John Wayne’s drawl, his measured line delivery, and his rolling walk were not invented in a studio office. Wayne copied them from a real cowboy named Enos Edward Canutt, known to history as Yakima Canutt. And the famous truck stunt in Raiders of the Lost Ark was a direct homage to a stunt Canutt performed forty years earlier. This episode follows Canutt from a ranch near Penawawa Creek in eastern Washington, where he broke his first wild bronco at eleven, to a world bronco-busting title at seventeen and the brutal rodeo circuit where a bull tore his upper lip open.

The conversation covers how a bout of flu in the Navy during World War I permanently damaged his voice and ended his leading-man prospects when talkies arrived, and how he reinvented himself as an engineer of action with the L-stirrup, the shotgun wagon release, and buried cable rigs. It examines his mentorship of John Wayne, their invention of the over-the-shoulder screen punch, the 1939 Stagecoach stunt beneath a galloping six-horse team, his catalog of broken bones and crushed organs, and his second-unit masterpiece, the Ben-Hur chariot race, filmed over five months without a single horse injured.

• How the L-stirrup’s missing outer edge kept riders from being dragged to death
• The Running W tripwire device, now banned worldwide for what it did to horses
• Why the camera’s lack of depth perception makes a cinematic punch look real
• How he broke six ribs saving a frozen actress on the set of San Francisco in 1936
• Why his 1967 Academy Honorary Award cited his safety devices rather than his daring