I broke new ground. I was the only person to get on the mike and announce, then get in the ring and wrestle, and then come back to the mike afterward. I’d say, “You don’t see Howard Cosell doin’ this, do ya? I’m the only announcer in the world who can back up what he says by getting in the ring and provin’ it!”
I quickly became even more popular behind the microphone than I was on the mat, but I was no less outrageous. They called me, facetiously, wrestling’s only “unbiased” announcer. I had a wardrobe to match my attitude. My commentating bits came to be known as the Jesse “The Body” Fashion Show because Vince put me in a different far-out costume each night. I wore tie-dyed tuxes, pink satin smoking jackets, feathers, earrings, peace signs, wild sunglasses—never the same outfit twice.
In fact, one night, when I was wearing a tie-dyed tux, a fan came up, shook my hand, and asked in a deep Austrian accent, “Nice suit, where did you get it?” That was my first encounter with Mr. S., but it was by no means my last.
The NBC gig spawned a whole wave of others: I hosted Wrestlemania, I did color commentary for the Minnesota Vikings, I became the commentator for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers—fans came up and told me, “We love having you in the booth because you’re like one of us. It’s like having a fan in the booth.”
I also appeared as the host of Get a Grip Night on the Movie Channel. The show featured wrestling flicks, and it was my job to introduce the film and comment on it during breaks. I hosted the show from a library set—very Alastair Cooke—tall shelves, shaded reading lamps, stacks of weighty leatherbound tomes piled all around, and in a stately wing-backed leather chair, this big wild-haired guy in tie-dye and feathers, reading Shakespeare. I’d look up at the camera and announce in a snooty tone, “Good evening. Welcome to Get a Grip Night on the Movie Channel, the only movie network not for geeks.” At the end of the segment, I’d say something like, “That’s all for now. It’s time for me to . . . hit the books”—BAM!
I was the greatest announcer wrestling’s ever had, but I ended up getting banned from both leagues. I’m too independent; I don’t kiss their asses. McMahon wouldn’t work with me because I beat him in the lawsuit, so that rules out the WWF. Hogan wouldn’t work with me because he knows I know what kind of man he really is. So that left me out of the WCW. It’s their loss. I’m not hurting from it. And now that I’m in politics, our relationship has started to improve a little.
It’s all politics. In some ways, wrestling politics aren’t all that different from the brand of politics I’m dealing with now. Only now, I’m smarter and wiser than I was then. Toughing it out in the ring against hails of insults and dealing with all the backstabbing and betrayal and infighting—what better training is there for public office?
The commentating was a terrific boost all on its own, but the best thing about it was where it led me. A phone call woke me up early one morning when I was staying in a hotel in Saint Louis. It was one of the people at Titan Sports, the WWF’s parent company in Connecticut. He was full of excitement: “Jesse! There’s a Hollywood agent that has a movie role he thinks you’d be interested in. You wanna talk to him?”
I said, “Sure.”
That’s how I met Barry Bloom. He told me he thought I had a great presence on camera, and he just had a gut instinct that I’d be great in the movies. This was at a time when the whole world was going “Hulk this, Hulk that.” And Barry was saying, “Yeah, Hulk’s good, but have you seen this Jesse Ventura? He has more talent.”
Barry and I got to talking back and forth, developing a rapport. His boss at the time, Mary Ellen White, kept asking, “Why are you spending all this time talking to that wrestler? He’s never made us any money.”
Barry replied, “He will.”
So I told Vince to book me in California whenever he could. He said, “Oh, you like that sun out there, huh?”
I just grinned and said, “Yeah. I like the sun.”
Barry got me on an episode of Hunter. We did it all aboveboard, through Vince and everything. But whereas Barry only took 10 percent of what I made, Vince took half! When I finally got my check, I called Barry and said, “Well, Barry, I got my seven hundred and fifty dollars for doing Hunter. What’s the deal?” Barry was outraged. He told me I was getting shafted. So I said, “Screw Vince. I’m dealin’ directly with you from now on.”
