The Terminator was not what I’d call a happy set. How can you be happy in the middle of the night blowing things up, when everybody is exhausted and the pressure is intense to get complicated action sequences and visual effects just right? It was a productive set where the fun was in doing really wild stuff. I’d be thinking, “This is great. It’s a horror movie with action. Or, actually, I really don’t know what it is, it’s so over the top.”
Much of the time, I had glue all over my face to attach the special-effects appliances. I have strong skin, luckily, so the chemicals never ruined it much, but they were horrible all the same. Wearing the Terminator’s red eye over my own, I’d feel the wire that made it glow getting hot until it burned. I had to practice operating with a special-effects arm that was not mine, while for hours my real arm was tied behind my back.
Cameron was full of surprises. One morning, as soon as I was made up as the Terminator, he said, “Get in the van. We’re going to go shoot a scene.” We drove to a nearby residential street, and he said, “See that station wagon over there? It’s all rigged. When I give the signal, walk up to the driver’s side door, look around, punch in the window, open the door and get in, start the engine, and drive off.” We didn’t have the money to get permission from the city and to properly set up the scene of the Terminator jacking a car, so that’s how we did it instead. It made me feel like I was part of Jim’s creativity, sneaking around the permit process to bring in the movie on budget.
Lame ideas really irritated him, especially if they involved the script. I decided one day that The Terminator didn’t have enough funny moments. There’s a scene where the cyborg goes into a house and walks past a refrigerator. So I thought maybe the fridge door could be open, or maybe he could open it. He sees beer inside, wonders what that is, drinks it, gets a little buzz, and acts silly for a second. Jim cut me off before I could even finish. “It’s a machine, Arnold,” he said. “It’s not a human being. It’s not E.T. It can’t get drunk.”
Our biggest disagreement was about “I’ll be back.” That of course is the line you hear the Terminator say before it destroys the police station. The scene took a long time to shoot because I was arguing for “I will be back.” I felt that the line would sound more machinelike and menacing without the contraction.
“It’s feminine when I say the I’ll,” I complained, repeating it for Jim so he could hear the problem. “I’ll. I’ll. I’ll. It doesn’t feel rugged to me.”
He looked at me like I’d lost my mind. “Let’s stick with I’ll,” he said. But I wasn’t ready to let it go, and we went back and forth. Finally Jim yelled, “Look, just trust me, okay? I don’t tell you how to act, and you don’t tell me how to write.” And we shot it as written in the script. The truth was that, even after all these years of speaking English, I still didn’t understand contractions. But the lesson I took away was that writers never change anything. This was not somebody else’s script that Jim was shooting, it was his own. He was even worse than Milius. He was unwilling to change a single apostrophe.
—
When Conan the Destroyer hit the theaters that summer, I went all out to sell it. I went on as many national and local talk shows as would book me, starting with Late Night with David Letterman, and gave interviews to reporters from the biggest to the smallest magazines and newspapers. I had to lean on the publicists to line up appearances abroad, despite the fact that $50 million, or more than half, of the first Conan movie’s box office had come from outside the United States. I was determined to do everything in my power to make my first million-dollar role a success.
The second Conan outearned Conan the Barbarian in the end, breaking the $100 million mark in worldwide receipts. But what was good for my reputation was not such great news for the franchise. In the United States, Conan the Destroyer made it onto fewer screens than the original and grossed $31 million, or 23 percent less money. Our fears had come true. By repackaging Conan as what film critic Roger Ebert cheerfully called “your friendly family barbarian,” the studio alienated some of our core audience.
I felt like I was finished with Conan; it was going nowhere. When I got back from my publicity tours, I sat down again with Dino De Laurentiis and told him definitively that I didn’t want to do any more prehistoric movies, only contemporary movies. It turned out he had cooled off on Conan too. Rather than pay me millions for more sequels, he’d rather I make an action movie for him, although he still didn’t have a script. So for now I was free to do more projects like The Terminator.
