MAN: They had a perfect moment in time.
That's as much as that cliff was going to give them.
I'm glad that she got in her car and drove off.
Because if she would have hung out any longer,
it was like the entire mountain was going to fall on top of her.
That cliff had it out for them or something.
I don't know what it was but it just didn't end well for the Boenishes.
Nothing happens by chance.
Every single thing that ever happens, happens for a reason.
Happens due to the law of the universe.
And it's just incumbent upon me
to figure out enough what those laws are and obey those laws.
I feel that when I jump off a cliff,
I'm obeying those laws of the universe, including gravity.
- Ready? - WOMAN: I'm ready.
OK. Four, three, two, one, go.
We've moved over to the mid-point of our newsroom
to get away from the mainstream news of the day
and look at some more unusual things going on.
Of course, I have been the one
with the more unusual things going on for most of the day.
One of them is the growing fad of parachuting from skyscrapers.
Especially here in Los Angeles. And you pursued that yesterday afternoon.
MAN: Downtown Los Angeles is a natural for this sort of thing.
In particular, the high-rise construction boom is a big attraction.
Because the unfinished buildings usually have little security,
jumpers can make it secretly to the top and make theirjumps.
Not too many years ago, this sport wouldn't have worked in Los Angeles
because there were no true high-rise buildings.
But now several buildings are above 50 stories tall
and skyscraper skydiving is a big sport. It is also illegal.
MAN: We almost feel like we're astronauts walking on the moon.
It just gives us a feeling of power and of joy.
We want to share it with the world but every time we try to,
people can't relate because, in a sense, it's out of their realm.
When I first started this story, I thought that's a crazy thing.
Why would anyone want to do that?
But after talking for a while with those people
and hearing the thrill they get from it,
I have to admit it's a little tempting.
- No! - Only a little, but it is.
- Doofus! - (LAUGHS)
My guest's name rhymes with Danish. His name is Carl Boenish.
You are a cinematographer, A, but you are, B, a cliff jumper.
I want to say that again so people know I meant to say it.
Cliff jumper. You jump off cliffs, Carl. You do do that?
Yes, I do, Pat.
CARL: One of my mottos is there's no future in growing up.
I just never want to grow up.
Most people, I guess they grow old. I don't want to grow old or grow up.
(WOMAN LAUGHS)
I don't want to be childish.
But I think there are a lot of virtues in being childlike.
Because if you study a child, he hasn't been taught what he can't do.
- WOMAN: We all do a lot of praying. - MAN: You do pray?
CARL: I think a lot of this comes from a metaphysical basis, even.
A spiritual basis.
I think that the biggest aspect to why I do this is for rejuvenation.
Because if I can master these goals, it improves every other department in life.
I think that if a group of people can watch me jump off a building
and be successful, they can say, "Well, I probably don't want to do that
but maybe I could bowl that perfect 300 game."
LONG: He was a guy that was everything and everywhere all at once.
And he had this crazy infectious enthusiasm. And he would laugh.
And he would fly over to the piano and play some classical riffs
and then he would talk about quantum mechanics.
And then he would get a little weepy
and then he'd wax nostalgic about some job that he had.
Then we'd go out and jump on the trampoline.
It was like a stream of consciousness.
Half from hell and half from, you know, some better world somewhere.
I mean, it was really an interesting kind of thing being around this guy.
WOMAN: Our father's name was Carl.
And Ronnie was Carl, so at home, we always called him Ronnie.
My brother got polio from a polio vaccine.
They weren't sure he was going to live.
MAN: But he survived it.
And for his recovery he was in a wheelchair and couldn't walk.
His legs were really weak.
So he spent his time playing the piano.
PRICE: When he had polio, he missed a whole year of elementary school.
But once he finally got cleared and could go back to school,
he challenged every boy in his class one at a time
until he could beat them in a foot race.
And he beat every one of them.
He talked to me a lot about his birth mother leaving.
And I think that touched him deeply.
Then he was in high school and he was, you know,
very intellectual and always doing his calculus.
BOB: So he had just finished college when I was born
and started working for Hughes Aircraft as an electrical engineer.
WENTZEL: Once he got into skydiving he just changed.
They're always pulling you in. You're part of a group.
You have to fly together. So he changed completely.
WOMAN: You used to be an engineer. Pretty safe, secure type job.
When and how did you make the decision to give that all up
and go into doing this, what you like to do, full time?
It's funny. My boss at Hughes Aircraft told me,
"Carl, the man who knows how will always have a job."
"The man who knows why will be his boss."
And at that time I knew how to design electrical circuits.
I knew how to skydive.
But I knew why to skydive
much better than I knew why the electronic circuits worked.
OK, new sheet of paper. New heading entitled The Gypsy Moths.
PRICE: He was working at Hughes Aircraft.
And he got the opportunity to do Gypsy Moths.
And that was a big MGM production.
CARL: I was asked by MGM
to be in charge of the aerial free-fall filming sequences.
MAN: John Frankenheimer,
the director who created the excitement of Grand Prix,
now captures the drama and spectacle
of the death-defying game called skydiving in The Gypsy Moths.
So he went and took the Gypsy Moths job
and that was the end of his electrical engineering career.
CARL: I didn't know how I wanted to film the aerial sequences.
I had to experiment and try all kinds of things.
And I had to find really young guys who were willing to do that.
Pull it! Pull it!
Carl was an innovator. He was probably the only one in Hollywood,
or the area, that was known for free-fall photography.
MAN: Background of Carl Boenish and his films.
Carl Boenish's early start.
He has been able to put off going back to work two months at a time
such that for over the last ten years, he's never had to go back to work,
and is accustomed to making film payments instead of car payments.
As it's worked out in the past,
Carl Boenish usually spends about two years
to make one 15-minute film.
If you were jumping with Boenish, it was expected
that you'd wear a helmet-mounted camera or possibly two.
Carl's main focus was to share the wealth. Share that feeling.
To share the feeling with people that didn't understand it,
that thought we were absolutely crazy to do something like this.
But once you see it and see the beauty of it,
I think people tend to understand the motive.
CARL: I've been skydiving for 18 years now
and I've been filmmaking forjust as long.
Primarily, I consider myself a filmmaker first and a skydiver second.
So whatever he did, he wanted to capture on film the best way he could.
I think he wanted to show the humanity, the freedom, that is felt
when you are pushing the envelope of what the human spirit can accomplish.
MAN: Yosemite is beautiful. It's breathtaking.
Many people cry when they first see it.
It's beyond their expectation, beyond their experience.
I was the chief ranger in Yosemite National Park.
And my job was protection.
So protecting the park from the people and the people from the park
and the people from the people.
Where did you get the inclination to jump off a cliff?
Well, this comes from making 1500 parachute jumps over 15 years
and becoming so proficient at it that you wonder,
well, what else is out there?
