So I tried to figure out how to balance my time. I thought that doing one movie a year might be the perfect pace. People now accepted the fact that I was one of the biggest stars, so I didn’t have to prove anything. But they were expecting more movies, so I had to make sure I came back and gave them good ones. If I heard an idea or saw a script that was exceptionally good and triggered something in me, I wanted to be able to make that movie. But there were other opportunities out there as well, and movie acting was no longer enough.
I thought that maybe the way to keep myself interested was to do what Clint Eastwood does and spice up the movie career with directing and producing every so often—sometimes appearing in the movie and sometimes not. And so on. I loved the idea of new challenges, along with new dangers of failure. Clint was one of the very few Hollywood personalities who had his head screwed on straight. He was good in business. He never lost money. He was wise in the ways he invested. He was always getting involved in ventures he felt passionate about, like his restaurant business and his golf businesses in Northern California. From the time I came to America, he was always someone I’d idolized. I didn’t know if I had that kind of talent, but maybe I could try to be like Clint when acting was no longer enough for me and I was looking for the next challenge.
Then there was a completely different path I could see myself taking. Clint had been elected mayor of Carmel, California, his hometown. That too appealed to me, although I did not know at that point which office I might seek one day. Still, I couldn’t help but feel influenced by being around the Shrivers and the Kennedy family, even though we were on different sides of the fence politically.
In November 1991 a surprise push in the direction of running for office came from Richard Nixon. He invited me to stop by his office before a fund-raiser and the opening of a holiday exhibit at his presidential library, scheduled a few hours after the opening of the Reagan library. I knew how Nixon was hated by many people, and I was aware of the Watergate scandal and the hardship it put the country through. Taking that out of the equation, however, I admired him and thought he was a terrific president. I suspect he knew I was a fan, because I’d praised him in the media even at the height of his unpopularity. I especially loved talking about him then because of the side of me that likes to be rebellious and shock people.
He’d told me on the phone when he invited me to his event, “I want you to enjoy it, Arnold.” In fact, he was setting me up to make a speech without telling me. So I agreed unsuspectingly and brought along my nephew Patrick, the son of my late brother and his fiancée, Erika Knapp. Patrick, now in his midtwenties, had graduated from the University of Southern California Law School and had been hired as an associate by my entertainment lawyer, Jake Bloom. I loved hanging out with him and teaching him the ropes. We went down and greeted President Nixon at the holiday opening, which drew about thirteen hundred people.
Nixon was very good at paying attention to you. He would get into your head, and I was impressed. He said, “Arnold, I want you to come into my office.”
“Can my nephew come in with us?”
“Oh, absolutely.” We walked into his office, and he closed the door and pumped me for information about all kinds of things: what was I doing, how was it going with the movies, what made me a Republican, why was I involved in politics. After answering, I told him what was in my gut: “I came to America because it’s the greatest place in the world, and I’m going to do everything I can to keep it the greatest place. For that to happen, we can’t have schmucks running for president or hanging out at the White House. We need good leaders, and we need to move the agenda forward and have it be the same in the states and the same in the cities. So I always want to make sure that I vote for the right person and that I campaign for the right person. I need to know what they stand for, how they’ve voted in the past, how did they represent their state, were they great leaders, and all those kinds of things.” I told him about the challenges facing California in the areas of health and education, based on what I’d learned as the fitness chairman. And I talked about the challenge of making the state more business friendly.
Then someone came in and said, “Mr. President, they’re almost ready for you.” So we stood up. He turned to me just before we went and said, “You must run for governor of California. If you run for governor, I’ll help you all the way.” That caught me by surprise because we hadn’t been talking about that at all. He was the first ever to mention it to me in a serious way.
He sent Patrick to take a seat but told me, “Stay up here; stand over near the podium.” There were others standing there as well, including Bob Hope and other celebrities, and I joined the group.
