Terminated: Meet The Victims Of The Original ‘Terminator’
40 years ago on the day James Cameron’s The Terminator opened, the #1 song in America was “I Just Called To Say I Love You” by Stevie Wonder.
The gritty sci-fi classic had nothing to do with love, as a musclebound cyborg played by Arnold Schwarzenegger in his breakthrough role, arrives naked in 1984 to begin a citywide killing spree, starting at The Griffith Observatory.
He’s come from the postnuclear wasteland of 2029, determined to kill innocent waitress Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton), before she can give birth to future resistance leader John Connor, who will stop the ruthless machines.
Before The Terminator meets his end in a hydraulic press, he runs up an impressive body count, including these unfortunate casualties and their actors’ memories of being part of the film.
Bill Paxton: Punk Leader
“Hey, I think this guy’s a couple cans short of a six-pack!”
“Jim (Cameron) cast me as The Punk Leader and Arnold finishes me pretty quick! I had an even smaller part in Arnold’s next movie, Commando, but he doesn’t kill me in that!”
Fun Fact: Bill Paxton is the first person to be killed by a Terminator, Alien and Predator. Lance Henriksen is the second.
Brian Thompson: Punk
“Wash day tomorrow? Nothing clean, right?”
“When Arnold Schwarzenegger kills us and takes our clothes at The Griffith Observatory, I was really impressed with James Cameron—he came from Roger Corman, so he was always maximizing his budget.
“After Cameron got all of the footage of Arnold walking with the city behind him and establishing shots of us outside the Observatory, he found a way to extend the night shoot.
“Schwarzenegger comes at us at the Observation Viewers, so Cameron had a blackout circus tent placed over it, so when we lost the night, we could still shoot for a couple more hours, despite the sunrise. That was really smart.”
Dick Miller: Pawn Shop Clerk
“You can’t do that!!”
Terminator: “Wrong!”
“(James) Cameron and (Gale Anne) Hurd were from Roger’s studio—when people leave Corman and do their first movie after Roger, they usually find a part for me in it—so I’m the Pawn Shop Clerk, who gives Schwarzenegger all the guns before he shoots me!”
Marianne Muellerleile: Wrong Sarah
Terminator: “Sarah Connor?”
Wrong Sarah: “Yes?”
“I was pretty new to L.A., when I got this call to audition for James Cameron. The role was the ‘Wrong Sarah’, who answers the door to find The Terminator there to kill her.
“When I came in for the audition, it was a very small room, I only said a single word, ‘Yes?’ And then I had to do a silent scream as he pointed the gun at me.
“The audition was in a room with a long conference table, where Cameron and his people were sitting. The table takes up most of the room, and I’m supposed to be terrified that a man is coming after me with a gun.
“I do my silent scream. He wants me to do it again, but this time vocalize, so I scream and then leave. I get two more callbacks for a silent scream.
“Each time, I do my silent scream and then Cameron calls me back in again—he was a handsome, tall guy with blonde hair and blue eyes. Clearly a perfectionist, because he brought me back several times to do my silent scream!
“He was fully concentrated on making this ambitious movie. I’m not into science fiction, my husband Tom is, but I’m not—so I had no idea that it would become this genre classic!
“It was a fast shoot, Cameron is really quick… The day we shot it, I had a Six a.m. call and I was out by Noon. We do the scene where I say my line, back up and the red dot appears on my face.
“At a break between shots, I was on the steps of my dressing room on the trailer, working on my investments and learning songs for Church. We shot a couple times, took a break and Arnold came up.
“He told me he was a fellow Catholic, but he wasn’t singing in the choir! He saw me doing investments and gave me some great business advice, he’s really smart.
“I did call my mom and tell her I did The Terminator. She was excited, ‘When am I gonna see it?’ Cut to a year later, we’re in Time Square, my Mom and I, and they run the trailer on the screens of all these electronic shop TVs, and we see my scene 15 times! I said, ‘There you go, Mom, you don’t even have to buy a ticket—that’s my whole scene!’
“When the camera is on me and you see the red dot appear on my forehead, I don’t think it was more than three of four takes when the camera is on me. Cameron knew exactly what he wanted.
“At lunch, Arnold asked if I wanted to have lunch in his trailer. I said ‘Sure!’ I had already eaten my own lunch because I was dieting, so I had carrot sticks and I thought, ‘Might as well go in and see what he’s eating!’
“That was the first time I saw someone having wine with lunch on a set, which is very European. It was white wine, chicken breast without skin, and a tossed salad, no dessert. It was a much better-looking meal than my carrot sticks!
