‘Hooper’: The movie celebrating stunt performers that beat ‘The Fall Guy’ to the punch by decades
David Leitch has been one of the most vocal proponents of stunt performers getting the credit and recognition they deserve for risking life and limb in the name of entertaining audiences, with Ryan Gosling‘s blockbuster romantic action comedy The Fall Guy doubling as an ode to those in the line of fire.
A veteran stuntman himself and a regular double of Brad Pitt on Fight Club, Ocean’s Eleven, and Troy, among others, the filmmaker has become one of the genre’s most popular and renowned directors after helming Atomic Blonde, Deadpool 2, Hobbs & Shaw, and Bullet Train.
Leitch co-founded 87North Productions alongside fellow ex-stuntman and John Wick director Chad Stahelski, and they’re far from the only professionals to have segued into filmmaking. Extraction‘s Sam Hargrave, Day Shift‘s J. J. Perry, Angel Has Fallen‘s Ric Roman Waugh, and his younger brother Scott of the fourth Expendables flick are part of the current crop, but the precedent was set a long time ago.
Hal Needham was already a legendary stuntman before he directed his first feature, and he got off to a phenomenal start when he debuted with Smokey and the Bandit. A massive hit at the box office, Needham already had a long-standing close friendship with star Burt Reynolds after doubling for him on numerous occasions, which inspired the relationship between Leonardo DiCaprio’s Rick Dalton and Pitt’s Cliff Booth in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
For his second feature, Needham sought to blur the lines between art and life with Hooper, which reunited him with Smokey duo Reynolds and Sally Field. The leading man stars as Sonny Hooper, an ageing stuntman struggling with the realisation his body is rebelling against his chosen profession. Instead, he signs on to be the coordinator for an expensive action flick, only to find himself butting heads with a brash upstart who thinks the title character’s methods of orchestrating on-screen carnage are outdated.
They may be separated by almost half a century, but the parallels between Hooper and The Fall Guy are clear. Both were directed by former stuntmen who found huge success in the action arena when they moved behind the camera, and each of them pays tribute to the often-unheralded work that goes into crafting the high-octane stunts audiences have been conditioned to expect as part and parcel of the genre.
Whereas Leitch and Stahelski are at the forefront of the campaign to have an Academy Award created specifically for stunts, Needham was much more literal in the way he used Reynolds as a thinly veiled facsimile of himself. He cut his teeth working the second unit on Reynolds’ The Longest Yard and Gator before making his first film as a director at the age of 45, with Hooper the character and Hooper the movie reflecting the potential obstacles many stuntmen face when their body can’t take much more and their options dramatically narrow.
The Fall Guy might be splashier, more fantastical, and dripping in the megawatt charisma of leads Gosling and Emily Blunt, but Hooper serves as the perfect companion piece when Leitch and Needham both crafted entertaining spectacles specifically to celebrate some of cinema’s most underappreciated professionals.
