Father Malone's Weekly Roundup - Devil at Your Heels (1981)

Thank you. We're back here. We're talking about daredevils, though not a Von Doomfest daredevil. Nevertheless, HP is here. We're talking about a particular daredevil, a Canadian daredevil.

Those are rare. And we're talking about Ken Carter. In particular, we're talking about the 1981 documentary The Devil at Your Heels, which chronicled his attempt to jump the St. Lawrence River over the distance of a mile in a rocket car. And we're bringing all of this up because in just one week, September the 25th, as a matter of fact, there is a feature film, a narrative film being made about him, actually made.

It's like I said, it's coming out next week, starring Jay Baruchel as Ken Carter. That film is simply called The Stuntman. H.P., is this your first introduction to Ken Carter? And what is your experience with daredevils in general? I think we were the last generation to experience pure.

Yeah, I was not familiar with him at all. until I saw the trailer for The Stuntman, and that led me to work backwards. And once I learned that it was based off of this documentary, I just thought, well, okay, most adaptations of documentaries, or a lot of them, don't measure up to the original source material, because we all know that truth is stranger than fiction. I agree with you that our generation probably was the last that. Were. entranced by the actions and the adventures of the daredevils. Evil Knievel's obviously the template.

We all know, I mean, even today, Evil Knievel is a known commodity. Everybody knows the name. No one's actually seen what he does or maybe knows what he does, but everybody knows what an Evil Knievel is. what the idea represents. So, yeah, I was very excited to come across this. This is an interesting sort of lost chapter.

I love anything that takes place in the good old 70s. There's an innocence to that, and I don't know, I dug it. I want to explore more about the 1970s and Daredevil, right? Did you have the wind-up Evel Knievel motorcycle? Of course, yes.

Of course. I had it as a kid, and I got it years and years later. They put out a reproduction of it that I picked up so I could play with it. I probably got it more for me, but I played with it with my kids. Now, did you have the ripcord version, or do you have that awesome thing you put him into, like with a crank, and you would spin it, and then he would zoom out of there?

I had the crank version. I didn't even know there was a ripcord version. Yeah, I had the simple ripcord version myself. I was always envious of the giant cranking machine. Because how else was I going to get this guy to never land a fucking landing ever?

Much like Evel Knievel himself. You know, you said he has endured. In fact, not to give too much free advertising, because I don't really like their pie all that much. But we have a pizza place called Evel Pie here in Las Vegas. It is completely Evel Knievel themed.

And there have been two movies about Evel Knievel in the past, I believe. Did you ever see the one Viva Knievel? Is that the one with George Hamilton? Yes. I did.

I saw it many, many, many years ago. I got it on, it was a, it was when DVDs were super popular companies, I suspect it was material that had the copyright had run out on. So you would get these cheapo DVDs that would have a double feature or, you know, a number of movies on one disc. And this one had Viva Knievel and it had, I don't remember the name of the movie, but it was, it featured Joe Namath as a Hell's Angel or something. Oh my God.

Was that not the one featured in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood? What's her name is in? Sharon Tate. She goes to the Bruin Theater and puts up her dirty feet and we have to look at those dirty feet for the entire scene. It was called CC and Company.

That was the name of the movie. Says the description is a motorcycle rebel saves a woman from a gang and fights an outlaw guru for supremacy. And this, I'm looking at the cast list. Sid Haig was in it. Anne Margaret was also in it.

But I do not see Sharon Tate, so I don't think it was the same movie. Hmm. Maybe that was... Oh, it was a trailer playing before her movie. Ah.

That's what it was. That's what it was. Because Tarantino loves Cece and Company, apparently. Yeah. Oh boy.

Now this is the, this like you, this is the first time I'd ever heard of Ken Carter. I feel a little bit ashamed that I only know Knievel because Knievel seems like a real dick as a human being. And from what I gather, Ken Carter seems like a real sweetheart. I read years and years ago, someone wrote a, I think it's considered like the definitive biography of evil Knievel. I don't remember who the author was, but it was a big bestseller at the time.

And that's, What you're saying is borne out. I think he was a grifter. I don't think he was a nice person. He was only heroic by dint of the fact that he would do these crazy stunts, but I'm not sure that he's somebody that should be held up as a shiny example of goodness or humanity. I think if he hadn't worn those awesome suits, we wouldn't be talking about him today.

No, and I know that... I believe, I didn't see any of it, but I believe his son tried to carry on the family tradition of stunt work, but. I don't know how good he was. Robbie Knievel. Robbie Knievel, that's exactly right.

I think he might have. I know that he didn't try Snake River again, but I think he did some stunt work in Vegas, like at Caesars, I think. He sure did. Now, I myself have crossed the Snake River dozens of times, and I've not broken any bones, so I think I'm a better daredevil than Evil Knievel. I've also visited his hometown in Idaho, where there is a cafe where they serve his favorite dish, which was the most disgusting chili I've ever had in my life.

Yeah, you've mentioned that to me in the past, actually. Yeah, but the listeners haven't heard it. Yeah, now let me get into the nuts and bolts of the movie here. The Devil at Your Heels. Here's the trailer, everybody.

Ken Carter jumps cars for a living, and people like to see him do it. They come for the thrill of watching a man risk his life. At 37, he knows he can't keep jumping forever. But Ken has a dream. Before he's finally through, Ken Carter wants to amaze the world.

The Devil At Your Heels is directed by Robert Fortier, starring Ken Carter, and narrated by Gordon Pinsett, who has some dulcet tones. And in doing a little research, I discovered a crossover between one of HPMI's absolute obsessions, that he is an actor in his own right, and starred in an episode of Banachek. In fact, no sign of the cross. Oh, that's what the... I was wondering what the crossover was with that.

That's the guy who narrated the movie. Yeah, man. Who's, by the way, still alive, still kicking around, still acting. That's crazy. How did you make that connection?

Wow. I was just going through his IMDb page. I went, oh, Banachek. I happen to have some familiarity with Mr. Banachek.

Let's go watch that episode. And he's the villain. He's John Weymouth. He's like the main guy. That is.

I vaguely remembered that episode, but... But that's an incredible pull. That's really, really cool. So everyone, if you want to see this guy, episode three, season one, Manichek, no sign of the cross. But yeah, it's crazy that a movie like this devil, devil at their heels, or is it, is it, was it their heels or your heels?

I can't, I can't remember. Your heels, not mine, sir. Devil at your heels. I, I think we're going to get into the, in more into the nuts and bolts of it, but I think you, you and I, you can agree with me that it's, it's a really remarkable movie. It's, it's, it's, Really, it's so entertaining.

It's one of those truly truth is stranger than fiction type of of stories. But how is it that it took this, you know, fictionalized remake to shed light on it? It's amazing. It is amazing. You know what it makes me think of, though?

And I probably said this before. There are certain biographical elements. pictures that are based on novels or, you know, other materials effectively. And then there are movies that are based on documentaries. So I can think of Man on a Wire got turned into that, whatever that Zemeckis film was with Joseph Gordon-Levitt. I think The Walk.

The Wire. The Walk. I was going to say The Wire. The Walk. Yeah.

And then we had Man on the Moon based on the documentaries about Andy Kaufman. And every time that I see a film like what was it? What was the one with Steve Crow? Another Zemeckis thing. Another fucking welcome to.

Oh, he's the guy who makes the war miniature. Yeah. Marwen call or something like that. Yes. Yeah.

