So... Alright - Trucks and Terminators

Episode Date: October 24, 2023

Geoff does some armchair psychoanalysis on James Cameron. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

So, I was having a conversation with somebody the other day, and we were talking about The Terminator. And it became clear that Emily had... First off, Emily didn't realize that The Terminator and Terminator 2 were two different movies. I guess she'd never seen either, and they were, I guess, truncated in her mind. So she and I sat down, and we watched T1 and T2. Which, by the way, I don't know if you've seen them recently. I don't know if you've never seen them, but they're fantastic films, and I had never seen them back-to-back before, and it changed my level of enjoyment for them. First off, they're very different movies. If you're familiar with them, you know that Terminator 1 is in every way a horror movie.

It is about a relentless, unstoppable killer that never stops coming after you. A death snail, if you will. And it follows, but done in 1994, way before that shit. And then Terminator 2 is an action movie. And it's a great action movie. It's a fantastic action movie with comedic elements. But they are very different films. And they kind of... It's interesting because they deal with different films. And they kind of, it's interesting because they are, they deal with time travel, right? And honestly, I've seen a lot of time travel films in my life, and I've read a lot of time travel books. I think that they handle time travel about as well as I've ever seen. They sew it up really well. It makes sense. They take a lot of care to explain it and treat it in a way

that doesn't create a lot of plot holes. And watching 1 to 2, there's a lot of history repeating itself, playing out in front of you, but done in such a cool way. A lot of what 2 does is lovingly send up moments from 1 and make them bigger and better. However, we're not really talking about Terminator. I guess we are and we aren't. We're talking about James Cameron. If you don't know, James Cameron is the director who directed The Terminator and Terminator 2, as well as Aliens and True Lies and The Abyss and Titanic and Avatar and Avatar 2, the sequel, and a bunch of other National Geographic stuff. Those are his big theatrical films. And I don't know a ton about James Cameron. I consider myself a fan in the way that most people consider themselves a fan if they like

all those movies. I've never seen a James Cameron film I didn't enjoy. But I wouldn't say I know a ton about the dude. However, I did remember one piece of information. I learned it on the internet in the last 10 years or so. I remember reading that James Cameron was a truck driver before he was a director, and that he actually... He didn't go to film school. He actually learned everything he needed to know about film while driving truck. And I always thought that was kind of interesting. That's a great everyman story. You support yourself as a truck driver.

And then on nights and weekends, you're learning about directing and film. And then you become the second highest grossing director of all time, just 30 years later or however long later. Like that's a pretty cool story in itself. But going into watching Terminator, one of the earliest shots is, and this is an Easter egg that's been reported before, but Terminator pulls up in front of one of the Sarah Connors homes, I think the first one he's looking for, and he's in a stolen station wagon. And he parks on top of a semi, like a little toy semi truck, like a Ertl toy truck, and crushes it. And that is

essentially the same semi truck that runs him over at the end of the movie in the climactic fight scene at the very end, where they're on like a freeway. So it's kind of like an in-movie Easter egg that has been noticed by many people. I'm certainly not the first person to notice it. I'm sure you've already noticed it in your lifetime. lifetime but seeing it this time and remembering that i'd read that that james cameron was a truck driver in the past i thought i wonder if that had anything to do with it like maybe when james cameron was driving truck you know up and down the california freeways maybe he uh maybe he was like daydreaming about how to work them into movies or like you know dreaming about just running motherfuckers over who were bugging him,

and then somehow that memory made its way into, maybe consciously or subconsciously, into Terminator. Maybe he spent long, boring days driving down the 101 just thinking about how there aren't enough semi-trucks being blown up and run into shit in films, and if he ever got the chance, he would go hog wild. So after we watched T1 and T2, I went back and I re-watched them so that I could try to pay attention to every time a semi or a big truck appears on camera. I thought it was more than it was, but it's still more than, I would

