My wife didn’t know about my inquiry to Bob. She read about my possible candidacy in the papers and saw me flirting with the idea, but she assumed that I’d never want the schedule, keeping twenty appointments a day, and the general crap you have to take when you’re in politics. I’m sure she was thinking, “He loves life too much. He’s into the pleasure principle, not the suffering principle.” I didn’t tell her I was seriously considering a run, because I didn’t want endless conversation about it at home.
The consultants identified pluses and minuses right away. The Ronald Reagan factor was my biggest plus. He’d proven that entertainment cuts across party lines: not only do people know your name but also they’ll pay attention to what you say no matter whether they’re Democratic, Republican, or independent—as long as you’re not a flake. Governor Pat Brown and his political handlers totally misjudged the power of celebrity when Reagan beat him in 1966, and I think that power is still hard for politicos to believe. When George Gorton, who had been Pete Wilson’s top strategist, came with me to an after-school event at the Hollenbeck Youth Center, he was stunned to find nineteen TV crews waiting to record my visit for the evening news. That was at least a dozen more cameras than he’d ever seen show up for the governor himself at this kind of event.
The first poll they took, of eight hundred California voters, gave the kind of mixed picture that you would expect. All the voters knew who I was, and 60 percent had a positive image of me. That was a plus. But when they were asked to choose today between Gray Davis and me as governor, they picked Davis by more than two to one. I wasn’t even running, of course, but I was very, very far from being a favorite. The consultants listed other obvious minuses: although I had a strong philosophy and lot of opinions, my knowledge of issues like jobs, education, immigration, and the environment wasn’t so deep. And, of course, I had no fund-raising organization, no political staff, no experience dealing with political reporters, and no track record in getting elected to anything.
One question that came up was whether to campaign for the governorship in 2002 or wait until 2006. Waiting would give me more time to establish myself in Californians’ eyes as a contender. George Gorton suggested that whenever I ran, a good way to lay the groundwork would be to campaign for a ballot initiative. Among all the states, California is famed for its tradition of “direct democracy.” Under the state constitution, legislators aren’t the only ones who can create laws; the people can too, directly, by placing propositions on the ballot in state elections. The ballot-initiative system dates back to Hiram Johnson, California’s legendary governor from 1911 to 1917. He used it to break the power of a corrupt legislature controlled by the giant railroads. Its most famous modern-day application was in the California tax revolt of 1978. That was when voters passed Proposition 13, a constitutional amendment officially titled “People’s Initiative to Limit Property Taxation.” I’d been in America only ten years at that point, and I remember marveling at how ordinary citizens could limit the state’s power.
If I sponsored a ballot initiative, Gorton pointed out, I could get out in front of the people without having to announce right away for governor. I’d have a reason to build an organization, hold fund-raisers, form alliances with important groups, talk to the media, and do TV ads. And if the initiative passed, it would prove that I could win votes across the state.
But before I tackled any of that, Bob and his colleagues felt they ought to impress upon me what I might be getting into. I was paying them, but they were ambitious guys who wanted to make sure they weren’t wasting time on some Hollywood vanity campaign. In fact, they got ex-governor Wilson himself to deliver the message personally. He took charge of a four-hour strategy session at my office in March 2001. Wilson told me that he hoped I would run and that I had the beginnings of a good team to get it done. But, he added, “You need to be realistic about how this will affect your life, your family, your finances, and your career.” Then he went around the table, and each advisor laid out ways in which my life would change. Don Sipple, a political strategist, talked about how Eisenhower and Reagan had made the transition to political life successfully, while Ross Perot and Jesse Ventura had failed. Perot, a Texas businessman, came from out of nowhere in 1992 to run for president as an independent, and won an astounding 19.7 million votes, or almost one in five votes cast that November. Ventura, my former castmate in Predator and The Running Man, and a former pro wrestler, was midway through a shaky term as governor of Minnesota, after which he would not seek reelection.
The difference between those who adapted and those who didn’t, Gorton said, was a willingness to totally commit. Others talked about how I’d need to put up with media criticism like I’d never imagined; how I’d need to become expert in wonky topics; how I’d need to ask for campaign contributions. I took such obvious pride in my financial independence that they realized the last item would be hard for me.
But what surprised me was the level of enthusiasm in the room. I thought they were going to tell me that this wasn’t right for me and maybe I should try for an ambassadorship or something. That was the way people in Austria had reacted when I said I wanted to be a bodybuilding champ. “In Austria we become ski champs,” they’d said. And it was the way that Hollywood agents had reacted when I said that I wanted to become an actor. “Why don’t you open a gym?” they’d said. But I could tell that these political pros weren’t just stringing me along. These guys knew me from the campaigning I had done for Wilson. They knew I was funny. They knew I spoke well. They saw me as a serious possibility.
