Hooper

were just like plot devices just so that these they got them to this point to this point and it was dumb I don't even want to talk about anymore but I was looking forward to this movie too so I was disappointed so another thing I want to talk about Sam a couple weeks ago you and me went out grabbed some drinks and you recommended a movie to me That I immediately came home and saw.

And that is the 1978 Burt Reynolds film Hooper.

Yes.

Yes.

No, The Villain was the Hal Needham.

Hal Needham, who had directed The Stunt Driver and Smoking the Bandit and that stuff.

Not The Stunt Driver, The Stunt Man.

He was a stunt man, but I have no idea what that movie was.

And he directed a movie that I really liked that I had just watched before The Villain.

remember

it.

Oh, no, Hooper is what I'm thinking of.

And then finally there started to be this kind of wake wave of increased appreciation for them.

And in 1978, you get the movie Hooper with Burt Reynolds as an aging stuntman trying to do a big stunt to go out on top as his career is kind of winding down.

In 1980, you get the incredible film, The Stuntman, with Steve Railsback and Peter O'Toole, which if anyone loves movies and hasn't seen that movie, definitely check it out.

That's about a fugitive on the run who ends up getting recruited by this insane director to be a stuntman on a movie set to kind of hide him from the law.

He just makes him do the craziest stunts possible.

Awesome movie.

Um, but yeah, 78 Hooper stunt man 80 and then fall guy 81.

So it's kind of like, there's this like wave of people saying maybe it's time to finally like highlight what these guys do because we couldn't have made all these awesome movies without them.

So he was asking about...

So I said I wanna talk about the '70s and '80s and the movies that I grew up on that were very influential in me, and some of them were part of the movies that I was a part of, and, uh, and... or ones that my pops used to talk about, or Hal Needham, that was my dad's best friend, that I got to really talk to him a lot about, you know, the great two movies that I thought he made, Smokey and the Bandit and Hooper.

You know, that were two really fun movies.

Um-

There is such...

Like, me being an ex-stuntman, there's so much truth behind the curtain to being a stuntman that I think majority of the people don't know about.

And Burt and Hal Needham, the director in Hooper, showed this really terrific scene, 'cause it obviously had all these sets and stunts going on on the movies that Burt's character plays.

But there's this scene when Burt's alone.