Though I made no secret of my support for Reagan and gave what I could to Republican candidates and causes, I stayed off the political stage. My movie career was my focus. When you promote a movie, you want to win over everybody, and if you give political speeches, you are bound to turn off some percentage of viewers no matter what you say. Why do that?
Besides, I wasn’t famous enough yet for very many people to be interested in my views or for politicians to seek my endorsement. I wasn’t even an American citizen yet! I had my green card, paid my taxes, and considered the United States my permanent home, but I couldn’t vote. I put stickers on my car for the candidates I supported, but I gave no speeches.
I kept quiet about politics when I visited Austria, too. The media there lionized me as a native son made good, and I never wanted to be perceived as some wise guy coming back and telling people what to do. Once or twice a year, when I visited, I’d hang out with my friends and catch up on the latest political debates and developments. My political mentor Fredi Gerstl had become a member of the Graz city council and was an increasingly influential voice in the conservative People’s Party nationally. I found it enlightening to talk with him about how the American and Austrian systems compared: private ownership versus public ownership of industries; representative democracy versus parliamentary government; private funding versus public finance. Fredi gave me an inside view of the political maneuvering in Austria on key issues, such as the push to privatize the transportation systems, as well as the tobacco, steel, and insurance industries, and the fight against the resurgent extreme right wing.
Fredi also introduced me to Josef Krainer Jr., who won the governorship of the state of Styria in 1980. He was a little younger than Fredi, and his whole life had been in politics. His father, Josef Sr., had been the governor of Styria throughout my boyhood—a national figure who’d won election after spending all of World War II in prison because of his opposition to the Anschluss: the occupation and annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany in 1938. Josef Jr. had studied in Italy and America, and his beliefs were an interesting blend of economic conservatism and environmental advocacy that I found very appealing. Another good friend of mine was Thomas Klestil, a fast-rising diplomat who’d been the consul general in LA when I first arrived. He was now Austria’s ambassador to the US and was destined within a few years to become Austria’s president, succeeding Kurt Waldheim.
Ties like these made me reluctant to renounce my Austrian citizenship in 1979, when I became eligible to apply in the United States. (I’d had my green card for the required minimum of five years.) I never like to cut things from my life, I only add. So dual citizenship would be ideal. But while it was permitted in America, Austrian law said I had to choose—I couldn’t have it both ways. The rare exceptions were typically for distinguished diplomats, and the decision had to be made by the governor of an Austrian state. I asked Fredi what I should do. He told me that with Josef Krainer Jr. about to run for governor, I’d be wise just to wait. Three years later, I was deeply honored when Josef granted me the exception. I celebrated by taking Maria to dinner at 72 Market Street and applied for my American citizenship immediately.
After another year, it was granted. On September 16, 1983, I stood proudly among two thousand other immigrants in the Shrine Auditorium across from the University of Southern California campus and swore my allegiance to the United States. I’d felt like an American from the time I was ten years old, but now it was becoming real. Raising my hand and repeating the oath gave me a chill, and I felt goose bumps all over my body. Afterward, photographers tracked me down and took pictures of me showing off my naturalization certificate, with Maria beside me, both of us grinning. I told the reporters, “I always believed in shooting for the top, and to become an American is like becoming a member of the winning team.”
At home we had a party for our friends. I put on an American flag shirt and an American flag hat and I couldn’t stop smiling with the joy of being officially an American at last. It meant that I could vote, and I could travel with an American passport. I could even run for office someday.
CHAPTER 16
The Terminator
WHEN I FIRST SAW the mock-up for The Terminator movie poster, the killer robot pictured was O. J. Simpson, not me. A few weeks earlier, I’d run into Mike Medavoy, the head of Orion Pictures, which was financing the project, at a screening of a picture about a police helicopter.
“I have the perfect movie for you,” he said. “It’s called The Terminator.” I was instantly suspicious because there’d been a schlock action movie called The Exterminator a few years before.
“Strange name,” I said.
“Well,” he said, “we can change it. Anyway, it’s a great role, a leading role, very heroic.” He described a sci-fi action movie where I would be playing a brave soldier named Kyle Reese, who battles to save a girl and protect the future of the world. “We’ve pretty much got O. J. Simpson signed up to be the terminator, which is like a killing machine.
“Why don’t we get together?” Medavoy suggested. “The director lives down in Venice near your office.”
This was in the spring of 1983. I’d been reading lots of scripts with the idea of doing a new project in addition to the Conan sequel, which was supposed to start shooting near the end of the year. I was being offered war movies, cop movies, and even a couple of romances. A script about Paul Bunyan, the mythical lumberjack and he-man, was tempting. I liked it that he went around righting wrongs, and I thought that having a blue ox for a sidekick would be funny. There was also a folk hero script called Big Bad John, based on country singer Jimmy Dean’s 1961 hit song. It was about the legend of a hulking, mysterious coal miner who uses his strength to save the lives of fellow miners during a mine collapse but doesn’t make it out himself. Now that I’d done a big movie connected with names like Dino De Laurentiis and Universal Pictures, studios and directors were courting me and the projects I was being offered were getting better and better all the time. Shortly before Conan came out, I changed agents, signing with Lou Pitt, the powerful head of motion picture talent at International Creative Management. I felt bad leaving Larry Kubik, who’d helped me so much when I was nowhere in my movie career. But I thought I had to have a major agency like ICM behind me because it handled all the big directors and big projects and had the connections. And it was satisfying, of course, to come in at the top of one of the giant agencies that had turned me down just a few years earlier.
