Synopsis for
The Stunt Man (1980) More at IMDbPro »

Cameron (Steve Railsback), a Vietnam vet who's wanted for attempted murder, is caught by the police but escapes. Crossing a bridge, he dodges an antique car that seems to be trying to run him down; when he turns around, the car has disappeared. Later, he's attracted to a movie shoot -- a World War I battle scene -- on the beach. After the scene, he notices an old woman who walks through the set greeting the actors, then falls in the water. Cameron dives in to rescue her and is horrified when she pulls off her face -- a mask. She's not an old woman, but the movie's leading lady, Nina Franklin (Barbara Hershey), testing the costume and make-up for the scenes set late in her character's life.

The director, Eli Cross (Peter O'Toole), descends from the sky on his camera crane to offer Cameron a job, explaining that their last stunt man disappeared when his car ran off a bridge. They haven't found the body, and Eli can't afford the production delays that will result if the police get involved. Cameron's job is to pretend to be Burt and do his stunts -- a role within a role that allows both Eli and Cameron to avoid entanglements with the police.

Cameron, rechristened "Lucky," learns stunt work under the tutelage of Chuck (Charles Bail), the film's stunt coordinator; there's some cool detail about how stunts are pulled off. (To film the wing-walking scene, they tether the plane to the ground and fly in circles at an altitude of about 6 feet.) At the same time, Lucky-Cameron's getting involved with Nina -- who, it turns out, once had a romance with Eli and still admires him tremendously. Eli admits to her that he's jealous of Lucky.

The last shoot of the film-within-the-film involves Lucky's most difficult stunt, driving a Dusenberg off a bridge and escaping under water -- the same scene Burt was shooting when he died. Lucky believes Eli is trying to kill him, and will use the stunt to make it look like an accident. It's plausible; killing Lucky would get him out of Nina's life and remove the most unreliable witness to the cover-up of Burt's death. In the wee hours of the morning before the shoot, Lucky and Nina plan to escape: Nina hides in the trunk of the stunt car, which Cameron will drive away instead of driving off the bridge.

Unbeknownst to Lucky, Chuck has planted an explosive in one of the Dusenberg's front tires to make the car's tumble off the bridge look more realistic. The car goes into the water, where a panicked Lucky scrambles to reach Nina in the trunk -- until he happens to look up out of the floating car's rear window to see Nina with Eli on the bridge. Lucky emerges, gasping, from the river and notices that there were divers in the water with him all the time. Nina tells him that she was found in the trunk hours before the shoot, and Eli told her that Lucky had changed his mind and decided to do the stunt. Lucky, of course, had done no such thing, but Nina's so pleased that he and Eli have made up that he doesn't tell her. Eli, descending as usual from heaven on his crane, explains that he wouldn't let Lucky run off thinking that Eli was trying to kill him (and not incidentally leaving the film incomplete). The best way to convince Lucky of Eli's good will, Eli felt, was to make sure Lucky got through the stunt in one piece. Lucky, though furious -- not for the first time -- at Eli's high-handed manipulativeness, is amused in spite of himself and giddy with relief at surviving. As the movie ends, Cameron and Eli are bickering over Cameron's pay for the stunt and planning to catch a plane to the production's next location.