Grim Game Image – Courtesy of Bio4Kids
HARRY HOUDINI BREAKS WRIST
Harry Houdini, whose business is to get out of things, got into trouble yesterday in a motion picture studio in Yonkers by clinging to a wall in a parachute descent indoors. He broke his left wrist and suffered several bruises, but he doesn’t believe his injuries will prevent his appearance in “Everything” at the reopening of the Hippodrome on August 22. Mr. Houdini is appearing in a twenty reel motion picture serial soon to be released, in which he is supposed to put a flat wheel in the grim reaper’s best chariot. He got out of an aeroplane in the studio, and something went wrong with the parachute he caught himself just in time. As the camera was “grinding,” several hundred feet of film not in the scenario will add an extra chapter to the serial. [Page Eight New York Herald, Tuesday August 13, 1918]
Unlike the Grim Game Aeroplane accident, I don’t believe the several hundred feet of film ever made it on screen.
This was probably the beginning of the idea to use stunt doubles in motion pictures. Even Douglas Fairbanks left the riskier stunts to the doubles.
Yep, HH lived by the following rule: “I risk my life lotsa times, but I don’t take no chances, a good stuntman always knows what his limit is”