Career
Robinson grew up in Los Angeles, California. At the early age of nine, Dar made the cover of Life Magazine for inadvertently ranking for his accomplished abilities on the trampoline. Dar's father, Jess Weston Robinson was responsible for the "trampoline sensation" that swept the country. Dar spent many hours spent helping in his father's Gymnastic Supply Company. Dar's natural athletic abilities & by his accomplished ease on the trampoline would quickly render him the "ranking" of 3rd place for his division. Ironically he was unaware of the ranking until his placing third. One of Robinson's first major stunts was a 100 foot jump from a cliff into a river for actor Steve McQueen in the 1973 film, Papillon. In the same year, he appeared as a motorcycle stunt man in the Clint Eastwood film, Magnum Force. He is also remembered for driving over the edge of the Grand Canyon and safely parachuting out before hitting the ground. In 1979 he set the world record for a free-fall from a helicopter, dropping 311 feet (95 m) onto an airbag.
At 220 feet, Dar's stunt from Atlanta's Westin Peachtree Plaza hotel in Sharky's Machine still holds up as the highest free-fall (no wires) stunt to ever be performed from a building for a commercially-released film. However, despite it being a record-setting fall, in the final edit they are clearly using a dummy (only the briefest moment of the beginning of it is used in the movie).
In a highly publicized feat, as the stunt double for actor Christopher Plummer in the 1979 film production Highpoint, Robinson made a 700 foot free-fall from a deck on the world's tallest free-standing structure, the CN Tower in Toronto, Canada.
Robinson returned to Toronto to attempt a world record cable jump from the CN Tower for a feature-length television documentary film called The World's Most Spectacular Stuntman. The first test of the cable using a bag of water equal to Robinson’s weight smashed into the ground when the cable snapped. High winds and bad weather delayed the jump until August 12, 1980. Although visibly nervous, he leapt from the tower's edge, plummeting more than 1,200 feet (366 m) tied to only a 1/8" (3 mm) steel cable, stopping only a short distance above the ground. For this feat he was listed as highest paid stuntman for a single stunt to date in the 1988 Guinness Book of Records.
Read more about this topic: Dar Robinson
Famous quotes containing the word career:
“Each of the professions means a prejudice. The necessity for a career forces every one to take sides. We live in the age of the overworked, and the under-educated; the age in which people are so industrious that they become absolutely stupid.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)
“He was at a starting point which makes many a man’s career a fine subject for betting, if there were any gentlemen given to that amusement who could appreciate the complicated probabilities of an arduous purpose, with all the possible thwartings and furtherings of circumstance, all the niceties of inward balance, by which a man swings and makes his point or else is carried headlong.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“A black boxer’s career is the perfect metaphor for the career of a black male. Every day is like being in the gym, sparring with impersonal opponents as one faces the rudeness and hostility that a black male must confront in the United States, where he is the object of both fear and fascination.”
—Ishmael Reed (b. 1938)