They’ve shot plenty of movies there already, though.
You ever see a movie so many times you know all of its beats and dialogue? I think everyone has a couple of movies like this. One of mine is Pee-wee’s Big Adventure. Another is probably Mad Max II: The Road Warrior. My buddy’s dad had a copy of this on VHS, which he had recorded himself from a television broadcast … the first time I saw it I thought it was something illicit.
And a third is probably Terminator 2: Judgment Day.
It feels like Hollywood too rarely comes up with anything new anymore. As such, there are a lot of Terminator movies and most of them can be missed. In addition to Terminator 2 (T2) there’s obviously the original, which is also great, but then there’s Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (this is the one with the Terminatrix); the one most famous because audio leaked of star Christian Bale bawling out the cinematographer on set; the Sarah Connor Chronicles, which was a television series about terminators that I haven’t seen; and then there was that one I did see in a theater called Terminator: Dark Fate (it stunk!). I’m probably forgetting a movie and another TV show. But it doesn’t matter; what I’m trying to say is, Terminator 2, unlike almost all of the others, is good.
Starring Arnold Schwarzenegger at the height of his celebrity, they spent a ton of money on this flick and it shows. The stunts were spectacular, the one-liners memorable, and the special effects cutting edge. More than 30 years later, they still hold up pretty well. And that end scene, with the remorseless T-1000 thrashing around in a pit of molten steel?
They shot it in a decommissioned Southern California steel mill!
If you’re a Southland native you probably already know about this, but for the rest of us: T2’s climactic showdown between the good and bad terminators takes place in the erstwhile Kaiser Steel mill in Fontana, in San Bernardino County. The mill ceased its production eight years before the movie was released and was only in operation for 40 years, but its backstory informs the wider economic history of the west the over the last century. This fully integrated mill – located 50 miles east of Los Angeles, in an unlikely spot – was built in the early 1940s by industrialist Henry Kaiser to supply his Pacific shipyards with steel, which were churning out Liberty Ships for the war effort. Historian Mike Davis described it thusly in his book City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles:
“Kaiser’s Richmond shipyards had a critical bottleneck: a persistent shortage of steel plate. An industrial colony of the East, the West Coast had always imported steel at high markups ($6-$20 per ton); now, in the midst of a superheated war economy, the Eastern mills could not supply, nor could the railroads support, enough of this high-cost steel to meet the Pacific shipyards.”
So Kaiser decided to build a mill of his own. But why place a steel mill in the Inland Empire? Because the federal government, which supplied Kaiser with a $110 million loan to stand the mill up, insisted that the Kaiser facility had to be located at least fifty miles inland, ‘away from possible Japanese air attack’, writes Davis:
This locational constraint was widely thought to preclude postwar conversion of the facility to competitive production. Rule-of-thumb wisdom held that an integrated complex could only operate at a profit if dependence on rail transport was confined to one ‘leg’ of its logistical ‘tripod’ of iron ore, coking coal and steel product. A Southern California tidewater plant was accorded but a slim chance of survival in the postwar market; an inland location, dependent upon coal and iron rail shipments from hundreds of miles away, was considered an economic impossibility.
But Kaiser believed that ‘problems were only opportunities with their work clothes on’, and refused to be daunted. He calculated that radical economies in steel-making and mining technology, together with the vast promise of the postwar California market (drastically underestimated by Big Steel), would allow him to convert profitability to peacetime production. Accepting the War Department’s disadvantageous conditions, he sent his engineers in search of a suitable inland location. They quickly fixed their sights on Fontana.
Kaiser’s bet paid off, at least for a few decades. The mill became an industrial fixture, closely associated with Fontana, and did well before eventually declining in the face of import competition in the 1970s. After the mill closed in 1983, the property was parceled up. One part of it became a finished steel processing plant, which is still in operation. Another chunk of it became a NASCAR track, which only closed up shop in 2023. Shortly after T2 was filmed there, a Chinese state-owned manufacturing conglomerate bought the mill’s Basic Oxygen Process and Caster operation, disassembled the entire thing, and shipped it in pieces back to China where it was reassembled and resumed steelmaking.
And through it all, the mill showed up in Hollywood productions. Among the movies shot there are The Running Man (another Arnold movie!); A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge; Mortal Kombat; a couple of scenes in Independence Day; and, of course, Hell Comes to Frogtown.
None of them are as good as Terminator 2, though. It’s streaming right now on Paramount Plus.
And if you’d like to read more about the rise and fall of Kaiser Steel in Fontana, you can find Mike Davis’ book here and here.