Miami Vice Comes Full Circle

 Back in the late 1980s, Rob and I had a chance to write about the making of Miami Vice – the original Vice, with Don Johnson and Philip Michael Thomas. Doing this project for Ballantine Books was great fun. We got onto the Vice set in Miami, were flown out to LA to talk with director Michael Mann and whoever else would give us the time of the day. But what’s really interesting about the project is how it came full circle with one of the people we interviewed.

Even though the two stars – Johnson and Thomas – refused to be interviewed for the book, the people who did talk to us were just great. One of the nicest men we met during this project was Ernie Robinson, who doubled for Philip Michael Thomas on stunts. When we met Robinson, he was 53 and looked twenty years younger. He stood nearly six feet tall, weighed 163 pounds, and was built similar to Thomas except in the legs. When he had started in the business in the 1960s, there were few qualified black stunt men.

“I was involved with the Tenth Cavalry – an equestrian outfit – and through them I met white stunt men. At the time, white guys had been doubling for blacks. You  know, they used makeup and stuff.”

We asked Robinson if he’d ever doubled for a white actor and he laughed heartily, making us think the question was preposterous. “Hey, I’ve doubled for everybody even women, with wigs and clothes and all.”

His start as a stunt man was slow. But eventually he started finding jobs doubling for people like Bill Cosby, Roscoe Lee Brown, Harry Bellafonte, Sidney Poitier, and Richard Pryor. Big names. And he had nothing but nice things to say about all of them. Cosby, he said, was just as nice as he seemed. Poitier was soft-spoken, the elegant type. And Pryor? “He doesn’t even have to start any dialogue. It seems that just in conversation, he gets people cracking up. I really enjoyed working with him.”

Robinson and about 20 other black stunt men started the Black Man’s Stunt Association and he served as its president for a decade. Through the association, he trained blacks who were struggling to become stunt men and always told them the business was more dangerous than it seemed because it looked so easy.

Synchronicity was no stranger to Robinson’s life. He paid attention. When working on the movie Greased Lightning, he experienced something that he spoke about in a hushed, almost reverential tone. “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 my 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.”

Fast forward decades. This morning, one of the emails in my box was from a woman named Nonie L Robinson, who had tweeted:

Rob and Trish | https://www.synchrosecrets.com/synchrosecrets/?p=12830 … via @trishmac – Thank you for writing about my grandfather Ernie Robinson, Stuntman on Miami Vice!!

 We had written up this very synchro in November 2012. I wrote her back and told her he was one of the nicest people we had met on the set.

Nonie has also been involved in movies and TV.  I somehow find this full circle stuff quite gratifying!

Crossroad has since brought the book back into ebook and audio format. On Amazon, the sole review of the ebook illustrates a basic misunderstanding of how these kinds of projects worked then and now. Our instructions with this project amounted to: This is not a hatchet job.

And really, other than the fact that the two principal stars refused to be interviewed, there was little to criticize. Michael Mann ran a tight ship. He knew his characters, the location and the story. But he also gave his actors the freedom to make their own decisions. When we mentioned that Johnson and Thomas didn’t want to be interviewed, he shrugged. “I can’t make them talk to you. Write around them.”

So we did. In the end, they were pretty much incidental to the book.