Total Recall: My Unbelievably True Life Story

CHAPTER 17 Marriage and Movies

WHEN YOU SET THE date and say, “Okay, April 26 next year will be our wedding,” you have no idea whether you’ll be shooting a movie then or not. As 1986 rolled around, I tried to get the production of Predator put off for a few weeks, but Joel Silver, the producer, was worried that we’d run into the rainy season if we waited. That’s how I found myself deep in the Mexican jungle near the ruined Mayan city of Palenque less than forty-eight hours before I was due at the altar. I had to charter a jet for the first time in my life to make sure I got to the rehearsal dinner in Hyannis Port on time.

The day I was scheduled to leave, pro wrestler Jesse Ventura shadowed me on the set. We were shooting an action sequence in the jungle, and he’d be hiding in the bushes, not involved in the scene. While I was supposed to be screaming to the other guys, “Get down! Get down!” we’d hear Jesse chanting in that deep voice, “I do, I do, I do.” We were all laughing like hell and blowing take after take. The director kept asking, “Why are you not concentrating?”

Maria was not happy that I missed the final preparations. She wanted my mind to be on the wedding, but my mind was on the movie when I arrived. Predator had big problems, and—rightly or wrongly—in the mind of the public, the star is responsible for a movie’s success. There was talk of having to stop production, and when that happens to a movie, there is always the chance that it might never restart. It was a risky moment in my career. I refocused, of course, so that my mind was on the wedding, but not 100 percent. Meanwhile, some of our guests were wondering why the groom had showed up with a military crew cut. I made the best of it. Even if the situation wasn’t ideal, doing it this way was adventurous and fun.

I’d closed my ears to my friends’ horror stories about married life. “Ha! Now you get to argue about who should change the diapers.” Or “What kind of food makes a woman stop giving blow jobs? Wedding cake!” Or “Oh boy, wait until she hits menopause.” I paid no attention to any of that. “Just let me stumble into it,” I told them. “I don’t want to be forewarned.”

You can overthink anything. There are always negatives. The more you know, the less you tend to do something. If I had known everything about real estate, movies, and bodybuilding, I wouldn’t have gone into them. I felt the same about marriage; I might not have done it if I’d known everything I’d have to go through. The hell with that! I knew Maria was the best woman for me, and that’s all that counted.

I’m always comparing life to a climb, not just because there’s struggle but also because I find at least as much joy in the climbing as in reaching the top. I pictured marriage as a whole mountain range of fantastic challenges, ridgeline after ridgeline: planning the wedding, going to the wedding, deciding where we’d live, when we’d have kids, how many kids we’d have, what preschools and schools we’d choose for them, how we would get them to school, and on and on and on. I’d conquered the first mountain already, planning the wedding, by realizing that it was a process I couldn’t stop or change. It didn’t matter what I thought the tablecloths would look like or what we’d eat or how many guests there should be. You simply accept that you have no control. Everything was in good hands, and I knew I didn’t have to be concerned.

Maria and I had both been cautious about getting married and had waited a long time: she was thirty, and I was thirty-seven. We now were like rockets in our careers. Just after we got engaged, she’d been named coanchor of the CBS Morning News, and soon she would be switching to a similarly high-paying, high-profile job at NBC. These assignments were in New York, but I’d made it clear that I would never stand in her way. If our marriage had to be bicoastal, we would work it out, I said, so we should not even debate that now.

I always felt that you should wait to marry until you are set financially and the toughest struggles of your career are behind you. I’d heard too many athletes, entertainers, and businesspeople say, “The main problem is that my wife wants me to be home, and I need to spend more time at my job.” I hated that idea. It’s not fair to put your wife in a position where she has to ask, “What about me?” because you are working fourteen or eighteen hours a day to build your career. I always wanted to be financially secure before getting married, because most marriages break up over financial issues.

Most women go into a marriage with certain expectations of attention; usually based on the marriage their parents had, but not always. In Hollywood, the gold standard for husbandly devotion was Marvin Davis, the billionaire oilman who owned 20th Century Fox, Pebble Beach Resorts, and the Beverly Hills Hotel. He was married to Barbara, the mother of his five children, for fifty-three years. All the women were melting over Marvin Davis. We’d be at a dinner party at their house, and Barbara would boast, “Marvin’s never, ever been gone a single night without me. Every time he goes on a business trip, he comes home that same day. He’s never gone overnight. And when he is, he takes me with him.” And the wives would say to their husbands, “Why can’t you be like that?” Or if your wife was within range, you’d receive jabs or kicks under the table. Of course, not long after Marvin died in 2004, Vanity Fair magazine published a story revealing that he’d been broke and Barbara was left trying to continue their philanthropic causes and cope with a bunch of debts. Then a lot of Hollywood wives were really pissed at his example.

I’d promised myself that we would never have to use Maria’s money—neither the money she earned nor any from her family. I wasn’t marrying her because she came from wealth. At that point, I was making $3 million for Predator, and if it did well at the box office, I’d earn $5 million for the next project and $10 million for the next, because we’d been able to nearly double my “ask” with every film. I didn’t know whether or not I’d end up richer than her grandfather Joseph P. Kennedy, but I felt very strongly that we would never have to rely on Shriver or Kennedy money. What was Maria’s was hers. I never asked how much she had. I never asked how much her parents were worth. I hoped that it was as much as they dreamed of having, but I had no interest in it.

I also knew that Maria wouldn’t want a two-bedroom rental apartment lifestyle. I had to provide her with a lifestyle similar to the way she’d grown up.

My new wife and I were extremely proud of what we’d already achieved. She picked a house for me to buy for us after we got engaged, much more lavish and luxurious than the one we’d started in. The new place was a five-bedroom, four-bath, 12,000-square-foot Spanish-style mansion on two acres of a ridge in Pacific Palisades. Wherever you looked, there were beautiful sycamore trees, and we had views of the entire LA Basin. Our street, Evans Road, led up the canyon to Will Rogers State Historic Park, with its fabulous horse and hiking trails and polo grounds. The park was so close that Maria and I would ride our horses up there; it was like a big playground we could use day and night.

In the months before the wedding, I was busy promoting Commando and shooting Raw Deal—the action movie I’d promised to make for Dino De Laurentiis—and getting ready to start Predator. Maria was even busier in New York. But we carved out time for renovating and decorating. We expanded the swimming pool, put in a Jacuzzi, built the fireplace we wanted, and fixed the tiles, the lighting, and the trees. Under the house, where the land sloped down to the tennis court, we excavated and finished a level, which then served as a tennis house, entertainment area, and extra space for guests.

