Total Recall: My Unbelievably True Life Story

CHAPTER 14 What Doesn’t Kill Us Makes Us Stronger

CONAN THE BARBARIAN IS set in primitive Europe during the fictional Hyborian Age, after the sinking of Atlantis but thousands of years before the dawn of recorded history. I arrived in Madrid in early December to witness it taking shape in modern-day Spain. John Milius had been telling people we were out to make “good pagan entertainment, first and foremost a romance, an adventure, a movie where something big happens”—and also full of action and gore. “It’ll be barbaric,” he promised. “I’m not holding myself back.”

To bring his vision to the screen, he’d recruited the A team: masters like Terry Leonard, the stunt director who’d just worked on Raiders of the Lost Ark; Ron Cobb, the production designer responsible for Alien; and Colin Arthur, formerly of Madame Tussauds, to supervise the making of human dummies and body parts. By the time I got there, Conan was already its own little industry. The movie’s headquarters was in a swanky hotel in central Madrid where most of the actors and senior crew would stay, but the real action took place in locations all across Spain. Two hundred workers were busy building sets in a large warehouse twenty-five miles outside of the city. Outdoor sequences were scheduled for the mountains near Segovia, as well as the spectacular dunes and salt marshes of Almería, a province on the Mediterranean coast. A Moroccan bazaar in the provincial capital was to be dressed as a Hyborian city, and we were also due to film at an ancient fortress nearby and at other historical sites.

The $20 million production budget was lavish: the equivalent of $100 million today. Milius used the money to put together an amazing roster of people and special effects. He brought in artisans, trainers, and stunt experts from Italy, England, and the States, as well as the dozens of Spaniards the film employed. The script called for an animal population of horses, camels, goats, vultures, snakes, dogs, a hawk, and a leopard. More than 1,500 extras were hired. The score was to be performed by a ninety-piece orchestra and a twenty-four-member choir, singing in a mock Latin language.

Milius was fanatical that every bit of clothing and gear be true to the fantasy. Anything made of leather or cloth had to be aged by having cars drag it through the dirt until it looked dirty and worn. Saddles had to be hidden under blankets and furs because John said in those prehistoric times, there would have been no saddle makers stitching leather. The weapons came in for an endless amount of attention. The two broadswords for Conan himself were custom forged to Ron Cobb’s drawings and inscribed with a pretend language. Four copies were made of each sword at $10,000 each. Naturally John insisted that these swords and all the other weapons had to be weathered looking, not gleaming. They were meant to kill, not shine, he said. Killing was the bottom line.

I busied myself during December studying lines, helping block out action scenes, and getting to know the other people on the Conan team.

Milius had unorthodox ideas about choosing a cast: he picked athletes instead of actors for other big parts. As my sidekick, the archer Subotai, he hired Gerry Lopez, a champion surfer from Hawaii who had starred as himself in Milius’s previous movie, Big Wednesday. And as Conan’s love, the thief and warrior Valeria, he chose Sandahl Bergman, a professional dancer recommended by director-choreographer Bob Fosse. John believed that the rigors of weight training, dancing, or being out seven hours a day surfing waves that could kill you built strength of character, and he was sure that this would show through on the screen. “Look at the faces of people who went through horrible times; people from Yugoslavia or Russia,” he would say. “Look at the lines, the character in their faces. You can’t fake that. These people have principles that they will stand and die for. They are tough because of the resistance they’ve fought through.”

Even a fanatic like John realized that our lack of experience in front of the camera might be a problem. To inspire us and help offset the risk, he cast some veterans too. James Earl Jones was just finishing a run on Broadway as the star of Athol Fugard’s A Lesson from Aloes, and he signed on to play Thulsa Doom, the evil sorcerer and king who slaughters Conan’s parents and sells the young hero into slavery. Max von Sydow, the star of many Ingmar Bergman films, joined as a king who wants to reclaim his daughter who has run off to join Thulsa Doom’s snake cult.

One of Milius’s concerns was finding guys bigger than me to play Conan’s enemies, so it didn’t look like Conan was just going to run over everybody. He was very particular about that: they had to be taller and more muscular than me. On the bodybuilding circuit, I’d met a Dane named Sven-Ole Thorsen, who was six foot five and weighed over three hundred pounds. Sven also had a black belt in karate. I contacted him on Milius’s behalf and put him in charge of looking for other big guys. At the beginning of December they all came to Madrid, a half dozen big, really threatening-looking Danes: power lifters, hammer throwers, shot-putters, martial-arts experts. Among them I felt like the little guy, and I’d never felt that before. We worked together, training with the battle-axes and swords and the horseback riding. I had a big head start, of course, but by the time we started shooting in January, the Danes were getting pretty good, and they made a major contribution to the battle scenes.

