Arnold Schwarzenegger - Total Recall - My Unbelievably True Life Story

My so-called cameo turned out to involve four whole weeks on the set. They shot all the Lord Kalidor scenes with three cameras, and then used the extra footage in the editing room to stretch Kalidor’s time onscreen. So instead of making a minor appearance, I ended up as one of the film’s dominant characters. The Red Sonja poster gave twice as much space to my image as to Brigitte’s. I felt tricked. This was Dino’s way of using my image to sell his movie, and I refused to do any promotion the following July when Red Sonja appeared.

Red Sonja was so bad that it was nominated for three Golden Raspberry awards, a kind of Oscar in reverse for bad movies: Worst Actress, Worst Supporting Actress, and Worst New Star. Brigitte ended up “winning” as Worst New Star. Terrible movies can sometimes be hits at the box office, but Red Sonja was too awful even to be campy, and it bombed. I tried to keep my distance and joked that I was relieved to have survived.

The biggest complication of Red Sonja for me was Red Sonja. I got involved with Brigitte Nielsen, and we had a hot affair on the set. Gitte, as everyone called her, had a personality filled with laughter and fun mixed with a great hunger for attention. After the shoot, we traveled in Europe for a couple of weeks before parting ways. I went home assuming our fling was over.

In January, however, Gitte came to LA to do the looping of the movie—the rerecording of dialogue to make it clearer on the soundtrack—and announced that she wanted a continuing relationship. We had to have a serious talk.

“Gitte, this was on the set,” I told her. “It was fun over there, but it wasn’t serious. I’m already involved with the woman I want to marry. I hope you understand.

“If you’re looking for a serious relationship with a Hollywood star,” I added, “there are guys around who are available, and they will flip over you. Especially with your personality.” She wasn’t thrilled, but she accepted it. Sure enough, later that year, she met Sylvester Stallone and it was love at first sight. I was happy for her that she’d found a good partner.

The Terminator had become a sensation in my absence. Released just a week before Halloween 1984, it was the number one movie in America for six weeks, on its way to grossing close to $100 million. I didn’t quite realize how successful it was until I got back to the United States and some people stopped me walking down the street in New York.

“Oh man, we just saw The Terminator . Say it! Say it! You’ve got to say it!”

“What?”

“You know, ‘I’ll be back!’ ” None of us involved in making the movie had any idea that this was going to be the line people remembered. When you make a movie, you can never really predict what will turn out to be the most repeated line.

Despite The Terminator ’s success, Orion did a terrible job of marketing it. Jim Cameron was bitter. The company was focused instead on promoting its big hit Amadeus , the story of the eighteenth-century composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, which went on to win eight Oscars that year. So without giving The Terminator much thought, the marketers positioned it as an ordinary B movie even though there were signs from the start that it was much more. Critics wrote about it as a major breakthrough, as if to say, “Wow, where did that come from?” People were amazed at what they saw and how it was shot. And it wasn’t just guys who liked it. The Terminator was surprisingly appealing to women, partly because of the powerful love story between Sarah Connor and Kyle Reese.

But Orion’s advertising campaign was pitched to action fanatics, and featured me shooting and blowing everything up. The TV commercial and the movie-house trailer would make most people say, “Ugh, crazy, violent science fiction. That’s not for me. My fourteen-year-old might like it. Oh, but maybe he shouldn’t go. It’s rated R.” What Orion telegraphed to the industry was “This is a bread-and-butter movie to help pay the bills. Our classy movie is about Mozart.”

Cameron went nuts. He begged the studio to expand the promotion and raise the tone before the movie came out. The ads should have been broader, with more focus on the story and on Sarah Connor, so the message would be: “Even though you may think it’s crazy science fiction, you’ll be quite surprised. This is one of our classy movies.”

They treated him like a child. One of the executives told Jim beforehand that “down-and-dirty action thrillers” like this usually had a two-week life. By the second weekend, attendance drops by half, and by the third week, it’s over. It didn’t matter that The Terminator opened at number one and stayed there. Orion was not going to increase the promotional budget. If its executives had listened to Jim, our box office could have been twice as big.

Nevertheless, from an investment point of view, The Terminator was a big success, because it made $40 million domestic and $50 million abroad, and cost only $6.5 million. But our profits weren’t in E.T. ’s league. For me, in a weird way, it was lucky that the movie wasn’t bigger. Because if it had earned, say, $100 million right off the top in US theaters alone, I would have had a tough time getting cast as anything but a villain. Instead, it fell into the category of “that was a great surprise.” It made Time magazine’s list of the year’s ten best movies. For me personally, the fact that both Conan and The Terminator each took in $40 million at home demonstrated that the American public accepted me as both a hero and a villain. Sure enough, before the year was out, Joel Silver, the producer of the Nick Nolte–Eddie Murphy hit 48 Hrs. , came to my office and pitched me on playing Colonel John Matrix, the larger-than-life hero in an action thriller called Commando . The pay was $1.5 million.

The fling with Brigitte Nielsen underlined what I already knew: I wanted Maria to be my wife. In December she acknowledged that she was thinking more and more about marriage. Her career was taking off—she was now an on-air correspondent for CBS News—but she would be turning thirty soon and wanted to start a family.

Since Maria had been quiet about our marrying for so long, I didn’t need for her to signal twice. “This is it,” I told myself, “the end of dating, the end of telling people ‘I believe in long escrows,’ and all this bull. Let’s take this seriously and move forward.” Literally the next day, I asked friends in the diamond business to help design a ring. And when I wrote down my list of goals for 1985, at the very top I put, “This is the year I will propose to Maria.”

I liked having the diamond in the middle, bookended by smaller diamonds on the left and right sides. I asked my friends in the jewelry business to come up with ideas along those lines and sketched for them what I envisioned. I wanted the main diamond to be a minimum of five carats and the others to be maybe a carat or two each. We worked on that idea, and then within a few weeks, we had designs. And in another few weeks, I had the ring.

From that day on, I kept it wrapped up and ready in my pocket. Everywhere we went, I was just looking for the right moment to propose. I almost asked Maria at various points in Europe and Hyannis Port that spring, but it didn’t feel quite right. I was actually planning to propose when I took her to Hawaii in April. But the minute we got there, we met three other couples who all said, “We’re here to get engaged,” or “We’re here to get married.”

I thought, “Arnold, don’t propose here, because every schmuck’s coming over here to do the same thing.”