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Over the next several weeks, I spent a lot of time out of the state: at an Inner-City Games event in Las Vegas, a Hummer promotion in New York, a visit to Guam, a premiere in Osaka, Japan, and Easter in Maui, Hawaii, with Maria and the kids. But along the way, I started sounding out close friends. Fredi Gerstl, my mentor from Austria, was very supportive. As far as he was concerned, nothing was harder than being a good political leader—so many interests, so many constituents, so many built-in obstacles. It’s like captaining the Titanic as opposed to driving a speedboat. “If you like challenges, this is the best,” he said. “Go for it.”
Paul Wachter, my financial advisor, told me he wasn’t surprised—he’d sensed me getting restless over the past year—but he felt obliged to remind me of the money I’d have to pass up if I switched careers. He really liked seeing those $25 million movie paychecks coming in. He pointed out that if I got elected, I’d have to forgo two movies a year at $20 million or more each, plus spend millions of my own money on personal expenses that would not be tax deductible. It wasn’t a stretch to say that the total cost to me over two terms could be more than $200 million.
Another close friend I wanted to touch base with was Andy Vajna, who with his business partner, Mario Kassar, had produced Total Recall and Terminator 2 and owned the rights to make Terminator 3. Andy is Hungarian-American, an immigrant like me, and besides his success in Hollywood, he owns casinos in Hungary and other businesses here. Also, Andy had worked in government in Hungary and was close to Victor Orbán, who became prime minister. I saw Andy and Mario as part of my Hollywood kitchen cabinet for kicking around ideas. So I wanted to sound them out on my running for governor. If they were enthusiastic, I meant to hit them up for a lot of money for the campaign and then have them go out and ask other producers to contribute.
When I went to their office to talk about the governorship in April, 2001, I didn’t expect them to bring up Terminator 3. I’d signed a “deal memo” to star in it if it ever got made, but the project had been in development limbo for years. Andy and Mario had even lost the rights at one point and had to buy them back in bankruptcy court. Jim Cameron had moved on to other projects, and as far as I knew, they didn’t have a director or a script. But as I made my pitch about politics, I saw them looking at me as if to say, “What the fuck are you talking about, running for governor?”
Terminator 3, it turned out, was a lot far
ther along than I’d thought. A script was almost ready, and, not only that, they’d entered into merchandise and international distribution deals worth tens of millions of dollars. They were planning to start production within a year. Andy was reasonable and friendly but firm. “If you back out, I will get sued, because we sold the rights based on you as the star,” he said. “I’m the last person interested in suing you, but if I get sued, I will have to sue you because I can’t afford to pay all these guys back. With damages! The numbers will be huge.”
“Okay, I got it,” I said.
I pride myself on being able to juggle many tasks, but I could see that running for governor and making a Terminator movie at the same time was a nonstarter even for me. People would think it was totally half-assed.
So now what? I still wanted to do something political. In fact, I was pumped. So when I went back to my political team and broke the news that I couldn’t run, I told them not to stop. I told them that we’d do a ballot initiative instead. They were skeptical about this; it was hard for them to imagine how a person could do justice to a movie and an initiative campaign at the same time. To me, it was no different from what I’d done all my life. I’d gotten a college education while I was a bodybuilding champ. I’d married Maria in the middle of filming Predator. I’d made Kindergarten Cop and Terminator 2 and launched Planet Hollywood while I was the president’s fitness czar. And I had a clear vision of the issue I wanted to pursue.
Working on the President’s Council on Physical Fitness and Sports had made me aware of the problem of millions of kids left after school with nothing to do. Most juvenile crime is committed between three and six o’clock in the afternoon. That’s when kids get exposed to mischief, hustling, gangs, and drugs. Experts contended that we were losing our kids not because they were bad but because they were unsupervised. There had long been cops and educators who campaigned for after-school programs, which provided an alternative to gangs and a place for kids to get help with homework. But the legislators never listened. So the cops and educators became my first allies.
As part of expanding the Inner-City Games, I’d created a foundation to make them a nationwide movement and recruited a close friend of Maria’s and mine, Bonnie Reiss, to lead it. Bonnie is a high-powered New Yorker with curly black hair who is funny and fast-talking and almost as fierce an organizer as Eunice. She and Maria met while Maria was in college and Bonnie was in law school and clerking for Teddy Kennedy; the two of them had moved to LA together to work on Teddy’s 1980 presidential campaign. Later Bonnie founded an influential nonprofit called the Earth Communications Office, which focused on raising money for environmental issues. Essentially she became Hollywood’s go-to person on the environment. She was a big fan of the Inner-City Games as well and welcomed the chance to spread the idea.
Los Angeles still stood out not only because it was the home of the Inner-City Games but also because it was the only big city that had after-school programs in every one of its ninety elementary schools. I went to consult the woman who’d accomplished this, a dynamic educator named Carla Sanger. After I’d asked a million questions, she suggested, “Why don’t you carve out the middle schools and high schools and do programs there?” So Bonnie and I started raising funds to do just that. Our plan was to bring Inner-City Games after-school programs into four schools in 2002 and expand from there.
Pretty quickly, though, I realized that the task was too big. We would never be able to raise enough money to put a program into every middle school and high school that needed it. Even worse, Los Angeles was just one city in a state that had roughly six thousand schools and six million students.
