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COPYRIGHT 2003 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
Ever since the days of the Keystone Kops, Hollywood stuntmen have called the dangerous stuff they do "gags." A punch is a gag. A car jumping across an open drawbridge is a gag. An aerial dogfight requiring elaborate flight plans and F.A.A. oversight is a gag; and so is a fiery explosion that blasts your hero off a pier and into the Gulf of Mexico.
In late August, I stood on a thousand-foot-long pier just outside St. Petersburg, Florida, with the crew of "The Punisher"--yet another movie version of a Marvel Comics property. We were watching Mike Owen, a stunt double, get ready for a fire gag. He knelt on the edge of a floating dock just off the pier, wearing three layers of thin, fire-protective long underwear known as Nomex under his costume. The Nomex layers had been soaking in a cooler at forty-two degrees. Once Owen put them on, it didn't matter that it was noon and so hot that nearly everybody on the pier was dripping with sweat; Owen wanted to hurry up and do the gag, just so that he could stop shivering. In addition, his face and his hair had been slathered in a gel that protects you from burns--but only as long as it's wet. After a crew member finished putting it on, Owen had about five minutes in which to complete the gag safely.
The explosion would be the climax of an extended chase scene, which was being shot in Fort De Soto Park. The scene would take about a minute of screen time, but it required a week of shooting and included a fair selection of thrills. In addition to the fire gag, there was a series of car jumps, an S.U.V. rollover, and a tricky car crash that Gary Hymes, the second-unit director, who had choreographed the entire stunt sequence, was saving for the last day on location. For that final stunt, Hymes somehow had to make a motorboat that was hitched to a trailer suddenly come loose from a car pulling it down the road, bounce high in the air, then slam down on a Ford pickup racing behind it--without killing anybody.
The chase down the beach comes early in the movie, and it's meant to establish the motivation of Frank Castle, a.k.a. the Punisher. He is the darkest character in the moral universe of Marvel Comics; this sequence, in which his wife and child are killed before his eyes and he himself is shot, blown up, and left for dead, helps establish why. The Punisher first appeared in 1974, as a mercenary hired to kill Spider-Man, and in 1986, after several bloodthirsty cameos, he got his own series. The philosophy of the gun-toting vigilante superhero is simple: "I kill only those who deserve killing."
The Punisher, relying on righteous anger and government weapons training, has no superpowers, and this gives the movie's stunt sequences a human scale that's missing from most Marvel franchises. As Owen rehearsed the fire gag, he and the film's director, Jonathan Hensleigh, discussed the scene's narrative elements: at the start, Castle, barely alive after being shot in the chest, sees a tongue of flame approaching--it's supposed to be gasoline that the executioners have poured on the dock and then lit. (The fuel is a mixture of unleaded gasoline and diesel, which photographs better and has a slower burn rate.) Hensleigh wanted Owen to recoil as the fire closed in, a movement that would, coincidentally, bring Owen out of his collapsed position to a nearly upright stance, allowing him to be both more visible to the cameras and better situated for the ensuing gag.
The crew had positioned two propane-filled cannisters so that they were aimed directly at Owen. The fireball they were set to deliver was rigged to flare at the same instant that a ratchet cable, which was hooked to a snatch harness hidden under Owen's costume, jerked him off his knees and tossed him thirty feet away, into the Gulf. The equipment was hidden in plain sight--the ratchet line was threaded through a standard hoist, the sort you'd hang your prize-winning tuna from; if any wires did show up in the shot, they would be digitally erased in post-production. Owen had been rehearsing all week, hooking himself to the equipment, varying the height and velocity of his trajectory, and trying different rag-doll motions in the air. He and Hymes had gone over the video playbacks until they found the most convincing manner in which to be blown sky high.
As Owen walked to his mark on the edge of the dock and knelt down, he said, "Finally, it's happening." Six cameras--two on each...
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