Maria had chosen curtains and fabrics, but when I came back in late May after shooting Predator, they hadn’t yet been installed. She wasn’t due home from New York for another three weeks. I wanted to make sure that the renovation was finished exactly as she’d envisioned it so that Maria and I could move in and have the perfect house to live in as husband and wife. So I leaned on the decorator to finish the job, and there was a frenzy of painting and furnishing and hanging art. I’d been working with the contractors long distance while I was on the Predator set and flying home on weekends to check on the renovation. I also had a Porsche 928 waiting for her at the house.

On the living room wall, the best spot was reserved for my wedding gift to Maria: a silk screen portrait of her I’d commissioned from Andy Warhol. I liked the famous prints he’d made of Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, and Jackie Onassis in the sixties. He’d done these by shooting Polaroid portraits and then picking one to enlarge as the basis for a silk screen. I called him and said, “Andy, you have to do me a favor. I have this crazy idea. You know how you always do the paintings of stars? Well, when Maria marries me, she will be a star! You’ll be painting a star! You’ll be painting Maria!” This made Andy laugh. “So I would like to send her down to your studio, and she will sit for you, and you will photograph her and then paint her.” The image he created of Maria was a dramatic forty-two-inch square painting that captured her wild beauty and intensity. He ended up doing seven copies in different colors: one for my office, one for Maria’s parents, one for himself, and four for this wall, where they were clustered in a giant eight-foot square. Lithographs and paintings by Pablo Picasso, Miró, Chagall, and other artists we’d collected hung elsewhere in the room. But among all of those beautiful images, Maria’s was the gem.

I played a big role in decorating our house, but the wedding itself was out of my hands. The Kennedys have a whole system worked out for weddings in Hyannis Port. They hire the right planners, they handle the limos and buses, they make sure the guest list isn’t so big that people are spilling out the back of the church. For the reception, they know just where in the family compound to put up the heated tents for the cocktails, dinner, and dancing. They manage public and media access so that well-wishers can glimpse the comings and goings and reporters can get the photos and video clips they need without disrupting the event. Not a single detail of food, or entertainment, or accommodations gets missed. And people have a really great time.

Franco was my best man, and I’d invited a few dozen family and friends, and people who had helped me the most in my life: like Fredi Gerstl, Albert Busek, Jim Lorimer, Bill Drake, and Sven Thorsen, the Danish strongman I’d become buddies with during Conan. Maria’s list numbered almost one hundred just in relatives. Then there were her longtime friends like Oprah Winfrey and Bonnie Reiss, and close colleagues from work like her coanchor Forrest Sawyer. There were also friends we knew as a couple, and beyond that an entire galaxy of amazing people who knew Rose Kennedy, Eunice, or Sarge: Tom Brokaw, Diane Sawyer, Barbara Walters, Art Buchwald, Andy Williams, Arthur Ashe, Quincy Jones, Annie Leibovitz, Abigail “Dear Abby” Van Buren, 50 people or more connected to the Special Olympics—and on and on. In all, we had 450 guests, and I probably knew only a third of them.

Seeing so many new faces didn’t detract from the wedding; it made the event even more colorful for me. It was an opportunity to meet a lot of people, full of fun, full of life, full of toasts. Everyone was upbeat. Maria’s family and relatives were extremely gracious. My friends kept coming up and saying, “This is amazing, Arnold.” They had a really good time.

My mother already knew Eunice and Sarge—she’d met them during her annual spring visits. Sarge was always joking with her. He loved Germany and Austria, spoke German to her, and knew just how to make her feel good. He would sing beer-hall songs to her and invite her to waltz. They’d spin through the living room. He always pointed out what a great job she’d done raising me. He would talk about details of Austria, different towns he’d traveled through on his bicycle, and about The Sound of Music, the history of Austria, when the Russians left and Austria became independent, and what a great job of rebuilding the Austrians had done, how he loved the wines, how he loved the opera. My mom would say afterward, “Such a nice man. So educated. How little I know about America compared to how much he knows about Austria!” Sarge was a charmer. He was a professional.

At the wedding, she met Teddy and Jackie too. They were incredibly gracious. Teddy offered his arm and walked her out of the church after the ceremony. He was very good at important little gestures like that; taking care of the family this way was his specialty. Jackie made a fuss over my mom when we went to her house the afternoon before the wedding. Her daughter, Caroline, as maid of honor, was hosting a lunch there for the bridesmaids, groomsmen, and close family—thirty people in all. Not just my mom, but everyone meeting Jackie for the first time walked away impressed, just as I had been when we’d first been introduced at Elaine’s. She talked to everybody, really sat down and engaged in conversation. Having watched her through the years, I could see why she’d been such a popular First Lady. She had an amazing ability to ask questions that would make you wonder, “How did she know that?” She always made my friends feel welcome when I brought them to Hyannis. My mother fell in love with her too.

My mom gave the rehearsal dinner that night at the Hyannisport Club, a golf club overlooking the Shrivers’ house. We billed the evening as an Austrian clambake, and mixing the American and Austrian cultures was the theme. We put out red-and-white-checked tablecloths from an Austrian beer hall, and I showed up wearing a traditional Tyrolean outfit and hat. The menu was a combination of Austrian and American food, with a main course of Wiener schnitzel and lobsters, and a dessert of Sacher torte and strawberry shortcake.

There were great toasts that evening. The toasts on Maria’s side were about her and how great she is and how I’d benefit from being her husband. From my side it was the opposite: what a great guy and perfect human being I am, and how she’d benefit from that. Together we’d make a perfect couple. The Kennedys really know how to celebrate these moments. They all jump in and have a great time. That was very entertaining for the outsiders. And for my friends, it was the first time being exposed to that world. They’d never seen that many toasts and such a lively audience. I took the occasion to give Eunice and Sarge their copy of Warhol’s portrait of Maria. “I’m not really taking her away, because I am giving this to you so you will always have her,” I told them. And then I promised all the guests, “I love her, and I will always take care of her. Nobody should worry.” Sargent put in his two cents: he had this rap about being the luckiest man in the world. “You’re the luckiest guy in the world to marry Maria, but I’m the luckiest son of a bitch alive to be with Eunice. We’re both lucky!”

The wedding was held at St. Francis Xavier, a white clapboard church in the middle of Hyannis, a couple of miles away. It was a Saturday morning, and literally thousands of well-wishers were waiting outside as we arrived. I rolled down the window of the limo and waved to the crowds behind the barricades. There were dozens of reporters and cameras and video crews on hand too.