When you run up against a problem that gigantic, sometimes government has to help. But Carla told me that she’d tried many times to lobby for funds in Sacramento, and it was hopeless. State officials and lawmakers just did not see after-school programs as important. I checked with a few state senators and assembly people I knew, and they said she was right.
That left only one possible avenue: putting the issue directly before the California voters as a ballot initiative. I saw in this idea the chance to improve the lives of millions of kids and at the same time to get my feet wet in state politics. This wasn’t the right time for me to run for governor, but I committed myself to spend the next year campaigning for what came to be known as Proposition 49, the After School Education and Safety Program Act of 2002.
I signed up George Gorton as the campaign manager, along with other members of the Pete Wilson brain trust, and they set up a headquarters downstairs from my office, a space we had previously leased to actor Pierce Brosnan and his production company. Soon they were surveying voters, researching the issues, preparing lists of donors and media contacts, networking with other organizations, planning for signature gathering and public events, and so on. I was like a sponge soaking it all in.
In my movie career, I’d always paid close attention to focus groups and surveys, and, of course, in politics opinion research plays an even bigger role. I felt right at home with that. Don Sipple, who was expert in political messaging, sat me down in front of a camera and had me talk at length. Those tapes got edited into three-minute segments to be shown to focus groups of voters. The purpose was to pick out what themes and traits of mine appealed to people and what might put them off. I learned, for example, that people were impressed with my success as a businessman, but when I mentioned on the tape that Maria and I lived in a relatively modest house, the people in the focus groups felt that I must be out of touch.
That fall I’d blocked out two weeks to promote my latest action movie, Collateral Damage, which was scheduled to be released on October 5. This was just one of hundreds of millions of plans that had to change in the aftermath of September 11, 2001. Any other year, Collateral Damage would have been exciting big-budget action entertainment, but after 9/11, it just didn’t work. I play a veteran Los Angeles firefighter named Gordy Brewer whose wife and son are bystanders killed in a narco-terrorist bombing at the Colombian consulate downtown. When Brewer sets out to avenge their deaths, he uncovers and thwarts a much larger narco-terror plot involving a hijacked airliner and a major attack on Washington, DC. After 9/11, Warner Bros. canceled the premiere and reedited the movie to delete the hijacking. Even so, when Collateral Damage debuted the following February, it felt both irrelevant and painful to watch in light of the actual events. The irony was that in making the film, the producers had this big debate about whether firefighting was a macho enough profession for an action hero. That was one question that the real-life heroism at ground zero laid to rest.
I learned there is a whole art to shaping a proposition so that it doesn’t put people off or cause unnecessary fights or resistance. For instance, to keep after-school from crowding out existing programs that people liked, we designed it to take effect no earlier than 2004, and only if the California economy was growing again and annual state revenues had gone up by $10 billion. To hold down the overall cost, we made it a grant program to which schools had to apply. And we made it so that wealthy districts that already had after-school programs would be expected to wait in line behind districts that couldn’t afford them.
All the same, when education experts estimated the annual cost—$1.5 billion—we were all in sticker shock. Even in a state with $70 billion in revenue, that was much more than voters would approve. So before we even started campaigning, we scaled down our proposal to cover just middle schools, not high schools. This decision was painful, but something had to go, and the younger kids were more vulnerable and needed the programs more. Narrowing the program cut the price tag by more than $1 billion.
But before we filed it in late 2001, we circulated drafts and went around making presentations to unions and civic groups: teachers, principals, school superintendents, chambers of commerce, law-enforcement officials, judges and mayors and other public officials. We wanted the broadest possible coalition—and the smallest possible number of enemies. Just as Pete Wilson�
�s guys had predicted, I found the fund-raising part hard at first. The reason I wanted to be wealthy was that I never wanted to ask anyone for money. It was so against my grain. When I made the first solicitation, I was literally sweating. I told myself it wasn’t really me asking, it was the cause.
That first call was to Paul Folino, a technology entrepreneur and a friend of the Wilson campaign, and after a short and gracious conversation, he committed $1 million. My second call was to Jerry Perenchio, a producer and mover and shaker who ended up owning the Spanish-language television network Univision and then selling it for $11 billion. I knew Jerry personally. He promised to raise another $1 million. Those were heavenly calls; I felt so relieved when I hung up the phone. Then I made smaller calls for $250,000. I ended the day flying high.
The next day I went to hit up Marvin Davis in his office in the Fox Studios tower. He weighed about four hundred pounds. “What can I do for you?” he asked. I’d made movies for Fox, and his son had produced Predator. I gave him the whole rap, putting a lot of enthusiasm into explaining what I could do for California. But when I looked up from my notes I realized he’d fallen asleep! I waited until he opened his eyes again, and then said, “I totally agree, Marvin, we have to be fiscally responsible.” He could sleep all he wanted as long as he gave us the check. But instead, he said, “Let me talk to my guys. We’ll be in touch with you. It’s a very courageous thing to do.” Of course I never heard back.
Total Recall: My Unbelievably True Life Story Page 51