Arnold Schwarzenegger - Total Recall - My Unbelievably True Life Story

This was my first experience with large-scale studio marketing. A media tour was being planned to promote Conan internationally. In the first meeting I went to, the marketers said, “We’re going to Italy and France.”

“Okaaay,” I said, “but if you look at the globe, there are more countries than Italy and France.” Being European, I was very conscious that there was a whole world out there besides the United States. In the early 1980s, movie grosses were two thirds domestic and one third international, but you could see it starting to shift. If you didn’t promote internationally, who knew how much money you left lying on the table?

I said, “Guys, why don’t we be more systematic? Spend two days in Paris, two days in London, two days in Madrid, two days in Rome, and then go up north. Then say that we go to Copenhagen, and then to Stockholm, and then down to Berlin. What’s wrong with that?”

“Well, that’s not the way we do things. You know the movie is released on different dates in different countries, and we don’t want to give interviews too far in advance.”

“So what about working out a deal with the magazines and newspapers in those countries to hold their stories until the release date?”

“We’d have to check that out.”

I knew another reason for their reluctance to send me on a PR tour was that very few actors like to sell. I’d seen the same thing with authors in the book business. The typical attitude seemed to be, “I don’t want to be a whore. I create; I don’t want to shill. I’m not into the money thing at all.”

It was a real change when I showed up saying, “Let’s go everywhere, because this is good not only for me financially but also good for the public; they get to see a good movie!” Eventually the studio agreed to have me promote Conan in five or six countries. I felt that was a big step forward.

It was the same debate I’d had with my publisher when my book Arnold: The Education of a Bodybuilder came out. The United States accounts for only 5 percent of the world’s population, so why would you ignore the other 95 percent? Both industries were shortchanging themselves. I’d learned from Joe Weider always to think of the global market.

I saw myself as a businessman first. Too many actors, writers, and artists think that marketing is beneath them. But no matter what you do in life, selling is part of it. You can’t make movies without money. Even if I had no publicity obligation in my contract, it was still in my interest to promote the movie and make sure it made as much money as possible. I wanted to be involved in the meetings. I wanted everyone to see that I was working very hard to create a return on the studio’s investment. I felt it was my responsibility to pump up the grosses.

Conan ’s breakthrough came just after Valentine’s Day 1982. The first test screening, in Houston, was such a success that Universal couldn’t believe the data: viewers rated the movie a 93 on a scale of 1 to 100, which almost always signals a major hit. The studio telephoned that night and said, “This is huge. We want to try it again in Las Vegas tomorrow. If we do that, can you come?” Driving past the cineplex the next afternoon, we could see this was no ordinary screening. A line stretched around the block, and besides the comic book fans that Universal had expected, there were bodybuilders with tight shirts and bulging muscles, gays, freaks with weird hair and glasses, people wearing Conan outfits. There were some women but the crowd seemed to be mostly men, including a major contingent of bikers in full leather. Some of those guys looked ready to riot if they didn’t get in. Universal simply kept opening auditoriums until everybody was seated—it took three to accommodate them all.

The studio had been banking on die-hard fans of Conan in the comics and fantasy novels to make the movie a success. They were supposed to become the core audience; the people who, if they like a movie, will see it several times and tell all their friends. What Universal didn’t count on was my guys: the bodybuilders. They made up probably a third of the audience that night—and you can imagine the test scores they gave Conan. Without them, the film might have gotten maybe an 88, but with them, it was again 93, just like in Houston. The studio was very excited. And Dino De Laurentiis was flipping. He came over to me that night and said, “I make you a star.” With his accent, I wasn’t sure whether he meant that he intended to make me a star or that he already had. But this time I didn’t tease him about it.

After that night, Conan was unstoppable. A month later, sneak previews in sixteen cities across the country drew overflow crowds. The cops had to be called in Manhattan because people on line were literally fighting to get in; in Washington, DC, the line went for blocks and caused a major traffic jam; in LA, they did three showings back to back instead of the one they had planned—some people waited in line eight hours.

News write-ups in the trade press after the screenings helped us get placement in hundreds of theaters. When Conan opened nationwide on May 14, it became the first blockbuster of what is still talked about as the best movie summer ever. That summer also brought us The Road Warrior, Rocky III, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Blade Runner, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, The World According to Garp, Poltergeist, An Officer and a Gentleman, Tron, The Thing, and, of course, E.T. Conan the Barbarian held its own among them all.

BACK IN SANTA MONICA,Maria welcomed me home from Madrid and the Hyborian Age by giving me a little Labrador puppy she had named Conan.

“You know why she gave you the dog, don’t you?” one of her friends teased me.

“Because her family is always into dogs?” I said.

“It’s an audition! She wants to see how you’d handle children.”

I didn’t know about that, but Conan and I—that is, Conan the Canine and Conan the Barbarian—got along very well. I was happy to be back in our house, too, which was totally transformed by the décor that Maria and I had started on together.

The other big change during my absence was the January inauguration of Ronald Reagan. Nobody in Hollywood seemed to know what to make of the fact that he was president, not even the conservatives. Just after his election, Maria and I had dinner with friends of mine from the entertainment business who had worked on his campaign.

“Why did you push this guy?” she asked. “He’s not presidential material. Jeez, guys, he’s an actor!”

Instead of defending Reagan, they said things like, “We know, but people like listening to him.” They didn’t talk about what he’d done for California while he was governor or about his vision or his ideas. Probably they were just being polite. They didn’t want to come right out and say in front of Maria that the time for Democrats was over.

I was amazed to see how negative most of the people in Hollywood remained toward Reagan during his presidency. Never mind that he was bringing the economy back; all I heard was criticism of how he’d cut the parks, or cut public employees’ salaries, or thrown out the air traffic controllers, or not done the right thing by the environment, or kissed up to the oil companies, or gotten rid of Jimmy Carter’s synthetic fuel, wind, and solar energy projects. It was always some complaint. There was no sense of the big picture and of what was being accomplished.

What mattered to me was that he represented the values that had brought me to America. I came because the United States was the greatest country with the best opportunities, and now that it was my home, I wanted to keep it that way and make it even better. After the turmoil and gloom of the 1970s, Americans voted for Reagan because he reminded them of their strength. Maria would say, “I don’t know why you are for this guy.” But that was why.