He then got in front of the microphone and started talking. The speech was good, relaxed, and I was impressed because he had no notes. He spoke eloquently about the library and its mission, certain things that he had accomplished in his life, certain policies that must continue, and so on. “And, of course, I have a great following here. You people are responsible for making this all happen, and I am very grateful for your support,” he said. “But now I want to bring someone up who is the future of this state and . . .”
I didn’t hear what he said after this because my heart was racing.
“Maybe he just wants to mention me,” I thought. But I knew he was about to ask me to speak. The two sides of my mind immediately started a debate. One was saying, “What the fuck? Jeez, I’m not ready for this,” and the other side was saying, “Man, President Nixon is talking about you. Be happy!”
I heard the president say, “Arnold, come on up here.” And there was huge applause.
So I stepped out in front of all those people and stood there shaking his hand. Then he whispered to me, but so that you could still hear it clearly over the microphone, “I think you should say a few words.”
Luckily, when you feel good about someone and you know specifically why, it is not difficult at all to speak from the heart. I didn’t miss a beat. I even made a joke of it. “Well, I always like to be called up for a speech without any prior notice, but thank you very much.” That got a little bit of a laugh. I went on and spoke for a few minutes about how I became a Republican. I told the story of seeing Nixon on television for the first time during the 1968 presidential campaign “when he was talking about supporting law enforcement!” A few people applauded. I said, “He was supporting the military, the Pentagon, military expansion, and America can be powerful only if you have a strong military.” More applause.
“And he was talking about building an economy that is a global economy. He was talking about eliminating tariffs and barriers to trade, and ultimately it is our prosperity we have to protect, not labor!” Still more applause. “I loved hearing all those lines from him. And coming from a socialist country, I especially liked hearing someone say get government off our back.” Applause and cheers.
“Therefore, I became a big fan of this man. I was a big supporter of his, and I’m here today because I’m still a big supporter of his. We need more leaders like him!” Now everyone was applauding and cheering. It was heaven.
Afterward, President Nixon took me back to his office and said, “Remember what I told you about running for governor.”
I figured that the idea of eventually ending up in politics was not that far fetched when someone like Nixon suggested it. But my sense of it was never so intense that I felt “this is definitely going to happen.” It was never one of those “I’ll do it this year” items. I didn’t dwell on it, didn’t put a timeline on it. I was very relaxed.
CHAPTER 20
The Last Action Hero
NOBODY IN HOLLYWOOD WINS all the time. At some point, you’re bound to get a beating. The next summer, it was my turn, with Last Action Hero. We’d promised the world a blockbuster hit: “the big ticket of ’93” and the “biggest movie of the summer” was how we promoted the movie. Terminator 2: Judgment Day had been the biggest movie of 1991, and the expectation was that Last Action
Hero should top it.
Instead, Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park became the summer hit everybody had to see; it ended up outdoing even E.T. as the biggest success in movie history. Meanwhile, we delivered a film that didn’t have the snappiness it needed to be great entertainment, and we had the bad luck to have scheduled the movie’s release for the weekend after Jurassic Park’s opening. From the moment Last Action Hero hit the theaters, it got stomped. The front-page banner headline of Variety said, “Lizards Eat Arnold’s Lunch.”
But in fact, Last Action Hero made money and was a failure only in comparison to what had been anticipated. If I hadn’t been such a big star, no one would have noticed. It was too bad, because I loved the idea of the movie. It was a combination action movie and comedy, the two kinds of roles I did best. To appeal to the broadest audience, we were making it PG-13—a big summer fun ride, essentially; a spoof, without too much graphic violence, crude language, or sex. I starred as the action hero, Jack Slater, a maverick Los Angeles Police Department detective. I was also the movie’s executive producer, which meant that I had to approve every facet of the project: developing the script, picking the director and the cast, lining up the studio for financing, distribution, and marketing, setting the budget, getting a PR firm on board, planning the foreign release, and on and on. The added responsibility was a pleasure. In the past, I’d often taken an active hand in my movies, bringing together the deal or lining up the director, and, of course, planning the marketing. But sometimes when I said, “Let me see the poster” or “Let’s figure out a better photo to use,” I felt like I was butting in. Now I could be involved in everything, from dreaming up promotional stunts to approving the prototypes for Jack Slater toys.
