Fresh Air - Film Icons: Clint Eastwood / Eli Wallach & More

Episode Date: August 30, 2024

The 1964 spaghetti Western A Fistful of Dollars turned Clint Eastwood into a star. He had a famous squint in his closeups, but he told Terry Gross in 1997, it wasn't necessarily character driven. "They bombed me with a bunch a lights, and you're outside and it's 90 degrees, and it's hard not to squint." We'll also hear from Eastwood's co-star in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, Eli Wallach, who went on to play a bandit in several Westerns. Cultural historian Christopher Frayling tells us how the Italian director Sergio Leone broke the conventions of the Hollywood Western, and stuntman Hal Needham describes his most daring feats.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Support for this podcast and the following message come from the NPR Wine Club, which has generated over $1.75 million to support NPR programming. Whether buying a few bottles or joining the club, you can learn more at nprwineclub.org slash podcast. Must be 21 or older to purchase. This is Fresh Air. I'm David Bianculli. This week, we're featuring our classic films and movie icons series of interviews from our archives. Today, westerns. First up, Clint Eastwood. He became a TV star as Rowdy Yates on Rawhide, but left that series in midstream to go overseas and make movies with Italian film director Sergio Leone. Eastwood's stoic and vengeful character, who appeared in several films, was dubbed the man with no name.

But those Italian films made Eastwood not just a star, but an icon. Terry Gross spoke with Clint Eastwood in 1997. At the time, he was the subject of a biography by film critic Richard Schickel. Well, in some of your action roles, in some of your westerns and like Dirty Harry films, you not only don't say a lot, but what you do say, you're saying often through clenched teeth, you know, in that really guttural voice. How did you develop that style of speaking? I don't know what you're talking about.

Well, I think that the character just drives you in that. It's a character who is maybe frustrated with the things that the common person on the street is frustrated with, the bureaucracy that we live in, the nightmare that we as a civilization have placed on ourselves. And I think this is a person who is frustrated with that, especially if you're trying to solve a case in a limited amount of time. So make my day line are the do-you-feel-lucky-punk kind of lines, but were lines that people gravitated towards.

Did you have a sense of that reading the script that, you know, presidents would be, you know, making, you know, improvising on those lines and that they'd be people just, they would just enter the general vocabulary? Could you read a script and say, these lines are going to last beyond the film? Nobody can say that for sure. I think the appeal of some of those early characters was the fact that the man would have the right answer, and it was always usually very terse, kind of right to the point,

but with a little bit of humor involved. So everybody said, God, I would love to be able to do that. Have you ever been able to do that, have just the right comeback at just the right moment? Very rarely. Right. When you're doing a line like, make my day, and you know, okay, this is a really good line, do you go home and do line readings and go, make my day, make my day, make my day,

and just do it over and over until you figure out exactly how you want to do it? Looking into the bathroom and doing some of your best acting. Are you talking to me? No, I don't go over the lines. I don't play them out loud. I'd rather play them for the first time when I do them. No, really? And I usually do them by the motivation of what the feelings are at the time.

So I start them from what the intent is and then let it kind of go out. It's sort of like blowing through a trumpet or something. You start and the sound magnifies as it comes out. If you sit there and practice line readings to yourself, you'll just get confused. I want to get to your Spaghetti Westerns, the films you made with Sergio Leone. You started the Sergio Leone films when you were still making Rawhide, the TV Western.

How did Sergio Leone get to see Rawhide and decide you were the one to star in his Western? He had seen an episode that an agency had in Rome, and he had seen an episode, and they thought, well, here's a chance to hire an American actor who has been doing Westerns

but is not very expensive. They didn't have any money to spend, so they didn't have a lot of choices as far as names of the moment. There's a lot of really interesting facial close-ups in your movies with Sergio Leone, and he had a very iconographic way of shooting faces, particularly your face. And your face in those close-ups is often, well, mysterious, unknowable. Instead of the facial close-ups like revealing this essence of who you are, they reveal the unknowability of who you are. And I've always wondered, what were you thinking during those close-ups to get the right expression on your face?

The first response would be to say absolutely nothing to get the... George Cukor used to say he'd tell Greta Garbo sometimes to look into the camera and stare and don't think about a thing. But that's maybe a little oversimplification or a way that got a certain effect out of her at that time. But you think about what the demands are of the plot, usually because this character, though he wasn't saying a lot, he was plotting a lot. And so you just thought about what your next moves were. It's just a question of thinking like you would in real life. You have an inner monologue. Every actor plays an inner monologue as you're playing your outer character. And sometimes your outer character is saying, good evening, it's wonderful to see you. But underneath, you might be saying, yeah, dirty, rotten. So you really don't care. And so that's your inner monologue. And so I might have been saying something like that to myself at the time. I don't like these guys.

