The former television journalist and Kennedy family heir cited irreconcilable differences but offered no additional details about the breakup.

She also did not list a date when the couple separated, although they announced they had done so on May 9.

A week later, the former action star and former governor admitted he fathered a child with a member of his household staff years ago.

Shriver’s filing does not indicate the couple has a prenuptial agreement, which likely means Schwarzenegger’s earnings from his career as a Hollywood megastar will be evenly divided with his estranged wife.

She is seeking spousal support but any amount would be determined later, either through a settlement agreement or by a judge. The former couple’s breakup is expected to be handled mostly behind closed doors.

Several of Schwarzenegger’s biggest hits, including “Predator,” “True Lies” and the blockbuster sequel “Terminator 2″ were made during his marriage to Shriver.

Shriver was an award-winning television journalist but put her career on hold when Schwarzenegger ran for governor.

Economic disclosure forms filed when Schwarzenegger left as California governor in January show he has interests in at least eight entities each worth $1 million or more. An exact tally of his wealth is impossible to calculate.

The forms show the “Terminator” star still retains rights to intellectual property from his days as a fitness guru and movie star.

Shriver’s holdings are more modest but are listed in the disclosure as being worth more than $1 million. She is a member of the Kennedy family and is a beneficiary of some of its assets, and also owns rights and royalties from her work as an author, the filings show.

In recent months, Shriver has appeared in videos posted on YouTube in which she talks about stress in her life, the weight of expectations and the search for faith in a troubled world.

She signed her divorce petition roughly two weeks ago, but her attorney filed it Friday afternoon.

Shriver and Schwarzenegger were married in 1986 and have four children together, including two sons who are still minors. Shriver’s petition seeks joint custody of the teens, who are 17 and 13.

Schwarzenegger’s spokesman Adam Mendelsohn declined comment in an email. Shriver’s attorney Laura Wasser did not immediately return a phone message seeking comment.

Shriver stood by her husband’s side as he ran for California’s governorship in 2003, even after the Los Angeles Times reported accusations by several women that they had been groped by the movie star.

Schwarzenegger later said he “behaved badly sometimes” and was twice elected to the governorship.

He failed to fix the state’s chronic budget problems and left office in January with an eye toward environmental projects and a return to the big screen.

One of his projects was an animated collaboration with comic book legend Stan Lee titled “The Governator,” but the project was shelved after Schwarzenegger admitted fathering the child out of wedlock.

—–

And his post-gubernatorial admission of a secret affair with his housekeeper — that resulted in a love child he hid from his wife, Maria Shriver, and their children — all but shatters the family values image he tried to sustain.

The question now on most minds: Can the Terminator find a strategy to return to prominence and utter his most famous acting line, ‘I’ll be back’, once again?

I caught up with one of Hollywood’s most powerful and prominent PR players, Michael Levine, to ask that very question. He thinks the Terminator is, well, terminated.

Levine’s firm has represented a Who’s Who of American culture — from Michael Jordan and Michael Jackson to Joe Lieberman, John McCain and Bill Clinton. In short, America’s rich and powerful turn to him for advice when in crisis.

Levine disclosed to me that he twice voted for Schwarzenegger for governor. But it didn’t keep him from mincing words as he predicted Schwarzenegger has only just begun his downward spiral from power.

“America right now is a very cynical place and for good reason,” Levine told me. “Arnold Schwarzenegger has gifted America with another reason to be cynical. By the way, societies that are profoundly cynical are not healthy societies.”

“Before the scandal, his political career was over (since he did such a poor job as Governor). Now, since the scandal, any kind of fantasy he may have had with a future in politics — appointed or otherwise — is non-existent. He is politically radioactive,” Levine added.

Levine also is worried the backlash from his downward fall from grace could also cost Schwarzenegger at the box office.

“Before the scandal, his acting days as a leading man action hero were also largely going to be over because he is aging and was never a great actor to begin with. Now, since the scandal…look, last time I went to a movie theatre about half the people in there were women and I’m not exactly sure how this is going to play out with them.”

