TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/122490/1224206.000

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 18.5 KB | 378 lines

                                                                                BUSINESS, Page 52

Box-Office Brawn


Body builder to megastar: Arnold Schwarzenegger has a huge
following everywhere and the world on a string. It could only
happen in the movies.

By RICHARD CORLISS -- Reported by Elizabeth L. Bland/Los Angeles


    Arnold Schwarzenegger is a director too. This year he did
The Switch, a 25-minute episode on the cable-TV series Tales
from the Crypt. It's a little morality play that asks the
question, What do you have to do to become Arnold
Schwarzenegger?

    To win the love of his fickle girlfriend, a rich, withered
old man named Webster spends $1 million on plastic surgery; he
trades faces with a young Adonis named Hans. But the girl still
finds Webster repulsive, so he spends $2 million more for Hans'
handsome torso. Webster is a big hit on Muscle Beach, but when
he's in a swimsuit his spindly legs make his lady ill. So he
squanders the last $3 million of his fortune on Hans' legs and
one or two other appendages. Perhaps finally he can win his
beloved's heart? No; she's eloped with Hans, who now has an old
man's body and $6 million. As for Webster, he's got a great
physique -- but pity the guy. He still looks puny compared with
Arnold Schwarzenegger.

    Who could hope for money, fame, power, love, brains and
muscles? Only Arnold, as he is everywhere known. Just now he
is the movies' top star, the one whose name above the title of
a film -- Conan the Barbarian, The Terminator, Predator, Twins,
Total Recall or his new Kindergarten Cop -- guarantees that
people will buy tickets or snatch up the videocassette. He
didn't need a plastic surgeon or a movie-agent Mephistopheles
to become Arnold; his eminence is a triumph of the will. Even
if he weren't a celebrity, he would be richer than Webster; his
shrewd entrepreneurship and real estate investments have made
him tens of millions. As for the girl, he got her: Maria
Shriver, NBC newscaster and Kennedy niece. When he is not
chumming with the clan in Hyannis Port, he is stumping for
George Bush or serving as chairman of the President's Council
on Physical Fitness and Sports. Conan is a Republican.

    And $6 million wouldn't come close to buying
Schwarzenegger's body, not even for a single movie. He asks and
gets twice that price, and the moguls know it is a fair deal.
He will show up on time, throw his beautifully beveled body
into every scene, take direction conscientiously -- and when
it comes time to promote the picture, press the flesh till
fingers go numb. "Arnold loves being a movie star," says Ivan
Reitman, his director on Twins and Kindergarten Cop. "He
approaches the role with great gusto and charm. He is a
throwback to the classic movie stars of the '40s, who were
proud of their profession. If you're going to do it, why not
do it all the way?"

    Schwarzenegger knows no other way to do it. His first
notable Hollywood film was Stay Hungry, and that might be the
key to his success. "You've got to be hungry," he says,
"otherwise you can't be motivated." The hunger, the motivation,
the four-wheel drive, have helped this Gargantua from Austria
embody a real-life American Dream story -- poor boy to champion
body builder to movie curiosity to nonpareil megastar -- that
is so improbable even Hollywood would be embarrassed to put it
into production. They have also made him, at 43, the most potent
symbol of worldwide dominance of the U.S. entertainment
industry.

    Politicians may debate whether America, in the post-cold war
era, will continue to hold center stage. But no one can doubt
that it fills the world's screens -- cinema and television --
as well as its VCRs, bookshelves, record stores and CD players.
The dominance is especially pronounced on movie marquees. In
most foreign countries, the most popular films are from
Hollywood: brain-bashing action epics from Schwarzenegger and
Stallone, to be sure, but also fantasy romances like Pretty
Woman and Ghost. If we make it, they want it -- and lately, if
they are Japanese, they want to buy the American companies that
make it. Foreign investors realize that in the chancy business
of manufacturing popular art, Hollywood has an ever tighter
grip on the world's pulse. Since 1985 the overseas take from
U.S. films has doubled. Movies represent a robust portion of
an entertainment industry that registers an annual $5 billion
or so trade surplus.

