As I move from preschool to grocery store to a night on the town, I long to dazzle with dangerous glamour, projecting a steely don't-mess-with-me attitude. I want to look as if I could take you down if you set me off in a parking lot.
But I don't really want to hurt anyone. The answer: Stunt-fighting class.
I wanted a place that would allow a neophyte like me to get a serious workout while learning some real moves, without a whit of saber fighting, martial arts or film experience. I found my match at Film Fighting LA. For $30, I could drop in for a two-hour class, no experience necessary.
The class, at Wing Chun Studio, is taught by Robert Goodwin, a master martial artist, fight choreographer and SAG member with credits a mile long. He's coordinated car gags, brawls and sword duels for TV and film. He was one of Christian Bale's martial arts instructors for "Batman Begins" and he trained the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. The Sunday afternoon stunt class I planned to attend promised a sampler of Hong Kong fighting, Kali stick and knife fighting, and rolls and falls. The description said I would get to spar, sort of, with working actors, stunt fighters and professional wrestlers.
It sounded terrifying, but totally cool.
As soon as I walked into the class -- in an old West L.A. warehouse -- I felt myself slipping into a parallel universe. The studio looked like one in a movie, with tatami-like mats on the floor, bamboo fighting sticks poking out of porcelain vases, Japanese swords mounted on the walls, and a grimacing life-size rubber torso suspended from the ceiling for kicking, hitting and whomping. Goodwin himself seemed to come from central casting. Dressed in loose pants and a T-shirt, his gray hair pulled back in a ponytail, his eyes projecting a Zen-like calm, Goodwin could have just returned from a decade in a Japanese dojo. (Like much of the day, this was an illusion -- he has never studied in Asia.)
Goodwin says he enjoys teaching the principles of martial arts and swordsmanship and applying them to film technique because it engages the yang -- or action -- part of his personality.
"It's doing what I was doing when I was 9 years old with a stick and shield," he said. "Only now I get to do it in costume."
There were seven students including me -- three women and four men. The others were actors and seemed to range from their 20s to their 50s -- though few would reveal their true age.