“The thing about Arnold is he likes himself A LOT, A LOT. I am told by people very close to him that he is so far out there that he actually believes that people think he did a good job as Governor.”

Prior to leaving office, Schwarzenegger shocked people when he commuted the sentence of Esteban Nunez, the son of a political ally who had plead guilty to voluntary manslaughter in the stabbing death of 22 year old college student, Luis Santos.

The Terminator seen here yukking it up with political friend Fabian Nunez. Arnold commuted the manslaughter sentence of Nunez’s son before leaving office.

The Santos family has filed a lawsuit against Arnold Schwarzenegger alleging he violated a victim’s rights initiative when he reduced the manslaughter sentence. It’s just one more cloud hanging over the storm front we now know to be Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Schwarzenegger has just announced that work on his new movie projects will stop “until further notice.” “At the request of Arnold Schwarzenegger, we asked Creative Artists Agency to inform all his motion picture projects currently underway, or being negotiated, to stop planning until further notice,” said Schwarzenegger’s lawyer, Patrick Knapp.

Apparently, the Terminator will have his hands full preparing for the most important role of his life after politics: defendant in what will surely be an expensive and very public divorce trial.

So there I was, at the gym (in my outfit with the polka dots) watching CNN (not by choice) when the anchor wondered … and I paraphrase: “why is the public so obsessed with the Arnold Schwarzenegger story?”

Dumb question.

The public wasn’t asking for this story, nor was it reported by the public.

The story was reported by reporters – some employed by CNN – and continues to be reported, by reporters! some from CNN!

See, the public really doesn’t possess the capacity to uncover muck -and on the odd occasion that it does- they’re often mocked by CNN.

See the ACORN story.

Now, as someone who does a nightly show, I’ve never received a letter asking to cover more celebrity news. If anything, the public writes in about stuff they feel is ignored by everyone else.

See the ACORN story.

Or my workout routine. Which should win a Peabody.

But here’s what really gets me: that a network like CNN needs to finger the public for an obsession, when it’s the media that’s obsessed with Arnold.

It satisfies their kinky interest, not yours.

Which reveals the media’s hypocritical criticism concerning America’s repressed attitudes.

They believe it’s silly for us to frown upon a married celeb impregnating a housemaid.

But if the media felt any differently, they wouldn’t be reporting the same story over and over again!

Could it be our media is actually more repressed than the public it mocks?

Maybe.

Which is why I’m boycotting salacious gossip and I suggest you do the same.

Especially if you hear anything about me and a pool boy named roderigo. He’s a filthy liar and I was only giving him CPR.

And if you disagree with me, you’re a racist homophobe.

Tonight, another great show:

Nick Gillespie!

Tom Shillue!

Leeann Tweeden!

and me. plus you.

This radio clip comes pre-satirized:

Transcript via Newsbusters:

ROSIE O’DONNELL: There is a legacy of the Shrivers in America, of the Kennedy/Shrivers, right? And it’s not the Schwarzeneggers, and I always felt like, you know – He, this Republican guy, kinda snuck in and…

BOBBY PEARCE (staffer): She married beneath her.

O’DONNELL: …I don’t know, I always felt that’s not my place to say. But I always did feel that, and, I feel like, “You don’t have a right to that legacy”…

PEARCE: And he proved it.

It’s reasonable to conclude Arnold’s personal shortcomings are precisely what makes him a suitable heir to the Kennedy legacy.

But we do not live in the age of the Western.  Those of us in our thirties and forties grew up in the age of the action hero.  The action hero is the figure who does not do the merely human things well but performs superhuman deeds that defy the imagination.  He does not simply draw a gun faster than another man.  Instead, he races through explosions on a motorcycle and dives out of planes without a parachute and yet invariably emerges from the ruins unscathed.  Of course, the action hero has half a dozen stunt doubles and computer graphics and millions invested in the movie to pull it all off.  But it’s all worth it: for the illusion, for the moment of suspended disbelief.  When you meet the actual man who plays the part, though, you find him pretty underwhelming. 