The plot is built around a kid named Danny Madigan, an eleven-year-old who is the ultimate fan. He’s obsessed with action movies and knows everything there is to know about them. Danny gets a magic ticket that lets him cross into the latest film featuring the action hero Jack Slater, his all-time favorite.
For director, I was happy to land John McTiernan, who had made Predator, as well as Die Hard and The Hunt for Red October. John always has great clarity of vision, and on Last Action Hero that gave me my first hint of trouble. We were having a drink after shooting until three in the morning one night in New York, and John said, “What we’re really making here is E.T.” When I heard that, I had a sinking feeling that maybe the whole PG-13 thing was a mistake. Even though we had a kid costar in the movie, people might not buy me doing a family-friendly action film. That was okay for Harrison Ford in Raiders of the Lost Ark but not me. I’d made the comedies, of course, but those were different because no one expects you to blow people up in a comedy. When you’re selling a movie with the word action in the title, you’d better deliver some. Conan II had fizzled because we’d made it PG. Now we were betting we could pack in enough amazing stunts and energy to make Last Action Hero live up to its name.
The idea of a warmer, more cuddly action movie did seem right for the times. Arkansas governor Bill Clinton had just beaten George Bush in the 1992 presidential election, and the media were full of stories about baby boomers taking over from the WWII generation and about how America was now going in an antiviolence direction. Entertainment journalists were saying, “I wonder what this means for the conservative hard-core action heroes like Sylvester Stallone, Bruce Willis, and Arnold Schwarzenegger. Are the audiences now more into peace and love?” That’s the trend I wanted to connect with. So when the toy people showed up with their prototypes of a Jack Slater doll, I vetoed the combat weapons they proposed. I said, “This is the nineties, not the eighties.” Instead of wielding a flamethrower, the toy Jack Slater threw a punch and said, “Big mistake!”—which was Slater’s tagline against the bad guys. On the toy package it said, “Play it smart. Never play with real guns.”
We went all out on merchandising and promotion. Besides the action toys, we licensed seven kinds of video games, a $20 million promotion with Burger King, a $36 million “ride film” to go into amusement parks, and—this was my favorite—NASA picked us to be the first-ever paid advertisement in outer space. We painted “Last Action Hero” and “Arnold Schwarzenegger” on the sides of a rocket and then held a national sweepstakes whose winners would get to push the launch button. We put up a four-story-tall inflatable statue of Jack Slater on a raft just off the beach at Cannes during the film festival in May, and I set a personal record there by giving forty TV interviews and fifty-four print interviews in a single twenty-four-hour period.
Meanwhile, the production was running late. At our only test screening, on May 1, the movie was still so unfinished that it ran for two hours and twenty minutes, and you couldn’t make out most of the dialogue. By the end, the audience was bored. After that, the schedule was so tight that we ran out of time for more tests. Instead, we were forced to fly blind without the feedback you need to fine-tune a movie. Still, nobody at the studio wanted to postpone the opening, because that might create the perception that the movie was in trouble, and I agreed.
A lot of people liked Last Action Hero, as it turned out. But in the movie business, that’s not enough. You can’t have people just like your movie, you need them to be passionate. Word of mouth is what makes movies big, because while you can put in $25 million or $30 million to promote the movie on the first weekend, you can’t afford to keep doing that every week.
We had terrific awareness and anticipation going in. Yet maybe because of Jurassic Park, ticket sales were below expectations the first weekend: $15 million instead of the $20 million we’d predicted. And when I realized that people were coming out of the theaters warm but not hot, saying things like “It was actually pretty good,” I knew we were dead. Sure enough, the second weekend, our box office dropped by 42 percent.
The criticism went way beyond Last Action Hero. My career was over, history. Writers attacked everything I’d ever done in movies, as if to say, “What do you expect from a guy who works with John Milius and talks about crushing his enemies? That’s the world that they want to live in. We want to live in a compassionate world.”
