SAG actress and singer Marneen Lynne Fields during her "Kathryn Davis - Take 2" music video shoot at the famous Marilyn Monroe hand prints at Grauman's Chinese Theater in Hollywood, California. Marneen plays the lead role of actress-singer, Kathryn Davis for "Kathryn Davis Take 2," a pilot of a prime time television series she's created. Title track by South African hit maker Rory Wolman of Shine Records, with Marneen Lynne Fields on lead vocals.
Welcome to the official blog page for Cartwheels & Halos -
the upcoming biography of Marneen Lynne Fields - actress, singer, composer, producer, pioneering Hollywood stunt woman and survivor.
Cartwheels & Halos: The True Marneen Lynne Fields Story is as much a dark and troubling tale of survival and redemption as it is a celebration of the multifaceted performance career of a child born with emphysema and an enlarged heart. A severely hearing impaired teenager who rose from the trailer park anonymity of the small town of Minot, North Dakota to climb her way up to several distinct and varied plateaus in the American entertainment world, and she continues to rise.
Class One advanced all-around college gymnast, Marneen Fields was discovered by Hollywood in 1976 and became a pioneering film and television stunt lady and a SAG actress. She’s gone on to become a respected multi-award winning pop-rock singer and ASCAP composer, and an aspiring scriptwriter. One of her greatest accomplishments was being coined, “Hollywood’s Original Fall Girl” in the mid 1980s and awarded a Fall Girl license plate by stunt coordinator J.P. Bill Catching and the Stuntman’s Association. To date Marneen’s talents have seen her compared to Oscar winner Sissy Spacek, Golden Globe winning pop composer Dianne Warren, Grammy Hall of Fame artist Whitney Houston, and when competing in gymnastics Marneen was able to perform some of the moves on floor exercise that were made famous by Olympic gold medal gymnast Olga Korbut.
Cartwheels & Halos is the telling of Marneen’s triumphant overcoming of incredible odds - including child abuse, an ankle reconstruction surgery, and years lost to a near-fatal car accident resulting in a series of life-threatening abdominal operations leaving her to live with PTSD. Marneen learned to roll with the punches to emerge from a long and lonely tunnel of horrors that left her physically and emotionally shattered and spiritually heartbroken. Yet she was able to summon her enormous reserves of strength and faith to reinvent herself as a potent force, both in the public spotlight and behind the scenes. To date she continues to create a wide and varied body of work while continuing to pursue her artistic passions with remarkable energy.
Filled with wonderful memories, fascinating insights and amazing anecdotes from this great period of Hollywood television and filmmaking (not to mention an abundance of rare photographs and song compositions from Marneen). Cartwheels & Halos is an engaging and revealing look at showbiz from a unique perspective, told by the person who was there to live through it all, creating a story that will entertain, inspire and move all those who take the journey.
Co-written by Marneen and her husband, Australian author and film historian John Harrison, Cartwheels and Halos is currently being prepared for a projected 2017 publication date, both as a hard copy trade paperback and online e-book. Bookmark this page and check back regularly for updates and sneak previews!
Working on more collages to be included in the e-book edition of Cartwheels & Halos: The True Marneen Lynne Fields Story. This one depicts Marneen stunt doubling for female lead Kim Myers and getting accosted by Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund) in A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge (1985).
In mid-1977, I packed my travel bags and headed for the dry air and sunny climate of the Arizona desert to film one of the stunts which I became best known for within the industry, getting punched off a moving train by Clint Eastwood in his classic action film, The Gauntlet. I landed the job after receiving a call from Clint’s stunt double and coordinator, Buddy Van Horn. He had been given my number and asked if I would be prepared to do this rather risky stunt. Though I was quite apprehensive about it, it was far too good an opportunity to turn down. I had about two weeks to get ready before I was due on location in Arizona, so I spent that time practicing in the playground at the local beach, where I would stand up on the moving swings and leap off of them while they were still in motion then roll into the sand.
In the movie, Clint – who also directed as well as starred in alongside his future wife Sondra Locke – plays Ben Shockley, an alcoholic and down on his heels cop from Phoenix, who is given the seemingly simple task of travelling to Las Vegas to escort a troublesome female witness named Gus Mally (Locke) back for a court case. Of course, this "nothing witness" for a "nothing trial” ends up instigating a white-knuckle fight for survival, as the cop and his witness are chased across the desert by corrupt officials who are determined to kill them both before they reach their destination.