say, an average film. T1 begins with Terminator popping into LA in front of a garbage truck. And that's a garbage truck, but it's like the front of like a semi cab on a garbage truck back. So I kind of half count that. And then the aforementioned scene 10 minutes later when he runs over the semi with the station wagon, the little toy. And then that's pretty much it to the end. Although I got to say, by the way, there is a shot, there's a scene in the middle of the movie when Reese and Sarah Connor are hiding out in a parking garage and they're trying to ditch the car and get a new car and eventually terminator finds them and they're escaping and they're running down one aisle and then terminators are driving on another aisle and they're having a

shotgun battle where reese is shooting out of his car at the terminator and terminator is shooting out of his car at reese and i don't think I've ever seen before or since a tandem shotgun battle like that before. It's over pretty quick, but it's just a really cool, I don't feel like enough recognition got poured on that shotgun battle. It's actually quite a clever and fun and exciting and kind of thrilling little scene in the movie. Anyway, then you go a lot further down and then at the end there is a huge scene on a freeway where he gets run over by the same toy truck that runs him over obviously life-size this time and and then the movie's over then t2 it starts with the t101 which by the way this confused the shit out of me so i looked into it in the first terminator film they very clearly call him the t101 that's his's his model number, I guess. Right. But then in Terminator 2, they refer who the bad

guy in Terminator 2 is the T-1000, Robert Patrick. Right. They refer to Arnold Schwarzenegger's model as the T-800 when it was the T-101 in Terminator 1. So I looked it up and here's the official Internet answer. They're actually the same thing and without one there couldn't be another the t800 is the endoskeleton and the t101 is the skin and therefore physical appearance of the model so this it's like series 800 model 101 that seems retconned to me but okay so anyway there you go if you've ever been confused about why the terminator is where arnold schwarzenegger's terminator is the T-800 and the T-101, I guess that should explain it.

So T2 starts with Arnold Schwarzenegger, the T-101 or the T-800, whatever you want to call them, time bubbling in between two big semi-trucks. There they are. It literally starts the movie off with them. And then he has his famous naked, like, biker barroom fight. Then, and by the way, another interesting thing when you watch those movies back to back, it is crazy how much smaller Arnold Schwarzenegger is in Terminator 2 versus Terminator 1. I know,

you know, he wasn't on the professional circuit anymore, but man, his back in 1 is like twice the size of his back in 2. And he's still huge in two. Don't get me wrong. It's just crazy how big he was in those early 80s movies. And then, of course, not too much longer after we're introduced to teenage John Connor, we have the huge culvert LA motorcycle chased by a semi-truck scene where John Connor starts off on a, he starts off on like a little dirt bike and then he ends up on arnold schwarzenegger's uh like hog like his harley and then they're being chased by uh the t-1000 in the big semi huge scene you've definitely even if you

haven't seen the movie you've seen that scene i'm pretty sure and then we're it's we were semi-less for most of the movie then at the end we have kind of the repeat of the final scene but this time the semi-truck is full of liquid nitrogen and then things happen the rest of the movie unfolds i don't want to spoil it if you haven't seen it but looking back on it after after watching the two back-to-back again i guess it's not that many semi-truck scenes i think it's six if you count it out. But total screen time chewed up in or around or being chased by a semi is pretty significant. I'm not going to timestamp that shit and figure that out. But it's clear James Cameron devoted a lot of Terminator one and a lot of Terminator two to

semi trucks. And there are tons and tons and tons of articles and stories about how he got his start about how he was a truck driver and then on the weekends he would drive down to usc and he would go in and just xerox all of the doctoral dissertations on on film and emulsion and printing and like everything technically he could learn about about film and he would like fill up all these binders and then just study it constantly says i think he says that he gave himself a full college education for about 120 dollars in xerox fees which you know it's pretty fucking cool and honestly probably doable by anybody listening to this podcast really is the the information is out there if you if you have the

wherewithal and the drive to teach it to yourself. Fuck, it's even easier now because we have YouTube and master's classes and all that stuff. But anyway, there's all these inspirational articles and interviews with them about this, but nobody at any point in time asks them, hey, are all these truck scenes in these movies because you were a truck driver? And the more I read, the more frustrating I got with the lack of that question being asked, let alone answered. And so to my limited knowledge, it seems like it's never been addressed

in any kind of major way, but doesn't it make sense to you? Because it makes sense to me that a guy got his start, he funded his film career partially by being a truck driver, and then suddenly made trucks a big part of his first two movies. Now, I should back that up trucks a big part of his first two movies. Now, I should back that up. That's technically not his first two movies.