It was very agreeable and just as we had talked about the previous fall—except that, being Dino, he had a favor to ask. Before I hung up my broadsword for good, he said, “Why don’t you just do, you know, a cameo?” He handed me a script called Red Sonja.
Red Sonja was Conan’s female counterpart in the Conan comics and fantasy novels: a woman warrior, out to avenge the murder of her parents, who steals treasure and magic talismans and battles evil sorcerers and beasts. The part that Dino had in mind for me wasn’t Conan but Lord Kalidor, Red Sonja’s ally. A big part of the plot has to do with his lust for Sonja and her virginity. “No man may have me unless he’s beaten me in a fair fight,” she declares.
Maria read the script and said, “Don’t do it. It’s trash.” I agreed, but I felt I owed Dino a favor. So at the end of October, just before The Terminator was due for release, I found myself on an airplane to Rome, where Red Sonja was already filming.
Dino had searched for more than year to find an actress Amazonian enough to play Sonja. He finally found Brigitte Nielsen on the cover of a magazine: a six-foot twenty-one-year-old Danish fashion model with blazing red hair and a reputation for being a hard partyer. She had never acted, but Dino just flew her to Rome, gave her a screen test, and cast her as the star. Then to make the movie happen, he brought in veterans from the Conan team: Raffaella as producer, Richard Fleischer as director, and Sandahl Bergman as the treacherous Queen Gedren of Berkubane.
My so-called cameo turned out to involve four whole weeks on the set. They shot all the Lord Kalidor scenes with three cameras, and then used the extra footage in the editing room to stretch Kalidor’s time onscreen. So instead of making a minor appearance, I ended up as one of the film’s dominant characters. The Red Sonja poster gave twice as much space to my image as to Brigitte’s. I felt tricked. This was Dino’s way of using my image to sell his movie, and I refused to do any promotion the following July when Red Sonja appeared.
Red Sonja was so bad that it was nominated for three Golden Raspberry awards, a kind of Oscar in reverse for bad movies: Worst Actress, Worst Supporting Actress, and Worst New Star. Brigitte ended up “winning” as Worst New Star. Terrible movies can sometimes be hits at the box office, but Red Sonja was too awful even to be campy, and it bombed. I tried to keep my distance and joked that I was relieved to have survived.
The biggest complication of Red Sonja for me was Red Sonja. I got involved with Brigitte Nielsen, and we had a hot affair on the set. Gitte, as everyone called her, had a personality filled with laughter and fun mixed with a great hunger for attention. After the shoot, we traveled in Europe for a couple of weeks before parting ways. I went home assuming our fling was over.
In January, however, Gitte came to LA to do the looping of the movie—the rerecording of dialogue to make it clearer on the soundtrack—and announced that she wanted a continuing relationship. We had to have a serious talk.
“Gitte, this was on the set,” I told her. “It was fun over there, but it wasn’t serious. I’m already involved with the woman I want to marry. I hope you understand.
“If you’re looking for a serious relationship with a Hollywood star,” I added, “there are guys around who are available, and they will flip over you. Especially with your personality.” She wasn’t thrilled, but she accepted it. Sure enough, later that year, she met Sylvester Stallone and it was love at first sight. I was happy for her that she’d found a good partner.
—
The Terminator had become a sensation in my absence. Released just a week before Halloween 1984, it was the number one movie in America for six weeks, on its way to grossing close to $100 million. I didn’t quite realize how successful it was until I got back to the United States and some people stopped me walking down the street in New York.
“Oh man, we just saw The Terminator. Say it! Say it! You’ve got to say it!”
“What?”
“You know, ‘I’ll be back!’ ” None of us involved in making the movie had any idea that this was going to be the line people remembered. When you make a movie, you can never really predict what will turn out to be the most repeated line.