I loved watching Maria coming up the aisle. She looked so regal with her beautiful lace dress and long train and ten bridesmaids, but at the same time, she was radiating happiness and warmth. Everyone settled down for the formality of the nuptial Mass, during which the exchange of vows takes place about one third of the way through. When the moment came, Maria and I stood before the priest. We were about to say “I do,” when all of a sudden the back door of the church went bang!

Everyone turned around to see what was going on. The priest was staring past us and we looked over our shoulders too. There, silhouetted against the daylight in the entrance of the church, I saw a skinny guy with spiky hair and a tall black woman wearing a dyed-green mink hat: Andy Warhol and Grace Jones.

They were like gunslingers coming in through the swinging doors of a saloon in a Western movie, or at least that’s how it seemed to me because I was seeing it larger than life. I thought, “This fucking guy, I can’t believe it. Stealing the show at my wedding.” It was wonderful in a way. Andy was outrageous. Grace Jones could not do anything low-key. Maria and I were delighted that they made it, and when the priest in his sermon counseled us as a couple to have at least ten good laughs a day, we were already on our way.

There aren’t many guys who would describe their wedding reception as enriching and educational, but that’s how ours was for me. As my new father-in-law took me around to introduce me, I was again in awe of how many different worlds Sarge and Eunice had touched. “This guy ran my Peace Corps operation in Zimbabwe, which then was called Rhodesia …” “You’ll love this guy; he’s the one who took charge when there were riots in Oakland, and we put in VISTA and Head Start.”

I was in my element because I was always eager to meet as many people as possible from different fields and backgrounds. Sarge accounted for the lion’s share of the guests from politics and journalism and the business and nonprofit worlds. It was a collection of people he had worked with in the Peace Corps and the Kennedy administration, in politics over the years, in Moscow on his trade mission there, in Paris during his ambassadorship, and on and on. Another guy he wanted me to meet was from Chicago: “Unbelievable, Arnold, an extraordinary human being. He single-handedly managed the entire legal aid program I started, and now people who have no money can get legal advice and representation.” This went on all day long. “Arnold, come over here! Let me introduce you to this friend from Hamburg. Ha ha, you’ll love talking to him—he cut this deal with the Russians …”

When it came time to dance, Maria ditched her pumps and switched to white sneakers to protect a toe she’d broken the previous week. Then as Peter Duchin and his orchestra struck up a waltz, she wound the train of her dress five or six times around her wrist, and we showed off the steps we’d been practicing, to much applause. My friend Jim Lorimer from Columbus had arranged for us to take ballroom dancing lessons. Those helped us a lot.

The cake was a copy of the legendary one at Eunice and Sarge’s wedding: a carrot cake with white icing and eight tiers, standing more than four feet tall and weighing 625 pounds. Its appearance started another round of toasts.

I made one remark at the reception that seemed like a minor thing at the time but would dog me for years. It involved Kurt Waldheim, the former secretary general of the United Nations, who was running for president of Austria. We’d invited him and other leaders, including President Reagan, the president of Ireland—even the Pope. We didn’t think they’d come, but it would be great to get back letters from them for the wedding album. I’d endorsed Waldheim as a leader of the conservative People’s Party with which I’d been associated since my weight-lifting days in Graz.

A few weeks before the wedding, the World Jewish Congress accused Waldheim of concealing his past as a Nazi officer in Greece and Yugoslavia while Jews there were being sent to the death camps and partisans were being shot. This was hard for me to take in. Like most Austrians, I saw him as one of the greats—as secretary general, he’d been not just a national leader but also a world leader. How could he have any kind of Nazi secrets? He’d have been investigated long before this. Many Austrians thought it was an election-year smear tactic by the rival Social Democrats—a stupid move that embarrassed Austria in the eyes of the world. I said to myself, “I will continue supporting him.”

Although Waldheim did not attend our wedding, the People’s Party sent two representatives to the reception who unveiled an attention-grabbing present: a life-size papier-mâché caricature of Maria and me wearing Austrian folk outfits. In a toast I gave thanking people for all the letters and gifts, I wove that in. “I want to thank also the representatives from the Austrian People’s Party for coming here, for giving us this gift, and I know that this is also with the blessing of Kurt Waldheim. I want to thank him also for it, and it’s too bad he’s going through all these attacks right now, but that’s what political campaigns are all about.”

Someone gave this to USA Today, which mentioned it in a story about the wedding, drawing me into an international controversy that dragged on for years. When it was finally proven that Waldheim had lied about his military record, he came to symbolize Austria’s refusal to face its Nazi past. I was still struggling to understand the horrors of Naziism myself, and if I’d known the truth about Waldheim, I would not have mentioned his name.

That regret was still to come, however. Maria and I jumped in the limo and headed for the airport feeling like this was the best wedding we’d ever been to. It was a very special day. Everyone was happy. Everything was a straight ten.

Maria had told her fans on the CBS Morning News that she was taking off only a few days. I didn’t have much time to honeymoon either. We went to Antigua for three days, and then she came with me to Mexico to spend a couple of days on the Predator set. When we arrived, I had everything prepared: the flowers were ready in the room, and I took Maria to a romantic dinner with mariachi music. When we came back to the room, I opened a bottle of great California wine, which I figured would lead to some good action. Everything was perfect the whole evening—until she went to take a shower. Then I heard loud screams coming from the bathroom, like in a horror movie.

I should have known. Joel Kramer and his stunt crew had decided play a joke on us newlyweds. Actually, it was payback, because some of the stunt guys and I had put spiders in Joel’s shirt and snakes in his bag. The set was like a summer camp in that way. So when Maria opened the shower curtain, there were frogs hanging off it. You’d think she’d understand the mentality, because her cousins in Hyannis were playing practical jokes all the time. But she has a quirk: although she’s physically daring—Maria wouldn’t think twice about jumping off a thirty-foot cliff into the ocean—if she sees an ant, or a spider, or there’s a bee in the bedroom, she freaks. You’d think that a bomb had gone off. Same thing with her brothers. So the frogs really triggered some drama. There was no way Joel could have known this, but even so his joke was highly successful. Fucking Joel screwed up my entire night.