Great documentary. Just an OK movie. And I'm worried, even though it seems like the the Baruchel film coming out, The Stuntman, by the way, terrible fucking title, considering there already is a movie called The Stuntman. And that movie is fucking awesome. Yeah, you know, he's doing it as a little independent film, so it has this sort of scrappiness of the original guy.

But at the same time, this is so well documented. Like, I can't see a fictional film adding anything to this. I agree. I will say that I've already read some of the advanced reviews of The Stuntman, and apparently they did a really good job with it. It's the same director who did Goon, that Sean William Scott movie.

I like that. I like that first one. The second one I did not like. First one, I agree. The first one was much better than the second one because he's able to, he really humanized the character who could have just been a parody of himself, but I thought he did a really good job.

And I think he's going to work a similar magic here. So I'm hoping it'll be good, but at the same time, having watched the original source material, which I, it's my understanding they took actual footage from this original movie and used it in the fictionalized retelling. It's, I can't imagine, I'm certainly not going to learn anything new. I mean, you're seeing this, this movie was filmed over the course of what, five years? Five years.

It was meant to be like a puff piece, like, profile on a famous Canadian in 1980, and then they just kept filming and filming and filming, and five years later, we got this. Wow. Okay. Let's talk about Ken Carter for a second, shall we? Absolutely.

Very Canadian, it must be said. Extremely. The most Canadian, if you will. He's very polite, and he's very sweet, and he's got optimism... If you could bottle this man's optimism, we would all never need drugs again.

This isn't a spoiler. I want to avoid saying too much about the story because I don't want to spoil some of the twists and turns for people. But I will say within the first 10 minutes, the first thing you see with Ken is he's doing a stunt where he's just jumping a car over. I think it's like 15 station wagons, let's say. This was him pre-Doug.

Oh, yeah. Now, this is showing us. They're trying to show us Ken at his prime. Like, this is the big wow to suck us into this crazy journey we're going to go into. Right.

He doesn't even clear the cars. He doesn't. He makes it about probably halfway to three quarters of the way over, and he just falls on top of one of these cars. But in the process, he really injures himself severely. I believe he breaks his leg or his ankle.

Breaks his right ankle, yeah. Breaks his right ankle, which is commonplace for these daredevil. People don't think about that. Even a crash like this in Hollywood looks like nothing. The impact is severe enough that he has to be pulled out of the car.

But instead of just going right to the ambulance, which is what he should have done, he insists that they bring a microphone over to him. He's in all this pain. But as politely as he can muster, he tells the people, look, don't worry. I will be here tomorrow to attempt another stunt. You haven't seen the last of me.

Thank you for... I mean, I would be howling if my ankle had just been broken. I'd be screaming, take me to the hospital. And you can see how much pain he's in because you can see that hand tremoring with that microphone in it, just trying to maintain it level while he's announcing how fine everything really is. That's exactly it.

It's that relentless Canadian optimism that you can... It's sort of like how people would describe the stiff upper lip for English folks. I've known a fair few Canadians in my time, and this is very much par for the course. And we'll see moments over and over again where any regular sane human being, when faced with some of the obstacles that are popping up, and some of them are minor and some of them are major. He doesn't ever freak out, not once.

No, he just, he's looking for a way through. He's single-minded in his determination. He makes no bones about the fact that he wants to do this big jump over the St. Lawrence because he wants to be the number one guy. He wants to supplant Evel Knievel as the number one Daredevil.

I don't, but actually I don't even think he really uses the word daredevil. I think, I don't think anyone in this movie does. Yeah. I think he's, he, and it's funny because he does, he makes reference to the word. He doesn't use stuntman either because stuntman to him is lesser to what he does.

Stuntman is like something that you graduate from to do what he does. I don't remember what he, what he, if he even calls, he categorizes what he does. But you can, I mean, you can understand that because a stuntman is an anonymous person who just makes something crash and, you know, that's it. And this is a person doing it for all the glory. Yeah, and you would assume somebody like this is, again, taking the Evel Knievel template that he's some sort of grifter who is just looking to fleece people's money and not really, you know, it doesn't take the actual, like, risk-taking seriously.

But I never got that sense with Ken Carter. I got the sense that he does want to be respected. He comes from extremely humble beginnings, which we will talk about. And that has to feed into his mania for wanting to be considered the best at what he does. Let's talk about those humble beginnings, because when they introduced the concept, it's the typical, it was a hardscrabble youth.

And, you know, he was able to rise above and now look at him in this day. Right. And now look at him today. And I thought, because where was he growing up? Was it Toronto?

Was it Quebec or Montreal? I think it was Montreal. If I remember correctly, it was Montreal. So it's like the slums of Montreal. And I'm like, oh, come on.

How bad could it be? It's like Victorian England where he grew up. He walks in, and it's like complete devastation in this courtyard, as if a nuclear war had happened many, many years ago. And he looks around smiling and says, not much has changed. It looks like what you see Chernobyl looking like.

Everything is desolate and empty. No one's living in this apartment anymore. And it's just, he talks about there's a window that looks out onto nothing. And he and his siblings... would wait in line so they could look out the window. They could take turns looking out the window.

That's how desperately sad and hardscrabble their life was. They don't have toys. They don't have a television to occupy them. They have to look out the window. It's like watching the light bulbs burn or something.

He has to fight for the right to look out the window. Look out the window. Anyone listening to this, think about that. That someone. That's their one means and mode of entertainment is looking out, just simply looking out the window.

That's where this guy's coming from. And yet he's so relentlessly cordial and confident and all of that. It's really remarkable. I must admit, this movie, everybody, it's going to be linked in the show notes. It's on YouTube.

It's free. So you can go check it out. Should have mentioned that before we got into it. I will admit that I got as far as him saying, so we used to fight for the right to look through the window. I might have skipped ahead 30 seconds or 45 seconds just to, because it was becoming so irretrievably sad that I didn't think I was going to be able to go on.

It doesn't go on for that much longer than that. I'll say I didn't skip ahead, but I do want to mention that not only is this free on YouTube. Now, usually when you say a movie is free on YouTube, that means it's just this crappy thing. copy of a copy of a VHS. This looks to me like this is a first generation copy. It's the Canadian Film Council or whatever.

The Canadian Film Board, the CFB. The CFB, who I've seen their work in other ways, and I think they truly do God's work in everything they do. It's an absolute sterling copy. And I didn't feel like I was missing anything from watching it that way. No, it had to have been completely remastered.

I think they did do a sort of big re-release in 2016 of this or something. Somebody put it out as another edition. This feels like that. But. As you said, you can go to the Canadian Film Board website right now and watch it for free.

Oh, it's on there too? Yeah. So that might actually be a rip of their version and then just dumped onto YouTube. Oh, interesting. Yeah.

Canadian Film Board, as you said, doing the Lord's work. I remember if you watched HBO at all during the 1980s, they would never start a movie that not on a half hour or the hour. It was usually the hour. Which meant that if a movie ended at like 10.35, then they had to fill 25 minutes of material. So they would show any and everything, including all of the Canadian film board shorts, all the animated shorts that had been proliferating since the 70s.

The cat came back, everybody. The cat came back. Have you ever seen the sweater? I have seen the sweater. Maurice Richard, the hockey player.

Did you see the big snit? It sounds familiar. It's a couple playing Scrabble while the world is ending outside. Oh, okay. I thought it was going to be some sort of Dr.

Seuss-ian, you know, the snitches or something. No, it's so good. Yeah, I don't even want to ruin anything, even one of the jokes, honestly. I'm going to watch that following this recording, Father Malone. Everyone go to the Canadian film board and then watch Devil at Your Heels.

