Disappointing autobiography from a colourful Hollywood character. Needham certainly had an interesting life and made a decent contribution to movie making - indeed, he's one of the few stuntmen of whom you could argue was an auteur - but his memoirs are unfocused.
Needham was - as he mentions many, many times in this book - born poor, living in Tennessee then Arkansas. Dad shot through but ma was a decent woman, hard working and religious and all that stuff and she remarried to a sharecropper. Needham's childhood seems to have consisted of a lot of poverty and chores but joining the army helped him. He got work as a paratrooper and developed contacts which proved useful. After discharge he went to work as a treelopper but broke into stunts via a buddy who was helping out on The Spirit of St Louis. (Needham tells a great story where Billy Wilder took part in a flight stunt to win a bet that the director wouldn't do it.)
Needham admits to being interested in stunts mainly for the money - he talks a LOT about how much money he made, how you could get more money doing certain jobs in certain ways, it clearly drove him - but he also seems to have found his life's passion. He would practice stunts on the weekend, developed his own stunt crew, was always thinking up new bits of business. Once he got a job as Richard Boone's stunty on Have Gun Will Travel he didn't look back and became one of the best in the business.
Interestingly though, Needham has few classic action films on his resume - no Bond films, say, or even The Great Escape. He did a lot of TV, many films for Andrew McLaglen (like Bandolero!), a couple of the lesser known John Waynes, some Burt Reynolds films. He branched out into other areas - doing ads to demonstrate the power of air bags, developing the Wild West show at Universal's theme part. At one stage he was so high profile he even had his own action figure. He moved into directing with Smokey in the Bandit - a film originated by Needham.
Needham was a good ole boy - that is very clear from this book where he includes an anecdote working on The French Connection 2 telling a local French girl how the Americans came and save the French during the way; he's always talking about hanging out at the bar, and chasing women. But he clearly had a gift for connecting with audiences - the Smokey films were big hits, as was Hooper and The Cannonball Run. These were all Needham projects - Smokey and Cannonball were his ideas.
Then around the early 80s it started to go wrong - Stroker Ace bombed as did Cannonball Run II and Megaforce. Needham's directing and stunt career wound down - interestingly, it coincided with the declined in Burt Reynolds' career.
You won't hear much about that in this book - actually you won't hear anything. You'll hear a lot about stunts, in fact heaps about stunts. There's plenty about growing up poor, and adventures on the way to making it, and his views on stuntmen. There is a little bit on John Wayne (almost all positive), but surprisingly little on Burt Reynolds (Dinah Shore was nice, they shared a house, Needham drove him over the state line when it seemed Reynolds might be up for murder during the making of The Man Who Loved Cat Dancing). It's frustrating because I would've loved a closer look at Reynolds or Andrew McLaglen or other people. And Needham can tell a good story - he does a good bitch session on Peter Bogdanovich making Nickelodeon which inspired a Bogdanovich-esque director to appear in Hooper.
I know there's always a danger in a reviewer going "I wish a book had been X" but I honestly think Needham had a better, more interesting book in him than this effort. No reflection on his less successful films, no real grasp of the personalities he worked with, his own private life was vague. Still, if you enjoyed his films you'll get something out of it.
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