3/25/2023 0 Comments Stuntman bob pleso“I didn’t know nothing about Hollywood,” Harris said. Every week a group of men would get together, drag out some old mattresses and learn how to do stunts. One day when Harris was at her house she called Brown and he stopped by.īrown talked to Harris about becoming a stuntman, and about another stuntman named Eddie Smith, who held group meeting at Athens Park in Los Angeles. The friend suggested that Harris talk to Calvin Brown. She knew he had broken into the world of stunt work and that the pay was lucrative. Hollywood was twenty miles away - and much further away in his mind.Ī friend of his knew Calvin Brown well. Air Force, and after a dream of playing in the NBA faded away, he just needed a job, any job, to feed his family. Harris hadn’t come to Southern California to make a name for himself in Hollywood. Harris spent about eight years as a Hollywood stuntman, until a barroom brawl scene in the film “Top of the Heap” ended his career. “And that’s how they found Calvin Brown,” Harris says, referring to the nation’s first recognized black stuntman. Willie Harris, president of the Black Stuntmen’s Association, will never forget what Cosby said on set fifty years ago: “ No white guy is going to double me painted down.” If I hadn’t gotten into comedy you could’ve found me for $750.” “I said ‘don’t ever again, please, please, take a white man and put him in my position. “I said, ‘I know some cats in the projects that would do that for seventy dollars,’” Cosby recalled as the audience laughed. In a conversation with director Sheldon Leonard, Cosby learned that the stuntman had been paid $750 to perform a car stunt - big money in the 1960s. Then they put a wig on his head and started to cut the wig, to approximate Cosby’s afro. It was so black the man’s lips looked bright red. black, ” Cosby told the audience, evoking laughter. They not only painted the man, they used a hue of makeup that didn’t even come close to Cosby’s brown skin color, as Cosby recalled to an audience at the 2008 Black Stuntmen’s Association reunion at Fitzgeralds Hotel in Las Vegas. Casting Cosby was viewed as revolutionary - and controversial.īut another revolution began the day Cosby came face-to-face with his stunt double - a white man who had been painted black. Never before had a black man held a leading role on an American television drama. On the show, Bill Cosby played a secret agent. The “no” that started the movement was uttered one day in 1965 on the set of the television drama, “I Spy.”
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