Tag Archives: Arnold Schwarzenegger

My moment with Vincent Price

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It was the spring of 1982 and I was in an unexpectedly quiet spot in Chicago’s O’Hare airport, waiting for a plane. And, just as unexpectedly, there in front of me was horror movie icon Vincent Price.

I had been in Chicago on a press junket for the Arnold Schwarzenegger movie “Conan the Barbarian,” which was due to come out in just a few weeks. I’ve previously recounted my brief meeting with Schwarzenegger, who was far from a household name at this point.

Likewise, Vincent Price wasn’t a household name anymore. Except in my household, and those of other old horror movie fans around the world.

Price was about 71 by this point and his career had, in some ways, peaked a couple of decades earlier. His series of classic 1960s horror films, many adaptations of Edgar Allen Poe movies, were followed by a series of 1970s films that, by virtue of being offbeat, had given his later career a boost. Price had won critical acclaim and made fans with the “Dr. Phibes” movies and “Theater of Blood,” in which he played a washed-up horror movie actor plagued by a series of murders … or was he the murderer?

I loved the Poe movies and looooved the “Phibes” films, which were modern and old-fashioned at the same time.

But by 1982, the type of horror movies in which Price had starred had fallen out of fashion. This was the period in which every hack filmmaker was imitating John Carpenter’s great 1978 “Halloween” with cheap and tawdry slasher films.

Maybe I was emboldened by having just talked to Schwarzenegger and the “Conan” crew, but I knew I had to talk to Price.

He was, improbably, alone. No entourage. Not even a traveling companion.

I crossed from the bank of seats where I had been about to sit and approached him slowly. He looked up and smiled and seemed to encourage me to come closer.

I introduced myself, told him what I was doing in Chicago and asked if I could sit with him for a moment.

Even though by this point in his career he must have been approached by strangers thousands of times, he welcomed me graciously and gestured for me to sit down.

We made small talk — at least when I wasn’t telling him how much I loved his work — although I don’t recall if he said why he was traveling.

I remember thinking how jealous Jim, Brian, Derek and my other movie fan friends would be about my opportunity to meet one of our favorite stars so I asked if he would mind if I got out my tape recorder and recorded our conversation.

Price, so friendly in our few minutes together, balked at this.

“I think it would attract too much attention,” he told me.

By this point, a few other people had arrived at the gate for their flights and had noticed Price. He was right, and I nodded.

We spoke for a few more minutes, although by this point Price was distracted by the other people around us. Before long, a woman came up to where we sat and asked if she could take his picture. (This was in the days before cell phones, of course, and the woman had a camera, which was certain to attract even more attention.) Price smiled a little tightly and gave his permission.

Feeling almost guilty that I had started this snowball of recognition, I thanked Price for spending some time in conversation with me and headed back to the seats closest to my gate. He smiled and thanked me for my time.

Price spoke to a few of the people near him but before long excused himself, probably to go to a nearby airport restaurant. I didn’t see him again before my flight left.

Although Price seemed almost a curiosity to the crowd in the airport that day, he achieved yet another level of pop culture fame just a few months later. Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” album and music video, featuring Price’s spoken word “rap,” was released in November of that year. Although he wasn’t seen in the insanely popular video, his distinctive voice was heard, and anyone who wondered whatever happened to Vincent Price had their question answered.

I was lucky enough to have found out, a few months earlier, whatever happened to Vincent Price. And in the process, found that he was a gracious and generous man.

I didn’t get a chance to meet Price, who died in 1993, again. But he’ll live on in my memory from our airport meeting that day in 1982.

In which I’m as tall as Arnold Schwarzenegger

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I used to be about five feet 10 inches tall. And I used to write about movies.

What do those two factoids have in common?

What if I threw in a third factoid: I’m as tall as bodybuilder-turned-actor-turned-governor-turned-tabloid-fodder Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Or at least I used to be. Or Arnold used to be.

Confused yet?

Even though I’ve written about weightier subjects for most of the last 20 years, the first dozen or so years of my journalism career were devoted, primarily, to feature and entertainment writing. Besides writing for the now-defunct Muncie Evening Press, I wrote for some Indianapolis-based entertainment tabloids, Hot Potato and The Alternative, and some fan-published magazines.

