Happy to cut to the chase

On a recent afternoon, the writer Kevin Conley sat in a rental car driven by Sean Graham, a tanned, ripped stuntman who hadn't slept for 72 hours. The two spent some time kicking up dirt on a back road in Griffith Park, burning out the car's clutch, driving with two wheels on the curb and stripping the life out of a very sad emergency brake.

"I got all the insurance!" shouted Conley, 48, from the back seat. "The most I'll have to pay if it's totaled is $500."

With that, he took over and was skidding downhill toward a reverse 180 when a ranger's truck showed up in the distance. Conley and Graham settled down, like teenagers whose mom had caught them sneaking a six-pack of beer. They began rehearsing what to say if they were pulled over.

"Good thing we're not saucin'," offered Graham.

Stunt driving isn't everybody's idea of a good time, but Conley -- a short, rotund New Yorker in geek-chic Ray-Ban glasses and black T-shirt -- thrilled to his friend's down-home insouciance and stories of crashes and near misses.

"Actors are always smaller than life," he said, after Graham left in a whirlwind of tall tales. He means not just physical stature but presence -- actors often blend into the background or observe others. "But the stuntmen are the actual sexy guys on the set. So the reaction you expect a movie star to get you often get from a stuntman. It's real theater."

Graham, who did Mark Wahlberg's stunts in "The Italian Job," was one of hundreds of stuntmen Conley met while writing "The Full Burn: On the Set, at the Bar, Behind the Wheel and Over the Edge With Hollywood Stuntmen." The book tells the field's history mostly through magazine profiles of stunt stars and was just released by Bloomsbury.

Conley's recurring subject is "the passionate subculture," with its own argot, personal code and value system.

"I like to make accessible a very arcane art," he said later at a downtown coffee shop, "and make people appreciate what you would never see."

He's spent part of his career writing about dance and is interested in capturing the body in motion. "With stunts it's kind of like male choreography. It's macho dance."

Leaving school behind

Growing up in Detroit, Conley was more interested in Latin and Ingmar Bergman, both of which he studied at Yale, than gear-head chatter. But he picked up car talk "by osmosis," whether he wanted to or not.