When Cameron’s Galaxy of Terror sets were finished and the crew arrived to shoot them, he wasn’t impressed. “They had no idea what they were doing,” Cameron says. “I’m watching them shooting the sets and just blowing it, not getting the shots, not getting the performances.” It was a lightbulb moment for Cameron. He had never thought of himself as a director. “I didn’t think I had that much to offer as a filmmaker. Design, yes, absolutely, I knew that part of it. But I’m watching these guys just fail and I’m thinking, ‘I can do that.’” He cornered Corman in the hall. “I think I should be the second unit director,” he said. “I’ll work at night and get inserts.” Again Cameron made up a job for himself. And again Corman encouraged the enthusiastic young man. “He said, ‘That’s a good idea. Start tomorrow. Put your group together.’” Corman took ideas from any level. There was no grip too lowly to suggest a script change. It was one of the producer’s trademarks. Cameron took the opportunity to propose a new scene that would involve Sid Haig’s character cutting off his own arm with a crystal, and maggots swarming it. Corman liked it. “So my first task was to shoot the bullshit scene I had just made up,” Cameron says. “An insert shot of an arm lying on the ground with maggots crawling.”
The next day, when it came time to film his big scene, Cameron was completely focused. “Bring me the arm! OK, bring me the maggots!” For the maggots, he was using a box of mealworms from a pet-food store, where they’re sold as reptile food. Mealworms are fine little larval sources of protein, but they’re apparently a lot more sedentary than maggots. Cameron sprinkled the mealworms on the prop arm, and they sat there. Not even a wriggle. For the scene to work, he needed some serious writhing. “I wasn’t about to go out to the town dump and find some cow carcass and get real maggots, plus I had to have the shot by ten,” he says. “So I said, ‘Let’s see what happens if we juice these things.’” He got his hands on some methylcellulose, a viscous solution readily available on the set since it was a key ingredient in alien slime. He poured it over the arm and added the mealworms. Then he took a 110-volt cord, stripped it, split it, laid two copper ends in the methyl-cellulose, ran the cable behind the set, and buried it. He set up the camera and ran a test. A crewman behind the set plugged in the cord, the voltage zipped through it, and the mealworms came alive. It worked beautifully. They unplugged the cord, not wanting to kill their worm cast, and reset for the real thing. Just then, two visitors arrived on the set. They were producers working on a sequel to one of Corman’s cult hits, Piranha. Someone had recommended Cameron as their special-effects supervisor, so they had stopped by to meet him. As they walked in, Cameron was rolling the camera. He called action, the man hidden behind the set plugged in the cord, and, right on cue, the worms began delivering their Marlon Brando–caliber writhing. Cameron panned the camera, got his shot, and called cut, and the worms stopped. The visitors were duly impressed. They hadn’t seen the electrical cord or the crewman hidden behind the set. What they saw was a man who could direct maggots. Just imagine what he could do with actors.
Bad Story, Bad Piranha
Ovidio Assonitis, one of the two producers who swept through the miraculous maggot set, needed a director—and fast—for his $500,000 horror sequel, Piranha II: The Spawning. Assonitis’s prior credits included a 1977 flesh-eating-octopus movie called Tentacles and a 1980 The Omen knockoff called The Visitor. Twice before, Assonitis had hired first-timers in order to secure a deal from a small label at Warner Bros. that allowed him to make cheap films as long as he used an American director. The feeling at the studio was that the Italian producer’s florid tastes needed to be mediated by someone with more native sensibilities. But a few days into both of those productions, Assonitis had declared the directors incompetent as a pretense for taking over the movies himself. Now he was looking for another sacrificial director. This blond kid who got maggots to writhe on cue looked American (though he was really Canadian) and smart enough not to ruin the movie during the few days he would be in charge. Cameron was sitting in the crosshairs of a producer who had no real intention of letting him direct. But he didn’t know that.
