Total Recall: My Unbelievably True Life Story

know it was against the rules, and I’m sorry.”

When I see a great performer, I always start to dream. Wouldn’t it be cool to be a rock ’n’ roll star like Bruce Springsteen? Wouldn’t it be cool to give a speech to the applause of one hundred thousand people like Ronald Reagan? Wouldn’t it be cool to do a hilarious half-hour standup routine like Eddie Murphy? Maybe it’s the Leo in me, the perpetual performer who always wants to be the center of attention.

So with Milton Berle, I was saying to myself, “Maybe I will never get to his level, but if I can learn just a little bit of what he knows …” How many times in life do you have to give a toast? How many times do you have to give a speech for some worthy cause like physical fitness? Or appear at a press conference at some movie festival?

With action movies, the problem is compounded. Fifty percent of the critics will automatically say, “I hate action movies. I like love stories. I like movies you can take the family to see. This guy just kills people, and kids watch it, and then they go out on the street and kill people.” Starting with something disarming and funny is a good way to stand out. You become more likable, and people receive your information much better.

Whenever I watched a comedy, whether it was Animal House or Ghostbusters or Blazing Saddles, I always thought, “I could have done that!” But nobody was going to hire me for that kind of part, and it made no sense to dig in my heels and insist, “My next movie has to be a comedy.” I hadn’t gone all the way with action movies. If I was going to branch into comedies anytime soon, I would need someone to be my cheerleader.

_

That problem resolved itself at a ski lodge in Snowmass Village, Colorado, outside of Aspen, in late 1986. Maria and I found ourselves hanging out by the fireplace one evening with Ivan Reitman and Robin Williams and their wives. Robin and I were having a good time trading funny stories about skiing and who in Aspen was sleeping with whom. Ivan was the master. He had produced Animal House and produced and directed Ghostbusters and Legal Eagles, and I wanted to work with him really badly, so I was using all the joke-telling skills I’d learned from Milton Berle. It worked. By the end of the evening, Ivan was looking at me thoughtfully.

“You know,” he said, “there’s a certain innocence about you that I’ve never seen come through on the screen, and a certain sense of humor. I think Hollywood wants to keep you pigeonholed as the action hero, but it could be quite attractive to see you play a strong guy with that innocence.”

After we came back from Aspen, I called Ivan and suggested that we develop something together. He agreed. He asked some writers to come up with five ideas for me and gave me all five: two-page memos that each sketched a character and a story. We eliminated four very quickly, but the fifth—about mismatched twins who are the product of a scientific experiment to breed the ideal human—seemed great. Julius Benedict, the Arnold character, who gets all the good genes, is virtually perfect but naive. He goes in search of his brother, Vincent, a smalltime crook, with comical results. We agreed that the title, The Experiment, didn’t work, given my Germanic background, so the project was renamed Twins. From that point, everyone fell in love with the concept.

I cooked up the idea of casting Danny DeVito as Vincent, because I’d run into Danny’s agent and thought it would be very funny to have the twins look so different physically. Everyone liked that idea. They talked to Danny. He loved the idea, although right away he had reservations. “Okay, it’s a great sight gag, Arnold and me as twins,” he said. “Now how do we sustain that?” Danny liked to have things nailed down. And that is how the project began.

Ivan, Danny, and I made an interesting team. Ivan’s mother was a survivor of the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz, and his dad had been a resistance fighter; they emigrated from Czechoslovakia after the war. Like many children of Holocaust survivors, Ivan has incredible drive, and he’s combined this with his wonderful talent for directing and producing comedy. Danny turned out to be hilarious to work with, and in spite of his huge successes on TV and in movies, he’s the opposite of a crazy Hollywood personality. He drives normal cars and has a great family and lives a normal life. And he’s extremely well organized financially.

Being realistic and levelheaded about business enabled the three of us to add a little chapter to Hollywood business history. We knew that selling Twins in the usual way would be difficult. In theory, the studios would love the idea: you just had to picture me and Danny DeVito next to each other on a movie poster. But in reality, what we were proposing was an offbeat picture by three expensive guys. If each of us got paid his going rate, the budget would be so top-heavy that we thought no studio would touch it. And yet none of us wanted to take a pay cut because working for less can hurt your negotiating power in future deals.