I was thrilled to see all of this unfold around me. Just as my stunt teacher predicted back in LA, the movie machinery was working on my behalf. I was Conan, and millions of dollars were being spent to make me shine. The movie had other important characters, of course, but in the end it was all geared to making me look like a real warrior. The sets were built for that purpose too. For the first time, I felt like the star.

It was different from being a bodybuilding champion. Millions of people were going to watch this movie, whereas in bodybuilding the biggest live audience was five thousand and the biggest TV audience was one million to two million. This was big. Movie magazines were going to write about Conan, the Calendar section in the LA Times was going to write about it, and magazines and newspapers around the world were going to review it and analyze it—and debate about it, no doubt, because what Milius envisioned was so violent.

Maria came to visit for a few days at the end of December after spending Christmas with her parents. This gave me a chance to introduce her to the crew and the cast, so she wouldn’t think I’d dropped off the face of the earth. She got a laugh out of how I’d already assembled a whole posse of friends from the muscle world: not just the Danes but also Franco, because I’d arranged a small part for him.

I was glad that Maria wasn’t still there when we started filming a week later. In the first scene we were scheduled to shoot, an unarmed Conan, newly released from slavery, is being chased by wolves across a rocky plain. He escapes by scrambling up an outcropping, where he will stumble upon the mouth of a tomb containing a sword. In preparation for this sequence, I’d been working every morning with the wolves, just to conquer my fear. The wolves were actually four German shepherds, but without telling me, Milius had ordered the stunt coordinator to rent animals that had some wolf in them. He thought that would heighten the realism. “We’ll time it all out,” he promised me. “You’ll already be running when we release the dogs, and they won’t have enough time to cross the field and get you before you’re up the rocks.”

On the morning we shot the scene, they sewed raw meat into the bearskin on my back to attract the dogs. The cameras rolled, and I sprinted across the field. But the trainer let the dogs loose too soon, and I didn’t have enough of a head start. The wolf pack caught me before I could get all the way up the rocks. They bit at my pants and dragged me down off the rock, and I fell ten feet onto my back. I tried to stand and rip off the bearskin but fell over into a thornbush. The trainer called out a command, and the dogs froze and stood near me, drooling.

I’m lying there full of thorns and bleeding from a gash where I’d landed on a rock. Milius was not sympathetic. “Now you know what the film is going to be like,” he said. “This is what Conan went through!” I went off to get stitches, and when I saw him later at lunch, the director was in a great mood. “We got the shot. We’re off to a great start,” he said. The next day I ended up needing more stitches after I cut my forehead leaping into a rocky pool. When Milius saw the blood running, he said, “Who did that makeup? It’s terrific. Looks like real blood.” He refused to think about what would have happened to the production if I’d been crippled or killed. But of course there was no stunt double because it would have been very difficult to find anyone who had a body like mine.

The rest of the week was devoted to an elaborate action sequence from much later in the plot. In our warehouse outside Madrid, the crews had constructed the Orgy Chamber of Thulsa Doom’s mountain temple. From the outside, the warehouse was a big, drab two-story building made of corrugated steel and surrounded by a dusty parking lot, tents, and a crude sign that said “Conan” in red paint. But inside, after you wended your way through the makeup, costume, and prop departments, you were transported into the debauched splendor of the sorcerer’s cannibalistic snake cult. The Orgy Chamber was a high-ceilinged hall with marble terraces and staircases lit by torchlight and draped in beautiful satin and silk, with a dozen naked women and their consorts sprawled on thick cushions in a central pit, dozing and reveling. In the center of the pit rose a pink and gray twelve-foot marble pillar with four giant snake heads carved on top. The feast was being served by attendants from a bubbling cauldron in which you could see severed hands and other body parts.

The script called for Conan, Valeria, and Subotai to burst in on this orgy, slay the guards, and seize the wayward princess who had fallen under Thulsa Doom’s spell. The guards, of course, were supposed to be subhuman thugs, some of them wearing reptile masks, and I was stripped to the waist with my face and torso painted in fearsome black camouflage stripes that looked like lightning bolts. Sandahl and Jerry were painted in stripes too. It felt fantastic putting our weapons training into action, and Milius was pleased as we worked our way through dozens of shots.