So... Okay, we get the history of Ken, and it's fine. He's a gregarious fellow. When we first meet him, he's rather unkempt, but he's shaven. And then we jump ahead a year, and suddenly he is a full-on beatnik with a black turtleneck and chain.

So I guess he's a member of the Lonely Island as well. But now the hair is bushier, and he's got the makings of a Van Dyke. He's a little... It has to be said, he's put on a few pounds also. I think this is his greatest form.

Of the five years that we see him, second year Ken Carter is... He could have jumped it without the car right here. So he's jumping from... I don't know if we set the stage. He's jumping over the St.

Lawrence Seaway, but he's jumping from the Canadian sides over to the American side. But what's one of the remarkable aspects of this is that there's no... There's no landing zone on the other side. There's no ramp on the opposite side. So what his plan is, what they decide to do is plant rose bushes so that at least his landing can be cushioned.

Aim for the roses, he says at one point. Aim for the roses. Which, by the way, a side note, aim for the roses. I don't know if you found this out in your research. There was another documentary called Aim for the Roses, which... was a musical docudrama about a guy named Mark Haney who wrote a musical about Ken Carter in 2018 or 2012 or something.

So he wrote a musical about Ken Carter, and this documentary is about the guy writing the musical about Ken Carter. I was not able to locate this, but it sounds. So Aim for the Roses is the devil at your heels for the theater version of the exact same story. Exactly. All I could find, and I would encourage you to check this out if you haven't already, for a lot of people listening, is there are trailers on YouTube.

And it looks completely bonkers because it looks like something like, it looks like Flaming Lips doing songs in tribute to Ken Carter. They're wearing the same outfits and they're driving the same car that he drove in it. But it's all like musical stuff with cellos and it looks completely bizarre. But anyway, my point is Aim for the Roses. When you said that, it reminded me of this other movie.

But yeah, that's his thing. Aim for the Roses. That will cushion his fall. If we had found out about this new Baruchel movie, we could have made the documentary about the making of that movie. What would you call it?

And called it some other, I don't know, some other obscure Ken Carter. We call it the Mad Canadian, which is what they should have called this movie, The Stuntman. That is his nickname. His nickname is the Mad Canadian and nobody's using it. But the thing is, he's the Mad Canadian and he's...

One of the great things about any daredevil or stock car driver or anybody, demolition derby enthusiast, is they always paint... like everything about them all over the car, all over the helmets, all over everything. So he has a helmet that has like Ken Carter on the front and it says the Mad Canadian on both sides and probably has information about his stunts. But I just love the self-aggrandizement, even though he's so Canadian that he doesn't go that far. He doesn't go as far as Evel Knievel in doing that, but there's still an element of that. And I love that this is such a threadbare production throughout.

That when somebody else takes over the role of stuntman for him, he's still wearing Ken's mad Canadian helmet because that's like probably the only helmet they could afford. The plan. I'm going to jump one mile over this river and land in a cow field, hoping the cows aren't there, by the way, because there's really nothing they can do about what's going on on that other side. Should we cut the trees down? No, we don't want to ruin anything too badly over here.

And what I love about this documentary, it's just germane to late 70s, early 80s, everything filmed on 16mm. They got themselves a helicopter, knowing they were going to need one for the jump. So they make full fucking use of that helicopter. The opening scene is just a slow orbit around this lonely ramp, standing in the middle of this landscape. And when they reshow it, when he's describing the stunt, they cut back to that footage.

And I'm just looking at it and going, There's just no way, Ken. This whole notion of rocket cars and rocket-powered vehicles, motorcycles, this is obviously Evel Knievel's stock in trade, but the physics, in the light of day, they just don't make any sense to me. I don't see how anyone could co-sign on this idea that he's going to fly a mile, a mile in a car. That has been specially outfitted with a rocket. It just seems insane to me.

But at the same time, what's also crazy is that at least at the outset, he's got coverage on ABC Wide World of Sports, which was a big show at the time. And he has all these investors who are willing to put in money. The car itself, I think, cost something in the neighborhood of $ 100, 000 in sales. 1976 money, which is probably like $ 650, 000 now. Yeah, at.

Least. I did love the sort of the P.T. Barnum aspect of it, the early on where he's just trying to sell the stunt, and they go to Toronto, and they've got the car mocked up on a flatbed, and they're going to hit... They turn on the engine so it blasts the entire street. And as it turns out, none of that is real.

That's just like a mock-up car that they built just to get investment. It wasn't even the real car that they were going to have to build the car. There is a real huckster vibe to it. Although not to say that he's trying to defraud anybody. No, no, no.

It's showmanship, man. It's like William Castle. That is exactly it. He has to build the interest just to get the investors so he can build the car and build this ramp. I mean, this ramp is no joke.

It's steel girders that are being welded by hand. And one of the big challenges that they face throughout is they're doing this. What's the town they're doing this in? It's like Morrisburg or something on the Canadian side. Remember the name of the town they're doing it in?

I don't. What, what apparently they, this there, I don't know if it's unseasonable or if it's just the way it is, but they get hit constantly with rain, which is pushing the progress of this ramp building out and out. That's one of the reasons why this thing took five years to pull off is because they could never get the ramp. Well, actually let's break some of those problems down in the first year. He goes and tries to find investors in that scene that I just described and gets nowhere.

And then out of the fucking blue, ABC television swoops in and is like, we'll pay for the whole thing. And it's like, well, here we go. And then it takes forever to get the car built, which is what pushes the date back in the first place. Right? The whole purpose is to have this car.

And then. Because the date of the first ramp jump gets pushed, then it gets into this rainy season. And so that spoils it, which scares off ABC, who decide, by the way, when they pull out, it's not necessarily like we're not interested in anymore. It's we're pretty sure this guy might die. Well, they also, ABC.

Oh, yeah. The secret weapon. They send Evel Knievel to appraise everything. And he goes out there. He's kicking the ramp.

He's looking. He's talking with Ken. And he essentially files a report with the ABC Wide World of Sports where he says, look, this is too dangerous. I don't know that he can get up to speed on this ramp. I don't think the ramp is high enough.

I think it's too rainy. I think it's too dangerous. I would do the jump. And that effectively, I think that that only contributes to the skittishness around whether they're going to pull this thing off. Right.

But that's not what that's not when they pull the plug. That's when they decide we're only going to film it just in case he dies. We don't want to broadcast that live. So that's I love that. That's still the mentality of networks.

It's we don't care if he dies. We just don't want to horrify people when it happens. We'll just turn this to an immemorial special and include a lot of the jump. I mean, it does make some sense. You don't want to horrify viewers or turn them off completely or, God forbid, on their part, be liable for this guy dying as part of a television special.

So, whatever their logic is, it's hard to fault the notion that, you know, maybe this isn't going to be all sunshine and roses. So, So they push it a whole year, which seems a little weird to me. But anyway. But now, OK, so ABC is effectively pulled out. But he has now a whole group of investors and he's got enough money to basically get everything going.

Can we talk about the car for a moment? Because when they show the prototype of the car on the drag strip when they're testing it and it's just the shell. So it's the metal and it's all welded together and the rockets are involved. There's no there's no outer coating. Right.

It's like when Iron Man first emerges from the cave and it's not red and yellow. It's just, you know, just straight up gray metal. That's what we're looking at here. Yeah. And when I was looking at that, I thought, wow, I think he's got a real shot.

Yeah. No, I thought that thing aerodynamically and low to the ground as it was. I thought that just as a projectile, like the head of a bullet. I think that could go pretty far and probably make it. I don't know if he would survive, but I think it could probably go the mile, right?

