A military man finds his niche in Hollywood.

Byline: Mark Baker The Register-Guard

PLEASANT HILL - Things weren't going so smoothly for Jody Hart at Pleasant Hill High School in the late 1980s. His grades were poor, he was stubborn and more concerned with being a standout football player than a standout human being.

Then Jack Underwood got in his way.

"He hauled me into a closet," Hart recalls. Well, that's not exactly how Underwood, who retired from teaching in June, remembers it. He hauled him somewhere, into a side room, wherever.

"I think I took him in there and just had a meeting of the minds, so to speak," says Underwood, who lives in Eugene and ran Pleasant Hill High's resource program for special needs and at-risk students for 29 years. Underwood told Hart he was not only going to make the football star a peer tutor in his program, he was going to make him a role model.

Now, Underwood says he is always just "tickled" to hear about the latest success of Hart, the 34-year-old Marine Corps veteran who four years ago started Combat Casting - a Los Angeles film production company that provides veterans for military and police scenes in TV and film.

``Jody was special,'' Underwood says of the young man who went by ``Joe'' when he was an all-league football player on the defensive line for ``P Hill'' despite being listed at only 5 feet 10 inches and 175 pounds. ``He was just a neat all-around kid.''

Hart's company has provided actors for such films as ``Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle,'' ``Princess Dairies 2'' and ``Bad Boys II,'' and TV shows such as ``Alias,'' ``CSI: NY'' and ``ER,'' among others.

And Combat Casting just made its own film, "Poet's War," now in post-production and written and directed by Hart's Combat Casting partner, Jared Chandler, who owns a military prop shop that stocks their casting company with gear.

"It just really started growing in this last year," Hart says by telephone from Los Angeles, right before heading to a production meeting for a film called "Lions for Lambs." The Robert Redford-directed film stars Tom Cruise and Meryl Streep, and is about a platoon of U.S. soldiers stationed in Afghanistan. It's scheduled to begin shooting in January.

"I look at it now as a way for veterans to get into acting if that's their dream," says Hart, whose resume includes stunt work and bit parts in television and film.

It began after his four years of Marine Corps service, when he was cast as the Stanford track and field coach in 1998's "Without Limits." Filmed in Eugene, it was one of two films made about the life of University of Oregon track legend Steve Prefontaine.

After that, he moved to San Diego and landed work on the TV show ``Pensacola: Wings of Gold,'' starring James Brolin. He was hired as a "weapons and props person," says Hart, who's now home for the holidays, visiting his parents here.

He got his first acting role not long after that, playing ``SWAT Soldier No. 1'' on the Sci-Fi Channel's "Millennium Man."

Then he began to come across more and more stunt men, he says, who suggested he get into stunt work because of his athletic ability and his military background. Soon, he was taking stunt driving and stunt fighting courses.

It was work as a technical adviser during the second season of ABC's former hit show, ``Alias,'' starring Jennifer Garner, that led to Combat Casting, Hart says.

He would find himself spending a couple of hours here and there training actors and extras on military tactics, and then began to recruit his Marine buddies to help.

Hart - whose nickname in the Marines was ``Hollywood'' or ``Iceman,'' because of his blond hair and resemblance to Val Kilmer's character in "Top Gun" - had found his Hollywood niche.

The company's Web site, www.combatcasting.com, posts images of 107 uniformed actors from across the nation, 95 men and 12 women. Each has served, or are serving, in one of the five branches of the military, a police force or a SWAT team.

Hart never pursued acting in high school, although he admits he dreamed about acting like many American children, remembering a time when he acted out ``CHiPs'' episodes with a cousin. He also remembers crashing around and falling down in front of his father, Jim Hart, one time.

"What do you think you are, a stunt man?" Jody Hart recalls his father saying.

"And here I am," he says.

COMBAT CASTING What: Los Angeles-based casting and production company for TV and film started by Pleasant Hill High School graduate and Marine Corps veteran Jody Hart Find it online: www.combatcasting.com