The Last Action Heroes by Nick de Semlyen

Author:Nick de Semlyen [de Semlyen, Nick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Crown
Published: 2023-06-06T00:00:00+00:00

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MIDWAY THROUGH THE TWINS SHOOT, as the production shot near LA’s iconic Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, Reitman had spotted a poster for Rambo III. Instinctively, he steered Schwarzenegger toward it and they ad-libbed a scene in which the star considers Stallone’s grim, bandana-bedecked face, compares their biceps, and then chuckles in mild derision, waving his rival away like no threat at all.

The meta moment got huge laughs from crowds over Christmas 1988, but it’s unlikely to have made Stallone any less grim. Their rivalry was, that year, burning hotter than ever. At the start of 1988, Playboy ran Schwarzenegger’s interview mocking Stallone’s “fucking fur coat”; to another reporter, Arnold derided his foe’s security detail (“I think a lot of times this bodyguard stuff is a show”). In February, a story by Wendy Leigh ran in the United Kingdom’s News of the World tabloid, alleging that Schwarzenegger was secretly pro-Nazi; Leigh later claimed that her source was Stallone, and that he paid for her legal fees when Schwarzenegger sued. (Stallone denied these allegations through his lawyers.) In September, according to the New York Post, Stallone and his entourage entered a bar, saw a picture of Schwarzenegger on the wall, and demanded that the owner take it down.

There were attempts to broker a truce, even to put them together in a film. But nothing stuck. Schwarzenegger claimed that Stallone had offered him the villain role in Cobra but that he turned it down: “I didn’t think I would be done justice, so I stayed away from it.” And when Carolco, which had a deal with both stars, arranged a sit-down with both men and director John Hughes for a project named Bartholomew vs. Neff, it was an uneasy affair. “Everybody was kind of tense,” remembers Mario Kassar. “I managed to get them to come to my house, but the whole thing was, ‘Who’s coming first and who’s coming second?’ It was a very funny screenplay, about two neighbors who hated each other and are always doing bad things to each other. But after the meeting, everybody went their own way. It was history.”

Then there was Duke and Fluffy. Purchased by Carolco after an intense bidding war, the action-comedy script told the story of a loyal mutt and a feisty feline who fall into a machine designed by their scientist master, are transformed into humans, and then team up to retrieve him from criminal clutches. Schwarzenegger signed up to play the dog-man, Duke. Bette Midler was in the picture to play the cat-woman, Fluffy. John McTiernan, John Hughes, and Robert Zemeckis all flirted with directing it.

“Animal movies were popular,” says Rick Gitelson, who co-wrote the screenplay with Eric Freiser. “But nobody had done animals turning into people. We thought it was a great way to do an action movie.” Schwarzenegger met the writers at the Rose Café in LA’s Venice neighborhood to share his notes on the latest draft. “It was brief: ‘I like your script. I want to do this,’ ” Gitelson recalls.

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