If Ronald Reagan is the political figure who stands for the age of the Western, of simple integrity, Arnold Schwarzenegger is most assuredly the political figure who reveals the lie behind the action hero: that he is not what he seems.  Arnold’s whole career has been built around lies.  The first lie is his body.  Yes, he lifted weights.  But what really gave him the absurd title of Mr. Universe were the steroids that changed him from a muscular man into a comic strip.  The second lie is the part he played—for there was really only one part, that of impossibly muscular kick-ass guy.  It was never human.  In his most famous film, Terminator, he did not even pretend to play a human.  Only in the later comedies did Arnold join the ranks of the human.  The problem with the action hero is that he is not really a hero.  A true hero must face death and failure.  He must fight for the good and be capable of losing it.  He must risk being hated for doing the right thing.  John Wayne and Jimmy Stewart played heroes.  The first Rocky movie was about a hero.  Conan and Terminator are essentially video games on screen.  The adolescent audiences do not think for a moment that Arnold will die; they just want to see the cool action scenes.  The third lie was Arnold’s political career.  He came into office as not just a conservative but with the rhetoric of a fiscal libertarian.  Yet when the very first unions stood up to him, he failed to use his fame and considerable political capital.  He caved.  Ronald Reagan, you will remember, stood up to the airline traffic controllers when they threatened a strike.  On the way out of office, Arnold gave silly exit interviews about how everyone expected him to be the “Governator” rather than just an ordinary governor.  The expectations were just too high, he complained.  But our memories aren’t that bad.  We know that the promise of a “Governator” was what got him into office in the first place.

And finally we come to the lie of his marriage.  For years we have had Arnold and Maria, with the help of the press, flaunt this impossible marriage before us: the staunch conservative who marries into the Kennedy clan and maintains his political views, but who just can’t do without the love of this woman.  There were rumors during the first campaign: about inappropriate comments and groping directed at almost any attractive woman he was around.  But he was an actor, after all, a sex symbol.  We should excuse him.  And now the truth be told: a love child with an employee of the house.

The just complaint of Maria Shriver is, interestingly enough, the complaint that countless women in this nation also have right now.  It is the complaint that the Tea Party is fueled by.  “Give us a man who is what he seems,” they say, whether referring to a husband or a political candidate.  “Give us a fellow who is in good shape but not hopped up on steroids.  Give us a political candidate who is not the creature of a slick campaign manager.  Give us a man we can trust.  Give us a man who won’t say one thing to get us to marry him (or to get into office) and do just the opposite when he has gotten what he wants.”  In short, give us a man.

Former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and his wife of 25 years, Maria Shriver, announced Monday that they are separating.

More entertainment-related videos at BBTV.

In fact, I even have a script for him. The working title is “HARD VENGEANCE.” But I’m also toying with “BRUTAL JUSTICE,” “JUSTIFIED VENGEANCE,” VENGEFUL JUSTICE,” And my fave, “HARD VENGEFUL JUSTICE, INC.”

But I also like “THE LAST STRAW.”

But I think people might think it’s about hay.

Here’s the story: Arnold’s character is a hardworking joe (named Fred), whose son is in college having the time of this life. During a party at a frat house, Fred’s son gets into a fight with gang members, who stab Fred’s son to death.

The thugs are captured. To Fred’s dismay, a plea bargain is made to prevent his son’s killers from getting life – after the thugs taunt his family with accusations of guilt, and blaming their actions, mockingly, on gangsta rap.

But Fred gets on with his life.

Then, everything changes.

Yes, it turns out one of the killers had connections. His father was friends with the governor, a well-known celeb. In the final days of his term, the unthinkable happens: the governor commutes the killer’s sentence.

Fred is devastated. His family, distraught.

What does he do? Well in the spirit of all great Arnold flicks like Raw Deal, Commando and Junior, he takes matters into his own hands.

