Hollywood stuntman-turned-director
Hal Needham, a veteran Hollywood stuntman who later embarked on a less risky career as a director of action movies including Smokey and the Bandit and The Cannonball Run, both of which starred his friend Burt Reynolds, died Friday in Los Angeles. He was 82.
During the course of his career, Needham said in a speech at the Academy Awards in 2012, he broke 56 bones, including his back twice. He punctured a lung, had a shoulder replaced and knocked out several teeth. He invented several new stunt methods and devices - among them the introduction of air bags for breaking falls, prompted by watching pole-vaulters - as “a way to save myself some trips to the hospital,” he said.
Needham was born in 1931 and, as he said at the Academy Awards in 2012, raised “way back in the hills of Arkansas during the Great Depression.” His father was a sharecropper. As a boy, Needham fished and hunted squirrels with a rifle. He later moved with his family to St. Louis.
After his discharge in the 1950s from the Army as a paratrooper in the 82nd Airborne Division, he began a career that spanned hundreds of movies and television shows across five decades.
In the 1970s, Needham turned his attention to car stunts, he said in an NPR interview in 2011, and collaborated often with Reynolds, whom he had met when they both worked in television. Reynolds starred in Needham’s directorial debut, Smokey and the Bandit, in 1977.
Needham won a scientific and engineering Oscar in 1986 for the development of a camera car. Later he was given a governor’s award by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and was introduced by director Quentin Tarantino.
Arkansas, Pages 12 on 10/29/2013