Dhe laugh, the shoulders and of course the accent: Even if Arnold Schwarzenegger walked through the foyer of the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles with a hood over his head that evening, everyone would recognize him.
For the photographers, after decades in Hollywood, he automatically poses in front of the larger-than-life Tiffany blue book cover, which shows him as a bodybuilder in his younger years, and beams in a few dozen cameras. “I knew I had a higher calling. Modesty is not for me,” Schwarzenegger is said to have once said about himself. On this evening you believe him immediately.
The Cologne publisher Taschen invited to the museum of the American Film Academy to present “ARNOLD”, a two-part limited edition photo book – Schwarzenegger as an athlete, actor, politician and activist, photographed by Annie Leibovitz, Herb Ritts, Andy Warhol and other photo artists .
“He took California by storm,” says publisher Benedikt Taschen about the 75-year-old at the introduction on Thursday night. Almost 1,000 guests, including fans, companions and members of the American Film Academy, applaud when Schwarzenegger comes on stage in jeans, western boots and accompanied by the editor Dian Hanson. “Today is about stories,” says Hanson.
A “Typical American Success Story”
Your history with Schwarzenegger began more than 40 years ago. It was then that the bodybuilder caught her eye at the Mr. Olympia competition. Because of his beautiful skin and body, as the former editor of pornographic magazines recalls.
As she describes the Austria at the time of Schwarzenegger’s birth in the summer of 1947, two years after the end of World War II, as the root of his vision of a better life in the United States, silence falls in the museum’s David Geffen Theater. Schwarzenegger picks up the microphone. He wanted to clarify something. “I always tell people they’re right when they say I’m a typical American success story. But they’re wrong when they say I’m self-made,” he says. “I am the product of millions of people who have helped me.”
He became governor of California in 2003 because more than four million people voted for him. And by supporting training partners at Gold’s Gym in Venice, who have also been trying to get tickets for his performance at the Academy Museum in recent weeks. “A warm welcome to all the folks at Gold’s Gym. I see them sitting everywhere, women and men, pumped up and with big veins.” The audience cheers.
Schwarzenegger then asks producer Mike Medavoy to stand up. As head of various film studios, Medavoy had worked with him again and again. “He’s the man who was responsible for the first ‘Terminator’ film. He approached me at a screening and said there was a great role for me in the production.” The rest is history.
After his career as a bodybuilder, which ended in 1980 with his seventh Mr. Olympia title, Hollywood almost didn’t work out. According to the studios, his accent was too strong and his body too wide. “I was told it was impossible to become a star. Back then, Woody Allen, Dustin Hoffman and Al Pacino were considered sex symbols. The guys weighed almost 60 kilograms. I weighed 120 and looked like a monster next to them,” he recalls.
The ideal of beauty changed a few years later. The producer Ed Pressman had seen the Austrian in the docudrama “Pumping Iron” and was looking for a leading actor after buying the film rights for “Conan the Barbarian”. As so often this evening, Schwarzenegger quotes from his rules for success. “Don’t listen to the naysayers,” he advises the audience, whom he has previously called on to work hard (“You have to work your ass off”) and persevere (“If already, than already – as we say in German”) .
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