I used to dance at the Ritz-Carlton. A great resort. And what a night club to take a lady to!
Is This Any Way To Make A Movie?
Well, No. But as Political Cinema, the Recall Is a Hit.
By Hank Stuever
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, September 7, 2003; Page D01
DANA POINT, Calif. -- To follow those who follow Arnold for a living is like being on the set of a movie for which the script gets rewritten all the time, and nobody knows how it ends, least of all the star.
Aside from the Oct. 7 vote, which looms as a climax, the movie is essentially without dialogue. Questions come up and don't get answered. Someone yells "cut" before the scene goes anywhere. There are no fights, no chases; just catch lines.
Trucks arrive hours before the leading man ever gets to the set; cable is laid, people gripe at one another about issues such as stepladders and sight lines and microphones. All of this is usually normal to a campaign stop, but Arnold Schwarzenegger's everyday movement has an impervious, unscratchable quality about it, something that used to be described as "Teflon," which goes nicely with the raw egg that was lobbed at him from the crowd at a college campus appearance Wednesday in Long Beach. With yolky goop on his shoulder, the candidate then asked for bacon.
This is extra-strength Teflon: Whenever reporters bring up the Oui magazine article from 1977 in which he bragged of group sex in his workout gym, they are batted aside, with a stock comment about hype and the '70s and letting go of the past.
When asked about earthy comments he made about women in an Esquire magazine interview published this summer -- "As much as when you see a blonde with great [breasts] and a great [rear end], you say to yourself, 'Hey, she must be stupid or must have nothing else to offer,' which maybe is the case many times. But then again there is the one that is as smart as her breasts look, great as her face looks, beautiful as her whole body looks gorgeous, you know, so people are shocked'' -- the candidate or one of his spokesmen emphasizes that he was comparing himself to women who are stereotyped because of how they look.
Then again, in describing the making of his latest movie, "Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines," in an Entertainment Weekly article dated July 11, he enthused: "How many times do you get away with this -- to take a woman, grab her upside down and bury her face in a toilet bowl? I wanted to have something floating there."
"Let me tell you a personal story," Schwarzenegger says to the 60 or so board members of the California Chamber of Commerce on Friday morning, in an orchestrated plea for their endorsement. They have gathered at the Ritz-Carlton resort near Laguna Niguel, and a slight feeling of Arnold fatigue mists the scene. The hotel sits on a cliff from which somebody (a reporter, perhaps) just might leap, after another Schwarzenegger speech about the mess in Sacramento, the loss of jobs, the need to attract new business, his pledge to reform workers' compensation programs. By now most anyone can tell you that there is no such thing as a personal story in the state's recall election saga, unless it was published in an old porn mag.
The story he has to tell today is about his job, specifically the making of "T3." Producers, he says, wanted to shoot it in Canada, because it would shaved $8 million from production costs.
"I said, 'Let's sit down, let's talk about that,' " Schwarzenegger says.
He kicked in some of his own money, he says, and negotiated other cost-cutting measures; and so the picture was shot in and around Los Angeles, at a cost of $172 million, "which helped create jobs. "I kept jobs in the state," he boasts.
So much for film budgeting. When a woman on the chamber board asks him for specifics about balancing the state's budget, he speaks only of his desire to first perform an audit -- a thorough, deep audit of everything down to the budget for paper clips.
What he's talking about sounds like a sort of high colonic up the back end of the capital of his beloved, ailing "Cullyfornia." The audit is Schwarzenegger's secret weapon, after which, he says, money will reveal itself and be redistributed, and citizens still won't have to pay market-value taxes on their homes or suffer any longer the indignity of higher taxes on their cars.
Schwarzenegger, thanks the group, basks in polite applause and leaves the ballroom, but does not proceed directly to the media herd, instead disappearing through the hotel's Pacific Promenade wing. The media gang is told that he will reenter from the door to the south, so that he can appear to be strolling along the sidewalk in the sunshine, overlooking the sea. It will be prettier that way, and it's why they shoot movies in Southern California.
After a 15-minute make-ready, the 56-year-old celebrity performs his walk, emerging alone, as if he goes everywhere all by himself.
He is wearing a navy blazer, tan dress slacks, a white shirt and red-white-and-blue necktie, and black alligator shoes with lug soles. He's not wearing any of his rings. The cadaverously orange makeup has been toned down.
He is asked three times about the Esquire and Entertainment Weekly quotes, until he finally says, "I think you should just go and talk to women I work with." He calls on a reporter from Austria, who asks him about his upbringing and schooling and how or if he would try to make California's schools more like Austria in the 1950s. Schwarzenegger lapses into a story about his mother, who would attend parent-teacher conferences and, upon receiving a bad report re young Arnold's behavior, would "give me a Terminator look . . . [and] smack me across the face."
He is asked if he had ever driven a car when he first came to Cullyfornia in 1968 from Austria, since he now opposes a new state law granting driver's licenses to undocumented immigrants. Yes, he says, but he had the right papers, a resident visa.
And then he is gone, with his staff, via two opaque-windowed SUVs, leaving behind the $425-a-night Ritz-Carlton and a few bewildered guests, who watch from their oceanside balconies. (The only other action in the hotel this morning is a weight loss conference sponsored by the people who make Lean Cuisine.) Outside, David Anthis, 39, a Dana Point resident, waits with a camcorder to get a glimpse of Schwarzenegger, whom he says he'll vote for.
"I hate to say it, but something is better than nothing," he says.
Schwarzenegger has the ability to turn wherever he is into Planet Hollywood. His arrival transforms, for a few hours, a town plaza, community center, campus quad or charter school. Californians get told they need a strong leader. Kids get told to do their homework. Reporters get told to never mind the details.
Later that afternoon, the scene shifts 50 miles northward, for the dedication of a new campaign volunteer headquarters in downtown Santa Monica, in a large space that used to be a furniture store.
Outside the office, a few dozen protesters affiliated with Code Pink, the women's peace activist group, hold signs in protest of Schwarzenegger's perceived views about women. "Arnold the Groper! For Governor??!" reads one sign; another says "California Hopes While Arnold Gropes"; still another reads "Governor Gang Bang." "I want him to apologize to the women of California," says Karen Pomer, one of the protest organizers, citing mostly magazine articles that have alluded to or reported incidents in which Schwarzenegger behaved badly, even threateningly to women. "His behavior is a well-kept but not-so-well-kept secret in Hollywood."
Hermetically sealed behind the glass doors, campaign workers and supporters stand and eat hot dogs and ice cream and listen to a mariachi band. The candidate and his wife, Maria Shriver, show up and take their places on a stage crowded with Californians of various ethnicities, the Schwarzenegger-Shrivers' parish priest and a few bodybuilders. It turns out the muscle comes in handy when an interloper, Jared McCaskill, 28, begins shouting during Schwarzenegger's speech -- something about Schwarzenegger's brief (and unrecollected) meeting with Kenneth Lay, the disgraced former Enron chief.
McCaskill is lifted by his limbs by the big guys and shoved out the back door into the alley. He brushes himself, says he's fine, happily walking beachward, pleased with his own performance.
Pieces of all this will play on the nightly news. Following how Arnold gets followed is a little like watching the daily rushes of some new Arnold movie. The results are shown to a test-audience every night, whether the plot makes sense or not. He never said he was making a chick-flick, and, accordingly, the Code Pinkers don't get much screen time.
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