Total Recall: My Unbelievably True Life Story

there are some actors who just need more attention. One violent scene was hard to film because I was supposed to grab her by the neck, and she freaked. “Don’t touch me! Don’t touch me!” At first I figured that she hadn’t been brought up like a tomboy and tried to sympathize, but it was more than that. We found out that she’d had a serious neck trauma early in her life. I think she even had a scar.

“Sharon,” I said, “we all rehearsed this in the hotel room on Sunset. Paul was there, we all were there, going through scene by scene. Why did you never say, ‘By the way, when we get into the fight scene, it says here that you’re strangling me, I have a little hang-up about my neck’? Then we could have worked around it step-by-step. I would gently put my hand on your neck, and then you let me know when I can squeeze tighter and when we can get a little rough. Because I’m the first one to understand.” Paul calmed her down, and Sharon was willing to work through the scene. She wanted it to be a success; we just had to go through the difficult step first. That’s the way it was.

When you’re an actor and when you’re a director, you deal with all of those problems. No one gets up in the morning and says, “I’m going to be difficult today,” or “I’m going to derail the movie,” or “I’m going to be a bitch.” People just have their hang-ups and insecurities, and acting definitely brings them out. Because it’s you who is being judged, it’s your facial expressions, your voice, your personality, your talent—it’s everything about you so it makes you vulnerable. It’s not some product you’ve made or job you’ve done. If someone tells the makeup guy, “Can you tone this down a little bit? I have too much powder there,” he says, “Oh, sorry,” and just wipes it off. But if someone says, “Can you get rid of that self-conscious smile while you’re doing the scene? You have something weird going on in your face,” you feel like “Jesus!” Now you don’t know what to do with your face. Now you’re self-conscious. In acting you take criticism so much more personally. You get upset. But every job has its downside.

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In spite of Verhoeven’s amazing work, Total Recall almost got lost on the way to the screen. The trailer we had playing in movie theaters in anticipation of the movie’s release was really bad. It was too narrow; it didn’t convey the film’s scope and weirdness. As always, I was looking at the marketing data from the studio: the “tracking studies” as they’re called, which measure a movie’s buzz.

Marketing departments generate hundreds of statistics, and the trick is to find, right away, the numbers that are really important. The ones I lock in on are “awareness” and “want to see,” which measure how people answer the questions “On this list of movies that are coming out, which have you heard about and which do you want to see?” If people respond, “I know about Total Recall and Die Hard 2, and I’m dying to see them,” then you know your movie will be up there. An awareness figure in the low to mid-90s means that your movie will probably open at number one and make at least $100 million at the box office. For every percentage point below that, you might gross $10 million less, which is why studios and directors often tweak their movies at the last minute.

Another useful measure, “unaided awareness,” shows whether people spontaneously name your movie among the films they know are coming up. A score of 40 percent or more means you have a winner. Two other numbers also matter a lot: “first choice,” which has to hit 25 percent to 30 percent to guarantee success; and “definite interest,” which has to be between 40 percent and 50 percent.

With some hits, like Conan the Barbarian, the numbers are promising right from the start. With other films, they signal that it could go south. That was the case with Total Recall. Even after weeks of trailers and advertisements, its awareness was in the 40s, not the 90s, first choice was only 10 percent, and it wasn’t being named as a “want to see.”

I knew pretty much all there was to know about the marketing of movies by then, but it wasn’t doing me much good. The source of the problem wasn’t Total Recall itself but TriStar Pictures, the distributor, which was responsible for cutting the trailers and handling the publicity. Its marketers didn’t know what to do with the film, and the studio itself was in upheaval. TriStar and its sister studio, Columbia Pictures, were being taken over by Sony and merged in one of those 1980s megadeals. New leadership had arrived—Peter Guber and Jon Peters—to oversee the whole thing, which meant that many TriStar executives were about to lose their jobs.

In most cases, a change in studio management can sink a movie. Not only do the new guys have their own projects, but also they want to make the previous administration look bad. That wasn’t a problem with Guber and Peters, both of them highly successful producers, because they were animals. They just wanted success, no matter who started the project. Over the years, I’d gotten to know Guber well enough to be able to get him on the phone and raise the alarm about Total Recall.

“Peter, we are three weeks away from opening, and there’s only a forty percent awareness of the movie,” I said. “That, to me, is disastrous.”

“What’s the problem?” he asked.

“The problem is that your studio is screwing up the publicity campaign and the trailers that are in the movie houses. But don’t take my word for it. I want you and Jon to have a screening of the movie and the trailer. I’m going to sit there with you. Let’s look, and you tell me what you think.”

So we sat down and watched Total Recall and the trailer. “This is incredible,” Peter said. “The movie looks like a hundred-million-dollar movie, but the trailer makes it look like a twenty-million-dollar movie.” He was all set to call in the TriStar marketers and say, “I want to see size, guys! I want to see the big action that we have here!”

But I stopped him. “I think we’ve got to hire outside help,” I said. “Don’t let the studio make those decisions anymore, because they’re not capable until you clean house. You haven’t done that. The old guard is still there. Give the movie to an outside company to do the marketing. Let’s go to the top three and have a bidding war to see which firm comes up with the best idea.”

They listened, and we held meetings with three promotion firms. Cimarron/Bacon/O’Brien, which was number one in the business, articulated the failings of the Total Recall trailer even better than I had. It won the contract, and by the following weekend, we were out there in the marketplace with new trailers and a totally different campaign. It sold the movie using taglines like, “They stole his mind. Now he wants it back. Get ready for the ride of your life,” and “How would you know if someone stole your mind?” The trailers highlighted the amazing action and special effects. They got the message across: in fourteen days, we went from a 40 percent awareness to 92 percent awareness. It was the talk of the town. Joel Silver called, in spite of our falling-out over Predator, and said, “Fantastic. Fantastic. It’s going to blow everyone away.”

Sure enough, Total Recall had not only the number one spot at the box office in its opening weekend, it was the number one opening weekend of all time for a nonsequel movie. We pulled in $28 million in the first three days, on the way to $120 million that year in the States alone. The equivalent today would be more than $200 million, because the ticket prices have doubled. The film was a huge success abroad as well, earning over $300 million worldwide. It won a Special Achievement Oscar for its visual effects. (A Special Achievement Oscar is how the Motion Picture Academy honors an accomplishment for which there is no set category.) Paul Verhoeven had a masterful vision and did a great job. I was proud that my interest and passion helped to bring about the movie. But the experience also proves how important marketing is—how important it is to tell the people what this is about; really blow up their skirt and make them say, “I have to go see this movie.”

CHAPTER 18 Comic Timing

I LOVED BEING AN action hero, and with my body and background, it was a natural for me. But you can’t spend your whole life running around blowing things up. I’d dreamed of doing comedy for years.

I’ve always believed that everything in life has a funny side. It was funny to be posing all oiled up in little skinny briefs in front of all these people, trying to be the world’s most muscular man. It was funny getting paid millions of dollars to fight a predator from outer space. It was funny going through Lamaze classes trying to pretend that pregnancy is a team effort. I saw great humor in Maria and me coming from totally opposite upbringings. I laughed about my accent, and I loved Saturday Night Live’s Hans and Franz characters