Movie sets are noisy places between takes, with people talking, equipment clattering, and crews bustling around. On the fourth morning, we were getting ready for a shot in Thulsa Doom’s private alcove, carved high in the wall of the Orgy Chamber, when somebody said, “Dino is here,” and I heard the commotion suddenly stop. I looked down the broad sweep of stairs, and there, in the pit, amid all the naked girls, was our legendary producer making his first appearance on the set. De Laurentiis was immaculately groomed, wearing the most elegant suit with a beautiful cashmere overcoat, which, being Italian, he draped over his shoulders like a cape.

He stood surveying the whole scene and then climbed up the steps to where we stood. Maybe there were twenty steps, but to me it seemed like a hundred, because it took a long time. I just watched him come closer and closer, with those naked women in the background. Finally he reached the top and walked right to me.

“Schwarzenegger,” he said, “you are Conan.” And he made a snappy turn and walked back down and off the set.

Milius had been near the camera, and the microphones were on. He came over to me. “I heard that,” he said. “You realize that’s the greatest compliment you’re ever gonna get from this guy? This morning he watched the three days of film we’ve shot, and now he’s a believer.”

I felt this was Dino’s way of telling me I was off the hook for calling him short four years ago. From that point on, he would come to Spain once a month or so and invite me to his hotel for coffee. Slowly, we warmed to each other.

Dino delegated the actual nuts and bolts of producing Conan to his daughter Raffaella and to Buzz Feitshans, who’d worked with Milius on earlier films. Raffaella was a pistol: she was his middle daughter with the Italian actress Silvana Mangano, and she’d known she wanted to be a producer from the time she was a kid. Even though Raffaella was only Maria’s age, Dino had been teaching her the ropes for ten years, and this was already her second major feature.

I’d learned enough about movie production by now to be impressed with the job that she and Buzz did. They really had to scramble to find a country to shoot in after the Yugoslavia plan fell through. Every country has a film commission, and typically, when you produce a film, you start by calling and saying, “We want to make this movie in your country. What can you do for us?” In the case of Conan, Spain jumped at the chance. The commission told Raffaella and Buzz, “First, we have a great warehouse you can make into a studio. There’s running water, flush toilets, and showers. There’s room for the generators you’re going to need. We have an extra warehouse you can also rent, plus an empty hangar on an air force base. We have a luxury apartment complex in Madrid that’s perfect for the actors and senior crew. It’s attached to a five-star hotel, so you’ll have restaurants and room service always available. There’s room for your production offices too, right around the corner.”

All that carried a certain price tag. Conan was a complicated project, so Buzz, Raffaella, the designer, the location scout, and others on the production team had to factor in a thousand other items. How many horses would we need, and how many stunt riders? Were they available in Spain, or would they have to be brought in from Italy or other places? Did Spain have the right kinds of desert, mountain, and seaside locations? Could we get permission to shoot there? What about historic ruins? And, of course, Raffaella and Buzz wanted to stay within the budget, so they were constantly looking for deals.

They sized up other countries too, and within a remarkably short time, they were able to come back to the studio with a rundown. “In Spain, we can shoot the movie for eighteen million,” they said. “In Italy, it will cost us thirty-two million. Or we can do it in Las Vegas and build the sets in the Nevada desert, and it will cost even more. Or we can do it on soundstages in LA, and it will cost even more.”

The choice was the same as always in modern movie production: between countries with an established moviemaking industry and labor unions, like Italy, and entrepreneurial, nonunionized countries like Spain. Unions or not, Dino had a reputation for getting things done. When he wanted to shoot sixteen hours a day, he shot sixteen hours a day. He was very powerful in that way, and people in Hollywood knew it and didn’t mess with him. If the studios wanted a movie done for a certain price, they worked with him. In this case, he backed Raffaella and Buzz when they picked Spain. “We’ll have to build the whole thing in a warehouse,” they told the studio, “but it’s still much cheaper than using real soundstages where labor can hold us up.” We definitely had no labor problems on Conan. Everyone worked together. If a shot needed to be changed quickly, everyone lifted lights and moved things around.

