James Cameron: A Biography

ABOUT THE BOOK

It was 1982. A then-twenty-seven-year-old James Cameron, recently fired by producer Roger Corman from the Rome-based set of schlocky B movie Piranha II: The Spawning, had been staying in an Italian pensione hotel, his pay for the film exhausted, stealing hard rolls from room-service trays for sustenance. Wracked by fever, one night he dreamed of a “chrome skeleton, emerging out of a fire,” cut in half, dragging itself after a woman. As he later told The New Yorker, he thought, “That was cool. I’d never seen that in a movie before.”

Of course, the “chrome skeleton” was “the terminator,” and the woman was Sarah Connor--not a victim, as it turns out, but the first in what would become a long line of indelible action heroines Cameron would create. “The Terminator,” starring the director’s future wife Linda Hamilton as Connor and then-little-known strong-man actor named Arnold Schwarzenegger as the terminator, would prove one of the highest-grossing movies of 1984. Needless to say, Cameron would never again have to worry about where his next meal was coming from.

EXCERPT FROM THE BOOK

Cameron married his fifth wife, actress Suzy Amis, who played Rose’s granddaughter Lizzy Calvert in Titanic , on the film’s set in 1997. They have three children together, but Terminator star Hamilton has reasonable doubts about the relationship. After all, when Cameron met Amis, he was still in a relationship with her.

"The woman he can't get is always his dream girl," she told The Daily Mail. "Work and women go hand in hand for Jimbo, and I should know."

In fact, four of Cameron’s five wives he met on movie sets, beginning with Gale Ann Hurd, the producer who believed enough in the script for The Terminator to finance it. He divorced his first wife, Sharon Williams (a waitress at Bob’s Big Boy, who Cameron married when he was still working blue-collar jobs in Orange County) to marry Hurd in 1985. His third wife, director Kathryn Bigelow, whom he married in 1989 and divorced two years later, remains a collaborator to this day. She still goes to Cameron to run scripts by him, including the one for The Hurt Locker. Their friendly professional rivalry manifested at the 2011 Academy Awards ceremony, when they were both up for Best Director--Cameron for Avatar, Bigelow for The Hurt Locker. Bigelow won...

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CHAPTER OUTLINE

James Cameron: A Biography

+ Introduction

+ Background and upbringing

+ Major accomplishments and awards

+ Personal life

+ ...and much more