As They Say In Hollywood...pex Sell Tix

"It was cheap," he says sadly. "I said, 'Dino, we've got to agree that there will be no more Conan-type movies because I don't think your love lies with Conan.' " De Laurentiis agreed. Red Sonja sank without a trace. Commando was released and immediately became one of the top grossers of 1985. Schwarzenegger had left his loincloth behind forever.

But not his tendency to be a little too spontaneous at meetings. He had a gag in mind to liven up the climactic carnage in Commando. Excited, he met with Larry Gordon, then the president of motion picture production at Twentieth Century Fox, to discuss the scene in which he would cut an enemy soldier's arm off. "Sometimes these stunt guys take five minutes to die" he told Gordon. "So I grab the arm, chop it off. Blood comes out of his side. I'm holding his arm in my hand. He starts screaming, 'Aaaaah! Aaaaah!'

"I think to myself, 'All the other soldiers are going to hear this and come running.' So I yell, 'Shut up!' And on the word 'up,' I hit him over the head with his arm and knock him out. I run. I notice that I'm still holding his arm. I throw it away like it's still moving in my hand. 'Ach!' "

Gordon studied Schwarzenegger for a long, pale moment. "Arnold," he finally said. "Get out."

To this day Schwarzenegger steadfastly maintains the arm gag would have been funny on the screen. "In Terminator, they laughed when I reached into a guy's chest and pulled his guts out," he points out. "I can get away with things that most people can't."

That's true. But no one knows why. "I'm not sure I can explain the phenomenon of Arnold," says Cameron. "When I wrote Terminator, I didn't have a world-class bodybuilder in mind to play the character. Originally, the Terminator was an infiltration unit, capable of being anonymous in a crowd. Arnold is definitely not anonymous in a crowd.

"We cast Arnold because of his impassive, implacable face. His body, his power were things that you hold in the back of your mind throughout the film as a latent sense of great force on tap but not on display. I think people rooted for him because there's some little chittering demon down in the back of everyone's mind that would like to be him for about 10 minutes, to go in and talk to the boss without using the doorknob."

Every time one of his movies opens, Schwarzenegger pays serious attention to the audience surveys, trying to pinpoint what people like about him. So The Running Man comes out and they take the surveys and Schwarzenegger gets a call from executive producer Keith Barish. "Keith tells me that this picture elicited by far the largest percentage of female enthusiasm of all my pictures," Schwarzenegger says proudly. "So I ask him how they answered the question, What do you like about Arnold? And he tells me that many women wrote down, 'He has a cute ass.' "

"I said, 'Thanks a lot, Keith. That's really helpful. Now I know which direction to take with my next movie.' "

He laughs the Arnold Laugh and puffs the Arnold Stogie and then drives the Arnold Jeep home to Maria in Pacific Palisades. Tomorrow morning, he'll wake up early, play on the beach with his Labrador retrievers, Conan and Strudel, and drive to Santa Monica to work out with his lifetime pal Franco Columbu at his lifetime pal Joe Gold's gym. Then he'll head for work in L.A., bust a few heads, quip a few quips and cause Red Heat director Hill to sigh and say, "He's more than an actor. He's a natural force."