Then Maria headed home, and it was time for me to get back to work as Major Dutch Schaefer, the hero of Predator. It’s a sci-fi action movie, of course, in which I’m leading my team in the jungles of Guatemala as guys are getting picked off and skinned alive by an enemy we don’t understand. (It turns out to be an alien, equipped with high-tech weapons and invisibility gear, that has come to earth to hunt humans for sport.) Producers Joel Silver, Larry Gordon, John Davis, and I took a big risk in picking John McTiernan to direct. He had done only one movie, a low-budget horror film called Nomads about some people who drive around in a van and create mayhem. What set it apart was the tension McTiernan maintained in a film that cost less than $1 million to make. We felt that if he could create that kind of atmosphere with so little money, he must be very talented. Predator would need suspense from the moment the characters arrive in the jungle—we wanted the viewer to feel scared even without the predator around, just from the mists, the camera movements, the way things came toward you. So we gambled that McTiernan could handle a production more than ten times as expensive.

Like any action movie, Predator was more of an ordeal than a pleasure to make. There were all the hardships you’d expect in a jungle: leeches, sucking mud, poisonous snakes, and stifling humidity and heat. The terrain McTiernan picked to shoot on was so rough that there was hardly an inch of level ground. The biggest headache, though, turned out to be the predator itself. Most of the time it keeps itself invisible, but when it appears onscreen it is supposed to look alien and fearsome enough to terrify and wipe out big, macho guys. The predator we had wasn’t up to the job. It had been designed by a special-effects company that the movie studio chose to save money: Stan Winston, who created the Terminator, would’ve cost them $1.5 million, and this other shop charged half that. But the creature came across as ridiculous, not menacing; it looked like a guy in a lizard suit with the head of a duck.

We started to worry as soon as we started test shooting, and after a few scenes, the worry crystallized. The creature didn’t work, it was hokey, it didn’t look believable. Also, Jean-Claude Van Damme, who was playing the predator, was a relentless complainer. We kept trying to work around the problem. Nobody realized that the creature footage couldn’t be fixed until we were all back from Mexico and the film was in the editing room. Finally the producers decided to hire Stan Winston to do a redesign and arranged to send us back down to Palenque to reshoot the climactic confrontation. That’s a night sequence where the predator is revealed fully and goes mano a mano with Dutch in the swamp.

By now it was November, and the jungle was freezing cold at night. Stan’s predator was much bigger and creepier than the one it replaced: a green extraterrestrial, eight and a half feet tall, with beady sunken eyes and insect-like mandibles for a mouth. In the dark it uses thermal vision technology to find its prey, and Dutch, who by this time in the movie has lost all his clothes, covers himself with mud to hide. To shoot that, I had to put cold, wet mud on my body. But instead of actual mud, the makeup artist used pottery clay—the same clay they use to make the bottle-holders that keep your wine chilled at the table in restaurants. He warned me, “This will make the body cool down a few degrees. You may be shivering.” I was shivering nonstop. They had to use heat lamps to warm me, but that made the clay dry out, so they didn’t use them much. I drank jägertee, or hunter’s tea, a schnapps mixture you drink while ice curling. It helped a little, but then you got so drunk it was hard to do the scene. You try to control your shivering while the camera is on, hold onto something really hard to stop the shaking, because as soon as you let go, it starts again. I remembered putting mud all over myself as a kid on the Thalersee and thought, “How did I ever enjoy that?”

Kevin Peter Hall, the seven-foot-two-inch actor who had taken over in the predator suit, was facing his own challenges. He had to look agile, but the costume was heavy and off balance, and with the mask on, he couldn’t see. He was supposed to rehearse without the mask and then remember where everything was. That worked most of the time. But in one fight, Kevin was supposed to slap me around but avoid my head; all of a sudden there was a “whap!” and there was this hand right in my face, claws and all.

The hassle paid off at the box office the following summer. Predator had the second-biggest opening weekend of any 1987 film (after Beverly Hills Cop II) and ended up grossing $100 million. McTiernan turned out to have been a great choice, and you could see from Die Hard the next year that his success with Predator was no fluke. In fact, if a director of his caliber had done the sequel to Predator, the movie could have become a major franchise on a par with Terminator or Die Hard.

I had a parting of the ways with the studio executives about that. What happened with Predator happens to a lot of successful movies with first-time directors. The director goes on making hits, and his fee goes up: after Die Hard, McTiernan’s was $2 million. And, of course, costs had risen in the years since Predator, but the studio executives wanted to do a sequel that would cost no more than the first movie. That ruled out McTiernan. Instead, they hired another relatively inexperienced and inexpensive director; in this case, the guy who’d made A Nightmare on Elm Street 5. Joel Silver wanted me to do Predator 2, but I told him that the movie would take a major dive. Not only was the director wrong, but the script was wrong too. The story was set in Los Angeles, and I told him, “Nobody wants to see predators running around downtown LA. We already have predators. Gang warfare is killing people all the time. You don’t need extraterrestrials to make the town dangerous.” I felt that unless they paid to bring in a good director and a good script, hiring me wasn’t going to do anything. He wouldn’t budge, so I walked away. Predator 2 and all the other Predators that followed flopped, and Joel and I never worked together again.

The studios have the hang of it better today. They do pay for the sequel of a successful picture. They pay the actors more money, and the writers more money, and they bring back the director. It doesn’t matter if the sequel costs $160 million to make. Franchises such as Batman and Ironman are going to gross $350 million per movie at the box office. The Predator movies could have been like that. But with a cheaper director, and cheaper writers and actors, Predator 2 became one of the biggest bombs of 1990. They didn’t learn and made the same mistake with the third Predator movie twenty years after that. Of course it’s always easy to be smart in hindsight.

I was riding the great wave of action movies, a whole new genre that was exploding during this time. Stallone started it with the Rocky movies. In the original Rocky, in 1976, he’d looked like just a regular fighter. But in Rocky II, he had a much better body. His Rambo movies, the first two especially, also had a giant impact. My 1985 movie Commando continued that trend, coming out in the same year as the second Rambo and Rocky IV. Then The Terminator and Predator expanded the genre by adding sci-fi dimensions. Some of these movies were critically acclaimed, and all of them made so much money that the studios could no longer write them off as just B movies. They became as important to the 1980s as Westerns were in the 1950s.

The studios couldn’t wait to cook up new scripts, dust off old scripts, and have writers tailor scripts to me. Stallone and I were the leading forces in the genre—although Sly was really ahead of me and got paid more. There was more work for action stars than either of us could do, and others emerged in response to the demand: Chuck Norris, Jean-Claude Van Damme, Dolph Lundgren, Bruce Willis. Even guys like Clint Eastwood, who were doing action movies all along, started bulking up and ripping off their shirts and showing off muscles.