It was very compact. Yeah. And then they're like, and now here's the car. And the car pulls around the corner. It's like a fucking Crown Victoria shell on top of this thing with Aeron's quote unquote, these wings like attached to the side.

And I thought, is no one involved even familiar with the concept of aerodynamics? Yeah. Well, they needed the Flash. We already talked about, or you mentioned, that we wouldn't know who Evel Knievel was if he didn't have the star-spangled jumpsuit and the bike and whatever. So you needed to have that Flash.

Even his eventual jumpsuit that he has to don has arrows on it, and it's not quite the Evel Knievel deal. So I get that, but it made me think of NASCAR... cars that people maybe don't realize that, that when you look at a NASCAR vehicle, like there's headlights, but the headlights aren't real. They're, they're essentially painted on because having headlights makes the car heavier. So I kind of looked at it that way, but yeah, I, I. Mean, having, it's not helping HP.

It is not helping his, the whole purpose is to jump far. This is saying, I don't want you to jump far. But he wants to do it in style. Right. How about the shell of a 1959 shoebox Ford?

It's all round, man. Well, they could have also just painted. Yes, painted cool shit on the. Yes, this is my point. Like, I understand you got to have sizzle with the steak, but like the sizzle goes on top of the steak.

You don't need a shell that's automatically creating drag to the point where you're going to fucking die. But already, we're glossing over a little bit. So they build this car, and I guess the builders, I don't want to talk too badly of them because they apparently were very respected in that industry at that time. Yeah, but apparently everyone was an idiot in the daredevil industry. Apparently, because they build it, and they're going to test, because the fuel they're using is some sort of hydrogen peroxide derivative, which- I'm led to believe is highly, highly volatile.

So they build this fuel tank and they test it and the tank explodes, which sets them back. So then they have a scene where the two owners of the company are talking about this failure and they basically say, all right, well, you know, this is why you have to do things yourself. If you want it to get done right, you have to do it yourselves. It was the welds, the welds didn't hold and we thought that might be the case. So Now we're going to work on it ourselves and it'll get done right.

And what happens? They test the second tank and it also explodes. At which point the narrator even says they refuse to be, you know, they're not talking to us anymore. No, they fucked off to Florida or wherever they were from. They just, they won't, because they looked like idiots.

Yeah. They came on and said, well, we're going to do it ourselves and do it right. And it still failed. So how do you come back from that? I would like to point out that When we first meet Ken and he's going to do that first jump, the one where he breaks his ankle, the simple jump.

Yeah. We meet him and whatever person is with him and they are stripping the car that he's going to jump with. So they're pulling off all the inessential pieces to get it less weighty so it'll go farther. Right. And he gets in and he starts it up and he says, ah, doesn't run too bad.

Doesn't run too good either. You know, I would prefer another one, but this is the one we got. And I think that is maybe the problem with the entire rest of the movie. I mean, it's a great movie. I'm not saying anything wrong with the movie.

I'm just saying that might be the problem with the entire operation going forward. It always seems like that's good enough. Well, not only that, but he gets out of the car, that first car at the beginning of the movie, and he says, look here, do you hear that? And he's shaking the door, and he says, do you see how that thing's shaking? Because the frame of this whole thing is all rusted out.

See people around here, they run these cars into the ground. This is the best of what we can have. The framework's all rusted out though. So I don't, you know, but like, so I'm thinking I'm seeing him rock this car back and forth and you can see it flexing like a car that you're pulling on the door should not flex. So it looks like maybe the, the way Christine might've looked when they were pulling her apart in while they're making Christine, you know what I mean?

Like it's just nothing inside. It looks completely, it, it, It looks completely unsafe. So for him to still, you know, like you said, just greet it with a shrug and go, well, I mean, this is the best that we have in this area. So what am I going to do? This is what I have.

So it's no surprise that he would end up injuring himself badly, even though like the actual impact of it didn't look that bad. But I mean, the car was like being held together by chewing gum and hope at that point. Yeah, but we can't expect anything else. Because that's who he's surrounding himself with. I mean, it really is charming, his unflagging belief in himself and the notion that he's going to do this stunt.

Come hell or high water, he's going to do this stunt. And he comes. Well, here's the thing. I was thinking about this. Should we just... warn of spoilers and say, here's the point of no return and talk about what happens?

Or should we just. The only real spoiler in this movie is how it ends. But it's a big one, though. Yeah, don't tell how it ends. But, okay.

I guess we can leave it at that. But I will say this. Not mentioning how it actually ends. Leading up to that, there are at least a couple of. By the way, we can just say spoilers from here on out, yeah.

Yeah. So so up to up to the ending, he has at least what, two or three times where he comes. At one point, he comes within like 15 seconds of going like this stunt is going. And then he has to stop because there's there's essentially a mechanical failure that prevents him from going. But multiple times, like if I were in a car like that, I would chicken out at the drop of a hat.

I wouldn't even consider doing this. So for him to say it's a go many times, either he's crazy or he's just that determined, or both. Before his car is even built, he goes to try out another car. And this is a scene where his assistant, his protege, has brought his racing suit, but Ken has forgotten. His.

So he has to put on this younger, smaller man's clothes, which he barely squeezes into. And now he has to squeeze into a car that is custom built for somebody at least like five or six inches shorter than him and at least 20 pounds lighter. And now he has to take off this sausage skin of a racing thing just so he can fit in the thing. And the entire time my anxiety was through the fucking roof because I am very claustrophobic and watching him squeeze into that seat where he has to, he has to angle one shoulder and then the other to like lock behind these things. And then everything.

It's a funny car, which I'm not sure is a thing anymore. I remember when I used to hear about these a lot more, but, It's, it's essentially a chassis that is custom made for the driver, which is why he has such a hard time because the driver is a few inches shorter and certainly a few pounds lighter. So you, you, it formed around you. So for him to climb into that, and then you, you like bring the body of the car down over you, like, like, like it, like a, like a cockpit almost. And did we mention his protege's name is Kenny Powers, like eastbound and down?

Do you think that he was inspired by that name? He must have been. And what a shame that they didn't get him to play like maybe 10 years ago. Like Kenny Powers in this movie, the sort of protege stuntman. You know, he reminded me of what's his name?

Ryan Dunn from Jackass. Yeah, exactly. Really, he looked and sounded to me like what you would consider the prototypical daredevil stuntman of the time. Just totally jacked up. Just a rough and ready guy, hair all scraggly.

You can tell he's been in a few wrecks. They talk about how he broke his back once or twice, so now he has to race with a special brace because it could cripple him. It's absolutely insane. I will say, though, they show him complete one jump. And the howls of joy coming from this man upon landing properly made me think, yeah, he really ought to be doing this.

This is probably the only thrill this man has in his life. Oh, yeah. He is like a hero when he completes that. And the adrenaline. And let's just say he did complete a jump.

Every fucking jump we see of these daredevils, they always just end up crashing into something, and then we cheer because they get out alive. This guy did the jump, landed the car, and drove away. I've seen footage. Here's something I want to mention. So after I saw this movie, I recommended it to another friend of mine who has similar tastes, and we got into a little debate about daredevils nowadays.

And he did correctly make the point that, look, There are still people who do this. The Nitro Circus. That's exactly it. The Metal Militia. Metal Militia.

That's another good one. There's a whole traveling circus of these stunt performers that come to Gillette Stadium every year. It's like what they used to do with Bigfoot. They just put a bunch of cars in an arena and they just go to town. Right.

