Up on Two Wheels: Stunt Driving School
Box 90 maneuver rotates the vehicle exactly 90 degrees,
placing it inside the cones
Bobby Ore (no, not the pro hockey player of the same name) was about to demonstrate an intricate car stunt, the details of which totally escaped me. My role was to stand motionless in the center of a huge asphalt skidpad. Ore promised he would first spin the car 180 degrees, placing the front bumper within inches of my knees, and then circle me, all the while maintaining that uncomfortably small distance from my body. How he proposed to accomplish this feat I had absolutely no idea.
With supreme effort I suppressed the urge to sprint for safety into the surrounding Mojave desert. Coping with its 110-degree heat, spiny cactus and a few ill-tempered rattlesnakes seemed a viable alternative to entrusting my continued good health to a complete stranger. Never having met either of the two Bobby Ores, for all I knew it could well be the hockey player who now held my life in his hands.
But with Ore arguably the world's best stunt driver and holder of 13 world records, I could hardly decline his offer. Waiting obediently for my debut as a human traffic cone, I wondered idly about the consequences of a miscalculation on his part. The thought of being flattened by an errant automobile seemed terribly ironic, principally because Ore was driving my own car, a Mustang Cobra.
Brake lights glowed as he came to a halt a hundred yards away. Backup lights came on and tires chirped as he legged the throttle, accelerating hard toward me in reverse. When no more than a few car lengths away, the front of the red Cobra coupe abruptly snapped sideways and the car pivoted neatly 180 degrees, front bumper almost brushing my pant leg. Then, at full opposite lock, throttle buried, the rear Firestones vaporized themselves as the Mustang described three geometrically perfect circles and came to rest in a thick cloud of rubber dust.
A grinning Ore now faced me; we were separated only by the length of the hood. Ears ringing from the racket, impulsively I glanced down, noting that the left corner of the bumper sat barely six inches from my right kneecap. I was pretty sure now that the Bobby Ore in the driver's seat was the stunt-driver Ore.
On this Saturday morning I had joined seven others to seek knowledge from this guru of precision driving. We were enrolled in the equivalent of a Stunt Driving 101, a two-day driver-training class at Bobby Ore's Motion Picture Stunt Driving School in southern California. There is nothing like it anywhere in the world.
My fellow students were all professional stunt men whose years of experience ranged from 8 to more than 20. Also included was a 17-year-old youth whose stunt credits already included doubling for MacCaulay Culkin in "The Good Son" and "Getting Even with Dad." In the former, at age 13 he'd performed a "descender fall" from a cliff into Lake Superior, a concealed body harness attached to a thin cable regulating his speed of descent. The distance: 192 feet. At the time of our school he'd had his driver's license less than a year.
Bobby Ore (third from left) maps out the fine points of the next exercise
The day opened with a brief classroom session where Ore quickly zeroed in on the primary focus of his school: a level of car control so precise, so intuitive as to be well beyond that required merely to win a professional race. Surprisingly, this concept is completely foreign to stunt drivers, said Ore, who are self-taught and drive by the seat of their pants. Precious few can repeat a stunt, placing the vehicle exactly in the same spot--we're talking inches here, not feet--for take after take until the director is satisfied. Most are unable even to articulate how they execute a car stunt. In success the better drivers might achieve perhaps a .700 average, no more. Which can lead to big problems.
"An automobile is the most dangerous thing on the [movie] set," Ore said. "Miss your marks by a few feet and you can wipe out a $500,000 camera or, worse, a crew member. Which I've seen happen more than once."
Aside from wear and tear on the personnel, the financial penalty for a stunt gone wrong can be enormous. Any time a vehicle is on camera, identical backup vehicles, sometimes several of them, are routinely prepared. Compared to the cost of idling a $200,000-per-day production crew, vehicles are cheap. The cult classic Vanishing Point, released in the early 70s, began shooting with a fleet of nine Dodge Chargers. When production wrapped some two months later, all nine had been destroyed.
