But I had an even bigger project in the works: Terminator 2: Judgment Day.
Seven years had passed since The Terminator lifted both our careers, and Jim Cameron and I had always felt committed to a sequel. He’d directed a couple of huge pictures since then—Aliens and The Abyss—and, finally, in 1990 he got the rights and preliminary financing in place for Terminator 2. Still, I was a little thrown when Jim sat me down at a restaurant and told me his concept for my character in the film.
“How can the Terminator not kill anyone?” I asked. “He’s a terminator! That’s what people want to see, me kicking in doors and machine-gunning everybody.” I was suspicious that the studio was pulling back and trying to make the Terminator into something rated PG. That had destroyed Conan and I didn’t want to see it happen to the Terminator.
“No, no,” said Jim. “You’re still really dangerous and violent. But this time the Terminator comes back when John Connor is a kid, and he’s programmed to protect him. He’s not the villain anymore. The villain is a new, smaller, even scarier terminator—the T-1000—that is programmed to kill Connor. Your terminator has to stop it.” The killing was still there, but it was done by the T-1000. As soon as I understood that the movie was going to stay R-rated, I relaxed.
As T2 began taking shape, my other businesses were booming. I’d used some of the money I’d earned in films as capital to expand in real estate. Now I owned three good-sized apartment buildings in LA with a total of more than two hundred units, plus the Denver property, which Al Ehringer and I were developing into offices, restaurants, and shops. Our gamble on the run-down side of Santa Monica had paid off too: 3110 Main was now a thriving complex of offices and shops, and the neighborhood had become hip. Our first set of tenants—boring corporate tenants like a bank, an insurance agency, and a real estate office—had given way to producers, directors, and entertainers. Johnny Carson had his office on the second floor, and I split the third floor with Oliver Stone. “Why don’t I take the space to the left of the elevators,” he suggested, “and you take the space to the right? That fits with our politics.” I laughed and agreed, which is why my office is where it is today. A little later, LA Lakers basketball star Shaquille O’Neal moved into the building, and then other producers and sports managers followed.
I was also launching a huge public service project. Very soon after Katherine’s birth, I got the call from the White House that I’d been hoping for. “The president would like you to chair the President’s Council on Physical Fitness and Sports,” the representative told me formally, adding, “He says he wants you to do just what you proposed during the campaign: to put fitness for everybody back on the national agenda.” Being named “the president’s fitness czar,” as the media called it, was the most satisfying development in my work life. I saw this as part of the crusade I’d started decades ago, promoting bodybuilding as a means to fitness and health. Also, by working with the Special Olympics, I was selling the idea of sports and fitness for everyone, not just athletes. This was why I’d been so emphatic with President Bush about wanting the job. So much could be done with it. The White House always made the mistake of appointing big sports names, but not people who had a record of getting the job done or had the ability to follow through. You needed an athlete or idol, yes, but someone who would do the work, not just sit on the throne. I had a clear vision of what had to be done. And by this time, I was addicted to public service, especially doing things for kids. It had nothing to do with fame anymore.
This news was almost as gratifying to my mother-in-law as it was to me. Eunice had written personally to President Bush to recommend me—she felt passionately about fitness not only because of her leadership of the Special Olympics but also because the strongest presidential champion for fitness since Teddy Roosevelt had been her brother Jack. When I called to thank her, she asked immediately, “How are they planning to announce it?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “What would you suggest?”
“First of all, I’d have you meet with the president in the Oval Office. Have them take a picture of that meeting and release it to the public. After the meeting, I’d have you and the president come out of the White House together and talk to the press. You should be ready to make a statement about what you bring to the table and what your mission as chairman is going to be. You always have to have a mission and a reason why you’re the right choice.”
Eunice had the Kennedy political genius. She knew that a job appointment at this level was not normally considered big enough to justify a press conference. The president has all kinds of councils: the Council of Economic Advisers, the health council, the drug council, the job creation council, and on and on. Ordinarily, for an appointment like mine, the White House press office would simply put out a statement along the lines of: “Today President Bush announced that he has chosen Arnold Schwarzenegger to be the chairman of the President’s Council on Fitness.” After that, it would be an uphill battle to get anybody’s attention. But if the press sees you coming out of the Oval Office with the president, you’ll win respect.
The president, it turned out, was totally on board—he had his guys orchestrate the announcement to make me look like a big shot. It was very close to what Eunice had envisioned. I went outside the White House to where the journalists were. I talked about my appointment, my meeting in the Oval Office, my enthusiasm, my vision, my mission statement.
The challenge of being fitness czar really excited me, and by the time I met with the president again, up at Camp David in Maryland a few weeks later, I’d done my homework. I wanted to bring back and expand all the sports and fitness events that JFK had held. I’d asked Sarge and Eunice what they thought I could do with this appointment. They’d been around when Jack was in charge; what was his vision? Why did he hold fitness events in front of the White House on the South Lawn? I wrote down everything. I met with the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Agriculture, and White House officials. That’s how I started building an agenda. I also sought out experts like John Cates of the University of California, San Diego, implementer of the country’s first Youth Fitness Camps. So I was ready with a detailed proposal.