In fact, Spain was a great place to shoot in every way, with one little exception: the stunt guys took too long to die. Milius would tell them over and over, “When he cuts you, just drop.” Instead, they would fall theatrically, get partway back up, fall down again, gasp—this was their moment, and they were going to play it to the hilt. I’d be busy slaying my next opponent when I’d hear Milius shout to the guy behind me, “You’re dead! Stay down! He cut you, don’t move!” But they were like zombies. Finally Milius offered to pay them extra if they died immediately and stayed dead.

These were the kinds of things they don’t teach you no matter how many years you go to acting class. For all the talk about sense memory and getting into character, no one prepares you for what to do when the wind machine is blowing snow in your face and you’re freezing your ass off. Or when somebody’s holding a measuring tape up to your nose to mark the focus on a shot. Then how do you do all this sense-memory shit? All that stuff about being in the moment goes out the window.

There’s a whole production going on while you’re trying to act. You have to deal with the distractions of 150 people on the set working and talking. The lighting guy is putting up ladders in front of you and saying, “Can you move? I don’t want to drop a lamp on you.” The soundman is fooling around with your waistband to put on a battery pack. The boom guy is shouting at the camera guy to get out of the way. The set designer is saying, “I need more plants in the background, guys.” The director is trying to coordinate. The producer is screaming, “In five minutes we have to get lunch! If you want the shot, get it now!”

Then the director says, “Arnold, look your opponent in the eye. Head straight up. Dominate this scene.” This sounds good: we’ve worked on that in acting class. Except what if he has put you on a horse that’s very lively? The horse is spinning and rearing up. How do you look dominant when you’re scared that the horse will go nuts and throw you off? So you have to stop and rehearse with the horse. Under those circumstances, how do you act real?

I’d never done a love scene on camera and found it really strange. A closed set means that you can’t bring guests, but you still have endless people looking on: the script supervisor, the lighting techs, the camera assists. And you’re naked. No one in acting class ever talks about what to do in a nude scene when you really get excited. In sex, one thing leads naturally to another. It can be embarrassing. They say you should stay in character, but that’s not really what they want, trust me. All you can do is try to think about something else.

Even though the set was supposedly closed, the sex scenes seemed to have a magnetic effect. After Conan escapes from the wolves, he is seduced by a witch who puts him on the trail of Thulsa Doom. Cassandra Gava, who was playing the witch, and I were rolling around naked in front of a roaring fire in the witch’s stone hut. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed the walls of the hut move. A little gap opened in the corner, and I could see a pair of eyes glinting in the firelight.

“Cut!” Milius called. “Arnold, where you looking at?”

“Well, actually,” I said, “it’s the funniest thing. I saw that corner of the room move apart, and I think I saw eyes peeking through.” A guy ran behind the set, and we heard voices. Then Raffaella came out looking totally sheepish. She said, “I’m sorry, but I just had to peek!”

Conan’s true love in the film is Valeria. Sandahl Bergman had never done love scenes either and felt just as awkward as I did. I was somehow supposed to be this weird combination of a barbarian and a gentleman, but not too much of either. It was hard to get in the mood because you don’t have a chance to practice with your costar; you just have to start mechanical and cold. On top of all that, Sandahl and Terry Leonard the stunt chief had fallen in love, and I was intensely aware that he was standing by probably ready to rip off my head. Meanwhile, Milius was working hard to avoid the censors, saying things like, “Arnold, can you move your behind so it’s in that shadow there? And make sure you hide her breasts with your arm, because we can’t have nipples in the shot.”

The action scenes had perils of their own. Conan lives in a world of constant danger. You never know what’s going to attack you in the fantasy world. It could be a snake one day and a wolf-witch the next. When shooting such scenes, I had to be on my toes.

Doing battle with a giant mechanical snake left me sore for a week. The sequence was in the middle of the movie, where Conan and his allies sneak into the Tower of the Serpent and steal some of the cult’s precious jewels. We were supposed to climb the tower (actually a forty-foot-high set built in the abandoned air force hangar) and then lower ourselves into a dungeon ankle deep in garbage and the bones of sacrificial virgins. The snake, thirty-six feet long and two and a half feet wide, was a replica of some kind of boa constrictor, operated remotely and animated with steel cables and hydraulic pumps capable of exerting nine tons of force. It turned out to be pretty hard to control, and the operator hadn’t practiced enough. One time it coiled around me and started slamming me against the dungeon wall. I was yelling to him to ease up. In the script, Conan kills the snake, of course: Subotai crawls out of a tunnel to find his buddy in danger and tosses him a broadsword, which Conan, in a single, swift motion, catches by the hilt and chops into the snake. I had to grab the heavy sword and strike a precise point behind the snake’s head to trigger the exploding blood pack. Conan, of course, has to be totally confident as he does all this. But part of me was thinking “I hope this goes well.” I’m proud to say that two and a half years of training paid off, and I nailed it in the first take.