For my big scene, I stunt doubled for actress Samantha Doane as one of the tough biker chicks who runs into Shockley and Mally when they jump aboard the carriage of a passing goods train. The plot set-up was that the couple had previously stolen a motorcycle from this outlaw biker gang, which has them out for revenge. After getting rid of the two male bikers (who are busy forcing themselves lasciviously on Mally), Shockley angrily approaches the female biker, who looks at him and asks “You wouldn’t hit a lady, would you?” Shockley replies by slugging her in the face and sending her flying out of the train carriage and onto the hard and hot desert floor. I also doubled for Samantha during the fight with Clint inside the train carriage, and had a small background role as one of the female bikers in an earlier scene. I had henna tattoos drawn on me by one of the make-up artists for both of my roles – one of black roses painted onto my shin for the background scene, and a heart with an arrow through it onto the top clevage of my chest, with arrows onto my upper biceps for my stunt scene. The hairstylist took an hour putting my hair into pin curls in order to pin a thick black curly wig onto my head, which was not only intensely uncomfortable to wear in the Arizona heat, but gave me extra concern about the possibility of it coming loose and disturbing my field of vision during the jump.
For the leap from the moving train carriage, all I had for protection was a small boy’s football girdle and some knee pads strapped to me under the pair of grotty old blue Levis which the character wore. All movie stunts are serious and carry potential risks, but this one filled me with a particularly strong level of anxiety in the lead-up to its execution. The screenplay called for me to be standing with my back to the open train carriage, causing me to exit going off blind. When Clint throws a punch at my jaw, I had to turn to my right and leap from the train, while trying to make it look as if my body had gone limp from the punch. The scary part was, because the train was in motion, until I actually spun around and made the commitment to fall, I had no real idea of exactly where I was going to land. Clint and Van Horn had blocked out my scene with me and gone over the approximate area where I was expected to fall. I was warned by both of them that I must make sure my body moved in the same direction the train at all times (hard to do when you’re going off backwards with a half twist), or I could be thrown back under the train track wheels and squashed to death. I watched in nervous anticipation as the props department prepared the ground for my crash landing. They removed as many rocks as they could, then they rolled in a small wheel barrel of full of sand. They poured the sand around the general area I’d be landing in to help cushion my fall, but there were still a few cactus plants and smaller rocks in the area. I remember them tossing an old rusty Coke can and more cactus plants onto the sand to make it look more authentic.
One thing you have to bear in mind is, when your body leaves an object traveling at a speed like that, the gravitational pull carries you along with the object, even after you have left it. The train was travelling steady at around five miles per hour, which may not sound like much, but seems a whole lot more when you are the one who has to make the leap. As I performed the half twist to align myself with the massive train, and launched myself off the carriage, my body, unexpectedly, popped high up into the air and I flew horizontally at the same speed of the train as I was carried along the side of it. All of this happening within seconds prior to beginning my descent. While mid-air, my arms, legs, and body flailed uncontrollably for what seemed like slow, terrifying minutes rather than the few seconds it actually took to complete the fall. It was very frightening for me at that moment. In those few seconds, I had to try and muster all my strength to regain equilibrium and keep my body moving in the direction of the train as I was free falling and being pulled every which way. At the same time, I was also trying to keep a mindful eye on where I was going to land. I was certainly terrified at that moment, and wondered why the hell I was even here doing this. The noise of the train and its gravitational pull had me feeling as if I might be pulled back against the side of the carriage or, even worse, sucked under its rolling wheels and crushed to death, which added to the incredible anxiety and adrenaline that was charging through my body.
