—
Scripts for Total Recall had been kicking around Hollywood for so long that people were saying the project was jinxed. Dino De Laurentiis owned the rights for much of the 1980s and tried to produce the movie twice—once in Rome and again in Australia. It was a different kind of movie from what it ultimately became: less violent and more about the fantasy of taking a virtual trip to Mars.
I was pissed that Dino didn’t offer it to me, because I told him that I would like the part. But he had a different vision. He hired Richard Dreyfuss for the Rome attempt and Patrick Swayze from Dirty Dancing for the Australian attempt. Meanwhile, he gave me Raw Deal. They finally got as far as building sound stages in Australia and were about to start shooting Total Recall when Dino ran into money trouble. This had happened several times during his career. It meant he had to get rid of some of the projects.
I called Mario Kassar and Andy Vajna at Carolco, which was then the fastest-growing independent film production company, riding high from doing the Rambo movies. They’d bankrolled Red Heat, and I thought they’d be perfect for Total Recall. I said, “Dino is wiping out. He has a lot of great projects, and there’s one specifically that I want to do.” They moved fast, launched an all-out assault, and bought it from him within days. I was the driving force through all these years.
So now the question was who should direct. It was still unresolved a few months later when I ran into Paul Verhoeven in a restaurant. We’d never met, but I recognized him: a skinny, intense-looking Dutch guy about ten years older than me. He had a good reputation in Europe, and I’d been impressed by his first two English-language movies, 1985’s Flesh+Blood and, two years later, RoboCop. I went over and said, “I would love to work with you someday. I saw your RoboCop. It’s fantastic. I remember Flesh+Blood, and it was also fantastic.”
“I’d love to work with you too,” he said. “Maybe we can find a project.”
I called him the next day. “I have the project,” I said and described Total Recall. Next I called Carolco and said, “Send Paul Verhoeven the script immediately.”
A day later Verhoeven told me that he loved the script, even though there were a few changes he wanted to make. That was normal: every director wants to pee on the script and make his mark. His suggestions were smart and made the story much better. He immediately dug into the research on Mars: How would you free the oxygen that’s bottled up in the rocks there? There had to be a scientific basis for it. Paul added a dimension of realism and scientific fact. Control of Mars in the story now hinged on controlling the oxygen. So many things he said were brilliant. He had a vision. He had enthusiasm. We got together with Carolco and discussed what he wanted to change, and Paul signed on to direct the movie.
That was in the fall of 1988. We went into full swing in rewriting, and then into full swing on where to shoot it, and then into full swing on preproduction, and we started filming in late March at the Churubusco Studios in Mexico City. We shot all the way through the summer.
We chose Mexico City in part for the architecture: some of its buildings had just the futuristic look the movie needed. Computer-graphics imagery was not yet very capable, so you had to do a lot of work in the real world, either by finding the perfect location or by building full-scale sets or miniatures. The Total Recall production was so complex that it made Conan the Barbarian seem small-scale. The crew, which numbered more than five hundred people, built forty-five sets that tied up eight sound stages for six months. Even with the savings that came from working in Mexico, the movie cost more than $50 million, making it the second most expensive production in history at that point, after Rambo III. I was glad that Rambo III had been a Carolco production, so Mario and Andy weren’t allergic to the risk.
What drew me to the story was the idea of virtual travel. I play this construction worker named Doug Quaid who sees an advertisement from a company called Rekall and goes there to book a virtual vacation to Mars. “For the memory of a lifetime,” the ad says, “Rekall, Rekall, Rekall.”
“Have a seat, make yourself comfortable,” the salesman says. Quaid is trying to save money, but right away the salesman, who’s a little slippery, tries to get him to upgrade from the basic trip. He asks, “What is it that is exactly the same about every vacation you’ve ever taken?”
Quaid can’t think of anything.
“You! You’re the same,” says the salesman. “No matter where you go, there you are. Always the same old you.” Then he offers alternate identities as an add-on for the trip. “Why go to Mars as a tourist when you can go as a playboy, or a famous jock, or a . . .”
