And The Award Goes To…Action Oscars

First, a little bit of background here…

Not long after I joined Bluesky, I discovered that legendary producer was also there, so I gave her a follow. To my shock and confusion, she started following me back. GALE ANNE HURD WAS FOLLOWING ME. The woman behind Aliens, the Terminator franchise, The Walking Dead and its various spinoffs, to name but a tiny few, was following me. Mind BLOWN.

Now, she didn’t really interact with me much, if at all, until last week when she posted an exciting announcement that the Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences would be adding a long-overdue category for stunt design. It’s a subject near and dear to Hurd’s heart as her aunt, , was a stunt double back in the 1930s — always uncredited, because stunt performers didn’t merit on-screen mention at the time, and certainly not (gasp!) a woman stunt performer.

Anyway, I reposted her post with an offhand, mostly joking remark, and, well, this happened:

Needless to say, I fanboyed HARD.

And I also got to seriously thinking about which movies would have won a stunt design Oscar in past years. Some choices were, to me, extremely obvious; others, not so much — including more recent cinema that relies so heavily on CGI that stuntwork is almost unnecessary, but that’s another topic. I threw out a few posts mentioning some of the obvious choices, and then I decided for funsies, I was going to expand on that and do a series of blog posts I’m calling “Action Oscars” (look, I’m writing this at 5:30 AM, I’m not at my most creative).

So we arrive to here and now, and I’m going to start the series with what I personally consider to be the king of stunt films:

Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)

Stunt Coordinator: , Stunt Arranger:

Aside from being one of the best movies of all time, I consider Raiders of the Lost Ark to be the gold standard for classic stuntwork, in part because it covers the spread, so to speak. It has fistfights, gunfights, chases, escapes — a little bit of everything, and they each present a different set of challenges, both to the people planning the action and those executing it.

And Glenn Randall Jr. — a veteran stuntman and stunt coordinator whose career began with Ben-Hur in 1958 and continued on until his retirement in 2000 — rose to the challenge in a big way. The opening temple scene, culminating in Indiana Jones () fleeing from a giant boulder, is one of the most iconic action set pieces in cinema, and it only gets wilder from there, eventually culminating what I’m calling…

The Moneymaker

(I’ll be using that header to denote the sequence that, in my humble opinion, seals the deal on awarding the Action Oscar to a particular film, while also giving a tip of the hat to ace stuntwoman/stunt coordinator , who is an absolute badass.)

The Raiders roller coaster ride hits its biggest peak late in the second act when Indy and Marion () escape the Well of Souls and then have to sneak out of the Nazi work camp, only to learn the Nazis are preparing to move the Ark of the Covenant and have to intercept the truck carrying it.

Glenn Randall Jr. (foreground), preparing for his spotlight moment in “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” The other guy is director Steven Spielberg, who you might have heard of.

What follows is a breathtaking marathon sequence that hits a harrowing high note when one of Ford’s stunt double, , falls off the front of one truck, goes under it, and then gets dragged behind it. The stunt homages a similar stunt from the film Stagecoach (1939), often considered one of the most dangerous ever performed (I’ll almost certainly revisit that film in a later installation). Leonard in fact attempted a similar stunt in The Legend of the Lone Ranger (1981), but was seriously injured when his leg went under a stagecoach wheel. He was eager to give it another shot in Raiders. The truck was specially built to be higher off the ground to give him more clearance, on top of digging a shallow trench in the road. You can see the result starting at 5:20 in this clip.

Naturally, I’d be remiss if I didn’t acknowledge the action sequence that didn’t happen, Indy’s planned fight with the “Cairo Swordsman” (the late ). The sequence was supposed to be a full-on whip vs. scimitar fight, for which Richards had rehearsed extensively, but Ford was deathly ill the day they were supposed to film it. Ford and Spielberg brainstormed a workaround and ended up with an iconic moment in a film filled with iconic moments.

Other nominees: Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior, Escape From New York, For Your Eyes Only.

There you have it, our first “Action Oscar” winner from the past! If you think one of the other nominees for 1981 got robbed, or I overlooked a film from that year deserving of consideration, leave a comment (but please keep it respectful).