Hal Needham was born to be a stuntman. He was taking “crazy” risks as a teenager, long before he was leaping from planes, jumping from high-rise buildings and crashing burning cars in a screen career that would span 310 movies and 4,500 television episodes.

In the late 1940s Needham began working as a tree-topper, scaling and pruning giant sugar maples in Arkansas. “I was always pushing the limits, going as far as I could. I would do all kinds of crazy things,” he once said. “They used to call me Squirrel, because I would get on the top of the tree, take off my harness and hang by my toes on a branch 50 feet up in the air.”

His collaborations with friend Burt Reynolds, with whom he made two Smokey and the Bandit films, Hooper, two Cannonball Run movies and Stroker Ace, are the stuff of cinema legend. In Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Brad Pitt played military veteran and stuntman Cliff Booth, who is the best friend of movie star Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio). 

Tarantino’s characters were inspired by Needham and Reynolds, with Pitt talking publicly about the “epic stories” of Needham, who broke 56 bones – including his back, twice – during his death-defying stunts. And now we have The Fall Guy, a Ryan Gosling blockbuster celebrating the art of the stuntman directed by former stunt ace David Leitch – whose career is following the path of his hero, Hal Needham.