Now Quaid is curious in spite of himself. He asks about going as a secret agent.
“Aaaah,” says the salesman, “let me tantalize you. You’re a top operative, back under deep cover on your most important mission. People are trying to kill you left and right. You meet a beautiful, exotic woman . . . I don’t wanna spoil it for you, Doug. Just rest assured, by the time the trip is over, you get the girl, you kill the bad guys, and you save the entire planet.”
I loved that scene of a guy selling me a trip that, in reality, I never would actually take—it was all virtual. And, of course, when the Rekall surgeons go to implant the chip containing the Mars memories into Quaid’s brain, they find another chip already there, and all hell breaks loose. Because he isn’t Doug Quaid: he’s a government agent who was once assigned to the rebellious mining colonies on Mars and whose identity has been wiped and replaced with Quaid’s.
The story twists and turns. You never know until the very end: did I take this trip? Was I really the hero? Or was it all inside my head, and I’m just a blue-collar jackhammer operator who may be schizophrenic? Even at the end, you aren’t necessarily sure. For me, it connected with the sense I had sometimes that my life was too good to be true. Verhoeven knew how to balance the mind games with action. There’s a scene in Total Recall where Quaid, now on Mars, stands in front of his enemies as they start shooting at him from close range. Thousands of bullets are flying, and you’re grabbed by the suspense. Suddenly he vanishes, and you hear him calling out from nearby, “Ha ha ha, I’m over here!” They were shooting at a hologram he’d projected of himself. In science fiction you can get away with such stuff, and no one even questions it. That’s great, great storytelling; the kind that has international appeal and staying power. It wouldn’t matter if you watched Total Recall twenty years from now, you could still enjoy it, just as you can still enjoy Westworld today. There’s just something very appealing about futuristic movies if they have great action and believable characters.
It was a tough movie to make, with lots of stunts and injuries and craziness and night shooting and day shooting and dust. But when the set is the tunnels of Mars, it’s interesting work. Verhoeven did a great job directing me and the other leads, Rachel Ticotin, Ronny Cox, Michael Ironside, and Sharon Stone. Sharon, who plays Quaid’s wife, Lori, is actually a government agent sent to keep an eye on him. She follows him to Mars, breaks into his room, and kicks him in the stomach.
“That’s for making me come to Mars,” she says. By the end of the next scene, she’s saying, “Doug . . . you wouldn’t hurt me, would you, honey? Sweetheart, be reasonable . . . We’re married,” while she’s pulling out a gun to kill him. He shoots her between the eyes. “Consider that a divorce,” he says. Where else in movies do you get away with that: a guy shoots his beautiful wife in the head and then makes a wisecrack? No such thing. Forget about it. That’s what makes science fiction wonderful. And what makes acting wonderful.
Working with Sharon will always be a challenge. She is a sweetheart of a person when not on the set, but there are some actors who just need more attention. One violent scene was hard to film because I was supposed to grab her by the neck, and she freaked. “Don’t touch me! Don’t touch me!” At first I figured that she hadn’t been brought up like a tomboy and tried to sympathize, but it was more than that. We found out that she’d had a serious neck trauma early in her
life. I think she even had a scar.
“Sharon,” I said, “we all rehearsed this in the hotel room on Sunset. Paul was there, we all were there, going through scene by scene. Why did you never say, ‘By the way, when we get into the fight scene, it says here that you’re strangling me, I have a little hang-up about my neck’? Then we could have worked around it step-by-step. I would gently put my hand on your neck, and then you let me know when I can squeeze tighter and when we can get a little rough. Because I’m the first one to understand.” Paul calmed her down, and Sharon was willing to work through the scene. She wanted it to be a success; we just had to go through the difficult step first. That’s the way it was.
