One of our books that we’re bringing back into digital format is The Making of Miami Vice, a behind the scenes look at how the original TV show was made. In proofing the scanned file, we ran across an incredible synchronicity in a chapter entitled Gags.
Gags are stunts that stunt men perform in movies and TV. Car chases, boat chases, motorcycles chases, explosions, air ram stunts. In a typical episode of Vice, there were four or five gags per show and each episode had a gag budget of $10,000, and that’s in 1980s dollars. When you consider that the overall cost per episode was $1.4 million, that ten grand was just a drop in the bucket.
There was a stunt coordinator and stunt men, special effects experts, pyrotechnic experts, all the behind the scenes people who made every effect, every stunt, look real. A man named Paul Nuckles was the stunt coordinator when we were writing about the show. He directed the action for the gags and coordinated with the stunt men for Don Johnson (Crockett) and Philip Michael Thomas (Tubbs). At the time, there were perhaps twenty black stunt men in the business and only a handful of them who were successful and able to obtain work regularly. One of them was Ernest Robinson who, with some other black stunt men, started the Black Stunt Man’s Association. Robinson served as the organization’s president for a decade and was Thomas’ stunt man.
When we interviewed Robinson for the book, he’d been around the movie and TV business for some years and had learned to pay attention to synchronicity. In a soft almost reverential tone, he told us that when he worked on Greased Lightning as a double for actor Richard Pryor, he experienced a stunning – and tragic – synchro.
“I did this stunt on a track that wasn’t supposed to happen. I was just supposed to be driving. The car I was in had little tires, skinny tires, it was a period-type car. Anyway, so I was turning sideways to start skidding on two wheels and as I brought the car back down, another car went under mine. The front wheels of my car leaped off the track and the car fell fifty feet to the ground. It landed so that I could get out, and just after I did, it exploded.
“Half an hour later, this car pulls up to the track and this guy walks toward me and I knew he had bad news. He told me my father had died. I think he died at the same time I went over that fifty-foot drop. I shoulda been dead, see. I should’ve had at least a scratch. But I had nothin’, not even a bump on the head.”
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In synchros like this, I invariably wonder if the father gave his life for his son, in some strange arrangement that occurs within Indra’s net.
We decided to update the book with an additional chapter at the end about where some of the people who acted and worked on Vice are now, more than 25 years later. In researching that, we discovered that in November 1986, less than a year after we had interviewed Robinson, he was badly injured on the Vice set when an explosion was detonated too soon. His legs were badly burned. The accident ended his stunt man career and he eventually moved on to acting and worked as a cameraman.
The explosion sequence was included in an episode of Vice called Baby Blue. That photo at the top of the post is Robinson, caught in the fireball that ended his career as a stunt man.
Another oddity in this story, if not a synchro…three years after Robinson served as stuntman for Richard Pryor and escaped a deadly fire, Pryor himself was enveloped in flames while making the movie Bustin’ Loose. Pryor, however, wasn’t acting,; he was free-basing cocaine and drinking rum, an explosive combination in his case. No stuntman needed.
morning news,,,, network
Ah, okay. It’s a good synchro!
what a story – well, what stories! – miami vice was always on my watch list in its prime – so interesting/intriguing this post – and the issue of fire – and then, how interesting that the sequence name that included the fire scene was “baby blue” with the thing of his father’s death and his being “baby blue” in that regard –
That “baby blue”reference made me think of the song “Baby Blue” and I found a clip of Graham Bonnet (in Australia and Britain a bonnet is the hood of a car)
singing it –
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VSBDlsTyT60
The lyrics of the song are also intriguing considering a fire ended Ernest’s stunt career.
” You must leave now, take what you need, you think will last.
But whatever you wish to keep, you better grab it fast.
Yonder stands your orphan with his gun,
Crying like a fire in the sun.
Look out the saints are comin’ through
And it’s all over now, Baby Blue….
Leave your stepping stones behind, something calls for you.
Forget the dead you’ve left, they will not follow you.
The vagabond who’s rapping at your door
Is standing in the clothes that you once wore.
Strike another match, go start anew
And it’s all over now, Baby Blue
It’s all over now, Baby Blue
Aha it’s all over now, Baby Blue. …”
And with Don Johnson playing ‘Big Daddy’ Bennet (Bonnet ?) in
“Django Unchained”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eUdM9vrCbow
it seems a puzzle is forming below the surface
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HTE4PL40E0w
Just after my father-law-died I had a dream,which I have often related about on the blog about being pushed up a hill in a baby blue coloured pedal-car by him only to be released at the top of the hill to cruise down under my own control.I’m still working on the meaning of that one,but it has proved rewarding chasing that vivid dream up so far.
I have to say though that I’m not much of a Quentin Tarantino movie fan.I will see “Django Unchained”,but if his last movie was anything to go by,I’ll probably not like it.
I liked quentin’s earlier films.
Interesting lyrics! I remember you talking about that dream, Daz. Some of them you can puzzle over for years.
just spent a weekend plus setting up artifical christmass trees (40 ft) with a crew,,, couple of grips,, one spent 6 years working on the Nash B set…. but the coicindence was the morning we first started the set up,,, morn new showed an intersection,, (region like West Palm to Miami) showed and intersection…….
What is morn new??
Giving his life for his son, I guess we all would but would the father have knowingly had a choice? An interesting synchro that raises lots of questions.
Not knowingly, but at a deeper level?
Also interesting about the Miami Vice / Stunt-man’s father dying sync is that the next movie Don Johnson is in is “Django Unchained” where Johnson plays a character named Spencer Gordon ‘Big Daddy’ Bennet .
The plot is –
“Former dentist, Dr. King Schultz, buys the freedom of a slave, Django, and trains him with the intent to make him his deputy bounty hunter. Instead, he is led to the site of Django’s wife who is under the hands of Calvin Candie, a ruthless plantation owner. ”
Schultz was my father’s surname until my father took his step-father’s surname when my Nana remarried.So Schultz should be my real surname too.
Daddy syncs everywhere,isn’t there?
Daddy synchs….hmmmm