So because I was I had said to him, why are you? You really couldn't have that time that we had in the 70s where Evil Knievel was big news. And he had, you know, actual because, you know, no one's covering the metal militia nowadays. No, they're doing crazy shit all the time and probably posting it and it's streaming everywhere and nobody hears a thing. Nobody hears a thing.

And because I think it's all become so much more sophisticated now. and it's been codified and made into an industry. Whereas back then it really, it was only a few steps removed from some backwater hick. Who's just jumping alligators on his motorcycle for fun. Or, or a Harry Houdini, you know, just somebody who shows up when everybody look at me for 10 seconds, I'm going to do something you've never seen before. And everyone goes, Ooh.

Who's the, but no, but who's the guy? Oh, I can't think of his name. Harry Blackstone. No, no, no, no. The guy who like, What's his name?

The extreme close-up magician who goes to Vegas and he's like. Oh, David Blaine. David Blaine, who's always... It's like no stage presence, but he can do the most incredible things. But I guess he's the closest we have to a Harry Houdini, right?

Where he'll say, I'm going to go to Times Square and I'm going to encase myself in a big block of Jell-O for a week. And you can come out and see me do this and there's no... There's no subterfuge. It's not like I'm faking it. That is very Harry Houdini, because Houdini's stuff seemed as much to be endurance test as trickery, you know?

But, I mean, David Blaine can do really good close-up magic. Yeah, no, I'm not trying. Look, he's a really good magician, but that doesn't mean that he's just not a weird guy who has a very odd cadence. I don't want to see you on ice for a week. Who gives a shit?

What are you doing, man? It's... But it is he is really the heir apparent to Harry Houdini. You're right. But I guess my point is we still have these attention seeking, you know, feats of strength and human achievement.

But it's just not it will never be what it was with Knievel. and Ken Carter and all these other risk takers. Well, maybe it's a little more pure now because there's no element of grandstanding necessarily. None of these people are doing it because they think they're going to become famous, whereas everyone in the 70s thought they were going to become famous doing this crazy nonsense. Everybody. And by the way, I managed to remember this book.

There's a book, there's an author named Scott Von Doviak, who is one of my favorites. He's only written two books, but they're fantastic. One he did was called Lowdown Road, which is basically like a 70s exploitation movie in a book where these two cousins from the South have this scheme to defraud, I think, the mafia out of $ 1 million in weed. And this all goes down at Evel Knievel's Snake River Canyon jump. So what they've done is they've crafted, this guy's crafted this crazy, you know, pulpy story that, But based in reality of the jump and all the logistics around it.

It's a fantastic book and I recommend it to everybody. I don't know why this guy isn't like well known as an author because he does amazing. The other one was called, I think, Charles Gate Confidential, which is about, it's another heist type story, but it takes place at the Charles Gate Apartments in Boston. And it's a parallel story from like, I think the 40s, the 80s and the 2000s where this scheme, this heist is happening. And he's just an incredible author.

But Lowdown Road was the one that takes place during Evel Knievel's jump. And it's very evocative. So I just wanted to mention that. Joe Hill wrote a short story. It was a romance that took place during the filming of Dawn of the Dead.

Did he really? That's interesting. Is it a short story? It is. And it's one of the best things I've ever read of his.

It's a gap in my reading. I keep saying I'm going to get into Joe Hill, but I never do. His novels are good, but like Dad, his short fiction is really fucking punchy and good, man. Stays with me. His short fiction, actually, I find now sticks with me a lot more than his dad's in some ways.

Really? Oh, that's interesting. Well, I mean, he's our age, so he's talking our language, you know, and Stephen was, Mr. King was speaking his generation's language. That is true, but there was something homespun about the way Stephen King would use language, and I always found that comforting, even in the midst of All the crazy stuff he wrote about.

Oh, I don't necessarily mean the style of writing so much as what King's fears were the fears of his generation and Joe Hill's are more ours. So I find that what he's trying to dissect about horror resonates with me a lot more powerfully than what I was experiencing through King, which was his interpretation, you know? Makes sense. He's a dead ringer for his dad, too. It's creepy.

It is super creepy. I know. I love it. Anyway. Anyway, we got sidetracked here.

We're talking about Kenny Powers. He's a character. This movie is filled with characters. Let's talk about Sammy. Speaking of characters.

So he's got this guy, Sammy. He's the rocket car guy. And he's the first to test the rocket car. And shouldn't have everyone known at that moment... Maybe Sammy should take a lesser role in this organization when he cracks up the fucking rocket car.

And then doesn't tell Ken what the problem was. So Ken experiences the exact same problem. Yeah. Who is this Sam guy? He's the villain of the piece.

Well, there's many villains to this piece. I think Sam's the contender. I think, well, just so embarrassing for that to happen. I mean, because they have a film. He didn't bank on the fact that there was going to be a film crew following them around.

As you said, this was just supposed to be a puff piece for a couple of weeks about this stupid jump. But it becomes this thing where now the filmmakers are following them around for literally years. So, I mean, you know, I'm not excusing Sammy or what happens. I'm just saying he didn't account for this. Yeah, but after he cracked up that car, he knows he's on camera.

And so he knows he's going to get called out for his bullshit. And he keeps getting called out and he keeps talking his way out of it. And I think Kenny is so nice that he just accepts it. But at the same time, I keep thinking, your life is on the line, man. Why are you listening to this fool?

You would figure that, yeah, you would want the best of the best people that you trust implicitly. After I almost destroyed my car because of a problem that you had noticed and then did not tell me about, that would be the end of our acquaintance. And then... They fucking, there's another moment where, where they're about to try the fucking jump and the engine like vents, like it down vents, they say. And like, and it like lets out all the fuel.

And if he had actually gone for it, he never would have even like gotten off of the ramp. And Sam is just like, blah, Zay's like. No, that's fine. It's all fine. That was like supposed to happen.

Even it was, that's exactly what it was supposed to do. Yeah. Oh, that's what, that's the closest. up to the end of the movie, let's say, that he comes, he's literally seconds from punching that car and going. But because of this weird venting issue, he had to, it was an abort situation. Abort, abort.

It's like what you see in Apollo 13 or whatever. It was, you know, he came that close at that point. He analyzed it. Okay, but those were the first two false starts. The other one is a little more impactful.

When Ken is just driving the car up the ramp for the first time, He notices how bumpy it is. And it's not the first time it's been pointed out to him, which he points out to Sammy, who's just like, no, once you're at 250 miles an hour, those bumps aren't going to matter. You're just going to launch right off of them. And I'm sitting there going, who is listening to this physicist? Well, I think if anybody, it's like a convincing liar.

If you can say these things with the utmost conviction... and not betray any uncertainty about it, then people will believe you. That's what Sammy's game is, I think. Yeah, well, it clearly works. And, you know, as it turns, well, as it turns out, Ken is right about everything. Yeah, all of his worries are exactly what goes wrong.

Which is a credit to him as a stunt driver that he's experienced enough and he understands enough about the nuts and bolts of it, to know that, yeah, this is really bumpy. I'm not sure that this is going to be good for the car because this thing needs to be structurally intact by the time I hit the ramp. Otherwise, I'm cooked. I mean, everything is, you know, like a hair's breadth from total destruction. Everything has to go right for this thing to be pulled off correctly.

Ken saw himself as the overseer of the whole thing. when he really needed an overseer of the whole thing. He needed somebody who could step in and look at each of the departments. If you notice, throughout the movie, every time there's sort of a delay or a problem, they cut to the groups. Here's the group of investors discussing what they want to do. Here's the group of stuntmen discussing what they want to do.

