All Things:Science Fiction/Fantasy

O.J. Simpson Was Considered To Play 'The Terminator,' With Arnold Schwarzenegger As Kyle Reese | The Playlist

As the oral history over at EW shows, things could turned out very wrong for James Cameron and his iconic sci-fi film.

Of all the new information in the oral history, the craziest and shocking detail is that the casting for the film had some interesting possibilities, namely that Orion president Mike Medavoy told Cameron and co-writer/producer Gale Ann Hurd that he wanted, ?O.J. Simpson for the Terminator and Arnold Schwarzenegger for the good guy, whatever his name is.? Yes, that O.J. Simpson. Why? As the former studio chief said, ?At the time, O.J. Simpson had one of those commercials for Hertz where he jumped over a counter and ran to get a rental car. It was all of that stuff, which I thought the Terminator should have.?

Needless to say, James Cameron was dubious. ?Medavoy came to me and [producer Gale Anne Hurd] and he said, ?Are you sitting down? You must sit down. I want O.J. Simpson for the Terminator," he recalled. "Gale and I just looked at each other and thought, ?You?ve got to be f- - -ing kidding me. How do we get out of this??

Two things stopped the Juice from playing the Terminator, Cameron?s awareness of the problematic nature of having ?an African-American man chasing around a white girl with a knife? and how well he hit it off with Schwarzenegger during a meeting Cameron hoped to torpedo the idea of casting of the former bodybuilder. The rest, as they say, was history. The rest of the history is filled with great anecdotes?including Cameron?s continuing grudge against the head of Orion for not fully supporting the film?and it?s well worth it for fans of Cameron?s original film and the series as a whole.
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George Miller Says Script For 'Mad Max: Fury Road' Sequel Already Written | The Playlist

During the press conference for the film, director George Miller revealed the world of 'Fury Road' is already expanding. “In order to tell this story, we came up with two others. We’ve written the screenplay of one and the novelization of another, but it’s a very rough novel,” Miller said. “We kept working on them while we were working on other things.” It's a fascinating revelation, for myriad reasons, and one has to ask: is one of those screenplays "Mad Max: Furiosa"? This new 'Mad Max' was originally meant to be two features that would shoot back to back, but obviously that plan changed. Secondly, Charlize Theron and Miller have already said there was no 'Fury Road' screenplay; instead they relied upon extremely detailed storyboards (a move that is said to have made studio brass extremely nervous).

This is going back about four years (this movie has been in the works for a long time), but at the time it was rumored that Miller was going to head into production on two films: "Mad Max: Fury Road" and another titled, "Mad Max: Furiosa." The idea was that Tom Hardy's character would lead one movie, and Charlize Theron's the other, with both films shooting at the same time, and released not long after each other, "The Matrix" sequels-style. How real those plans were isn't known, but 'Fury Road' wound up going into production on its own—perhaps WB didn't want to put the cart in front of the horse.
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