Out of Window Out of Body “Drop Zone” Tales, Part I

Out of Window Out of Body
“Drop Zone” Tales, Part I
I
had been working on the movie “Drop
Zone” as a rigger and aerial stunt performer in Miami for nearly three months
in 1994. The movie is a bit hokey from a
skydiver’s point of view but the majority of
the stunts were not faked. Computer-generated imagery was used for some stunts,
but only minimally. Executive producer and director John Badham is known for action movies with
as real as possible stunts.
I was a lucky boy when there was a script change
that allowed me a jump from the First Federal
Building. This was the first
BASE jump in a feature film in the U.S. in more
than 10 years. After one went awry in the early
‘80s, the stunt industry put the kibosh on Hollywood and real BASE jumps. When my first jump
pleased the producers, (I didn’t shhpank!) they
changed the script again to allow for another building jump, just outside of Los Angeles.
I was about to perform this stunt for the final kill
scene. It went something like this: The good guy
(Wesley Snipes) whom I was doubling for, and the
bad guy (Gary Busey), are shooting it out on the
top floor of a building. Snipes still has his rig on,
sans the main he had cut away after landing on the
roof. They come together face to face, with guns
Moe and Rusty Vest before landing
on a boat dock.
14 • BLUESKIESMAG • ISSUE #52 • MARCH 2014
pointed at each other’s heads. Click ... Click.
They are both out of ammo. Snipes tackles Busey
and crashes through a glass window. Deploying
his reserve, he drops Busey, who then crashes
head-on into his partner’s oncoming truck windshield. End scene.
I was tortured for more than 3 hours in the
makeup and wardrobe trailer to make me look like
Snipes. They greased down what was left of my
hair and glued on a tight rubber cap. I had been
doubling for Michael Jeter (who is 5’4”, bald, and
white) and already sported 3 shaved-out bald spots
. Next, they glued black sheep’s wool on top of the
rubber cap. Sponges, pads and airbrushes made
me black. It was somewhat frightening as I looked
at a radically different me in the mirror. I walked
outside to make my way 280 feet up to the top floor
of the Warner Center building to make the jump.
As I walked across the street, there were about a
dozen of my friends sitting on the curb waiting to
watch. Some wished me luck with nervous smiles.
Many of them could not look me in the eye.
BASE jumping was still considered the lunatic
fringe and many of my friends thought I should
have been dead long ago. In fact, in my early
somewhat manic BASE jumping days, should I
take the mighty whipper, I had willed everything
I owned to a friend, in trade for practically free
rental space in his industrial building for my rigging shop. He and his partner were pretty sure I
was going to die BASE jumping. We just looked
at it like a business deal. They got the raw end
of the deal though; I lived!
Our aerial-stunt team had been doing some
very serious stunts for the last 3 months and
we were all pretty surprised that we had no
serious injuries ... or deaths. Would this be
The One? All the major stunts were in the
can except for this one. But first, here are
some behind the scenes stories and out-ofthe norm jumps that we made.
The majority of the stunts were done in
Miami. We made many night jumps over
B y M oe V iletto
A ll photos by T om S anders
w w w . ae r ial f o c us . c o m
Guy Manos overshooting
truck landing.
the ocean, landing in a downtown Miami park. On
one of those jumps, world renowned aerial cinematographer Tom Sanders, wearing an unfathomable
amount of camera gear, had a malfunction and
skidded in on his back; gutter-balling down an asphalt walkway under a Cricket reserve. No damage
to the camera itself but the custom magnesium
housing acted like a rudder as it ground into the
asphalt bringing him to a stop. There was a helicopter that was not supposed to be airborne while
we were jumping and it nearly hit Tom’s cutaway
main. The all-yellow canopy luckily landed on a sea
wall and we were just as lucky to have found it—in
the dark, no less.
Tom also filmed Jake Brake landing on the roof
of a building surrounded by death, also at night.
The roof had several levels and was scattered with
air-conditioning units, a stairwell and microwave
dishes, and was surrounded with high-tension
lines that you could hear buzzing and crackling.
An out landing was not an option. Not one you
could walk away from anyway. Jake made a steep
accuracy approach with Tom flying just
Norman Kent.
above and behind, filling up the frame and
barely out of Jakes canopy’s turbulence.
This perspective, to me, is one of the best
shots in the movie.
Tom later told me that once he lowered his
head and rested his chin cup on his chest it
became as stable as a tripod. But once his
head was lowered he would have to use his
hands should he need to raise it again. This
says a lot, seeing that Tom has the neck of an
ox from all that belly paddling in order to surf.
Watching him walk around balancing 2 concrete
blocks worth of camera gear on his head makes
one wonder how anyone could handle an opening shock. A hard opening or poor body position
had the potential to break his neck. The very wellknown cinema-photographer Norman
Kent also wore his share of pre-Go Pro
anvils and 35-millimeter movie film
cameras. These guys are super human.
Accuracy master and former Golden
Knight Rusty Vest, with me as a tandem
passenger, landed on a raised boat dock.
The director wanted us to land hard. We
had no choice. Coming up short would
have slammed us face first into the raised
dock. Overshooting would put us in the
drink. Not so bad. Rusty stove-piped us
straight down to the dock, just over a tree
line. Just like the accuracy guys do, only the
tuffett was a hardwood deck with no give.