The next time I came to L.A., Barry met me at the plane and shepherded me to his car, “You have a two o’clock appointment today with a lady named Jackie Burch. She’s casting the next Schwarzenegger film.”
Barry parked outside an office building on the Twentieth Century–Fox lot, and I went inside. That’s how it’s done—your agent never goes inside with you. I walked in, and this little lady walked up to me. I said, “Hello, I’m Jesse Ventura.”
She said “Hi, I’m Jackie Burch.” She couldn’t take her eyes off me. She looked me up and down twice. Then she smiled and said, “Let’s go meet the executive producers.” She hadn’t even given me a reading yet!
She walked me across the lot and into a huge, plush office where Joel Silver, John Davis, and Larry Gordon, the producers, sat waiting to meet me. Jackie introduced me to them and said, “I think we have our Sergeant Blain.”
Jackie took me back to her office and handed me the script, which at the time was also called Hunter. The Sergeant Blain character was a six-foot-four, 250-pound professional killer. Perfect, though at the time I looked anything but military. I had bleached blond hair to my shoulders, three earrings in each ear, sunglasses, and a long goatee. I looked like a madman. But Jackie saw past all that. Sergeant Blain was me.
The line I read for her was one where Blain has just offered the other guys chewing tobacco, and they’ve turned him down: “Buncha slack-jawed faggots around here. This stuff’ll put hair on yer hog leg. Make you a god-damned sexual ty-rannosaurus. Just like me.” Even there I fit the role, because I chewed tobacco at the time. I could chew and spit—pwttt!—and make it look like I’d been doing it all my life.
Jackie said, “Here, take the whole script; read it.”
Half an hour later, they called Barry with an offer.
Well, now I had a problem. I still worked for Vince McMahon. I flew back to Minneapolis, and I tried to call him. I kept getting the same runaround: “Vince is in a meeting; he’s busy.”
I said, “Look, it’s extremely important. I only need Vince for five minutes—five minutes!”
They kept saying, “OK, we’ll tell him.”
Barry called and said, “Look, Jesse, the film company needs to know if you’re taking the role, or else they’re gonna look for someone else.”
I told him, “OK, I’ll try calling Vince again.”
When I called Vince’s line again, I got George Scott, Vince’s booker. George said, “Jesse. Look. You can’t get through to Vince.”
“Why not?”
“Well, if you won’t tell anyone else I told you, do you want to know what he said? He said that he doesn’t have time for Jesse Ventura’s personal problems.”
I said, “That’s cool. I’ll tell you what, George. Don’t hurry. Don’t hurry. When he has time, if there’s a break in the day, simply tell Vince that I’ve been cast in the next Arnold Schwarzenegger film and that I’m accepting. And I’ll get back to him in due time. Thanks, George.” Click.
I called Barry and told him I was accepting the role. Five minutes later, the phone rang. Guess who it was?
Vince sounded a mite pissed: “Well, Jesse, what’s going on here?”
I said, “Vince, I’ve been offered a role in the next Arnold Schwarzenegger movie, and since I couldn’t get through to you to let you know, I accepted.”
“Who’s the agent?”
“It’s Barry Bloom.”
Vince roared, “You tell Barry Bloom he’s fired! He doesn’t do anything without clearing something like that through me!”
I said, “Vince, Barry don’t work for you. He works for me.”
“Well,
you can’t go do this. I need you for wrestling right now.”
“Vince, wrestling will always be there. I’ll never get another opportunity like this. I’m goin’ to do this film. Tough luck.”
So I quit. I did the commentating job on Wrestlemania II that I’d already agreed to do, then I left the very next day for Mexico to start shooting. While we were down there, the title of the film was changed to Predator. It was by far the best film of my career. People say I stole the film from Arnold. Fox even made a T-shirt with my famous line, “I ain’t got time to bleed.” Taking that role was one of the best decisions I’ve made in my life.
Even once I was down there, Vince was still trying to regain the control he’d lost. He sent his top WWF Magazine photographer, Steve Taylor, down to do a story about the shoot. Steve got a call from Vince and relayed a message to me: “Jesse, Vince wants you to call him immediately.”
