Hal Needham may have penned the colorfully titled memoir "Stuntman! My Car-Crashing, Plane-Jumping, Bone-Breaking, Death-Defying Hollywood Life," but he has no Ernest Hemingway delusions.
"I don't claim to be an author," said the tree trimmer-turned-stuntman-turned-actor-turned-director, who will nonetheless make one of the more anticipated Decatur Book Festival appearances Saturday. "What I did was just write down the stories that I remembered."
At 80, the Tennessee-born, raised-all-over-the-South Needham would seem to have a million of them. He formed a sort of good ol' boy Rat Pack in the 1970s with Burt Reynolds, actor-country singer Jerry Reed and a changing posse of fellow jokers, and he later directed members of the original Rat Pack in two "Cannonball Run" films. He worked with an astounding array of Hollywood talent, including Jimmy Stewart, Kirk Douglas and Raquel Welch, and he pulls out yarns about them like sliding cigs out of a pack.
In conversation from his home in Southern California, the daredevil, devil-may-care spirit that he brought to his career breakthrough, "Smokey and the Bandit" (1977), which he wrote for Reynolds and directed, amply came across.
On how he feels when he wakes up in the morning after a stunt career in which he broke 56 bones and his back twice: "You know what, I have no ill effects. I've also had a punctured lung and knocked-out teeth. Good health kind of ran in my family. That's the only thing I can credit it to."
On his first stunt, in the mid-1950s for the TV show "You Asked for It," in which he jumped off the wheel of a low-flying Cessna and knocked a friend and fellow former paratrooper off a horse: "My buddy said, 'Here's what we're going to do. ... And I went 'WHAT?' But I was also thinking about all the people back in Arkansas when they saw me on television: 'I know him!' We got paid a little money, too, but I saw a new future for Hal, you know what I mean?: 'Hell, I believe I can do this stuff.' And I became the highest-paid stuntman in Hollywood from about '65 to '75."
On how Reynolds helped him move up from second-unit director to lead director: "Universal, the only reason they let me do 'Smokey' was because Bert put his stamp on me. ... They cut a lot out of my budget, but I went ahead and did it anyway. I'm so damn glad I did because it cost $4.3 [million] to make, and so far it's made $350 million and still counting. Universal says it's the most requested film they have in their vault."
On what made Reynolds a superstar back in the day: "If you look at 'Smokey,' you see a very charismatic person, [and he's] got that lady-killing smile. He has a way of portraying humor on the screen like nobody else.
"Let me just tell you one thing. In ‘Smokey,' I had him [race] down the street with the police chasing him. There was a toilet in this park, and I had him come in over the curb, slide up and stop, and then you see the cop go by. I had him pull right up even with the camera, look directly in the lens, which you never, never do, and smile that ‘Look at what I just did!' smile. It worked like a charm. Only he could get away with it."
On how movies like "Smokey" and "Cannonball Run" tapped a vein of Southern humor and spoke especially well to moviegoers down South: "Oh, are you kidding me! When they tried to release 'Smokey,' they started in New York at Radio City Music Hall, and it didn't make enough money to pay the Rockettes, for Christ's sakes. Then they took it down South and it went right through the roof. With that word of how good it did in the South, it went back up to New York and broke box-office records."
On another favorite co-star, John Wayne: "Duke is my favorite actor. He wrote something on a picture to me, and my wife said it doesn't make any sense to her. He wrote, 'You can count 'em [friends] on one hand. Count me in.' You understand that? Whooo!"
On what he's up to these days other than promoting his book: "I had a guy call me the other day about directing a film. I don't think I want to do that anymore. I think I'm through. I think I just want to lay back on my laurels."
Author appearance
Hal Needham
4:15 p.m. Saturday, First Baptist Decatur Sanctuary Stage, 308 Clairemont Ave., Decatur. Free. www.ajcdecaturbookfestival.com.
About the Author