What he did know from the beginning was that Piranha II was not going to be Citizen Kane. Assonitis took Cameron out to lunch at Zucky’s, a divey deli in Santa Monica, to offer him the job. He would be paid ten thousand dollars, five thousand now and five thousand when he finished. “It was the thing you did at Corman,” Cameron says. “If a directing gig opened up, you just took it. It didn’t matter if it was Coed Nurse Zombies. You didn’t read the script. The simple fact that Roger was gonna spend money on it was all you needed to know. If there was a slot you took it. And then you learned how to direct.” Cameron figured that whatever the movie was, he could make it better. By August 1981, he was in Assonitis’s office in Rome immersed in preproduction, working on his storyboards, trying to fashion some decent-looking rubber fish, and rewriting the script. In Piranha II, a navy ship containing experimental piranha eggs has sunk, unleashing flying carnivorous fish on helpless beachgoers. “I had a bad story and bad piranha,” Cameron says. “But I was going through all the steps.”
Just about the only bright spot in the movie for Cameron was a couple of cast members, especially a grizzled New York actor named Lance Henriksen playing the besieged resort community’s sheriff. Henriksen immediately struck Cameron as cool. The son of a waitress and a Norwegian seaman nicknamed Icewater for his cold personality, Henriksen had dropped out of school at age twelve and spent his adolescence riding freight trains across the country. He was a teenager in jail in Tucson for vagrancy when he got his first role, as an extra in a Lee Marvin TV movie being filmed at the prison. By the time Cameron met him, Henriksen had established a steady career as a character actor in movies like Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Damien: Omen II Utterly devoid of pretension and always up for adventure, Henriksen would become a creative ally of Cameron’s on the troubled Piranha II set, something of a muse for one of the director’s iconic characters, and a regular weekend shooting buddy.
A week before the start of production, Cameron reported to the location in Jamaica, where Assonitis’s team had supposedly been prep-ping the shoot. Cameron sat down to hold his first meeting and learned that the production manager had yet to secure a single location or set for the film. As chaotic as Corman’s company seemed, his productions were always well organized. You can’t make movies on a shoestring budget any other way. So Cameron was appalled. He ripped open the petty-cash drawer, grabbed all the money and a Polaroid camera, and stormed out. On the sidewalk, Cameron flagged down the first person he saw, a young Jamaican guy with a battered white car, and offered him some cash to drive him around for a day. They visited a police station, a school, a hotel, with Cameron cutting cash deals and handwriting contracts for all the locations.
One of the spots they scouted was a morgue in St. Ann’s Bay. It had an autopsy table and a cooler with two doors. Cameron visualized just how he would stream the light through the windows. “Yeah, this will work great,” he thought, and made another deal. On the day of the morgue scene, Cameron showed up early with his fake piranha-chewed corpse. He saw a huge cockroach skittering across the floor that he wanted to catch and use in a shot. He was ready to go. Suddenly, Cameron realized he hadn’t entirely thought through the details of the morgue location. “I guess I thought they would take the bodies and put them someplace else,” he recalls. Instead, in the space where Cameron planned to film his fake corpse, was a real dead man, with another dead man stacked on top of him, and a little girl who had been hit by a car stacked on top of them. The bottom body had been autopsied, so there were gallons of blood lying in a tray beside it.
Cameron’s cast had not yet arrived. He asked the morgue staff if he could move the bodies to the side to give him a place to shoot, and then had his art director cut a piece of plywood for a divider. He set up his fake body, and the cast and the rest of the crew trickled in. Steve Marachuk, who played resort employee Tricia O’
Neil’s biochemist boyfriend, got curious about what was behind the plywood. “Steve says, ‘Hey, there’s real bodies in here! I can use it for the scene.’” Cameron tried to dissuade his leading man from the Method approach, to no avail. Marachuk looked, stood silently for a moment, and excused himself. He wouldn’t return to the set for half an hour. When Cameron finally got rolling, two dreadlocked hearse drivers walked in. They needed the bottom dead guy, who had been autopsied, so they would have to move the other dead guy and the little girl. “Can you come back when we break for lunch?” Cameron asked them. They did, but as they were removing the bottom corpse, one of the hearse drivers dropped his end and the overflowing blood tray splashed to the floor. “They’re laughing, they get the guy back on the thing, push his guts back in, and go,” Cameron says. Meanwhile, the first-time director was standing in a Jamaican morgue with gallons of real blood covering the floor and his cast and crew outside eating lunch. He stepped out to address them—“Take your time, guys! Have some more salad!”—grabbed a mop, a bucket, and some disinfectant, and started cleaning up.