    But Hollywood did more than make money with its product; it
minted, and then exported, the nation's cultural ideology. From
the first years of this century, with flickering images of
cowboys and comic tramps, the movies were America's most
glamorous way of advertising itself to the world. The bustling
genius of the American system ensured that to a Peruvian or a
Perugian, "the movies" meant Hollywood. And the stars bred
within that system sold the movies' myth about America. A
Manhattan penthouse became the top of the world when Fred
Astaire and Ginger Rogers danced through it; the canyons of
Arizona were the promised land as long as John Wayne patrolled
them.

    As Hollywood touched the world, so it lured the world's
talent to Southern California. Most of the men who built the
studios were Jewish immigrants from Germany and Eastern Europe.
Writers, directors, designers, cinematographers would make
their names in Europe, then stow away to the States. And
co-opting like crazy from the start, Hollywood made foreigners
its greatest stars: Charlie Chaplin and Mary Pickford, Cary
Grant and Greta Garbo. So it is only fitting that the
torchbearer, the sword wielder, the giant of American movies,
should be an overgrown Austrian with a face and body out of a
superhero comic.

    Like a Ninja Turtle conceived in disaster and destined for
greatness, Schwarzenegger was born in the rubble of the Third
Reich's defeat, in the Austrian village of Thal. His father was
a policeman, his mother a housekeeper, and they lived in a
house that had no toilet or refrigerator until he was 14. Could
it have been such mean circumstances that gave Arnold an edge?
He thinks so. "Today in America," he says, "I see kids
comfortable, getting everything they want, peaceful minds, no
hang-ups. And I realize that stability will never create the
hunger it takes to go beyond the limits where others have been.
For that, you have to be a little off. Something has to happen
in your childhood that you say, `I'm going to make up for
this.' You don't even know what it is. Maybe I was competitive
with my brother or trying to prove something to my father. But
it doesn't really matter. Something was there that made me
hungry."

    When journalists dig for the darker side of Schwarzenegger's
youth, something is there that makes him angry. Arnold, a
tattly biography by British free-lancer Wendy Leigh, asserts
that Schwarzenegger's father joined the Nazi Party in 1938 and
that his older brother Meinhard died in a car crash after
drinking heavily. Schwarzenegger attended the funeral of
neither man. Leigh also charges Arnold with brutal practical
jokes, coarse womanizing and relentless taunting of opponents
in his body-building days. The star has dismissed Leigh's
contentions, saying, "I don't want to give a third-grade
journalist any credibility." He can hardly be held responsible
for his kin's sins; the other allegations suggest that he took
the rough passage, common in males, from boorish youth to
robust maturity.

    Arnold was 11 when he saw his first movie on a big screen.
"That was a sensation." It was also his introduction to the
kind of Hollywood fable that he would later live out. "Now I
was fascinated with America. When I got to junior high school,
I thought, `What am I doing here?' The action was somewhere
else. And all of the sudden, something woke up. It was an urge
that I was meant for something big. If anybody asked me about
getting to the top in acting and making movies -- becoming like
a Clint Eastwood or a Warren Beatty or a Burt Reynolds --
people would say, `Do you know what it takes to get there? How
are you going to do it?' I didn't have an answer. But
something was in me that made me feel like it was going to
happen."

    Arnold didn't just dream; he made it happen. Like a
visionary athlete, artist or businessman (all of which he would
eventually become), he devised a plan and climbed the mountain.
More precisely, he became the mountain. "My parents wanted me
to play soccer or be a skier," he recalls. "But I chose body
building. It was a very American sport, and I thought, `If I
do well, it could take me to America.'" It was also a very
American way for a boy to create a superman in his own image.
Following Nietzsche's law ("That which does not kill us makes
us stronger"), Arnold spent years punishing and pumping up his
gangly frame until it was a prizewinning work of art -- a
fabulous cartoon of muscularity.

