Total Recall: My Unbelievably True Life Story

like me. We hung out together and had mutual respect, even though politically he was left and I was right. He’d enlisted in the army and fought in Vietnam, and now was very antiestablishment, always railing against the government, against Hollywood, and against the war.

Oliver made me read a lot of comic books and fantasy novels out loud, wanting to get a sense of how I handled dialogue and what did and didn’t sound good in my voice. He’d sit on the couch and close his eyes while I read passages like “Hither came Conan, the Cimmerian, black-haired, sullen-eyed, sword in hand, a thief, a reaver, a slayer, with gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth, to tread the jeweled thrones of the Earth under his sandaled feet.”

Ed had encouraged Oliver to think big—he was budgeting up to $15 million for the film, almost double the cost of an average movie—and Oliver did. He transformed the story into what Milius later described as “a feverish dream on acid.” He changed the setting from the remote past to the future after the downfall of civilization. He imagined a four-hour-long saga in which the forces of darkness are threatening the earth, and Conan must raise an army to restore the kingdom of a princess in an epic battle against ten thousand mutants. Oliver dreamed up the most extraordinary images, like the Tree of Woe, a huge, predatory plant that seizes Conan’s comrades as they hack at it and imprisons them in a world below—the tree’s hell. His script also called for a multiheaded dog, a harpy, small bat-like creatures, and much more.

By the time the script began circulating the following summer, though, it still wasn’t clear whether the project would go anywhere. Oliver’s vision would cost a fortune to shoot: not $15 million but $70 million. Even though 1977’s Star Wars was setting records at the box office and the studios were looking for epics, that was too much, and Paramount got cold feet. Ed had been developing Conan for four years, and now he and his partner were in debt.

I’d decided to take a zen approach. I had my contract, and I knew that major productions can take a long time to develop. I was not in any hurry, I told myself. These delays were meant to be. I just wanted to be sure to use the time wisely so that when the day of shooting came, I would be ready.

Ed lined up projects to give me more experience in front of the camera. I played a supporting part in The Villain, a Western spoof starring Kirk Douglas and Ann-Margret. The name of my character was Handsome Stranger, and the rest of the movie was just as lame. It flopped totally at the box office when it came out in 1979, and the best thing I can say about it is that I improved my horse-riding skills. I also costarred with Loni Anderson in a made-for-TV movie, The Jayne Mansfield Story, in which I played Mansfield’s second husband, the 1950s bodybuilding champ Mickey Hargitay. These were not starring roles, and they didn’t involve much pressure, but they did help prepare me for the real deal: Conan, the big international movie that would get worldwide promotion and had $20 million behind it.

At the same time, I tended to my businesses. I was still running my bodybuilding enterprises and coproducing the championship in Columbus, Ohio, that would eventually become the Arnold Classic. Each year Jim Lorimer and I were able to raise the cash prize, and the event grew in popularity and prestige. Meanwhile, there were real estate opportunities that were too good to pass up. In Southern California, the value of property was rising at almost twice the rate of inflation. You could put down $100,000 to buy something for $1 million, and the next year it would be worth $1.2 million, so you’d made 200 percent on your investment. It was crazy. Al Ehringer and I flipped our building on Main Street and bought a city block for redevelopment in Santa Monica and another in Denver. I traded up my twelve-unit apartment building for a thirty-unit one. By the time Ronald Reagan came into office in 1981 and the economy slowed, I’d achieved another piece of the immigrant dream. I’d made my first million.

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Conan the Barbarian might still be stuck in the comic books today if John Milius hadn’t reentered the picture in 1979. He took Oliver Stone’s script, chopped it in half, and rewrote it to cost much less, but still $17 million. Even better for Ed Pressman, Milius had a path to money. He was under contract to do his next movie for Dino De Laurentiis, who loved fantasy. Late that fall, Dino and Ed worked out a deal in which Dino effectively bought the project from Ed. With Dino’s connections came big-league distribution, as Universal Pictures agreed to handle Conan in the United States.

All of a sudden—bang!—the project really started rolling.

What was good for Conan the Warrior wasn’t automatically good for me, however. De Laurentiis still despised me from our first encounter. Even though I was under contract, he wanted to get rid of me.