I said, “You tell Vince McMahon Jesse Ventura doesn’t exist down here. Sergeant Blain is down here. I have nothing to do with wrestling here; I’m doin’ a movie. You tell Vince he’ll have to wait till I get back to the States.”
The night before I flew to Mexico, I met up with Barry. It was a Sunday night. Late that evening, Barry suddenly said, “You’ve got your Declaration of Citizenship and everything, right?”
Jeez—I didn’t even know I had to have one! We were running all around town like chickens with our heads cut off, trying to find a place open that could process a Declaration of Citizenship for me. We even went to the Beverly Hills police department. Nothing. Nada.
I put my head in my hands. “Are we fucked? Did I just torpedo my own film career before it even got started?”
Finally in the wee hours, we found a Declaration of Citizenship Form that we were told would do the trick. We came crawling into the airport the next morning, bleary eyed, and the guy who checked us in said, “Hey—this is filled out wrong. Here—have another one.” He had a whole stack of blank forms right there at the airport!
Barry and I looked at each other, “God, are we a couple of idiots!”
Here’s a little bit of cocktail-party trivia: before we flew down to Mexico, we met a guy who had been hired to work inside the Predator suit, an ambitious young kid who was trying to work his way into the business. Something about him impressed me. I told Barry, “Watch out for this guy. He’s goin’ places.” Unfortunately, it turned out that Mexico wasn’t one of those places, at least not on this shoot, since he later got fired from the film. But he eventually proved me right. His name? Jean-Claude Van Damme.
The guy who took over the suit work from Van Damme was Kevin Peter Hall, an absolutely terrific guy, a glow of light. He always had a smile on his face. He did extremely well for himself considering he was seven foot two—how many roles are there for somebody that tall? It saddened me a lot to learn that he died of AIDS. Hollywood lost someone special when it lost Kevin.
Hollywood is Hollywood, but when you get way, way out of town on location like we did, the cast and crew become a family. It’s you guys against the world. Everyone becomes closeknit. I think the film turns out better because everyone’s so focused. When you shoot in L.A., everyone goes home every night. On location, you live the project until it’s done.
I got to be especially good friends with the stunt guys. They liked me because I wasn’t afraid to get down and dirty with them. I did my own rappelling in Predator. They didn’t want me to, but I’ve got to defy death occasionally, just for my own peace of mind. Sometimes, you need to defy death so that you can appreciate life more.
I admired the stuff the stunt guys did. I especially liked to watch the full-body burns, where they’d be entirely engulfed in flames. They asked me if I wanted to do that, and I asked, “How much does it pay?” They told me. I said, “Move the decimal point over a couple of times, then we’ll talk.”
The stunt guys and I had a mutual respect for each other, but the higher-ups, the above-the-line guys, took a little more convincing. I was a newcomer—I can understand why they didn’t have a lot of confidence in my acting ability. But for a while there, they weren’t even going to give me a chance to prove to them that I could do it.
One day while we were in Mexico, I was handed a bunch of new changes to the script. These new changes took some of the best lines away from my character and gave them to somebody else’s. I wasn’t going to let them do that. I went over to Joel Silver’s trailer and asked to see him. They pulled the old Vince McMahon line, “He’s in a meeting.” Well, you can only hear “He’s in a meeting” so many times. So I kicked open the door to his trailer and said, very calmly, “We gotta talk.” Joel gave me back my lines.
It was during those weeks on location that Arnold Schwarzenegger and I got to be good friends. Arnold is terrific. He’s a close friend to this day; he even flew into town for my inauguration. He’s one of the most focused men I’ve ever met in my life. He’s self-made; I respect him for that. He’s achieved things that no one thought were possible. Arnold and I are parallel in a lot of ways. We don’t believe in the word can’t. Whenever somebody says we can’t do something, we take that as a challenge. We become that much more focused. People told Arnold he couldn’t become a movie star. They told him he’d have to change his name and lose his accent. Well, he’s Arnold Schwarzenegger, and he’s never lost the accent—and he’s about as big a star as you’ll ever find. He said the first agent he ever approached turned him down. Can you imagine how that guy’s kicking himself today? He could have had 10 percent of that!