    To many people, body building is a bizarre pseudo sport:
part weight lifting, part boylesque. It stands in that curious
crossroads of exhibition and self-flagellation where Narcissus
meets the Nautilus. If Schwarzenegger really thought this trail
would lead to Hollywood, he would have to blaze it himself.
Except for Steve Reeves, the Hercules of cut-rate '60s epics,
few body builders had been able to work up so much as a sweat
in pictures.

    But Arnold did find fame in the sport. By 1975, long before
moviegoers knew of him, he was the lone superstar of body
building, earning the Mr. Olympia title an unprecedented seven
times, Mr. Universe, five. At the climax of the documentary
film Pumping Iron, which chronicles Schwarzenegger's last Mr.
Olympia contest before retiring, the announcer tries to work
some suspense into his revelation of the winner's name. But
when he says, "The one and only . . . ," a broad grin breaks
over Arnold's face. Who else could deserve that title?

    "I was extremely happy as a body builder," Schwarzenegger
says. "I was competing, training, doing seminars all over the
world, winning the top trophies. The first time is the best.
Fabulous! Even the second and third time, rubbing it in,
letting them know you are here to stay. But then, all of a
sudden -- zap! -- it is not enough anymore to make you happy.
You say to yourself, `Now what? I know that I don't have
anything much better to do, but I am going to quit.' I wanted
to go again for discomfort, to create the old hunger, to get
into acting. Because I knew it was going to happen."

    By now the reader knows not to raise a skeptical eyebrow
when Arnold says something is going to happen. At the time,
though, it was as hard to imagine him fitting into mainstream
films as it would be to fit his wonderfully preposterous name
on a movie marquee. Even after he scored a worldwide hit in his
first starring role, as a primeval pillager in Conan the
Barbarian, he was still seen as a fluke or a freak. Could this
slab of sirloin beefcake act? It hardly mattered. He could fill
the film frame superbly. He was also lucky. With the box-office
triumph of Star Wars, Hollywood was back in the action-fantasy
business. And with producers spending millions on optical
gadgetry, Arnold was a bargain: here was a star whose body was
its own stunning special effect. Eventually, smart moviemakers
figured out how to carve a narrative niche sturdy enough for
him to occupy.

    The Terminator, in 1984, turned the trick. James Cameron's
hurtling, resonant parable, about a cyborg come from the future
to kill a woman who would one day give birth to a
postapocalypse messiah, gave Schwarzenegger a million rounds
of ammunition and 75 words of dialogue, most notably the
ultimate death threat: "I'll be back." Playing a robot villain,
he also played with moviegoers' expectations; they could root
for him to die and cheer when he kept coming back. As Arnold
recalls, "A studio executive called me after The Terminator and
said, `I can't believe it. I only saw you a few seconds without
your clothes on, and they all went for it.' Then all of the
sudden I got all of these action scripts that were unrelated
to the body. Each step of the way, there were these changes.
And the fans go along with it, as long as you give them
quality."

    Scratch a critic and you'll get an admission that
Schwarzenegger's films have the quality of ferocity. There is
something in Arnold that sparks the pinwheeling imaginations
of action directors. They get him to lift trucks, carry huge
trees on his shoulder, upend telephone booths with little punks
inside. In Mark L. Lester's puckishly violent Commando, he
righteously kills dozens of people in his determination to save
a single life; as one helpful woman observes of Arnold and his
adversaries, "These guys eat too much red meat." John
McTiernan's Predator (1987) twists another commando genre into
a jungle monster movie: half a dozen supersoldiers infiltrate
enemy territory -- and Arnold gets to go mano a mano with a
space alien who looks like the Creature from the Black Hole.
And in this year's Total Recall, directed by Paul Verhoeven,
he prowls through a densely detailed futureworld while
masquerading as a villain, a fat woman and (least convincingly)
an ordinary guy.

