Johnny Hangtime (7 page)

A
week later, I still hadn't figured out a way to break the news about the Niagara Falls scene to Mom. We hadn't shot one second of film yet, but reports about
Two Birds, One Stone
were already turning up in magazines and on TV.

People were saying this would be the movie where Ricky Corvette would grow up. He would stop playing a cute kid and take on his first role as a young man. Very few child stars grow up to become adult movie stars. Everybody wanted to know if Ricky could make that leap. If he flopped, his career would probably be over.

The cast and crew of
Two Birds, One Stone
gathered at Paramount Pictures in Hollywood. Mom drove me over to the enormous soundstage, and Roland gathered everybody around him to talk us through the movie.

“Ladies, gentlemen,” Roland said, pacing back and forth. “We're going to make movie history.
Two Birds, One Stone
is going to be bigger than
Star Wars
. Bigger than
Titanic
. It will have more action, more
stunts, more excitement than any film that came before it. The audience will leave the theater shaking their heads in astonishment.”

Roland glanced at me and Mom before continuing. “But the most important thing is not how exciting it will be or how much money this movie is going to make. The most important thing is that nobody gets hurt.”

Satisfied that I wouldn't get killed—at least not
that
day—Mom gave me a hug and left so she could get to work on time.

The only two people who missed the meeting were Ricky and Augusta. They were shooting a Pepsi commercial together in Tahiti, and would join the rest of us in a few weeks. In the meantime, Roland explained, we had to begin shooting the action scenes.

It would be fairly easy to shoot around Ricky and Augusta, because the movie was almost all action. Roland told us he would shoot the simplest stunts first, saving the big one for the end. That way, I supposed, if I got killed going over Niagara Falls, at least the film would be finished.

Paramount's lawyers arrived on the set, and Roland warned us they would be keeping an eye on things. We broke up the meeting and the crew set up for the first gag.

 

Picture this: I am sitting atop Squirt, who seems to have a bit of the sniffles today. The script calls for a team of bad guys with guns to be chasing me down a city street. I leap on a policeman's horse—Squirt—and the bad guys start shooting at me. They hit Squirt instead of me, and he falls down while I escape.

They're not going to actually shoot Squirt, of course. He's got to fall down on his own. Back in the old days, when they needed a horse to fall in a movie, they used what was called a running W—two criscrossed trip wires. The rider would yank them at the proper
moment, and the horse's feet would be pulled out from under him.

Animal rights groups put a lot of pressure on the movie industry to ban the running W, because many of the horses were getting hurt. These days, they train horses to fall on command. Squirt has fallen hundreds of times. My dad taught him how to do it when Squirt was very young.

“Roll camera!” Roland shouted. “Meet you at Taco Bell!”

I snapped the reins once and Squirt galloped off. Carefully, I eased my left foot into the step stirrup. That's a little step that is placed on the side of the saddle away from the camera. As we approached the camera, I shifted my weight to that side.

“Down Squirt, down!” I hollered, pulling on the reins.

Squirt let his front legs collapse and rolled his body left. Before he hit the dirt, I jumped off the step stirrup and fell clear of him. I landed on the bed of cork and soft dirt that had been prepared for me, tumbling over a few times so there was no chance Squirt would hit me. It was a perfect fall, I thought.

“Cut!” Roland yelled. “Let's try that one more time, Johnny.”

Roland explained to me that the fall looked a bit fake to him. I had jumped off too soon, before Squirt reacted to being shot. Roland was right, as usual. I had to be careful not to anticipate so much.

We shot the scene again and then a third time because Roland wasn't happy with the lighting. Finally he got what he was looking for, and the crew gave Squirt and I a nice round of applause.

“Good boy,” I whispered into Squirt's ear. He got up gingerly and I led him to the trailer for Mom to take him home later.

 

Next scene. Picture this: I am in the Trikes & Bikes store at the Anaheim mall. The entire mall has been closed for the day so we can shoot the movie here.