It's when backup cars aren't available that producers and stunt coordinators can suffer severe gastric distress. Ore reminisced about a Dodge Viper television commercial filmed long before the car was in production. The stunt required a Viper to be driven on-camera at a brisk pace and spun 90 degrees, coming to rest between two parked Vipers. It would be a one-shot take: the three hand-built prototypes comprised the total world supply of Vipers at the time and were of almost incalculable value. Crunch one and the project was history. Fortunately, the driver made it in on the first take. And that, said Ore, was our goal. By the time we graduated from his course, all of us should have the skill to do likewise.
Perhaps, but later as we slid about in our open-air classroom, things were not going well. Strapped into stock Mercury and Ford compact models, our first task was to master the art of shuffle steering, feeding the wheel smoothly from hand to hand, no watch-winding, palming or hand-over-hand action allowed. To make matters more difficult, we were told to keep hands low on the wheel at the 8 and 4 o'clock positions. (This keeps the hands out of the frame when the camera is shooting over the driver's right shoulder from the back seat.)
We struggled to master this awkward technique while negotiating a tight slalom course of traffic cones. No problem at low speeds but as velocities rose, technique went out the window and cones flew. Bobby Ore stood impassively nearby, gazing off into the desert as if unaware of the wholesale carnage being inflicted upon his twenty-dollar-apiece rubber traffic cones. On a collision course with yet another cone and certain Ore wasn't looking, I cheated, grabbing an armful of lock just in time to squeak past.
"I saw that!" Ore barked. Back to shuffle steering, hands at four and eight. Long before any of us showed proficiency at shuffle steering, we were told to repeat the exercise. Only this time we were to traverse the course backward, using only the mirrors to navigate. More cones flew.
The methodology behind Ore's precise car control gradually emerged as the day wore on. It's a mix of proper vision, smooth control inputs, good planning and total concentration on finesse--letting the car do the work, not manhandling it and hoping for the best.
We soon learned that most stunts incorporate variations of a few basic maneuvers, dubbed box nineties and one-eighties. A fledgling who masters these will have a solid foundation for performing car stunts.
We tackled the reverse one-eighty first, demonstrated earlier are Ore prepared to dance around me in the Cobra. Before offering a look at his own style of reverse one-eighty, Ore asked for volunteers, choosing one of the more experienced stuntmen to show us what he'd learned after years of trial and error. Clambering into a Mercury, the 30-ish Canadian fellow snapped off a good one. But on his second attempt the car lunged way offline, far enough that I wouldn't have wanted to been working on that movie set. I thought back to Ore's earlier reference to .500 performance averages.
A successful reverse one-eighty, Ore said, is like every other maneuver; it depends on strict observance of three critical factors: focus, hand position and the use of all available space. Focus is first: he marked his box, the car's intended resting place, by placing a cone about two feet from each corner. Two more cones were placed 30 yards away at the point where the spin would start. We looked dubiously at the ridiculously small space.
"Start by driving the course slowly while you pick out your marks," Ore advised as we took turns riding with him. "And use every inch of available space. The more space you have, the more time you've got and believe me, more is better."
He nodded toward an expanse of desert and a sprinkling of small buildings standing about a quarter-mile away. "I'm going to use the door on that little shed over there as my reference point. The instant the car starts to rotate, I'm going to swivel my head and find that mark. Wherever my eyes are fixed is exactly where the car will end up."
He reversed course and drove to the edge of the pavement, lining up on his two marker cones. Mirrors were carefully adjusted, critical since they are used exclusively when driving in reverse. The outside mirrors are aimed to cover the rear quarters, the rear door handles serving as inner reference points. The inside mirror fills the gap between them.
Hand positions vary, depending on the desired direction of rotation. Our mentor chose to spin clockwise. Left hand grasping the wheel at 2 o'clock, Ore shifted into reverse and released the brakes, accelerating toward the box, eyes scanning the mirrors. As the speedometer raced toward 30 mph he shifted the automatic into neutral and as the marker cones flicked past, whipped the wheel around counterclockwise to six o'clock. The car began a graceful spin; as it neared 180 degrees Ore shifted into drive, loosened his grip on the wheel to let the steering center itself and accelerated briefly, coming to rest precisely within the box, having rotated exactly 180 degrees.
