THE FULL BURN: On the Set, at the Bar, Behind the Wheel, and Over the Edge With Hollywood Stuntmen, by Kevin Conley. Bloomsbury; 214 pages; $25.99.

The stuntman whom other stuntmen still speak of in hushed tones is Yakima Canutt, and the stunt that started the modern trade was done by Canutt in John Ford’s Stagecoach. In it, Canutt, playing an Indian, jumps from a horse to a stagecoach team running full tilt.

Riding the lead horse, he’s shot and falls between horses pounding away at 25 miles an hour. Holding on to the tongue of the stagecoach, back to the ground, Canutt positioned himself between the hooves of two teams of running horses, then let go.

The horses passed on either side of him, and the stagecoach passed over him.
After the stage cleared, he got up and staggered a little, to show that he wasn’t a dummy and that there hadn’t been any camera trickery. And he did it all in one take — no editing involved!

Canutt did the stunt two more times, in other movies, and a stuntman named Terry Leonard did a variation of it in Raiders of the Lost Ark, but the latter film cheated by doing the scene in short takes, not all in one shot, and by digging a small ditch to give Leonard some extra room. Among his successors, Canutt’s stunt still is revered for its combination of creativity and craziness.

Kevin Conley’s The Full Burn is the story of stunting. It mentions Canutt in passing, but it doesn’t have a whole lot of historical perspective, concentrating as it does on in-depth profiles of a handful of great modern stuntmen: Jeanne Eppers, Mike Kirton, Terry Leonard and the second unit director Dan Bradley — the elite among the several thousand people who do stunt work and hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.

There’s a commonality to these men and women — blue-collar, roughhewn, the sort of daredevil personalities that you find in rodeo and oil rigging. They tend to drink, they tend to carouse, and they tend to get divorced a lot. But by and large, they are proud people, because they do things that most people not only can’t do, but won’t do.

Maybe once every five years or so a stuntman will get killed, usually on a substandard quickie production. It’s not danger they’re addicted to, because the whole point of the stunt trade is to make it look dangerous while absolutely minimizing the actual danger. They might look suicidal, but they’re not — quite the contrary, although, evidently, a lot of old stuntmen do kill themselves once they get to life’s colostomy stage.

They’re not always fully respectful of their profession’s past. Dan Bradley, who designs and shoots the action sequences for the Bourne films, objects to the empty streets you see in older chase scenes.
“I loved Bullitt when I first saw it as a kid,” he tells Conley, “but if I were to deliver that chase, shot for shot today, they’d fire me. It does not hold up. I like it cluttered, so it feels more dangerous.”

On the basis of the book, and on the basis of the day I spent with Canutt in the mid-’70s, what motivates stuntmen is adrenaline rush, an enjoyment of problem-solving and the pleasure they take in each other’s company.

In many ways, it’s a strange business, in that you work just as hard on junk as you do on obviously good stuff. Dan Bradley did the car chases for The Dukes of Hazzard, and because the director was incompetent, the footage in the finished film was awful.

The business has changed a lot; it used to be predominantly westerns that used stuntmen, for horsefalls and the like. Stuntmen were often cowboys — Canutt was a rodeo champion — but nowadays, stuntmen rarely get on horses. Instead, they’re behind the wheels of cars or setting themselves on fire. As a result, most modern stuntmen come to the business through snowboarding, Motocross and X Games.

The biggest enemy stuntmen have today is CGI — computer-generated imagery. Although most CGI hasn’t advanced quite far enough to convincingly portray a human body, the day isn’t far off when the technology could conceivably obliterate the profession.

The other enemy is more traditional: wear and tear. Conley interviews one stuntman, Ron Rondell Jr., who used to be 5 feet 10 inches tall, but is now 5 feet 6. You name it, they have it. Concussions. Hip replacements. Back problems.

The Full Burn is basically a series of magazine profiles pasted together to make a book. Conley closes it by having a bunch of stuntmen set him on fire — the full George Plimpton. He comes through it just fine — the full burn lasts seven seconds, long enough for a shot in a movie, long enough for a cool author photo.
This isn’t the definitive history of stunting, assuming such a book could even be written. But it gives a great overview of the personalities attracted to a tough business, and the uncanny way they have of slowing time during a stunt so they can figure out what to do if things start to go wrong.

“I came to see it as one of the few traits that the best in the business have in common,” says Conley, “this ability to… sort through the possible outcomes till they hit upon the most survivable option. And they seem to do so at will, on an adrenaline surge, whenever the director calls ‘Action.’ ”