My mind quickly adjusted to the new world I was in. I’d always told Maria that my goal was to make $1 million for a movie, and with the second Conan movie, the money was locked in. But I no longer wanted to be just Conan. The whole idea of making a few Hercules-type movies and then taking the money and going into the gym business like Reg Park went right out the window. I felt I had to aim higher.
“Now that studios are coming to me,” I said to myself, “what if I go all out? Really work on the acting, really work on the stunts, really work on whatever else I need to be onscreen. Also market myself really well, market the movies well, promote them well, publicize them well. What if I shoot to become one of Hollywood’s top five leading men?”
People were always talking about how few performers there are at the top of the ladder, but I was always convinced there was room for one more. I felt that, because there was so little room, people got intimidated and felt more comfortable staying on the bottom of the ladder. But, in fact, the more people that think that, the more crowded the bottom of the ladder becomes! Don’t go where it’s crowded. Go where it’s empty. Even though it’s harder to get there, that’s where you belong and where there’s less competition.
It was very clear, of course, that I would never be an actor like Dustin Hoffman or Marlon Brando, or a comedian like Steve Martin, but that was okay. I was being sought out as a larger-than-life character in action movies, like Clint Eastwood and Charles Bronson, and John Wayne before them. Those were my guys. I went to see all their mo
vies. So there would be plenty of work—and plenty of opportunity to become as big a star as any of them. I wanted to be in the same league and on the same pay scale. As soon as I realized this, I felt a great sense of calm. Because I could see it. Just as I had in bodybuilding, I believed 100 percent that I’d achieve my goal. I had a new vision in front of me, and I always feel that if I can see it and believe it, then I can achieve it.
Lou Pitt and I were already looking at war movies and heroic movies as a fallback in case Conan ever lost steam. Otherwise, it was more of a speculative exercise, because under the terms of my current contract, Dino De Laurentiis owned me for ten years. It called for me to make one Conan movie every two years for as long as Dino chose, up to five movies, and to take no other roles. So if Conan became the success we all wanted, we would do a third movie in 1986, a fourth in 1988, and so on, and we’d make a lot of money. As to being tied up, Lou told me, “Don’t worry about that. If we need to, we can renegotiate.” So I put that worry aside as the idea of going from muscles to mainstream action movies gained stronger and stronger appeal.
Mike Medavoy arranged for me to have lunch with the director of The Terminator, as well as the producers, John Daly and Gale Ann Hurd. I read the script before I went. It was really well written, exciting and action packed, but the story was strange. A woman, Sarah Connor, is an ordinary waitress in a diner who suddenly finds herself being hunted down by a ruthless killer. It is actually the Terminator, a robot encased in human flesh. It has been sent back in time from the year 2029, an age of horror where the world’s computers have run amok and set off a nuclear holocaust. The computers are now using terminators to wipe out what’s left of the human race. But human resistance fighters have begun turning back the machines, and they have a charismatic leader named John Connor: Sarah’s future son. The machines decide to eliminate the rebellion by keeping Connor from ever being born. So they use a time portal to send a terminator to hunt down Sarah in the present day. Her only hope is Reese, a young soldier loyal to John Connor, who slips through the time portal before it is destroyed. He is on a mission to stop the terminator.
James Cameron, the director, turned out to be a skinny, intense guy. This whole weird plot had come out of his head. At lunch that day, we hit it off. Cameron lived in Venice, and like a lot of the artists there, he seemed much more real to me than the people I met from, say, Hollywood Hills. He’d made only one movie, an Italian horror flick called Piranha II: The Spawning, which I’d never heard of, but I got a kick out of that. He told me how he’d learned moviemaking from Roger Corman, the low-budget producing and directing genius. Just from Cameron’s vocabulary, I could tell he was technically advanced. He seemed to know everything about cameras and lenses, about the way you set up shots, about lights and lighting, about set design. And he knew the kinds of money-saving shortcuts that let you bring in a movie for $4 million instead of $20 million. Four million was the amount they were budgeting for The Terminator.
When I talked about the movie, I found myself focused more on the Terminator character than on Reese, the hero. I had a very clear vision of the terminator. I told Cameron, “One thing that concerns me is that whoever is playing the terminator, if it’s O. J. Simpson or whoever, it’s very important that he gets trained the right way. Because if you think about it, if this guy is really a machine, he won’t blink when he shoots. When he loads a new magazine into his gun, he won’t have to look because a machine will be doing it, a computer. When he kills, there will be absolutely no expression on the face, not joy, not victory, not anything.” No thinking, no blinking, no thought, just action.
