Arnold Schwarzenegger - Total Recall - My Unbelievably True Life Story

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?