Making Conan brought back memories of the wild summers with my Austrian buddies pretending that we were gladiators on the shores of the Thalersee. Here it was Milius’s fantasy that set the pace. Before we shot a scene, he’d tell endless stories from history, about how barbarians ate, how they fought, how they rode, their religions, and their cruelties. For the orgy sequence, he talked about the decadence of ancient Rome, the women, the nudity, the sex, the violence, the intrigues, the feasts. Around us he had the best weapons experts, the best horse people, the best designers, wardrobe, and makeup people, all to draw us into the Conan world.
I loved the immersion of being on location: sharing the Apartamentos Villa Magna with the other actors, driving from there to the warehouse, learning a whole new way of functioning for six months. I’d never filmed in a foreign country before. I picked up a lot of Spanish because very few people on the set spoke English. At first the work was too intense for me to allow myself to do anything but train, rehearse, and shoot. But after a month or two, I started to relax. I realized, “Wait a minute. I’m in Madrid! Let’s go see some museums, let’s go see interesting architecture, buildings, and streets. Let’s try some of the restaurants everyone talks about and have dinner at eleven at night like the Spaniards.” We discovered boot makers, leather makers, and tailors, and started buying uniquely Spanish things like ornate silver ashtrays and beautifully tooled leather belts.
Working for Milius was a constant adventure. I had to tear apart a vulture with my teeth, for example. This was in the scene where Conan’s enemies crucify him in the desert upon the Tree of Woe. The tree was a huge outdoor prop built on a rotating base so that the angles of the sun and shadows would stay constant. As Conan nears death in the boiling heat, vultures circle and gather on the branches, and when one lands to try to feed on his face, I bite its neck and rip it apart with my teeth. Naturally, with Milius the birds on the branches were real—they were trained, yes, but still vultures, with lice all over them. During the three days we needed to shoot the scene, the vultures were taken into a tent every hour to rest while I stayed out on the hot tree with five new vultures. The bird I tore apart was an animated prop made of dead vulture parts. I had to rinse out my mouth and wash my skin with an antibiotic afterward.
We also had to contend with camels. I’d never been around a camel, much less ridden one, but the script demanded exactly that. A week before we were due to shoot the scene, I told myself, “You’d better make friends with the camel and figure this out.” I discovered quickly that they’re very different from horses. They get up on their back feet first and throw you forward. And you can’t just tug on the reins as you would with a horse, because if you do, the camel will turn its head 180 degrees until it’s face to face with you. It might spit in your eye, and if it does, the saliva is so caustic that you need a doctor. And camels bite—usually the back of your head, just when you’ve forgotten they’re around.
In addition to the mechanical snake that had its way with me, I had to contend with real snakes too. They were some sort of water snake, and their handler worried that they were getting dehydrated. So he put them in the apartment house swimming pool. In the United States, the department of health or animal welfare would have been there in two seconds, and also the water would have been full of chlorine, which wouldn’t have been good for the snakes’ skin. But in Spain and around Milius, these kinds of things happened all the time.
Milius always pushed the envelope. Environmentalists complained that our sets disrupted the salt marshes, and the producers had to promise to restore the sites. Animal-protection advocates complained because Conan included scenes in which a dog gets kicked, a camel gets punched (by me, but it was just a fake punch), and horses get tripped. None of that would have been allowed in the United States. The production had excellent stunt riders who knew how to turn the horse during a fall so that it would roll and not break its neck, but even so, those stunts were dangerous for both the horses and the people; I saw many bruises and cuts and split heads. Such stunts have since been outlawed from movies.
Even so, the bloodshed in Conan seems tame by today’s standards. At the time, however, the film introduced a whole new dimension of violence on screen. Up until then, swordfights had always been a little too tidy: characters would crumple to the ground, and maybe you’d see a little blood. But Milius was strapping five-quart blood packs on actors’ chests. Five quarts is about as much blood as you have in your entire body. When a battle-axe struck one of those packs, blood flew everywhere. And anytime blood was being spilled, he was insistent about making sure it was against a light background so that you could really see the carnage.
Milius didn’t think he needed to apologize for this. “It’s Conan the barbarian. What do you expect?” he told reporters. But after the shooting wrapped in May and we came home, the issue continued to percolate. The decision makers at Universal were worried that advance word of excessive violence would drive away viewers.
At that point, they were considering Conan for a November or December holiday release. That was until Sid Sheinberg, the president of Universal, who was famous for discovering director Steven Spielberg, saw a rough cut in August. He watched me hacking people apart, blood everywhere, and halfway through the screening, he stood up and said to the other executives sarcastically, “Merry Christmas, guys,” and walked out. So Conan was pushed back: Universal’s Christmas 1981 releases were On Golden Pond, the family drama starring Henry Fonda, Jane Fonda, and Katharine Hepburn, and a horror flick.
