The Futurist Read online

  “You Can’t Read, Jim?”

  As a child, Cameron was sometimes too smart for his own good. At the end of first grade, his teacher called Shirley in to explain that her son was going to be held back. “She said, ‘He can’t read. He can’t do anything. He just sits and looks out the window,’” Shirley recalls. “I said, ‘You can’t read, Jim?’ He gets this smirk on his face. He knows I know he can read.” Shirley asked her son to pick up any book on the teacher’s desk. He selected a science text and began reading aloud about the species of the Pleistocene era. “The teacher’s jaw dropped. She said, ‘Why didn’t you tell me you could read?’ He said, ‘If you think I’m gonna sit there and read See Spot Run all day long …’ I was so mad at that kid.” In the fall of second grade, Shirley got another call. This time the teacher was skipping her son to grade three. In the middle of grade three, he was moved to grade four. Shirley had a rule that her kids weren’t allowed to do homework when they got home from school. She felt they had spent enough time bent over books. But Cameron was a voracious recreational reader who pored over the latest comic books, especially Spider-Man, and loved science-fiction writers like Arthur C. Clarke, Robert Heinlein, Ray Bradbury, and Kurt Vonnegut.

  He won every academic prize given out for grade nine at Niagara Falls’ Stamford Collegiate High School. “We thought it was wonderful,” says Shirley, “but the other kids didn’t.” Skinny and a head shorter than his classmates as a result of the two skipped years of grammar school, Cameron was an easy target. “I got pounded,” he says. He eschewed sports and instead became president of the science club, which, he recalls, “consisted of me and one Czechoslovakian girl.” In tenth grade, he was bitten by the history bug in a class on the ancients. “The Egyptians, Minoans, Greeks, Romans. I can picture every class, every slide show, and almost quote the lessons,” he says. By then he had learned to do well enough to earn good marks without drawing too much attention to himself. The awards stopped. Cameron had enough smart, oddball friends that he didn’t feel like an outcast. But sometimes the groupthink of his peers baffled him. “They thought they were being so rebellious by all wearing bell bottoms,” he says. “I didn’t get it.”

  First period meant singing the national anthem and saying the Lord’s Prayer. In tenth grade, standing at the head of his row, Cameron listened to his classmates and felt a surge of defiance. “It struck me as this tribal chant.” In the middle of the prayer, he sat down, opened his book, and started to read. When he looked up, his teacher’s eyes were wide, but she didn’t chastise him, and he never said the Lord’s Prayer again. Shirley had brought her children up attending an Anglican church while Philip, agnostic since age sixteen, stayed home. One of the books Shirley found her son reading under his covers at night was a thick history of world religions. His Sunday-school teacher wanted to put him in the adult Bible class, but Shirley objected. As a teenager, Cameron’s interest in religion was driven as much by intellectual curiosity as by any kind of spiritual questing. As an adult, his movies would be full of religious imagery. Today he calls himself a “converted agnostic”—“I’ve sworn off agnosticism, which I now call cowardly atheism,” Cameron says. “I’ve come to the position that in the complete absence of any supporting data whatsoever for the persistence of the individual in some spiritual form, it is necessary to operate under the provisional conclusion that there is no afterlife and then be ready to amend that if I find out otherwise.” By the way, Cameron’s explanation for why he’s not agnostic is similar to his father’s reason for why he is agnostic. “An agnostic questions things,” Philip says. “They don’t have all the answers.” It’s easy to see how things can get cerebrally rambunctious with the Camerons.

  Other Worlds

  Growing up hundreds of miles from the nearest ocean, Cameron never so much as stuck a toe in salt water, but he was riveted by Jacques Cousteau’s underwater documentaries. The French oceanographer’s movies aired on TV regularly in the 1960s, delivering images of the richness and exoticism of life beneath the waves into the living rooms of landlocked families like the Camerons. Later in his life, Cameron would adopt Cousteau’s deeply felt environmentalism, but at sixteen, it was the spirit of exploration that hooked him. “I began to think of the deep ocean as equal to outer space,” Cameron recalls. “This was an alien world I could actually reach.”