Once the centrifugal pull of the train dissipated, my body fell like a sack of potatoes, hitting the harsh Arizona floor with a force equal to the weight of my body times the speed of the object. In other words, pretty darn hard. I flipped over wildly about ten times before slamming into a cactus of all things, which halted my roll. I was rattled and bruised, but miraculously came away without a scratch on my bare arms and face. I went from incredible apprehension to feeling like a complete champion in seconds! I had conquered the jump off the moving train, and got to walk away without any broken or fractured bones, only a badly bruised left heel. It could have so easily gone the other way, though. When you watch the stunt in the film, you can see how close I came to landing on that rusty old Coke can. To think we all stood around watching the props department nonchalantly toss it into the sand (presumably to give a bit of variety to the barren landscape), and my youth and inexperience making me ignorant to the damage it might have caused had I connected with it upon landing. This was still the days of the old hard tin Coke cans, not the easily-crushable aluminum ones which became the mainstay not long after. I hate to think of what might have happened if my face landed on it, or if I had hit the back of my head on it while rolling over upon landing. As I always did upon completing a successful stunt, I thanked the angel on my shoulder.
Despite the incredible risks and the immense terror which gripped me during its execution, it remains a stunt which I am incredibly proud of, and is certainly one of the defining moments of my stunt career, which was launched virtually overnight because of it. They put my jump in the trailer, a still photo of it was sent out to all the newspapers and entertainment magazines, and the Hollywood stunt community began taking real notice of me. It was one of the most dangerous stunts which a female had ever attempted on film to that point, and it looked amazing and startlingly authentic when it was seen on the big screen for the first time, and it still holds up incredibly well on home video today. People still gasp when they see that stunt for the first time, because they can see that it is real. No matter how advanced cinema special effects might look today, thanks primarily to computer technology, nothing will ever match the genuine excitement of a girl with little more than knee pads, a football girdle and a lot of heart and spirit, taking a great and dangerous leap into the unknown in the name of filmmaking.
About a week after I got back from filming in Arizona, I received a personal phone call from Fritz Manes, who was Clint Eastwood's childhood friend and producer at the time. Fritz told me he was leaving me a drive-on pass at the Warner Brothers Studio front gate and to come by the office to pick up some photographs he had for me. When I arrived at the studio and opened the door to Malpaso Productions, there was Clint Eastwood, standing alone in the reception area of the outer office. I kid you not, he was in a state of complete calm and deep thought, and I imagined he was either meditating or if it was his way of running and remembering lines. I wondered how he was going to react, since I had entered without knocking first, but he was fine as he shook my hand and I reminded him that I was the girl he had punched off the train. “Yes, Fritz isn't here right now,” Clint replied. “But he has some photos for you. Come in here, Fritz left them on his desk." He handed me a huge manilla envelope with my name written in black swastik pen on it. Once again, he shook my hand and complimented me on the great stunt I did, as he opened the envelope and showed me the still photos which captured my entire sequence in a set of 8X10 shots, which I still possess and treasure to this day.
Clint Eastwood was the most talented director and producer I ever worked with, no doubt. After my stunt had been completed, and I lay winded and nearly knocked-out on the hot desert floor, pain tearing at my left heel, I looked up and wondered how I was going to get out of that sand trap as the train had vanished. A few moments later, the train coming rolling slowly backwards down the track, Clint hauled himself off the train as soon as it came to a halt, ran over to me and picked me up in a giant hug. “I LOVED IT!”, he exclaimed. In 2010, Clint actually contacted me via Facebook, and was nice enough to send me a copy of a 1988 issue of Star Magazine, which ran an article on me with the headline Clint Eastwood’s Hug Changed My Life.
Released in December of 1977, The Gauntlet proved to be another popular box-office hit for Clint, who could really do no wrong at this point in his career. With a production budget of US $5.5 million, the film would earn a tidy US $35.4 million during its initial theatrical run in America, which at the time was a pretty impressive figure (even more so considering Star Wars was still dominating the box-office at the time). It felt good to be involved in a project that was proving to be a hit with the public, it meant all the hard work and risks I had put myself through was being seen and hopefully appreciated by lots of people. It made the ordeal more than worthwhile.
But I have to tell you, going out that train blind and backwards with a half twist, not knowing if I I was going to end up safely on the sand or crushed under metal wheels, was absolutely terrifying. It still makes me shake just to think and write about it.
(Excerpt from the forthcoming book Cartwheels & Halos: The True Marneen Lynne Fields Story, by Marneen Lynne Fields & John Harrison. Copyright 2016 by the authors of the work).
