The Terminator’s shooting schedule was delayed by nine months, which is practically a death sentence for your finances in Hollywood if you were counting on that income.

Luckily for James Cameron, 20th Century Fox threw him a lifeline and gave him a writing assignment because they liked The Terminator screenplay so much. That assignment was Aliens, which would end up being his next film, and while he was writing that, he also got an assignment to write Rambo: First Blood Part II.

On top of that, with the extra time he had, he rewrote parts of The Terminator, meaning he was writing/rewriting three different scripts at the same time. To make sure he wasn’t mixing the scripts up, he wrote each one at a different desk.