He goes after the governor. Fred fights his way up the power ladder of California, taking out bad guys and slimy bureaucrats, until he comes face to face with the villain – a puffy, former action hero with a fondness for cigars and Hummers.

In a perfectly matched battle, they slug it out, until Fred finally thrusts a gavel into the gov’s cranium.

At that point, Arnold (er, Fred) looks to the camera and says, “Case closed.”

I really think Arnold could pull this movie off!

Of course this is just a movie idea.

Does anyone have any connections?

Tonight:

Arthel Neville!

Robert George!

Jesse Joyce!

other stuff!

this and that!

That’s how the initial treatment of Aliens (then called Alien II) tapered off after a mere twenty pages. Producers David Giler and Walter Hill had done little more than describe the basic setup: “Ripley and soldiers” versus the eponymous creatures. The rest, they decided, was for the guy who wrote The Terminator to flesh out.

Getting fired from Piranha Part Two: The Spawning, a schlocky job-for-hire, convinced James Cameron there was only one way he could make his Hollywood dreams come true. “I knew I was never going to be offered another movie,” he later explained about that time, “unless I came up with something myself. I had to write a film that made sense for me as a director. I thought it had to have effects that would justify my existence on the project, and I also had to not price myself out of the kind of budget that studios were likely to trust me with.”

So a guy who already specialized in sci-fi special effects and production art decided to add screenwriter to his list of talents. Using his fiery fever-nightmare about a killer robot as his jumping off point, and calling on many of the seminal sci-fi influences of his youth, he proceeded to write The Terminator. Each effect and action scene was thoroughly dissected on paper: Could I do this on a micro-budget? What special effect tricks could pull it off? Just like his early demo-film Xenogenesis, this would be a movie designed not just to entertain, but to show Hollywood what he could do.

What even he may not have realized is how much the script itself would benefit his career, irrespective of any movie made from it. I read it many years ago, and speaking from a screenwriting and filmmaking perspective, it was damn good — good enough, in my opinion, to take its place next to Chinatown as a script eminently worth teaching to students. Much of it consists of one-line images, each sparingly but evocatively worded. It’s not just descriptive, but cinematic — as line after line pile up, it reads as if you are watching the movie. Here’s a taste:

The bar customers are frozen in the weird tableau, cowering, gaping.

Sarah stops screaming.
Reese stand motionless, gun aimed.
In the sudden silence, the sound of him cocking the shotgun is abnormally loud.

ON TERMINATOR, very still.
Then he smoothly rolls to a crouch and slips the UZI machine pistol from beneath his overcoat, where it has been hanging on a shoulder strap. He doesn’t seem too impaired as he swings around to fire.

Reese rolls like a cat and comes up firing.
A burst from the UZI rakes the bar where he stood.
An orgy of shattering glass.
Total pandemonium.

SEVERAL ANGLES as patrons of the bar run, scream or dive for cover, depending upon their level of intelligence.

After he finished the screenplay, he was determined not to play the sap for anyone the way he had on Piranha Two. His agent read the script, said he hated it — and was promptly fired by Cameron. Various studios expressed interest, but (the eternal mantra from that crowd) “only if someone else directs.” Time after time Cameron turned them down, a broke wannabe leaving serious money on the table. With his producing partner (and future wife) Gale Anne Hurd, Cameron finally struck a meager deal at tiny Hemdale Pictures in London, only after having acting pal Lance Henriksen stalk into the company’s headquarters dressed as the Terminator, complete with gold foil on his teeth and a silent, menacing stare for the frightened office workers.

In hindsight, Cameron’s Terminator shoot ended up serving as a sort of grand pre-production process for Aliens. Actors Bill Paxton, Lance Henriksen, and Michael Biehn all found themselves graduating from the former film to the latter, as did special effects wizard Stan Winston. The guns, props, ships, and futuristic grit of Aliens all had their antecedents in elements of The Terminator’s production design. Perhaps most importantly, the script for Aliens was written during a key break in The Terminator’s pre-production, when producer Dino De Laurentiis executed an option in Arnold’s Conan contract to have him come back for a second turn as the world’s most famous fictional barbarian in Conan the Destroyer.

