Total Recall: My Unbelievably True Life Story

CHAPTER 20 The Last Action Hero

NOBODY IN HOLLYWOOD WINS all the time. At some point, you’re bound to get a beating. The next summer, it was my turn, with Last Action Hero. We’d promised the world a blockbuster hit: “the big ticket of ’93” and the “biggest movie of the summer” was how we promoted the movie. Terminator 2: Judgment Day had been the biggest movie of 1991, and the expectation was that Last Action Hero should top it.

Instead, Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park became the summer hit everybody had to see; it ended up outdoing even E.T. as the biggest success in movie history. Meanwhile, we delivered a film that didn’t have the snappiness it needed to be great entertainment, and we had the bad luck to have scheduled the movie’s release for the weekend after Jurassic Park’s opening. From the moment Last Action Hero hit the theaters, it got stomped. The front-page banner headline of Variety said, “Lizards Eat Arnold’s Lunch.”

But in fact, Last Action Hero made money and was a failure only in comparison to what had been anticipated. If I hadn’t been such a big star, no one would have noticed. It was too bad, because I loved the idea of the movie. It was a combination action movie and comedy, the two kinds of roles I did best. To appeal to the broadest audience, we were making it PG-13—a big summer fun ride, essentially; a spoof, without too much graphic violence, crude language, or sex. I starred as the action hero, Jack Slater, a maverick Los Angeles Police Department detective. I was also the movie’s executive producer, which meant that I had to approve every facet of the project: developing the script, picking the director and the cast, lining up the studio for financing, distribution, and marketing, setting the budget, getting a PR firm on board, planning the foreign release, and on and on. The added responsibility was a pleasure. In the past, I’d often taken an active hand in my movies, bringing together the deal or lining up the director, and, of course, planning the marketing. But sometimes when I said, “Let me see the poster” or “Let’s figure out a better photo to use,” I felt like I was butting in. Now I could be involved in everything, from dreaming up promotional stunts to approving the prototypes for Jack Slater toys.

The plot is built around a kid named Danny Madigan, an eleven-year-old who is the ultimate fan. He’s obsessed with action movies and knows everything there is to know about them. Danny gets a magic ticket that lets him cross into the latest film featuring the action hero Jack Slater, his all-time favorite.

For director, I was happy to land John McTiernan, who had made Predator, as well as Die Hard and The Hunt for Red October. John always has great clarity of vision, and on Last Action Hero that gave me my first hint of trouble. We were having a drink after shooting until three in the morning one night in New York, and John said, “What we’re really making here is E.T.” When I heard that, I had a sinking feeling that maybe the whole PG-13 thing was a mistake. Even though we had a kid costar in the movie, people might not buy me doing a family-friendly action film. That was okay for Harrison Ford in Raiders of the Lost Ark but not me. I’d made the comedies, of course, but those were different because no one expects you to blow people up in a comedy. When you’re selling a movie with the word action in the title, you’d better deliver some. Conan II had fizzled because we’d made it PG. Now we were betting we could pack in enough amazing stunts and energy to make Last Action Hero live up to its name.

The idea of a warmer, more cuddly action movie did seem right for the times. Arkansas governor Bill Clinton had just beaten George Bush in the 1992 presidential election, and the media were full of stories about baby boomers taking over from the WWII generation and about how America was now going in an antiviolence direction. Entertainment journalists were saying, “I wonder what this means for the conservative hard-core action heroes like Sylvester Stallone, Bruce Willis, and Arnold Schwarzenegger. Are the audiences now more into peace and love?” That’s the trend I wanted to connect with. So when the toy people showed up with their prototypes of a Jack Slater doll, I vetoed the combat weapons they proposed. I said, “This is the nineties, not the eighties.” Instead of wielding a flamethrower, the toy Jack Slater threw a punch and said, “Big mistake!”—which was Slater’s tagline against the bad guys. On the toy package it said, “Play it smart. Never play with real guns.”

We went all out on merchandising and promotion. Besides the action toys, we licensed seven kinds of video games, a $20 million promotion with Burger King, a $36 million “ride film” to go into amusement parks, and—this was my favorite—NASA picked us to be the first-ever paid advertisement in outer space. We painted “Last Action Hero” and “Arnold Schwarzenegger” on the sides of a rocket and then held a national sweepstakes whose winners would get to push the launch button. We put up a four-story-tall inflatable statue of Jack Slater on a raft just off the beach at Cannes during the film festival in May, and I set a personal record there by giving forty TV interviews and fifty-four print interviews in a single twenty-four-hour period.