“The council has been thinking small,” I told President Bush. “We need to change that.” I described how we would bang the drum in DC and get the departments in charge of health, education, and nutrition to coordinate on a national fitness campaign. We’d also make fitness much more visible at the White House. “Let’s do a public fitness demo on the White House lawn this spring,” I suggested.
I sketched how this would work: we’d set up stations for golf, tennis, aerobics, weight training, baseball, rope climbing, and other activities that the average person could undertake. We’d invite trainers, athletes, parents, grandparents, and kids, and the national media, especially the morning shows. “We’ll get everyone involved,” I said. “Then you and Barbara can come out of the White House and take the lead and try things. It’ll be a celebration, like Fourth of July, and it will show that fitness is fun.”
The president became very enthusiastic. “When we get back to Washington on Monday,” he said, “I want you to meet with the White House staff and get this under way.” I also proposed restoring the presidential awards program, the fitness certificates and medals that JFK had handed out. “People were very proud of those certificates and medals,” I said. “They lead to challenges in schools, and that’s how you get the kids involved in the movement.” He liked that idea too.
My own mission, I explained, should be to get out and promote. Digging into the realities of fitness in United States, I’d realized that I would have to address it both state by state and locally. Some states had a governor’s council on fitness, some didn’t. Some had statewide programs, others left it up to local governments and the schools. Only one state actually required daily physical education in schools from kindergarten through twelfth grade. I felt very strongly that I had to carry to all fifty states th
e message that fitness was a national priority.
“You’re going to all fifty states?” he asked.
“You’ll see,” I told him. “I love being on the road and meeting people and selling. That’s what I do best.”
At the first meeting at the White House to plan the Great American Workout, about fifteen government officials were present. And they all said no. The guy from the parks department said no because so many people would ruin the lawn. The guy responsible for public safety said, “The weather in Washington can get very hot in May. People will be fainting, and they’ll need water and food, and we don’t have a budget for that.” The guy from the Secret Service said, “We can’t cover that many people if the president is moving from station to station. Too much risk.”
Afterward, I told Jim Pinkerton, the White House policy advisor I’d been working with, that it was the worst meeting I’d ever had. “Let me explain this to the president, and you should talk to him too,” he said. I saw President Bush a couple of days later and described the official reaction I’d gotten.
“Oh, that’s typical government.” He laughed. “It always starts out like that. But don’t be discouraged. Let me talk to them.”
At the next planning meeting, they all sat down and said, “It’s a great idea. We found a way around the problems. It’s very complicated, but the president wants to do this.”
So on Tuesday, May 1, 1990, at precisely 7:19 a.m., President and Mrs. Bush emerged from the White House to join what he declared was the first annual Great American Workout. Two thousand visitors were already on the South Lawn doing the activities we’d set up across four or five acres: aerobic dancing, exercise machines, horseshoe pitching, hoop shooting, soccer, and ball playing. The cameras followed as the president and Barbara went from activity to activity. We’d put together a spectacle that would have impressed even JFK. It put across both the importance and the joy of physical activity.
We’d done a walk-through the day before. I didn’t think about it at the time, but watching the preparations, I learned things that I would put to use later in my own campaigns. I saw firsthand how to plan and stage the event for the media: figuring out where you want them to be part of it, where you don’t want them to be part of it, and when and how they would be invited. The Great American Workout was officially open from seven to nine o’clock in the morning. The reason the president joined at 7:19, I learned, was that 7:19 was the moment of peak viewership on the Today show and Good Morning America. Until then, I’d made dozens of appearances on morning TV and never paid any attention to what time I was scheduled to be on the air. But from then on, I would always insist on appearing sometime right around 7:30.
—
Not long after the Great American Workout, I took time out from being fitness czar to fly to Cannes. I went primarily to promote Total Recall, which was scheduled for release that June. But the ride over, on the Carolco jet, was all about Terminator 2. Jim Cameron had just finished the script with his coauthor and had promised to bring it along for everyone to see. He handed it out after we took off. By the time we landed, we’d read it and were jumping all over the airplane in excitement about how big and technologically sophisticated the story was. I never expected T2 to be just an ordinary sequel: Cameron is a big believer in surprising the audience, and I felt confident that Terminator 2 would be as amazing and unexpected as the original. But this script blew me away. I asked a lot of questions about the shape-shifting Terminator 1000 that my character would be fighting against—it was a challenge even to imagine a machine made of liquid metal alloy. That’s when I realized that Cameron’s knowledge of science and the world of the future went way beyond the ordinary. After we reached Cannes, the foreign distributors flipped over the script and couldn’t wait to sign up. No one batted an eye that Terminator 2 would cost $70 million to produce—more than ten times as much as the original. They knew it was going to be a huge success.
T2 was always meant to be much bigger than The Terminator. Not only did it have a giant budget, but also it took eight months to shoot rather than six weeks. We were in a race against the clock: the movie had to be ready for summer 1991 to meet its financial commitments. The preproduction was so complicated that filming couldn’t start until October 1990, and by the time production finished in May 1991, T2 had become the most expensive film project in history, at $94 million.