While Cameron was directing Piranha II, he wasn’t allowed to see his dailies, the raw, unedited footage of his shots. On his fifth day at work, Cameron learned from one of Assonitis’s assistants that he was fired. “He says, ‘Ovidio has viewed the dailies and he doesn’t believe they’ll cut together,’” Cameron recalls. Like the two directors before him, Cameron was out. “It bothered me that they said my scenes weren’t any good. That bothered me more than getting fired, because it spoke to the whole issue of whether I really could be a director or not. I thought I’d covered them kind of well.” He told Assonitis’s representative that he didn’t want his name on the film. Of course, Assonitis needed it for the Warner Bros. deal, and he knew Cameron was broke. “I literally didn’t have the money to hire a lawyer to get my name taken off the movie,” Cameron says. For the first time in his rocketing filmmaking career, Cameron was confronted with some self-doubt. Maybe he really wasn’t that good. Maybe he should just stick to drawing spaceships, or even go back to trucking. Angry and disappointed, he left the Piranha II set and went home.
What felt like a career ending, however, was actually one beginning. The torment Cameron went through over his failed first directing effort would lead him exactly where he needed to be, into the dark recesses of his mind, for that’s where he found The Terminator. But first he would have to confront the man who had fired him.
3.
KICKING IN THE DOOR
The Nightmare
One long, miserable night alone in a Rome hotel room in March 1982, Cameron collapsed onto his bed with a raging fever and thought he might be dying. This was to be a life-altering night for the filmmaker, but not in the way he feared.
Cameron had come to Italy to see a rough cut of Piranha II: The Spawning. He was twenty-seven, broke, and depressed. Cameron wanted to know if Ovidio Assonitis was right, and if maybe he should abandon his Hollywood aspirations. “I felt I shouldn’t go on with a directing career if I was deluding myself and my shot design and scene architecture didn’t work,” Cameron says. Not sure how exactly he would get home to California, Cameron had bought a one-way plane ticket to Rome, where Assonitis was in postproduction on the film.
When Cameron arrived in Assonitis’s office in Rome, he must have been an intimidating presence, because the producer spent the meeting hunched behind his desk gripping a sharp letter opener. Eventually, Assonitis relaxed and allowed his visitor to see a rough assembly of the film. As Cameron had suspected, his scenes cut together just fine. Assonitis had fired Cameron so he could sit in the director’s chair himself—it wasn’t a coincidence that all the scenes of topless women bouncing on the decks of yachts had been shot in the last half of the schedule, and that Assonitis had cast those parts himself without Cameron’s knowledge, using Penthouse centerfolds.
Horrified that his name would be attached to such shlock—even by B movie standards—Cameron decided to do some damage control. The next night he slipped the lock of the editing room with a credit card, crept in, and found himself surrounded by film cans labeled in Italian. Cameron spotted a can marked fine—at least he knew what that meant—and decided to recut the film himself, starting from the end. Every night for weeks, Cameron snuck back in and reedited the footage into something that, although he still considered it trash, at least was his trash.
Cameron had only collected half of his ten-thousand-dollar fee for Piranha II, and he had already spent that money. While in Rome, he couldn’t afford food, so he snatched scraps from room-service trays at his pensione. Every morning a plate with two hard rolls was placed next to the door of each room. Cameron would take one roll from each plate and live on that for a few days. Eventually, his skinny, exhausted body broke down and succumbed to fever, and that’s when Cameron had his nightmare epiphany. He dreamed of a chrome torso emerging, phoenixlike, from an explosion and dragging itself across the floor with kitchen knives. Cameron awoke and immediately started sketching the deathly figure on hotel stationery as ideas for a story line surrounding the image flooded his mind. A few days later, as he wandered the streets in the wind and rain, Cameron found a lire note worth about twenty dollars on the sidewalk. He bought himself an espresso and believed his fortunes were turning around. Indeed they were. Cameron’s fever dream was a creative jolt that would become his first great movie idea.