In all this, the body was key. The era had arrived where muscular men were viewed as attractive. Looking physically heroic became the aesthetic. They looked powerful. It was inspiring: just looking at them made you feel that they could take care of the job. No matter how outlandish the stunt, you would think, “Yeah, he could do that.” Predator was a hit partly because the guys who go into the jungle with me were impressively muscular and big. The movie was Jesse Ventura’s acting debut. I was at Fox Studios when he came to interview for the job, and after he walked out, I said, “Guys, I don’t think there’s even a question that we should get this guy. I mean, he is a navy frogman, he’s a professional wrestler, and he looks the part. He’s big and has a great deep voice; very manly.” I’d always felt we lacked real men in movies, and to me Jesse was the real deal.

My plan was always to double my salary with each new film. Not that it always worked, but most of the time it did. Starting from $250,000 for Conan the Barbarian, by the end of the 1980s, I’d hit the $10 million mark in pay. The progression went like this:

The Terminator

(1984)

$750,000

Conan the Destroyer

(1984)

$1 million

Commando

(1985)

$1.5 million

Red Sonja

“cameo” (1985)

$1 million

Predator

(1987)

$3 million

The Running Man

(1987)

$5 million

Red Heat

(1988)

$5 million

Total Recall

(1990)

$10 million

From there I went on to $14 million for Terminator 2 and $15 million for True Lies. Bang, bang, bang, bang; the rise was very fast.

In Hollywood, you get paid for how much you can bring in. What is the return on investment? The reason I could double my ask was the worldwide grosses. I nurtured the foreign markets. I was always asking, “Is this movie appealing to an international audience? For example, the Asian market is negative on facial hair, so why would I wear a beard in this role? Do I really want to forgo all that money?”

Humor was what made me stand out from other action leads like Stallone, Eastwood, and Norris. My characters were always a little tongue in cheek, and I always threw in funny one-liners. In Commando, after breaking the neck of one of my daughter’s kidnappers, I prop him up next to me in an airline seat and tell the flight attendant, “Don’t disturb my friend, he’s dead tired.” In The Running Man, after strangling one of the evil stalkers with barbed wire, I deadpan, “What a pain in the neck!” and run off.

Using one-liners to relax the viewer after an intense moment started accidentally with The Terminator. There’s a scene where the Terminator has holed up in a flophouse to repair itself. A paunchy janitor pushing a garbage cart down the hall thumps on the door of the Terminator’s room and says, “Hey, buddy, you got a dead cat in there or what?” You see from the Terminator’s viewpoint as it selects from a diagram listing “possible appropriate responses”:

YES/NO

OR WHAT

GO AWAY

PLEASE COME BACK LATER

FUCK YOU

FUCK YOU, ASSHOLE

Then you hear the one it chooses: “Fuck you, asshole.” People in the theaters were howling at that. Was the guy going to be the next victim? Would I blow him away? Would I crush him? Would I send him to hell? Instead, the Terminator just tells him to fuck off, and the guy goes away. It’s the opposite of what you expect, and it’s funny because it breaks the tension.

I recognized that such moments could be extremely important and added wisecracks in the next action film, Commando. Near the end of the movie, the archvillain Bennett nearly kills me, but I finally win and impale him on a broken steam pipe. “Let off some steam,” I joke. The screening audience loved it. People said things like “What I like about this movie is there was something to laugh about. Sometimes action movies are so intense you get numb. But when you break it up and put in some humor, it’s so refreshing.”

From then on, in all my action movies, we would ask the writers to add humor, even if it was just two or three lines. Sometimes a writer would be hired specifically for that purpose. Those one-liners became my trademark, and the corny humor deflected some of the criticism that action films were too violent and one-dimensional. It opened up the movie and made it appealing to more people.

I’d visualize an inventory of all the different countries in my mind’s eye—a little like the Terminator’s list of “possible appropriate responses” in that flophouse scene. “How will this play in Germany?” I’d ask myself. “Will they get it in Japan? How will this play in Canada? How will this play in Spain? How about the Middle East?” In most cases, my movies sold even better abroad than in the United States. That was partly because I traveled all over promoting them like mad. But it was also because the movies themselves were so straightforward. They made sense no matter where you lived. The Terminator, Commando, Predator, Raw Deal, Total Recall—they all focused on universal themes such as good versus evil, or getting revenge, or a vision of the future that anyone would fear.

Red Heat was the only movie that was even slightly political—it was the first American production ever allowed to film in Moscow’s Red Square. This was during the détente period of the mid-1980s, when the USSR and the US were trying to figure out how to work together and end the Cold War. But my intentions were mainly to make a buddy movie, with me as a Moscow cop and Jim Belushi as a Chicago cop teaming up to stop Russian cocaine dealers from sending the stuff to America. Walter Hill, our director, wrote and directed 48 Hrs., and the idea here was to combine action and comedy.

All Walter had in the beginning was an opening scene, which is often how movies get made: you have one idea and then sit down and cook up the rest of the roughly one hundred pages for the script. I play a Soviet detective named Ivan Danko, and in this scene I’m chasing a guy down. I find him in a Moscow pub, and when he resists arrest, we fight. After I have him subdued and helpless on the floor, to the horror of the bystanders, I lift his right leg and brutally break it. Moviegoers would be grossed out by that. Why would you break a guy’s leg? Well, in the next instant, you see that the limb is artificial, and it’s filled with white powder: cocaine. That was Walter’s idea, and as soon as I heard it, I said, “I love it, I’m in.”

We talked back and forth as he wrote the script, and we decided that it would be good to have the buddy relationship reflect the working relationship between East and West. Which is to say that there is a lot of friction between Danko and Belushi’s character, Detective Sergeant Art Ridzik. We’re supposed to be working together, but we’re constantly on each other’s case. He makes fun of my green uniform and my accent. We argue about which is the most powerful handgun in the world. I say it’s the Soviet Patparine. “Oh, come on!” he says. “Everybody knows the .44 Magnum is the big boy on the block. Why do you think Dirty Harry uses it?” And I ask, “Who is Dirty Harry?” But our working together is the only way to stop the cocaine smugglers.

Walter had me watch Greta Garbo in the 1939 film Ninotchka to get a handle on how Danko should react as a loyal Soviet in the West. I got to learn a little Russian, and it was a role for which my own accent was a plus. I loved filming in Moscow and also loved doing the fight scene in the sauna where a gangster challenges Danko by handing him a burning coal. He’s amazed when Danko doesn’t flinch; the cop simply takes the coal and squeezes it in his fist. Then he punches the guy through a window and leaps after him to continue the fight in the snow. We shot the first half of that scene in Budapest’s Rudas Thermal Bath and the second half in Austria because Budapest had no snow.