I'd like to blow them all away, but I'd be very unpleasant at the moment. You developed a squint also in some of those closets. Well, that was just the sunlight. Was it? Yeah. They bomb me with a bunch of lights, and you're outside, and it's 90 degrees. It's hard not to squint.

Now, in Richard Schickel's book about you, he says that, you know, Rawhide followed the strict production code of the time. You couldn't show a fired gun and the victim of the bullet in the same shot. There had to be an edit in between. What was your reaction to Sergio Leone's really vivid approach to violence? Well, that was true. The Hays office at that time had a rule for Westerns only, ironically, and you couldn't show the shooty and the shooter in the same shot. It couldn't be a tie-up shot, in other words. So you'd have to do it as an individual cut.

And if you look at even later American Westerns of High Noon, you won't see the tie-up. But Sergio didn't know about all that. And I wasn't about to tell him because I was really enjoying this. We were trying to break all the moles. And in breaking all the moles, it made those pictures a hit or somewhat of a revisionist idea or certainly an outsider's point of view, they became popular, but they also brought with it some resentment. There were a lot of people felt, who is this upstart? We didn't come in and bless this guy to come along, and we didn't bless

these movies to come along, an Italian interpretation of the great American genre. So there was a certain resentment that hung around with those pictures for some time. Now, as people look back on them, they enjoy the fact that there was a different period, and then it went on to somebody else. And Sam Peckinpah came along later later and he did another look at the Western. And someone else comes along and does another one. And I come back to him and take another shot. And somebody else down the line, that way it keeps the great American art form alive. Clint Eastwood, I thought that your choice of directing and starring in The Unforgiven was

such an interesting choice. Because it's a movie about a man who goes from bad man to good man to myth. And it's also interesting because it's about the difficulty of killing someone and what it takes out of you when you do kill someone. And you'd been in so many mythic movies and been in so many movies where the character that you played killed a lot of people.

So I'm interested in how you related to the story in The Unforgiven and how it dealt with myth-making and with violence. Well, those exact things that you mentioned are what attracted me to the project. The fact that even though I had done pictures where I've been a police officer and had Western films where I had a lot of gunplay and stuff, it's not that I approve of that sort of thing. And I don't necessarily approve of the romanticizing of gunplay. And I don't think it's...

And I thought here was a chance, here was a story that had sort of shot holes in that, if you'll pardon the pun. And it brought out the truth about gunplay and the fact that there is some loss to your soul when you commit an act of violence. And to play a person who was deeply affected in his life because of some of the mayhem that he'd been responsible for was, to me, made the character more interesting. It was more interesting for me to play. And that particular... In fact, I never thought the film would be really commercial when I was making it,

because it had all these statements about mayhem and violence, and I thought maybe this might not be a straight-ahead action movie that people wanted, but I liked the story, and I felt it was worth telling. Well, Clint Eastwood, I feel like I must talk with you a little bit about music. Let's listen to this. Oh, give me land, lots of land under starry skies above. Don't fence me in. Let me ride through the wide open country that I love. Don't fence me in.

Let me be by myself in the evening breeze. Listen to the murmur of the cottonwood trees. Send me off forever, but I ask you please, don't fence me in. Just turn me loose, let me saddle my old saddle Underneath the west... Terry, you should have seen the pain in this room. That's from the album Clint Eastwood Sings Cowboy Favorites. And there's a picture of Clint Eastwood as Rowdy Yates on the cover.

That was... Roarhide's Clint Eastwood Sings Cowboy Favorites. Actually, I was the Milly Vanelli of the moment there. That wasn't me. Oh, yes, it was. I actually like your singing voice. I really do. I mean, this is a strange album with strange arrangements

and not always good songs, but I really like your singing. I imagine you're also influenced by Chet Baker in your singing. Well, that wasn't, in the first place, that wasn't the kind of songs that I would normally like to sing. The songs on here, I'd imagine not. You got to sing Cole Porter, don't fence me in. There's nothing wrong with that. Cole Porter is certainly wonderful, but what happened is that somebody had the brilliant idea that I should do some cowboy songs, not country western songs, Nashville type,

but real straight cowboy songs. And I wasn't sure whether I liked the idea, but they said, well, you'll do it. And we have a session tomorrow. And I said, well, tomorrow I'm leaving. Well, well, you do it. You just stop by the studio on the way to the airport. So I did a whole album. You think about people who take six months to make an album, but this one, we did the whole album in one session, and I didn't know the songs. I had to come in and learn them real quick. Some of them I knew. Some songs like that you've heard as a child, but you don't really know them. So it was a little frustrating. It wasn't my favorite musical experience in life, but it was, you know, there again, you learn something every day.