“We talked about the movie and when I told him I was going to Mexico without a guy, he said, ‘Those men are gonna have a field day with you!’ He’s very sweet and funny.
“Some kids were excited to see him on set, he casually put his arm around me, and greeted young kid fans, 11 or 12, telling them I was in the movie with him.
“He was so engaged with the kids, who told him they were bodybuilding like him—he patted them on the head and praised them on their muscles–they were 11, so their muscles weren’t really noticeable! They smiled when Arnold said that—he was just a great guy.
“People still send me pictures from the film, screen grabs, photos, drawings of me as The Wrong Sarah—always with the red dot on my forehead!
“I worked with Arnold a couple more times—I played a tow truck driver in Jingle All The Way, with a quick funny scene with Arnold! They cut the scene theatrically but put it back in for the DVD, and I did a Super Bowl commercial where Arnold played Zeus. One of his people recognized me from both films and took me to Arnold, who was so sweet and nice, he even tweeted a really sweet message about how happy he was to be working with me again!”
Bess Motta: Ginger Ventura
“We’re better than mortal man deserves!”
Ginger, Sarah’s wild roommate, makes love to her boyfriend Matt, then grabs a quick postcoital meal while listening to her Walkman headphones. Because of this, she fails to hear Terminator enter her apartment and kill Matt, before he terminates her.
“I can believe how big Linda Hamilton and I have our hair in that! We look like poodles! I have one of the cutest lines in movie history, when I tell her, ‘We’re better than mortal man deserves!’
“We shot that scene in a little Burbank apartment, us getting ready for our dates, in a tiny little bathroom. Jim (Cameron) shot that whole scene from the bathtub because it was so small and he’s pretty tall! He was hunched down, holding the camera, right on us at the bathroom counter, primping! He’s also the voice of the guy who breaks the date with Sarah!
“Oh My God, it’s so amazing to be in that movie! It’s one of my favorite movies, regardless of my being in it—I like the movie even more after I’m gone! When T2 came out, I was so proud to be part of that family of movies.
“I was the star of an aerobics show called The 20 Minute Workout that was a big hit in Canada. Since James Cameron is Canadian, I always wondered if that’s where he first saw me!
“In the script, Linda and I had a scene in the gym, it was the ‘80s, so movies always had scenes in a gym and we rode off together on motor scooters. None of that was shot. The audition for it was way up on Mulholland, at Gale Anne Hurd’s parents’ house on Beverly Glen. The house overlooked the whole valley!
“I was disappointed, I thought ‘Ohh man, is this small time, I’m auditioning at somebody’s house!’ They don’t even have an office. I didn’t even get the whole script, just my audition scene.
“When I saw that, I had all the confidence of a young aerobics teacher— ‘They would be lucky to have me in this!’
“I auditioned, they offered me the part and sent me the script and that’s when I saw Ginger had a nude scene. In those days, a nude scene was a career killer—this was long before Pamela Anderson and other actresses made it fashionable.
“When I saw that, I thought, ‘Oh no, this is just some low-budget piece-of-crap slasher film!’ At the time, I told my friends, ‘I got this part, but I’m not gonna do it because of this nude scene.’ As originally scripted, it’s from the Terminator’s POV—he watches us going at it through a window, I read that and thought, ‘Oh Lord!’
“A friend or two of mine read the script and told me, ‘DON’T pass on this—This is really good—you should do it!’ I thought about it, but the sex scene had me fully on top of him, writhing—but it wasn’t the way it turned out at all!
“I said to Jim, ‘I can’t do it, I would feel uncomfortable doing it.’ I don’t know if that’s why James Cameron decided to soften it and make it funnier, but he came up with the Walkman.
“Jim said to me, ‘What if you’re listening to your Walkman while having sex?’ I said, ‘That’s funny, I can do that!’ I can do a scene like that as long as it’s funny and cute, and he made sure it was!
“What amazed me is the reputation Jim Cameron wound up with, as being tough! When I met him, he was the sweetest guy in the world! Nice, kind, a very decent guy. I came back and read for Jim again a couple times before he cast me.
“When we actually did the film, he was always nice, calm and kind. Shooting at the Burger joint, I remember sitting in a trailer and he was very calm and kind between shots, too.
“Shawn Schnepps was in my acting class, when I saw Shawn in the movie(As Sarah’s friend at Bun Boy who tells her, ‘You’re dead, Honey!’), I felt comfortable that Terminator was a real movie! Shawn is so good, she wrote and appeared in Encino Man later on!
“I remember laying for a long time in a sticky puddle of karo syrup blood after Arnold kills me—because Jim Cameron wanted every shot to be perfect!”
Categorized:Interviews
