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Posted by on Sep 27, 2022 in Blog, Movie Reviews | 0 comments

The Greatest Hollywood Stunt Driver in History

 

 

Bill Hickman. 

Know that name? 

You should. 

He’s only given us five of the greatest car chase scenes in movie history.

 

Wow, I can’t believe I didn’t know this. Just stumbled across this today while browsing. A must-share.

The stunt driver who did the car race and chase scenes from Rebel Without a Cause (1955), Bullitt (1968), Diamonds are Forever (1971), The French Connection (1971), and The Seven-Ups (1973) were all performed by the same man, Bill Hickman. That’s pretty amazing. Those are five of the greatest car race and chase scenes ever filmed.

READ MY CAR CHASE RANKINGS (BEST DOZEN) HERE

I didn’t even recognize Hickman as the same driver on camera, though he appears as the mob-connected guy with horn-rimmed glasses and a dark suit (who dies in a fiery staged crash) in Bullitt and the hitman driver in The Seven-Ups. He did The French Connection scene too, but Gene Hackman was shown as the driver in an illegal and quite dangerous filming shoot done in one take. I also read a comment from a Las Vegas local who was on the scene while the famous car chase scene was shot in downtown Las Vegas while filming Diamonds are Forever.

“Bill Hickman who drove the Dodge Charger in Bullitt and the Pontiacs in the French Connection & The Seven Ups was the driver who performed the jump over the cars from the parking lot. The previous stunt driver destroyed two mustangs trying to do it. They were down to their last Mustang; they called Hickman in to do the stunt and he got it on one take. Showed why he was known as the best stunt driver at that time.”

The French Connection car chase scene is one of the most uncompromising sequences ever committed to celluloid, a camera mounted on the car’s front bumper to deliver a ­hair-raising experience for moviegoers. You could never get away with filming such a scene now.  It’s downright scandalous, and potentially deadly what happened the morning when this famous scene in Brooklyn was shot

Director William Friedkin goaded the hard-drinking, no-nonsense Hickman into pushing even his own limits, as he recalled:

“Bill said to me, ‘What do you think of the chase, boss?’ I said, ‘Bill, it’s nothing. You haven’t shown me a damn thing. I heard what a great stunt driver you were and this thing is lame.’ He said, ‘All right, you wanna get in the car and I’ll show you something?’ Hickman drove at 90mph for 26 blocks without stopping. That’s the main chase shot… it comes from that one take.”

 

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