Would you like to sing more or play more? No, I don't have any. One of my key sayings, a man must know his limitations. Clint Eastwood speaking with Terry Gross in 1997. Coming up, we hear from actor Eli Wallach, who co-starred with Eastwood in the classic Sergio Leone western, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. This is Fresh Air.

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Listen to 1A, where we celebrate your freedom to listen by getting to the heart of the story together. Only from NPR. Eli Wallach already had played villains in westerns before he appeared opposite Clint Eastwood as Tuco in The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. Tuco was the ugly one, and also was one of the toughest of the tough guys in the 1960 movie, The Magnificent Seven. Terry Gross spoke with Eli Wallach in 1990 and asked him how he got that part. When I first read the script, I said, well, I want to play the crazy, it was based on the Seven Samurai. I want to play the crazy samurai. Oh no, they said, that's the love interest. Horse Bukos is going to play it. What do you want me to play? They said,

the head bandit. I said, well, in the Japanese movie, you just see his horse's hooves, and he's a man with an eye patch. I don't want to play that. Then I read the script carefully, and I come right into town in the first minute of that movie, shoot somebody and ride out. The next 50 minutes of that movie are devoted to me saying, is he coming back? When is he coming? I said, I'll do it. I'll do it. And I loved, I used to arrive on the set early in the morning, put on my outfit, get on my horse with my 35 bandits and we'd go for an hour ride through the brush in Tepoztlan in Mexico. And I loved it. I loved it. Did you have to learn gunplay and horse riding for the role? No. If it says I shoot somebody, I shoot them. I'll never forget what my son said.

Yul Brynner shot and killed me in this movie. And my son was about seven, and he said to me, gee, Dad, couldn't you outdraw Yul Brynner? I said, Peter, when you read the script, you read whether you're shot or not shot. So I love those kind of films. They're fun. Now, another famous Western that you did is The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. Right. Now, this is the most celebrated of the spaghetti Westerns. Correct. And the director, Sergio Leone, is now considered one of the great directors of our time. He was not known, though, when you worked with him on The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.

Did you think of him as a great or potentially great director then? No. When I was making a film in California, when the agent out there said, there's an Italian here who wants you to be in a movie. I said, what kind of movie? He said, a Western. I said, he said, a spaghetti Western.

I said, that's an anomaly. That's like Hawaiian pizza. I don't know. He said, he wants you to look at a few minutes of one of his other movies. And I looked at a few minutes and I said, I'll do it. Where do you want me to go? He said, he wants you to look at a few minutes of one of his other movies. And I looked at a few minutes and I said, I'll do it. Where do you want me to go?

He said, I want you in Rome on such and such a date. And I arrived. And I spent the next four and a half months working every day on that movie. And it was an exhilarating experience. What had he seen of yours? Evidently, The Magnificent Seven. So then, I don't know how, you never know how things happen in the movies. Did it seem ironic to you that you and Clint Eastwood, who had played in American Westerns, were now making a Western for an Italian director? Originally, all those

Italians changed their names. Two of the biggest stars in Italy are Terence Hill and Bud Spencer. Their real names are Mario Girotti and Carlo Pedersoli. And they changed their names because no one wanted to go and see Italians playing Westerns. But I, after the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, I spent about six years off and on in Italy doing Westerns. You played a Mexican in the Good,, Bad, and the Ugly. Yep. So once again, you had to do a Mexican accent,

but it was a light one. It was kind of a light Mexican accent. I want to play a short clip from the movie. Oh. Okay? And this is a scene, if anyone remembers the story, I'm sure a lot of our listeners do, you and Clint Eastwood have this scam going. There's a big price on your head. Right. So Clint Eastwood brings you into the story, I'm sure a lot of our listeners do, you and Clint Eastwood have this scam going. There's a big price

on your head. So Clint Eastwood brings you into the law and just as they're about to hang you, he cuts you loose and you both ride away and you split the bounty. Exactly. So you split the price that was on your head. So this is after the first time when

you're about to be hung, Clint Eastwood frees you and you're splitting up the bounty. There are two kinds of people in the world, my friend. Those with a rope around their neck and the people who have the job of doing the cutting. Listen, the neck at the end of the rope is mine. I run the risks. So the next time I want more than half.