Meanwhile, the production was running late. At our only test screening, on May 1, the movie was still so unfinished that it ran for two hours and twenty minutes, and you couldn’t make out most of the dialogue. By the end, the audience was bored. After that, the schedule was so tight that we ran out of time for more tests. Instead, we were forced to fly blind without the feedback you need to fine-tune a movie. Still, nobody at the studio wanted to postpone the opening, because that might create the perception that the movie was in trouble, and I agreed.

A lot of people liked Last Action Hero, as it turned out. But in the movie business, that’s not enough. You can’t have people just like your movie, you need them to be passionate. Word of mouth is what makes movies big, because while you can put in $25 million or $30 million to promote the movie on the first weekend, you can’t afford to keep doing that every week.

We had terrific awareness and anticipation going in. Yet maybe because of Jurassic Park, ticket sales were below expectations the first weekend: $15 million instead of the $20 million we’d predicted. And when I realized that people were coming out of the theaters warm but not hot, saying things like “It was actually pretty good,” I knew we were dead. Sure enough, the second weekend, our box office dropped by 42 percent.

The criticism went way beyond Last Action Hero. My career was over, history. Writers attacked everything I’d ever done in movies, as if to say, “What do you expect from a guy who works with John Milius and talks about crushing his enemies? That’s the world that they want to live in. We want to live in a compassionate world.”

Politics came into it. As long as I’d been on a roll, I’d never been attacked for being Republican, even though Hollywood and the entertainment press are generally liberal. Now that I was down, they could unload. Reagan and Bush were out, Republicans were out, and so were mindless action movies and all the macho shit. Now was the time for Bill Clinton and Tom Hanks and movies that had meaning.

I framed the criticism philosophically and tried to minimize the whole thing. I had all kinds of movie projects lined up—True Lies, Eraser, and Jingle All the Way—enough to feel confident that one movie going in the toilet would have no impact on my career or on the money I made or on anything real. I said to myself it didn’t matter, because at one point or another, you’re going to get the beating. It could have been for another movie. It could have been three years later. It could have been five years later.

No matter what you tell yourself or what you know, at the time you’re going through it, it is bad. It’s embarrassing to fail at the box office and have your movie not open well. It’s embarrassing to have terrible stories written about you. It’s embarrassing to have people start calling this your year to fail. As always, I had the two voices battling inside my head. The one was saying, “Goddammit, oh my God, this is terrible.” And the other was saying, “Now let’s see what you are made of, Arnold. Let’s see how ballsy you are. How strong are your nerves? How thick is your skin? Let’s see if you can drive around in your convertible with the top down and smile at people, knowing that they know that you just came out with a fucking stinker. Let’s see if you can do that.”

I had all this stuff going on in my mind, beating myself up and trying to encourage myself at the same time, wondering how to go through this. It was kind of a repeat of the night after I lost Mr. Universe against Frank Zane back in 1968.

Maria was a great support. “Look, the movie was good,” she said. “Maybe it was not what we expected, but it was good, and you should be proud. Now let’s move on. Let’s go to the next project.” We went to our vacation house in Sun Valley, Idaho, and played with the kids. “Don’t take this so seriously,” she said. “Look what we have here. You should think about that, not about the stupid movie. Those things come and go. Plus, on top of it, out of your twenty or so movies, at least two-thirds were successful, so you have nothing to complain about.”

But I think she too was disappointed and probably embarrassed when friends called. That’s what they do in Hollywood. They say, “I’m so sorry about the box-office grosses,” when they are really trying to see how you respond. So Maria was getting calls from friends saying things like, “Oh my God, I saw the LA Times story. God, I’m so sorry! Is there anything we can do?” That kind of dialogue.

We all do it. It’s human nature to empathize with someone else’s troubles. I would call Tom Arnold if one of his movies went down. I would call Stallone. I’d say, “Fuck the LA Times, fuck the trades, those stupid motherfuckers. You’re a great, talented actor.” That’s what you do. But at the same time, there is still a side of you that wonders, “What is he going to say?” So why wouldn’t people call me and do the same thing?

