Objective: “Arnold Schwarzenegger’s people just got back to us. He’s available to film for an hour at his office today, but we need to get him a script by 4pm.” This was the message I got at 1pm. Given the time constraints, I was tasked with writing a short, down-the-middle, no frills script where Arnold quickly talks about the Dream House prize and the charity it benefits, but come on…this is Arnold Schwarzenegger…

Solution: Given that Arnold Schwarzenegger defined an entire genre, pretty much invented the movie one-liner, and is one of the most larger-than-life, famous people in the world, I wrote a script filled with Arnold one-liner word plays and contextually accurate homages to his films that also tied back to the campaign. Arnold still had to read it, approve it, and hopefully not chase after me with the Conan The Barbarian sword (which he has hanging on the wall in his office, by the way).

Results: Arnold Schwarzenegger read my script VERBATIM for the video. He even added his own badass one-liner at the very end! What started out as a request to write a generic 30-second video turned into a 1-minute “Arnie Special” that generated millions of views and was one of the most successful pieces of marketing material for the entire campaign.