You may run the risks, my friend, but I do the cutting We cut down my percentage Cigar My blend of fear with my aim Hmm, but if you miss you had better miss very well Whoever double crosses me and leaves me alive, he understands nothing about Tuco. Nothing.

I love that little sadistic laugh at the end. But I don't think it's a very good Mexican accent. You know, it's standardized. I didn't do the cliche of, I think maybe I do that. I didn't do that. I wanted specifically to be clear in what I was saying. The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly is really one of the most kind of brutal, sadistic Westerns. No, it's done with tongue in cheek.

I know. I know. I know there's a lot of humor in it. But what kind of mood did Leone, or Leone, I'm never sure tongue in cheek. I know. I know. I know there's a lot of humor in it. But what kind of mood did Leone, or Leone, I'm never sure which it is, tell you that he wanted? One of the things he said to me, he said, I want every shot to be done like Vermeer. I want the light to come in from the side windows. And he said to me, I don't want you to have your gun in a holster. I said, where will I put it?

He said, with a lanyard around your neck. I said, oh, and then it dangles between my knees, right? He said, yeah. He said, when you want it, you twist your shoulders and I cut and the gun is in your hand. I said, show me. He put it around his neck, he twisted his shoulder, he missed the gun

it hit him in the groin he said keep it in your pocket so that's it's interesting that you became a kind of action hero when you were

probably in your 50s already when the good the bad the ugly and the magnificent seven yeah no you must have been in your 40s

in the magnificent seven but you know like today most action heroes are a lot The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. And The Magnificent Seven. Yeah. No, you must have been in your 40s in The Magnificent Seven. But, you know, like today, most action heroes are a lot younger. It's like they start off in their 20s and 30s playing that kind of role. Did you feel like it was an odd match? Well, you wear very tight pants in these movies, and they get up on a horse. They'd always have to cut. I'd put my foot in the stirrup, but then they'd cut away to somebody looking at me, and the next thing,

I was on the horse. So, no, I tell you, in the good, the bad, and the ugly, I did most of the stunts, and they were very dangerous. I was sitting on a horse with a noose around my neck, and Clint's supposed to shoot the rope. Then they put a little charge of dynamite in the rope, and it would explode. And then I would ride off on this horse. I said, did you put any cotton in the horse's ears? They said, what do you mean cotton in the horse's ears? I said, he can hear the explosion. He's going to be terrified. My hands are tied behind me. Well, they didn't do it. They shot the rope, and that horse took off. Now I'm riding, not using reins, just using my knees, and praying that that horse would eventually stop,

and eventually he did, but it was frightening. Actor Eli Wallach speaking with Terry Gross in 1990. He died in 2014. Coming up, we talk about the films of Italian director Sergio Leone, who bucked the traditional Hollywood western for his own version. Also, what it's like to jump on the back of a galloping horse while it's pulling a stagecoach. We hear from stuntman Hal Needham. I'm David Bean Cooley, and this is Fresh Air. The Neubauer Family Foundation supports WHYY's fresh air and its commitment to sharing ideas and encouraging meaningful conversation. Support for NPR comes from the station.

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Find out how the NYPD transformed into one of the world's most powerful police forces. From Wondery and Crooked Media with Push Black, this is Empire City. Follow Empire City on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. Let's continue with our series about classic films and movie icons featuring interviews from our archives. Today, we're looking at westerns. And though it's common to think of the genre as classically American, thanks to the films of John Ford and others, in the 1960s, some of the best Westerns were imported from Italy. That's when the Italian director Sergio Leone made such films as

A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, and Once Upon a Time in the West. His brutal Westerns revived the genre, made a movie star of Clint Eastwood, and created a visual style that influenced many film directors around the world. He also introduced many of us to the film music of Ennio Morricone. Yet despite all that, Leone's films at the time were disparagingly called spaghetti westerns. In 2005, Terry Gross spoke with Christopher Fraling, one of the world's leading experts on Leone.