“I don’t like the Schwarzenegger,” he told Milius. “He’s a Nazi.”

Luckily John had already decided that I was perfectly cast. “No, Dino,” he said. “There is only one Nazi on this team. And that is me. I am the Nazi!” Milius wasn’t a Nazi, of course. He just wanted to shock Dino, and he loved saying outrageous things. For the rest of the production, he would go to odd antique stores and buy these little lead figurines of Mussolini and Hitler and Stalin and Francisco Franco and put them on Dino’s desk.

Dino’s next move was to send his company lawyer to renegotiate with me. The guy’s name was Sidewater, and my agent Larry nicknamed him Sidewinder. The lawyer announced, “Dino doesn’t want to give you five points, like it says in the contract. He wants to give you no points.”

I said, “Take the points. I’m in no position to negotiate.”

He gaped. “All five?” It astounded him to hear me simply say that, because he’d expected a fight. Each of those little digits can add up to many thousands of dollars when a film hits big.

“All the points,” I repeated, “take it. Take it all.” I was thinking, “You can take it and shove it because that’s not what I’m doing the movie for.” I understood the reality. The situation was lopsided. Dino had the money, and I needed the career, so it made no sense to argue. It was just supply and demand. But, I also thought, the day will come when the tables will turn, and Dino will have to pay.

With John Milius, everything was drama, I learned as we got to be friends. He was a cigar-smoking, bearlike, Harley-Davidson-riding guy, with black, curly hair and a beard. History obsessed him, especially war, and he had an encyclopedic knowledge of battles and weapons from the time of the Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans all the way up to the present day. John could talk authoritatively about the Vikings, the Mongols, pirates of every period, the samurai, medieval knights, and longbowmen. He knew every size of bullet used in the Second World War and what kind of pistol Hitler wore. He didn’t need to do research, it was already in his head.

John liked to call himself a Zen fascist, and he’d brag that he was so far to the right that he wasn’t even a Republican. Some people in town thought he was sick. But he was such a fantastic writer that even the liberals would call him for help on their scripts, like Warren Beatty with Reds. Nobody was better at writing macho lines. A great example of his work is the soliloquy in Jaws, when Robert Shaw’s character, Captain Quint, recalls the sinking of the USS Indianapolis in World War II after it had delivered the atomic bomb to be dropped on Hiroshima. It took five days for rescuers to arrive, too late for most of the crew. Quint’s speech ends: “So, eleven hundred men went into the water. Three hundred sixteen men come out, the sharks took the rest, June the 29th, 1945. Anyway, we delivered the bomb.”

Milius also wrote Robert Duvall’s iconic line in Apocalypse Now, “I love the smell of napalm in the morning … It smells like … victory.” And of course the line that was already my favorite in Conan, when the barbarian is asked, “What is best in life?” and he says, “Crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentation of their women.”

It was fun hanging out with a guy who was so totally committed to the macho fantasy, the Teddy Roosevelt ideal. I liked to step in and out of it. I could be an actor one minute, the next minute a beach bum, the next minute a businessman, the next minute a bodybuilding champion, the next minute a Romeo—whatever it was—but Milius was locked in. It was part of his charm. At his office, there were always guns, swords, and knives lying on his desk. He would show off his Purdeys: British shotguns, custom fitted and specially engraved, each of which took months to make and cost tens of thousands of dollars. He treated himself to a new one after every movie. The shotgun was always part of the deal. If John brought the movie in on time, he’d automatically get a Purdey.

He knew so much about the world, and he loved to share his knowledge with anyone who’d listen. He’d grab a sword and say, “Feel this sword. Feel the weight of it. That was the difference between the British sword and the French sword. The French was always lighter …” And off he’d go. Or he’d look at an actress and say, “Yeah, she’s beautiful, but she is not erotic for the age of Conan. I don’t think they had those oversized breasts. And see how wide-set her eyes are, and the shape of her nose and lips? Those are not Egyptian lips.”

Right away Milius had me start watching movies he thought were important for my preparation. He’d put on the 1954 Japanese classic Seven Samurai and say, “You’ve got to see Toshiro Mifune.