MAN: El Capitan. 3,600 feet of polished granite
rising from California's Yosemite Valley.
For climbers, its vertical ascent
is one of the great challenges of North America.
A group of professional parachuters
traveled to this unique spot to experience flight.
When I organized the first load to go to El Capitan,
we spent nearly all summer there, four or five trips,
scouting of the geography, finding, hopefully, places suitable to jump.
Then we stumbled upon this really idyllic place
that's about 3,000 feet tall
with an overhang of a couple hundred feet.
And as soon as I saw it I yelled, "Eureka!"
MAN: The pioneers of this remarkable attempt
are skydivers Kent Lane and Tom Stark.
Along with Kenny Gosselin, Mike Sherrin and helper Sally Wenlzel.
Expedition leader Carl Boenish with Dave Blattell.
Carl, on his own, was doing a lot of research on El Cap.
He then asked me to help him with the filming of it.
I wanted to figure out a way, if possible,
to film a person running off a cliff.
But from a vantage point looking back toward the cliff.
The first jumps were going to be made off El Cap
and Carl wanted to get motion-picture footage
of the first jumpers running towards him jumping off the cliff
and then that way he could then follow them down as they were in free fall.
CARL: Actually, I made a homemade ladder
that's about 20 feet long out of aluminum.
I perched on the end of this ladder so I could film toward the cliff.
BLATELL: It was a long pole.
And it had some crosspieces on it
to kind of make it like a little bit of a ladder.
When it was set up by the rock climbers on El Cap,
it was just this rod sticking out from the mountain
with a little bicycle seat.
And if you were going to sit on that bicycle seat,
there's nothing between you and 3,000 feet below you.
I mean, it was just nothing.
He would go out there...
and then he'd have to get up the nerve
and swing 180 so that he could sit on that seat.
He was nuts.
He was absolutely nuts. Then you would hear his laugh
and you were guaranteed that he was nuts.
And he talked us into jumping off this thing.
So we're all nuts.
We were all young and not knowing any better. We're ready to go.
BLATELL: Kent Lane, first jumper off of the first trip.
Two and a half years' jumping, 600 jumps.
My name is Kent Lane. The first time I heard about it,
it sounded like really a neat thing to do.
I was scared to death.
When I was out on this ladder, I'd make sure everyone was ready.
And I would start the countdown.
Five, four, three, two, one, go!
I saw a wall, a huge granite wall, accelerating right next to me.
When you exit off of a cliff, there's no wind to work with.
And so how you go off
is how you're going to stay for the next four or five seconds.
Can't wait to do it again.
And so once we got down on the ground
we had ground crew that took our gear
and they placed them under rocks or under logs. It is all mapped out.
We were all dressed up as hikers. All we did was we'd land and stood
and ground crew changed us from skydiver to hiker.
And then we just, you know, dispersed.
We were entirely successful in all our cliff jumps
because I feel that we were constantly led by the idea
that we were glorifying mankind's beautiful spirit of seeking adventure
and that we were within our rights of freedom and dominium over all the Earth.
There are many man-made laws that aren't laws at all that need to be broken.
One is a belief that it's impossible to jump off a cliff.
I felt the activity I thought was exciting.
And to do it off of El Cap just trigged my imagination.
I thought that was wonderful.
I didn't feel adversarial,
but it didn't keep me from doing my job at times.
It didn't seem like it was going to stop.
How do you herd a bunch of cats?
We had word that there were going to be cliff jumpers
coming into the top of El Cap.
And it was against the law.
This is a cat-and-mouse part of it.
LANE: A couple weeks later when Carl and I went back
and we jumped off, I got caught by the ranger.
I was the first person ever caught for BASE jumping in Yosemite.
MAN: Tom Stark, Dave Blattell and Jill Morgan got citations.
I was an attorney for the Federal Government.
So I couldn't represent them.
But I did a lot of pro bono work for them
and we were trying to challenge their park's regulation.
Speaking of El Capitan, there have been some controversies around that.
Apparently the park did not want people jumping off their cliffs.
Yeah. That's true. And we can certainly see their point of view.
But they just didn't understand.
In fact, they couldn't even believe that we just jumped off.
Basically, we will just jump off and fall for ten seconds
and fall over a thousand feet.
I found most of the jumpers very agreeable.
Carl was special. You kind of have an instinct about the ringleaders.
He was easy to remember. He had this aura of life.
You don't have to dislike someone to take away their freedom.
My name is Carl Boenish. I'm expedition of this leader.
(LAUGHTER)
Cut.
MAN: The park ranger at the time that issued these citations
was aware that Carl was involved in it.
MAN: What did you say with respect to the filming?
CARL: OK, they asked me, you know, whose equipment it was
and first of all they said, "Where is Carl?"
You know, I mean, where is Carl Boenish?
- Really? - Yeah. They're out for blood.
WENTZEL: Somehow we got involved with rangers.
The film was confiscated.
Carl was very concerned about his film.
MAN: One of those what was there was the park ranger
that sort of had this vendetta against Carl
and they continued to press the litigation aspect.
We don't want to be limited by anything except nature.
We always have to listen to nature's laws.
But not necessarily man's laws.
The US Magistrate, Don Pitts,
he was kind of tired of seeing this parade of cliff jumpers coming in.
So he was throwing the book at him.
MAN: I know that the park ranger was really trying to focus on Carl.
CARL: I don't mind being called paranoid,
if that's what you want to call it or me.
I do admit to being extreme and radical.
And I feel that I'm justified in being extremely radical
if it's based on truth and principle.
I believe that truth is radical.
WENTZEL: My time with Carl ended at the beginning of '79.
You were either all in or, you know, there were challenges.
At some level he was really trying to kind of close that gap
of getting that unconditional, forever love by his side.
The fact that Carl was around 40 years old and not married
told me that he either wasn't interested in women
or not interested in marriage.
He was a geek, a nerd, everything you can imagine in that scope.
I wouldn't say he was popular with the ladies.
I know that when it came to Jeanie, something really captured him about her.
His whole life just changed and the focus of his life was Jeanie.
Those of us who met Carl, anybody, would go away
with part of his goodness, it becomes a part of you.
And whenever anybody expresses goodness,
it travels away with that person.
Carl and I first met in April of 1979.
I was a sophomore at Pomona College.
Carl was showing his most recent film, which was Skydive.
(APPLAUSE)
Afterwards, he had us get in a circle.
He said, "Everybody stand up. Get in a circle and hold hands."
So the group of us stood up and held hands the way he had requested.
We're thinking, "This is a bit odd. Where is he going with this?"
And, of course, he just wanted us to experience the position
that skydivers would be in when they came into a star formation.
His purity was a very attractive quality.
And everybody recognized that.