It's a complicated gag. The script calls for Ricky to be testing this hot new mountain bike as if he is thinking of buying it; however, some bad guys get there first and plant a bomb to kill him. It explodes in a ball of fire, blowing him ten feet, through the front window of the store, and into the fountain in the middle of the mall. Roland wants to get it all in one take.

“Roll cameras!” he booms.

“Meet you at KFC!” I yell back.

I am wearing three layers of fire resistent underwear. On top of that and under my clothes is a Kevlar fireproof suit. I'm already sweating because my skin can't breathe. But then again, I don't want it to.

My face is covered by a nonflammable silicone mask that looks vaguely like Ricky Corvette's face. My hands have to be covered with flesh-colored silicone too. It would look dumb if I were wearing fireproof gloves inside.

An ice cold, gooey gel made from a rare tropical plant has been smeared all over me. It doesn't stop the burning, but it increases your body's tolerance to heat. On top of that is a layer of flammable glue.

Even with all this on your body, a stuntman can't do a full fire burn longer than a minute or two. I've come pretty close a few times, and it's not fun. First, you start feeling warm. Then you feel hot. After that…well, you
bake
to death. I'm just thankful Mom couldn't make it to see this. She told me she had to stay home because the vet was coming over to take a look at Squirt.

Behind me, the pyro guys have rigged up a fake bomb composed of flash powder, rubber cement, and this black powder called naphthalene that smells like mothballs. You light up a few hundred pounds of that stuff and it makes a fireball that'll burn your eyelids off if you're not careful.

I take a deep breath from the air tube one of the grips holds up to my mouth. She takes the tube away and I close my mouth tightly.

“Three…two…one…”

The blast goes off. As soon as the fire licks the flammable glue, I am engulfed in flames. My body is a human torch. Thanks to all the fire protection, I don't feel a thing.

The explosion was designed to
look
powerful, but it really isn't. To launch me and the bike, Roland installed an air ram in the floor under me. It's a pneumatic device that pushes up with 2,000 pounds of pressure per square inch to shoot you into the air.

The air ram fires and I feel like I've left my stomach behind. I am on the bike, in a full burn, flying straight toward the front window of the store. I have no control. It's a no-brainer. That's what stunt guys call a gag in which you're just a passenger.

A body that shattered real glass would be sliced into a million pieces, of course. In the early days of the movies, they used candy glass for window-breaking scenes. It was this sugar-based stuff that was rolled to the thickness of a window—sort of like a lollipop window.

The problem was that candy glass melted under hot lights. Nowadays they have thin plastics that look and shatter just like real glass. I must have flown through a hundred windows over the last three years. It's fun!

The front wheel of the bike crashes through the window, and pieces of “glass” are flying all around me. I don't feel it, just as I don't feel the flames that are burning away my clothes.

The next part of the gag is actually the most dangerous—landing in the fountain. Roland didn't want me to land
with
the bike because it could slip on the water and break a lot of bones (mine). His first thought was to have me wear a jerk vest attached to a thin wire that
would pull me off the bike after I crashed through the window. But he was afraid the flames might burn through the vest. Instead, he decided to attach a wire to the
bike
, and yank it out from under me before I hit the fountain.

I am about ten feet from the fountain. I feel the pull on the bike. I let go of the handlebars and the bike flies out of harm's way. The fountain is coming up fast. If I land in the water, it will put the flames out immediately. If I miss, crash pads surround the fountain. A bunch of guys with wet blankets and fire extinguishers are also stationed around to smother the flames if they have to.

The water is only two feet deep. I spread out my arms and legs to distribute the impact of the water across my whole body. I struggle to keep my head up. The one part of your body you don't want to slam into anything is your head. It's not like you can put a cast on it and it will heal in six weeks.

You would think water would be a soft place to land, but in fact, it feels like concrete. I prepare for the impact and belly flop into the middle of the fountain. The flames are extinguished immediately. Water sloshes all over the place. I gasp for air. As I open my eyes and rip the mask off my face, everybody on the crew is cheering.