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We all knew that Conan would be controversial, and the puzzle was how to market it and present it to the media. I watched Milius give some of the early interviews, drawing reporters into the macho fantasy. One of his big talking points was Friedrich Nietzsche; the epigraph at the beginning of Conan, “That which does not kill us makes us stronger,” is paraphrased from the German philosopher’s 1889 book Twilight of the Idols. The other big talking point was steel. “Steel gets harder and more durable the more you pound it,” John would tell the reporters. “It’s no different than the character of a human being. It needs to be tempered. It needs to overcome resistance. The more a man struggles, the stronger he is. Look at people who come from war-torn countries or tough city neighborhoods. You can see the struggle in their faces. A makeup artist can’t do that. And that’s what makes Conan the fiercest and most powerful warrior, what he went through as a child. Luxuries and comforts are evil for humans.” For Milius, Conan was making a statement that went way beyond action movies and comic books. It all tied back to Nietzsche.
He’d show the reporters one of his samurai swords and say, “You know, a samurai sword is heated and pounded on an anvil seven times so that it has the necessary strength. The samurai warriors would practice on criminals. They’d take them out and make them stand and cut off the head with a single swing.” He would act out this whole drama as the reporters took notes. And I would be thinking, “How does he come up with this shit?” My approach was much more direct. I sold the entertainment aspect, the joy of Conan as a fun ride and epic adventure, like a Star Wars set on earth.
To promote the movie, it was important to work every possible angle. We used special-interest magazines to build an audience—stories on sword fighting for the martial-arts magazines. Stories for horse magazines. Stories for fantasy magazines that were into swords and sorcery. Stories for bodybuilding magazines on how you needed top conditioning to be Conan.
The movie, of course, needed a rating before it could be released. I was really annoyed by the way that powerful studio executives kowtowed to the members of the ratings board. The board was made up of Motion Picture Association of America appointees whose names were never even publicly announced. Most were middle-aged people with grown kids, but they reacted to Conan like a bunch of old ladies: “Oh, ah, ah, the blood! I’ve got to close my eyes!” The word came down that we had to edit out some of the gore.
I said to myself, “Where did th
ey get these squeamish idiots? Let’s have some young, hip people rate it.” I asked one of the studio guys, “Who is in charge of this? There must be someone in charge. Why don’t you go and get them fired?”
“No, no, no, no,” he said. “You don’t want to rock that boat.”
No one was willing to fight back on anything.
I didn’t understand there was a chess game being played. Universal had in the works Spielberg’s E.T., which the studio was counting on as its summer blockbuster of 1982. It didn’t want to do anything to antagonize the raters. It wanted to be loved, it wanted Spielberg to be loved, it wanted E.T. to be loved. So then here come Milius and Schwarzenegger, slaughtering all these people on the screen. Milius is already Hollywood’s bad boy, with his right-wing Republicanism and his reputation for saying outrageous things. And, of course, the studio is ready to say, “Let’s cut those Conan scenes right now, so that when we bring E.T. to the rating board next week, we don’t get crucified,” even though there was no harm in E.T. at all.
I was mad as hell because I felt that every one of the killings in Conan was well shot and extraordinary. So what if the first thing you see is Thulsa Doom raiding Conan’s boyhood village and that his mother’s head goes flying through the air? You could say we needed that scene to make Thulsa Doom the ultimate villain, so that when Conan hunts him down, it’s justified. But you fall in love with your own work. In hindsight, I think that making us tone down the violence helped bring more people to the film.
This was my first experience with large-scale studio marketing. A media tour was being planned to promote Conan internationally. In the first meeting I went to, the marketers said, “We’re going to Italy and France.”
“Okaaay,” I said, “but if you look at the globe, there are more countries than Italy and France.” Being European, I was very conscious that there was a whole world out there besides the United States. In the early 1980s, movie grosses were two thirds domestic and one third international, but you could see it starting to shift. If you didn’t promote internationally, who knew how much money you left lying on the table?
I said, “Guys, why don’t we be more systematic? Spend two days in Paris, two days in London, two days in Madrid, two days in Rome, and then go up north. Then say that we go to Copenhagen, and then to Stockholm, and then down to Berlin. What’s wrong with that?”
“Well, that’s not the way we do things. You know the movie is released on different dates in different countries, and we don’t want to give interviews too far in advance.”
“So what about working out a deal with the magazines and newspapers in those countries to hold their stories until the release date?”
“We’d have to check that out.”
I knew another reason for their reluctance to send me on a PR tour was that very few actors like to sell. I’d seen the same thing with authors in the book business. The typical attitude seemed to be, “I don’t want to be a whore. I create; I don’t want to shill. I’m not into the money thing at all.”
It was a real change when I showed up saying, “Let’s go everywhere, because this is good not only for me financially but also good for the public; they get to see a good movie!” Eventually the studio agreed to have me promote Conan in five or six countries. I felt that was a big step forward.
It was the same debate I’d had with my publisher when my book Arnold: The Education of a Bodybuilder came out. The United States accounts for only 5 percent of the world’s population, so why would you ignore the other 95 percent? Both industries were shortchanging themselves. I’d learned from Joe Weider always to think of the global market.
I saw myself as a businessman first. Too many actors, writers, and artists think that marketing is beneath them. But no matter what you do in life, selling is part of it. You can’t make movies without money. Even if I had no publicity obligation in my contract, it was still in my interest to promote the movie and make sure it made as much money as possible. I wanted to be involved in the meetings. I wanted everyone to see that I was working very hard to create a return on the studio’s investment. I felt it was my responsibility to pump up the grosses.
