the fourth story of a mental hospital.

The idea was, after crashing through the ceiling, instead of falling to his death, he would land face up on a gurney, comically, his head in an open pizza box, to the surprise of two doctors eating pizza. The director wanted a flourish of debris to accompany the crash landing, so the carpenters on the set built a false ceiling using drywall and a sheet of plywood with an oval cut out it for the stunt man to fall through. There wasn’t enough time or money to build a second false ceiling if things didn’t go as planned. The stunt would have to be perfect in one take.

No one was more confident than the stunt man. He could do the stunt with his eyes closed. In fact, he planned on keeping his eyes closed during the fall to shield them from the debris. The stunt man, a former gymnast, was known for his keen air sense. He could tumble through the air blindly and still know where he was. It would be a piece of cake, as easy as an apple dropping to the ground.

When you’re staging a high fall the rule is, the guy doing the falling sets up the crash pad, because if something goes wrong he can only blame himself, but when the director asked the rookie stunt coordinator if he could move the pad three feet over to get a better shot of the actors, he mistakenly assumed there’d be plenty of room -- the pad was ten feet long after all -- and he moved it three feet over.

The director called action, and the stunt man jumped from the ledge, crashing through the ceiling as planned, missing the crash pad completely. The cameras were rolling as first the back of his head then the rest of him struck the concrete floor, knocking him out cold. A loud crack echoed through the set. 

Bleeding from his nose and his ears, his limbs at lifeless angles around him, the stunt man was motionless, unconscious. Then chunks of false ceiling rained down on his face, and, gasping, he opened his eyes.