Let's go back a little into a diehard fan area and obscure facts. This time I wanted to put a spotlight on the deleted alternative Arrival scene from The Terminator. I noticed that some of the websites that had something on it are long time gone, and you can barely find it mentioned anywhere. So perhaps many may not be aware that Terminator's arrival and exchange with the three punks was shot after the principal photography wrapped up, and it was shot on James Cameron's expense. Actually, it was RE-shot because the arrival and the murder of the punks was already shot months prior but with different actors. Cameron did not think the original actors who portrayed the punks did a good job and wasn't happy with Terminator's arrival scenes either. So after the shooting has finished, he hired his good friends and paid the shooting crew and Arnold Schwarzenegger from his own pocket. The reason why it's such an obscure fact is because one of only two mentions of this is in a hidden Easter Egg video on 2001's The Terminator Special Edition DVD. It's a short featurette with editor Mark Goldblatt talking about the reshot scenes
"The original scenes, for whatever reasons the casting didn't quite work and there wasn't really money in the budget for reshoots. I don't believe the insurance covers bad acting. Jim decided, in that particular case he needed simply to go back and recast and do it over again. So he cast his friends, people he had worked with, that he knew, that he liked, people like Bill Paxton, Brian Thompson and [David] Kristin and of course it made all the difference in the scene"
Adam Greenberg, director of photography for The Terminator and Terminator 2: Judgment Day was NOT the Director of Photography for those reshoots, either because of scheduling conflict, or because Cameron could not afford him out of his own pocket. The substitute was Donald G. Jackson who recalled the story of reshooting Terminator's arrival scene with Cameron holding the light, in a 2003 interview on scottshaw.com which is still online
The panned shot described above is this one
There are no stills and almost no footage of the original Arrival scene, other than a brief shot of the Terminator scanning the area upon his arrival, present in the first trailer. Or so it’s been rumored, but I’m not convinced. The background and the lighting on his face is an identical setup to what was in the film.
Scene as it appears in the film below:
So I believe it’s just an alternative shot or an outtake. No photos or video of the original punks had surfaced yet. It’s also been rumored that the original Arrival scene was shot on a Schoolyard, but it was never substantiated by anything. Just recently however, evidence came out which seems to confirms the Terminator’s Arrival was indeed shot on a Schoolyard - the setting of the arrival that has remained unchanged in every iteration of the script. “‘The Terminator’ Movie Historian”, as I like to call him, Instagram’s Terminator1984fan came into posession of multiple production documents that confirm the Schoolyard set was dressed and used for the shooting of the original opening. Certain information had been cut off/censored from samples below to avoid internet stealing
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