In which I’m as tall as Arnold Schwarzenegger

I used to be about five feet 10 inches tall. And I used to write about movies.

What do those two factoids have in common?

What if I threw in a third factoid: I’m as tall as bodybuilder-turned-actor-turned-governor-turned-tabloid-fodder Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Or at least I used to be. Or Arnold used to be.

Confused yet?

Even though I’ve written about weightier subjects for most of the last 20 years, the first dozen or so years of my journalism career were devoted, primarily, to feature and entertainment writing. Besides writing for the now-defunct Muncie Evening Press, I wrote for some Indianapolis-based entertainment tabloids, Hot Potato and The Alternative, and some fan-published magazines.

I also tried to write once for a nationally-distributed entertainment magazine, but my submission — an in-depth review of an early, unused script for the 1989 “Batman” movie — earned me a cease-and-desist letter from Warner Bros., the makers of that movie. That’s a story for another day though.

For a guy writing about books, music and movies in a town the size of Muncie, I was pretty ambitious. I requested and received opportunities to do phone interviews with directors like John Carpenter (“Halloween”) and George Romero (“Night of the Living Dead”). I got to interview Julie Walters — now better known as Mrs. Weasley from the “Harry Potter” films — early in her career.

I also went on press junkets, in which studios flew entertainment writers to big-city screenings of upcoming movie releases. They put us up in a hotel, screened the movie for us and let us interview, in brief fashion, the stars. Sometime I’ll tell you about getting to meet Nick Nolte that way.

But it was at one of those press junkets where I got the opportunity to meet Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Now, this isn’t the Arnold Schwarzenegger we all know today. This was in 1982, and Arnold was publicizing “Conan the Barbarian.” He had been in a couple of movies by that time, but the Arnold that would be the stuff of action movie legend — “The Terminator,” “Commando,” and many more films — hadn’t happened yet.

This Arnold was still a fairly unpolished guy. I mean, he was dressed up for the press junket, in a suit and tie. And he was unfailingly polite. But I remember him as being rough around the edges, even in front of the press. He was outgoing and friendly but maybe a little louder than you would expect of a Hollywood type. I also remember he seemed flirty toward the female journalists in the group.

These press junkets are run like an interview factory. Arnold and co-stars Gerry Lopez (a surfer-turned-actor who played Arnold’s sidekick in the movie) and the gorgeous Sandahl Bergman (a dancer-turned-actor who was also seen in “All That Jazz”) were brought into a hotel room rented by the movie company and seated for 20 or 30 minutes with a group of four or five entertainment writers. Each writer threw out a couple of questions, in turn. I mostly found myself hoping that the only interesting questions wouldn’t be asked by somebody else first. Once that session was done, the writers were herded to another room to interview the next cast member and a new group was brought in.

The TV interviewers got one-on-one time with the actors but they were all cursory interviews, really. There’s not much time for an in-depth discussion in 20 minutes.

I don’t remember a lot about the interview with Arnold that my group conducted. Questions were asked and answered and it all sounded a lot like the kind of stuff you see on TV and online to this day. Yes, making the movie was a lot of fun. Yes, the cast got along. Yes, the stunts were a challenge.

But what I do remember was thinking, “Wow. Arnold is just about my height, maybe a little taller.”

Yes, it’s a strange thought to come away from the interview with. But Schwarzenegger — who was, with “Conan,” just beginning to build a larger-than-life image — was already being marketed as a big guy. Certainly he was “pumped up,” to quote Hans and Franz, but height-wise he seemed like a normal guy.

Arnold’s height has been the subject of some conjecture over the years. In researching this blog entry, I found an Internet site, www.arnoldheight.com, that takes a tongue-in-cheek approach to solving the mystery of just how tall he is. The site speculates that the actor is somewhere between five feet nine and six feet two. But if offers photographic evidence — mostly by matching Arnold up against some famous c0-workers — suggesting that the actor, who claims to be six feet two inches, has perhaps — ahem — fibbed a bit about his height.

In the nearly 30 years since my encounter with Arnold, I’ve met a number of actors and TV personalities. I’ve found that many of them are kind of on the small side, probably because TV and film cameras make most of the general population look like hideous, hulking creatures. The camera adds 10 or 20 or 50 pounds, all of it ugly.

As for me, I’m shrinking in my declining years. I’m not sure I’ll ever measure five feet 10 inches again, even on a good day.

And if I’m shrinking, one can only imagine that Arnold is, nearly 30 years on, experiencing the same effect.

I used to be five feet 10 inches tall. Maybe, just maybe, Arnold can make the same claim.

Not that he’d want to.