The success of Smokey and the Bandit demanded more of the same, though a true sequel would take three years. In the interim, Reynolds and Needham dreamed up Hooper (1978), a paean to Hollywood stunt performers that amps up the magnitude of daredevilry and pyrotechnics. As the eponymous "fall guy" (the surname Hooper was a nod to veteran stunt coordinator Buddy Joe Hooker), Reynolds was surrounded again by old friends: Needham as director, Field as his long-suffering girlfriend, acting mentor James Best in a supporting role, and Adam West (who had won the part of TV's Batman away from Reynolds in the mid-Sixties) as the vain movie star for whom Hooper doubles. Added to the cast was Jan-Michael Vincent as an up-and-coming stuntman and Brian Keith as Fields' ex-stuntman father, Jocko Doyle - a character created in tribute to Jock Mahoney. Among the film's many plot points drawn from real life was the stroke that befalls Keith's irascible Jocko; Jock Mahoney had suffered a similar stroke in 1973 and was confined for a time to a wheelchair. (Reynolds worked Mahoney into a stunt bit - wheelchair and all - in his 1978 black comedy The End.) Reynolds and Needham had hoped Mahoney could play Jocko in Hooper but were overruled by executives at Warner Bros.
Laced with laughs aimed both low (a barroom brawl featuring Pittsburgh Steelers q-back Terry Bradshaw) and high (Robert Klein as a snooty auteur patterned after Peter Bogdanovich) and capped by a nigh-apocalyptic stunt jump (and the actual destruction of a former World War II era military hospital complex in Tuscaloosa, Alabama), Hooper was another win for the Reynolds-Needham-Field axis (if not quite on par with the windfall of Smokey and the Bandit). Audiences were amused and satisfied but the critical consensus was, not surprisingly, split. While Pauline Kael came down on the production like the proverbial falling smokestack, branding Hooper "a half-cocked piece of movie-making," New York magazine's David Denby - no fan of Reynolds or Needham - offered a dissenting opinion: "A raucous celebration of the childish daring of Hollywood stuntmen, Hooper is one of the most entertaining movies of the year... I don't think we've had a movie about Hollywood filmmaking as funny as this one since Singin' in the Rain." Hooper also helped usher in a vogue for stories (for screens big and small) about stuntmen, among them Richard Rush's The Stunt Man (made in 1977 but unreleased until 1980), Brian Trenchard-Smith's Stunt Rock (1980), and the long-running TV series The Fall Guy, starring Lee Majors as a seasoned stuntman who moonlights as a bounty hunter.
By Richard Harland Smith
Sources:
But Enough About Me by Burt Reynolds (Bonnier Publishing, 2015)
Jock Mahoney: The Life and Films of a Hollywood Stuntman by Gene Freese (McFarland & Company, 2013)
Review of Hooper by David Denby, New York (August 28, 1978)
