Hal Needham's Six Greatest Stunts

Decades before CGI allowed filmmakers to create exciting action sequences from the safety of the editing bay, men and women who were exceptionally brave, tough and a little crazy had to perform the stunts themselves—and wear the bruises and broken bones as badges of honor. Stuntmen jumped the cars, fell from the highest towers and tackled the bad guys from their horses. When it comes to the most influential, iconic and pioneering stuntmen of all time, the nearly indestructible Hal Needham is it—one of the greatest to ever walk onto a movie set. Here are his six greatest stunts.

By Ben Stewart


GM Pickup Truck Canal Jump

In the mid 1970s, General Motors was interested in creating an exciting 20-minute stunt film that it could show in its dealerships to keep customers entertained. Needham proposed jumping a pickup truck across a 140-foot-long canal, and GM signed on. He says, "We didn't have enough room to just use the engine in the truck, so we mounted a 15,000-pound-thrust, hydrogen-peroxide rocket on the back." Needham only had 50 or 60 yards to get the truck up to speed before the end of the ramp and knew he would have to be going at least 100 mph to get over the canal. "When my front wheels hit that ramp, I hit the rocket. It was so powerful that the back wheels couldn't keep up with the thrust of the rocket and it left black marks from the back tires skidding. The nose of the truck just kept rising and rising and rising. I lost the ramp on the other side—couldn't see it at all—I was looking at blue sky." The truck landed tail-first and the force of the impact whipped the nose of the truck down so hard it bent the frame and blew out the windshield and rear window. Needham was hauled off to the hospital with his first broken back, a compression fracture. "This thing had a telemetry system we wired up in the cab . . .I pulled 29 g's when I landed on the other side," he says.
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