When you’re an actor and when you’re a director, you deal with all of those problems. No one gets up in the morning and says, “I’m going to be difficult today,” or “I’m going to derail the movie,” or “I’m going to be a bitch.” People just have their hang-ups and insecurities, and acting definitely brings them out. Because it’s you who is being judged, it’s your facial expressions, your voice, your personality, your talent—it’s everything about you so it makes you vulnerable. It’s not some product you’ve made or job you’ve done. If someone tells the makeup guy, “Can you tone this down a little bit? I have too much powder there,” he says, “Oh, sorry,” and just wipes it off. But if someone says, “Can you get rid of that self-conscious smile while you’re doing the scene? You have something weird going on in your face,” you feel like “Jesus!” Now you don’t know what to do with your face. Now you’re self-conscious. In acting you take criticism so much more personally. You get upset. But every job has its downside.
—
In spite of Verhoeven’s amazing work, Total Recall almost got lost on the way to the screen. The trailer we had playing in movie theaters in anticipation of the movie’s release was really bad. It was too narrow; it didn’t convey the film’s scope and weirdness. As always, I was looking at the marketing data from the studio: the “tracking studies” as they’re called, which measure a movie’s buzz.
Marketing departments generate hundreds of statistics, and the trick is to find, right away, the numbers that are really important. The ones I lock in on are “awareness” and “want to see,” which measure how people answer the questions “On this list of movies that are coming out, which have you heard about and which do you want to see?” If people respond, “I know about Total Recall and Die Hard 2, and I’m dying to see them,” then you know your movie will be up there. An awareness figure in the low to mid-90s means that your movie will probably open at number one and make at least $100 million at the box office. For every percentage point below that, you might gross $10 million less, which is why studios and directors often tweak their movies at the last minute.
Another useful measure, “unaided awareness,” shows whether people spontaneously name your movie among the films they know are coming up. A score of 40 percent or more means you have a winner. Two other numbers also matter a lot: “first choice,” which has to hit 25 percent to 30 percent to guarantee success; and “definite interest,” which has to be between 40 percent and 50 percent.
With some hits, like Conan the Barbarian, the numbers are promising right from the start. With other films, they signal that it could go south. That was the case with Total Recall. Even after weeks of trailers and advertisements, its awareness was in the 40s, not the 90s, first choice was only 10 percent, and it wasn’t being named as a “want to see.”
I knew pretty much all there was to know about the marketing of movies by then, but it wasn’t doing me much good. The source of the problem wasn’t Total Recall itself but TriStar Pictures, the distributor, which was responsible for cutting the trailers and handling the publicity. Its marketers didn’t know what to do with the film, and the studio itself was in upheaval. TriStar and its sister studio, Columbia Pictures, were being taken over by Sony and merged in one of those 1980s megadeals. New leadership had arrived—Peter Guber and Jon Peters—to oversee the whole thing, which meant that many TriStar executives were about to lose their jobs.
In most cases, a change in studio management can sink a movie. Not only do the new guys have their own projects, but also they want to make the previous administration look bad. That wasn’t a problem with Guber and Peters, both of them highly successful producers, because they were animals. They just wanted success, no matter who started the project. Over the years, I’d gotten to know Guber well enough to be able to get him on the phone and raise the alarm about Total Recall.
“Peter, we are three weeks away from opening, and there’s only a forty percent awareness of the movie,” I said. “That, to me, is disastrous.”
“What’s the problem?” he asked.
“The problem is that your studio is screwing up the publicity campaign and the trailers that are in the movie houses. But don’t take my word for it. I want you and Jon to have a screening of the movie and the trailer. I’m going to sit there with you. Let’s look, and you tell me what you think.”
So we sat down and watched Total Recall and the trailer. “This is incredible,” Peter said. “The movie looks like a hundred-million-dollar movie, but the trailer makes it look like a twenty-million-dollar movie.” He was all set to call in the TriStar marketers and say, “I want to see size, guys! I want to see the big action that we have here!”
But I stopped him. “I think we’ve got to hire outside help,” I said. “Don’t let the studio make those decisions anymore, because they’re not capable until you clean house. You haven’t done that. The old guard is still there. Give the movie to an outside company to do the marketing. Let’s go to the top three and have a bidding war to see which firm comes up with the best idea.”
