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By Paula Hendrickson
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| The Deadricks doubled Lloyd and Jeff Bridges in Blown Away. |
When Vince Deadrick Jr. was eighteen, his dad set him on fire in the backyard. When he was a father himself, he hit his twelve-year old daughter with a van. Child abuse? No. Just life in a stunt family.
Many stunt performers have at least one family member – related by birth or marriage – in the business. Is it genetics? Nepotism? Or simply learning by exposure? After all, not every kid gets set on fire by Dad.
For Vince Deadrick Sr. that backyard immolation was not so different from teaching his son to ride a bike: "I lit him on fire so I could get him used to it, and it turned out real good. His mom didn’t like it much, but it’s better to do it where it’s comfortable and there’s not the pressure of, ‘Hurry up, we’re running behind.’"
Vince Deadrick Jr., stunt coordinator for Star Trek: Enterprise, remembers it this way: "It was a great burn, completely engulfed. I was nervous – I got a little warm at the end – but I’d seen him do it with that same suit, so I felt confident he was setting it up correctly. And I really wanted to do it!"
When the elder Deadrick entered the business in 1955, he was a stand-in, but he spent weekends practicing stunts. While photo-doubling Steve McQueen on the CBS series Wanted: Dead or Alive, he got his first shot at stuntwork – by asking McQueen straight out.
As Deadrick tells it, the star replied, "Okay, fine, but if you screw up, you’re back standing in." That led to a seven-year stint as McQueen’s double, followed by a four-year job doubling Lee Majors on The Big Valley. That led in turn to a job as stunt coordinator and Majors’ double on the seventies phenomenon, ABC’s The Six Million-Dollar Man.
"My dad pretty much was the Six Million Dollar Man," Deadrick Jr. says. "Lee did all the acting, but Dad did all those jumps and the big ‘bionic’ stuff."
Even after visiting sets, watching Dad rehearse fights and mimicking him, Deadrick Jr. didn’t realize he wanted to become a stuntman. Then a stand-in job on Six Million Dollar Man offered an even closer look at the profession.
"My dad didn’t throw me in front of the camera doing stuntwork," he says. "I had to work out, watch, help set up boxes for high falls and learn. He’d tell me how things were done while he was doing them."
Sometimes the young man saw more than he bargained for, like the time he watched Dad wipe out during a dive from a thirty-two-foot-high platform into a four-foot-deep cement pond. "They took me in a Jeep to the nurses’ aid place, waiting for the ambulance," Deadrick Sr. says. "I was twitching like a chicken, throwing up. Blood was gushing out the top of my head because I’d split it wide open again."
"I was right there," says Deadrick Jr., then nineteen, "and it still hurts because that was a difficult time. We’d just lost Mom, and here he was on a gurney bleeding profusely and going into shock. I’ll never forget seeing his ankle shaking and hitting the gurney, bone against metal. That sound! I’m going, ‘Oh my God, he’s dying.’ By the time we got him to St. Joseph’s [Hospital] he’d flatlined." Doctors brought him back, and as soon as he was able, he was working again.
The younger Deadrick had a close call on the same series when doing his first backward high fall – in a rock quarry. "As young and inexperienced as I was," he says, "I pushed off too far." He landed over the edge of the airbag, but his father caught his head, cradling it in his hands." He said, ‘Look to your left,’ and there was this huge boulder. He saved my life and I’ve never forgotten it."
Father and son have worked together in such projects as 1994’s Blown Away, where they doubled Lloyd and Jeff Bridges, and the ’99 feature Arlington Road, which also starred Jeff Bridges. "But what’s really come full circle is the Star Trek thing," Deadrick Jr. says. "Dad doubled Bones [DeForest Kelley] and a few of the other actors [on the original series]. He even doubled Captain Kirk [William Shatner] once or twice."
Other family members are connected to the franchise, too. "My daughter, Holly, just got done working for Junior a couple weeks ago on Enterprise," Deadrick Sr. says.
