To the few pedestrians on the street, it must have looked as if the man jumping from the 16th story of an office building in Westwood, Calif., was hell-bent on killing himself. Bob Brown actually wasn't committing suicide, but he was doing something almost as crazy. The man now appearing on over a thousand screens as stunt double for T-1000 actor Robert Patrick in Terminator 2, Brown was trying to set a personal-best record by plunging 180 feet, 20 feet more than he'd ever attempted before. And not simply by jumping the distance halfway normally. No, Brown, 32, a world-champion high diver and trampolinist, dove backward through a breakaway-glass window and executed a 2 1/4 somersault with a full twist before landing on a massive air bag below.
Of course, he wasn't doing this just for his own amusement. One of the leading stuntpeople in the business, Brown took the fall for the benefit of The Ultimate Challenge, the new Fox reality-based show that chronicles feats of daredevilry. His chancy dive — and the existence of the Fox show and syndicated TV's new Stuntmasters — indicate how radically the stunt game has changed. Hollywood's hunger for action films has made stunts much more ambitious, breathtaking, and dangerous and has bred a new kind of person to perform them. Dick Butler, former president of the Stuntmen's Association, says that when he got started 30 years ago, ''there were the crazy Johns who'd take a swig of booze, fall off a horse, and miss their spot at the hitching rail. You can't get by with that now. Gags are much more deadly these days.''
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