Despite The Terminator’s success, Orion did a terrible job of marketing it. Jim Cameron was bitter. The company was focused instead on promoting its big hit Amadeus, the story of the eighteenth-century composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, which went on to win eight Oscars that year. So without giving The Terminator much thought, the marketers positioned it as an ordinary B movie even though there were signs from the start that it was much more. Critics wrote about it as a major breakthrough, as if to say, “Wow, where did that come from?” People were amazed at what they saw and how it was shot. And it wasn’t just guys who liked it. The Terminator was surprisingly appealing to women, partly because of the powerful love story between Sarah Connor and Kyle Reese.
But Orion’s advertising campaign was pitched to action fanatics, and featured me shooting and blowing everything up. The TV commercial and the movie-house trailer would make most people say, “Ugh, crazy, violent science fiction. That’s not for me. My fourteen-year-old might like it. Oh, but maybe he shouldn’t go. It’s rated R.” What Orion telegraphed to the industry was “This is a bread-and-butter movie to help pay the bills. Our classy movie is about Mozart.”
Cameron went nuts. He begged the studio to expand the promotion and raise the tone before the movie came out. The ads should have been broader, with more focus on the story and on Sarah Connor, so the message would be: “Even though you may think it’s crazy science fiction, you’ll be quite surprised. This is one of our classy movies.”
They treated him like a child. One of the executives told Jim beforehand that “down-and-dirty action thrillers” like this usually had a two-week life. By the second weekend, attendance drops by half, and by the third week, it’s over. It didn’t matter that The Terminator opened at number one and stayed there. Orion was not going to increase the promotional budget. If its executives had listened to Jim, our box office could have been twice as big.
Nevertheless, from an investment point of view, The Terminator was a big success, because it made $40 million domestic and $50 million abroad, and cost only $6.5 million. But our profits weren’t in E.T.’s league. For me, in a weird way, it was lucky that the movie wasn’t bigger. Because if it had earned, say, $100 million right off the top in US theaters alone, I would have had a tough time getting cast as anything but a villain. Instead, it fell into the category of “that was a great surprise.” It made Time magazine’s list of the year’s ten best movies. For me personally, the fact that both Conan and The Terminator each took in $40 million at home demonstrated that the American public accepted me as both a hero and a villain. Sure enough, before the year was out, Joel Silver, the producer of the Nick Nolte–Eddie Murphy hit 48 Hrs., came to my office and pitched me on playing Colonel John Matrix, the larger-than-life hero in an action thriller called Commando. The pay was $1.5 million.
The fling with Brigitte Nielsen underlined what I already knew: I wanted Maria to be my wife. In December she acknowledged that she was thinking more and more about marriage. Her career was taking off—she was now an on-air correspondent for CBS News—but she would be turning thirty soon and wanted to start a family.
Since Maria had been quiet about our marrying for so long, I didn’t need for her to signal twice. “This is it,” I told myself, “the end of dating, the end of telling people ‘I believe in long escrows,’ and all this bull. Let’s take this seriously and move forward.” Literally the next day, I asked friends in the diamond business to help design a ring. And when I wrote down my list of goals for 1985, at the very top I put, “This is the year I will propose to Maria.”
I liked having the diamond in the middle, bookended by smaller diamonds on the left and right sides. I asked my friends in the jewelry business to come up with ideas along those lines and sketched for them what I envisioned. I wanted the main diamond to be a minimum of five carats and the others to be maybe a carat or two each. We worked on that idea, and then within a few weeks, we had designs. And in another few weeks, I had the ring.
From that day on, I kept it wrapped up and ready in my pocket. Everywhere we went, I was just looking for the right moment to propose. I almost asked Maria at various points in Europe and Hyannis Port that spring, but it didn’t feel quite right. I was actually planning to propose when I took her to Hawaii in April. But the minute we got there, we met three other couples who all said, “We’re here to get engaged,” or “We’re here to get married.”
I thought, “Arnold, don’t propose here, because every schmuck’s coming over here to do the same thing.”