James Earl Jones was late joining the production because he had to wrap up his commitment on Broadway, but after he arrived, we quickly became friends. By mid-March, when the production moved from Madrid to Almería to film the battle scenes and the climactic confrontation at Doom’s mountain citadel, I spent days hanging out in his trailer. He wanted to keep in shape, so I helped him with his training, and in return, he coached me on my acting. With his powerful bass voice, James was a wonderful Shakespearean actor, and he’d won both a Tony Award and an Oscar nomination for his performances in The Great White Hope, a drama about racism and boxing. (His character was based on Jack Johnson, the World Heavyweight Champion from 1908 to 1915.) Lately he’d become internationally known as the Star Wars villain Darth Vader. He told me the amazing story of how he’d gotten into acting. As a kid in Mississippi, James had such a serious stutter that from the time he started school at age five until he was fourteen, he refused to talk. The schools classified him as functionally mute. Then in high school he fell in love with literature and felt a desire to read great works aloud. His English teacher encouraged him, “If you like the words, you’ve got to be able to learn to say them.”

Milius wanted me to add a half page of dialogue that he’d written during the shooting. It was in the quiet before the climactic battle at the Mounds, a Stonehenge-like ancient burial ground of warriors and kings by the sea. Conan and his allies have fortified the monument and are waiting to be attacked by Thulsa Doom and a large troop of savage henchmen on horseback. Thulsa Doom has already killed Valeria, and Conan and his friends are greatly outnumbered and expect to die. So before the battle, Conan is sitting on a hillside with his chin on his fist, looking at the sea and the beautiful blue sky and thinking melancholy thoughts. “I remember days like this when my father took me to the forest and we ate wild blueberries,” he says to Subotai. “More than twenty years ago. I was just a boy of four or five. The leaves were so dark and green then. The grass smelled sweet with the spring wind.

“Almost twenty years of pitiless cumber! No rest, no sleep like other men. And yet the spring wind blows, Subotai. Have you ever felt such a wind?” (Cumber means “burdens.”)

“They blow where I live too,” says Subotai. “In the north of every man’s heart.”

Conan offers his friend the chance to leave and go home. “It’s never too late, Subotai.”

“No. It would only lead me back here another day. In even worse company.”

“For us, there is no spring,” Conan says grimly. “Just the wind that smells fresh before the storm.”

I’d practiced these lines dozens of times, as I always did before a shoot. But I told Milius, “It doesn’t feel natural to me. It doesn’t feel like I’m really, you know, searching and seeing it.” You can’t just recite a monologue like that. It truly has to seem like you are thinking about an earlier time, the memories are coming to you, ideas are popping into your head. In some moments you say things in a rush, and in other moments you just stare. The question was how to create that naturalness.

Milius said, “Why don’t you ask Earl? He does this onstage where the pressure’s even higher because you can’t edit out the mistakes.”

So I went to James Earl’s trailer and asked if he would mind taking a look at the dialogue.

“No, no, absolutely. Sit down,” he said. “Let’s look at that.” He read it and asked me to deliver the lines.

When I finished, he nodded and said, “Well, what I would do is have this retyped two ways. Do it once so the lines are really narrow and go down the entire length of the page. And the second time do it with the paper turned sideways, so that you have the widest lines possible.” He explained that I’d practiced so much that I’d unconsciously memorized the line breaks. So each time I hit one, it came across as a break in thought. “You need to throw off that rhythm,” he explained.

Seeing the lines retyped made me hear them in a different way, which helped tremendously. I came back later in the day, and we dissected and rehearsed the dialogue line by line. “Well, normally after a sentence like this you would pause, because that’s a pretty heavy thought,” he’d say. And, “Here maybe you want to shift position a little bit. Whatever comes to mind, whether it’s a stretch or a shake of the head or just a pause. But you shouldn’t program yourself,” he stressed, “because it could be different from one take to the next, unless John tells you that’ll cause a problem with editing. But usually they only keep a shot until the thought changes, and then they’ll go to another angle.”