Conan’s breakthrough came just after Valentine’s Day 1982. The first test screening, in Houston, was such a success that Universal couldn’t believe the data: viewers rated the movie a 93 on a scale of 1 to 100, which almost always signals a major hit. The studio telephoned that night and said, “This is huge. We want to try it again in Las Vegas tomorrow. If we do that, can you come?” Driving past the cineplex the next afternoon, we could see this was no ordinary screening. A line stretched around the block, and besides the comic book fans that Universal had expected, there were bodybuilders with tight shirts and bulging muscles, gays, freaks with weird hair and glasses, people wearing Conan outfits. There were some women but the crowd seemed to be mostly men, including a major contingent of bikers in full leather. Some of those guys looked ready to riot if they didn’t get in. Universal simply kept opening auditoriums until everybody was seated—it took three to accommodate them all.
The studio had been banking on die-hard fans of Conan in the comics and fantasy novels to make the movie a success. They were supposed to become the core audience; the people who, if they like a movie, will see it several times and tell all their friends. What Universal didn’t count on was my guys: the bodybuilders. They made up probably a third of the audience that night—and you can imagine the test scores they gave Conan. Without them, the film might have gotten maybe an 88, but with them, it was again 93, just like in Houston. The studio was very excited. And Dino De Laurentiis was flipping. He came over to me that night and said, “I make you a star.” With his accent, I wasn’t sure whether he meant that he intended to make me a star or that he already had. But this time I didn’t tease him about it.
After that night, Conan was unstoppable. A month later, sneak previews in sixteen cities across the country drew overflow crowds. The cops had to be called in Manhattan because people on line were literally fighting to get in; in Washington, DC, the line went for blocks and caused a major traffic jam; in LA, they did three showings back to back instead of the one they had planned—some people waited in line eight hours.
News write-ups in the trade press after the screenings helped us get placement in hundreds of theaters. When Conan opened nationwide on May 14, it became the first blockbuster of what is still talked about as the best movie summer ever. That summer also brought us The Road Warrior, Rocky III, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Blade Runner, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, The World According to Garp, Poltergeist, An Officer and a Gentleman, Tron, The Thing, and, of course, E.T. Conan the Barbarian held its own among them all.
CHAPTER 15
Becoming American
BACK IN SANTA MONICA, Maria welcomed me home from Madrid and the Hyborian Age by giving me a little Labrador puppy she had named Conan.
“You know why she gave you the dog, don’t you?” one of her friends teased me.
“Because her family is always into dogs?” I said.
“It’s an audition! She wants to see how you’d handle children.”
I didn’t know about that, but Conan and I—that is, Conan the Canine and Conan the Barbarian—got along very well. I was happy to be back in our house, too, which was totally transformed by the décor that Maria and I had started on together.
The other big change during my absence was the January inauguration of Ronald Reagan. Nobody in Hollywood seemed to know what to make of the fact that he was president, not even the conservatives. Just after his election, Maria and I had dinner with friends of mine from the entertainment business who had worked on his campaign.
“Why did you push this guy?” she asked. “He’s not presidential material. Jeez, guys, he’s an actor!”
Instead of defending Reagan, they said things like, “We know, but people like listening to him.” They didn’t talk about what he’d done for California while he was governor or about his vision or his idea
s. Probably they were just being polite. They didn’t want to come right out and say in front of Maria that the time for Democrats was over.
I was amazed to see how negative most of the people in Hollywood remained toward Reagan during his presidency. Never mind that he was bringing the economy back; all I heard was criticism of how he’d cut the parks, or cut public employees’ salaries, or thrown out the air traffic controllers, or not done the right thing by the environment, or kissed up to the oil companies, or gotten rid of Jimmy Carter’s synthetic fuel, wind, and solar energy projects. It was always some complaint. There was no sense of the big picture and of what was being accomplished.
What mattered to me was that he represented the values that had brought me to America. I came because the United States was the greatest country with the best opportunities, and now that it was my home, I wanted to keep it that way and make it even better. After the turmoil and gloom of the 1970s, Americans voted for Reagan because he reminded them of their strength. Maria would say, “I don’t know why you are for this guy.” But that was why.
That spring, I met one of the great thinkers of the twentieth century: economist Milton Friedman. The Nobel Prize winner had shaped Reagan’s ideas about free markets and also had a big influence on me. Friedman’s 1980 public television series Free to Choose was a big hit, and I’d watched every installment, soaking up his ideas like a thirsty sponge. He and his wife, Rose, had written a bestselling book, also called Free to Choose, and I’d sent copies to all my friends as a Christmas present. The producer of the TV series, Bob Chitester, somehow heard about that and tracked me down to ask if I’d like to meet the Friedmans, both of whom had retired from their professorships at the University of Chicago. They lived in San Francisco, where Milton was now a fellow at the Hoover Institution think tank on the Stanford University campus.
Total Recall: My Unbelievably True Life Story Page 30