While waiting for his star to return, Cameron investigated other writing assignments to pay the bills. He got the job writing Rambo: First Blood Part II based on the quality of his Terminator script, and then took a meeting with David Giler and Walter Hill, both of whom had read The Terminator and came away impressed. At first, the meeting looked to be a bust: the producers thought Cameron might be suitable for writing a “Spartacus in space” movie they were developing, but the director wasn’t interested. On his way out the door, however, they mentioned another project they were sitting on: a sequel to Ridley Scott’s Alien.

That was different. Like with 2001 and Star Wars, Cameron the sci-fi fan had been blown away by Alien a half-decade earlier. The chance to take that world and do something new with it was alluring. He first crafted a forty-two-page outline, merging the producers “Ripley and soldiers” idea with his own futuristic, Heinlein-esque rebels from The Terminator, then added a Queen alien/breeding subplot culled from an old sci-fi script, written during his early days in Hollywood, called Mother.

He wrote at a fiendish pace, splitting his time between Rambo, Aliens, and last polishes on The Terminator. By the time Arnold was back from Conan the Destroyer, Cameron was only up to page ninety of Aliens (most scripts are 120 pages, with each equaling approximately a minute of screen time), but Giler, Hill, and the Fox executives were so impressed by them that they vowed to wait for Cameron to come back after his Terminator shoot to finish the job. Furthermore they said that, should The Terminator prove successful, he could direct Aliens. “At that point I really didn’t need to do an Alien sequel,” said Cameron, “but I liked what I had created, and once I had that imagery in my head I couldn’t get rid of it any other way but to go out and make the movie.”

In many ways, then, Aliens is the true spiritual sequel to The Terminator, far more than the risible Terminator 2: Judgment Day. There was so much similarity that, as Michael Biehn remembers, “Early on [in the Aliens shoot] I suggested to Jim that the character I was playing was too much like the character I played in Terminator, and he sat down with me and we talked about what we could do to make him different.” The final blessing bestowed upon Aliens by that earlier film was the most important of all: it convinced Sigourney Weaver to reprise her key role of Ellen Ripley.

Originally, she wasn’t interested. “I didn’t really want to do the sequel,” Weaver said in an interview at the time. “I was pretty skeptical of what I thought was an attempt to cash in on the success of the original. My question for Cameron was, ‘Why should I do this movie?’”

By way of an answer, Cameron sat her down and showed her The Terminator. “I found,” Weaver said, “that Jim and Gale wanted to make Aliens a character film as well as an action film.” Seeing Linda Hamilton’s turn as Sarah Connor gave her ideas about the new arc for her own character in Aliens — it wouldn’t be just a lesser retread of Scott’s movie. On top of that, the dystopian, devastated future, along with the impressive effects and action sequences, assured her that Cameron could come up with a cinematic visuals as interesting and compelling as Ridley Scott’s.

“I felt Jim and Gale were a kind of new breed of filmmaker that I wanted to be associated with,” Weaver said. “I found it was easy to talk to Jim. Jim told me that if I think of the first Alien movie as a fun house, I was going to think of Aliens as a roller-coaster ride.”

Previous posts in the series “James Cameron, Sigourney Weaver, and Aliens”

Part 1 | Part 2

FURTHER READING and VIEWING

Read Rebecca Keegan’s The Futurist: The Life and Films of James Cameron. This is a fine book that tells the story of Cameron’s single-minded rise to Hollywood visionary. Time and again obstacles that would have stopped most of us are surmounted via an admirable combination of smarts, ingenuity, and toughness that any wannabe filmmakers would be wise to emulate as best they can. Cameron gets a lot of flack around here these days for his drift into typical Hollywood leftist fellow-traveling, but this book reminds us of the other side of his personality, the one that gave us some of the best movies of the 1980s.

