Ringer

Ringer is an unofficial term from the stunt community for a stunt player brought in from outside a production’s regular team to confront someone the team cannot safely or professionally strike back at. In the book, the practice gives physical force a role in workplace discipline: a ringer can punish an abusive director or actor in front of the crew, while the people who hired him remain at a remove. Cliff Booth is described as the finest practitioner of this custom in the 1960s film industry, but the work also sits alongside the stigma and unstable employment that increasingly shape his career.

Meaning and Function

A stunt gaffer and his crew may have to endure a director who shouts at them or an actor who hits them during a staged fight and then blames them for it. They cannot simply knock the director down or punch the actor in return. The alternative is to hire a stunt player for the day who does not belong to the gaffer’s crew. That player is the ringer: an outsider who can do what the regular team cannot, and who may take the confrontation into full view of the production.

The practice is informal rather than a listed or official job title; its meaning comes from what the hired player is expected to do. The ringer is not simply another performer assigned a dangerous stunt. He is enlisted to answer conduct that the crew has had to absorb without openly retaliating. The arrangement turns a production’s hierarchy against itself: the person with authority or star status who has been mistreating others is made vulnerable to a public physical reprisal, while the crew gets to watch.

The book’s hypothetical example involving Robert Conrad makes the distinction clear. Conrad, a star on The Wild Wild West, is said to pride himself on performing many of his own stunts, while stuntmen are sometimes hurt when he accidentally hits them for real in staged fights. He blames the stuntmen rather than taking responsibility. The passage raises the possibility of hiring a ringer in response, but does not say that Cliff Booth was actually hired to confront Conrad. The example instead describes the kind of grievance that could produce a ringer’s job.

Cliff Booth’s Reputation and a Notorious Job

Within the stunt community, being Rick Dalton’s double is not what Cliff Booth is most known for. The book ranks it below his military record, the speculation that he killed his wife, and his talent as a ringer. His work in that capacity is described as the best in the industry during the 1960s. That ranking places the role within a reputation built from very different kinds of notoriety: the ringer’s work is a professional skill, but one practiced through violence and shadowed by what colleagues believe about Cliff’s private life.

The account of Hurry Sundown supplies the clearest example. The production had spent a year in the broiling Mississippi sun with Otto Preminger, whom the crew regarded as a relentlessly abusive director. A stunt player was hired for the day, with the plan that he would deliberately spoil a shot and provoke a confrontation. Cliff did so during one of Preminger’s tirades, punching the director in the jaw and knocking him into the Mississippi mud.

Cliff explained the blow by saying that Preminger’s German Gestapo accent had triggered a wartime flashback, causing him to forget where he was. The next day, the production manager gave him a bus ticket home. The account also makes clear that the job was not treated as ordinary work: Cliff left Mississippi with an additional seven hundred dollars, paid off the books, and that night the crew celebrated with him at a hotel bar, where he did not have to pay for a drink. The public punch, the excuse, the hidden payment, and the crew’s welcome together show how the ringer’s intervention could be both deniable and openly appreciated by the people it was meant to defend.

The Boundary Between Ringer Work and Ordinary Doubling

The distinction matters because Cliff’s work as a ringer should not be confused with his regular assignment as Rick Dalton’s stunt double. On The Green Hornet, Cliff was brought onto the set to double Rick during Rick’s guest appearance; he was not hired as a day-player ringer to give Bruce Lee a public beating. When the two men fought, Cliff was struggling against his instinct to kill Bruce Lee. The third round was broken up by the stunt gaffer’s wife, and Cliff was quickly fired.

The reason his hiring had already been precarious was that stunt gaffer Randy Lloyd and Randy’s wife Janet believed Cliff had killed his wife. After the fight with Bruce Lee, the suspicion against him was compounded by a visible on-set confrontation. For the stunt community, he was now associated not only with the rumor of murder but with trying to break a television lead’s back in front of the crew. Afterward, Cliff effectively ceased being Rick’s stunt double and became his gofer.

Employment, Leverage, and Consequences

Cliff’s change in status exposes the difference between a recognized double and a worker who must find each job through a production’s existing network. Earlier, his involvement in Rick’s projects had been written into Rick’s contract: if Rick had the role, Cliff doubled him, and a chair with Cliff’s name on it awaited him on set. By the time Rick was guesting on other television shows, that guarantee was gone. Stunt gaffers generally relied on their own crews, and Cliff’s access to a few days of work on shows such as Tarzan or Bingo Martin depended on Rick speaking to the gaffer for him.

When Cliff asked Rick to talk to the stunt gaffer on Lancer about work, he was asking for advocacy, not invoking an assured position. Rick said the gaffer was best friends with Randy, and Cliff understood what that connection implied. The exchange shows how reputation and personal loyalties could close off work even when a performer had the skill to do it. It also places ringer work against the rest of Cliff’s employment: the role made him valuable to crews seeking a forceful answer to abuse, but it did not secure a steady place on a production.

The aftermath of The Green Hornet incident made that insecurity sharper. Cliff had already received little stunt work because of the speculation that he was a murderer; the altercation gave the Hollywood stunt community another reason not to hire him. Rick continued paying him a nominal salary to drive, run errands, and remain available, with the expectation that stunt jobs would supplement it. The ringer’s capacity to wield leverage for a crew thus contrasts with Cliff’s own diminished leverage as a worker: outside one specially arranged confrontation, he still depended on other people to make room for him on set.