Red Heat was a success, grossing $35 million in the States, but it wasn’t the smash I’d expected. Why is hard to guess. It could be that audiences were not ready for Russia, or that my and Jim Belushi’s performances were not funny enough, or that the director didn’t do a good enough job. For whatever reason, it just didn’t quite close the deal.

Whenever I finished filming a movie, I felt my job was only half done. Every film had to be nurtured in the marketplace. You can have the greatest movie in the world, but if you don’t get it out there, if people don’t know about it, you have nothing. It’s the same with poetry, with painting, with writing, with inventions. It always blew my mind that some of the greatest artists, from Michelangelo to van Gogh, never sold much because they didn’t know how. They had to rely on some schmuck—some agent or manager or gallery owner—to do it for them. Picasso would go into a restaurant and do a drawing or paint a plate for a meal. Now you go to these restaurants in Madrid, and the Picassos are hanging on the walls, worth millions of dollars. That wasn’t going to happen to my movies. Same with bodybuilding, same with politics—no matter what I did in life, I was aware that you had to sell it.

As Ted Turner said, “Early to bed, early to rise, work like hell, and advertise.” So I made it my business to be there for test screenings. A theater full of people would fill out questionnaires rating the film, and afterward twenty or thirty would be asked to stay and discuss their reactions. The experts from the studio were concerned primarily with two things. One was to see if the movie needed to be changed. If the questionnaires indicated that people didn’t like the ending, the marketers would ask the focus group to elaborate so we could consider changing it. “I thought it was fake for the hero to survive after all that shooting,” they might say, or “I wish you’d shown his daughter one more time so we could see what happened to her.” Sometimes they would point out issues you hadn’t thought about while filming.

The marketers were also looking for cues on how to position the film. If they saw that a majority loved the action, they’d promote it as an action movie. If people loved the little boy who appeared at the beginning, they’d use him in the trailer. If the people responded to a particular theme—say, the star’s relationship with her mother—then they’d play that up.

I was there for personal feedback. I wanted to hear what the test audience thought about the character I played, about the quality of the performance, and about what they’d like to see me do more or less of. That way I knew what I needed to work on and what kinds of parts I should play next. Many actors get their cues from the marketing department, but I wanted it directly from the viewers, without the interpretation. Listening also made me a more effective promoter. If someone said, “This movie isn’t just about payback. It’s about overcoming tough obstacles,” I would write down those lines and use them in the media interviews.

You have to cultivate your audience and expand it with each film. With each movie, it was crucial to have a certain percentage of viewers say, “I would go see another movie of his anytime.” Those are the people who’ll tell their friends, “You’ve got to see this guy.” Nurturing a movie means paying attention to the distributors also: the middlemen who talk theater owners into putting your movie on their screens rather than somebody else’s. The distributors need to know you’re not going to let them hang out there by themselves. Instead, you’ll appear at ShoWest, the National Association of Theatre Owners convention in Las Vegas, and take pictures with the theater owners, and accept an award, and give a talk about your movie, and go to the press conference. You do the things that the distributors feel are important because then they go all out in pushing the theaters. Later that week, one of them might call you and say, “You gave that speech the other day, and I just want you to know how helpful it was. The guys who own these multiplex theaters agreed to give us two screens at each multiplex rather than one screen, because they felt like you are really pushing the movie, that you believe in it, and because you promised to come through their town promoting the movie.”

Early in my movie career, the hardest thing was giving up control. In bodybuilding everything had been up to me. Even though I relied on Joe Weider and my training partners for help, I was in total control of my body, whereas in movies, you depend on others right from the start. When the producer approaches you with the project, you’re relying on him to pick the right director. And when you go on a movie set, you’re relying on the director totally, and a lot of other people besides. I learned that when I had a good director, like a John Milius or a James Cameron, my movies went through the roof because I was directed well. But if I had a director who was confused or did not have a compelling vision for the movie, it would fizzle. I was the same Arnold either way, so the director was the one. After realizing this, I couldn’t take myself too seriously even when I got heaped with praise. I didn’t make The Terminator the success that it was; it was Jim Cameron’s vision, he wrote the script, he directed it, he made the movie great.

I did become part of the decision-making in a lot of films, with power to approve the script, approve the cast, and even to choose the director. But I still made it my rule that once you pick a director, you have to have total faith in him. If you question everything he does, then you will have nothing but struggles and fights. Many actors work that way, but not me. I will do everything I can to make sure that we check out the director beforehand. I’ll call other actors to ask, “Does he handle stress well? Is the guy a screamer?” But after you pick him, you’ve got to go with his judgment. You may have picked the wrong guy, but still you cannot fight throughout the movie.

In 1987, just one week into filming The Running Man, director Andy Davis was fired. The producers and studio executives staged a coup on the set while I was away for a few days promoting the springtime bodybuilding championships in Columbus. By the time I came back, they’d replaced Andy with Paul Michael Glaser, who had gotten into directing TV shows after being an actor on TV. (He played Detective David Starsky on the 1970s series Starsky and Hutch.) He’d never directed a movie, but he was available, and so he was hired.

It was a terrible decision. Glaser was from the TV world, and he shot the movie like it was a television show, losing all the deeper themes. The Running Man is a sci-fi action story based on a novel by Stephen King, built around a nightmare vision of America in 2017—thirty years from when we were shooting. The economy is in a depression, and the United States has become a fascist state where the government uses TV and giant screens in the neighborhoods to distract people from the fact that nobody has a job. This public entertainment goes way beyond comedy or drama or sports. The number one show is The Running Man, a live contest in which convicted criminals are given a chance to run for freedom but are hunted down and slaughtered onscreen like animals. The story follows the hero, Ben Richards, a cop who has been wrongly convicted and winds up as a “runner” fighting to survive.

In fairness, Glaser just didn’t have time to research or think through what the movie had to say about where entertainment and government were heading and what it meant to get to the point where we actually kill people onscreen. In TV they hire you and the next week you shoot, and that’s all he was able to do. As a result, The Running Man didn’t turn out as well as it should have. With such a terrific concept, it should have been a $150 million movie. Instead, the film was totally screwed up by hiring a first-time director and not giving him time to prepare.

Scripts for Total Recall had been kicking around Hollywood for so long that people were saying the project was jinxed. Dino De Laurentiis owned the rights for much of the 1980s and tried to produce the movie twice—once in Rome and again in Australia. It was a different kind of movie from what it ultimately became: less violent and more about the fantasy of taking a virtual trip to Mars.