When we were all departing,
I saw another girl was talking to him and giving him her phone number.
And I thought, well, she's very interested. So I just let it be.
It had been fun to see Carl's movie.
It was nice to meet and talk with a parachutist.
I wanted to pursue this somehow.
And I thought to myself, "I know Carl."
I believe that I wrote him a letter, actually.
He ended up calling me and telling me,
"I'll come out and get you. It's right on the way to drop zone."
And this ended up being our first date.
Carl and I talked a lot going out to the drop zone.
It was a long drive.
We talked about things that we believed in.
Principles that we held to.
While we were at the drop zone Carl said, "Let's have a foot race."
And I thought, "OK."
I think we were running next to the airplane
as the airplane was starting to take off.
It was just something that came to him to do.
I guess maybe in a sense, it was just a gauge.
A gauge of possibilities.
It had gotten late in the day after our day at the drop zone
and it was a long drive back.
Carl had told me that his sister had her house
right there at Lake Elsinore and that she wasn't home.
He said it will be fine if we just spent the night there.
So he said, "Well, you can sleep here on the couch
and I'll go sleep in the bedroom where I usually do."
After a couple of hours he came in and said,
"Can I lie down here beside you on the floor?"
Then I said, "Well, that's OK."
"That's OK."
Then he said, "Can I hold your hand?"
And so I said, "Yeah."
And so he was lying there parallel to me
and we're holding hands and that's the way we spent the night.
In a matter of just a few weeks,
we covered all the ground that each of us felt was necessary
to figure out if we were sufficiently compatible to start a life together.
It wasn't start a relationship, live together, any of that.
It was start a life together, get married.
You're about to get married in a week.
Yes. I'm very excited about that.
Does your fiancée jump off cliffs?
Well, not yet. She would like to. Since we met, she's made eight skydives
and she has a natural affinity for the air.
I think she's going to be a very fine skydiver.
She didn't seem like the skydiver type to me.
I remember she wore this red and yellow and blue bright clothes.
And she kind of looked like she worked at the little hot-dog stand
where they dip the hot dogs.
This girl just does not look like a skydiver.
JEAN: More than once, people at the drop zone pegged me as a librarian
and some as a nun.
They were trying to figure out where I was coming from.
There's this psychologist named Jung.
And he always talked about the marriage of opposites, right?
And if you wanted the diametric opposite of Carl Boenish
that would be Jean Boenish.
JEAN: I had that thoughtful demeanor, and Carl did too.
We were both very analytical, very detail oriented,
and interested in an intelligent approach to everything.
We were two people who were a very good coupling. A unique coupling.
We were very well fit for each other and we loved each other very much.
And now, ladies and gentlemen, here we are.
I am interviewing you live
from the church of the marriage of Jean and Carl Boenish.
Jean, would you like to come here and say a word? Quick. Hurry, hurry.
We ran out of tape. And this is...
Alright, one word. I don't know what I've gotten myself into.
- One word is, "I do!" - Those are two words.
JEAN: When I was considering BASE jumping,
when it was presented to me by Carl,
it was something that struck me as pleasant as camping.
MAN: One of the most interesting and incomprehensible love stories ever.
But they got along great.
She was sort of the brains of the operation.
JEAN: So I was marrying into his established business
and joining him in partnership as the team.
Fifteen seconds!
Camera goes on at five. Here you go.
Five, four, three, two, one, go!
There she goes!
(WHOOPS) Alright!
JEAN: It was a wonderful thing for both of us
to begin our life working together on a daily basis.
Beautiful. Perfect form. Oh, man.
Hey, Carl. it went really well. Let me tell you something, though.
It takes more than four seconds to open.
Well, at least the count of four when you're scared.
Roger. I copy. Yeah, I'll tell you...
You had such flawless form.
You were rock steady. Everything went mint.
You make a hard act to follow, Jeanie. That was flawless stability.
I'm going to try to do the same thing. Even I bend the knee.
It's pretty easy, though. Have a good one.
Okay duke.
It's a rush, you know? I'm using the word scared because it's not...
When you're counting the seconds, it's not that.
It's just that you seem to count extra fast.
It's what skydivers call a rush.
You jump off and there's absolutely nothing
because you can't work with anything.
You're at the mercy of nothing. You're falling.
Jean Boenish, if I saw her in the street,
the last thing in the world I would think
is that she would put a parachute on and jump off a rock.
But she believed and loved him so much,
and if Carl said that you could jump off a cliff, do this, she did it.
And she did it better than most of the men at the time.
CARL: Well, we're kind of used to people calling us crazy.
But at least in our opinion, we're not crazy.
We're basically fun-loving adventurers and we really have fun skydiving.
It's almost become a way of life for us, we take it so seriously.
Interestingly enough, if it weren't for the camera,
I, personally, probably wouldn't be that interested in skydiving.
Because the camera captures something not only for ourselves
but for everybody, over a vast amount of time.
And it's really a sense of creativity that we do a lot of things in skydiving
just for the sake of the camera,
and hence for millions of people, to see what we do.
BOB: Pretty much all the BASE jumping was called into the Manor Drive house.
"We're going to go jump El Capitan at six o'clock tomorrow morning."
"Want to come and film?"
Carl and Jean, this is Mary Todd. Well, I'm over here.
We did El Cap yesterday and it just went so fantastic.
Piece of cake. Everything.
As you can tell, nothing happened. No rangers.
BOB: Soto say he was a ringleader, yes, he didn't tell people to go jump
but he knew about it.
Even though we had had problems with the National Park Service
as far as arrests or people wanting to fine or prohibit,
BASE jumping was not an illegal activity.
And in the park service specifically,
it should easily have been a permitted activity.
Currently it's pretty illegal to jump off of the top of most of those cliffs.
And I know that you've been instrumental in fighting that.
What's going on with that now?
Is that going to be legalized in your opinion?
Well, we hope that in time, just like mountain climbing,
that it will be unregulated.
Right now, we want to work hand in hand with the park service.
WENDT: We both wanted the same thing. To legalize it.
To reduce the danger of jumping illegally.
Because they're doing it at night. Trying to evade us.
MAN: Bill Wendt is the National Park Service director for Yosemite.
El Capitan happens to be inside of Yosemite National Park.
And it's one of the few cliffs in the world
where they can safely jump from the top of a cliff
and parachute down to a suitable landing site.
We have finally, after a year of negotiating back and forth,
you might say, convinced the park service that it can be done safely.
The park service is issuing permits.
WENDT: It worked, and it worked for a while,
but it really started to be untenable.
There were just too many free spirits.
And we had to shut them down. The ninth of September.
CARL: Jumping off El Capitan was first unregulated
because it was unthought of.
And then it was regulated because it was feared.
And then it was banned because it was abused.
WENDT: We got it started because I recommended it.