At the time, Frayling had written the book Once Upon a Time in Italy, the Westerns of Sergio Leone. What's a scene from Leone's first Western, A Fistful of Dollars, that you loved in 1967 when you first saw it and that you still love now that you could describe for us? Gosh. Four or five bad guys sitting on a five-bar gate in the main street of a fly-blown Spanish town standing in for a northern Mexican town. And the man with no name, the hero,

walks up to them and there's this satisfying sort of crunch on the soundtrack as his boots walk down the main street and lots of dust. And they uh in in true macho style they start abusing each other and they start laughing at him and uh he looks down and lights his cigarillo and says my mule don't like you laughing he gets the crazy idea you're laughing at him now if you just apologize to my mule and then there's silence and there's a whirring sound on the soundtrack,

and you get the eyes and you get the puff of smoke, and suddenly an explosion, and all five bad guys fall off the five-bar gate. It's a sort of parody of the Western confrontation. It's so extreme and very, very stylish. And it was the first really big close-up of the young Clint Eastwood, who was fantastically good-looking in those days, only with a designer stubble, smoking a cheroot,

with his eyes screwed up as he looked into the sun. It's a very memorable moment. It's stayed with me ever since. Well, I think we should hear that scene because it's classic Clint Eastwood talking between his teeth. So here's that scene that you're talking about, and the explosion that we hear at the end

is him shooting all those guys who are waiting for him. Adios, amigo. President Stranger, did you get the idea? We don't like to see bad boys like you in town. Go get your mule. You let him get away from you? See, that's what I want to talk to you about. He's feeling real bad.

Huh? My mule. You see, he got all riled up when you men fired those shots at his feet. Hey, you making some kind of joke? No. You see, I understand you men were just playing around but the muley just doesn't get it of course if you were to all apologize i don't think it's nice you laughing.

See, my mule don't like people laughing. It's the crazy idea you're laughing at him. Now, if you apologize like I know you're going to, I might convince him that you really didn't mean it. That's a scene from Sergio Leone's first Western, A Fistful of Dollars. Why did Sergio Leone love Westerns? Why did he want to make them in Italy? Well, you've got to imagine a child growing up in 1930s Rome at a time when Mussolini was the dictator

and when most American movies were banned and those that were seen were dubbed into Italian. And the young Leone first saw his Hollywood western movies in the 1930s at that time and his heroes were Gary Cooper and Clark Gable and

films like Stagecoach. And to him they represented an absolute model of freedom. He lived in suburban Rome, in cramped conditions, and he saw these wide open spaces, this unimaginable desert that goes on forever. He couldn't understand what they were saying. He never heard...

In fact, he never learned to speak English, Sergio Leone. That's what's so extraordinary. But they were dubbed into a different language, not very well. But nevertheless, they clicked in his mind. Then in the 1950s, when he went into the film industry, he found that nobody was really very interested in the Western. A lot of Hollywood veteran directors went over to Italy to make epics, films like Ben Heer and Helen of Troy and Quo Vadis. And Leone hung around these films. Sometimes he was the assistant director. And he talked to directors like Fred Zinnemann, who'd made High Noon,

Robert Aldrich, who'd made The Last Sunset and Apache and films like that. And they all said to him, the Western's dead, it's finished. We don't make Westerns anymore. So basically, Leone made Westerns because Hollywood had stopped making them and because in Europe, and particularly in Italy, there was this huge interest in the Western and a huge knowledge of it as well. So, the whole thing starts in a kind of folk memory of American Westerns that went back to the 1930s.

And it's partly political. But the other thing was that Leone felt that Westerns had got a bit talky. There was too much talking in them. He liked Westerns where Rin Tin Tin did all the thinking, you know. Old-fashioned Westerns where lots and lots of action and not too much talk. He didn't like psychology. Freudian Westerns got on his nerves.

Well, you know, but he knew he was making Westerns that were different from American ones. He said, and I think this is to you that he said this in your interview with him, that John Ford, the great director of Westerns, was full of optimism, whereas I, on the contrary, am full of pessimism. Well, that's the thing. He loved the look of the Western and the idea of the Western and the fairy tale of the Western, but he didn't like some of the ideologies. He didn't like John Wayne very much and some of the sort of crusading element of the Western

that you got in 50s and early 60s Westerns. So loved the visuals, didn't like the ideology very much. So he takes the concept of the Western and makes it much, much more cynical. I mean, the hero, for example, when people ask him, why are you doing this for us? As someone actually asks in The Fistful of Dollars,

the first of his Westerns, why are you doing this for us? As someone actually asks in The Fistful of Dollars, the first of his westerns, why are you doing this for us? Instead of saying, you know, because a man's got to do what a man's got to do, or there's some things a man can't just ride around, things like that, that he says, $500? He works strictly for ready cash. So he has a very streetwise 1960s cash only attitude to life. And this was a very different kind, 1960s, cash-only attitude to life. And this was a very different kind of hero to the old-fashioned crusading hero. And I think that the modern movie action hero begins with the Clint Eastwood character in A Fistful of Dollars, where you identify with the hero not because of what he believes in anymore, because he doesn't actually believe in anything.