So when we pitched Tom Pollock, the head of Universal, we proposed to make Twins for no salary at all. Zero. “I can guarantee it will be a hit, because of Ivan and Danny here,” I told him. “But I understand that you see me as an action guy. I’ve never done comedy, and I’m an unknown quantity. Why should you have to take the risk? So don’t pay us anything until we prove we’re worthy.” What we wanted in exchange was a piece of the movie: a percentage of the box-office receipts, video sales and rentals, airline showings, and so on. Hollywood calls this the back end.

Tom was so convinced that the movie was going to be a hit that he said, “I’d rather give you the cash.” But by this time, Ivan, Danny, and I had really gotten attached to our idea. “We don’t want cash,” we said. “None of us is short of cash. Let’s all share the risk here.”

The deal we ended up with guaranteed the three of us 37.5 percent of all the income for the movie. And that 37.5 percent was real, not subject to all the watering-down and bullshit tricks that movie accounting is famous for. We divvied up the 37.5 percent among ourselves proportionally based on what each of us had earned on his previous movie. Because I’d been paid a lot for The Running Man, I ended up with the biggest slice, almost 20 percent. It made the math simple: if Twins was a decent-sized success and made, say, $50 million, it would put almost $10 million in my pocket.

Tom Pollock knew full well how rich these terms could turn out to be. But he didn’t want us to go to another studio and get offered more. Besides, if we made money, Universal would make plenty of money too. He had a great sense of humor about it. We were in his office, and after we agreed, he stood up and theatrically turned his pants pockets inside out. “Okay,” he said. “Now I’m going to bend over. Go ahead. You can steal everything from me and fuck me!” It became one of those legendary lines from a studio executive. We all laughed. Then he said, “I think it’s a good deal. Let’s do it.”

I’d never realized that moviemaking could be so much fun when you’re not covered in freezing jungle mud or getting beaten around by mechanical snakes. We shot Twins in Los Angeles, New Mexico, and Oregon in the early months of 1988. I got to do things on camera that I’d never done before. I got to waltz. I got to sing. I got to play a thirty-five-year-old virgin getting seduced by a beautiful girl (played by Kelly Preston, John Travolta’s wife, who was a joy to work with). I got in touch with what Ivan called the innocent side of me.

Danny DeVito was the Milton Berle of comic acting. He never tried to throw in funny lines, never depended on a joke to create humor—that doesn’t work on camera. Instead, he depended on the circumstances to create the humor. He was so smart in the way that he used his voice and eyes, and the way he threw his body around. He knew exactly what worked for him, what people love about him, what would sell. He knew exactly how far he could take the dialogue, and for all of us, there was a constant back-and-forth with the writers as we fine-tuned scenes and lines. And as a partner on the set, Danny was great! He smoked stogies. He made pasta for us once and sometimes twice a week. He made the good espresso, and he was always ready with the Sambuca and the good after-dinner or after-lunch drinks.

The chemistry between us worked really well right from the start. As shady Vincent, he was always trying to play me like putty. He’d conned a lot of people, and now he was going to con me. And I, as Julius, was an easy mark but at the same time smart enough to figure out the situation and do something about it. I just had to play my character exactly the way it was written: naive, strong, smart, educated, sensitive, able to speak a dozen languages.

Compared to being an action hero, it was a lot easier to be a comic star. The rehearsals were all about changing the rhythm of my persona. I had to get rid of the stern looks, the hard lines, the commanding, machinelike talk. No more of that Terminator slow monotone. I had to throw out everything I’d learned in action films to telegraph leadership and command. Instead, I had to soften everything. I had to say the words more gently, roll them together, and combine them with gentler looks and smoother turns of the head. There’s a scene early in the movie where a bad guy on a motorcycle zooms up from behind Julius and tries to snatch his suitcase. But Julius