And it was stopped because I recommended it.
So I'm responsible.
And maybe I was too impatient and didn't...
That... that I will admit.
It really has no connection with what we consider
to be an International Aviation sport.
It's more closely related to circus acrobats and circus tricks.
MAN: OK, the Granite Circus was one of Carl's dreams.
The last day of jumping, he wanted to make it spectacular.
So he arranged for one person to be on stilts, that was me.
Mayfield was going to walk on his hands, doing a handstand.
Carl was on a pogo stick
and one other guy was going to be on a skateboard.
I got up on the stilts, made about two or three steps and I was gone.
It was so cool
that that kind of set my heels in. I was into BASE jumping.
Even though it wasn't called BASE jumping at the time.
That was the program for me.
After the permitted season of jumping from El Capitan,
the number of jumpers interested doing this activity was growing.
And Carl in his foresight knew that we needed to be able
to call it something other than fixed object skydiving
or skydiving from fixed objects or cliff-jumping.
There were boundaries beyond just cliffs.
I found some other objects around that I thought might be interesting to jump.
MAN: Phil Smith, Smitty, came up with a couple ideas.
One of them was jumping off TV towers.
He had a TV tower in Houston that was over a thousand feet high.
He also mentioned that there was a building going up at a construction
that was ultimately going to be about 900 feet high, a little bit more.
One thing led to another.
Carl and Jean decided to come out in January of 1981.
The four of us would go down and jump the TV tower.
That was the prime focus.
The building had been mentioned almost in passing.
It seemed like not having done either one
that a TV tower jump would be a lot more feasible than a building
just because of the logistics of getting onto a building.
Smitty did all the homework and lined it up for us.
And by that I mean figured out when we need to be there
and how to get onto the tower because we'd have to climb a fence.
How to get away and how many sets of cables there were on the tower
so we could avoid hitting those. Bottom line is we jumped that.
JEAN: Carl and I had traveled out to Phil Mayfield's house
and we met Phil Smith there as well.
MAYFIELD: And we started talking about Carl's latest ideas. His grand idea.
His big picture of fixed object jumping.
SMITH: That evening we were up in Phil's house in Arlington.
And we were planning our next day's jump.
And Carl had been daydreaming all week and brainstorming this thing.
He came up with the idea of making an organization
where to be a member,
you had to have jumped these four different kinds of objects.
MAYFIELD: So we started brainstorming different acronyms, different names
so that we could come up with something that was kind of catchy.
I don't really know who came up with it, but it evolved into the word BASE.
And all of the guys instantly just grabbed hold of BASE
and said, "Well, that's the one."
- MAN: What's your group called? - CARL: We don't...
Crazy Men of the World. No, what are you called?
That's what most people call us.
But we've got an organization.
We have to be members of it
although we don't have a roster of official members yet.
It's too new an organization.
The type of jumping that we do, first of all, is called BASE jumping.
B-A-S-E is an acronym for Buildings, Antennae Towers, Spans and Earth.
SMITH: So at that time nobody had jumped off four things.
We had kind of planned to do the building in Houston.
At that time, it was called Texas Commerce Tower.
You jumped off a cliff. What's next? I heard you want to jump off buildings.
Well, yes. It's just mankind's spirit that's bubbling out saying,
"if there are mountains let's climb them."
"if there are buildings, let's jump off of them."
SMITH: Houston was going through a lot of growth.
They were building several new buildings
that would be about a thousand feet high.
At that time, that was kind of our criteria.
I didn't want to do much lower than that.
The nice thing about those buildings is when a building is under construction,
they're really vulnerable to people like us.
Often the building would have just a chain-link fence around it.
You could just pull it apart and find someplace to get in or climb over it.
It was really easy to do.
There is a stairway, no elevator.
But there's a stairway and we just went up to the top, no problem.
With Carl Boenish, you have to understand
the number-one thing is the film.
So it didn't matter the security of getting away and making the jump
and getting all that stuff; that was secondary to getting that film.
So we got in there real early. We could have made a jump then and got out
but the light wouldn't have been good.
So we always had to wait on Carl for perfect light.
About the time we started seeing a little bit of traffic down the streets,
Carl let us know that time is right. The conditions are good.
Once we put the jumpsuits on and the cameras on and plugged them in,
we knew that it was just about the time.
As soon as we got the go-ahead, "OK, we're ready down there."
"The helicopter's ready. OK, you guys, we're waiting on you."
We knew that we had to start the countdown, turn the cameras on.
I didn't want to screw up. Neither one of us did.
OK. Five, four, three, two, one.
The thing that I remember most was looking down as I was pushing out
at the windows on each floor going by.
The first second, I saw two or three go by.
Then by the third second they're going by just incredibly fast.
(MAKES WHOOSHING SOUNDS)
Step off and then... (EXHALES)
You'll see the building behind you or the cliff or whatever it is.
As it just goes... (MAKES WHOOSHING SOUND)
MAYFIELD: I let go of my pilot chute, which opens my canopy,
because I see Smitty's over here.
His is already starting to string out.
I let mine go. I opened probably 150 feet below him.
And just as soon as I got open and I was not facing the building,
I breathed an enormous sigh of relief.
Because now the whole thing is over. All the danger is over.
All I got to do is land and hopefully get away.
But even if I don't get away, if I get detained by the police
because I was trespassing, I'm OK with that.
So Phil Mayfield and I, I guess we skyrocketed into history
and made the first completed BASE members.
MAN: Phil Smith is BASE jumper number one.
He was the first person to jump all four required objects
and has since made over 50 successful leaps.
Skydiving then was just as much a challenge as BASE jumping is now.
So it's that challenge that we're seeking.
And we really want to... We want to expand our environment
to include bigger and more and greater things.
BASE jumping, there's so many things out there that haven't been tamed
that I'm really excited to tackle them.
SMITH: 1981, that's when the BASE program started.
We actually told the public, told the world, about BASE.
Of course, it grew exponentially after that.
MAYFIELD: Almost immediately, Carl was bent on legitimizing it to the world.
Are you bored with your life nine to five
looking at the clock, check in, check out?
Look, you only go around once. You might as well go for it.
MAN: Carl and Jean Boenish are here. They're BASE jumpers.
You jump off of buildings, antennae towers and bridges?
Yes. And cliffs.
- And you're both crazy. - No, we're not.
As the equipment got better and word spread about this thing
then the numbers began really accelerating.
Then it became a worldwide thing.
Not just the United States or not just Texas and California.
It took off.
MAN: The still uncompleted 54-storey Crocker Center in downtown LA
may have seen the last skydiver jump from its lofty heights.
A group of intrepid divers have been climbing to the top of the building
and parachuting off for about four months.
But always at two or three in the morning.
The jumpers say it's a new sport called BASE diving.