You identify with him because of his style, you know, the way he wears his clothes, the way he walks, the personal style of the man. And that, of course, is the basis of identification of all modern action heroes. And I think it begins with Clint Eastwood in A Fistful of Dollars. Let's talk a little bit about the casting in those Westerns. His casting is so good. Of course, Clint Eastwood is the most famous character in his westerns, the man with no name in the Fistful of Dollars trilogy. Clint Eastwood was known as Rowdy Yates on Rawhide, the TV cattle herding series. What did Leone see in Eastwood? You know, in the mid-1960s when he cast him.

Well, it was partly because Clint Eastwood wasn't very expensive. He came for $15,000, $16,000 in those days, and they had a very, very limited budget on Fistful of Dollars. But mainly, he wasn't the first choice either, that Leone had in mind Henry Fonda, even at that early stage. He had in mind James Coburn and one or two other actors, but they all proved to be, and Charles Bronson, and they all proved to be either too expensive

or they didn't read the script. And it has to be said, the script in its early stages, which was badly translated from the Italian, is a very peculiar read. We will go to the hill of boots, you know, that sort of thing. And so I'm not surprised that they turned it down. Then Sergio Leone watched an episode of Rawhide on 60mm in Rome at an agency and saw Clint Eastwood.

And what he saw was this man who walks in this very cat-like light way, that light Californian voice, the squint of his eyes. And the legend has it, I don't know if it's true or not, that Leone started colouring in the picture with some stubble and some rough sheepskin waistcoat, a dirty denim shirt, roughed him up a bit, made a lot of make-up. There's a lot of make-up in these films,

a surprising amount by today's standards, to make him look much more dark and sunburnt. He wanted a sort of rougher character, and, of course, the charut, the cigar, because in the 1960s, this charut was sort of masculine and hard and a controlled person. So he roughed Clint Eastwood up a bit

and together they discussed the part. I think that Clint Eastwood is probably the only actor in history who's actually fought hard for less lines. But he read the script and thought he was saying much too much. It was much too talky. And he had these long speeches of motivation and everything.

And Clint Eastwood just put a line through them and said, look, you can say this in one line. Christopher Frayling speaking with Terry Gross in 2005. Coming up, broken bones and near-death experiences. We hear from former stuntman Hal Needham. This is Fresh Air. The Bullseye podcast is, according to one journalist, the, quote, kind of show people listen to in a more perfect world. So make your world more perfect. Every week, Bullseye puts the pop in culture, interviewing brilliant authors, musicians,

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That is what we do at NPR. And we do it for you. Keep listening. Hal Needham probably was one of the most famous Hollywood stunt doubles. He did all kinds of stunts in all kinds of movies, but he got his start in Western movies and TV shows such as Laramie, Laredo, and Have Gun, Will Travel. On that show, he was the show's stunt coordinator and the stunt double for its star, Richard Boone. After many years of jumping on horses and stagecoaches and falling from great heights after being shot,

Hal Needham became famous for car stunts. Terry Gross spoke with him in 2011 when he had written a memoir called Stuntman, My Car-Crashing, Plane-Jumping, Bone-Breaking, Death-Defying Hollywood Life. Now, what were some of the standard Western stunts of the 50s and 60s when you were making the Westerns? Well, it had mostly to do with what we call saddle fall, where you get shot and fall off

the horse. We did horse falls, rear end falls, wagon wrecks, buggies, and so on. So a thing called a bulldog where the bad guy's trying to get away, the good guy comes up behind him, jumps from his horse, and then knocks the guy off the horse, and it normally winds up in a big fight. We did high falls and some roping stuff, and pretty well covered the major of them anyway. Yeah. Now, one of your early stunts was for Have Gun, Will Travel.

And you were jumping from a rock about 30 foot high onto a stagecoach that was moving by. Oh, yeah. And you're supposed to land on the top of the stagecoach as it rides by. Tell us what happened. Well, first of all, that was my second stunt on Have Gun, Will Travel. I had double boomed the day before, and he was kind of impressed, and he said, all right, you can do some stuff tomorrow. I got out there, and they said, can you jump from that rock to the top of a coach as it's going by, as it's passing? I said, I think so. So anyway, the rock was 30 feet high, and the top of a coach is 6 feet long and 4 feet wide.

They said, you want to see a rehearsal? I said, why not? They brought that thing under me, and I thought, I might have let my alligator mouth overload my jibber back in again. Because it really looked small. small looked like a postage stamp anyway they brought the coach through and i hit it right in the center as a matter of fact i broke through the top right up to my armpits and that uh kind of shocked the folks inside the coach and when they got a stop boone came over and offered me the job of being the stunt coordinator as well as his double on half-gun road travel.