And when you feel embarrassed like I did, you tend to assume that the whole world is focused on your failure. I’d go into a restaurant, and somebody would say, “Oh, hey, how are you doing? I see the new movie’s out, that’s great!” And I’d feel like, “That’s great? You motherfucker. Didn’t you read the LA Times?” But, in fact, not everybody reads the LA Times or Variety or goes to see every movie. The poor guy probably knows nothing about it and just wants to say something nice.

These woes were nothing another big hit wouldn’t fix. Before summer ended, I was back in front of Jim Cameron’s cameras, galloping a black horse across downtown Washington, DC, chasing a terrorist on a motorbike. True Lies was a large-scale action comedy that had over-the-top special effects, including a shoot-out between terrorists holed up in a Miami skyscraper and me in a Harrier jet, and a nuclear explosion that takes out one of the Florida Keys. And it had funny, complicated relationships, especially between me and my onscreen wife, played by Jamie Lee Curtis. My character, Harry Tasker, is a James Bond–style superspy whose wife, Helen, initially thinks that he’s a computer salesman. Jamie Lee played the part so well that she got nominated for a comedy Golden Globe.

I’d learned about True Lies the previous year, when Bobby Shriver called and said he’d seen a French movie that I might like to remake for the American screen. “It’s called La Totale!,” he said, “and it’s about this 007-type ass-kicking guy whose wife doesn’t know what he does for a living. Sometimes he comes home all banged up and has to make excuses. He’ll be arresting these international criminals, and, meanwhile, he can’t figure out how to deal with his teenage daughter, who’s doing crazy things.”

“Sounds funny,” I said.

“Yeah, yeah, it’s comedy and action. You laugh, but there’s a lot of suspense.” I called the movie’s agent and asked him to send it over, and I fell in love with it. Bobby was right, though: it was too static for an American movie and needed action and energy. “Jim Cameron!” I thought. “He’s been planning to shoot Spider-Man, but that just fell through.” So I called Cameron and said, “Let’s do this together, the way you envision things: big.”

Soon we had a deal with Fox, and Jim was writing the script. All his movies feature strong female characters, and he transformed Helen Tasker from an ordinary hausfrau to the character Jamie Lee plays: smart and sexy, with her own secret life. He’d call me in to consult while the script was taking shape. At one point, we holed up for two days in Las Vegas, exploring how I would talk to my wife, how I’d confront her if I suspected her of having an affair, what I would say to a terrorist before I killed him, how I would handle it if I found out my daughter was stealing from my friend. In those conversations, we tailored the rhythm of the dialogue to me. The timing of the project worked out perfectly: just a few weeks after the disappointment of Last Action Hero, we went into preproduction and were shooting by September 1.

Maria and I turned the making of True Lies into a family adventure. She was eight months’ pregnant when the filming started, and when she announced her maternity leave on her show First Person with Maria Shriver, she told the viewers, “Arnold will be here in Los Angeles when I give birth. Then I’ll pack up my family and go with him, and see how long I last as a set wife.” Cameron arranged it so that we would shoot in LA for three weeks until Patrick was born. Then the production moved to Washington, DC, and sure enough, a few days later, Maria, Katherine, Christina, the baby, and the nanny joined me.

We lived in Washington for a month, and it was an extremely happy time. Cameron, as usual, preferred shooting at night. So I’d work until daybreak, then come home and sleep, and in the afternoon, I’d get up and play with the kids. Katherine was now four and Christina, two and a half, and besides just tickling and horsing around, one of the things we liked to do was paint. My assistant, Ronda, the artist, had gotten me back into painting, something I’d loved as a kid. I’d always talked about going back to it, but I never had the patience to assemble all the materials and sit down to try. So one Saturday morning she came over to the house with a selection of acrylic paints and canvas and said, “For the next three hours, we’re going to paint.”

“Okay,” I said.

We sat, and I picked out a Matisse from an art book and set about copying it: a room with a rug, a piano, and a flower in a vase, with French doors opening to a balcony overlooking the sea. That got me back into art. So now I would draw castles in pen and ink and paint Christmas and birthday cards for Maria and the kids. The girls and I got into this delightful rhythm of making drawings and playing together, and I crayoned a beautiful Halloween pumpkin for Patrick and a birthday cake with candles for Maria.

