Bobby Bass, veteran motion picture and television stuntman considered a legend in Hollywood for his feats in the guise of such bigger-than-life actors as John Wayne and Sylvester Stallone, has died. He was 65.
Bass died Wednesday in Los Angeles after suffering from Parkinson's disease. "He was a remarkable man," actress Bo Derek, Bass' stepdaughter, told the Associated Press. "He's an absolute legend in this business. Everyone just revered him."
Some stuntmen specialize in fistfights, explosions or car crashes and race driving, but Bass did them all and intricate martial arts too. In 1986, he shared a Stunt Man Award for best vehicular stunt for his work in "To Live and Die in L.A."
Bass performed stunts in more than 40 films, including "Smokey and the Bandit" and its sequels, "Independence Day," "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" and "Scarface."
He also served as stunt coordinator or assistant director for about 30 other films, including "Sharky's Machine," "Lethal Weapon," "Black Rain," "Tequila Sunrise" and "Rocky V."
Sometimes he did both, coordinating and then performing the stunts, as in "Thelma and Louise."
For fight scenes, he helped popularize such barroom tactics as the head butt, used to good effect in "Lethal Weapon," the 1987 humorous action cop film.
"I think I dusted it off and gave it to Mel Gibson," Bass told an interview in 1992 about the disabling maneuver. "After that you started seeing it."
Bass taught another celluloid cop, Michael Douglas, to use that head butt in a scene for "Black Rain" in which Douglas' character matched skulls with Japanese thugs.
While Bass set trends in the stunt industry, he also worked to foster safer working conditions. He was dating Heidi von Beltz when the stuntwoman was paralyzed in 1980 during a stunt-car crash on the set of "Cannonball Run." Two years later came the fatal on-the-set helicopter crash that killed actor Vic Morrow and two children in "Twilight Zone: The Movie."
The two accidents, among the worst in movie history, prompted far stricter oversight of stunt work on all sets. As both a coordinator and stuntman, Bass was front and center.
"As far as the stunt coordinators doing more [is concerned], I think everybody is really checking in their footsteps," he said in 1987. "There is a little more intensity, because you can't turn your back on these incidents. We have learned from these dreadful things, and we'd be fools to say we didn't."
