‘Isn’t that what we are? Modern gladiators?’ : Reid’s Case: The Shadows of Illusion

There is no special ritual for the dead among stuntmen. Just the funeral. When one of them goes in as young Reid Rondell did last week, fellow stuntmen don’t meet on the edge of a windy cliff and send his empty motorcycle crashing down into the ocean, grade B movies notwithstanding. No riderless horse trots through the streets of Universal Studios. There are no flyovers, no 21-gun salutes, no gathering of the doomed at the place where he drank.

An illusion-maker simply fades from sight and buries himself in the memories and anxieties of others who pursue his trade, and the cameras roll on.

There was something special about Reid Rondell, and his death in that helicopter crash near Newhall touched a chord in the community of men and women who fake calamity to satisfy the crowd’s taste for it. He was one of them, the son of a respected stuntman, a 22-year-old who had grown up with the children of other stuntmen. In a way, they had all lost a son.

“We don’t court death, but we know it’s there,” one stuntman said to me. “We’re careful and we’re safety-minded and we calculate each stunt. There are no cowboys in the business anymore. But we still know that luck is a factor every time we shoot a scene, and sometimes luck runs out.

“Whenever I go on a job, I leave five letters in an envelope, one for my wife and one for each of my kids, to be opened in-the-event-of. I’m no fatalist, but when the Lord says you’re going to die, you’re going to die.”

A few years ago I watched car stunts being performed in a field near Saugus, based on a television script I had written. The script had contained some minor pursuits, but the producer added more of what he called fire and blood. They were necessary, he said, because audience reaction tests proved “the needle went up” when someone went out in flames.

This car didn’t immediately burn. Explosive charges blew the old sedan into a multiplicity of crashing rolls, and only when the director yelled cut! did a crew rush in to make sure the stunt driver was all right. He was. Later, the car was set afire to continue a scene whose illusion had projected the death of a human being to fill the belly of a television viewer.

I spoke with one of the stuntmen later and asked if he didn’t feel a little like a participant in a Roman circus, about to die well for the pleasures of “entertainment.” He looked at me with a kind of wry smile and shrugged.

“I suppose that’s true,” he said. “But isn’t that what we are? Modern gladiators?”

He said it with pride. He was among a select few who did what others could not do. He was the body hurtling through space, the man on fire, the driver of a brakeless truck, the passer-by blown to perdition by an enemy bomb. Shot, stabbed, hanged, beaten, choked, tortured. That’s entertainment?

“It was a lousy way for Reid to die,” another stuntman said. “That helicopter shouldn’t have crashed.” He thought about that for a moment then said, “It’s like going through a red light for years and never getting caught. Then you go through a yellow light and get nailed. It just shouldn’t happen that way.”

I have known Kim Kahana for years and have written about him before. He is no longer an active stunt performer, but his three sons and a daughter are. Kahana worries about them but knows there is nothing he can do to assure their safety. He has taught them all he knows.

“Kim Jr. is the same age as Reid was,” he said, preparing to attend young Rondell’s funeral. “I know how Ronnie (the father) feels because I feel that way myself. I feel it deeply. But I’m also thanking the Lord it was his son who died and not mine. Maybe that’s a lousy thing to say, but Ronnie knows what I mean.”

Movie-makers are, for the most part, civilized people. They understand their trade and would not barter a life for the success of a project. But the very technology that has enhanced film’s breathless qualities has pressed illusion to the brink of reality, and reality is an unforgiving teacher.

Next month an award similar to a movie Oscar will be instituted to honor the best stunt of the year and the person who performs it. Kahana believes that the effect of the award, rather than paying tribute to a business that deserves tribute, will create new challenges, ergo new dangers, to a trade already bristling with danger.

I agree. I liked Reid Rondell, though I never knew him. I liked his youth and the vitality of his life, a man-child flying into the teeth of the gale, heightened by the storm, playing with the wind.

His death diminishes us all in a society fattened by illusions of human pain. It ought to leave us wondering whether the passing thrill of the trick is worth the risk of reality in the process of make-believe.

Sadly, young Reid died proving it is not.