Max Von Sydow was generous and helpful too. It was great being able to watch two great stage actors rehearse and fine-tune until they got it right. Working with professionals, you learn a lot of nuances. I realized, for example, that actors often shift gears when the director moves from a master shot, to a medium shot, to a close-up shot, to a micro-shot (which captures, say, the eyes wincing). Some actors pay very little attention to the master shot because they know this is just to establish where they are physically in the scene. Therefore, they don’t overexert themselves. But the closer the shot, the more they perform. You realize how important it is to pace yourself: don’t go all out on the first takes; give just 80 percent. Eventually your close-up will come, and that’s when you really need to act. I figured out that this was also a way to get more close-ups of yourself into the film, because the editing will often pick the shot with the best performance.

Making Conan brought back memories of the wild summers with my Austrian buddies pretending that we were gladiators on the shores of the Thalersee. Here it was Milius’s fantasy that set the pace. Before we shot a scene, he’d tell endless stories from history, about how barbarians ate, how they fought, how they rode, their religions, and their cruelties. For the orgy sequence, he talked about the decadence of ancient Rome, the women, the nudity, the sex, the violence, the intrigues, the feasts. Around us he had the best weapons experts, the best horse people, the best designers, wardrobe, and makeup people, all to draw us into the Conan world.

I loved the immersion of being on location: sharing the Apartamentos Villa Magna with the other actors, driving from there to the warehouse, learning a whole new way of functioning for six months. I’d never filmed in a foreign country before. I picked up a lot of Spanish because very few people on the set spoke English. At first the work was too intense for me to allow myself to do anything but train, rehearse, and shoot. But after a month or two, I started to relax. I realized, “Wait a minute. I’m in Madrid! Let’s go see some museums, let’s go see interesting architecture, buildings, and streets. Let’s try some of the restaurants everyone talks about and have dinner at eleven at night like the Spaniards.” We discovered boot makers, leather makers, and tailors, and started buying uniquely Spanish things like ornate silver ashtrays and beautifully tooled leather belts.

Working for Milius was a constant adventure. I had to tear apart a vulture with my teeth, for example. This was in the scene where Conan’s enemies crucify him in the desert upon the Tree of Woe. The tree was a huge outdoor prop built on a rotating base so that the angles of the sun and shadows would stay constant. As Conan nears death in the boiling heat, vultures circle and gather on the branches, and when one lands to try to feed on his face, I bite its neck and rip it apart with my teeth. Naturally, with Milius the birds on the branches were real—they were trained, yes, but still vultures, with lice all over them. During the three days we needed to shoot the scene, the vultures were taken into a tent every hour to rest while I stayed out on the hot tree with five new vultures. The bird I tore apart was an animated prop made of dead vulture parts. I had to rinse out my mouth and wash my skin with an antibiotic afterward.

We also had to contend with camels. I’d never been around a camel, much less ridden one, but the script demanded exactly that. A week before we were due to shoot the scene, I told myself, “You’d better make friends with the camel and figure this out.” I discovered quickly that they’re very different from horses. They get up on their back feet first and throw you forward. And you can’t just tug on the reins as you would with a horse, because if you do, the camel will turn its head 180 degrees until it’s face to face with you. It might spit in your eye, and if it does, the saliva is so caustic that you need a doctor. And camels bite—usually the back of your head, just when you’ve forgotten they’re around.

In addition to the mechanical snake that had its way with me, I had to contend with real snakes too. They were some sort of water snake, and their handler worried that they were getting dehydrated. So he put them in the apartment house swimming pool. In the United States, the department of health or animal welfare would have been there in two seconds, and also the water would have been full of chlorine, which wouldn’t have been good for the snakes’ skin. But in Spain and around Milius, these kinds of things happened all the time.

Milius always pushed the envelope. Environmentalists complained that our sets disrupted the salt marshes, and the producers had to promise to restore the sites. Animal-protection advocates complained because Conan included scenes in which a dog gets kicked, a camel gets punched (by me, but it was just a fake punch), and horses get tripped. None of that would have been allowed in the United States. The production had excellent stunt riders who knew how to turn the horse during a fall so that it would roll and not break its neck, but even so, those stunts were dangerous for both the horses and the people; I saw many bruises and cuts and split heads. Such stunts have since been outlawed from movies.