He directed Piranha 2, sort of. I'll cover that in a second. But Terminator was the first movie he wrote and directed. And then Terminator 2 wasn't the second. I think he did Aliens in between. But it was another movie that he wrote and directed. So these were his first, like, his movies. And he filled it with trucks.

A lot of screen time going to semi trucks and i can't help but think that it must have been because of his experience driving trucks maybe not consciously maybe it's only subconsciously but i don't know i i just i'm mad that i can't find out that answer i'm left to to my own assumptions i guess that got me thinking though i bet i could figure that out by looking at the rest of his movies and seeing what else he used trucks in. Maybe there's a ton of trucks in all of his films. So I was looking at what else he made. And that's when I realized that since Terminator, he hasn't given himself a lot of opportunity to use semi trucks. There's true

lies. And I haven't seen that movie in a very long time. It wasn't available for streaming for many years. I think you can get it on like Hulu Premium now, so I'll have to go back and watch it. I don't remember there being any semi-trucks in it. But not too long after T2, he does The Abyss. That's all in the ocean. He does Titanic in the ocean. He does Avatar and Avatar 2, jungles and forests. So now my question is, is James Cameron so addicted to putting semi-trucks in movies, he has to only allow himself to direct films

where there can be no semi-truck? He has to eliminate the possibility from his own mind so that he can break free from it. All right, none of that's true. And it's, I'm just and I have a dumb imagination. However, in this process, I read some fascinating stuff about this dude.

For instance, did you know how many times James Cameron was married and to who? I had no idea. He was married one, two, three, four, five times. I knew he was married to Catherine Bigelow. That was a high profile wedding back in the 80s and 90s. They weren't married for very long either. They were only married for like two years, three years. But, and I don't know how this passed me by,

maybe you are all completely aware of this, but did you know that he was married to Linda Hamilton from 1997 to 1999? How crazy is that? I had no clue they were even a couple. I don't know if that means that they, like after the movies, they struck up a friendship and then fell in love or whatever. But yeah, I had no clue that James Cameron

and Linda Hamilton were actually married. Of course, they got divorced in 99 and now he's married to his current wife, Susie, who he's been married to since 2000. So that clearly, that marriage was clearly meant to last because it's going on 23 years, I guess. So congratulations to those guys. This episode is brought to you by Peloton. Forget the pressure to be crushing your workout on day one. Just start moving with the

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What day of the week do you look forward to most? Well, it should be Wednesday. Ahem, Wednesday. Why, you wonder? Whopper Wednesday, of course. When you can get a great deal on a whopper. Flame grilled and made your way, and you won't want to miss it. So make every Wednesday a whopper Wednesday. Only at Burger King, where you rule. But some of the most interesting shit I learned about this dude. So he got his start directing a movie called Piranha 2, which is interesting because Piranha 1,

if you're not familiar with Piranha 1 and Piranha 2, they're like, they're ripoffs of Jaws. When Jaws became popular in the early 70s, mid 70s, they started pumping out other, out whatever kind of water horror movie they could come up with. And Piranha 1 came out in, I want to say, like, 76? That was filmed in San Marcos, Texas. So just south of Austin, where Texas State is, just about 30 minutes south of Austin,

there's a place called Aquarina Springs. And it's very cool. You can take glass-bottom boat tours there. They filmed the movie Piranha 1 there, and then James Cameron directs his first film as Piranha 2, no connection there other than Piranha 1 was directed by a guy named Joe Dante, who if you've never heard of, he directed Gremlins, Gremlins 2, The Howling, one of my favorite movies, The Burbs, but also directed recently the hot topic of discussion over on the Fuckface podcast. He directed a movie called Small Soldiers that was very popular in 1998.