"There was a good spot for her," Deadrick Jr. chimes in. "She had a week’s work on the show and did a great job for us."
Deadrick Jr. still draws inspiration from his father’s career. "We just completed this Western episode [on Enterprise], and I incorporated two stunts he’d done." One was a fight in which Scott Bakula as Captain Archer (doubled by Deadrick Jr. because Bakula’s regular double, Diamond Farnsworth, was unavailable) and his opponent crash through a gate and roll under a horse. In the other, a minor character is shot, falls from one roof onto another, then to the ground.
The family name might be known for another generation of stuntwork if Deadrick Jr.’s kids have their way. His sixteen-year-old daughter, Tara, was hit by a van on Amanda and doubled Britney Spears falling through a window on All That. Twelve-year old Matthew is itching to get started, too.
Does he encourage them to get into the business? "I don’t know. It’s tough. For every successful stuntman, I’ve seen five fail."
Failure is something this father-son duo is unfamiliar with. Deadrick Sr. might not get called as often as he used to, but he recently worked on USA’s Monk and the Johnny Depp feature Pirates of the Caribbean. "If anyone wants to hire a seventy-one-year-old stuntman," he says, "I’m still around."
The Scott brothers – Walter, John-Clay and Ben – are part of a stunt dynasty that includes nine family members, and they owe their success, they say, to big brother Walter.
"He’s the one who came to Hollywood and did it all," says Ben.
"Yeah, I was the first," echoes Walter, stunt coordinator for NBC’s Las Vegas and HBO’s Six Feet Under. He moved to L.A. around 1960 from the desert town of Blythe, California, to become an actor. "In those days they were making a lot of westerns, and I’m a cowboy. I was raised on a ranch. I worked extra for about three years – my size helped, I’m six-three – and met a lot of actors I could double. My career took off because of the westerns and people I knew from the rodeo."
Walter’s first TV job was doubling Clint Eastwood on CBS’ Rawhide. He went on to work many other westerns as well as action series. "Hunter, Starsky & Hutch, The Mod Squad – name it and I probably worked on it," he says.
Growing up back in Blythe, John-Clay and Ben – sixteen and eighteen years younger than Walter, respectively – idolized their brother. "I always wanted to be like him," Ben says. "He brought me rollerball helmets and gloves and pads when he came home for Christmas. I was like, ‘Whoa! I want to do this stuff!’ I was pretty enthusiastic about it."
"They wanted to come to Hollywood," Walter says. "I said it was very difficult and they shouldn’t come, but they wanted to anyway. So I let them come [in 1978], but I made them roof houses and do all kinds of horrible things before I helped them become stuntmen. I wanted them to have a little bit of a tough time like I did."
"He liked to torture us," laughs John-Clay, who like Ben, worked as an extra for five years before breaking into stunts. "But it helped me learn the basics and etiquette of the business."
Ben agrees. "We met a lot of people," he says, "made contacts, learned how to act – on-set diplomacy and all that – and worked our way into stunts."
Walter prefers western work, while Ben does a bit of everything. John-Clay declares, "I’m the car guy." Which means he can maneuver them in all kinds of ways: dumping, hitting, spinning, T-boning. In off hours, he and Ben race cars at Willow Springs racetrack north of L.A.
"We get pretty competitive," Ben says, "but work-wise, I’d give either one of my brothers any job I have. I have to support my family, of course, but trying to keep them out of a show or take one away from them – that doesn’t happen."
Walter says: "If I’m running a show, I always try to have my brothers on it."
That doesn’t mean they always get the job. "The director’s got to make the final decision," Ben says. "It comes from the top."
Not all of the Scott brothers’ challenges have been physical. In the eighties, when the younger men got a gig on Spenser for Hire, their parts turned out to be French-Canadian brother assassins. "When we showed up," John-Clay recalls, "they said, ‘You’ve got a little dialog,’ and handed us a tape of French-Canadian gutter language. We had to study the tape that night to do our dialog. Then I had to jump from roof to roof on ten-story buildings."