“Cut!” Roland shouts. “Superb!”

The whole sequence—from explosion to splashdown—has taken less than two seconds. In slo-mo, it will take up about ten seconds of screen time. And, from preparation to cleanup, the scene has taken all day to shoot.

 

You think
you
had a tough week? On Tuesday, I got into an underwater fight with a lunatic wielding a harpoon. On Wednesday, I got thrown out of a car's sunroof and had to ski off a mountain. On Thursday, I had to jump off a train onto a Jet Ski. On Friday, I had to
cross a broken rope bridge while some guys were setting it on fire.

But Saturday was the worst day of the week—Mom showed up.

Not that I wasn't happy to see her. But as soon as I saw her, I could tell something was wrong. She has a very easily readable face.

Mom hadn't been able to spend much time on the set with me. She had used up all her vacation days at work and her boss was starting to give her a hard time about taking days off.

“Johnny,” she said as soon as she stepped out of the car, “I have bad news. I had to have Squirt put to sleep.”

I didn't cry. Actors know how to cry. Stuntmen know how
not
to. I cried on the inside. Squirt had been more than a pet to me. We worked together. He saved my butt a few times. And he was a living reminder of my dad.

Mom told me that when we shot the routine horse fall, Squirt had hurt his left front leg pretty badly. Because horses weigh close to two thousand pounds, it's very difficult for their damaged legs to heal properly. Even if a cast is put on it, the horse can't be ridden again.

The vet made it as painless as possible, Mom assured me. Squirt was sedated first, then given a lethal injection of phenobarbitol.

Roland came over to flirt with Mom, but he saw right away that something was wrong.

“Squirt's dead,” I said, and I told him what happened.

Roland started sobbing quietly, and then the dam burst open. Big tears slid down his cheeks. He didn't bother wiping them away, and they gathered in his beard. Then he began bawling loud enough for both of us. I'd never seen a man break down the way he did.

I guess Roland felt somewhat responsible. If he hadn't shot the horse fall scene three times, maybe Squirt wouldn't have hurt himself.

“Meredith,” Roland apologized through his tears. “I'm so sorry. If I was in any way responsible—”

“You weren't, Roland,” Mom assured him. “Squirt was old. The vet said it was only a matter of time.”

“I assure you, this is the safest set I've ever worked on. You will not regret allowing Johnny to do this film. It showed tremendous courage and faith on your part, especially in light of what happened to your husband. When we shoot the Niagara Falls gag, every safety precaution will be in place.”

Uh-oh.

“What Niagara Falls gag?” Mom asked.

I tried to slink away, but Mom grabbed me by the collar.

“Didn't you read Johnny's script, Meredith?” Roland asked.

“Of
course
I read Johnny's script!”

Roland handed her his copy of the script and opened it up to the last two pages—the pages I had removed from the copy I showed to Mom. She read it, then turned to me. I thought fire was going to come out of her eyes.

“You tricked me!” she barked.

“I didn't know what to do!” I whined. “I knew you'd never let me do the movie, and I wanted to do it so badly.”

“You're
just
like your father!”

I always suspected she was afraid I would turn out like my dad, but that was the first time she ever came out and said it. Maybe she was right. Maybe I
was
just like my dad.

“That's it,” Mom said, grabbing my hand. “Johnny, we're going home.”

“But Mom!”

“We can't stop the film now!” Roland exclaimed. “Paramount has already invested a hundred fifty million in it.”

The mention of money made the Paramount lawyers flit over like moths to a flame. They said all kinds of things that made no sense to me: “commitment”…“breach of contract”. . “escape clause.” I didn't understand all the terms, but I got the idea. The long and short of it was, if Mom pulled me out of the movie, Paramount would take legal action against her.

“I'm sorry,” I kept telling her, but it didn't do any good.

Mom was furious, but she realized there was nothing she could do about it. She doesn't know any high-powered lawyers.