Anyway, Joe Dante directed Piranha 1. Piranha 2 was a film that was produced in Italy by an Italian production company and had no connection really to Piranha 1 that I'm aware of. Interestingly enough, though, before he directed Piranha 2, he worked on a movie called Rock and Roll High School, James Cameron did. I think he was in the art department on that movie. And Rock and Roll High School was directed by Joe Dante. So he did work with the guy who directed Piranha 1 before he directed Piranha 2 but I don't know that those two things had anything to do with each other other than being a happy accident because like I said Piranha 2 was produced by a different production company in Italy far far away from Joe

Dante in America as a matter of fact it was produced in Rome it was filmed in Rome and it was by all accounts a total disaster I've never seen film. I'm definitely going to go back and watch it now. James Cameron apparently said that if you watch the final cut of the film now, there's only two scenes that he shot in the whole movie. I guess the film was set to be directed. He was doing art on it, maybe, or photography, because he was working in art departments and he was doing director of photography stuff. because he was working in art departments and he was doing director of photography stuff. So he was already kind of coming up in the industry at this point. And they fired the Italian director, hired, he said, I'll do it, you know, and they hired him because according to him,

he was super cheap and they were trying to save money. And also according to him and some other people around that have worked with that production company before, I guess a popular move by this production company was to hire a director, get the name on the film, fire that director, say that it didn't work out,

and then the movie's actually directed by the Italian producers. And supposedly that's what the plan was here. That's what happened, at least if you listen to his side. If you listen to the Italian producer's side, he was terrible and did a terrible job and spent all day in a boat or in a series of boats chasing a cloud so that he could get the perfect lighting and they were like this is not how we're

gonna make this film and so they fired him apparently he was hired back and then fired again i don't know it's it's all muddy and a lot of like it's a lot of like references to old articles that i can't find and shit but But ultimately, he was fired from Piranha 2 and didn't make another film until Terminator. But that Piranha 2 film turned out to be very, very, very influential to him because he got very sick when he was in Italy directing that film in Rome.

Mentioned that he hated being in Rome, which I cannot agree with. I was in Rome not too long ago, and it's maybe the coolest place I've ever been. Just big fan of Rome. Anyway, he was directing, and he was under a ton of pressure. He said that it was so bad, nobody on the crew spoke English, they only spoke Italian, and so there was this huge language barrier. And then producers wouldn't let him look at the dailies, so he wasn't even allowed to see what he had shot. So he had no idea about continuity or how it was going.

And it just sounded like a nightmare. And according to him, he was set up to fail. And they wanted to fire him. They were planning on firing him when they hired him, that this was just kind of a thing that they did as a cost-saving method, I guess. He gets sick. He gets sick with fever

and probably has like a flu or something from stress. Has a nightmare in his hotel room right around that time. And the nightmare is, and this is a direct quote from him. Nightmares are a business asset. That's the way I look at it. I was sick. I was broke. I had a high fever and I had a dream about this metal death figure coming out of the fire, he said. And the implication was that it had been stripped of its skin by the fire and exposed for what it really was. When I have some particularly vivid image, I'll draw it or write some notes on it and that does not go away to this day. Oh, sorry. And that goes on to this day.

So he gets the idea from the Terminator from that dream. What's fucking crazy to me though, and nobody, I read a bunch of articles about this, and nobody makes this connection, and maybe I'm a lunatic for doing it, but my, like, armchair dream analysis, he even says it right there, the implication was that it had been stripped of its skin by the fire and exposed for what it really was. What it really was was a robot, right? It looked human, and then it was a robot. And then here you have a young James Cameron,

like 24 years old, and he's directing a film, but he has no control over what he's directing. There's a language barrier. There's authority issues. They won't let him succeed. He must have felt in his own heart, in his own mind, like a robot. I wonder if he ever, he must have.