John-Clay’s son Curtis, now eleven, was eight when he did a stunt with Uncle Walter, who carried him out of a burning building. "Curtis wanted to do it," John-Clay says. "Afterwards he was saying, ‘Dad, I want to go on more interviews!’" His father took him on a few but didn’t feel his son was ready for more.
Despite trying to dissuade them from getting into the business, Walter helped two of his daughters, Ann and Laurie, and his son Wes get started. As a child, Wes did some doubling. "Now that he’s an adult, he wants to do more of it, so I can’t stop him," Walter says. "I tell them all, ‘Let me know who is hiring you, what you’ll be doing – and I’ll tell you if you should do it.’"
Walter reminds his children it’s a tough business. "I’ve always said, ‘Get behind the camera – become a director or an assistant director or something because there’s no longevity in this. Find another way to make a living.’"
Ben has his own strategy for dealing with his kids’ interest in the family business. "I told them that if they go to college and get another career first, then I’ll help them get into the business. Otherwise they’d jump into it in a split second."
April Weeden-Washington was a casting director when she met stunt coordinator and second unit director William Washington on the job. "The project went nowhere, but obviously we did," she says. They married in 1998.
A former professional dancer, Weeden-Washington had wanted to break into stuntwork for nearly a decade, "but nobody would help me because it’s kind of a close-knit community. When I met William, it was just an opportune time. He started training me and then took me over to a stunt service. The next thing I know, I was jumping off buildings, going through glass and working on a consistent basis."
Since becoming a stuntwoman in 1995, she’s racked up numerous film and TV credits, including Melrose Place, Beverly Hills 90210, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Strong Medicine, JAG, Nash Bridges and several TV movies, sometimes working with her husband, sometimes coordinating projects of her own.
"One of the really nice experiences we had in television was the opportunity to work together on Angel," she says. "We both got to work the same day and the same shot."
"Working on Angel with my wife was nice," Washington agrees. "The best thing about working with April is knowing that we are one. We show up for work and we have each other’s backs. It’s fun but serious at the same time."
The couple collaborated on a series of movies for BET based on the Arabesque romance novels. "After All, Incognito – quite a few," Weeden-Washington says. "I even coordinated one called Hidden Blessings, but my husband didn’t work on that."
After All included a pivotal fight scene in which they had to make it appear that a man was beating a woman. "I was doubling Holly Robinson-Peete," Weeden-Washington says. "Because we look so much alike, they were able to keep the cameras right on me."
Her husband coordinated the stunt and also doubled the bad guy. "It looked like he was stomping me really hard, but actually it was just little taps."
Washington, a former world champion martial artist, has also done calf roping; he interested his wife in rodeo skills such as barrel racing and roping and helped her study martial arts. The couple used to train together frequently, but since the birth of their daughter, Kiera, scheduling joint workouts has gotten tough.
Twenty-month-old Kiera has already entered the family business. She wasn’t even walking when she got her first job, in the upcoming Fox Searchlight feature Johnson Family Vacation. "We were in a scene where a big rig is coming through, and we had to run across the road," Weeden-Washington says. "They thought that was too dangerous, so they just had her be at the side of the road when the big rig came through."
It was Dad who got Kiera that first gig. "While April was pregnant, I joked constantly about how Kiera would do a stunt whenever I coordinated something," Washington says.
"If it were up to me," says Weeden-Washington, "I’d want for her to be maybe a doctor, a lawyer, or some type of professional. I’m going to highly encourage her to get an education, like I did, because my education has been invaluable."
But it may be too late to discourage Kiera from a career in stunts, her mom concedes. "She tries to jump off things. She already likes William’s motorcycle. And she loves horses."
"Every chance I get I’ll hire my daughter," Washington says. "She’s very strong. Guess it’s in the genes."
PAULA HENDRICKSON covers the entertainment industry from Illinois. |
