Review by David Anthony
For extreme sports aficionados Carl Boenish will be a familiar name. While he did not invent this form of high stakes recreation, he refined the art of base jumping sufficiently to ensure himself a place in the Guinness Book of Records and to institutionalize what began as a fringe activity attracting a small corps of daredevils. Sunshine Superman, directed by Marah Strauch is a tribute to Boenish and his bold contribution to refining this particularly even peculiarly perilous pastime.
Sunshine Superman begins in 1969. Carl Boenish (rhymes with Danish) is an engineer with a penchant for physical challenges. As a post polio adolescent he resolved not to be outdone by his age mates and thus developed an aggressively competitive urge to athletically outperform his peers. A Hughes Aircraft engineer by profession his weekend warrior guise attracted him to skydiving, to which he was psychologically and intellectually drawn, and at which he excelled. When John Frankenheimer looked around for a crew to shoot his 1969 homage to skydiving, The Gypsy Moths, Boenish became one of those filming the actual, hair-raising air sequences.
In the following decade, Boenish took his expertise in combining flying and filming to even greater heights. Attaching a camera to a helmet, he and his band of mostly merry men scaled precipices then leapt from them. They documented these feats on film, starting in 1970 with the creation of PhotoChuting Enterprises in Hawthorne California. Jumping from towers in Texas and Toronto, natural escarpments like Royal Gorge in Colorado and El Capitan in Yosemite in 1978, and the World Trade Center in New York, Boenish and his band left their fates to chance and their parachutes. Boenish and company created a collective that felt it needed to come up with an acronym describing what they did. They chose to comprise an association using the descriptor BASE, for Buildings, Antenna, Span and Earth, each of which would serve as launching pads for their jumps. He is also largely response for a new art form, filming skydiving at close range, while diving. This can be seen in the abundant quantity of film this yielded, such as in Thrill Sports, a 1980 TV Movie with Dave Blattel, Phil Mayfield, Carl and spouse Jean Boenish.
Sunshine Superman relies heavily upon period footage recorded during numerous interviews Boenish did as he literally vaulted into the ranks of cinematic and television talk show celebrity. In that regard it begins as his personal saga. However, without losing sight of his prime importance, the film slowly morphs into much more, as director Strauch hones in on those around him, his associates, siblings, and his quietly powerful partner, Jean, who took on his dream and made it hers.
There is from the very beginning of Sunshine Superman an eerie sense of foreboding about the entire enterprise. Carl Boenish may laugh at danger, but danger there is in base jumping, extreme danger. It is precisely this that gives extreme sports their cachet, their fatal attraction. No one viewing the cliffs will minimize this.
Carl Boenish lives somewhere else, in a world without limits where he is always eager to push boundaries, even at the risk of life itself. The ominous implications of his propensity to do what has never been done makes it evident that there is no end to this desire to male history, that within him lies an unquenchable thirst.
Ultimately, Boenish works his way into the record books, but at great cost. That story is left to Jean and others to relate. In spite of the climax of this tale, remarkably little is said about the obvious: base jumping can kill you. This is understated until the final credits which contain a cryptic reference to some who have perished. In fact, scores of extreme jumpers have died globally. Close to 300 deaths are documented on a site devoted to keeping tabs on fatalities. This is the logical outcome of the behavior Sunshine Superman elevates to the level of the romantic. Make no mistake, I do not question the right to base jump. I do recognize the tremendous courage it requires. Yet in Sunshine Superman one should not overlook the haunting spectre of death looming at every corner. As is often said, “It’s your funeral.”
This is David H. Anthony.