In the rough-and-tumble stunt world, Terry Leonard is a legend.
People still talk about how he managed to crawl under a moving truck, doubling for Harrison Ford in "Raiders of the Lost Ark." Or the time he stood in for Michael Douglas in "Romancing the Stone" and nearly killed himself driving a car off an 80-foot waterfall outside of Durango, Mexico.
From riding horses in the John Wayne movie "The Train Robbers" to directing stunts in "2 Fast 2 Furious," the burly 62-year-old has done it all, and made a pretty comfortable living doing so.
But Leonard, who competes in rodeos in his spare time and typically sports a Stetson and spurs, has mixed feelings about his son's decision to follow in his cowboy boots.
"I'm very concerned about the sort of career my son is going to have," said Leonard, as he picked over a plate of biscuits and gravy at a restaurant near his ranch home in Agua Dulce. "There could be a time when all the stunt work is done on computers."
Leonard is no Luddite. He knows that the growing use of digital technology is a boon to the industry, drawing audiences with the kind of death-defying scenes that no stuntman could ever perform. But at the same time, the ability to create stunts on a computer screen clouds the future of a community already struggling from the effects of runaway movie production and fierce competition for jobs. If that's not enough, makers of movies such as "Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines" and the "Lord of the Rings" series increasingly are turning to actors to perform tasks that traditionally were handled by stuntmen.
"They're all worried their way of life is going to go," said director and writer John Milius, who has been involved in stunt-heavy projects from "Apocalypse Now" to "Clear and Present Danger." "They're right....To a large extent they're going to be a casualty."
Some say that's an exaggeration. The Screen Actors Guild and the loose-knit associations that represent the industry's 6,600 stuntmen and stuntwomen do not keep track of how much stunt work may be lost to digital technology. But they say their members continue to play a critical role in movie making today and point out that, in some cases, the trend toward digitally enhanced special effects has helped create more work for stuntmen and stuntwomen.