  Inspired by Cousteau, Cameron begged and cajoled his parents into enrolling him in a scuba class at a Buffalo YMCA pool. At the Y, he learned diving military style, with harassment drills, in which the instructor pulls off your mask and rips the regulator from your mouth. The harsh training engendered in Cameron a confidence and resourcefulness that would help him survive two near-drowning experiences in his life, one of them while filming The Abyss. His first dive outside the Y pool was in 1971, in Chippawa Creek. He had been taught to dive with a buddy, but the only scuba-certified citizens of his town were the two guys who pulled bodies out of the Niagara River for the fire department. So Cameron dived alone with a rope tied around his waist, the other end held by his father, who was standing on a dock. “Unbelievably lame move, but it made sense to us at the time,” he says.

  Cameron’s relationship with his father would strain in his teenage years. Philip wanted his son to be an engineer. “He didn’t understand me very well ‘cause I was into art and science fiction and fantasy and all this stuff he just couldn’t hang with,” Cameron says. “We were on this big disconnect.” If Philip didn’t always understand his oldest son, he kept holding the rope while he dived, literally and metaphorically. He would provide financial help in Cameron’s hungry early years as an aspiring filmmaker, tacitly supporting the career choice no matter how grievous the odds that his son would succeed. After Cameron directed Titanic—his seventh movie, the highest-grossing film of all time and winner of eleven Oscars—Philip finally acknowledged verbally that this directing thing might just work out.

  As a teenager, Cameron’s twin interests in science and art didn’t lead to any conventional career path that he could identify “There didn’t seem to be any reconciliation possible,” he says. “You were either in science or you were in the arts. But I was interested in both.” His dream was to write a science-fiction novel and illustrate it. Had the art form of graphic novels existed, Cameron says that’s what he would have wanted to do, but it didn’t yet. “I suppose it was pretty logical to say I want to be a filmmaker because as a filmmaker you’re telling a story with pictures. But I hadn’t really thought of it.”

  The first time he considered film as a career was in 1968, when he staggered out of a Toronto movie theater showing 2001: A Space Odyssey. Stanley Kubrick’s long, philosophical science-fiction film was performing poorly at the box office, and fourteen-year-old Cameron was one of only a handful of people in the giant, 1,500-seat room, sitting dead center in the front row of the balcony, alone. With its vast, allegorical story stretching from the dawn of man to a future where travel to Jupiter is possible, its realistic special effects and daring lack of dialogue, 2001 made a deep impression on Cameron. After it ended, he reeled outside into the sunlight, sat down on the curb, and threw up from the vertigo of the third act’s psychedelic trip sequence. “I didn’t know what to make of it,” he says. “It was really exciting intellectually, but mystifying and powerful visually. It was everything I thought I liked, but it didn’t really have any answers. But I felt viscerally that I knew what the answers were.” It was the moment Cameron went from being a fan of movies to wanting to make films himself. Specifically, he was interested in special effects. He wanted to be the guy who made the spaceships look real.

  Cameron and his friend Mike Nestler got their hands on Nestler’s father’s Super 8 camera. They galloped around Niagara Falls shooting everything in sight, splicing their footage together to make social commentaries about their hometown. They built spaceship models, lit them, and staged intergalactic battles in front of a strip of black velvet, wondering at their creative achievement. “It’s all gar
bage, but you start to think in a visual, narrative way,” Cameron says. He found a thick book about how 2001 was made, which taught him a few filmmaking terms but didn’t really answer his questions, leaving him to solve the mystery of the movie’s sophisticated special effects like an archaeological problem. He returned to the theater and saw the film several more times to try to understand how Kubrick had managed to place his actors so believably in space, his apes in their rocky, prehistoric world. The answer is a special-effects technique that Kubrick pioneered called front projection, in which the background image is projected onto both the performer and a highly reflective background screen, bouncing off the screen and into the lens of a camera. It would take about a decade before Cameron figured out how Kubrick did it, but knowing would eventually prove crucial to getting his first promotion in the movie business.