Cameron told a reporter, “Every time I start a film, I have a fantasy that it will be like a big family, and we’ll have a good time, and we’ll have all of these wonderful, creative moments together. But that’s not what filmmaking is; it’s a battle.” What made my character challenging is that this time the Terminator is adopting human behavior patterns as the plot unfolds. It was typical Cameron genius to have character development in a machine. The kid says to the Terminator, “No more killing; promise,” and orders me to talk less like a dork and more like a person. So the part has me transforming from being a killing machine to something that’s attempting to be human but not always getting there. I’m not very convincing the first time the kid gets me to say “Hasta la vista, baby.” Gradually the Terminator becomes humanized, but only to a certain extent. It’s still very dangerous and causes a lot of mayhem. Still, compared to the T-1000, I am definitely the good guy.
We were shooting the scenes out of sequence, so we were always having to figure out the right degree of humanity for the Terminator to show for that stage in the plot. For the first several weeks, I was constantly asking Jim, “Is he too human now, or not human enough?”
T2 opened whole new possibilities in visual effects. The T-1000 is made of liquid metal and can morph before your eyes to mimic any person or object it touches. The computer-graphics guys handled that challenge. But the movie also required grueling work from the actors and stunt doubles. Cameron would push his brother Mike, who was creating props and stunts, and Mike would push the envelope and us.
We started rehearsing the stunts months in advance. In the spectacular chase scene in the dry Los Angeles drainage canal, the Terminator is supposed to blast away one-handed with a sawed off ten-gauge lever-action shotgun while driving a Harley: pull out the gun, aim, fire, spin it to recock it, fire again, and so on. It all sounded great in the script, and it was doable—just a matter of reps, reps, reps. But the preparation was pure pain and discomfort. I couldn’t wear a glove because it would get stuck in the gun mechanism, and I tore the skin off my hand and fingers practicing a hundred times until I mastered the skill. Then I had to learn to do it while riding the Harley. Then I needed to put the riding and the gun skill together with the acting. It’s hard to watch where you’re driving and look where the director wants you to look at the same time. In one shot, I had to bring the front wheel of the moving bike almost to the lens of the camera on a truck in front of me. Simultaneously I was supposed to be shooting out, not looking down. And it would ruin the shot to have my eyes darting around.
I also had to ride the Harley toward a chained gate and shoot open the padlock before crashing through it. That took weeks of practice, first with gun alone, then on the bike, and then to do it all with cool. I did the takeoff of a spectacular jump with the bike into the canal bed. The other adult leads, Linda Hamilton as Sarah Connor and Robert Patrick as the T-1000, had it just as tough. Linda put herself through months of three-times-a-day physical conditioning to make herself convincing as a survivalist warrior. All of the stunts were so big that they took a lot more perspiration than in T1.
Every few weeks, when there was a break in the shooting, I’d morph from being the Terminator to being President Bush’s fitness czar. The job and my friendship with the president quickly became a very big part of my life. My compensation for the movie included a Gulfstream III jet, the perfect vehicle for visiting the states. My plan was to cover all fifty during President Bush’s first term in office. That gave me three years. I put the map of the United States in front of me and looked to see which states were close together. My idea was
to group them and, whenever I had a few days free from shooting or other business, hit four or six at a time—leaving room for improvisation, of course, because the governors wouldn’t always be available when I was. Many times if I had other business—a seminar, say, or a contest in Columbus, or a vacation in Hawaii—I’d organize the surrounding states.
When I visited the governors, I assured them that politics wouldn’t come into play. This was pure fitness and sports. For many governors, that was hard to understand. “The Terminator is coming from the Republican White House to expose me as not paying enough attention to children,” they would think, worrying that I would steamroll in and embarrass them. But we made it clear in advance that this was not our agenda. I wasn’t preaching a Republican philosophy but a fitness philosophy. Word got around, and suddenly the governors were at ease. We started to be welcomed. Everyone joined the fitness crusade.
It was a great, great learning experience to see firsthand the way state and local governments work. I’d never seen so many instant advocates for physical fitness. I figured out that we could do two states a day. Usually we’d start with breakfast with the governor, and I’d talk to him or her about improving fitness in the state. Every state was different, so I had to study up. Then we’d head to a school and join the kids in a fitness class. Next would come a press conference. In some states they were huge: a whole gymnasium packed with parents and kids would welcome us, with the school band playing. I’d always present the governor with a Tony Nowak jacket with the President’s Council logo, and help him put it on, and there would be a photo op of him surrounded by kids.
The final step was always a “fitness summit,” where we invited people from the Departments of Education and Health and Human Services, the governor’s staff, education officials, health club owners, the YMCA, the American Alliance for Health, Physical Education, Recreation and Dance, and so on. Usually it would be a crowded meeting room with fifty to one hundred people. We’d talk about the importance of fitness for kids and the health risks of not exercising. And they would make recommendations about how to work together. Then we’d get back on the plane, go to the next state, and do exactly the same thing in the afternoon.
Total Recall: My Unbelievably True Life Story Page 42