Politics came into it. As long as I’d been on a roll, I’d never been attacked for being Republican, even though Hollywood and the entertainment press are generally liberal. Now that I was down, they could unload. Reagan and Bush were out, Republicans were out, and so were mindless action movies and all the macho shit. Now was the time for Bill Clinton and Tom Hanks and movies that had meaning.
I framed the criticism philosophically and tried to minimize the whole thing. I had all kinds of movie projects lined up—True Lies, Eraser, and Jingle All the Way—enough to feel confident that one movie going in the toilet would have no impact on my career or on the money I made or on anything real. I said to myself it didn’t matter, because at one point or another, you’re going to get the beating. It could have been for another movie. It could have been three years later. It could have been five years later.
No matter what you tell yourself or what you know, at the time you’re going through it, it is bad. It’s embarrassing to fail at the box office and have your movie not open well. It’s embarrassing to have terrible stories written about you. It’s embarrassing to have people start calling this your year to fail. As always, I had the two voices battling inside my head. The one was saying, “Goddammit, oh my God, this is terrible.” And the other was saying, “Now let’s see what you are made of, Arnold. Let’s see how ballsy you are. How strong are your nerves? How thick is your skin? Let’s see if you can drive around in your convertible with the top down and smile at people, knowing that they know that you just came out with a fucking stinker. Let’s see if you can do that.”
I had all this stuff going on in my mind, beating myself up and trying to encourage myself at the same time, wondering how to go through this. It was kind of a repeat of the night after I lost Mr. Universe against Frank Zane back in 1968.
Maria was a great support. “Look, the movie was good,” she s
aid. “Maybe it was not what we expected, but it was good, and you should be proud. Now let’s move on. Let’s go to the next project.” We went to our vacation house in Sun Valley, Idaho, and played with the kids. “Don’t take this so seriously,” she said. “Look what we have here. You should think about that, not about the stupid movie. Those things come and go. Plus, on top of it, out of your twenty or so movies, at least two-thirds were successful, so you have nothing to complain about.”
But I think she too was disappointed and probably embarrassed when friends called. That’s what they do in Hollywood. They say, “I’m so sorry about the box-office grosses,” when they are really trying to see how you respond. So Maria was getting calls from friends saying things like, “Oh my God, I saw the LA Times story. God, I’m so sorry! Is there anything we can do?” That kind of dialogue.
We all do it. It’s human nature to empathize with someone else’s troubles. I would call Tom Arnold if one of his movies went down. I would call Stallone. I’d say, “Fuck the LA Times, fuck the trades, those stupid motherfuckers. You’re a great, talented actor.” That’s what you do. But at the same time, there is still a side of you that wonders, “What is he going to say?” So why wouldn’t people call me and do the same thing?
And when you feel embarrassed like I did, you tend to assume that the whole world is focused on your failure. I’d go into a restaurant, and somebody would say, “Oh, hey, how are you doing? I see the new movie’s out, that’s great!” And I’d feel like, “That’s great? You motherfucker. Didn’t you read the LA Times?” But, in fact, not everybody reads the LA Times or Variety or goes to see every movie. The poor guy probably knows nothing about it and just wants to say something nice.
—
These woes were nothing another big hit wouldn’t fix. Before summer ended, I was back in front of Jim Cameron’s cameras, galloping a black horse across downtown Washington, DC, chasing a terrorist on a motorbike. True Lies was a large-scale action comedy that had over-the-top special effects, including a shoot-out between terrorists holed up in a Miami skyscraper and me in a Harrier jet, and a nuclear explosion that takes out one of the Florida Keys. And it had funny, complicated relationships, especially between me and my onscreen wife, played by Jamie Lee Curtis. My character, Harry Tasker, is a James Bond–style superspy whose wife, Helen, initially thinks that he’s a computer salesman. Jamie Lee played the part so well that she got nominated for a comedy Golden Globe.
Total Recall: My Unbelievably True Life Story Page 44