Here's the builders discussing what they want to do. They needed a person coordinating those people to step in and go, we're going to stop now and we're going to resurface this ramp until it's smooth. And then we'll consider going. And don't forget that at one point, again, he's getting ready to go. The ground crew holds them up, basically goes on strike and says, we're not doing anything until you pay us an additional $ 27, 000.

In cash. In cash. And this is minutes before this all is supposed to go off, leaving the backers no choice but to try and scramble to find the money. I mean, there's The logistics of this are mind blowing. There's a helicopter, like you said.

There are boats and frogmen in the water ready because if he goes into the drink, they got to pull him out. Everybody's. And that's maybe why they. There's a fire truck. There's like there's this giant safety meeting with discussing how much water they have and when he can go in.

And you've got to make sure you get those hoses into the car because I'm going to be burning up otherwise. And it all seems like, like you said, like a massive machine going right now. And the guys who have to fuel the car and remove one barricade have gummed up the whole works for a fucking extortion scheme for $ 27, 000. Which the investors, by the way, because it's cash, this is the actual problem. Because it's cash, they have to fucking find $ 27, 000 in the middle of fucking nowhere Canada.

And they're losing the light. They have to, you know, and every time they're going to jump. There's this threat of bad weather because apparently in this area of Ontario, wherever they are, it's just notably bad weather all the time. It impacted the construction of this ramp, and they're always racing against it when they're trying to actually perform the stunt. So they're trying to get all this money gathered while racing to get enough daylight to do the stunt.

And also avoiding another rainstorm that's coming in. I mean, this is all the stuff. It's amazing that Ken is as optimistic as he is in the face of almost certain failure at every turn. You would have thought as soon as ABC stepped in, they would have said, we'll take it from here, kid. You know, like, where is it going to happen?

Okay, we'll make it happen. But along the way... Go build the car. We'll take care of everything else. But after every delay... this becomes less and less of an event.

Initially, there's going to be people there watching, but like you said, that doesn't happen after they get cold feet, ABC. Then it's going to be televised, but then that doesn't really come off. And then by the end of it, by the final attempt, let's say, there's just a handful of people on hand. There's probably maybe 30 people, and that's essentially just the people working the jump, and the backers. But here's what I liked about that.

That Ken did not care that the car wasn't welded correctly, that the seals were going to explode potentially, that it was aerodynamically fucked, that the roadway itself was a danger to him. What he cared about most and what he stuck to the most was, I want to do it in front of a crowd. He didn't care about TV or movies or longevity or He just wanted people to cheer when he fucking landed. There's real psychology going on there. Like we talked about his rather humble upbringings.

And I'm sure they're going to make a meal out of this in the adaptation that's coming out. That can only be driving him. The fact that he had nothing as a kid. And he grew up with nothing. And all he wanted was adulation. and credit for doing these stunts.

You know, that's not unreasonable considering. I mentioned this to you earlier today, and I just want to bring it up, and it's just a quibble, but, like, I was so taken with the hardscrabble, bootstrap-pulling Ken Carter, like, living hand-to-mouth, putting everything he owns into this car, that at one point when they went, Ken is wintering at his Fort Lauderdale home, His second home. And I went, oh, Ken's doing OK, I guess. Like, I mean, it didn't lessen the story in any way. He's still the same guy, but they had kind of framed it like this pauper.

And it's this guy who owns a house in the north and the south so he can summer and winter. Well, he's a hustler, but also remember that Ken wasn't married. He had no kids. So you got to spend the money somehow. I spend the money and, you know, he's single essentially.

And he had no one, you know, it would have been very different and a very sad story. I think if, if he was trying to support a family. And, and, and do his thing, that's true. Do right by the family. I'm, I'm grateful that we didn't, we were spared that kind of sub.

Shots of his, of his kids wondering if dad's coming home. Yeah. Or, you know, the wife, like kid may perhaps kissing him for the last time as he gets into the car, that would have been all too much. At least, you know, if he did perish in this stunt, he's not leaving this crazy legacy behind. I also want to mention, I'd mention this to you, I don't know exactly why or how this happened, but for some reason, the stuntman Dar Robinson loomed large in our childhood, Father Malone.

I can remember him coming up in conversation with you inexplicably in high school, because I think he was in a bunch of the Burt Reynolds movies. Right? He sure was. He was also, he did some, did he do any work in Raiders of the Lost Ark? Jeez, I think that was Randall.

Oh, the guy who was underneath? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I want to say that Dar Robinson had done that stunt. First of all, look, this is super nerdy, everybody. Yakima Canute is the main guy, the 30s and 40s and 50s stuntman who did all the craziest, coolest shit, including going underneath a stagecoach by going hand over hand underneath the stagecoach and then climbing back on top of it, which is what inspired the Raiders of the Lost Ark chase sequence where Indy goes under the truck.

But there had been, when Raiders came out, a making of special about the stunts in it that aired on like ABC or CBS or something like that, hosted by Harrison Ford, that I managed to record onto a VCR tape. So I saw it hundreds of times. And Dar Robinson is featured in that documentary. So I knew him from there. But it's like you said, he seemed to be in all of the Burt Reynolds movies.

And there are tons of behind the scenes making of those. So we saw him all the time. All the time. And I think he actually, the movie Sharky's Machine. He did that fall.

I think that was like a world's record, at least for the time. I don't know if it still holds up. But he was like a larger than life. Yeah. Yeah.

To the degree that even nerdy kids like us, who maybe were predisposed to knowing the minutia, even we knew about him, and he was a known guy. Didn't he use a decelerator on that? Was that the big deal, the Sharky's machine, he had a decelerator on? Probably, but I remember the shot itself. It's him like.

Falling and shooting. Falling and shooting, but it's framed so that you can't tell that there's anything underneath them. It looks really, really realistic, and I think he was and maybe still is considered the world's foremost stuntman. He was the stuntman. The best fakery falling shot I've ever seen was in Lethal Weapon at the beginning when Amanda Hunsaker jumps off of that building.

There's a shot of her falling and it's her. It's not a dummy. It's the stunt person, whatever. But they're falling and it looks like, oh my God, she's going to actually crash onto that car hood right and then it quickly cuts to the car hood caving in from inside it was a painted bag like the inflatable bags that they jumped into they painted it to look like the scene so she was able to actually fall in the land on the bag which was painted to look like the car so they were able to cut a second before she hit the bag. Oh that's really super clever I agree that was I thought you were going to talk about Riggs jumping off the building with the guy handcuffed to him which I.

No, that was lame because you could tell they weren't even handcuffed as soon as they came off the building. Yeah. But but anyway, the reason I mentioned Dar Robinson at all is because he pops up during what's essentially the climax of this movie. He and that to me gave Ken Carter even more credibility, almost more than having Evel Knievel because way. More than Evel Knievel because Dar Robinson is alive and unbroken.

Right. And Evel Knievel is is it's hard. to think of him doing anything but self-promoting anyway. He's not doing this out of friendship for Ken Carter, but Dar Robinson is there advising Ken, and you can see him walking through the ramp and all this kind of stuff. And to me, that lent a lot of weight to the stunt, even though at that point, the stunt had been pared back and pared back in terms of the scale of the audience. I just thought it was cool that Dar Robinson was there, and he was You know, I think he was probably already doing movies at that point, but he was like young Dar Robinson doing his thing.

It's cool. Good old Dar. Dar Robinson. What do you think Dar is short for? Like Daryl?

Dar is... I don't know. That could be... It could be... It may not be short for anything.

It could be. Radar O'Reilly Robinson? I don't think it's... I'm not sure it's short for anything. Darling?

