Journal of Alta California

SITTING ON A POWDER KEG

Los Angeles, 2029 CE. A nude cyborg from the future arrives at a biker bar, where he proceeds to beat the tar out of the patrons before leaving with a newly acquired wardrobe and motorcycle, riding off into the night on a mission to protect John Connor. This early scene in James Cameron’s Terminator 2: Judgment Day took several nights to shoot, and Peter Kent was there for the duration.

The muscular, six-foot-five Canadian had been Arnold Schwarzenegger’s stunt double since the original Terminator in 1984, taking beatings and driving stunt vehicles while wearing an Arnie mask. T2 was a grueling, six-month shoot that stretched into March 1991. “If I had some time, Arnold and I would hang out in the trailer and have a coffee and smoke a cigar,” Kent recalls. “But generally it was just running around with your hair on fire.”

On one of those nights, George Holliday, a plumber who had just purchased a Sony Handycam, noticed the crane lights and film crew surrounding the real-life biker bar across the street from his apartment in Lake View Terrace, a suburb north of Burbank. He grabbed his camera and ran over for a better look. “You weren’t allowed to get close, like all movie shoots,” Holliday says. “But I was close enough. I was filming [Schwarzenegger] coming out of the bar, getting onto the bike, and riding off.”

A few nights later, on March 3, Kent and company were still shooting the scene, and “we had pretty much every cop in L.A. out there with

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