You can view a clip of Marneen Fields performing the stunt from The Gauntlet at the following You Tube link:
In early 1985, I received a call from Sandra Gimpel, stunt coordinator and ex-president of the Stuntwoman’s Association of Motion Pictures asking me if I’d like to audition for the role of an insanity victim in a new film which she was stunt coordinator on. What I found most surprising about Sandra calling me out of the blue like that was it had been about five years since I had last seen her at a Stuntman’s Association 5K race. At that event I had mentioned to Sandra how serious I was about my acting and how I’d been studying acting with celebrity acting coaches like Victor French (known to many as Agent 44 on Get Smart) and Jeff Corey (who played one of the mutant humans in 1970's Beneath the Planet of the Apes), along with performing in small theater productions in the Los Angeles area. The timing of her call was perfect as I had just finished a run of the famous Paddy Chayefsky play, The Tenth Man at the Melrose Theater in Hollywood playing the lead role of schizophrenic Evelyn. I was thrilled to get her call to audition for this character because I was fascinated with portraying characters dealing with complex issues like mental illness.
The film which Sandra had contacted me about was a low budget horror film titled Hellhole, and I’d heard through the grapevine that Linda Blair was maybe going to star it. It was being produced by Louis Arkoff, the son of the legendary Samuel Z. Arkoff, the prolific producer of a long string of low-budget drive-in features which he produced between the 1950s through the 1970s, many of them with his partner James H. Nicholson and his American International Pictures (AIP) company. So Louis Arkoff came from a good pedigree and had huge footsteps to follow in. To co-produce the film with him he brought in Billy Fine, and to helm the film, he brought in French director Pierre De Moro, whom apart from Hellhole has two other films to his name, Christmas Mountain (1981) and the award winning Savannah Smiles (1982).
Hellhole was something of a throwback to the women-in-prison films (or WIP, as they were affectionately known as), that were so popular in the early 1970s. Except here, the location was changed from a prison to a female mental institution, where a young woman (played by Judy Landers, taking the role Linda Blair was originally marked for) is sent after suffering from amnesia that has been brought on by the trauma of seeing her mother brutally murdered in front of her. Unfortunately, amnesia turns out to be the least of her worries, as she soon discovers that the institution is run by a mad doctor and his female assistant who are performing illegal experiments involving chemical lobotomies on the inmates. Landers was a familiar face in television shows like Vega$ and BJ and the Bear, usually playing the blonde bombshell, and she often appeared in projects alongside her older sister Audrey.
Louis Arkoff certainly assembled an interesting cast to populate his film. Playing the role of the mad Dr. Dane was Marjoe Gortner (who had found fame in the 1940s as a child evangelist before turning to acting as an adult), and Mary Woronov (a statuesque actress known for her work in Andy Warhol and Roger Corman films), was cast as Dane’s feared assistant, Dr. Fletcher. Also in the cast was the late Ray Sharkey, Terry Moore (who had been acting in films since the forties, and starred in the classic 1949 monster movie Mighty Joe Young), and the late Robert Z'Dar, an actor with a huge face and immense, prominent jaw who developed a cult following thanks to his appearance in the Maniac Cop series of films.
I almost didn't get the role in Hellhole. Louis Arkoff and Pierre De Moro cast me with a verbal offer based on a four page composite of photos and credits which I had shown them during my interview. Louis cast me on the spot and tole me the part was mine, then within minutes when I re-entered the casting waiting room I was informed by a casting assistant that another actress had been given the role. Casting mix ups like that have happened to me throughout my career, sometimes over a courtesy phone call late at night after you think you’ve booked the job, and once while at the airport ready to board an airplane for San Francisco. It’s best to assume no job in Hollywood is yours until you’ve signed a contract. But on this day, I stood up for myself refusing to take no for answer because the producer himself had cast me. I flat out told the casting assistant that she must be mistaken because the producer and director had already verbally offered me the role. I remember this very aggressive lady then explained to me,
"We have two roles available, do you have any objection to playing a lesbian and doing nudity?"
“Well, yes. I do. Can you explain the roles in more detail?”
She told me in one role my character would eventually wind up dead and the mad female doctor’s character would passionately kiss my corpse on the lips. I said, “As an actor I'll take that part since I'm dead when she kisses me, I wouldn’t know that she had kissed me.” I let her know that I don't do nudity so I’d have to decline the other role. So I chose necrophilia instead. It seemed a lot easier to deal with.