Proving that a circa 1994 tandem canopy is
not for accuracy, we hammered. We had Harry O’ Conner, an ex-Navy SEAL, waiting under
the dock should we whack it and plop into
the drink. We came close. At the very least,
the potential to snap a limb on this jump was
something a stuntman may choose to accept.
I sat out of camera view in the front corner
bed of a dual-axle truck, with radio communication to the driver. I would be giving him speed
corrections as jumpers attempted to land in the
back while the truck was rolling through downtown Miami. And that was with tricky winds, and
at night of course. On the attempt, even after radio checks, I lost communication with the driver
as Guy Manos (who wrote the original script for the
movie) was overshooting the truck. I was screaming
“STOP!” so loudly through the radio that the driver
finally heard me from his open window. He stopped
and didn’t mow Guy down. The other two jumpers,
who also had their hands full, saw this and aborted
early on. Just flying a canopy in these windy conditions was challenging enough, let alone trying to
land in a moving truck surrounded by skyscrapers.
No more attempts were made due to the yahoo city
winds of Miami.
Longtime Skydive Deland owner Bob Hallett did
complete the stunt twice, as did Manos later on in
L.A. On one attempt, Bob approached in somewhat
bumpy air, side-saddled the right side of the truck
bed and rolled inside. Rolling the other way would
have put him under the rear wheels. Thump thump
… But it wasn’t over. His pilot chute had wrapped
around the dual axle. As the truck started to speed
away, the wheel and axle started to wind up his
bridle and reel him back out of the truck. Of course
that is the shot the editors chose.
On several day and night jumps we were asked
to “dump in a clump.” No intelligent skydiver
would ever think about deploying a parachute with
a group of others deploying at the same time in
the same space without tracking away. Sometimes
you just have to say no. The best compromise we
gave them was on a 5-way. We picked a pull sequence where, when the first person’s deployment
bag left the container, the next person would
pull and so on down the line. A slow opening or
hesitation could have put us dangerously close on
BLUESKIESMAG • ISSUE #52 • MARCH 2014 • 15
Guy Manos intentionally
docked on, then
wrapped his canopy
around Utah Steve in a
bundle of nylon and then
he would back away
and repeat while being
filmed from a helicopter.
16 • BLUESKIESMAG • ISSUE #52 • MARCH 2014
opening. On some of the larger formation
jumps, if you look closely you can see where
canopies were added to the frames digitally
in order to get multiple openings at the same
time. If Hollywood wants it, they will get it,
one way or another.
One scene called for “the gift wrap.” This
was where one of the good guys intentionally
flies and wraps his canopy around a bad guy’s
body as payback from a previous encounter.
The good guy then jettisons his canopy, leaving the bad guy cocooned in a mess of line
and nylon. And then the bad guy follows up
with a crash and burn landing in front of a set
of bleachers while still wrapped up in the cut
away canopy. Guy Manos intentionally docked on,
then wrapped his canopy around Utah Steve in
a bundle of nylon and then he would back away
and repeat while being filmed from a helicopter.
Shoobi Knutson was stacked on top of Utah’s
canopy and out of frame. This helped to help
keep Utah stable and have
his hands free to control
the wrap. The guys performed these controlled
wraps at a safe altitude,
should Utah need more
time to deal with clearing the mess if it turned
into a true wrap. But the
docks were perfect, engulfing Utah in canopy fabric
only and keeping the lines
away. The actual cutaway
was done separately. Harry
O’Conner and Guy Manos
both performed an intentional
cutaway with “air guitar move”
and reserve deployment.
A team of non-jumpers was
working on the crash landing
portion of the stunt. They constructed a rigid framework inside a canopy suspended from a
crane. The idea was to swing and
lower this contraption sideways
across the ground with a stunt
man suspended beneath. Later in
post-production, they would digitally erase any rigging and speed
up the film. After watching how
ridiculously fake this looked, Utah
coaxed BJ Worth, the aerial stunt coordinator , to do the crash and burn
himself. BJ had a chat with the director and it was a go.
Utah Steve exited the chopper and
opened with other canopies next to
him. Next, from a pouch on his chest
strap, he unfurled a “canopy wrap”
costume with sleeves that also had a
pair of goggles sewn into them. He put
them on and distributed the fake canopy
around his head and body, simulating
being gift wrapped. The sewn-in goggles
ered!
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ChutingSta
Moe Viletto as Earl Leedy, Michael Jeter’s
computer nerd character.
were a good idea but Utah was gasping for air as
the zero-porosity canopy fabric was blocking his
nose and mouth. The struggling he was doing was
not acting, but he managed to catch a breath now
and again.
For the crash landing, a section of lawn was watered down and Utah carved a turn and took the
hit—although he didn’t realize how close he came
to being taken out. The trailing lines and risers of
the wrapped canopy just nipped the top row of the
bleachers when he was carving the crashing turn.
If the riser would have stuck, the outcome would
have been very different. But as it turned out, it
was way better because it was for real, albeit a
little more risky than the original crane idea. In
fact there were several times when our aerial team
ended up doing non-jump-assigned stunts for the
regular stuntmen. They weren’t happy. The director
was more than pleased.
About the author:
Moe Viletto is the owner of
Tailored For Survival, a specialty
sewing and design company for
life support systems. He bought
a parachute after his first jump
in 1971, started to pioneer
BASE equipment and jumping
in the early 1980s, and has
been working in the parachute
industry full-time ever since.
Catch more of his stories on
Skydive Radio, episodes #188
and #189, at SkydiveRadio.com.
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