…Behind the Scenes of Huge Movies:

http://www.cracked.com/photoplasty_1296_24-horrifying-true-stories-behind-scenes-huge-movies/

Though I was familiar with some of them (Vic Morrow and the children he held being ripped to shreds -literally- by a falling helicopter’s blades while filming a scene for the Twilight Zone film is one of those horrifying things that make you realize stuntwork within films can sometimes be a very haphazard thing), many of them were unfamiliar to me.

Perhaps one of my favorite “horrifying” behind the scenes looks can be found on the bonus sections of the 1973 James Bond film Live and Let Die.  The film featured plenty of stuntwork, including the very famous “jumping over a pit of crocodiles” escape bit that has to be one of the most clever cliffhanger escapes ever committed to film, IMHO…

Anyway, what horrified me wasn’t so much this stunt (which, let’s face it, required some major stones from stuntman/owner of the crocodile farm to do) but rather some of the other stuntwork present in the film.  Specifically I’m referring to those involving the car/motorcycle chase.

Again, if you’ve seen the bonus material on the Live and Let Die BluRay, you find that many of those stunts had the stuntmen doing the work with little preparation or anticipation of what might happen.  One stuntman, for example, jumped with his motorcycle into water and, as it so happened, there was coral where he landed and he banged himself up badly.  And that was just one of the stunts!

As I watched that making of material, I got the impression that the stuntmen hired to do the work within this film were told to do this or that and they just said “Sure!”, not bothering to see if the stunt was doable or if they might get hurt doing it.  Perhaps that’s the way things were back then…

A crazy, crazy business!