Police aren't sure what to call it.
But they say there's no law against it, except maybe trespassing.
Question: why did you jump off the Crocker Center building
in downtown Los Angeles?
Answer: because it was there and a lot of fun.
Carl, how can you justify breaking the law to jump that building?
Answer: what laws am I breaking?
He assigned a lot more importance to the laws of nature
than he did the laws of man.
The laws of man, in Carl's eyes, were temporary at best.
JEAN: There were buildings in downtown Los Angeles
that were under construction.
The Crocker Center happened to start construction
when we were interested in jumping off of buildings.
CARL: Well, you know, Jean and I have each jumped from a building.
A thousand-foot, 75-story skyscraper.
And people say why?
Why did you do it, Jean?
I actually do it for the fun of it.
It's the feeling that you get when you jump off of a high dive.
There's nothing to push against
like when you're swimming through the water.
You are falling, literally, for the first two seconds.
And you can't control your fall.
That's why you have to be very careful in the manner in which you exit.
One morning, Carl had gone to do an early morning jump
after it was already light.
MAN: Yesterday three men jumped off the unfinished building,
the Cracker building in Los Angeles, in their sport of skydiving.
And today I talked to one of the three, Carl Boenish.
You're standing there and no matter how seasoned a skydiver you are,
or a BASE jumper, you're very apprehensive and you're nervous.
But you know in your mind you can do it,
even though your physical body says you'd better not do it.
I mean, that's 700 feet straight down.
So finally you say, "Here we go. Ready, set, go."
And the first second you start accelerating incredibly fast.
It leaves you almost breathless.
And then the second second you have a feeling of freedom and power
and confidence, almost euphoria.
You think, "Wow, I feel like Superman."
JEAN: The next day, the LA Times had this photograph of Carl
right on the front page jumping off of Crocker Center.
Plain as day, literally.
Mr Boenish, my name is Fred Gooch.
I'm an attorney for the owner of the Crocker Center.
I want to advise you that at 1 :30 tomorrow afternoon
in department 85 to the Los Angeles County Superior Court,
the owners of the property are going to seek an injunction against you.
An X party application for a temporary restraining order against you,
members of your group, and any other skydivers
from jumping off of the Cracker Center.
I suggest that you have your attorney call me.
And I pick up the LA Times one day
and I see this picture of somebody jumping off Crocker Bank.
And I read the article and, OK, that's Carl.
Then a day or two later I get this phone call from Carl saying,
"Jim, I think I'm in a little bit of trouble."
Here's the message.
Carl and Jean, this is Jim Winkler.
Give me a call as soon as possible.
Cracker Bank apparently does not want to settle.
JEAN: They wanted to get control over this situation.
So the Crocker Center decided that they wanted to start legal proceedings
specifically against Carl because he was named in the newspaper.
BOB: They couldn't catch him most of the time.
Then, when he was caught, I would guess the prosecutor at the time
basically told the judge, "We know this guy's doing this."
So the court ordered that he could not go into anything
over a 30-story building without a judge's approval.
CARL: Why do you do your homework and know what you're doing?
A lot of us do this day in and day out and we do it very systematically.
The difference in attention to detail is being a hero or being dead.
MAN: Some BASE jumps are illegal, others are not.
Tomorrow in Memphis, Tennessee,
as part of that city's annual Cotton Carnival
BASE jumpers Jean and Carl Boenish
plan to parachute from the top of a downtown office building.
JEAN: That building is called the Hundred North Main Building
and it's 432 feet to the top of the 36th floor.
A man came up and introduced himself.
He happened to also be the president of the Union Planters Bank Building,
which was the largest building in Memphis, Tennessee.
And he said, "Would you like to jump off of that building
for the Cotton Carnival?"
Carl and I just looked at each other.
We both turned back to him and we said,
"Well, that would be great. We'd be very interested in doing that."
They had a parade
and they had arranged for Carl and I to ride on one of the floats
so that we would be the co-grand marshals of the parade.
(CARNIVAL MUSIC)
So we were co-grand marshals and our job was to jump down from the building
with crystal medallions
that were made especially for the king and queen of the Cotton Carnival.
LONG: If you were around the Boenishes long enough
you got the feeling of people that really didn't belong.
They weren't weird, alright. They were different.
A little eccentric, even.
They didn't really fit anywhere, right?
See you at the bottom.
But they fit together.
Here we go.
Five, four, three, two, one, go!
We've just reached the Trollveggen,
which is the largest cliff face in Europe.
It'll be the site for our assault on the world BASE jumping record.
Standing over here on this ledge is Carl Boenish and his wife, Jean.
They're about to fling themselves off the mountain
in something called BASE jumping.
At that time, I was a recently graduated dude with no career
from graduate school studying literature and philosophy.
I had no idea what I was going to do other than what I had been doing
which was rock climbing and sea kayaking
and generally doing things that were really fun that made no money.
So I just took my expertise in adventure and applied it to production,
and I ended up working for David Frost.
We needed to have a centerpiece for an ABC special.
That special being The Guinness Book of World Records
which showed on ABC and also on BBC. We needed to have a centerpiece thing,
which was an international big action-adventure thing
that could carry the whole show.
I figured BASE jumping was going to be it.
JEAN: Carl was thrilled to be contacted by the Guinness people
and given the opportunity it was...
This was really an opportunity being given to us.
Meeting Carl Boenish was...
...not like anything I'd ever experienced.
By that time, I had been in New Guinea and the fricking North Pole.
I'd been all over and had seen just about every kind of person imaginable.
But I had never seen anybody like Carl Boenish.
Super energetic. He had plans to do everything
and he documented everything, he had pictures of everything.
He was everything. Everything about Carl was out there right from the beginning.
And it was like running into a geyser.
It was just like, "Whoa, look at this guy!" You know?
Carl, what's the old record?
The tallest BASE jump ever made is 4900 feet.
And that was made at Half Dome at Yosemite National Park.
High by anybody's standards. Jean, what are you going to attempt today?
Well, I'm not exactly sure what the height is here
but it's definitely over 4900 feet.
- All the best to you both. - Thank you.
JEAN: When they said let's go and do a record jump,
let's find a site that's the highest
from point of launch to point of landing.
And where would you like to go and do that?
The world was our oyster and we chose Norway.
Norway. Norway's beautiful.
And the people are wonderful.
And, as they say, there's a very open trust.
That's Norway.
It was like mounting an expedition, really.
We were pretty much involved in that
from the time that he said he could and would do it
until the time we left which is, I don't know, two and a half weeks later,
it was pretty much a mad dash.
I flew across the Atlantic and went to London and spent a day there.
Took a flight up to Oslo and the Boenishes were already there.
I just jumped in a rental car with them and we drove up to Andalsnes
which took all day.