Cut that out. Darling. Yeah, I love that. Wendy Darling. Do you remember the movie that he perished filming?

Because he died doing a stunt. Was it The Stuntman? No. Oh. 1986.

I'm cheating because I have it in front of me here, but I'm curious if you know. Was it City Heat? No. Brewster's Millions. Were there stunts in Brewster's Millions?

I don't know. There should have been. No. Do you give up? Do you want me to tell you?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. He died on the set of the film Million Dollar Mystery. Remember Million Dollar Mystery with like a throwback to. Like Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, right? Mad, Mad, Mad World.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. He was apparently he was filming a high speed run by the camera. He went in on his motorcycle past the breaking point of a turn and he went straight off into a cliff off to his death. Whoa. He basically just drove off of a road down into a cliff and that was it.

He died like a man. 1986, he would have been 39 years old. Wow. Young. Well, now it seems young.

In 1986, I would have thought, good, he was an old man. Get lost. It just seems like an ignominious way to- No. Are you kidding? That's the greatest way to die for a stuntman.

I mean, it's- Maybe it's the greatest, the most appropriate way for a stuntman to die, but not on Million Dollar Mystery. Okay. I understand the picture is not... But he's in Stuntman Valhalla now, so... Sure, sure.

And he, you know. With Yakima Canute. He did. I mean, the guy was the stuntman. I wonder if he doesn't, he should have a star in the Walk of Fame.

I bet he does. What is... Forgive me, audience. What is the name of... Harrison Ford stunt double on Raiders of the Lost Ark.

It's Randall something. I'm going to look that up now. Harrison Ford stunt double Raiders. Because I remember seeing a making of where they go through that stunt of him under the. They're like walking the path and they're like throwing out rocks like, well, that would kill me, you know?

Well, it cannot be overstated. I mean, we're a little off topic here, but you and I both, not together because we hadn't met by that point, but Seeing Raiders in the theater as a child, like what was that? It would have been like seven or eight. We would have been seven or eight at that time. Seven, yeah, seven.

Those stunts were so impactful. I mean, it just looked, that whole scene where he's on the truck and he's under the. Truck and he's- It was the most exciting thing I had ever seen in my life. Amazing. I recreated it a thousand times in my garage by sliding underneath my father's car.

On the, what they call it, the creeper? Yeah, the little creeper board. Just like, yeah, exactly. Just like pull myself along. Yeah.

So he was Vic Armstrong. Armstrong and? There's one other. Oh, you're talking about Randall something, right? Yeah.

I might be wrong. It says here that Vic Armstrong was the main stunt double and stunt coordinator, looking so much like Ford. that Spielberg initially mistook him for the actor. Maybe I am thinking of Vic Armstrong. I see Terry Leonard, who did. Terry Leonard is who I'm thinking of.

Why am I calling him Randall? Terry Leonard. He did the work around the truck. That's the guy. Yeah, to me, he actually looked more like Harrison Ford than Vic Armstrong.

Vic Armstrong did the ride down the statue in the Well of Souls. Ah, oh, right. Yeah, yeah, he's... Which went too soon, which is why you see him struggling to hold on to the fucking rope as it's going down. I remember seeing that making of.

All these scenes are coming back to me. But amazingly, Terry Leonard's. Still with us. Looked pretty scared in that scene, didn't I? Well, I would have had to have been crazy not to be.

All right, it wasn't a real boulder, but it wasn't cardboard either. Took 300 pounds of plaster to make it roll right. And if I had tripped... Could have been trouble. Looked a little scared in that scene, didn't I?

Well, I'd had to been crazy not to be. All right. It wasn't a real boulder, but it wasn't cardboard either. It took 800 pounds of plaster to make it roll right. And if I'd tripped, could have been in big trouble.

That's amazing. How you remembered that with such detail, Father Malone. That's incredible. I told you hundreds of times I watched that videotape. So apparently Leonard has received something called the Golden Boot Award.

Do you know what the Golden Boot Award is for? It's for stunt work. It's for work on Western films. I was going to say, you didn't let me finish. And for stunt work, it's the Taurus Lifetime Achievement Award.

The Taurus? Taurus. Taurus. Taurus. You say Taurus.

Taurus. Like the bull? Taurus. Yeah, the Taurus World Stunt Awards apparently has been happening. I have a Stunts Unlimited shirt.

You really? Where'd you get that? From somebody who knew somebody who was part of Stunts Unlimited. Is that like false honor? I do feel a little bit like that when I put it on, as if somebody might mistake me for the team.

Yeah, you know, if I were a stuntman and I saw somebody, just some ordinary character wearing. Stolen Valor. How dare you, sir, remove that shirt and hand it over to me now. Did I say false honor? That's terrible.

Let's get to the big jump. Here we go. Ready? Everybody ready? Oh, wait.

The crew, they bugged out with that $ 27, 000. So we now have no light and no searchlights on our boats. So maybe we'll wait. So, yeah. So then it brings us up to another.

So they go back to the site, only at this point, Ken Carter is in a hotel an hour away because he weather is bad and he knows there's all these issues with the ramp and all this kind of stuff. So he's not there. The backers get skittish again and they want this just to be done and they want to be able to get some return on their investment. So they. I guess convince is not really the word, but they basically inveigle Kenny Powers, Ken Carter's protege that we talked about earlier, to do the jump.

They just want to get the jump done. They just get the jump done. So he's now wearing, isn't he wearing the helmet, Ken Carter's helmet? And this is the guy, like I said, he broke his back and the narrator tells us, well, he needs to have the special brace, only he forgot it. So he's going to be doing the stunt without this special brace that may or may not break his back again.

And to his credit, he's all business. Kenny Powers is like, all right, let's just get this done. He's like, the countdown is too long in my opinion. No reason for me to be sitting there for three minutes. Give me 10 seconds and I'm going.

So that had me a little bit nervous because a lot can go wrong. I mean, there's a reason why, you know, Space shuttles don't take off with a 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 countdown immediately. But he's having none of it. He's in his jumpsuit. He's got his helmet on.

No back brace. I'm ready to go. I'm ready to go. No back brace. His girlfriend is there, and she looks terrified, suitably terrified to this whole thing.

I'd like to point out that Kenny Powers is American, and that sort of goes against the grain of what was trying to be attempted here. Oh, that's a good point. I didn't even that didn't even occur to me that maybe his American. This is what what goes wrong here. He Kenny.

Like I said, he looks like what you would imagine a stuntman looking like. He looks like I don't know if you remember the movie Every Which Way But Loose. How can I forget with Clint Eastwood? There's a gang of bikers that are always. I don't know.

I don't know why they were menacing his character through the whole movie. Kenny Powers looks like he should be a member of that biker gang. He just looks all kinds of scraggly and, like I said, teeth all jacked up. Just a mess. But he's a stuntman, to his credit.

He's a stuntman, and he does a stunt here. Tries to. Oh, boy. It's the fucking road, dummies. It's the road.

It's the bumps in the fucking road, you dummies. And because there are so many cameras filming this, It's like the Zapruder film because after, so it's no surprise he goes over the jump and almost immediately he's in the air. He wasn't able to fire the rockets when he should have. And the car essentially, the fiberglass outer shell basically just blows away. It just cracks and it's everywhere.

So you have this sort of half shell, half car thing that's I think it gets maybe charitably, what, 500 feet from the. Ramp? It lands in shallow fucking water on the Canadian side. It's literally 1 11th the distance it should take to get to the other side. Not even close.