ALIEN WAR: OR HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE FACT THAT ARMOUR PIERCING EXPLOSIVE-TIPPED ROUNDS FIRED FROM A FUTURISTIC SPACE RIFLE AT A LIKELY RATE Of 700-1200RPM WILL KILL ANYTHING, NEVER MIND AN ALIEN. Here’s a fun blog post that engages in scientific speculation about the aliens from the movie, their biology and physiology, and the “real-life” technology of the space marines fighting them.

Let’s see.  There has to be first and foremost a seriously bad-ass villain who seems to hold all the cards.  Bigger, stronger, heavily armed, inimically cunning, and totally remorseless.

Then toss into the mix the unlikely hero who against all odds must somehow find a way to defeat the afore mentioned baddie.  My ideal hero is a scrapper.  A street-smart yet vulnerable guy who knows that his task is impossible but will try like hell to get ‘er done anyway—even if it costs him his life.

As I am a biped (actually a ‘triped’) I would also ask that an attractive heroine be thrown in…but not just any eye-candy floozy.  She looks good in jeans but can also fire a weapon, toss a grenade, laugh, cry, and ultimately serve as the hero’s well-spring from whom he draws one last ounce of inner strength when his own will falters.  And she must have room to grow as the true protagonist of the story.

Now,  to really pull me in, I need very high stakes resting on the outcome of  this uneven match between the ubervillain and untested good guy and his bikini-model hottie made of iron inside.  And I mean stakes that are stratospheric; stakes that involve nothing less “all in” than the fate of the entire human race.

Last but not least, there must be some sort of intellectual premise that prompts me to think amidst the gunfire and explosions and screeching tires.  And not just check my brain at the door.

I would write such a film but James Cameron already did it in 1984.  He called the movie  The Terminator.  And an American film icon was born…as was the career of a transplanted Austrian body-builder-turned-screen actor (and later state governor) Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Has there ever been a more perfect villain so seamlessly woven into the fabric of a great plot?  A semi-organic robot is sent back from the future (the year 2029 to be precise) whose sole purpose is to execute an unsuspecting woman named Sarah Connor.  Why?  Because unknown to the walking dead of then present-day 1980’s a nuclear Armageddon is in the offing; one that is triggered by an automated missile defense system that becomes so efficient and powerful that the computer network created to protect its human masters from one another actually becomes self-aware and in a nanosecond analysis concludes that all mankind is a threat to them!

And so the machines unleash a global thermonuclear holocaust and embark on a systematic campaign of extermination of all those left alive when the fires burn out.   We learn through the film that the human race was on the brink of extinction until one man, John Connor, Sarah Connor’s son, rallied the humans and fought back.  Responding to the threat, the machines devise a plan to send a cyborg assassin through time to kill Connor’s mother before he is ever born, altering the time-space continuum in their favor.

But John Connor is no slouch.  He too sends a soldier from the future, Kyle Reese, into the streets of mid-80’s Los Angeles to find Sarah before the terminator does and protect her.  Since the terminator is literally a killing machine that will never give up, Reese must find a way to destroy this most efficient and resilient predator and save Sarah so that she can give birth to John who will then save the world four decades hence.

Quite a mouthful, no?  But what a great premise.   Beyond the concept itself, several aspects of the movie appeal to me on an intellectual, emotional, nostalgic, even  metaphysical level.

First off I like that Cameron takes great pains to explain why things happen the way they do, respecting the audience enough to not leave unanswered questions or loose ends.  One example is why Reese did not bring any futuristic “ray guns” with him to better deal with his nemesis (as the condescending shrink, Dr. Silberman,  inquires skeptically).  Reese explains that only organic matter can go through the time machine—ergo his nakedness upon arrival.  Ah, but the terminator is a robot isn’t he?  “Surrounded by living tissue!” a frustrated Reese replies. And there you go. Problem solved.

