He’s Back By TOM SHONE

THE FUTURIST The Life and Films of

James Cameron By Rebecca Keegan

273 pp. Crown Publishers. $24

As a boy in Chippawa, Ontario, James Cameron once sent some mice over the edge of Niagara Falls in a small submersible made from old mayonnaise jars, an Erector Set and a paint bucket. Another time, he made a hot-air balloon out of a dry-cleaning bag and some candles, floating it down the street until someone reported it as a U.F.O. and called the Fire Department. Together with the young Steven Spielberg’s experiments in civic alarum-raising — locking himself in the bathroom until the Phoenix Fire Department was summoned — Cameron’s excursions suggest two interlocking propositions: (1) If you want to know who is going to grow up to be a box-office titan, check out the rec­ords of your local Fire Department. And (2) nobody should be surprised if Balloon Boy turns into the proud auteur behind “Terminator Resurrection: This Time With Feeling.”

As Cameron’s latest art-house offering appears in a few select cinemas, Rebecca Keegan’s biography, “The Futurist,” arrives to shine a spotlight on this most shy and retiring of filmmaking violets. I’m only half-joking. The Cameron who emerges here is a pensive soul, racked by the thought of nuclear apocalypse after he reads a pamphlet on fallout shelters at age 8 — “a life-changing epiphany,” according to Keegan, leading to a lifetime of “daydreaming about Armageddon.” I’m sorry, but this is James Cameron we’re talking about? Mr. I Eat Pressure for Breakfast? The guy who detonated a small thermonuclear device just to backlight Arnold Schwarzenegger while he puckered up for a kiss with Jamie Lee Curtis? To this day, people watching that scene are unsure whether to shield their eyes, crouch under their seats or head for the basement.

To be fair, Cameron’s films have long attempted to balance airy calls for world peace with a fierce desire to see Harrier jump jets pass horizontally through tall buildings, but it’s disquieting to see that mixture served up so credulously here. Keegan visited Cameron on the set of “Ava­tar” for Time magazine in 2008 and decided to turn her article into a book, which is less a biography proper than a set visit by someone who got carried away with access to the great and mighty Oz: “Cameron’s brain is formidable, fascinating and equally developed on both sides.” That’s nice to know. Fans will already be familiar with the unusual molecular makeup of the Jim Cameron childhood: three parts science geek to one part rebel, he aced physics and was pounded at school. After the family moved to California, he got a job driving the hot-lunch truck for the Brea Olinda Unified School District and began scribbling plot ideas about blue people and bioluminescent planets while boning up on matte processes at the University of Southern California library. Then, in 1977, he saw “Star Wars” and emerged seething: somebody had made his movie. “That’s when I got busy,” he said.

Getting a job at Roger Corman’s studio, he sculptured spaceships for low-fi “Star Wars” rip-offs and landed his first directing gig on “Piranha II: The Spawning”; after he was fired, he found himself in a hotel room with a fever and dreamed of a steel skeleton clawing its way through a blistering inferno, thus making “The Terminator” the most innovative alternative to filing for unemployment benefits yet devised. That genesis is the stuff of myth; far more revealing is the three-month period Cameron spent in 1983 writing the scripts for “The Terminator,” “Rambo” and “Aliens,” figuring out how many pages per hour he had to write, then cranking them out to an accompaniment of “Mars, the Bringer of War” from “The Planets.” Hasta la vista, Holst!

Genuine revolutions come in two installments, with first the boy wonders — the Dantons, the Trotskys, the Spielbergs — to be followed, a few years later, by a much steelier strategist: a Napoleon, a Lenin, the man who would be king of the world. There are those who lament Cameron’s transformation from the scrappy filmmaker who made “The Terminator” for $6.4 million into the man who made “Titanic” for more than $200 million, but in truth he is one of the few directors who understand how to spend money, just as he is one of the few who know how to shoot action — a much smaller band than you’d think. Sigourney Weaver, an opponent of the N.R.A., was worried by all the chunky military hardware in “Aliens,” but remember what happens: the Marines descend to the mining colony on LV-426, bristling with guns and grenades, only to get their rear ends handed to them on a plate. Cameron had no need to direct “Rambo”: he’d already made his Vietnam movie.

Or think of the T-1000 in “Terminator 2,” mercury to Schwarzenegger’s might, and realize how powerfully it prefigured the enemy America would face on 9/11. Cameron has an instinctive understanding of asymmetry, in other words; it gives his combat scenes real heft and sinew. Would that the process by which a newly “mellow” Cameron coaxed virtual performances from his “Avatar” actors were anything that splendid: “To help them feel an explosion,” Keegan writes, “he boomed a noise over amplifiers, threw foam particles at them and whacked them with a padded jousting pole.” It’s enough to make you pine for the oxygenated screaming matches that characterized the shoots of “The Abyss” and “Titanic.” Cameron may have dragged filmmaking kicking and screaming into the 21st cen­tury, but he has helped deal an irrevocable blow to the art of film biography.

Tom Shone is the author of “Blockbuster: How Hollywood Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Summer.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/17/books/review/Shone-t.html?ref=books