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STUNTS, STARS & LEGENDS - December 2014

Nurse Betty (2000)

Story: A comedy, starring Renee Zellweger, about a widow’s post-traumatic obsession with a soap star.
A Kansas City waitress, with dreams of becoming a nurse becomes delusional after seeing her no-good car salesman husband murdered. Becoming delusional from shock, she becomes convinced that she is the former fiancee of her soap opera idol. What she also believes is that the soap opera is real and goes to LA to find a hospital where he works as a cardiologist. Meanwhile, her husband’s murderers are searching for the drugs stolen by her husband and, as luck would have it, they are stored in the trunk of the car she drove off in. Freeman, an aging hit man planning his retirement after this job, also becomes delusional about the woman he is tracking.


Stunts, Stars And Legends: Rodd Wolff

Rodd was born in Bloomington, Illinois and was raised in Phoenix where he was active in football, basketball and baseball at Cortez High. As a boy he was inspired by a meeting with Jock Mahoney, who became a lifelong friend and mentor. Rodd began riding horses and practicing stunts at the age of eight and also befriended and learned from Ben Johnson. He became a top horseman and trainer of falling horses, working primarily on Arizona-filmed projects. He was the riding double for Elvis Presley on “Charro” (1969) and a substitute for Jack Cassidy on an unsold television pilot. He later doubled Burt Reynolds and Terence Hill.

With his horse Sandy and Twerp he guest starred at numerous parades and rodeos, including the Rose Bowl Parade with Montie Montana. In 1977 he performed in the live show Buffalo Bill’s Wild West and Congress of Rough Riders of the World. He won both the Ron Nix Stuntman Competition and the Stunt Players Directory Photo Contest where he staged a horse fall while studiously reading a book. Wolff was hired as The Marlboro Man until the company discovered he was a non-smoker. In the early 1980s Jacko Mahoney and Rex Rossi tried to produce a movie about the Life of Tom Mix starring Wolff. He performed at the Grand Opening of the Hollywood Stuntmen’s Hall of Fame in 1988 in Moab, Utah.


Jack Gill

Jack Gill has created some of the movie industries’ most memorable action sequences. He directed and stunt coordinated blockbuster movies including “Fast Five” (2011), “The Hangover” - Part II (2013), “Date Night” (2010), “Austin Powers” in Goldmember” (2002), “Showtime” (2002), “Money Train” (1995), and lots more. As a stuntman, he has jumper cars and motorcycles through walls of wood, glass and flame on “Knight Rider” (1982) and “The Duke of Hazzard” (1979); he has taken falls from buildings as high as twelve stories, and jumped from exploding boats and mountain tops; he has flown through the air hanging from helicopter struts and streaked through the sky in the F-16 Fighter aircraft. He is past President of Stunts Unlimited, and a member of the Directors Guild of America, Screen Actors Guild and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and has been nominated and won many stunt awards over the past years. His wife is actress, Morgan Brittany, who was footprinted in cement in 1993 when she was here in Moab starring in “Sundown: Vampire In Retreat”, in which I had the opportunity of working as a stunt double for actor, John Ireland.


A Tribute To The Legendary Stuntman, Yakima Canutt

Here is Yakima Canutt, doubling for Lee Powell as the Lone Ranger in the Republic Serial called, “The Lone Ranger”, performing a ‘Running W’ horse fall in 1938. Yak had done this kind of horse fall hundreds of times and told me he never injured a horse. That same year, the ‘Running W’ was outlawed and discontinued in the United States. It was still being done in certain places in European movies. Canutt is an Honored Inductee in the Hollywood Stuntmen’s Hall of Fame and was footprinted in cement in 1975 in Palmdale, California.

If interested in learning more about the Hall of Fame, please contact John Hagner (Founder) at 435 260-2160.
email: johnhagner@hotmail.com
Hall of Fame website: www.stuntmen.org

John Hagner (Founder) is also the Artist of the Stars.
His Celebrity Portrait Drawings are available at telephone 435-259-7000,
Mailing address: 50 W. 400 N, Moab, Utah 84532.
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