The Thrill Makers Celebrity, Masculinity, and Stunt Performance [Paperback]

Well before Evel Knievel or Hollywood stuntmen, reality television or the X Games, North America had a long tradition of stunt performance, of men (and some women) who sought media attention and popular fame with public feats of daring. Many of these featsjumping off bridges, climbing steeples and buildings, swimming incredible distances, or doing tricks with wild animalshad their basis in the manual trades or in older entertainments like the circus. In The Thrill Makers, Jacob Smith shows how turn-of-the-century bridge jumpers, human flies, lion tamers, and stunt pilots first drew crowds to their spectacular displays of death-defying action before becoming a crucial, yet often invisible, component of Hollywood film stardom. Smith explains how these working-class stunt performers helped shape definitions of American manhood, and pioneered a form of modern media celebrity that now occupies an increasingly prominent place in our contemporary popular culture.

Jacob Smithis Assistant Professor at the School of Communications at Northwestern University. He is the author ofVocal Tracks: Performance and Sound Media, andSpoken Word: Postwar American Phonograph Cultures(both UC Press).

Starring human flies, daredevil aviators, bridge jumpers, and lion tamers,The Thrill Makersis a great read, as evocative as it is theoretically savvy, and convincingly argued. Culling telling details from a host of long-overlooked sources, Jacob Smiths account of sensational, high-risk public performance from the Victorian age to the 1930s unearths and illuminates the interwoven histories of public spectacle, masculinity, the motion picture industry, new forms of celebrity, and the expanding American metropolis.Greg Waller, Department of Communication and Culture, Indiana University.

The Thrill Makersis an historical tour-de-force that illuminates the origins of risk-taking performance in American entertainmel#É