And it lands, as you said, in the shallow water. But again, the violence of everything happening inside isn't necessarily obvious when you see this thing happening in real time. But he is in rough, rough shape. I don't remember, did he break his back again? Eight broken vertebrae.

That's it. And he just, he's a mess. They have to pull him out of the car. And then when they roll it back and talk about what went wrong, as you said, it's the jump. It's the road.

It's so rough. that it cracked the fiberglass of the car as it's going over this jump. And because things started happening inside of this car, I think at that point he got injured. I think because of it being shaking so much. Yeah, probably the most violent shaking possible. So he wasn't able to accelerate to the degree that he wanted to or should have.

And that's what causes this all to happen. And by the end of it, like I said, the car is just destroyed. There's nothing left to the outside. Very little left to the outside. I should say.

There's nothing left to this jump either. Nothing. So that is the ignominious end to all of this. What's great is then the film crew goes to Ken Carter's hotel room and he is nothing short of pissed about the whole thing. Finally.

Yeah. Finally, that Canadian genteel veneer is broken and you really see how mad he is it deservedly so because they this was his baby this was his dream and. I don't think he would have gotten much further than kenny powers but he would have gotten further because they show him over and over and over again practicing i get to this point this i do i get to the white line i throw this lever i get to that i throw this and like the kenny powers hadn't done any of that stuff he was just like i'm just gonna push the button and go. Yeah, he may not have made it. He probably wouldn't have made it.

I think he would have got him out halfway if he had been. I mean, look, the ramp was what was going to fuck him, but he had a better chance of getting further. As you said, Kenny Powers had no experience in this car. He was just, you know, just going for freestyling the whole thing, which this is this is something that could kill you. Freestyling is not the approach you want to take when you're dealing with, you know, a thousand foot ramp. over a mile onto the other side of, of this, this jump.

It's, it's, it's crazy, but I guess you need to be crazy to even attempt this stuff. So they, so they go to Ken Carter's hotel room and again, he, he, he's, he's hopping mad and, and he, you know, it's sad because this was his dream and it was basically taken away from him. And there's really no, I mean, by the end, he still vows. I will, I will do this someday. This will be my, You know, I'm not giving up on my dream.

But then there's the postscript of the movie where they talk about how, like, years later, like, not now, the jump is now rapidly eroding. Because, again, it's in the middle of a rainy part of Canada. There's no way that it would stand. At one point during a delay, the camera crew films kids sledding off of the ramp because now the snow has come in. That was beautiful, actually.

They're using it and then going down the sides of it. Yeah. They're doing what kids should do, which is use it for sledding. And if they don't make that a poetical moment in this film, this dramatization of all of what we're talking about, then they're fools. Then they've made a grave mistake.

But there is something really... I mean, look, Ken. Ken Carter was dead two years later, should be pointed out. That's what I was leading up to. He did die doing what He considered his life's work.

He died in Peterborough, Ontario, in another stunt, at 83, at the age of, I don't know, he couldn't have been more than 40 years old at that point, which, again, for us, at a certain age, it would seem old, but no longer. Oh, he's a whippersnapper now. Yeah. I also really liked, did you catch the song that closed the movie? By Long John Baldry?

Yeah. It was like, it reminded me of like, I don't know, like Blood, Sweat, and Tears. Yeah. A bluesy number, but it had a real poignancy to it that I thought worked well with what we had just witnessed. It was, the movie, I don't know nothing about the filmmakers, but the button they put on this movie and the post script, I thought it was just perfect.

It is a remarkable little movie. It's more Rocky than Rocky. It's more I play Rocky Rocky, then he's playing Rocky. It'll be interesting to see how they manage with this adaptation. I mean, I'm happy that they're shedding light on this completely bonkers part of history, I guess, but one never knows.

Well, we're going to have to meet back here and discuss it when it comes out. I don't know if it's going to be the weekend of, but stay tuned, midnight viewers, because we're going to do a compare and a contrast. As a matter of fact, we're going to have to watch that fucking Rocky movie, you and I. I really, that's, I mean, foolish. It's no secret to you that I've always been a big, big Rocky fan, despite.

Midnight viewers, HP is a fanatic when it comes to Rocky. I love it. Always has been. I love it. Take her to the zoo.

Part of it is the Rocky series was one of my dad's favorites, and we didn't, you know, my dad wasn't necessarily the most active guy. It wasn't like we would go and throw the ball around. I wasn't the most active kid, but we would sit around and watch these movies on cable. We watched all the Rocky movies. My dad really saw something in those movies that I think was special to him.

So I, grew to really love them and that's continued through the Creed movies. I think they're fantastic. Rocky 3 was one of my favorite theatrical viewing experiences of all time as a kid. You saw that in the theater? I didn't even see that in the theater.

Most of them I saw on cable. No, it started with 3, but I had seen Rocky 2 on cable, not Rocky 1. You saw Rocky one in the movies. No, no, no, no. I didn't see Rocky one or I didn't see Rocky one or two.

What I'm saying is it started with three. I had seen Rocky two, but I had not seen Rocky one. And then I saw Rocky three in the theater. And to me, that was it. Like when I walked back, when I saw Rocky after having seen Rocky three, I thought, oh, isn't that quaint?

Well, it's Rocky is a tough watch for, for, for, people today, I think, because it has that 70s thing. It's very painstaking. Rocky and Rocky II, it's a lot of Rocky getting beaten down by life to such a degree. I remember Rocky II, even as a kid, I found it an incredibly hard watch because it takes a lot of humiliation for Rocky to finally come out of retirement. And eventually, these became popcorn movies. where it's just like they're hitting watermelons for the sound effect of boxing, which couldn't be further from reality.

But maybe that's what the movie needed to get away from the awful depression of Philadelphia in the 70s and Rocky. I'll take James Brown dancing around with Dolph Lundgren glistening under spotlights over fucking watching Sylvester Stallone be beat down by life again. You say that Rocky III was a prodigious theatrical experience for you. Truthfully, when I think about it, Rocky IV, for me, was a similarly dazzling experience. Eye to eye.

Station to station. That was the first movie. I don't know why or how, but that's the movie where I understood what surround sound really was. Because those scenes where he's fighting Drago, I remember... being in the theater and you could hear like out of like various parts of the theater, it almost sounded like people are there going. But it sounded like they were actually in the theater with you because of the way the surround sound was was formulated.

So I thought that was and plus the living in America thing had had the the the bombast of a concert. It felt like you were really there. I didn't have any kind of surround sound or anything like that as a kid. Even now, I don't. So that was Really exciting to me.

It felt like a real theatrical show. I feel good. And I hope you all feel good, Midnight Heroes. Woo! Join us next time.

Maybe we'll talk about that Sylvester Stallone movie, I Play Rocky. Maybe we'll talk about the fucking stuntman. Who knows? I don't know. Until then, where can people find you, HB?

So I co-host tonight Mr. Walter's Taxi Podcast alongside Father Malone here, of course. I host the Noise Junkies podcast with perhaps an Art of Noise episode in the offing. Wouldn't that be something, man? That would also definitely feature a co-host of Father Malone because he's forgotten more about Art of Noise than I'll probably ever know.

HB, to be in England in the summertime with the one you love, close to the edge. So good. Well, we'll talk about it. But anyway, look for that sometime. And also, I have a Bandcamp site, hpmusicplace.bandcamp.com.

As for me, you're listening to it here, Father Millen's Weekly Roundup. Monday, we're going to have, well, we're not going to have, it's not going to be a Von Doomfest this week. It's actually going to be probably another Button Switches and Consoles. Check that one out and try to enjoy the daylight.