5/23/2023 0 Comments Silver screen lookIn the 1920s he was Fairbanks’ stunt double for the swashbuckler’s hardest scenes and after breaking his neck, back, ankles, arms, legs and ribs, he finally segued into stunt coordination, supervising a crew of professional daredevils on films such as How the West was Won (1962). Realism was enhanced by staged crash landings.Ī name that recurs several times in Danger is Richard Talmadge. For the first Oscar winner for Best Picture, the fighter ace adventure Wings (1927), director William Wellman (himself a World War I pilot) hired flyers to enact the choreography of aerial combat. Several stuntmen were injured during the grueling chariot race and some horses fell dead before reaching the finish line. For Ben Hur (1925), stunt riders were paid $5,000 (huge money back then). did many of his own stunts, albeit aided by such studio trickery as hidden trampolines and concealed hand grips.īefore long it became clear that bankable stars were too valuable to risk in icy waters or lions’ dens. Griffith’s Way Down East (1920) and Gloria Swanson was being pawed by a real lion in Male and Female (1919). Yes, silent movie buffs, Lillian Gish was really floating down the rapids on an ice flow in D.W. Usually-because as Scott McGee observes in Danger on the Silver Screen, in early days big stars commonly did their own stunts. Despite requests from Steven Spielberg and other prominent directors, the Academy has never seen fit to honor the men (and increasingly the women) who usually do the hard work of jumping from fast cars, falling from cliffs, toppling from horseback or crashing their motor bikes.
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