I told him how the actor would have to prepare for that. In the army, we’d learned to field strip and reassemble our weapons by feel. They’d blindfold you and make you take apart a muddy machine gun, clean it, and put it back together. “That’s the kind of training he should do,” I said. “Not too different from what I was doing in Conan.” I described how I’d practiced for hours and hours learning to wield a broadsword and cut off people’s heads like it was second nature. When coffee came, Cameron said suddenly, “Why don’t you play the Terminator?”
“No, no, I don’t want to go backward.” The Terminator had even fewer lines than Conan—it ended up with eighteen—and I was afraid people would think I was trying to avoid speaking roles, or, worse, that a lot of my dialogue had been edited out of the final film because it wasn’t working.
“I believe that you’d be great playing the Terminator,” he insisted. “Listening to you, I mean, you could just start on the part tomorrow! I wouldn’t even have to talk to you again. There’s no one who understands that character better.” And, he pointed out, “You haven’t said a single thing about Kyle Reese.”
He really put on the hard sell. “You know, very few actors have ever gotten across the idea of a machine.” One of the few to succeed, he said, was Yul Brynner, who played a killer robot in the 1973 sci-fi thriller Westworld. “It’s a very difficult, very challenging thing to pull off, from an acting point of view. And Arnold, it’s the title role! You are the Terminator. Imagine the poster: Terminator: Schwarzenegger.”
I told him that being cast as an evil villain wasn’t going to help my career. It was something I could do later on, but right now I should keep playing heroes so that people would get used to me being a heroic character and wouldn’t get confused. Cameron disagreed. He took out a pencil and paper and began to sketch. “It’s up to you what you do with it,” he argued. “The Terminator is a machine. It’s not good, it’s not evil. If you play it in an interesting way, you can turn it into a heroic figure that people admire because of what it’s capable of. And a lot has to do with us: how we shoot it, how we edit . . .”
He showed me his drawing of me as the Terminator. It captured the coldness exactly. I could have acted from it.
“I am absolutely convinced,” Cameron said, “that if you play it, it will be one of the most memorable characters ever. I can see that you are the character, and that you are a machine, and you totally understand this. You’re passionate about this character.”
I promised to read the script one more time and think about it. By now the check for lunch had arrived. In Hollywood the actor never pays. But John Daly couldn’t find his wallet, Gale Anne Hurd didn’t have a purse, and Cameron discovered that he didn’t have any money either. It was like a comedy routine, with them standing up and searching their pockets.
Finally I said, “I have money.” After having to borrow plane fare from Maria, I never left the house without $1,000 in cash and a no-limit credit card. So I paid, and they were very embarrassed.
My agent was skeptical. The conventional wisdom in Hollywood is that playing a villain is career suicide. Besides, once I’ve locked in on a vision for myself, I always resist changing the plan. But for a lot of reasons, The Terminator felt right. Here was a project that would get me out of a loincloth and into real clothes! The selling point would be the acting and the action, not just me ripping off my shirt. The Terminator was the ultimate tough character, with cool outfits and cool shades. I knew it would make me shine. I might not have a lot of dialogue, but at least I’d expand my skills to handling modern weapons. The script was great, the director was smart and passionate, and the money was good: $750,000 for six weeks of shooting right in LA. Yet the project was also low-profile enough that I wouldn’t be risking my entire reputation by trying something new.
I thought if I did a great job with The Terminator, it would open more doors. The key thing was that the next role after that could not be a villain. As a matter of fact, I shouldn’t do another villain for quite some time. I didn’t want to tempt the movie gods by playing a villain more than once.
It took me just a day to call back Jim Cameron to say I’d play the machine. He was as happy as he could be, although he knew that before anything could proceed, we needed to get Dino De Laurentiis’s release.
When I went to see Dino at his office, he wasn’t the hot-temper
ed little man I’d insulted a few years before. His attitude toward me seemed benevolent and almost fatherly; I’d felt the same thing from Joe Weider many times. I pushed to the back of my mind the way that Dino had clawed back my 5 percent of Conan at the beginning of our relationship. It wasn’t important, I decided, and I always prefer to be driven by what’s positive. Standing in his office, I didn’t focus on the big desk anymore but on the statues and awards from all over the world: Oscars and Golden Globes, Italian awards, German awards, French awards, Japanese awards. I admired Dino tremendously for what he’d achieved. He’d been involved in more than 500 movies since 1942 and had officially produced something like 130. Learning from him was much more important than making back that stupid 5 percent. Besides, he’d stuck to the deal to pay me $1 million for Conan II, enabling me to achieve my goal. I was grateful for that.
I didn’t have to say anything for him to figure out why I was there. He knew I was getting other offers, and I think other people in Hollywood wanting me made him appreciate me more. He’d also realized that I think more like a businessman than like a typical actor, and that I could understand his problems. “I’m seeing tremendous opportunities, and I want to be free enough to do some of these other things in between the Conan movies,” I told him. I reminded him that we could only do a Conan every two years because the marketers needed two years to reap each installment’s potential. “So there’s time for other projects,” I argued. I told him about The Terminator and a couple of other movies that interested me.
Total Recall: My Unbelievably True Life Story Page 32