I also tried to write once for a nationally-distributed entertainment magazine, but my submission — an in-depth review of an early, unused script for the 1989 “Batman” movie — earned me a cease-and-desist letter from Warner Bros., the makers of that movie. That’s a story for another day though.

For a guy writing about books, music and movies in a town the size of Muncie, I was pretty ambitious. I requested and received opportunities to do phone interviews with directors like John Carpenter (“Halloween”) and George Romero (“Night of the Living Dead”). I got to interview Julie Walters — now better known as Mrs. Weasley from the “Harry Potter” films — early in her career.

I also went on press junkets, in which studios flew entertainment writers to big-city screenings of upcoming movie releases. They put us up in a hotel, screened the movie for us and let us interview, in brief fashion, the stars. Sometime I’ll tell you about getting to meet Nick Nolte that way.

But it was at one of those press junkets where I got the opportunity to meet Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Now, this isn’t the Arnold Schwarzenegger we all know today. This was in 1982, and Arnold was publicizing “Conan the Barbarian.” He had been in a couple of movies by that time, but the Arnold that would be the stuff of action movie legend — “The Terminator,” “Commando,” and many more films — hadn’t happened yet.

This Arnold was still a fairly unpolished guy. I mean, he was dressed up for the press junket, in a suit and tie. And he was unfailingly polite. But I remember him as being rough around the edges, even in front of the press. He was outgoing and friendly but maybe a little louder than you would expect of a Hollywood type. I also remember he seemed flirty toward the female journalists in the group.

These press junkets are run like an interview factory. Arnold and co-stars Gerry Lopez (a surfer-turned-actor who played Arnold’s sidekick in the movie) and the gorgeous Sandahl Bergman (a dancer-turned-actor who was also seen in “All That Jazz”) were brought into a hotel room rented by the movie company and seated for 20 or 30 minutes with a group of four or five entertainment writers. Each writer threw out a couple of questions, in turn. I mostly found myself hoping that the only interesting questions wouldn’t be asked by somebody else first. Once that session was done, the writers were herded to another room to interview the next cast member and a new group was brought in.

The TV interviewers got one-on-one time with the actors but they were all cursory interviews, really. There’s not much time for an in-depth discussion in 20 minutes.

I don’t remember a lot about the interview with Arnold that my group conducted. Questions were asked and answered and it all sounded a lot like the kind of stuff you see on TV and online to this day. Yes, making the movie was a lot of fun. Yes, the cast got along. Yes, the stunts were a challenge.

But what I do remember was thinking, “Wow. Arnold is just about my height, maybe a little taller.”

Yes, it’s a strange thought to come away from the interview with. But Schwarzenegger — who was, with “Conan,” just beginning to build a larger-than-life image — was already being marketed as a big guy. Certainly he was “pumped up,” to quote Hans and Franz, but height-wise he seemed like a normal guy.

Arnold’s height has been the subject of some conjecture over the years. In researching this blog entry, I found an Internet site, www.arnoldheight.com, that takes a tongue-in-cheek approach to solving the mystery of just how tall he is. The site speculates that the actor is somewhere between five feet nine and six feet two. But if offers photographic evidence — mostly by matching Arnold up against some famous c0-workers — suggesting that the actor, who claims to be six feet two inches, has perhaps — ahem — fibbed a bit about his height.

In the nearly 30 years since my encounter with Arnold, I’ve met a number of actors and TV personalities. I’ve found that many of them are kind of on the small side, probably because TV and film cameras make most of the general population look like hideous, hulking creatures. The camera adds 10 or 20 or 50 pounds, all of it ugly.

As for me, I’m shrinking in my declining years. I’m not sure I’ll ever measure five feet 10 inches again, even on a good day.

And if I’m shrinking, one can only imagine that Arnold is, nearly 30 years on, experiencing the same effect.

I used to be five feet 10 inches tall. Maybe, just maybe, Arnold can make the same claim.

Not that he’d want to.