Text 5. Film stunts

CRASHHHH! AAAAAGH! OOOOOOOFFFF! B-B-B-B-B-BANGGG! The star of the film is on fire. Someone shoots him, and blood hits the wall from a hole in his back. He falls back through a window - a closed window. Broken glass flies everywhere. He falls ten meters to the street. A car drives over his body. And his clothes continue to burn...

Of course the actor is perfectly all right -because he didn't fall through the window. It was a 'stuntman'. Stuntmen and stuntwomen do all the dangerous things which you see (or you think you see) on the screen. And the stuntman was probably all right, because they are always very careful.

In old cowboy films, horses fell down when a wire pulled their feet.

They always fell on special soft ground. But they often hurt their necks

or their backs, and they sometimes died. Now it is illegal to use wires.

Today they teach horses how to fall. It takes a long time, but it is much

safer.

OUCH! In fact, this is not really dangerous at all. The window is not

made of glass. In old films it was made of sugar, and now there is a

special kind of very expensive plastic. Tables and chairs are made of

light balsa wood. And they are already half cut in the right places. So

they break into little pieces, and the stuntperson's head stays in one

piece!

Fire is the most dangerous thing of all. The stuntperson wears a special

suit under normal clothes. The fire comes from a sort of gel made of

alcohol. This gel produces three or four centimeters of vapour, and then

flames above that. So the flames do not touch the clothes themselves.

This is not a model, or a camera trick. It is a real stuntman named Jerry Hewitt. He fell 23 meters

and landed on a gigantic air bag made of nylon. 'It's not easy." says Jerry. 'If you land in the wrong way, you can break an arm or a leg - or even your back. And of course you have to be sure to land on the air bag! From 23 meters up, in a burning ski-lift, it looks very small.'

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