It was that time of year where the nights weren't really nights.
There's a midnight sun kind of thing.
So the sun never really totally set.
So we just kept driving and driving and driving.
That went on for eight hours and we ended up in Andalsnes
and I saw this cliff for the first time.
I said, "Wow, that's going to be interesting."
It's a scary sort of place.
It's like Sleepy Hollow with these huge cliffs rising on both sides.
Really formidable and really intimidating.
And it was really bad weather. It was just drizzly and cloudy and weird.
I wasn't real enthusiastic that it was going to break any time soon.
Wasn't necessarily a bad thing.
I knew it would take us a little while to figure out what we were going to do
and where we were going to jump.
One glance up there and I knew it was going to take me a while
to get fluent with the whole area. it was just too big.
It was too big and too confusing up there.
So I was lucky enough to meet with a friend.
He had climbed around here a whole lot.
He was not only a great sort of partner and climber
but a really decent, soulful guy.
We got along perfectly from the beginning.
We hooked up and every day we'd hike up the back side of Trollveggen,
go up there marching around looking for places to go.
MAN: I started climbing when I was 15
and I've been doing a lot of climbing in the area here in Romsdal.
I first met Carl when the others asked me to be a local guide
and be responsible for the security up in the mountains
while they were doing the parachute.
I really didn't know what's going on then, what they were going to do.
But it was really a exciting time to be together with them.
I remember his leg.
That he had hurt it once and broke it, I think.
And that he did not go to a doctor.
LONG: When Fred and I first started hiking up to the top of Troll Wall
to figure out a location where we're going to jump,
Carl went along with us but he was such a slow hiker
that ultimately we decided most of the time to go up there without him
because he just couldn't keep up.
Carl, when he got up into the mountains,
had some problems with his leg all the time.
He got very tired because it was hurting very much, I think.
LONG: I go, "What what's with this guy?"
"Why is he going so fricking slow?" It was driving me crazy.
It'd take half the day to get up to the top of the cliff, right?
And I thought he was just lazy.
And finally there's a little stone hut
that you can sort of take shelter in on your way up.
And we got about halfway up and we got to the stone hut
and it started raining so we had to actually go in this hut.
We went in this hut. We're sitting down and Carl's rubbing his leg.
I go, "What's going on? What's up, Carl?"
And he pulls his pant leg up and his leg has this...
The bone goes down like this and takes this jog.
I'm like, "Carl what's going on with that leg?"
And it turned out he'd broken his leg.
He'd broken his leg hang gliding a couple years before.
And he'd never got it set because he's a Christian Scientist.
I didn't know anything about any of that.
CARL: I believe that there's a law and order to the universe.
Some people call it God.
I don't care what you call it.
I just know that mathematics never fails us.
If we get the wrong answer, we didn't apply something correctly.
Nothing happens by chance.
Every single thing that ever happens, happens for a reason.
Happens due to the law of the universe.
LONG: One of the things I kept looking for
was someplace that was cantilevered out like that.
So we found this thing, Stabben pinnacle.
We get to the top and there's a bunch of big boulders around.
What you do is you do what's called a rock test.
And what you want is something that falls
somewhere between 15 and 20 seconds before it hits the wall.
The whole thing with BASE jumping is you don't want to hit the wall.
That's what's going to kill you.
Fred and I pushed ten rocks off the top of Stabben pinnacle
and they all hit between three and five seconds.
Every time.
We did the rock test and immediately ruled that out
as something we would do.
Carl goes, "No, it's too dangerous. it doesn't give it enough time."
There was quite a lot of people because it was a big team
and they had all the helicopters.
So it was both local people that was going up to see what was going on
and there was a lot of tourists
that were stopping because of the helicopter traffic that was going on.
LONG: It was a big event in Europe also.
So news teams from all over Europe were here
waiting for this thing to happen.
I mean, it was a zoo.
I was hoping to be able to do this thing sort of on a low profile.
But by the time the thing finally happened, it was no secret to anybody.
The Boenishes were both... Well, Jean, it was hard to tell
because she seemingly never got excited about anything.
But Carl was coming out of his skin. You know, like uncontainable enthusiasm.
This is a celebration of the human spirit
and thank you for bringing your spirits too.
Take a shot of Jean and me and the crowd.
Put it on Infinity. You have it on Infinity?
OK, look at the camera.
No, it's the other button.
LONG: I mean, it's like a geyser, you know? Just like Old Faithful.
The day prior to when we really got the thing on film,
he had done the jump basically at night already, and done it perfectly.
So we knew that everything was going to be perfect.
As soon as the sun comes up, he can do this jump.
We're going to get it a couple times so we got it covered,
then we're out of there.
Carl's enthusiasm was so high, everybody was really high on this thing.
Remember, BASE jumping had never been filmed on any kind of big scale.
It was little teeny 16mm documentaries
that people showed on their bathroom wall.
And a huge network television crew had swooped in here
with an internationally famous star, David Frost.
He was the host of The Guinness Book of World Records
and all this hoopla right? And, boom, we have six cameras.
I think Boenish had another couple cameras. We had cameras everywhere.
This is going to be a big event. Everything was going great.
Everybody was enthusiastic. It was sort of a big thing.
Then we got up, the sun was perfect.
It was a perfect bluebird day. That was lucky enough.
We got everybody in position in a matter of a couple hours.
DAVID FROST: They're getting ready now.
The Boenishes approaching the jumping off spot, coming out there.
And the pilot is doing a fantastic job. It's very difficult right there.
He seems to be balancing that helicopter almost on one skid.
And there are the Boenishes over there. There they are.
Perched on that very, very tiny outcrop.
Now with the help of our key mountain climber, cameraman as well,
they're making their final equipment checks.
Thirty seconds.
Are you ready?
- Twenty seconds. - Twenty seconds.
Ten seconds.
Are you ready?
Five, four, three, two, one, go!
- Congratulations. - Thank you very much.
Let's find Carl now. He's a little behind.
JEAN: He was very enthusiastic.
WOMAN: There he is. Alright! Perfect landing!
JEAN: He was always enthusiastic about all of his projects.
Particularly after a jump was finished or the film was in the can.
Terrific. Congratulations.
- Thank you very much. - That really excited him.
It was exciting. Wow. Wow.
That's a jump of a lifetime.
Well, did you see how much lift this big parachute has?
- I was staying up forever. - Listen, just by landing safely,
that means you have set now a new world's record for BASE jumping.
Norris, do you have the exact figures?
At least 400 feet further than any other BASE jump in history.
And the speed, because you deployed so late,
it was like flashing through a 20-story building in one second.
Carl was really enthusiastic about having finished the jumps.
To see that wall rushing by. Man, we loved it.
And for Carl, too, to have been able to make a record jump.