My co-star performance in Hellhole revolved around two big scenes in the film. My character, a religious insanity victim named Curry, an inmate at the institution is sitting in the cafeteria at meal time watching Judy Landers and another woman eating their dinner. I suddenly go into a religious hallucination and leap up from the table and begin to toss everyone’s plates into the air and onto the ground, screaming about the devil poisoning their food. After I have made a big mess and thrown everyone’s food onto the floor, I wrestle fight a nurse, and then jump up onto one of the tables, walking across other people’s food on their plates, knocking over a lot of dishes and ranting in tongues while bad guy Ray Sharkey looks on in disbelief. I stop dead in my tracks against the wall and perform the sign of the cross as Dr. Dane and Dr. Fletcher, accompanied by their big security guards, drag me off and sentence me to the hellhole, the secret experimental area where I am tied to a gurney and subjected to several needle injections into my neck (chemical lobotomy) and the gross post-mortem kiss.
My sequence inside the cafeteria scene was shot in one take, which was standard for scenes that were to be shot in one take, especially on low-budget productions. While everyone went to lunch, I stayed in the room going over and over my dialogue and the blocking for the scene. I didn’t get to meet Mary Wornov prior to the filming of the scene and imagined she was going to be a short and older-looking nurse, but when she walked into the room for my scene and I saw how tall and beautiful she was I was shocked, and it almost threw me off. I staged everything myself in the cafeteria, setting up the trays, bottles and plates of food for me to kick and trip over as I walked across the tabletops. Another thing to mention about my cafeteria scene is that director Pierre DeMoro gave me an interesting task moments prior to rolling camera that I hadn’t rehearsed. He told me to cross myself every time my character says the word, “devil,” and showed me quickly how to cross myself. Up until this point in my life I’d never been in a church so I didn’t know how to cross myself. Pierre let me know several weeks after filming that I’d crossed myself wrong. We both justified that crossing myself wrong was a great choice for a religious insanity victim. Eventually my character’s name of Curry was dropped from the credits and my character was titled Girl in the Cafeteria.
After the cafeteria sequence was finished, Marjoe Gortner pulled me to the side and quietly said, “This is how you speak in tongues.” He gave me a quick lesson in how to speak in tongues, which differed somewhat from my own interpretation. I’m sure Marjoe’s background in evangelism helped him there, and he was wonderful to work with and complimented me several times after filming the scene of me on the gurney, telling me what a great job I’d done. It’s a pity Marjoe seems to have given up acting and has not spent any time in the public eye for some time. In 1993, nearly ten years after Hellhole, I ran into him at the 12th Annual Golden Boot Awards. I had a nice chat with him, he told me he was with William Morris and that he was producing. I managed to snag a photo with him, and I must say he looked very resplendent in his western gear and huge belt buckle.
My scene on the gurney would not have turned so great had not producer Louis Arkoff given me such great direction on how he wanted me to play that scene. He told me minutes before the camera started rolling that he wanted me to take that gurney out of the floor and whip myself around very violently. To this day people who see the film talk about how much they love the scenes of my hair flipping back and forth, and that was Louis’ favorite part also. I felt honored and satisfied that finally, after being a serious acting student for eight years (and minoring in Theater Arts at USU), that I had become the first girl from the stunt arena to land a straight acting and speaking role this prominent. Louis told me that they ended up cutting most of the other actresses scenes that took place in Hellhole because mine were so outstanding. For my work in the film I studied performances like Jack Nicholson’s in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and loved the technique where the characters are seen being carried off while screaming back into the camera. I applied that staging technique when they carried me out of the cafeteria and it looked great on film and in all the still photos.
Originally in my close-up scene tied to the gurney prior to Mary Woronov performing the chemical lobotomy, my character spoke no lines. Woronov stepped in and said she wanted me to do some lines about being afraid of the devil, and saying the devil was her. I learned that day that sometimes in filmmaking lines are written and given to you on the spot. Pierre De Moro shot the scene where I was crying real tears from a long shot and I remember him saying he felt bad that he didn’t shoot any close-ups of it because it was so good. Unfortunately, as an actor, once you exhaust the emotion it’s awfully hard to summon it up again no matter how good you are. Pierre and I discussed how in highly charged emotional scenes a director should start with a tight shot on the actor to get the best performance, and save the establishing long shot for later in the sequence.