We were like gypsies for the next several months. We moved with the True Lies production to Miami, where I took Maria and the girls jet skiing. Then we moved to Key West, and then Rhode Island, and, finally, back out west. I did much better than my secret agent character at integrating family and work. Cameron ran an incredibly organized set, and each day there was always time for work and for play. Even so, making True Lies was challenging, and I don’t just mean the many hours I spent doggedly practicing the tango for the ballroom scenes. Cameron was pushing the envelope with the stunts and special effects, and in addition to employing forty-eight stunt people, he had the actors do many stunts ourselves. Jamie Lee dangled from a helicopter that lowered her onto a speeding car on the bridge that joins the Florida Keys. I swam in the ocean to escape a wall of flames. I trusted Cameron not to lead us down the path of death, but those stunts were inherently risky, and if you screwed up, nobody could protect you 100 percent.

My closest call was riding that black horse. In the movie, Harry Tasker chases the terrorist on a motorcycle across a Washington, DC, park, into a luxury hotel, through a ballroom and a fountain, and into a bank of elevators with people wearing tuxedoes and ball gowns until he finally corners the bad guy on the roof. But incredibly, the terrorist revs his bike and does a spectacular jump off the building and into the rooftop pool of an adjacent building. In the heat of the chase, Harry spurs his horse and charges the edge of the roof to make the leap. But at the last instant, the horse puts on the brakes and comes to a skidding stop—so suddenly that Harry flips out of the saddle in a big arc over the horse’s neck and ends up dangling by the reins over the street many stories below. Now his life depends on the horse, which he’s trying to coax to step back from the edge. The rooftop was actually a studio set built ninety feet up in the air. The movie crew was nervous that the horse might not stop in time and we’d skid over the edge, so they’d extended a safety platform, like a heavy-duty gangplank, out from the edge of the roof. That way, if the horse took an extra step or two, we wouldn’t fall. The image of the platform would be edited out of the final print.

Doing a stunt like that, you need a really feisty horse, because you have to do a lot of takes. An ordinary horse will figure out that you are not really going to let it jump, so after the first few tries, it won’t charge all the way to the edge of the roof. Instead, it will slow down halfway across and come to an easy stop. But a feisty horse loves the idea of jumping so much that he’ll charge the edge of the roof all day, hoping that this time you’ll let him go. So I was on a feisty horse, well trained but very aggressive. I loved it because I knew how to handle the animal from my training as Conan.

Before we could start, they had to check the camera angles and measure the focus. So I had to walk the horse to the edge of the roof and onto the gangplank above the studio floor. Suddenly, by accident, one of the cameras on a long boom dropped down into the horse’s face. It actually hit the horse—not hard, but enough to spook him. He tried to back up, but his hooves started slipping on the gangplank. I slid off him as fast as I could, but there was no place to go: I was on the gangplank, ninety feet up, and under the horse. All I could think was “Stay alive, stay on this platform, watch those hooves.” He was dancing around, and if he stepped on me or slipped again, he could take us both down. I realized that people have survived much larger falls. But I knew that in this case, the horse and I would land on the cement floor, and it would be over.

The last thing anybody thought was that just taking measurements would be dangerous. But our stunt director, Joel Kramer, knew that this stunt had never been tried before, and he was alert. I saw him jump out onto the platform and hold on to the horse, calming it and gently easing it back so that I could escape.

My brain worked the way it always does when I have a close call: I immediately dismissed the episode as if it didn’t exist. Once the horse settled down, we came back and shot the scene just as we’d planned. But I gave Joel a box of Montecristo cigars. Everybody realized that if he hadn’t looked out for us, the horse and I would probably be dead.

Maria was too much of a force to stay on the mommy track completely for very long. By the time we were in Florida, she was already back at work, lining up future stories, and when shooting broke for the production to move to Rhode Island, she and I went to Cuba for a day. Cuba, of course, was still off-limits to Americans, but Maria could go as a journalist. She’d already conducted a couple of interviews with President Fidel Castro, including one in which she asked him point-blank if he’d had anything to do with killing JFK. Now she was laying the groundwork for another interview, and I went along as the spouse.