Then it was our turn. I teamed up with Bill Edwards, a Canadian actor and stunt man from Vancouver whose 8-year career includes work on "Sliders", "MANTIS", and "The X-Files" among others. He was attending the school for the third time, not an uncommon event I would learn. He explained his reasoning.
"To be any good at it, this kind of driving takes practice, a lot of it," he said. "And this is the only place I know where I can practice and keep my skills up. It's a lot better than using some frozen parking lot back home. And it's the only place where I've been able to ask questions and learn about the technical part [of stunt driving]. I've picked up more knowledge in a day here than I learned in eight years of watching other stuntmen drive."
The school also carries a lot of weight with stunt coordinators, enhancing a graduate's marketability. Another, less tangible benefit of the school is heightened personal safety on the movie set. "As a graduate I can tell just by watching a driver if he's going to go wide on a shot," Edwards said, giving him valuable seconds to effect a strategic withdrawal from the danger zone.
Edwards and I quickly discovered that while the elements of a reverse one-eighty aren't especially difficult, at least when taken individually, combining them into a rapid-fire, choreographed sequence ratchets up the difficulty quotient a fair amount. It all takes practice. Hours flew by in our search for that elusive fluency in car control. During a break Ore pulled up in his Mustang GT and offered me a preview of his Advanced Stunt Driving curriculum--high-speed stuff that requires plenty of room.
We came booming out of the skidpad onto a narrow, serpentine road and approached a hard left turn. Ore sat motionless, making no effort to follow the roadway. I couldn't help but notice that our forward motion was about to be abruptly terminated, courtesy of a rather large boulder. At least he isn't driving my car, I thought.
At the last instant Ore lifted briefly from the throttle, feinted right then left with the wheel, and pitched the car sideways, boiling the back tires. I watched as his feet danced on the pedals, his fingers caressed the wheel as the Mustang seemed almost to rise up on tiptoes, pirouetting gracefully one way then another as he followed the road. Though the howling tires and engine roar suggested a major car crash in progress, Ore sat relaxed in his seat, making economical corrections of throttle and wheel even as the desert floor spun past the windshield like a kaleidoscope. Please God, I thought, just let me absorb twenty percent of what this man knows about driving, that's all I ask. Okay, ten percent would be acceptable.
Our search for knowledge continued as later we learned the box-ninety, a quarter-rotation spin into a small box (used in that Viper commercial). It was followed by more hours of practice. On the afternoon of the second and final day of class, at last we were given free rein, asked to execute a complex sequence of maneuvers. One car--the good guys--was pursued by a car full of bad guys firing automatic weapons and dogging their every twist and turn. It would be a multiple-camera shoot, meaning we'd have to be careful not to block the cameras' views of the rabbit car while hopefully refraining from wiping out either cameras or crew.
Taking turns at the wheel, each student executed forward and reverse one-eighties, box nineties in both directions, everything we'd learned. And most of the students put their new skills to good use. Drivers hit their marks, there were no cameras crushed, no crew members bunted into the weeds.
As we gathered on the skidpad later for a brief graduation ceremony, Ore allowed as how our final exam was a glimpse of the real world of stunt driving. "That last sequence represents about eighty percent of what you'll find on a set," he said. "And you did well; I'd be proud to work with any one of you."
Singled out for special mention was 17-year-old Mickey who'd driven rings around us all, blessed by his gift of innate talent. We'll be seeing more of this kid.
With that, Ore invited each of us to attend his 2-day Advanced Stunt Driving course, also held on weekends. According to graduates, this offer is not extended lightly; a fair number of students are invited instead to take another shot at passing the introductory class. No surprise there: it's not easy to pass muster with a guy who can drive his car to work on two wheels.