  When Cameron was sixteen, Philip came to his family with some news. His company, the paper manufacturer Kimberly-Clark, was transferring him to a plant in Orange County, California. The next school year would have been Cameron’s last—in Ontario at that time, students on a precollege track attended through grade thirteen. Moving would mean no prom and no graduation. But that didn’t faze him. “Jim said, ‘Can we leave tomorrow?’” Philip recalls. “He knew he was getting close to Hollywood.”

  Gone West

  In the fall of 1971, the Cameron family moved to Brea, California, a onetime oil and citrus town, now a growing suburb south of Los Angeles. The weather was perfect, their new house on top of a hill spacious, the ocean Cameron had long dreamed about just a twenty-five-minute drive away. And he was miserable. He was only thirty miles from Hollywood, but he might as well have still been 2,500 miles away for all that living in Brea had to do with show business. He didn’t know a soul. Cameron enrolled at nearby Fullerton College, a junior college with about twenty thousand students, planning to major in physics. He skipped Calculus 1 and went straight to Calculus 2, because that’s how he had always done things. As usual, he got an A in physics, but not in calculus. “So I thought, ‘Maybe this isn’t for me,’ and switched to English,” Cameron says. This is sort of like slipping on ballet shoes for the first time, not getting up on pointe by the end of the day, and abandoning dance for accounting. But it made sense to him.

  Cameron missed Niagara Falls and was starting to get itchy feet. When his Canadian friend Mike Nestler came to visit, they decided to spend the summer of 1972 hitchhiking together from Los Angeles to Vancouver to Niagara Falls. Cameron painted a gonzo freeway prop for their journey—a giant, photo-real hand with its thumb sticking out, which he wore on his arm. The superthumb worked—they never had to wait long for a ride. In the middle of Saskatchewan, they were picked up by a driver in a four-speed pickup truck. Cameron and Nestler didn’t have their driver’s licenses yet, but the pickup driver wanted to go to sleep. So at 2:00 a.m., on a rural Canadian highway, a stranger taught Cameron how to drive a stick shift. When the teenager finally got back to Niagara Falls, his beloved hometown was a bit of a disappointment. He realized his memories of the place were better than the reality. The next fall he would throw himself into making a life in California and finally grow to feel at home there.

  Cameron was taking fourteen units at Fullerton College by day and working four to six hours a night as a precision tool and die machinist. He continued to tackle his own creative projects on the side, writing science-fiction stories and drawing. He painted an emotional portrait of a Vietnam prisoner of war gripping prison bars that would be selected to appear on POW/MIA billboards across the country. By this point, Cameron was getting tall, about six-two, and had long blond hair and a reddish beard. He was losing his Canadian accent but held on to the sincerity he had brought south with him. He started dating Sharon Williams, a pretty, down-to-earth Orange County girl a year younger than him. It was she who suggested Cameron meet Bill Wisher, another Hollywood hopeful and sci-fi fan just finishing high school in Brea. “Jim was very intense, very bright, full of ideas,” Wisher recalls. “He was one of those guys that when you met him, you had the feeling he was going to do things.” Soon another Fullerton College student, Randall Frakes, came into their orbit. He shared Cameron’s passion for ideas, science fiction, and ancient tales. Frakes, who was seven years older and had been a journalist in the army, started out as a creative mentor. He read a postnuke survivor story Cameron was writing called “Necropolis.” “It was so maturely written, the poetic use of the words and yet the sharpness of the mind behind it,” Frakes says. “I said, ‘You should write movies, science-fiction movies specifically’” When Cameron had watched 2001, he had thought about finding a job on the technical side of movie making. It had never occurred to him to be a writer, and he had never read a screenplay before. So Frakes started loading Cameron down with Paddy Chayefsky scripts, Citizen Kane, Judgment at Nuremberg, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, any example of a well-written screenplay to get his friend started.