I had to be more creative. I knew my wife would be telling the story to my kids someday, and my kids would be telling their kids, so I had to come up with something unique. There were many options. It could have been on an African safari or on the Eiffel Tower, except that going to Paris would be a dead giveaway. The challenge was to make it truly a surprise.
“Maybe I should take her to Ireland,” I thought, “where she actually traces her ancestry—maybe some castle in Ireland.”
In the end I just proposed spontaneously. We were in Austria in July visiting my mom, and I took Maria out rowing on the Thalersee. This lake was where I’d grown up, where I’d played as a kid, where I’d learned to swim and won trophies for swimming, where I’d started bodybuilding, where I’d had my first date. The lake meant all of those things to me. Maria wanted to see it, since she’d heard me talk about it. It felt right to propose to her there. She started crying and hugging and was totally surprised. So it was exactly the way I envisioned it; the way it ought to play out.
After we got back to shore, of course, all kinds of questions came into her mind: “When do you think we should get married?” “When should we have an engagement party?” “When should we make the announcement?”
And she asked, “Have you talked to my dad?”
“No,” I said.
“It’s a tradition in America that you have to talk to the father and ask him.”
“Maria,” I said “do you think I’m stupid? Ask your father and he will tell your mother and your mother will blabber it to you immediately. What do you think, their loyalty is to me? You are their daughter. Or she will tell Ethel, and she will tell Bobby, and she will tell everybody in the family before you even find out. I had to have my chance to actually propose. So of course I didn’t talk to them, nobody.”
I did call her father that evening. “Normally I know I’m supposed to ask you first,” I said, “but I was not about to ask you anything because I know that you would tell Eunice and Eunice would tell Maria.”
“You’re goddam right. That’s exactly what she would have done,” said Sarge.
“So I’m just asking you now.”
He said, “Arnold, it is a great pleasure to have you as a son-in-law.” He was very, very gracious, Sargent, always.
Then I talked to Eunice and told her, and she acted very excited. But I’m sure that Maria had called her before I ever did.
We spent a lot of time with my mom. We hung out, we took her to Salzburg, and traveled around and had a great time. Then we went home to Hyannis Port. We had a little party to celebrate, with everyone sitting around the dinner table: the Shriver family, Eunice and her sister Pat, Teddy and his then wife, Joan, and many Kennedy cousins as well. They always had those long extended tables and a lot of people for dinne
r.
I had to tell in minute detail exactly how it came about. That was fun. They were hanging on every word and there were all these sounds: “Oh! Ahh! Fantastic!” And bursts of applause.
“You went on a rowboat! Jesus, where’d you find a damn rowboat?”
Teddy was boisterous and very loud and having a good time. “That’s amazing! Did you hear that, Pat? What would you have done if Peter had asked you to marry him in a rowboat? I know Eunice would have preferred the sailboat. She’d say, ‘A rowboat? That’s no good! I want action!’ ”
“Teddy, let Arnold finish the story.”
Everyone was asking questions.
“Tell me, Arnold, what did Maria do then?”
“What was the expression on her face?”
“What would you have done if she’d said no?”
Before I could answer, someone else said, “What do you mean, said no? Maria couldn’t wait for him to propose!”
It was this very Irish way of relishing the smallest details and turning everything into great fun.
Eventually Maria got a chance to speak. “It was so romantic,” she said. And she held up the ring for everyone to see.
When people come to me with a movie concept or a script, I always ask, “What is the poster? What is the image? What are we trying to sell here?”
I starred in Hercules in New York in 1969, but the producer went broke before the movie could be released. Michael Ochs Archives / Getty Images
Seven years later I got a supporting part in director Bob Rafelson’s Stay Hungry, for which I won a Golden Globe (that’s Raquel Welch I’m hoisting in celebration). Frank Edwards / Getty Images
Jeff Bridges, who starred, was generous with acting tips. Courtesy of MGM Media Licensing
Total Recall: My Unbelievably True Life Story Page 34