Big Bear's Randy Miller fools even fellow stuntmen as he wins award and gets `attacked' on stage.

BY PAT O'BRIEN
THE PRESS-ENTERPRISE

Randy Miller of Big Bear City won the first award ever presented by the World Stunt Academy Sunday in Santa Monica and then startled the audience by getting "attacked" on stage by a 600-pound Siberian tiger.

The image of Russell Crowe fighting a mammoth tiger in "Gladiator" is perhaps the most indelible of the Oscar-winning movie. But it was Miller who doubled for Crowe and went one-on-one with that tiger.

"I knew that the tiger scene in the movie was a pretty strong scene," he said but still felt a thrill of surprise when he was nominated for the first-ever stunt awards and then won Best Work with an Animal, the first of the awards to be presented.

When he was invited to the gala, the organizers offered him the opportunity to demonstrate how he staged attacks.

"They put a spot for me in the show. I knew that this was going to be a tough crowd to entertain or do stunts in front of, so at the last minute I thought I would try to make it look like this cat was really attacking me and was out of control," he said. "I started screaming that the tiger had grabbed me by the neck. She does a lot of snarling. This time she was really growling pretty loud."

The audience gasped, and Miller's assistant and girlfriend Molly Ehrlich came running and yelling. Miller had neglected to tell her what he was going to do.

"It was beautiful. It couldn't have been scripted any better. Then I let her know everything was OK, and we put the tiger up," Miller said.

He got what he wanted from the audience of hundreds of professional stunt people, actors, directors and other film industry people, such as Arnold Schwarzenegger, John Woo, James Cameron, Alec Baldwin, Michael Keaton, Nicolas Cage, Chuck Norris, Burt Reynolds, Sandra Bullock and Jeff Goldblum.

"For a second I really grabbed them," he said. "It was fun, but then I had to apologize to Molly." Miller -- who is 36 and a former entrepreneur who founded Original New York Seltzer -- said, "It was one of the coolest nights I've had in a long time."

Miller said the kind of film scenes he does with tigers, lions and bears is highly specialized work. "I'm really the only person that can deliver a hard-core, staged attack in a film," he said. He doesn't fear his animals -- he has 17 big predators on his 55-acre ranch -- because he raised them from infancy and says he knows how to read them.

Still, sometimes he gets hurt. He got chomped on in "Gladiator."

"The tiger wasn't trying to bite me. She was trying to pull a piece of wardrobe off my arm. She grabbed it, and I let her have it but then she really bit my arm," he said. "I had a big hole in my arm down to the bone. The medics patched me up."

Twenty minutes later, he was back at work on the scene with a steel plate fashioned over his wound.

To catch a glimpse of Miller, you can tune in to the broadcast of the World Stunt Awards June 16 from 9-11 p.m. on ABC or watch for an upcoming Gatorade commercial, in which he doubles for The Colts football team as they scrimmage with a team of lions.


Published 5/30/2001