William Wisher, co-writer of The Terminator and Terminator 2, has died at the age of 71.
Wisher studied as an actor before turning his hand to screenwriting. In the early 1980s, when he was on the verge of giving up on Hollywood altogether, he received a call from long-time friend James Cameron, who he had known since they were teenagers.
Cameron had sold his treatment for a movie called The Terminator and needed to crack out the screenplay in short order. He asked Wisher to write part of the script, specifically the Sarah Connor introductory scenes and the police scenes.
Wisher also received a cameo as a cop with the call sign 1L19. Arnold bounces his head off the police car and later mimics his voice over the police radio.
When Wisher shot the scene, the actual police working crowd control were short handed. As Wisher was dressed exactly like them, they asked for his help. He spent a few hours as an actual cop, keeping the public at bay so they could finish the scene.
I’ll Be Back
Wisher returned to co-write Terminator 2: Judgement Day. The writing was more collaborative this time. Instead of each writing specific scenes, Cameron and Wisher huddled around the typewriter and bashed it out together.
Wisher received another cameo in Terminator 2 as the guy who photographs Arnold’s T800 after the T1000 sends him crashing through a shop window. Cameron drafted Wisher in at the last minute after the actor scheduled to play the part missed his flight.
I consider this to be God’s hand at work, for two reasons. First, the original actor was Japanese. The character was meant to be a stereotypical camera-obsessed Japanese tourist, which was an embarrassing cliché by the early 1990s.
Second, Wisher’s cameo allows us to imagine that he was playing 1L19 again. Assuming the head wobble that Arnold gave him wasn’t fatal, he would have survived, but was probably in the hospital and not present at the police station massacre. He retired on medical grounds and took up photography as a hobby.
That look of shock on his face isn’t just because he just saw a guy being thrown through a window, but because he recognised him as the psycho who murdered seventeen of his buddies in 1984.
William Wisher went on to write Stallone’s Judge Dredd (not great, but not as bad as its reputation), The 13th Warrior (an underrated gem), plus script doctoring duties on Die Hard with a Vengeance and Live Free or Die Hard.
Not a bad record for this vicinity. Farewell and adieu, Mr Wisher.