  In his early twenties, Cameron led a bifurcated life. He held a series of blue-collar jobs, working as a janitor, a truck driver, and a machinist and pumping gas in the hottest city in the United States, the tiny Mojave Valley town of Needles, California. He took a job driving the hot lunch truck for the Brea Unified School District and on breaks would curl up in the cab and write. His coworkers in the maintenance yard labeled Cameron “the mystery man.”1 His girlfriend, Sharon Williams, was a waitress at the hamburger chain Bob’s Big Boy, an inspiration for Sarah Connor in The Terminator, who works at a diner. At night Cameron was painting, writing, and hanging out with Frakes and Wisher, often at the diner, drinking coffee and waiting for Williams to get off work, or at Kentucky Fried Chicken, talking passionately about movies for hours on end. On Saturdays, Cameron would stalk the library at the University of Southern California, photocopying graduate student theses on esoteric filmmaking subjects like optical printing and traveling matte processes. He filled two fat binders with technical papers. For the cost of a couple hundred dollars in photocopying, he essentially put himself through a graduate course in visual effects at the top film school in the country without ever meeting a single professor. Cameron and Williams married and rented a small house. Though passionately in love, they were often at loggerheads about the way his creative life took over both of theirs. Williams, whom Frakes describes as “smart in a streetwise way but not intellectual,” held on for the ride. “As Jim became more interested in Hollywood, they drifted apart,” Wisher says.

  In 1977, Star Wars hit theaters, and the unprecedented success of George Lucas’s space opera fired up the unofficial Brea film collective to get to work on a blockbuster of their own. “We were just kind of like our own little fan pod,” Cameron says. “It didn’t occur to us that there was a way to make movies where you started small, where you made independent films and you grew from that. We wanted to go straight to Star Wars.” To that end, they began to craft a plan, writing a science-fiction treatment they called Xenogenesis.

  Xenogenesis

  Financing for the Brea filmmakers’ space epic came about through a friend of a friend’s dad, who was an accountant for a consortium of Orange County dentists looking for a place to invest some money. After introductions were made, the group delivered their pitch for a film about the search for a planet on which to start humanity’s next life cycle. Cameron brought some of his paintings, and the novice group proposed a thrifty budget based on staged financing. “Jim being Jim, he basically took over,” says Frakes. With thoughts of Star Wars dollars dancing in their minds, the dentists gave the earnest young men thirty thousand dollars to create a film illustrating a scene from their treatment. If it turned out well, there would be more money to come. “They didn’t understand that we were so far out of the orbit of any normal filmmaking environment that a grip on the cheesiest film knew more than we did,” Cameron says.

  Inexperience didn’t stop Cameron and his friends from planning a very ambitious movie. They rented space in an industrial park near the Orang
e County airport and combed bookstores and libraries for how-to books on old-fashioned special effects like forced perspective and miniatures. They spent hours constructing sets with X-Acto knives and cardboard, sometimes working so late they slept beside their futuristic cityscapes. When they rented the camera, they had to be shown how to thread the film. “We were young and broke and had all the enthusiasm in the world and everything in front of us,” Wisher says. The special effects they accomplished are quite remarkable. In one shot, a character, played by Wisher, is running down a causeway being chased by a tank firing laser beams, while explosions blaze at his feet. To accomplish this, they had to rig the explosions and shoot Wisher’s performance with them, film a miniature of the tank, and animate the laser beams. They then had to combine the three strips of film into one. The twelve-minute movie that resulted includes some design elements that would resurface in Cameron’s later films—the tank is a prototype of the hunter-killer machines in The Terminator, and the robotic suit the heroine wears is a predecessor of Sigourney Weaver’s power loader in Aliens.

  The dentists never signed on for the feature-length version of Xenogenesis, but the experimental film served as a career stepping-stone for Cameron. It made a persuasive demo reel, showing that he knew how to build models and light and shoot in 35 mm with a special-effects camera. He would take Xenogenesis to Roger Corman’s New World Pictures, the prolific B-movie house that happened to be staffing up for the next best thing to Star Wars, a guerrilla version called Battle Beyond the Stars. Cameron was about to land exactly where he needed to be, in a Darwinian environment for would-be filmmakers, a place that rewarded smarts and scrappiness and the kind of alpha behavior he had honed as the oldest boy in a creative and boisterous home.