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Z, the extent to which fights were scripted varied from studio to studio. Republic's writers produced very detailed scripts and described action fairly precisely. However, the director and stunt ramrod worked together to refine the individual "falls" (whenever a stunt man goes down following a punch or other blow) and "gags" (leaps through windows, across tables, from balconies). Some fight sequences were written with standing sets in mind, enabling the writers to envision the donnybrook and script it accordingly. Sometimes set construction dictated the exact movements of a fight. When the set was large enough, the directors preferred to have the stuntmen use all of it, fighting around the perimeter as well as in the middle.

Not long ago I was looking at my copy of the shooting script for PERILS OF NYOKA. It had very detailed fight sequences, but I noticed that in most cases the final version differed to at least some degree from the scripted version. I imagine a lot of this had to do with the capabilities of the stuntmen and "gags" they evolved during the rehearsal process. The precision of some "gags" and "falls" can be chalked up to the director's knowledge of a stuntman's skill. Fight scenes with Dave Sharpe doubling the hero tend to be more acrobatic, because he was a tumbler and worked well with other tumblers, including Jimmy Fawcett and Ken Terrell. Tom Steele's fights mostly have him slugging it out, flat-footed, with the other stunters. When anybody makes a daring leap in a Tom Steele fight, it's one of the heavies (usually Duke Green). SPY SMASHER would have been a much different (and, in my opinion, weaker) serial had Steele been doubling Kane Richmond instead of Dave Sharpe.

The script for BATMAN, which is pretty sparse in some respects, has some fairly detailed descriptions of the fights, although there again the final results differ somewhat from the script.

Just now, after typing the above words, I flipped through a couple of my silent-serial scripts to see how those writers handled fights. Here's one example of Frank Leon Smith's scripting of a fight in the 1926 Charlie Chan serial, HOUSE WITHOUT A KEY:

Scene 135. Foreground French window. John dives at Saladine and brings him down, screen netting and all. They fight.
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Scene 137. Saladine's room. Saladine and John fighting all over the place. Give it detail: over chairs, over tables, against trunks, booting hand bags aside, tipping over decanter and glasses.
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Scene 140. Saladine's room. Saladine and John fight over the bed and all around. Make it savage.

That's actually more detail than you find in many silent-serial scripts describing fight sequences. Much of the time the writer will make general comments like, "Make it a whopper." Individual falls and gags are almost never described.

The generally free-swinging fights you see in many Universal serials strike me as having been barely scripted or barely directed. Or both. Then again, their sloppiness may just have been due to a lack of time. Some directors considered fight staging a nuisance; Ford Beebe was one of them. He recognized the importance of having thrilling fights in serials, but he hated staging them on the limited amount of time a serial schedule afforded. But I don't have any Universal serial scripts, so I can't say how tight or how loose the fights were scripted.

Black Tigrrr wrote:

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Here's another question on stunt fighting. I've always wondered why the fights at late Republic became so lackluster even though they used the same stuntmen. I know the directors were different which makes a real difference with the actors, but still you'd think with pretty much the same seasoned stunt team (Steele, Van Sickle, etc.) they could mount a more impressive spectacle. I'm watching the fights in Desperadoes of the West and they are pretty dismal.

Part of it was age. Remember, DESPERADOES is seven years later than the glory days of serial fights in DAREDEVILS OF THE WEST, SECRET SERVICE IN DARKEST AFRICA, THE MASKED MARVEL, and CAPTAIN AMERICA. But directorial choices account for the rest of it. The key thing was that Fred Brannon, during his tenure as solo serial director, put an end to undercranking during the fights. So you're seeing those '50s fights at normal speed, 24 frame per second, rather than the 20 frames used to shoot fights in something like SECRET SERVICE or MASKED MARVEL. Secondly, he relied on longer takes, doing most of the fight in a master shot and coming in for fewer close-ups and quick cuts than Witney, English, Bennet, et al. That destroyed the pacing of fights, so in those long takes you're watching middle-aged men whaling away on each other for what seems like forever.

Captain Canuck wrote:

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Another aspect of the same thing is cattle stampedes. How in the blazes did they manage cattle stampedes?

When I started going up to Lone Pine and talking with the locals about moviemaking up there, I learned a lot about Russell Spainhower, whose Anchor Ranch (which is still there, right along Highway 395 a mile or two south of the town itself) supplied stock and ranch hands to movie producers. Out in the Alabama Hills, that rocky area where Westerns were mostly shot, there was an area that is still referred to as "Cattle Pocket." It's a spot where the Hills narrow and the rock cliffs form a natural corral that can hold several hundred head of cattle. For stampede scenes, the Anchor ranch heads would run the herd toward Cattle Pocket, and the cows would stop on their own once they had nowhere else to run.

Sedona's Oak Creek Canyon has another of these natural corrals formed by rock cliffs. It's used for that exact purpose in at least two of my favorite B-Westerns: 1935's STORMY, with Noah Beery Jr., and the 1937 Hopalong Cassidy film, TEXAS TRAIL. Both movies involve the herding (and stampeding) of wild horses in that area.

I have no idea how stampedes were handled anywhere else, but I have to guess that a similar method was used. Getting a stampede going in one direction is not difficult; you just make sure the leader is pointed in the direction you want, and the others will follow him. Getting them to stop is the tough part, and I don't know how else it could have been done.

Somebody up at Lone Pine -- I think it might have been Russ Spainhower's granddaughter, who's still alive -- recalled that one time Spainhower got hassled by the ASPCA because he ran a herd of cattle in and out of Cattle Pocket several times in one day so that the director could get multiple takes from different angles. The ASPCA called it abuse. Spainhower called it exercise.