So let me ask you, when you're jumping off a 30-foot high rock onto a moving stagecoach, the top of which looks like a postage stamp because it's so relatively small from the height that you're at, what kind of mental calculation do you do to figure out when to jump? You know, you can't say, all right, when the coach gets there to that mark, I'm going to jump. You just have to look at it because you don't know how fast those horses are going to be running and anything else. It's just a thing that it's a clock inside of you that you say now and you go. There's no way to set a mark or anything like that to leave the rock. Now, on that stunt, was there protection for you? Like if you missed the coach, was there padding on the ground? Nothing.

Nothing? Nothing. It'd be impossible. First of all, they'd have to pad the road in front and behind, and the horses can't go through that. And over the side, they'd have to camouflage it. No, it's just too much of a problem. And if you say you can do it, they expect you to do it. I say this with the greatest of respect. I think you have to be crazy to be a stuntman like you. I won't argue that point. Okay.

So one of the standard shots that you'd have to do is, like, you're the bad guy and you're being shot and you have to fall. You mean fall off the horse or fall off of what? Fall off a balcony, fall off a horse, fall off a rock. You've fallen off all of them. So say, like, you're falling, you're shot, you're falling off from a height. So when you started making westerns, what protection was there for you to fall onto? Well, when I started, and that's a long time ago, they would take saw horses, you know, like carpenters use. They'd take those and they'd put one by 12, pine one by 12s across the top, put some cardboard boxes underneath it, and put a mattress or two on top of it. And that's what saved you from being

killed because the boards would bend about six inches and then they'd all break. And then the boxes would catch you. So that's what they had. And believe me, 45, 50 feet off of that into those, about all you could handle. That sounds so makeshift. Oh, it definitely was, but that's all they could come up with at the time, and I'm going to be really braggadocious here. I'm the one that brought airbags into the stunt world.

What's the highest jump you've done? 100 feet. You say one of the most dangerous stunts in Westerns, and if you've seen it in Western, you've seen this one. It's the stirrup drag, where a guy falls off his horse, but his leg is still in the stirrup, and the horse keeps galloping, dragging the cowboy across the ground over rocks and brush and who knows what else.

Why is that the most dangerous Western stunt? Well, there's a couple of things. Matter of fact, I saw one of our stuntmen get killed doing a stirrup drag. Wow. He had to go through the gate of an entrance to a ranch, and when he fell off the horse, the horse, you rehearse them so they'll go where you want them to go. Well, this horse didn't follow where he's supposed to go, and when he came to the gate, he swung around, the horse did, and it flung the guy way out to the side, and he hit his

head on the post, the fence post, and killed him. So that's the reason it's so dangerous, one reason. The other is when you fall off the horse and hit the ground, you're tied to the horse with a cable to the stirrup. And when you hit the end of that cable, it flings you back under the horse's feet, his back feet. And so you got to put one foot up against the horse's belly to keep yourself from being stepped on by his back feet. It's pretty dangerous. Now, the way we get release, you have a release on your foot to the cable and you just put a little wire up to your belt and you pull that and that's supposed to release you. If that doesn't work, you have a second release on hooked with a cable, something back way back by camera, and that releases the

whole saddle. And if that doesn't work, you can put two or three, what you hope are your buddies, on the fastest horses you can find, and they're called pickup men. They get out there and if they see you're in trouble, they're supposed to come in, stop the horse, and get you loose. It's really, really dangerous. Were you ever hurt during one of those yourself? Thank God, no, I never was. I've done quite a few of them, and I just got lucky. So what goes through your mind when a stuntman is killed? It must be a very sobering experience. We're all aware of the fact that it can happen. And hopefully, when you get ready to do the stunt, you've got it figured out,

you've got your confidence up, you say, this is going to be okay, and you go for it. And when something goes wrong, we all understand it, because we've all had things go wrong. One stunt I did, I broke my back, six rib, punctured a lung, knocked out some teeth. That wasn't the way I had it planned at all. Yeah, I'm sure it wasn't. One of your most dangerous stunts was for a Western, Little Big Man, about Custer's Last Stand. And so describe the stunt that you had to do here. Dustin Hoffman and his wife are heading west, and they're on a stagecoach that's got a six-upper horsey hook to it. They get attacked by the Indians.

