It is a chilly evening on the set of the Warner Bros. television pilot "Supernatural" as 70-year-old Hollywood stuntman Eddy Donno climbs behind the wheel of a black Chevy Impala, adjusts his goggles and revs the engine.
Wearing a mop-haired wig to double for an actor, Donno waits for the director to call "Action!" and then, with cameras rolling, he sends the car hurtling toward a two-story, paint-peeled house that is shrouded in drifting smoke to create the illusion of a haunted, fog-shrouded night.
The Chevy plows through a fence, crosses the yard and barrels through the front door in an explosion of splintering wood and clouds of dust, coming to rest next to the fireplace.
The first man to reach the car is Donno's 30-year-old son, Tony, also a stuntman.
"Dad, are you OK!?" he calls out.
Seconds later, Eddy Donno gingerly climbs out the passenger-side door. Standing amid the debris, he is greeted by applause from the cast and crew.
In four decades as a Hollywood stuntman, Donno has crashed his body into the windows of moving automobiles and suffered a blood clot on his brain after being accidentally dropped through a roof while dangling by his feet from a rope. He's taken tumbles down more stairs, been yanked off more saddles and rattled his molars in more car wrecks than he cares to remember.
But there is one thing he and thousands of other stunt professionals have never experienced: the chance to compete for an Academy Award. Just last week the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences voted not to create a new annual award for them.
Donno said he doesn't really care whether the academy recognizes stuntmen, but he questions why his craft doesn't have its own Oscar category when "they give the fifth makeup man an Oscar, and they give the eighth writer on the script an Oscar." Stunt professionals in recent years have been honoring their own, staging their own televised awards gala, the Taurus World Stunt Awards, on the back lot at Paramount Pictures.
As Donno enters the twilight of his career, many of his peers wonder what their profession will be like a generation from now. Already, they note, rapid advances in computer wizardry, prevalent in blockbuster action films like "The Matrix," are encroaching on human stunts.
"We may start the fall, say 10 feet, and then [computers] make it look like 100 feet," said Henry M. Kingi Jr., 34, who recently performed stunts on director Michael Bay's upcoming sci-fi film "The Island."
