CHAPTER 20
The Last Action Hero
NOBODY IN HOLLYWOOD WINS all the time. At some point, you’re bound to get a beating. The next summer, it was my turn, with Last Action Hero. We’d promised the world a blockbuster hit: “the big ticket of ’93” and the “biggest movie of the summer” was how we promoted the movie. Terminator 2: Judgment Day had been the biggest movie of 1991, and the expectation was that Last Action Hero should top it.
Instead, Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park became the summer hit everybody had to see; it ended up outdoing even E.T. as the biggest success in movie history. Meanwhile, we delivered a film that didn’t have the snappiness it needed to be great entertainment, and we had the bad luck to have scheduled the movie’s release for the weekend after Jurassic Park’s opening. From the moment Last Action Hero hit the theaters, it got stomped. The front-page banner headline of Variety said, “Lizards Eat Arnold’s Lunch.”
But in fact, Last Action Hero made money and was a failure only in comparison to what had been anticipated. If I hadn’t been such a big star, no one would have noticed. It was too bad, because I loved the idea of the movie. It was a combination action movie and comedy, the two kinds of roles I did best. To appeal to the broadest audience, we were making it PG-13—a big summer fun ride, essentially; a spoof, without too much graphic violence, crude language, or sex. I starred as the action hero, Jack Slater, a maverick Los Angeles Police Department detective. I was also the movie’s executive producer, which meant that I had to approve every facet of the project: developing the script, picking the director and the cast, lining up the studio for financing, distribution, and marketing, setting the budget, getting a PR firm on board, planning the foreign release, and on and on. The added responsibility was a pleasure. In the past, I’d often taken an active hand in my movies, bringing together the deal or lining up the director, and, of course, planning the marketing. But sometimes when I said, “Let me see the poster” or “Let’s figure out a better photo to use,” I felt like I was butting in. Now I could be involved in everything, from dreaming up promotional stunts to approving the prototypes for Jack Slater toys.
The plot is built around a kid named Danny Madigan, an eleven-year-old who is the ultimate fan. He’s obsessed with action movies and knows everything there is to know about them. Danny gets a magic ticket that lets him cross into the latest film featuring the action hero Jack Slater, his all-time favorite.
For director, I was happy to land John McTiernan, who had made Predator, as well as Die Hard and The Hunt for Red October. John always has great clarity of vision, and on Last Action Hero that gave me my first hint of trouble. We were having a drink after shooting until three in the morning one night in New York, and John said, “What we’re really making here is E.T.” When I heard that, I had a sinking feeling that maybe the whole PG-13 thing was a mistake. Even though we had a kid costar in the movie, people might not buy me doing a family-friendly action film. That was okay for Harrison Ford in Raiders of the Lost Ark but not me. I’d made the comedies, of course, but those were different because no one expects you to blow people up in a comedy. When you’re selling a movie with the word action in the title, you’d better deliver some. Conan II had fizzled because we’d made it PG. Now we were betting we could pack in enough amazing stunts and energy to make Last Action Hero live up to its name.
The idea of a warmer, more cuddly action movie did seem right for the times. Arkansas governor Bill Clinton had just beaten George Bush in the 1992 presidential election, and the media were full of stories about baby boomers taking over from the WWII generation and about how America was now going in an antiviolence direction. Entertainment journalists were saying, “I wonder what this means for the conservative hard-core action heroes like Sylvester Stallone, Bruce Willis, and Arnold Schwarzenegger. Are the audiences now more into peace and love?” That’s the trend I wanted to connect with. So when the toy people showed up with their prototypes of a Jack Slater doll, I vetoed the combat weapons they proposed. I said, “This is the nineties, not the eighties.” Instead of wielding a flamethrower, the toy Jack Slater threw a punch and said, “Big mistake!”—which was Slater’s tagline against the bad guys. On the toy package it said, “Play it smart. Never play with real guns.”
We went all out on merchandising and promotion. Besides the action toys, we licensed seven kinds of video games, a $20 million promotion with Burger King, a $36 million “ride film” to go into amusement parks, and—this was my favorite—NASA picked us to be the first-ever paid advertisement in outer space. We painted “Last Action Hero” and “Arnold Schwarzenegger” on the sides of a rocket and then held a national sweepstakes whose winners would get to push the launch button. We put up a four-story-tall inflatable statue of Jack Slater on a raft just off the beach at Cannes during the film festival in May, and I set a personal record there by giving forty TV interviews and fifty-four print interviews in a single twenty-four-hour period.
Meanwhile, the production was running late. At our only test screening, on May 1, the movie was still so unfinished that it ran for two hours and twenty minutes, and you couldn’t make out most of the dialogue. By the end, the audience was bored. After that, the schedule was so tight that we ran out of time for more tests. Instead, we were forced to fly blind without the feedback you need to fine-tune a movie. Still, nobody at the studio wanted to postpone the opening, because that might create the perception that the movie was in trouble, and I agreed.
A lot of people liked Last Action Hero, as it turned out. But in the movie business, that’s not enough. You can’t have people just like your movie, you need them to be passionate. Word of mouth is what makes movies big, because while you can put in $25 million or $30 million to promote the movie on the first weekend, you can’t afford to keep doing that every week.
We had terrific awareness and anticipation going in. Yet maybe because of Jurassic Park, ticket sales were below expectations the first weekend: $15 million instead of the $20 million we’d predicted. And when I realized that people were coming out of the theaters warm but not hot, saying things like “It was actually pretty good,” I knew we were dead. Sure enough, the second weekend, our box office dropped by 42 percent.
The criticism went way beyond Last Action Hero. My career was over, history. Writers attacked everything I’d ever done in movies, as if to say, “What do you expect from a guy who works with John Milius and talks about crushing his enemies? That’s the world that they want to live in. We want to live in a compassionate world.”
Politics came into it. As long as I’d been on a roll, I’d never been attacked for being Republican, even though Hollywood and the entertainment press are generally liberal. Now that I was down, they could unload. Reagan and Bush were out, Republicans were out, and so were mindless action movies and all the macho shit. Now was the time for Bill Clinton and Tom Hanks and movies that had meaning.
I framed the criticism philosophically and tried to minimize the whole thing. I had all kinds of movie projects lined up—True Lies, Eraser, and Jingle All the Way—enough to feel confident that one movie going in the toilet would have no impact on my career or on the money I made or on anything real. I said to myself it didn’t matter, because at one point or another, you’re going to get the beating. It could have been for another movie. It could have been three years later. It could have been five years later.
No matter what you tell yourself or what you know, at the time you’re going through it, it is bad. It’s embarrassing to fail at the box office and have your movie not open well. It’s embarrassing to have terrible stories written about you. It’s embarrassing to have people start calling this your year to fail. As always, I had the two voices battling inside my head. The one was saying, “Goddammit, oh my God, this is terrible.” And the other was saying, “Now let’s see what you are made of, Arnold. Let’s see how ballsy you are. How strong are your nerves? How thick is your skin? Let’s see if you can drive around in your convertible with the top down and smile at people, knowing that they know that you just came out with a fucking stinker. Let’s see if you can do that.”
I had all this stuff going on in my mind, beating myself up and trying to encourage myself at the same time,