I was pissed that Dino didn’t offer it to me, because I told him that I would like the part. But he had a different vision. He hired Richard Dreyfuss for the Rome attempt and Patrick Swayze from Dirty Dancing for the Australian attempt. Meanwhile, he gave me Raw Deal. They finally got as far as building sound stages in Australia and were about to start shooting Total Recall when Dino ran into money trouble. This had happened several times during his career. It meant he had to get rid of some of the projects.

I called Mario Kassar and Andy Vajna at Carolco, which was then the fastest-growing independent film production company, riding high from doing the Rambo movies. They’d bankrolled Red Heat, and I thought they’d be perfect for Total Recall. I said, “Dino is wiping out. He has a lot of great projects, and there’s one specifically that I want to do.” They moved fast, launched an all-out assault, and bought it from him within days. I was the driving force through all these years.

So now the question was who should direct. It was still unresolved a few months later when I ran into Paul Verhoeven in a restaurant. We’d never met, but I recognized him: a skinny, intense-looking Dutch guy about ten years older than me. He had a good reputation in Europe, and I’d been impressed by his first two English-language movies, 1985’s Flesh+Blood and, two years later, RoboCop. I went over and said, “I would love to work with you someday. I saw your RoboCop. It’s fantastic. I remember Flesh+Blood, and it was also fantastic.”

“I’d love to work with you too,” he said. “Maybe we can find a project.”

I called him the next day. “I have the project,” I said and described Total Recall. Next I called Carolco and said, “Send Paul Verhoeven the script immediately.”

A day later Verhoeven told me that he loved the script, even though there were a few changes he wanted to make. That was normal: every director wants to pee on the script and make his mark. His suggestions were smart and made the story much better. He immediately dug into the research on Mars: How would you free the oxygen that’s bottled up in the rocks there? There had to be a scientific basis for it. Paul added a dimension of realism and scientific fact. Control of Mars in the story now hinged on controlling the oxygen. So many things he said were brilliant. He had a vision. He had enthusiasm. We got together with Carolco and discussed what he wanted to change, and Paul signed on to direct the movie.

That was in the fall of 1988. We went into full swing in rewriting, and then into full swing on where to shoot it, and then into full swing on preproduction, and we started filming in late March at the Churubusco Studios in Mexico City. We shot all the way through the summer.

We chose Mexico City in part for the architecture: some of its buildings had just the futuristic look the movie needed. Computer-graphics imagery was not yet very capable, so you had to do a lot of work in the real world, either by finding the perfect location or by building full-scale sets or miniatures. The Total Recall production was so complex that it made Conan the Barbarian seem small-scale. The crew, which numbered more than five hundred people, built forty-five sets that tied up eight sound stages for six months. Even with the savings that came from working in Mexico, the movie cost more than $50 million, making it the second most expensive production in history at that point, after Rambo III. I was glad that Rambo III had been a Carolco production, so Mario and Andy weren’t allergic to the risk.

What drew me to the story was the idea of virtual travel. I play this construction worker named Doug Quaid who sees an advertisement from a company called Rekall and goes there to book a virtual vacation to Mars. “For the memory of a lifetime,” the ad says, “Rekall, Rekall, Rekall.”

“Have a seat, make yourself comfortable,” the salesman says. Quaid is trying to save money, but right away the salesman, who’s a little slippery, tries to get him to upgrade from the basic trip. He asks, “What is it that is exactly the same about every vacation you’ve ever taken?”

Quaid can’t think of anything.

“You! You’re the same,” says the salesman. “No matter where you go, there you are. Always the same old you.” Then he offers alternate identities as an add-on for the trip. “Why go to Mars as a tourist when you can go as a playboy, or a famous jock, or a …”

Now Quaid is curious in spite of himself. He asks about going as a secret agent.

“Aaaah,” says the salesman, “let me tantalize you. You’re a top operative, back under deep cover on your most important mission. People are trying to kill you left and right. You meet a beautiful, exotic woman … I don’t wanna spoil it for you, Doug. Just rest assured, by the time the trip is over, you get the girl, you kill the bad guys, and you save the entire planet.”

I loved that scene of a guy selling me a trip that, in reality, I never would actually take—it was all virtual. And, of course, when the Rekall surgeons go to implant the chip containing the Mars memories into Quaid’s brain, they find another chip already there, and all hell breaks loose. Because he isn’t Doug Quaid: he’s a government agent who was once assigned to the rebellious mining colonies on Mars and whose identity has been wiped and replaced with Quaid’s.

The story twists and turns. You never know until the very end: did I take this trip? Was I really the hero? Or was it all inside my head, and I’m just a blue-collar jackhammer operator who may be schizophrenic? Even at the end, you aren’t necessarily sure. For me, it connected with the sense I had sometimes that my life was too good to be true. Verhoeven knew how to balance the mind games with action. There’s a scene in Total Recall where Quaid, now on Mars, stands in front of his enemies as they start shooting at him from close range. Thousands of bullets are flying, and you’re grabbed by the suspense. Suddenly he vanishes, and you hear him calling out from nearby, “Ha ha ha, I’m over here!” They were shooting at a hologram he’d projected of himself. In science fiction you can get away with such stuff, and no one even questions it. That’s great, great storytelling; the kind that has international appeal and staying power. It wouldn’t matter if you watched Total Recall twenty years from now, you could still enjoy it, just as you can still enjoy Westworld today. There’s just something very appealing about futuristic movies if they have great action and believable characters.

It was a tough movie to make, with lots of stunts and injuries and craziness and night shooting and day shooting and dust. But when the set is the tunnels of Mars, it’s interesting work. Verhoeven did a great job directing me and the other leads, Rachel Ticotin, Ronny Cox, Michael Ironside, and Sharon Stone. Sharon, who plays Quaid’s wife, Lori, is actually a government agent sent to keep an eye on him. She follows him to Mars, breaks into his room, and kicks him in the stomach.

“That’s for making me come to Mars,” she says. By the end of the next scene, she’s saying, “Doug … you wouldn’t hurt me, would you, honey? Sweetheart, be reasonable … We’re married,” while she’s pulling out a gun to kill him. He shoots her between the eyes. “Consider that a divorce,” he says. Where else in movies do you get away with that: a guy shoots his beautiful wife in the head and then makes a wisecrack? No such thing. Forget about it. That’s what makes science fiction wonderful. And what makes acting wonderful.

