Darts in Movies, Darts in Real Life

I am so far behind in watching movies, that I just got around to seeing the 2003 movie Daredevil when it came on TV. I laughed when I saw that one of the characters was named bullseye. Bullseye's first scene is in an English Pub, where he bets a patron that he can hit three double bulls. While he is downing a pint, not even looking at the board, he hits three double bulls and then splits one of the darts with another. In the behind the scenes shots after the movie, they showed how they had the darts on a wire to make sure they hit the bull.

That brought back to mind a true story that happened a couple of years ago when I was playing darts in the New Orleans area. A local TV celebrity, Frank Davis, decided to cover the New Orleans area dart scene in one of his local news shows. He came over to Third Base, which is a great dart bar in the suburb of Metairie. A couple dart players were asked to come out for the filming, including myself and Scott Wollaston. After some interviews, Frank had his camera man set up a shot. The film would show Frank throwing the dart. Then it would cut away to just show the dart that Scott threw at the bull. The end product would look like Frank was hitting the bull. Scott was acting as kind of a dart stunt double.

Third Base had a lot of steel boards, and a couple of soft-tip boards. As you know, the double bull on a soft-tip board is the one segment that is roughly the same size as on a steel tip board. We set up on the soft-tip board as Frank requested. We figured that it would require a couple of takes to get a few shots in the double bull, as requested. Scott walked up and hit three double bulls in the first three darts. Frank and his cameraman were dumbfounded. We made a great show of acting like it was nothing special.