Arnold Schwarzenegger - Total Recall - My Unbelievably True Life Story

Rafelson wasn’t happy either, but the problem with directors when they get a big reputation is that they can be their own worst enemy. They just want to do everything themselves, cut the trailers, do the advertising. You can’t tell them anything. Then the big battles begin, and the fine print in the contract usually dictates who wins. In this case, it was the studio. Bob butted heads with the marketing people but never got anywhere. They thought he was not a team player.

One good thing did come of it, though. I finally found an agent on the strength of having costarred in Stay Hungry : Larry Kubik, whose small talent agency Film Artists Management also represented Jon Voight and Sylvester Stallone. His phone was ringing for me, but with the wrong kinds of offers. He was searching for leading roles where I might fit, and in the meantime, we were turning down lots of junk. Somebody asked me to play a bouncer. They wanted me to play a Nazi officer, a wrestler, a football player, a prisoner. I never took jobs like that because I would say to myself, “This isn’t going to convince anybody that you’re here to be a star.”

I was very glad I could afford to say no. With the income from my businesses, I didn’t need money from acting. I never wanted to be in a financially vulnerable position, where I had to take a part I didn’t like. I saw this happen all the time to the actors and musicians who worked out at the gym. An actor would complain, “I’ve been playing this part as a killer for three days, and I’m so glad it’s over.”

“If you hated it, why did you do it?” I’d ask.

“They gave me two thousand dollars. I have to pay for my apartment.”

You could argue that, no matter what the part, being in front of a camera was always good practice. But I felt that I was born to be a leading man. I had to be on the posters, I had to be the one carrying the movie. Of course I realized that this sounded crazy to everybody but me. But I believed that the only way you become a leading man is by treating yourself like a leading man and working your ass off. If you don’t believe in yourself, then how will anyone else believe in you?

Even before Stay Hungry, I had a reputation at the gym for turning down film work. Someone would call and say, “Can we have a few strong guys come over for an interview?” Some of us would go, and the stunt coordinator or director’s assistant would say, “What we want you to do is pull yourself up onto this roof, sprint across, have this fistfight, and then jump off the roof into a stunt pad…” I would say to myself, “That’s not really what builds a leading man’s career” and tell them I wasn’t interested.

“But we love you. The director loves you. You are the biggest guy, you have the right face, you’re the right age. We’ll give you seventeen hundred dollars a day.”

“I’d love the seventeen hundred a day, but I don’t really need the money,” I’d say. “Give it to one of my friends here; they need it much more.”

Larry agreed that I should be picky, but it drove his business partner, Craig Rumar, crazy to see us turn jobs away. I always got worried when Larry was on vacation. Craig would get on the phone with me and say, “I don’t know if I can get you anything. No one is doing movies now. Everything has gone foreign. It’s really tough out there. Why not do commercials?”

Larry’s biggest triumph that year was that after an endless number of tries, he got me an appointment to see Dino De Laurentiis. Dino was a legend in the movie business for producing classics like Federico Fellini’s La Strada (1954) and campy hits like Barbarella (1968), as well as lots of flops. He’d gotten rich and then gone broke making movies in Italy and then started over in Hollywood. Lately, he’d been on an incredible roll with Serpico, Death Wish, Mandingo, and Three Days of the Condor . He liked to adapt comic books to the screen and was looking for somebody to play Flash Gordon.

When Larry and I showed up at Dino’s office, it was just like a setup from The Godfather . Dino sat behind his desk at one end of the room, and at the other end of the room, behind us, was a connection of De Laurentiis’s from Italy, a producer named Dino Conte.

De Laurentiis was like an emperor. He had this huge, ornate antique desk: long and wide and maybe even a little taller than a standard desk. “Wow, look at this desk,” I thought. Dino himself was a little guy, very short, and I had this urge to say something complimentary but also funny. What popped out of my mouth was “Why does a little guy like you need such a big desk?”

He looked at me and said, “You havva an accent. I cannot use-a you. You can-a not be Flasha Gordon. Flasha Gordon is American. Ah.”

I thought he must be joking. “What do you mean I have an accent?” I said. “What about you ?” The whole thing was going south. De Laurentiis announced, “The meeting is over,” and Larry and I heard Dino Conte stand up behind us and say, “This way, please.”

Larry exploded as soon as we got to the parking lot.

“One minute and forty seconds!” he screamed. “This was the shortest meeting I’ve ever had with any producer, because you decided to fuck it up! Do you know how long I worked on this fucking meeting? Do you know how many months it took to get into this fucking office? And you say to the guy that he’s little instead of saying maybe the opposite? That he is tall; that he’s much, much taller than you thought he was? He’s a monster! He’s as big as Wilt Chamberlain! And maybe forget about the desk and just sit down and talk to him about your acting career?”

I realized he had a point. My mouth got in the way. Again.

“What can I tell you?” I said to Larry. “You’re right. That was a real forehead move. I’m sorry.” Forehead was a term I’d picked up from my bodybuilder friend Bill Drake, who used it all the time. “Look at that Archie Bunker over there,” he’d say. “What a forehead!” Meaning, What a lowbrow idiot.

It was more than a year after shooting Stay Hungry before I landed another lead role: this one in an episode of a popular TV series called The Streets of San Francisco, starring Karl Malden and Michael Douglas as police detectives. In the episode “Dead Lift,” they have to track down my character, a bodybuilder who loses it and unintentionally breaks the neck of a girl who mocks his body. The investigation leads them deep into a fictional San Francisco bodybuilding and arm wrestling scene, which meant that I was able to get bit parts for Franco and a lot of my other friends. Having the whole Gold’s Gym gang on the set was very funny. As it happened, the 1976 Mr. Universe and Mr. Olympia competitions were only a few weeks away, so the guys were more focused on preparing than on performing for the cameras. They drove the director crazy by wandering off to go train.

I knew that The Streets of San Francisco was a good credential that would help get Hollywood to take me more seriously. It was also a way to build up recognition among the television audience. The scene where I kill the girl was intimidating, though. Hurting a woman, yelling, ripping down paintings, and throwing around furniture was not me at all. Reading the script, I thought, “Jesus Christ, how did I ever get into this?” Considering how many hundreds of people I went on to wipe out in the movies, that’s funny in retrospect. In the end I just did the scene, not thinking too much about it, and the director was pleased.

My deeper worry was about getting typecast. I thought that playing a villain or an ass kicker onscreen was the worst thing for me. When Robert De Niro kills in Taxi Driver, he’s the little guy, and people are 100 percent behind him, so it’s good for his career. But for a man of my size and with my looks and accent, bad-guy roles seemed like a dead end. I asked Bob Rafelson about this, and he agreed. His suggestion was that I do the unexpected and play against type. I grew fascinated with the idea of doing a remake of the “The Killers,” an Ernest Hemingway story in which an ex-boxer named the Swede is hunted down by a couple of Mafia hit men. I imagined myself playing the victim, the Swede. But the idea never went anywhere.