Working with Sharon will always be a challenge. She is a sweetheart of a person when not on the set, but there are some actors who just need more attention. One violent scene was hard to film because I was supposed to grab her by the neck, and she freaked. “Don’t touch me! Don’t touch me!” At first I figured that she hadn’t been brought up like a tomboy and tried to sympathize, but it was more than that. We found out that she’d had a serious neck trauma early in her life. I think she even had a scar.

“Sharon,” I said, “we all rehearsed this in the hotel room on Sunset. Paul was there, we all were there, going through scene by scene. Why did you never say, ‘By the way, when we get into the fight scene, it says here that you’re strangling me, I have a little hang-up about my neck’? Then we could have worked around it step-by-step. I would gently put my hand on your neck, and then you let me know when I can squeeze tighter and when we can get a little rough. Because I’m the first one to understand.” Paul calmed her down, and Sharon was willing to work through the scene. She wanted it to be a success; we just had to go through the difficult step first. That’s the way it was.

When you’re an actor and when you’re a director, you deal with all of those problems. No one gets up in the morning and says, “I’m going to be difficult today,” or “I’m going to derail the movie,” or “I’m going to be a bitch.” People just have their hang-ups and insecurities, and acting definitely brings them out. Because it’s you who is being judged, it’s your facial expressions, your voice, your personality, your talent—it’s everything about you so it makes you vulnerable. It’s not some product you’ve made or job you’ve done. If someone tells the makeup guy, “Can you tone this down a little bit? I have too much powder there,” he says, “Oh, sorry,” and just wipes it off. But if someone says, “Can you get rid of that self-conscious smile while you’re doing the scene? You have something weird going on in your face,” you feel like “Jesus!” Now you don’t know what to do with your face. Now you’re self-conscious. In acting you take criticism so much more personally. You get upset. But every job has its downside.

In spite of Verhoeven’s amazing work, Total Recall almost got lost on the way to the screen. The trailer we had playing in movie theaters in anticipation of the movie’s release was really bad. It was too narrow; it didn’t convey the film’s scope and weirdness. As always, I was looking at the marketing data from the studio: the “tracking studies” as they’re called, which measure a movie’s buzz.

Marketing departments generate hundreds of statistics, and the trick is to find, right away, the numbers that are really important. The ones I lock in on are “awareness” and “want to see,” which measure how people answer the questions “On this list of movies that are coming out, which have you heard about and which do you want to see?” If people respond, “I know about Total Recall and Die Hard 2, and I’m dying to see them,” then you know your movie will be up there. An awareness figure in the low to mid-90s means that your movie will probably open at number one and make at least $100 million at the box office. For every percentage point below that, you might gross $10 million less, which is why studios and directors often tweak their movies at the last minute.

Another useful measure, “unaided awareness,” shows whether people spontaneously name your movie among the films they know are coming up. A score of 40 percent or more means you have a winner. Two other numbers also matter a lot: “first choice,” which has to hit 25 percent to 30 percent to guarantee success; and “definite interest,” which has to be between 40 percent and 50 percent.

With some hits, like Conan the Barbarian, the numbers are promising right from the start. With other films, they signal that it could go south. That was the case with Total Recall. Even after weeks of trailers and advertisements, its awareness was in the 40s, not the 90s, first choice was only 10 percent, and it wasn’t being named as a “want to see.”

I knew pretty much all there was to know about the marketing of movies by then, but it wasn’t doing me much good. The source of the problem wasn’t Total Recall itself but TriStar Pictures, the distributor, which was responsible for cutting the trailers and handling the publicity. Its marketers didn’t know what to do with the film, and the studio itself was in upheaval. TriStar and its sister studio, Columbia Pictures, were being taken over by Sony and merged in one of those 1980s megadeals. New leadership had arrived—Peter Guber and Jon Peters—to oversee the whole thing, which meant that many TriStar executives were about to lose their jobs.

In most cases, a change in studio management can sink a movie. Not only do the new guys have their own projects, but also they want to make the previous administration look bad. That wasn’t a problem with Guber and Peters, both of them highly successful producers, because they were animals. They just wanted success, no matter who started the project. Over the years, I’d gotten to know Guber well enough to be able to get him on the phone and raise the alarm about Total Recall.

“Peter, we are three weeks away from opening, and there’s only a forty percent awareness of the movie,” I said. “That, to me, is disastrous.”

“What’s the problem?” he asked.

“The problem is that your studio is screwing up the publicity campaign and the trailers that are in the movie houses. But don’t take my word for it. I want you and Jon to have a screening of the movie and the trailer. I’m going to sit there with you. Let’s look, and you tell me what you think.”

So we sat down and watched Total Recall and the trailer. “This is incredible,” Peter said. “The movie looks like a hundred-million-dollar movie, but the trailer makes it look like a twenty-million-dollar movie.” He was all set to call in the TriStar marketers and say, “I want to see size, guys! I want to see the big action that we have here!”

But I stopped him. “I think we’ve got to hire outside help,” I said. “Don’t let the studio make those decisions anymore, because they’re not capable until you clean house. You haven’t done that. The old guard is still there. Give the movie to an outside company to do the marketing. Let’s go to the top three and have a bidding war to see which firm comes up with the best idea.”

They listened, and we held meetings with three promotion firms. Cimarron/Bacon/O’Brien, which was number one in the business, articulated the failings of the Total Recall trailer even better than I had. It won the contract, and by the following weekend, we were out there in the marketplace with new trailers and a totally different campaign. It sold the movie using taglines like, “They stole his mind. Now he wants it back. Get ready for the ride of your life,” and “How would you know if someone stole your mind?” The trailers highlighted the amazing action and special effects. They got the message across: in fourteen days, we went from a 40 percent awareness to 92 percent awareness. It was the talk of the town. Joel Silver called, in spite of our falling-out over Predator, and said, “Fantastic. Fantastic. It’s going to blow everyone away.”

Sure enough, Total Recall had not only the number one spot at the box office in its opening weekend, it was the number one opening weekend of all time for a nonsequel movie. We pulled in $28 million in the first three days, on the way to $120 million that year in the States alone. The equivalent today would be more than $200 million, because the ticket prices have doubled. The film was a huge success abroad as well, earning over $300 million worldwide. It won a Special Achievement Oscar for its visual effects. (A Special Achievement Oscar is how the Motion Picture Academy honors an accomplishment for which there is no set category.) Paul Verhoeven had a masterful vision and did a great job. I was proud that my interest and passion helped to bring about the movie. But the experience also proves how important marketing is—how important it is to tell the people what this is about; really blow up their skirt and make them say, “I have to go see this movie.”