I never actually got to see or read a completed screenplay for Hellhole, only my scenes. I had no idea the film was going to have as much violence and sex that it wound up containing until I saw it in the theater. The script (written by actor Aaron Butler under the pen name Vincent Mongol) had some interesting ideas and moments and I felt the film could have been much better if they toned down lot of the stuff that I felt was in poor taste and concentrated on some of the more psychological aspects of the story, but I guess they were trying to appeal to the thrill-hungry drive-in crowd. One of my best days on the set was when the scriptwriter pulled me aside and told me I brought more to my role than he could ever have imagined it having. That was the ultimate compliment an actor can receive. Butler had also written the popular 1983 women in prison film Chained Heat, which starred Linda Blair and was also produced by Billy Fine.
Released in March of 1985, Hellhole seemed to slip through the cracks of independent film distribution at the time. The drive-in and grindhouse cinemas, where films like this found their biggest audiences were slowly disappearing in the wake of home video. When Hellhole did get released on VHS in America, on the RCA/Columbia label, it was exciting to see myself in the film featured in two of the three photos on the back cover of the video box. It’s interesting to note that after my name had been included in the Variety magazine credit listing, it was then mysteriously removed the following week, seeing my face so prominent on the video helped soften the blow of seeing my name removed from the credit listing in Variety, and reinforce how important my character and performance was to that film.
Over the subsequent years, Hellhole became something of a cult classic, but one that became increasingly hard to find with old VHS copies selling for high prices on sites like eBay and within collectors circles. The fact that a clip of my chemical lobotomy scene on the gurney from the film has racked-up over 600,000 views on You Tube provides testament to how popular the movie could have been had it been given a better chance.
Lots of people commented that I was destined to become the next Sissy Spacek after seeing my performance in Hellhole, but the film’s lack of distribution made it hard to capitalize on. Fortunately, Scream Factory announced that the film would finally be coming to DVD and Blu-ray in July of 2016, so maybe it might still prove to be a handy - if rather belated - stepping stone for me. I am glad the film will finally be available more widely and enable people to see and enjoy my performance in the wonderful high-definition which Blu-ray provides.
One thing I will never forget from my Hellhole experience was attending the cast party at Louis Arkoff’s magnificent house up in Mulholland south of Coldwater Canyon Blvd after production had wrapped. I was excited to be there but also rather nervous. I wasn’t used to walking around in high-heels when I descended a staircase holding my glass of wine and trying to look cool, calm and collected. You can probably guess what happens next. I lost my footing, but instead of tumbling down the stairs, I grabbed the railing with my free hand and vaulted head of heals straight over the railing and onto the floor below! The amazing thing was that I did it without spilling a single drop of my wine, and landed completely upright on my high heels. I glanced around at a sea of stunned faces and open mouths. I’m sure some people thought I had taken the spill deliberately to show off my stunt skills. There’s no doubt my old gymnastics and balancing ability came in handy when I had to make that landing with barely a split-second to think, but believe me there was nothing pre-planned about it. I managed to avoid breaking my neck and received a round of applause in the process. I also met Samuel Arkoff at the cast party, and it was true, he was usually seen smoking a cigar. It meant so much to me when he told me, along with co-producer Billy Fine how good they thought my performance was in the movie.
Hellhole though has certainly haunted me throughout the years. Mary Woronov slipped her big forceful tongue into my mouth when she kissed me. I wasn’t expecting it, and since my character was dead I could do nothing to resist against it. I just had to close my eyes and take it. It was real creepy, but it certainly looked effective and after many years of big-budget studio films and television work, it was certainly a memorable introduction to the world of exploitation filmmaking. I am proud of my performance in Hellhole and grateful for the experience and challenge, and I am happy that the movie has established a devoted fanbase in the years since its release, but it is not the sort of film I would have wanted to continue making.
(Excerpt from the forthcoming book Cartwheels & Halos: The True Marneen Lynne Fields Story, by Marneen Lynne Fields & John Harrison. Copyright 2016 by the authors of the work).
