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Cowboy Stuntman: From Olympic Gold to the Silver Screen Dean Smith with Mike Cox. Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 2013.
There is an intriguing group of books co-authored by Hollywood stuntmen about the business of making movies. Purporting to dispel myths about the industry by disclosing the inner workings of the Dream Factory, auto/biographies like Buster Wiles's My Days with Errol Flynn (1989), Gary Kent's Shadows & Light: Journeys with Outlaw in Revolutionary Hollywood (2009), Hal Needham's Stuntman! (2011), and Vic Armstrong's The True Adventures of the World's Greatest Stuntman (2011) offer entertaining and enlightening insights into the production and massmarketing of American popular culture. Released in 2013 by Texas Tech University Press, Cowboy Stuntman: From Olympic Gold to the Silver Screen is an important addition to this corpus. Co-authored by Dean Smith and Mike Cox, Cowboy Stuntman relates the fast-paced and unlikely life of Smith, a Texan farm boy turned Olympic Gold Medalist, who became one of Hollywood's leading stuntmen, appearing in ten John Wayne movies and doubling for a long list of actors as diverse as Robert Culp, Michael Landon, Steve Martin, Strother Martin, Robert Redford, and Roy...