Arnold Schwarzenegger - Total Recall - My Unbelievably True Life Story

Another close friend I wanted to touch base with was Andy Vajna, who with his business partner, Mario Kassar, had produced Total Recall and Terminator 2 and owned the rights to make Terminator 3 . Andy is Hungarian-American, an immigrant like me, and besides his success in Hollywood, he owns casinos in Hungary and other businesses here. Also, Andy had worked in government in Hungary and was close to Victor Orbán, who became prime minister. I saw Andy and Mario as part of my Hollywood kitchen cabinet for kicking around ideas. So I wanted to sound them out on my running for governor. If they were enthusiastic, I meant to hit them up for a lot of money for the campaign and then have them go out and ask other producers to contribute.

When I went to their office to talk about the governorship in April, 2001, I didn’t expect them to bring up Terminator 3 . I’d signed a “deal memo” to star in it if it ever got made, but the project had been in development limbo for years. Andy and Mario had even lost the rights at one point and had to buy them back in bankruptcy court. Jim Cameron had moved on to other projects, and as far as I knew, they didn’t have a director or a script. But as I made my pitch about politics, I saw them looking at me as if to say, “What the fuck are you talking about, running for governor?”

Terminator 3 , it turned out, was a lot farther along than I’d thought. A script was almost ready, and, not only that, they’d entered into merchandise and international distribution deals worth tens of millions of dollars. They were planning to start production within a year. Andy was reasonable and friendly but firm. “If you back out, I will get sued, because we sold the rights based on you as the star,” he said. “I’m the last person interested in suing you, but if I get sued, I will have to sue you because I can’t afford to pay all these guys back. With damages! The numbers will be huge.”

“Okay, I got it,” I said.

I pride myself on being able to juggle many tasks, but I could see that running for governor and making a Terminator movie at the same time was a nonstarter even for me. People would think it was totally half-assed.

So now what? I still wanted to do something political. In fact, I was pumped. So when I went back to my political team and broke the news that I couldn’t run, I told them not to stop. I told them that we’d do a ballot initiative instead. They were skeptical about this; it was hard for them to imagine how a person could do justice to a movie and an initiative campaign at the same time. To me, it was no different from what I’d done all my life. I’d gotten a college education while I was a bodybuilding champ. I’d married Maria in the middle of filming Predator . I’d made Kindergarten Cop and Terminator 2 and launched Planet Hollywood while I was the president’s fitness czar. And I had a clear vision of the issue I wanted to pursue.

Working on the President’s Council on Physical Fitness and Sports had made me aware of the problem of millions of kids left after school with nothing to do. Most juvenile crime is committed between three and six o’clock in the afternoon. That’s when kids get exposed to mischief, hustling, gangs, and drugs. Experts contended that we were losing our kids not because they were bad but because they were unsupervised. There had long been cops and educators who campaigned for after-school programs, which provided an alternative to gangs and a place for kids to get help with homework. But the legislators never listened. So the cops and educators became my first allies.

As part of expanding the Inner-City Games, I’d created a foundation to make them a nationwide movement and recruited a close friend of Maria’s and mine, Bonnie Reiss, to lead it. Bonnie is a high-powered New Yorker with curly black hair who is funny and fast-talking and almost as fierce an organizer as Eunice. She and Maria met while Maria was in college and Bonnie was in law school and clerking for Teddy Kennedy; the two of them had moved to LA together to work on Teddy’s 1980 presidential campaign. Later Bonnie founded an influential nonprofit called the Earth Communications Office, which focused on raising money for environmental issues. Essentially she became Hollywood’s go-to person on the environment. She was a big fan of the Inner-City Games as well and welcomed the chance to spread the idea.

Los Angeles still stood out not only because it was the home of the Inner-City Games but also because it was the only big city that had after-school programs in every one of its ninety elementary schools. I went to consult the woman who’d accomplished this, a dynamic educator named Carla Sanger. After I’d asked a million questions, she suggested, “Why don’t you carve out the middle schools and high schools and do programs there?” So Bonnie and I started raising funds to do just that. Our plan was to bring Inner-City Games after-school programs into four schools in 2002 and expand from there.

Pretty quickly, though, I realized that the task was too big. We would never be able to raise enough money to put a program into every middle school and high school that needed it. Even worse, Los Angeles was just one city in a state that had roughly six thousand schools and six million students.

When you run up against a problem that gigantic, sometimes government has to help. But Carla told me that she’d tried many times to lobby for funds in Sacramento, and it was hopeless. State officials and lawmakers just did not see after-school programs as important. I checked with a few state senators and assembly people I knew, and they said she was right.

That left only one possible avenue: putting the issue directly before the California voters as a ballot initiative. I saw in this idea the chance to improve the lives of millions of kids and at the same time to get my feet wet in state politics. This wasn’t the right time for me to run for governor, but I committed myself to spend the next year campaigning for what came to be known as Proposition 49, the After School Education and Safety Program Act of 2002.

I signed up George Gorton as the campaign manager, along with other members of the Pete Wilson brain trust, and they set up a headquarters downstairs from my office, a space we had previously leased to actor Pierce Brosnan and his production company. Soon they were surveying voters, researching the issues, preparing lists of donors and media contacts, networking with other organizations, planning for signature gathering and public events, and so on. I was like a sponge soaking it all in.

In my movie career, I’d always paid close attention to focus groups and surveys, and, of course, in politics opinion research plays an even bigger role. I felt right at home with that. Don Sipple, who was expert in political messaging, sat me down in front of a camera and had me talk at length. Those tapes got edited into three-minute segments to be shown to focus groups of voters. The purpose was to pick out what themes and traits of mine appealed to people and what might put them off. I learned, for example, that people were impressed with my success as a businessman, but when I mentioned on the tape that Maria and I lived in a relatively modest house, the people in the focus groups felt that I must be out of touch.

That fall I’d blocked out two weeks to promote my latest action movie, Collateral Damage, which was scheduled to be released on October 5. This was just one of hundreds of millions of plans that had to change in the aftermath of September 11, 2001. Any other year, Collateral Damage would have been exciting big-budget action entertainment, but after 9/11, it just didn’t work. I play a veteran Los Angeles firefighter named Gordy Brewer whose wife and son are bystanders killed in a narco-terrorist bombing at the Colombian consulate downtown. When Brewer sets out to avenge their deaths, he uncovers and thwarts a much larger narco-terror plot involving a hijacked airliner and a major attack on Washington, DC. After 9/11, Warner Bros. canceled the premiere and reedited the movie to delete the hijacking. Even so, when Collateral Damage debuted the following February, it felt both irrelevant and painful to watch in light of the actual events. The irony was that in making the film, the producers had this big debate about whether firefighting was a macho enough profession for an action hero. That was one question that the real-life heroism at ground zero laid to rest.