It was like, "Let's get out of here before the mountain falls on top of us."
I just had this feeling of doom
hanging over something that was potentially that sketchy.
So the moment they are over,
as though retroactively something could happen,
and combined with the fact that that was the last piece
that we needed to do on the show,
both of those combined and in concert gave everybody a reason to get...
It put jet underneath everybody.
They were gone. Barn! Out of there.
JEAN: After our record jumps, we were both really tired
because we had been up for a number of days with very little sleep.
Particularly in the last 24 hours or more.
It was one o'clock in the morning and it was not dark.
We really had a great deal of difficulty in this midnight sun situation.
We had a short night that night.
I was...
...tired from the jumps the day before.
And I told him I was going to sleep in
and he had decided he wanted to go and jump the Bruraskaret
which was the normally jumped site, so I didn't think much of it.
But I was grousing a bit. "You're tired. Why don't you stay?"
"Why do you have to go do this right now,
right today, when you're tired? Stay here and sleep."
That morning that Carl left for the jump as I was lying in bed,
I was grumping at him
that I didn't think that he should be doing this because he must be tired.
And that was the way
I was expressing my feelings and my intuitions about it.
If I had had 30 years more of experience that I have now,
perhaps I would have expressed my feelings in a different way
and understood that there was a message there for me.
That it was not a good idea for him to do this.
That's the honest truth about it. And...
I can only look at it in hindsight from here.
HUSOY: There was two locals. Friends of mine that followed them up.
And also Jean was aware that he was going up, of course,
but somewhere on the route they decided to go for Stabben instead.
His foot made much trouble for him
because I'd seen that in earlier days as well,
that he was having problems when we were walking up in the rough terrain.
It was quite rough up in the back of the Trolltind.
And it was a decision he took there and then
to get back down an easy way, I think.
LONG: The fact is we had done the record jump, filmed it,
and not more than 12 hours later, he had hiked back up there.
That didn't make any sense to me. I don't know how that was possible.
The fact we heard he'd done Stabben didn't make any sense
because we had agreed when we did the rock-drop test that it was suicidal.
Nobody could survive that jump. Why had he done that?
Why was it that if he was going to go back up
he didn't ask Fred or I to go up with him?
MAN: On Friday night I was on Grand Hotel at Andalsnes
because Carl had borrowed a room so he could pack his parachute.
So I and my brother was with him.
And they explained a lot about BASE jumping and how to pack the chute
so it released quick and things like that.
It didn't go well that day.
I have an impression that Carl, more than most of us,
thought that God had a plan for him that he had to fulfill.
I am a person who remembers in pictures
so I have a small glimpse of what happened during the day.
Me and my brother, we picked him up in my brother's car
where he lived with the Griiners.
I remember driving from the Griiners' and up to Trollstigen.
It was not so good weather.
It was a little rain and quite windy.
We went not so fast because he had the problem with his leg.
And then we went further up to Stabben.
We climbed up to the pinnacle...
...and sat there for at least... it was more than a half an hour,
maybe up to an hour.
He started to throw stones to measure the height of the wall.
We sat on top of the pinnacle and chatted
about different matters of life.
On the top of the mountain he asked us if we knew the story from the Bible.
The Temptation of Jesus.
The Devil brought Jesus to Jerusalem
and put him on the highest point of the temple.
And he said that if you throw yourself down,
God will send his angels and carry you in their arms
so you will not hurt your foot on the rock.
Jesus answered, "Do not put the Lord on test."
Carl just had... he had a particular laughter.
He pointed to his parachute and he said,
"This is my angel."
I think it's really amazing kind of last words.
I don't know what it means but it feels like it means something.
Finally, he said that he wanted to jump.
We prepared our cameras.
So I saw his jump through the lens.
I saw the back of the whole body
more like just his feet diving down.
His parachute was stalling against the mountain.
He slid under his parachute down the mountain
and stopped in some snow.
No signs of life.
No movements or anything after the parachute stopped.
It was before the days of the mobile phone.
It was decided my brother would run down
to call the police and start the rescue operation.
I waited, looking down on him, on top of the mountain.
Police district Romsdalen, on Saturday the 7th of July, '84
approximately 4:35pm, I received a call from Arnstein Myskja.
Arnstein explained he was calling from Trollstigen Fjellstue
and reported that he had just, at approximately at 3:50pm,
been a witness to Boenish, Carl Ronald, jump from Stabben,
a mountaintop situated between Trollveggen and Semletind
in Trolltindmassivet.
The jump had, for one reason or another, failed
such that Boenish hit the mountain wall and was suspended over the valley.
MYSKJA: We had brought a camera each,
and we were taking pictures when the accident happened.
You get so shocked you started to think about...
That you don't want to sell the photos.
Why don't we have the photos and just don't sell it?
It's not more difficult than that.
But we decided to destroy the pictures.
Just to open up and pull it out of the cassette
so it was fully exposed to the light.
LONG: I went back to where I was staying after we wrapped.
I think I just laid down. It was probably still mid to late afternoon
and I didn't really get up until the next morning
when Fred came hammering on my door,
saying Carl's been in an accident.
Fred came and got me. I got in the car.
We drove down, looked up, saw Carl's body.
It wasn't moving.
But his red parachute was sort of billowing in the air.
He was probably three quarters of a mile away
and a couple thousand feet up the flank of the bottom of the wall.
We went back to the police and said,
"We're going to have to try and figure something out to get up to get him."
They're going to have to call in a coast guard helicopter, and they did.
They had to fly up into the slab at the bottom of the wall.
We couldn't really climb up to it. It was sort of an isolated area,
but they recovered Carl's body, brought it on the helicopter.
They flew that helicopter down to the police station and landed.
Meanwhile, we hadn't gotten a hold of Jean,
which was probably not fair to her.
Nobody got a hold of Jean until the helicopter was on its way.
I was there with the police officer and let me tell you,
one of the boldest things I've ever seen anybody do,
was to call her up. I mean, I'll never forget it.
This guy is talking on the phone. He knew that the situation was bad.
And he's talking to her and he was holding it together
with the last ounce of strength that he had
saying your husband had been involved in an accident
and it doesn't look good.
I'll never forget watching that. God!
That was awful watching that.
But...
That was just one of those things where you just had to watch it
and deal with it, you know? It was like, "This is happening."
"Is this really happening?" Well, it was, you know?
JEAN: The police had come. Two of them.
And I met them downstairs at Griiners' hytter.
And they told me that Carl was dead.
Everybody in the room looked at me, silently.
And I could tell instantly that it was up to me and my response...
...to determine the entire atmosphere that would surround everything
that would happen subsequent to this announcement.
At first, I didn't understand because it didn't make sense
because I still thought he had jumped from Bruraskaret.
But then as the conversation proceeded,
that was when it was revealed that he had jumped from Stabben.