The high point for me, of course, was cigars. While Maria was busy with her meetings, I visited the Partagas factory, where they make Cohibas, Punches, Montecristos, and other legendary brands. I love factories, and whenever I’m passionate about a product, I want to see it being made. I love to watch cars being produced, shoes crafted, and glass blown. I love going to the Audemars Piguet watch factory in Switzerland to see the technicians at work in their white coats, gloves, glasses, and headgear so that no dust gets in the mechanism. And I also enjoy stopping at the wood-carving shops in Germany’s Black Forest, where they hand carve religious figures and masks. This Cuban factory was cigar heaven. Imagine a very large grade school classroom for a hundred students, with benches and wooden desks like in the old days. That’s exactly what it looked like. Men and women sat at the desks rolling cigars, and in the middle of the room was a platform, just like we had when I was in middle school, where the teacher was always elevated above the class. Here there was a guy sitting and reading the news out loud. My Spanish isn’t good enough that I understood everything, but it was news interwoven with propaganda. To sit there and read the news like that, you have to be colorful, almost an entertainer, like Robin Williams as the deejay in Good Morning, Vietnam. This guy was like that, talking and exclaiming a mile a minute and waving his hands. I’m sure it helped the workers pass the time.

I was amazed to see how they treat that extraordinary tobacco like gold. I’d seen security measures like this in the diamond and gold mines of South Africa but never anywhere else. When the workers arrive, they file into a huge room that was humidified perfectly and where the leaves are hanging—big, long leaves, perfectly groomed and cured. Each worker got an allotment of leaves and with it, three cigars for himself or herself. Those cigars were not at all as high quality as the leaves, though, and the rule was “Don’t ever roll a cigar for yourself.” From that point on, the workers would be checked so that all the tobacco was accounted for.

That’s how precious the tobacco is. It has to be grown a certain way. It has to be treated a certain way. It has to be groomed. It has to be carefully dried until it turns brown and is ready to be rolled. Everything has to be perfect, and the Cubans are geniuses at this. They have the best climate, they have the best soil, and they have the tradition: generations of people who are passionate about rolling cigars and who are always looking for ways to make the cigar ever more perfect.

You see them make the cigar: first the core, which has a particular quality of tobacco; and then the binder leaf, which has a different quality of tobacco; and then the wrapper, which has to be a leaf with absolutely no veins. When you look at a cigar and it has those thick veins in it, then it’s a cheaper cigar or someone wasn’t paying attention. You can buy a cigar like that for $8, and it will smoke well, but it’s not a pretty cigar like Davidoffs usually are, or Montecristos, or Cohibas. I watched the workers putting on the cigar bands. As with everything, it’s important to have a great-looking label. When you’re a cigar smoker, the interest increases with the band—especially if it looks international, if it looks Cuban, bright and Latino and loud, with the reds and yellows and sometimes a beautifully painted female figure.

Cuban cigars truly are as good as people say. There are plenty of fake Cubans around, but if you’re an expert, you can sniff out the fake ones from the real ones within seconds because the real Cuban cigar smells strongly like fertilizer. I know that sounds weird, but that’s how they smell. It tastes delicious to smoke, but when you open up the box and inhale—someone who doesn’t know about cigars wouldn’t like it.

Now that Bill Clinton was in the White House, my name was no longer quite so golden around Washington anymore. Even before Inauguration Day, Donna Shalala, the new secretary of Health and Human Services, asked me to resign as fitness czar. She said simply, “You campaigned for Bush, and we cannot have you be the chairman of the President’s Council.” And when we started shooting True Lies and asked Bruce Babbitt, the new secretary of the interior, for permission to ride the black horse through the reflecting pool at the Washington Monument, he turned us down flat even though they’d done it with other movies.

Maria was not a bit surprised. “Welcome to politics. That’s just the way it is,” she said. Of course, she was sorry to see me forced to give up the position as chairman. I was good at it, and I loved it. On the other hand, even though she liked George Bush personally, she couldn’t wait for Bill Clinton to get in. Deep down, what the balance of her feelings was, I don’t know. There may have been a little bit of a smirk mixed in there, because I’d been riding the Republican wave for so long, telling her Ronald Reagan this and George Bush that and how conservatives were going to straighten out the country. She couldn’t wait for a change.