Emotionally the film draws me in because in the first scenes the character of Sarah is so very much the every day girl in her mid-20s just doing her best to get by on her own in a tough and unforgiving world—totally oblivious of her true destiny until revealed to her by Reese who introduces himself at a hip dance club with the ultimatum:  “Come with me if you want to live!” followed by a large man in a leather jacket who suddenly unleashes an indiscriminate hail of bullets in her direction. Welcome to the show, Sarah.  So amidst this very macho film with two men slugging it out (well one man, one machine), you have as the central figure an archetypal strong woman played by a very alluring  Linda Hamilton who goes from an abused diner waitress to soldier of the future in 108 minutes.

Finally there is nostalgia.  I am a child of the 1980’s and The Terminator positively oozes that era from Sarah’s feathered hair, to her friends’ original Sony Walkman, to my favorite: the “bad boys” near the beginning with their punk rock spiked rainbow hair and studded jackets that seem so comically “quaint” when compared with today’s gang-banger hoods.  (Honestly, who’d have ever thought that one who mimics the style of Sid Vicious in an effort to appear menacing would in due course be considered passé?)

The film’s conclusion also leaves the movie-goer with much to ponder.   While on the run, Reese and Sarah fall in love and eventually consummate their relationship.  But they do not have long to prance hand-in-hand through love’s Arcady as the terminator soon finds them yet again.  Reese does what he can to slow it down, but the machine ends up killing him.  At the end of the day it is Sarah, not her sworn protector, who “terminates” the terminator.  She alone is left to mourn for her dead lover and his unborn child now growing within her womb. She will name their boy John.  And thus does John Connor in 2029 knowingly send his paradoxical father-to-be soldier back in time to save his own son whom Reese actually will spawn years before he himself is even born! Pretty cool stuff huh?

Heck, this whole movie is filled with cool stuff.  From lines that have made their way into the lexicon of pop culture (“I’ll be back”) to darkly humorous touches such as the terminator requesting from a perplexed gun-shop owner a not-yet-invented “phased plasma rifle in a 40-watt range” while compiling his arsenal of contemporary weaponry before the hunt for Sarah begins.  And of course, who can forget the special effects.  Although the stop-action sequences in the final scene are almost painfully primitive to us in 2010, they were state-of-the art in 1984 and effective in revealing to the audience in satisfying entirety the truly wicked machine behind the organic façade.

Still, I think the ultimate secret of The Terminator’s enduring appeal lies in the eponymous character that Arnold made his own.  As Reese tries to explain to an overwhelmed Sarah: “It can’t be bargained with! It can’t be reasoned with.  It doesn’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear.  And it absolutely will not stop…ever.  Until you are dead!”  In a world filled with moral relativism, p.c. inertia, and an obsession with “seeing things from all sides” (even 9/11, if you can believe that one) it is refreshing to look back on a villain who is the purest of evil.  One that is not even alive!  Just a viciously efficient murdering machine that indiscriminately lays waste to anyone or anything (even puppy dogs!)  that could compromise its sole raison d’être which is to kill one woman.  Period.  Not even Ridley Scott’s monstrous “Alien” is so purely malevolent as it is at least a living creature trying to survive and protect its offspring.

In my humble opinion, Arnold’s machine earns the prize for Hollywood’s baddest of the bad, as much from its utter indifference to the suffering it inflicts in carrying out its singular objective as the mission itself.  If it were not a machine, it would be a psychotic.  But no psycho-babble “ism” can save its moral soul for there is no soul to save.  Just a void filled by circuits and wires.

And if ever an actor and a role were so meant for each other, it was this one.  In screenwriting it is often recommended that you create two antagonists (one greater, one lesser) for added complexity.  But Arnold’s hyper-bad guy is all this flick needs to work.  And the rest of the film’s pop classic status radiates directly from that central marriage of, literally, man and machine.  Sometimes in Hollywood things just come together in a near-perfect fit.  As a film that defined the 1980s and the Cold War good versus evil binary world in which we lived, where the threat of atomic destruction was ubiquitous, The Terminator represents  just such a moment.