And things started to fall into place in a very different way.
So my response may not have been what they expected because...
...I needed to put on the hat of finding out what happened.
Carl and I were not just husband and wife. We were professionals.
We were pioneers.
We were people working together in something that was a vital activity.
And as a vital activity that other people were participating in as well,
the necessity was to find out what in the world happened.
He had a good exit.
But somehow obviously got turned around into the cliff.
And that is not a site where you have achieved the distance
from the cliff that you need to be able to handle
being turned into the cliff that soon upon opening.
I have a picture in my mind of him lying here with his red helmet on.
A blue jacket and also the injuries.
He had many bad injuries and serious injuries both in breast,
head and also the arms and the legs.
I think he died immediately.
I could see that it looked like Carl,
as far as the presence of the body.
But the real Carl was absolutely clearly not there.
I have seen a lot of dead people, and dying,
but this particular moment here is one of the strongest moments
because of his visions, his dreams, and what he did in Trollveggen.
What Carl did was something that the whole country was interested in.
So it was... it was strange.
Touching.
It's about...
...limits. Living on the edge.
And, of course, his dreams as I said, his vision,
and then suddenly he was here, lying dead.
And you know, when they are here, they are really dead.
JEAN: After that we got on a ferry
and it was just, you know, beautiful.
And I cried a little in the car.
And kept driving back to Andalsnes to Griiners' hytter.
A couple of days after Carl died
was the day that Erik Fenz was planning on jumping.
There I was. I was going to jump off the Troll Wall and Carl dies.
I'm just, like, holy shit.
But there was something that was, you know,
there was something that was bigger than the moment
that was driving me to want to continue.
JEAN: Word spread like wildfire that Carl had died.
Very quickly people around the world in the jumping community
knew what had happened.
And it really, really shocked and shook so many people.
I said, "I want to still do it."
She was like, "I want to do it too. With you. We're going to go do it."
Not wanting him to seem disrespectful in making ajump,
it would remove any aura of seeming disrespect
for me to be the one to be making a jump first after Carl's death
to show people it's fine, it's OK.
Carl wanted everybody to get on with their lives after he died
and that there was nothing wrong with BASE jumping because of this.
We just had to learn from it and go on.
(WOMAN SPEAKING IN NORWEGIAN)
JEAN: As I was under canopy coming down from that jump
I had my last personal time.
I had my last quiet time.
And I could see as I was coming in for a landing
that there was a group that had gathered.
And there was the prospect of having to deal with the press.
Well, I'm a BASE jumper. And I'm a professional.
And Carl wanted that no one should miss a beat in their lives
if and when he died, whenever that would have been.
And it didn't matter how.
Everybody goes through the same things in life.
From the time they're born to the time they die.
We all go through birth and death.
But we have had cultural pressures about how to handle it.
What did you feel doing this jump today?
It was just like any other BASE jump. It was the same.
Were you thinking of some special thing?
No. No. Nothing really special.
So you didn't have your husband in mind?
Well, under canopy I thought of him. But that's really kind of personal.
Everyone has his own real way of reacting. It will be individual.
And BASE jumping encourages people to think as individuals,
to discover and explore their individuality.
It is not unique to BASE jumping.
BASE jumping is just a condensed version.
Somehow, in this earthly experience,
we have to depart.
There has been no one who has not departed from this earthly experience.
So don't let death impede you as a hurdle.
Don't let it be a wall that you bang up against
and then can't see past, can't see through,
can't see over.
Climb the walls quickly as you can and go on.
We know everyone doesn't want to do this
but if they see us do it, they can be inspired
to go out and bowl a perfect 300 game or mow the lawn.
It doesn't matter what. They're encouraged by what we can do.
I think it makes, you know, a better quality life for us
to know that we can do this.
You always wondered with Carl
that underneath, what's the real story?
What are those core beliefs that would drive you to do that?
I got to think it's that sort of mystical thing
where he thought that he could... That mind-over-matter thing.
He was the one person that could get away with it.
But the Troll Wall had other ideas.
JEAN: What deserves the praise?
Death doesn't deserve praise.
Life and the wondrous works that we do in life from our good ideas,
those deserve the praise.
That's what we should be standing by.
That's what we should be paying attention to.
And that's what Carl was all about.
Carl would love to have the new wing suit flyers standing on his shoulders
and jumping v"-
They have taken from what he was trying to inspire in people
about breaking through artificial limitations
and going beyond what people say can or cannot be done.
He would be right there with the wing suit flyers.
And, in essence, is.
(THE AIR THAT I BREATHE BY THE HOLMES
If I could make a wish
I think I'd pass
Can't think of anything I need
No cigarettes, no sleep
No light, no sound
Nothing to eat
No books to read
Sometimes
All I need is the air that I breathe
And to love you
All I need is the air that I breathe
Yes, to love you
All I need is the air that I breathe
Sometimes
All I need is the air that I breathe
And to love you
All I need is the air that I breathe
Yes, to love you
All I need is the air that I breathe
PGGCQ came UPON me
And it leaves me weak
So sleep, silent angel
Go to sleep
Sometimes
All I need is the air that I breathe
And to love you
All I need is the air that I breathe
And to love you
(SUNSHINE SUPERMAN BY DONOVAN)
Sunshine came softly
Through my a-window today
Could've tripped out easy
it But I've a-changed my ways
It'll take time, I know it But in a while
You're gonna be mine, I know it
We'll do it in style
Cos I made my mind up You're going to be mine
I'll tell you right now
Any trick in the book now, baby
All that I can find
Superman or Green Lantern
Ain't got a-nothin' on me
I can make like a turtle
And dive for your pearls in the sea
A-you can just sit there thinking on your velvet throne
Yes
About all the rainbows a-you can a-have for your own
Cos I've made my mind up You're going to to be mine
I tell you right now
Any trick in the book a-now, baby
All that I can find
Everybody's hustlin' a- just to have a little scene
When I say we'll be cool
I think that you know what I mean
We stood on a beach at sunset
Do you remember when?
I know a beach where, baby
A-it never ends
When you've made your mind up
Forever to be mine
Mm-mm-mm-mm
I'll pick up your hand And slowly blow your little mind
Cos I made my mind up
You're going to be mine
I'll tell you right now
Any trick in the book a-now, baby
That I can find
Superman or Green Lantern ain't got a-nothin' on me
I can make like a turtle
And dive for your pearls in the sea Yep
A-you, you, you can just sit there
While thinking on your velvet throne
'Bout all the rainbows you can
A-have for your own
When you've made your mind up
Forever to be mine
Mm-mm-mm-mm
I'll pick up your hand
And slowly blow your little mind
When you've made your mind up
Forever to be mine
I'll pick up your hand
And slowly blow your little mind
Blow your little mind...