If truck driver Mike Ryan ever decides to interview for a position with a reputable OTR carrier, he'd better leave his resume at home. While most of us put our work experience on paper, his is on a five-minute video recording. Ryan seems like a nice enough guy, but based on the tape, it seems that every time he gets behind the wheel of a big rig, he manages to flip it, roll it, crash it, run it off a cliff, or turn it into a rolling fireball the size of Rhode Island. Sometimes he does it all at once. And yet, he keeps getting hired — not only that, the state of California has yet to revoke even one of his seven CDL categories. As a matter of fact, the state of California has lately been encouraging him to smash up trucks.
Mike Ryan is a stunt man. He has done most of his truck driving in front of film and television cameras. As one of a handful of Hollywood stunt drivers who specialize in semi-truck stunts, he has careened and exploded across the big screen in movies such as Terminator II, Thelma & Louise, Independence Day and Black Dog, and across the little screen in prime time shows and a slew of national commercials. In addition, for the last three years he's also raced the clock in an extremely modified "Freightliner" in the Pikes Peak International Hill Climb.
Lately, however, he has begun to scale back his work in feature films to concentrate on his business ("Picture Vehicles Unlimited," a company that supplies exotic and classic vehicles to filmmakers and advertisers; it has a website at www.picturevehicles.com), to participate in worldwide racing events (including the Pikes Peak Hill Climb) with his 1,200-hp modified Freightliner, and — believe it or not — to help improve trucking safety.
From Tennessee to Los Angeles
Ryan first drove trucks while working for a Tennessee landscaping company in his teens. Six months after he graduated, he was living in California when he spotted six Camaros parked at a local parts store. The Camaros had just been used to make the Ron Howard movie "Eat My Dust." "Being a teenage kid, I thought the sun rose and set over Camaros," says Ryan.
When he found out the Camaros were all owned by stuntman Ronnie Ross, he tracked Ross down and introduced himself. "Ronnie took me under his wing," says Ryan. Six months later, Ryan performed his first paid stunt. For the next seven years, Ryan did freelance stunt work and sold cars to support himself, but in the early 80s he was finally able to ditch the day job for full-time stunt work — but don't expect to find footage of him being tossed through a saloon window.
"Just vehicles," he says. "That's my only interest. Cars, boats, planes, motorcycles, any of that stuff, that's all fine and good. Setting myself on fire and jumping off a roof or getting in fights beneath a horse — no thanks. I gotta have something that hits the ground before me." He credits his emergence as a truck stunt specialist to his experience as a teenager. "In Tennessee, everybody drove a truck," he says. "It was one of the more common jobs, so it was never considered a big thing. But in Hollywood, nobody drives a truck, so I wound up getting pigeonholed.
"I like the stunts in semi-trucks because of their size and the dramatic quality that they have when you're sliding, rolling or crashing one of them," says Ryan. "They really command the available road. You can't get trucks to do as many things as you can get cars to do, but it's kind of fun to come up with new things."
The evolution of big rigs has both helped and hindered Ryan. "More power's always great!" he chuckles. "The old trucks, you had to use everything you had and you wished for a lot more. The 600-hp Cat is my favorite beast." On the other hand, he says, "The manufacturers build vehicles now that are dramatically safer than they were 10 or 20 years ago," says Ryan. "As a stunt guy, it makes it pretty hard — all those antilock brakes and traction control — we're always trying to figure out how to outsmart the engineers — 'How do I get rid of this ABS system? I can't do 180s and 360s and all that other skid and slide and hit the mark stuff with antilock brakes!' "
Safety tips from a rollover king
Lately, Ryan has been developing a safety program for trucking fleets. "I've used what we've learned in Hollywood from rolling and jackknifing and jumping and crashing semi-trucks to try to help drivers avoid some of those situations. [I] also let them know there are things they can do when they're in those situations that may either save them from making it worse, or allow them to choose the least dangerous or the best possible method of survival once it's in the fan. It ain't over 'til it's over. You've always got some options."
During the presentation, Ryan plays his five-minute crash video, to mixed reviews. "It's interesting to see the opinions of the truckers," he says. "Some say, 'Wow, cool, far out,' and others say, 'That's the rotten SOB that gives our industry such a bad name.'
"I feel a certain guilt. Truckers — as have many groups — have been stereotyped at times by Hollywood as less than savory people." Still, he points out that truckers aren't the only victims. "Hollywood has always gone for the bigger is better approach — how long have they been wreckin' trains? Since silent movies!" Ryan insists he holds "real" truckers in the highest esteem. "My brother is a long-haul guy out of Georgia. He hauls goods and tankers, and he's got something like a million-and-a-half safe miles."
Recreating wrecks
In keeping with the theme of safety, some of Ryan's most serious stunts aren't performed for movie directors, but for accident reconstruction experts. "I did a huge wreck a week and a half ago," says Ryan during a July interview. "It was an accident reconstruction for Cal Trans. I took a '95 Peterbilt and a big fuel tanker and drove it through a center divider on a freeway at highway speeds.
"I felt like a crash test dummy. It's just a horrific story — here's this soccer mom in a minivan with two kids, talking on a car phone, she merges onto the freeway, doesn't signal, doesn't look, and pulls right into the passenger door of this guy hauling 9100 gallons of gasoline down the freeway."
In the ensuing melee, Ryan says the truck went through a temporary construction center barrier. The tanker burst and ignited, and the trucker was killed. "The state got sued because somebody in the opposite lane decided that their guardrail wasn't sufficient," says Ryan.
He was called in to recreate the tragedy on film. "We found a truck only four serial numbers off the one in the accident — here's the identical truck, at the identical speed, at the identical angle of impact. I took $55,000 worth of the governor's money and turned it into $3,400 of scrap metal.
"That was pretty scary and pretty big," he says, and continues the understatement. "There's a little trepidation. I've got a 9-year-old son I want to make sure I'm around for, and a good wife."
In the end, Ryan hopes his safety and accident reconstruction work will make the roads safer for truckers and commuters alike. "The whole infrastructure of this country operates because these people are out there driving trucks up and down the road. Trying to survive my self-induced near-death experiences and dissect them into information I can share seems to be one of the better things I can do
"The general public is going to have to change some of its driving habits and practices out there on the road. My favorite soapbox is about people who, for whatever reason, get in the left lane, and whatever speed they're doing, 48 or 102, they act like they own the thing."
Perhaps if they shared Mike Ryan's perspective — upside down, more often than not — they'd pull to the right and toe the line.