Even so, the bloodshed in Conan seems tame by today’s standards. At the time, however, the film introduced a whole new dimension of violence on screen. Up until then, swordfights had always been a little too tidy: characters would crumple to the ground, and maybe you’d see a little blood. But Milius was strapping five-quart blood packs on actors’ chests. Five quarts is about as much blood as you have in your entire body. When a battle-axe struck one of those packs, blood flew everywhere. And anytime blood was being spilled, he was insistent about making sure it was against a light background so that you could really see the carnage.

Milius didn’t think he needed to apologize for this. “It’s Conan the barbarian. What do you expect?” he told reporters. But after the shooting wrapped in May and we came home, the issue continued to percolate. The decision makers at Universal were worried that advance word of excessive violence would drive away viewers.

At that point, they were considering Conan for a November or December holiday release. That was until Sid Sheinberg, the president of Universal, who was famous for discovering director Steven Spielberg, saw a rough cut in August. He watched me hacking people apart, blood everywhere, and halfway through the screening, he stood up and said to the other executives sarcastically, “Merry Christmas, guys,” and walked out. So Conan was pushed back: Universal’s Christmas 1981 releases were On Golden Pond, the family drama starring Henry Fonda, Jane Fonda, and Katharine Hepburn, and a horror flick.

We all knew that Conan would be controversial, and the puzzle was how to market it and present it to the media. I watched Milius give some of the early interviews, drawing reporters into the macho fantasy. One of his big talking points was Friedrich Nietzsche; the epigraph at the beginning of Conan, “That which does not kill us makes us stronger,” is paraphrased from the German philosopher’s 1889 book Twilight of the Idols. The other big talking point was steel. “Steel gets harder and more durable the more you pound it,” John would tell the reporters. “It’s no different than the character of a human being. It needs to be tempered. It needs to overcome resistance. The more a man struggles, the stronger he is. Look at people who come from war-torn countries or tough city neighborhoods. You can see the struggle in their faces. A makeup artist can’t do that. And that’s what makes Conan the fiercest and most powerful warrior, what he went through as a child. Luxuries and comforts are evil for humans.” For Milius, Conan was making a statement that went way beyond action movies and comic books. It all tied back to Nietzsche.

He’d show the reporters one of his samurai swords and say, “You know, a samurai sword is heated and pounded on an anvil seven times so that it has the necessary strength. The samurai warriors would practice on criminals. They’d take them out and make them stand and cut off the head with a single swing.” He would act out this whole drama as the reporters took notes. And I would be thinking, “How does he come up with this shit?” My approach was much more direct. I sold the entertainment aspect, the joy of Conan as a fun ride and epic adventure, like a Star Wars set on earth.

To promote the movie, it was important to work every possible angle. We used special-interest magazines to build an audience—stories on sword fighting for the martial-arts magazines. Stories for horse magazines. Stories for fantasy magazines that were into swords and sorcery. Stories for bodybuilding magazines on how you needed top conditioning to be Conan.

The movie, of course, needed a rating before it could be released. I was really annoyed by the way that powerful studio executives kowtowed to the members of the ratings board. The board was made up of Motion Picture Association of America appointees whose names were never even publicly announced. Most were middle-aged people with grown kids, but they reacted to Conan like a bunch of old ladies: “Oh, ah, ah, the blood! I’ve got to close my eyes!” The word came down that we had to edit out some of the gore.

I said to myself, “Where did they get these squeamish idiots? Let’s have some young, hip people rate it.” I asked one of the studio guys, “Who is in charge of this? There must be someone in charge. Why don’t you go and get them fired?”

“No, no, no, no,” he said. “You don’t want to rock that boat.”

No one was willing to fight back on anything.

I didn’t understand there was a chess game being played. Universal had in the works Spielberg’s E.T., which the studio was counting on as its summer blockbuster of 1982. It didn’t want to do anything to antagonize the raters. It wanted to be loved, it wanted Spielberg to be loved, it wanted E.T. to be loved. So then here come Milius and Schwarzenegger, slaughtering all these people on the screen. Milius is already Hollywood’s bad boy, with his right-wing Republicanism and his reputation for saying outrageous things. And, of course, the studio is ready to say, “Let’s cut those Conan scenes right now, so that when we bring E.T. to the rating board next week, we don’t get crucified,” even though there was no harm in E.T. at all.

I was mad as hell because I felt that every one of the killings in Conan was well shot and extraordinary. So what if the first thing you see is Thulsa Doom raiding Conan’s boyhood village and that his mother’s head goes flying through the air? You could say we needed that scene to make Thulsa Doom the ultimate villain, so that when Conan hunts him down, it’s justified. But you fall in love with your own work. In hindsight, I think that making us tone down the violence helped bring more people to the film.