They listened, and we held meetings with three promotion firms. Cimarron/Bacon/O’Brien, which was number one in the business, articulated the failings of the Total Recall trailer even better than I had. It won the contract, and by the following weekend, we were out there in the marketplace with new trailers and a totally different campaign. It sold the movie using taglines like, “They stole his mind. Now he wants it back. Get ready for the ride of your life,” and “How would you know if someone stole your mind?” The trailers highlighted the amazing action and special effects. They got the message across: in fourteen days, we went from a 40 percent awareness to 92 percent awareness. It was the talk of the town. Joel Silver called, in spite of our falling-out over Predator, and said, “Fantastic. Fantastic. It’s going to blow everyone away.”
Sure enough, Total Recall had not only the number one spot at the box office in its opening weekend, it was the number one opening weekend of all time for a nonsequel movie. We pulled in $28 million in the first three days, on the way to $120 million that year in the States alone. The equivalent today would be more than $200 million, because the ticket prices have doubled. The film was a huge success abroad as well, earning over $300 million worldwide. It won a Special Achievement Oscar for its visual effects. (A Special Achievement Oscar is how the Motion Picture Academy honors an accomplishment for which there is no set category.) Paul Verhoeven had a masterful vision and did a great job. I was proud that my interest and passion helped to bring about the movie. But the experience also proves how important marketing is—how important it is to tell the people what this is about; really blow up their skirt and make them say, “I have to go see this movie.”
CHAPTER 18
Comic Timing
I LOVED BEING AN action hero, and with my body and background, it was a natural for me. But you can’t spend your whole life running around blowing things up. I’d dreamed of doing comedy for years.
I’ve always believed that everything in life has a funny side. It was funny to be posing all oiled up in little skinny briefs in front of all these people, trying to be the world’s most muscular man. It was funny getting paid millions of dollars to fight a predator from outer space. It was funny going through Lamaze classes trying to pretend that pregnancy is a team effo
rt. I saw great humor in Maria and me coming from totally opposite upbringings. I laughed about my accent, and I loved Saturday Night Live’s Hans and Franz characters takeoff on me. I’d always been the perfect target for jokes; there was so much material to work with. Being Austrian, marrying Maria, being Republican, the accent. With all this going for you, you need a sense of humor so you can join the fun.
In 1985, the year after The Terminator became a hit, I was at a dinner in Denver on the eve of the Carousel Ball, a famous charity extravaganza organized by Marvin and Barbara Davis. Marvin, who was then the owner of Fox Studios, where I was making Commando, was known for his sense of humor. He and Barbara were seated with a bunch of comedians who were due to perform at the gala, including Lucille Ball and her husband, Gary Morton. I was at the next table with the Davises’ son, John, and the younger crowd. There was a lot of laughing at Marvin’s and Barbara’s table, and the jokes were starting to fly thick and fast. I heard Marvin call out, “Hey, Arnold, come over here. Why don’t you tell us a joke?” That was typical Marvin, I later learned. But I was speechless. I didn’t have a joke prepared. I didn’t even know what kind of jokes to make at such an event.
All I could say was, “Give me a little bit of warm-up time here. Maybe tomorrow I tell you,” or something like that.
But Lucille Ball jumped right in. “He’s very funny. You don’t have to worry about him,” she said. “I worked with him.” So she covered for me, and then Gary Morton interrupted with a joke, and then Milton Berle went off on a routine about what would Gary Morton be without Lucille Ball. I was saved, but it was a perfect example of how important it is to be prepared for such moments.
I’d met Milton Berle at the West Coast engagement party for Maria and me in 1985. Berle’s wife, Ruth, and Maria knew each other from the Share Girls, a charity group that Maria joined when she moved to LA; it included Johnny Carson’s wife, Dean Martin’s wife, Sammy Davis Jr.’s wife, and so on, and we called it the rich broads’ foundation. There was a great history between the Berles and the Kennedys because Milton had been a big fan of JFK. They’d hung out together, and Milton had given JFK a humidor that eventually sold at the Kennedy auction for $520,000 to Marvin Shanken, the publisher-editor of Cigar Aficionado magazine. Milton gave me one just like it, one of only three he ever gave away.
Total Recall: My Unbelievably True Life Story Page 38