Arnold and I have the same love of simple pleasures. While we were shooting Predator, Arnold got me into stogies—a habit I enjoy to this day. It’s very relaxing after a long day to put your feet up and disappear into a sweet-smelling cloud of smoke.
He’s a generous guy. When he got down there, he had all of his gym equipment put into a room, and he gave a key to me and anyone else who wanted one and said, “Work out whenever you want to.”
We got up in the mornings and worked out from five to six, because if we didn’t Arnold would be on our cases all day: “Jesse, you didn’t work out this morning. What’s the matter with you?” He’s a big teaser, but the nice thing is that he can take it just as well as he can dish it out.
So I started getting up at about quarter to five and getting into the gym before Arnold and his friend Sven (his bodyguard and double) came in. I would grab the mineral water and soak myself with it, so I would look like I was drenched in sweat. I would only be doing my first set when Sven and Arnold walked in, but Arnold didn’t know that! He’d walk in and say, “Sven! Look at this! Who knows how long Jesse’s been training! We must get up earlier. We can’t let Jesse outtrain me!” So it ended up that we were both getting up earlier and earlier, until we were getting up at four in the morning!
I like to joke that I “coached” Arnold through his wedding to Maria Shriver. While we were shooting, he was scheduled to leave the set for a few days to go get married. Before he left, I teased him that he’d have to remember to speak from the diaphragm and say clearly, “I do! I DO!” He’d be in front of the cameras ready to do a take, and I’d be off in a corner somewhere. Just as they were about to roll, I’d give him an “I DO!” and he’d break up. Then the director would get mad, and I’d have to keep quiet.
You had to mess with each other and have some fun to break up the monotony. On Sundays we never worked. They set up a big screen and a VCR, and we all sent home for our favorite movies. I had my copy of True Grit sent out—that great John Wayne classic that’s one of my all-time favorites. Jim Tyson, who did wardrobe, and Carl Weathers were sitting near me, and while the movie was going Tyson and I kept doing the dialogue before it happened in the film.
Finally, Carl had had it: “I can’t take this. I don’t need to hear the movie twice!” He got up and moved to the other side of the room so he didn’t have to hear me and Tyson! You tend to get a little crazy down there, so things like that amuse you. I went for ten weeks withou
t seeing a TV, and I found out it was a blessing. We had to start using our minds again to entertain ourselves. I think we’ve become too dependent on that box to entertain us.
That isolation was good for my focus, and one of the things I focused on was learning as much as I could from Arnold. He’s a phenomenal businessman. You can’t help but admire the wealth he’s attained. A few years later, I heard he’d turned down seventeen million dollars to do Predator 2. He said the timing wasn’t right. He doesn’t do things just for money. I said, “Arnold, how do you turn down seventeen million? I’d do it for half!”
Arnold teaches you by talking to you, which is why you always have to stay awake when you’re around him. I was pretty naive about the ways of Hollywood back then. One day on set, Arnold told me, “Jesse, always remember, never read a script until the money’s right.”
“Well, Arnold, that’s easy for you to say. You’ve got ten or twelve of them on your desk; you can pick and choose. I’m not afforded that kind of luxury.”
“But Jesse, if you read the script before you’ve negotiated the money, then if you like the script you have a biased opinion, and you’ll do it for less. And if you can’t get the money right, you’ve wasted your time reading the script.”
Then he stopped and looked me in the eye and said, “Jesse, in our business, we don’t have time to waste.”
Later, when he had asked me to do The Running Man, the negotiations got stuck. It was my second film, so I wanted a lot more money. I had my heart set on one figure, but the film company was thinking of another figure entirely. I was starting to be afraid I’d lose the role because I’d asked for too much money.
But one day I got a call from Arnold. First thing off the bat, he said, “Jesse. I thought you were going to do The Running Man with me.”
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