The guy's very successful and very smart. He must have made that connection. Or maybe I'm just reading way too much into it. But if I have a dream where a human is being laid bare to show that it is only a mechanical man, a robot at its true nature, while I'm in the process of being fired from a movie because I'm given no control and I'm being forced to do what I'm told and act like a robot, I think there's probably some correlation. That's gotta be the best firing for all of us up there.

I can't even imagine what other ones are to compare it to, but just think about that. If James Cameron has success in Piranha 2, if he doesn't get a fever, if he doesn't have that nightmare, does Terminator ever exist? Does it ever happen? It may be the only,

it may be that the only way we were able to have one of the greatest sci-fi series of my generation, of my lifetime, because that dude either did a shitty job or got unfairly fired

on his first film. So I don't know who the producers were of Piranha 2, but thank you for firing that man, because it gave him the seed for Terminator, which we are all better off for having seen and enjoyed. Another crazy little addendum to that is when Cameron went to get Terminator made, he showed it to a person named Gail Ann Hurd, who was, I guess, the founder of Pacific Western Productions. And Gale agreed to buy the script for Terminator for $1 on the condition that they let Cameron direct the film. So then Gale had

to go and convince the president of Hemdale Pictures to make the film with Cameron as the director and Hurd as the producer, which is probably a tough ask considering he got fired from his directorial debut. However, think about that. James Cameron believed in James Cameron to such a degree that he sold the script to Terminator for one fucking dollar. As long as he got to direct it because he believed that he could make that movie a hit. And clearly he did. That is the epitome of betting on yourself. Like, what a ballsy thing to do.

And you gotta really, really believe in yourself to do something like that. And clearly it was the right decision because he's now the second highest grossing director of all time. And I think he is in possession of three of the top four grossing films of all time. So it was a good

bet. It was a good bet by James. Another interesting thing about that dude and something that makes me like him a lot. He he quit his job as a truck driver to devote full time to the film industry after seeing Star Wars. He was so excited in 1977 by Star Wars. He was like, I got to quit being a truck driver I gotta dive headfirst into film I gotta make this happen and then when he finally wrote the screenplay for Terminator he wrote it after seeing Halloween he was so inspired by Halloween that he wanted to make a horror movie and it turned out to be Terminator I love that the dude is inspired by all the same shit that other normal people are inspired by like I appreciate directors like

Quentin Tarantino but he's always referencing some like fucking italian crime drama from 1968 that nobody's ever heard of and that's very cool or some kurosawa film or some some some little known uh piece of film noir that is super inspirational to him i like the james Cameron was just like, I like Halloween, I like Star Wars, I want to make big movies. And then he fucking did. Which brings me to the section I'd like to call, Other Shit I Didn't Know About James Cameron that doesn't necessarily fit into

this other than I think it's interesting. For instance, did you know James Cameron wrote Rambo First Blood Part 2? I had no idea. And I bet you didn't either. I guess they were so excited with the work he did on Aliens that they asked him not to direct, but they asked him to write the script for Rambo First Blood Part Two. And he did. And I had no fucking clue. One of my favorite movies when I was a kid, and I had no idea that the guy that

did Aliens and the guy that did Terminator was also the guy that wrote Rambo. That would have blown my mind when I was nine years old. Another interesting piece of James Cameron, he's not listed as a writer on it in the final credits, but according to the American Film Institute, James Cameron was a co-author on the movie Alien Nation, which if you haven't seen it, is a really good movie. It's got James Caan in it. It was so successful that it spawned a a tv series based off of it i think it only ran for for a year or two but it's all about how humans and aliens aliens exist and they come down to earth and we all have to live together and aliens really like milk i remember that being a big thing of it and just a lot of like like racism between humans and

non-humans and like a like just about how how those cultures integrate you know and i believe if i remember correctly alienation was like a cop drama where uh james khan and maybe like a cop alien are trying to solve a murder or a crime or something i gotta go back and re-watch it but i had no clue that james cameron wrote it in addition to that going way back even before his directing days when he was getting his start and he got some early gigs i mentioned he was on rock and roll uh high school he was getting his start and he got some early gigs. I mentioned he was on Rock and Roll High School. He was also visual effects. He did visual effects on Escape from New York, which is another classic early 80s film.