This was my first experience with large-scale studio marketing. A media tour was being planned to promote Conan internationally. In the first meeting I went to, the marketers said, “We’re going to Italy and France.”

“Okaaay,” I said, “but if you look at the globe, there are more countries than Italy and France.” Being European, I was very conscious that there was a whole world out there besides the United States. In the early 1980s, movie grosses were two thirds domestic and one third international, but you could see it starting to shift. If you didn’t promote internationally, who knew how much money you left lying on the table?

I said, “Guys, why don’t we be more systematic? Spend two days in Paris, two days in London, two days in Madrid, two days in Rome, and then go up north. Then say that we go to Copenhagen, and then to Stockholm, and then down to Berlin. What’s wrong with that?”

“Well, that’s not the way we do things. You know the movie is released on different dates in different countries, and we don’t want to give interviews too far in advance.”

“So what about working out a deal with the magazines and newspapers in those countries to hold their stories until the release date?”

“We’d have to check that out.”

I knew another reason for their reluctance to send me on a PR tour was that very few actors like to sell. I’d seen the same thing with authors in the book business. The typical attitude seemed to be, “I don’t want to be a whore. I create; I don’t want to shill. I’m not into the money thing at all.”

It was a real change when I showed up saying, “Let’s go everywhere, because this is good not only for me financially but also good for the public; they get to see a good movie!” Eventually the studio agreed to have me promote Conan in five or six countries. I felt that was a big step forward.

It was the same debate I’d had with my publisher when my book Arnold: The Education of a Bodybuilder came out. The United States accounts for only 5 percent of the world’s population, so why would you ignore the other 95 percent? Both industries were shortchanging themselves. I’d learned from Joe Weider always to think of the global market.

I saw myself as a businessman first. Too many actors, writers, and artists think that marketing is beneath them. But no matter what you do in life, selling is part of it. You can’t make movies without money. Even if I had no publicity obligation in my contract, it was still in my interest to promote the movie and make sure it made as much money as possible. I wanted to be involved in the meetings. I wanted everyone to see that I was working very hard to create a return on the studio’s investment. I felt it was my responsibility to pump up the grosses.

Conan’s breakthrough came just after Valentine’s Day 1982. The first test screening, in Houston, was such a success that Universal couldn’t believe the data: viewers rated the movie a 93 on a scale of 1 to 100, which almost always signals a major hit. The studio telephoned that night and said, “This is huge. We want to try it again in Las Vegas tomorrow. If we do that, can you come?” Driving past the cineplex the next afternoon, we could see this was no ordinary screening. A line stretched around the block, and besides the comic book fans that Universal had expected, there were bodybuilders with tight shirts and bulging muscles, gays, freaks with weird hair and glasses, people wearing Conan outfits. There were some women but the crowd seemed to be mostly men, including a major contingent of bikers in full leather. Some of those guys looked ready to riot if they didn’t get in. Universal simply kept opening auditoriums until everybody was seated—it took three to accommodate them all.

The studio had been banking on die-hard fans of Conan in the comics and fantasy novels to make the movie a success. They were supposed to become the core audience; the people who, if they like a movie, will see it several times and tell all their friends. What Universal didn’t count on was my guys: the bodybuilders. They made up probably a third of the audience that night—and you can imagine the test scores they gave Conan. Without them, the film might have gotten maybe an 88, but with them, it was again 93, just like in Houston. The studio was very excited. And Dino De Laurentiis was flipping. He came over to me that night and said, “I make you a star.” With his accent, I wasn’t sure whether he meant that he intended to make me a star or that he already had. But this time I didn’t tease him about it.

After that night, Conan was unstoppable. A month later, sneak previews in sixteen cities across the country drew overflow crowds. The cops had to be called in Manhattan because people on line were literally fighting to get in; in Washington, DC, the line went for blocks and caused a major traffic jam; in LA, they did three showings back to back instead of the one they had planned—some people waited in line eight hours.

News write-ups in the trade press after the screenings helped us get placement in hundreds of theaters. When Conan opened nationwide on May 14, it became the first blockbuster of what is still talked about as the best movie summer ever. That summer also brought us The Road Warrior, Rocky III, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Blade Runner, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, The World According to Garp, Poltergeist, An Officer and a Gentleman, Tron, The Thing, and, of course, E.T. Conan the Barbarian held its own among them all.