The shotgun guard gets shot off the coach. The driver turns chicken, and he's up there huddled in the boot of the coach hiding. So the horses run away. A stuntman, Dublin Dusty, got out of the coach, climbed up on the seat and jumped to the closest horse to the coach. I, as an Indian, came up on the outside and transferred my horse to the one right next to him. Then he stands up and jumps from that horse to the back of the one ahead of him, and I follow him, then does it again out to the leader, and I followed him out there. So we did that three times, but we did the whole scene 13 times. And here's what's really hard to believe. We had to do a standing broad jump

from the back of one horse to the back of the next one of 14 feet. And I'll tell you what, there's no athlete I don't think can do that standing still. These are horses that are in motion. Oh, they're running away. Yeah, coach running away. When we were training the horses to accept us jumping on their back and everything, the way we found we could jump the feathers was to get in motion, get in sync with a horse. So when he pushed off his back feet, we would use his momentum to get us out of the exit at two or three feet so we would get to the next horse. It was the toughest physical stunt I ever did in my life. The toughest. Now, I hate to bring this up, but

had you failed, you would have been trampled by the horses. Oh, well. Or run over by the coach, depending where you were. Yeah. You'd had two, four, or six horses run over you, plus a 4,000 pound coach. Yeah. You couldn't fail. If you messed up, you was going to be in big trouble. So you worked with a lot of horses doing Westerns. You owned horses. You trained horses. Two of your most beloved horses were named Hondo and Alamo. And Hondo lost his life as a result of a stunt.

He broke his leg doing a stunt. Yep, that's right. What happened? Well, you know, matter of fact, it was on Little Big Man. I played the ending that came down and jumped from my horse to the horse pulling the coach. The director wanted a shot of me coming off the hillside prior to that shot prior to me transferring so he said come fast you can i said all right and it was fall and the hillside the grass was all dead and everything so here i come off the hill just as fast as hondo could run and in a blink

of an eye i was sailing through the air and he had stepped in a gopher hole and broke his leg. So he slid a long way, so do I, and I looked back and I could see he was trying to get up. So I went back to take a survey and see what was wrong and so on and I realized he had broken his leg. So I held him down. Here's the part that I think shows how much I love the horse. We were way out in the country, and I said, Has anybody got a gun? When a horse breaks a leg, unless he's a thoroughbred or something, you destroy him. You put him out.

So I said, Anybody got a gun? The prop man said, No, I don't have one. And my buddy said, Well, he had one in the car. So I said, anybody got a gun in the prop man said, no, I don't have one. And my buddy said, well, he had one in the car. So I said, go get it. And he came back and handed me that gun. You know, I could not shoot that horse. And the reason I had to shoot him or somebody had to shoot him was they said, if you don't get a vet out here and verify that he had a broken leg before you kill him, you can't collect the insurance. I said, well, hell, it's going to take an hour and a half, two hours to get a vet out here. I don't want that horse to lay there suffering. Get me a gun, you know? So anyway,

we wound up shooting him. And don't tell me a big man don't cry, because I did. Did it change how attached you allowed yourself to become to your stunt horses? No, you know what? I made so much money with them, and I was such buddies with them. I'll tell you two stories, if you'll let me. One was, I had one of them, and I was just practicing a little bit, and I fell and came up, and I was was in my backyard or right close to my backyard. My wife is out there.

And I fell this horse, and I sat up on my butt, and I was just sitting there on the ground. And he came up, and he put his head over my shoulder, and I scratched his chin, under his chin. My wife said, if you did that to me, we'd get along a hell of a lot better, you know. So that's how. But also I have a thing in my book about when a horse, if I got two together, I kept those two together all the time so they'd become buddies. When you take one away, the other one would just pace back and forth in the corral until they worked up a sweat. Or sometimes if they're ill, a little ill, they got a stomach ache or something, they'll do the same thing.

I've been known to go out in the corral with them out in the barn, take some hay and make myself a bed and get a tarp and just cover up and sleep with them, out there in the barn with them. What I do, they calm down immediately, you know, and they'll come over and sniff me, and eventually they'll start eating the hay I'm laying on and things like that. You've got to have that rapport with them to understand them. Former stuntman Hal Needham speaking with Terry Gross in 2011.

He died in 2013. On Monday's show, we conclude our series of classic films and movie icons with interviews from our archive with Spike Lee and Samuel L. Jackson, who has been in Spike Lee's films Jungle Fever, Do the Right Thing, Mo' Better Blues, School Days,

and Chirac. I hope you can join us. Fresh Air's executive producer is Danny Miller. For Terry Gross and Tanya Mosley, I'm David Bianculli. Who's claiming power this election? What's happening in battleground states? And why do we still have the Electoral College? All this month, the ThruLine podcast is asking big questions about our democracy and going back in time to answer them. Listen now to the ThruLine podcast from NPR.

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