Assonitis recut Piranha II his way, but Warner Bros. had tired of the producer by then and refused to accept the movie. Two years after it was completed, the flying-piranha sequel was released by a tiny company that was a front for a porn distributor. The version you can rent or buy on DVD today is Assonitis’s, and although Cameron’s name is on the movie, he doesn’t consider it part of his filmography
The Blood Oath
The Terminator introduces many of the themes and motifs that would come to define Cameron’s career: a bleak future setting, an exploration of humanity’s relationship to technology, a love story with a potent heroine and a stoic hero, and, oh yes, lots of cool explosions. Movie fans and film theorists have found in it everything from a retelling of the Christ myth to a reinvention of film noir. For Cameron it was simply a chance to tell a story of his very own.
Still youthfully enthusiastic despite the Piranha II debacle, and energized by his new story idea, Cameron returned to California with a loan and a beater car borrowed from his father. He camped out on Randall Frakes’s floor in Pomona, California, in a squat, concrete house where he wrote the treatment for The Terminator. Even then, Cameron found writing a lonely, utterly unforgiving process. “Every thought, every gesture, is judged directly,” he says. “And it’s very hard to get started, and to stay focused.” He prefers the dynamic aspect of making films, laboring on a set with actors and cameras. When he’s writing, Cameron tends to bunker himself, working mainly at night and withdrawing from the outside world. He used to tell friends he’d like to buy the most uncomfortable chair he could find for writing, so he would finish as fast as possible just to get out of it. When it came time to turn The Terminator treatment into a script, Cameron enlisted his other friend from Orange County, Bill Wisher, as a collaborator and sounding board. Because he and Wisher had spent years talking about their favorite science-fiction books and movies together, they had a similar vocabulary and approach to storytelling. Cameron divided up his treatment—he gave Wisher, who was living fifty miles away in Brea, California, far from the Hollywood scene, the early Sarah Connor and police-department pieces. Cameron wrote everything else, including the future war and action sequences. Since this was before e-mail and home fax machines, every few days the two friends would compare notes on their high-tech thriller using a method just one step above two cans connected by string. Cameron called Wisher on the phone with a tape recorder on his end and had his friend read the new scenes into the receiver. Then he’d transcribe them.
The director shared his idea—a cyborg hitman from the future trying to change past
events—with his agent, whom he’d landed thanks to the Piranha II job and some spec scripts submitted as writing samples. The agent hated The Terminator and told Cameron it was a lousy idea, to forget it and start work on something else. So Cameron, who had no money and no prospects, fired his agent. In an industry where an agent is virtually the only path to paid work for an unknown writer, this was either recklessness or extraordinary self-confidence—something you can say about an awful lot of decisions Cameron has made in his career.
He did find someone else who shared his passion for the project, however: Gale Anne Hurd, Roger Corman’s former assistant, who had plucked the blond-haired model builder from obscurity in New World Pictures’ art department. Hurd and Cameron had worked well together in the low-budget pressure cooker at New World, and they decided to present themselves to potential financiers as a directing and producing team. The story of Cameron and Hurd’s first contract is the sort that makes Hollywood deal brokers shudder. Cameron sold Hurd the rights to The Terminator for one dollar in return for a blood oath that she would produce the film only if he directed it, or it wouldn’t get made. “I probably didn’t really need to do this,” Cameron says, “but I was naive and thought in expansive, theatrical terms.” Also, having fired his agent, he didn’t have any formal representation at the time. In any case, the first thing the financiers did was try to edge Cameron out, but Hurd said no. The blood oath worked. “And I have a career as a result,” Cameron says. “So I’ve never really regretted that decision, although it was costly financially.” (Cameron hasn’t made any money off the two Terminator movies that followed his own, nor the accompanying video games, action figures, or theme-park ride.) “I chalked it up to the cost of a Hollywood education,” he says. Cameron’s partnership with Hurd was to become one of the most vital in his career, one that would evolve into a romance by the time they were in postproduction on The Terminator and ultimately a marriage, and would remain, he says, “pitch perfect” on the two strenuous shoots that followed, Aliens and The Abyss. However, Cameron was always disappointed that Hurd never corrected the record regarding her contribution to the writing on The Terminator. She had suggested edits on the script, which is part of the role of a producer, and took a “with” screenwriting credit to help their team-based sales pitch. “People more or less assumed that she was responsible for the strong female character,” Cameron says. “Not the case. She did no actual writing at all.”
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