Snake Plissken, Kurt Russell. I had no idea James Cameron was involved in that. He also, I did some photography on it. In addition to that, he was the executive producer on Point Break. I didn't even have to think about that. Another phenomenal film to be a part of. And then I saw he produced this movie. It's a movie I forgot existed. He produced a film I really, really enjoyed. I think it had Ralph Fiennes in it called Strange Days. It came out in 1995. Yeah, it was Angela Bassett, Juliette Lewis, Tom Sizemore, Vincent D'Onofrio, and

Ed Rafe Fiennes. And it's a sci-fi movie. I don't really remember a lot about it. As a matter of fact, I forgot the movie existed until I read this, but it triggered a really funny memory to me of a time in my life. In 1995, I was 20 years old, maybe, and 21 years old, maybe. And I was in the army in Fort Hood, in Texas. And I would go down on the weekend sometimes, would drive down the seven hours or whatever it was, eight hours to New Orleans with some of my friends. I was either not 21 yet, and you could drink at 18 in New Orleans, or I had just turned 21 and all my friends wanted to go to New Orleans. I was kind of, you know, I spent a lot of my childhood in Alabama. So I was either not 21 yet and you could drink at 18 in New Orleans or I had just turned 21 and all my friends wanted to go to New Orleans. I spent a lot of my childhood in Alabama, so I was New Orleans adjacent most of my life, so I'm pretty familiar with it. So I would bring a lot of people with me to New Orleans and sometimes I would just go by myself or whatever. And one time I was

staying in New Orleans for the weekend. I don't remember why, but I was broke. I was dead ass broke. And I decided to do this thing that, by the way, I do not recommend this. It probably wasn't smart to do in 1995. It's definitely not smart to do now. So please don't do this. But I used to on, sometimes on trips like that, when I was incredibly poor, I would just sleep in my car in a parking garage somewhere. I probably didn't have the $36 for a motel six or whatever it was. So I found a pretty safe looking mall and I decided just to spend the night in my truck there. And I was doing it one night and I couldn't sleep. I didn't know what to do. I was fucking bored. And this is 1995. So this is before phones,

1995. So this is before phones, cell phones. This is before iPads. This is before we just had books and CDs. And so I said, fuck it. I got out of the truck and I went into the mall and I started walking around and I saw that, you know, the mall was closed, but there was a movie theater attached to it and it was open and it was playing the movie Strange Days, which I hadn't really seen or heard about. So I just went in and saw the movie Strange Days for like six bucks or eight bucks. I had that much money and really loved it. I remember thinking it was an awesome movie and thinking it was really funny that I was even watching it because I hadn't really heard much about it. And it was not on my radar.

And it was only because of the situation I'd put myself in that I was seeing it. And I don't remember anything about the movie now other than Ralph Fiennes was in it and I liked him a lot in it. But after that movie, I just went and I slept in my truck, spent the night in my truck, and then went about my business the next day. Completely forgot that I did that until I found out James Cameron produced Strange Days. So there you go. It is my assertion that James Cameron puts trucks in movies because he was a truck driver. And if you can confirm or deny that, I'd love for you to email me over at eric at jeffsboss.com and let me know your insights into it. I also believe that he only had that dream because he was afraid he was being turned into a robot by these Italian producers and that if that hadn't happened, if he

hadn't had that horrible experience, we may not have Terminator. If we didn't have Terminator, we might not have had Aliens. If we didn't have Aliens, you can go down the line and we may have never had Titanic. Crazy to think about. So I'll leave you with this. If you watch any James Cameron movies that aren't Terminator or

Terminator 2 in the near future, keep an eye out for semi trucks and let me know if if you see any if you do please drop me an email i'd love to know and uh all right