Arnold Schwarzenegger - Total Recall - My Unbelievably True Life Story

“There’s a huge opportunity there,” I told Bush. I described how great it would be for the White House to reassert leadership on health and fitness—especially by shifting the focus back to the idea that fitness is important for all Americans, not just athletes. “What about the other 99.9 percent of the people who never go out for sports?” I pointed out. “Who is paying attention to the overweight kid? He will never be drafted for a football game or a tennis team or a swimming team or a volleyball team or a water polo team. And what about the scrawny kid with the Coke-bottle glasses? Who is paying attention to that kid?

“A lot of schools have great athletic programs but not great fitness programs,” I continued. “What can we do for the majority of kids who didn’t go out for sports? And what about all the adults who have gotten out of shape or maybe never been in shape? It was good for JFK to highlight competitive sports to inspire people. It was good that Lyndon Johnson had made it the President’s Council on Physical Fitness and Sports . But now we should shift the emphasis from competitive athletics to fitness for all, and make sure that everyone participates.”

I knew that George Bush liked sports and kept himself in very good shape. “That’s a brilliant idea if you want to put the time aside,” he said. “It would take some time. If you do something, you want to do it well.”

From Columbus we traveled on to Chicago, where we held a rally at a high school. On the way back to the airport, the vice president noticed this place called the Three Brothers Coffee Shop and said, “Hey, there’s a Greek diner. Let’s stop.” So the cars all pulled over, and we went in. He did it so casually, the way he went into that restaurant and tried all the food and schmoozed with the customers, the waiters, and the kitchen help, I thought it was wonderful. Then as I thought about it afterward, I realized, “Arnold, you schmuck, he’s campaigning against a guy named Dukakis. Of course he’s going to stop at a Greek diner!”

It was a privilege to get such an inside view of a presidential campaign, especially just two weeks before the election. I’d never been involved in even a mayoral election, but now here I was seeing what the candidate does on the plane, how long he sleeps, how he preps for the next speech, how he studies the issues, how he communicates, and how relaxed he makes it all look. I was impressed with how easy Bush was with the people, how he posed for photos and talked to everybody and always knew the right thing to say. And how he kept his energy level up. He took a forty-five-minute nap on the plane. As Jimmy Carter once said, politicians are experts at naps. Then you have to wake up and absorb your briefing quickly. His staff would prep him so that he knew a little bit about the area. His daughter Doro was always along with him to lend moral support.

It was a whole different level of intensity from a movie set because everywhere you go, the media are there. You have no room for mistakes. Every wrong word, every gesture you make that’s a little odd, they will pick up and amplify into some huge thing. Bush dealt with it casually.

By Thanksgiving, as the Republicans were savoring Bush’s victory, we were getting ready to launch Twins . I’d never seen a director fine-tune a movie as methodically as Ivan Reitman. He’d sit in a test screening, talk to the audience, and then go back and change the music or shorten a certain scene and test the movie again. And the crucial “want to see” statistic would now be two points higher. Then he’d make another change, and it would go up another point. We literally drove Twins from 88 to 93, which Ivan said was even higher than Ghostbusters .

The premiere of the movie was a much happier combination of my worlds than the Republican convention had been. Eunice and Sarge engineered a huge benefit event at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, where the showing of Twins capped a daylong festival of entertainment in Washington, DC, promoting the Special Olympics. President-elect Bush came with his wife, Barbara, and Teddy Kennedy, Massachusetts congressman Joe Kennedy II, and other members of the Kennedy and Shriver clans all came. Barbara Walters and TV news anchorwoman Connie Chung were there, and even business tycoons Armand Hammer and Donald Trump. Out front there was a traffic jam of stretch limos, along with dozens of cameras crews and hundreds of fans.

A demo of gymnastics and weight lifting by Special Olympics athletes opened the show. Then the president elect got up onstage and praised the athletes for their courage before turning to me. “There are all kinds of courage,” he joked. “There is the courage of my friend Arnold Schwarzenegger, who more than once campaigned with me across this country—then returned home each time to take the heat from his own in-laws.” That got a laugh.

In fact, Eunice and Sarge always went to see my movies, and they would call me the next day to tell me what they thought. But not everyone in the Kennedy family was as enthusiastic about my films, because of the weapons and violence. So Eunice was only half joking when she said, “At last, the family can go see one of your movies.” Twins was the comedy hit of the season, which of course I loved because this was my first Christmastime movie, and it went over the top. The movie had a big opening weekend in mid-December and just kept going and going. Every day between Christmas and New Year’s, our US box office receipts topped $3 million—or more than a half million tickets sold per day. It was a happy ending for everybody who had taken a chance. Ivan went on producing and directing hit comedies, including Kindergarten Cop and Junior with me. Danny kept expanding his amazing talent into directing films like The War of the Roses and producing films like Pulp Fiction and Get Shorty . For Universal, Twins capped a year of five or six successes with a huge hit—and after Tom Pollock retired, he became chief executive of Ivan Reitman’s production company.

Hollywood is the town of copying. Now that I’d added a comedy dimension to my career, everybody started sending me comedy scripts in addition to scripts for action movies. More important, thanks to our unprecedented deal with Universal, I ended up making more money with Twins than I have with any of my Terminator movies. It didn’t take studios long to draw the line. Today nobody can come close to a deal as open ended as the one we had on Twins .

Counting international sales, video rights, and so on, Twins has been worth more than $35 million to me alone—and counting, because the DVDs keep selling and it keeps being shown on TV. For twenty-five years I’ve been trying to convince Universal to do a sequel. It would be called Triplets , and Eddie Murphy, whom I love and admire, would play our unknown other brother. Just recently at the Polo Lounge at the Beverly Hills Hotel we agreed to fast-track the project, and now Triplets is on the way.

As my success grew, Sarge was always challenging me to do more for the public good. “Arnold,” he would say, “your movies and your acting are great. Now tell me: how many times do you want to do another car chase?” He didn’t know anything about the entertainment business. In 1978, for the premiere of the first Superman movie, he and Eunice hosted a Special Olympics fund-raiser in a big tent at their house. Seated next to Sarge at the head table was none other than Superman himself, Christopher Reeve.

“What do you do?” Sarge asked him.

“I’m in the movie. I play Superman.”