I’d learned so much as presidential fitness czar that I knew exactly what I wanted to focus on next. Three years of travel around the United States had made me increasingly concerned about a major issue involving kids: too many of them were rattling around after school and in the summer with nothing to do and too little adult supervision. No matter what state I visited, I’d see the kids being let out of school at three o’clock. Half of them were getting picked up, or had a school bus, and half of them were just milling around.

As I got interested in this, I became friends with Danny Hernandez, an ex-marine who ran the Hollenbeck Youth Center in a poor, gang-infested part of LA. In Danny’s experience, summer vacations were always the toughest time for the kids; the time when they were most prone to become involved in crime, drugs and alcohol, and gangs. So in 1991 he developed the Inner-City Games—kind of like the Olympics—to give meaning and structure to the summer months. From June through August, kids from the different schools would train, and then on the last day of vacation they would compete.

Danny took me to see the center, which was the product of an unusual collaboration in the 1970s between local businesses and the LAPD. It had basketball courts, a weight room, and physical education classes, plus a computer room and computer classes and a place for doing homework. There was a beautiful boxing ring too, because this was East Los Angeles, a Latino area, and boxing is a big part of the culture. The idea, Danny explained, was to provide kids with a place to go and to give problem kids a second chance. Police stations in Hollenbeck and other East LA neighborhoods would often send kids to the center instead of to court. They’d tell the kid, “Just get off the street, go work out there after you’re through with school, do your homework there, there are computers there, there is a gym there, there’s boxing, so go!”

The Los Angeles riots in the spring of 1992 brought the need to keep kids out of trouble painfully to the fore. What triggered the violence was the acquittal of the LAPD officers who’d beaten an African-American motorist named Rodney King after he eluded a traffic stop. A video made at the scene indicated that police beat him severely despite the fact that he’d surrendered. Parts of LA went up in flames, dozens of people were killed, and there was rioting in other cities too. During the rioting, the Hollenbeck Youth Center served as a safe haven. I made a public service music video with Arsenio Hall, the actor and talk-show host, called “Chill,” which begged people to calm down.

In the aftermath, Danny and I stepped up our efforts to expand the Inner-City Games to involve more schools and more kids and to extend the program so it would be available year-round. By the time True Lies hit the theaters and topped the summer box office for action movies in 1994, the Inner-City Games were really catching on. We were now reaching thousands of kids, climaxing in nine days of finals for five thousand kids at the University of Southern California. We were expanding beyond sports, into art and essay contests, theater programs, dance competitions, and even programs for young entrepreneurs. Atlanta had launched its own Inner-City Games, and plans were in the works for Orlando, Miami, Chicago, and five other cities.

Working with these kids taught me a lot about myself. Until then I thought I was the poster boy for the American dream. I came to the United States virtually broke, worked hard, kept focused on my goal, and made it. This really was the land of opportunity, I thought. If a kid like me could do it, anybody could. Well, that wasn’t so.

Traveling to schools, I saw that it wasn’t enough to grow up with the United States as your address. In the inner cities, kids didn’t even dare to dream. The message they got was “Don’t bother. You’ll never make it. You’re a loser.”

I thought about what I had that those kids didn’t. I grew up poor too. But I had a fire inside of me to succeed and two parents who pushed me and taught me discipline. I had a strong public school education. I had after-school sports with coaches and training partners who were role models. I had mentors who told me, “You can do it, Arnold,” and then made me believe it. They were around me twenty-four hours a day, supporting me and making me grow.

But how many inner-city kids had those tools? How many learned the discipline and determination? How many got the encouragement that would let them even glimpse their self-worth?

Instead, they were told they were trapped. They could see that most of the adults around them were trapped. The schools were short of resources, the teachers were worn out and not always the best, and mentors were scarce. There were families in poverty and gangs all around.

I wanted them to feel their own drive, ambition, and hope, and get up to the same starting line. So it was never hard to work for these kids or to think of the right thing to say. “We love you,” I would tell them. “We care for you. You are great. You can make it. We believe in you, but the most important thing is that you believe in yourself. All these opportunities are out there waiting for you as long as you make the right decisions and have a dream. You can be anything you want to be. A teacher, a police officer, a doctor, you can do that. Or a basketball star or an actor. Or even the president. Anything is possible, but you have to do your end of the work. And we as grownups have to do ours.”