    The devisers of these burly entertainments knew the Arnold
character was both incredibly heroic and inherently comic; the
films contain their own parodies. Moviegoers realized this too.
Sure, even his forehead has intimidating muscles; but then he
breaks into a big gap-toothed grin, and the put-off is revealed
as a put-on. So to cast Schwarzenegger in comedy is very nearly
redundant -- especially when, as with Twins (1988), it offered
nothing more than Hollywood high concept: pairing the big guy
with scruffy shrimp Danny De Vito. Even lamer is Kindergarten
Cop, which opens in the U.S. this week. The film can't even
live up to its title, which suggests an hour or so of big bad
Arnold coping comically with snotty tykes. Oh, young performers
from the Professional School for Kute Kids do get to recite
part of the Gettysburg Address and, of course, say penis and
vagina. But mostly Cop is a police procedural, a hostage
thriller, a no-brain suspenser and a vengeful-mother drama. It
adds up to the sternest test yet for Arnold's box-office clout
-- and for the patience of his millions of fans.

    Hollywood is more demanding than any critic; it looks for
quality only on a profit statement. There, through good movies
and bad, action films and comedies, Arnold gets four stars. His
pictures can use a strong premise, but they don't need
high-priced supporting players; his aura is enough. (Quick,
name the second-billed actor of The Terminator, Commando,
Predator or Total Recall.) He also has the respect -- maybe
even the fear -- of the front-office boys, because he gets
involved in every aspect of production and promotion.

    "It's not enough to think about the script and the
director," he says. "I must ask, Who is the studio? What is the
international program? How much money do they have to spend on
promotion? I don't want to make a decision to work hard at
something, to believe in something 100% and then have an
executive in there who doesn't believe in spending a lot of
money. I've had that happen. Predator opened at $12 million,
and Barry Diller [who runs 20th Century Fox] said, `We don't
want to support the second week of the movie. It can go by
itself now.' That was a major, major, major mistake. Now I know
that is something to discuss beforehand."

    Schwarzenegger actively promotes his movies abroad, where
he is an even bigger star than in the U.S. "They see me as both
American and European," he says. "And they know that I am not
dealing with an American arrogance that says we are the kings.
I go to Australia, even though there is no money there. If the
Soviet Union would have a premiere of my film, I would go
because I know that The Terminator was the hottest tape on the
black market. So my attitude is that you have to pay attention
to the entire world. Everything is becoming very global,
especially movies. Look what has happened overseas in the past
five years with video and cable and TV. American companies are
finally waking up and cleaning up. But they were not ahead of
the game. Only because of demand are they waking up. We've got
to look at everything as equally important."

    Unlike some golden tycoons, Schwarzenegger sees his family
as equally important. And in his marriage to Shriver he
recognizes the collision of "coming from different worlds. It
is not easy, this process of trying to understand and
appreciate each other. It takes love and patience. But that was
no problem with us. Because I loved her all along, and I said
to myself right away that she was the woman I would end up
marrying. My friend Charles Gaines asked me in 1972 to describe
the ideal woman -- and down to the teeth it was Maria. She
knew also that she would end up with me." His wife is a valued
adviser in his film career. "I take under consideration very
seriously what she thinks," he says, "because I get a point of
view not only from a smart person but from a woman. Maria has
very good instincts. She reads fast, she analyzes and -- boom!
-- she has the notes. Like an agent."

    A Hollywood story is told about Mother Teresa: when asked
what new worlds she wished to conquer after winning the Nobel
Prize, the saintly nun replied, "Well, I would like to direct."
For Schwarzenegger, this is no joke. "After I directed that
little Tales from the Crypt, I felt ecstatic. It was something
I never expected. To work with actors and mold a scene. It's
wild." His plans are, as always, both bold and judicious: to
direct a feature-length TV movie, then a theatrical film. After
completing filming of Cameron's Terminator II, in which the
killer cyborg finds romance (and a new victim), he hopes to take
a breather.

    Deep breaths, of course, and a clear vision. Perhaps even
a glance back at the fairy-tale action film of his life. No one
would have given odds on a poor boy from Thal growing up to
become, well, Arnold Schwarzenegger. At the climax of Predator,
Arnold finally comes up against the humongous alien -- and it
is one ugly malefactor. He asks, "What the hell are you?" And
the creature, who has never spoken before, looks at Arnold and
mutters, "What the hell are you?" The monster obviously hadn't
been to the movies lately. He was staring at the most unlikely
and inevitable star of Hollywood's global era.