TERMINATOR 2
The T-800 in a scene shot especially for trailer #1.
In 1991, I was in a nondescript warehouse near the Van Nuys airport, sitting alone in a conference room, hunched over a videocassette deck, copying down slate information from dailies of James Cameron’s just wrapped film, TERMINATOR 2: JUDGEMENT DAY. The year before, Stan Winston had shot a wildly popular special shoot teaser trailer for the movie and eventually there would be a full on trailer #2 right before the movie came out, but now it was time to let audiences to get a first glimpse at the actual film.
Bill Loper at TriStar had passed on the edict from Cameron just the week before—he and his team (led by editor Mark Goldblatt, a fellow veteran of the Cannon Films ninja factory) were busy cutting the feature and would let Cimarron have access to their dailies just once—before we cut a single frame—to pull IPs on a small number of shots we might want for a trailer—and then we would have no more access to the film. And it was so early, that this future Academy Award winning special effects film only had 2 special FX shots ready—both from the same helicopter scene.
The pressure that day was intense, I had to make sure I got everything we needed to make a good trailer, while keeping it under about 1000 feet of film. But as a certified film geek, two things were just too good to be true—that was Ripley’s actual P-5000 Power Loader from ALIENS (a film I had seen 12 times in theaters) looming over me—and just watching Cameron’s dailies was like a free master class in action filmmaking.
Satisfied that I had gotten everything we needed, I left my shot list with Van Ling from Cameron’s team and the lab pulled our copies—and we found out later, when they went to finish the actual film, had proceeded to scratch two scenes of the original negative! In fact, until the digital remaster just a few years ago, every print of T2, from 70mm to VHS and LaserDisc, showed a nasty scratch on the right side of the frame, when Arnold says, “I’ll be back” and when Linda Hamilton one-handed pumps the shotgun. Not an auspicious start to my trailer…
As I prepped to start my cut, Cameron passed on one more note—don’t use the clanging music from the first film, it was dated 80s synthesizer music and he was not going to use it in the sequel. The right music choice is so critical in trailer cutting—so much so, that all of my proudest work owes as much to the music choice as to my editing. Whether it was the courage of my convictions, or just youthful arrogance—I told my boss, Bob Farina, that Jim Cameron, my filmmaking idol was dead wrong and I was going to prove it and use the original Terminator music anyway! Would Barbara Broccoli ask us to cut a 007 trailer without the Bond Theme?! To his credit Bob didn’t show how nervous that made him… he just said, “Well, we’ll just have to have somebody else cut a different trailer with the ‘right music’”. In the early 90s, it still wasn’t common to double or triple vend every trailer, so having the friendly competition of cutting against one of our own editors was a nice motivator.
Deciding to use the original TERMINATOR score was the easy part—finding it was a different story. The soundtrack album was out of print and no one I knew had an old copy. We couldn’t exactly ask Lightstorm, Cameron’s company, for it after they specifically told us not to use it! The only place I ended up finding any version, was in the end title section of my VHS copy of Terminator. Even then, it only had a few bars of the classic Bada-dum-da-dum. So, I recorded that few seconds of music off the VHS, had it transferred to 35mm mag, and then cut it into a loop. And Cimarron‘s sound mixer extraordinaire, Annie Heller (still several years away from becoming Annie Heller Wetherbee) took that loop and recorded two minutes of nonstop Bada-dum-da-dum. That 4 seconds of music would repeat endlessly, for more than a minute of my rough cut. It was a little monotonous, but, by just very slowly turning the volume up on the track for the entire length of the trailer, it did have a certain sense of building tension.
I used a shot from the first scene in ALIENS, of a laser sweeping across the smoky interior of the Nostromo’s escape pod for a temp background for the opening title sequence and the rest of the trailer really just laid out exactly like I saw it in my head that day in the conference room. I used the 2 fx shots of the liquid metal helicopter transformation in different parts of the trailer—to spread out the “bang for the buck” and ended the trailer with the alternate take Cameron shot for the trailer where Arnold says, “I swear, I won’t kill anyone,” to the camera, instead of to John Connor. And with that, I was ready to show.
Bill Loper came to Cimarron to see our 2 trailers and for the only time I can remember, brought his two bosses, Buffy and Kathy. They were thrilled with my cut and more importantly, the music and wanted to send version 1 to Cameron right away. While we waited to hear back from the notoriously demanding director, I finally started to wonder, would he would kill kill the trailer just over the music choice? Then we got his notes—he told us he had decided to cut the dream sequence with Kyle Reese out of the film—but he liked how it worked in the trailer, so, go ahead and leave it if you want. He didn’t like the shot of an awkwardly grinning Arnold as he picks up the mini-gun. It works in the context of his movie, but is so against type for what the audience expects from the Terminator, that it will throw people off. And then there’s the music. “Yeah, I guess I’m gonna have to use that music after all. But, we’ll have to score it for you—it can’t just be five notes over and over.”
With one shot change, we set about finishing the trailer—shooting the smoky laser beam for the opening graphics with my friend Ray Cecire and showing up in composer Brad Fiedel’s garage a few weeks later. He had a bitch of a time trying to recreate the sound he got way back in 1984, but it was ultimately a clanging success—and much more musical than my crummy loop.
Once the trailer was out and playing, I asked Loper how it was tracking and he said, “Are you kidding, we can put out 2 minutes of black leader and people will still go see this movie.” And one thing is for sure, there will never be another trailer for anything in the Terminator franchise… without those 5 notes of music.
Trailer #1
A screen used T-1000 prop that still sits next to my computer.
