James Cameron has finally admitted to copying the script of Terminator directly from Harlan Ellison.
In or around 1984 someone tells Harlan Ellison that they think the script for The Terminator sounds similar to his script for an Outer Limits episode called “Soldier,” which Ellison had actually adapted from his own short story, “Soldier Out of Time.” And when we say “similar” we mean that the opening sequences of both The Terminator and “Soldier” are aesthetically close enough to give you pause. Both deal with a guy from the future who ends up on some contemporary 20th century streets. In Terminator, this is Reese; in “Soldier,” a guy named Qarlo. What happened next (according to Ellison almost exclusively) was that the production company in question — Hemdale — started avoiding Ellison’s inquires to see a script. Eventually, after sneaking into an advance screening of the film, Ellison determined that there were enough elements of Terminator similar to both “Solider” and to another Outer Limits he wrote, “Demon With a Glass Hand,” to make a case against Terminator director James Cameron and Hemdale Studios.
Most damning, though, was a quote from James Cameron — which was supposed to have appeared in a magazine called Starlog — in which the director gave an interview about The Terminator ahead of its release. When asked where he got the idea from, he said: “I ripped off a few Outer Limits segments.” This sentiment was apparently repeated when a friend of Ellison’s visited the set of the film and Cameron said that he’d “ripped off a few of Ellison’s short stories” to make the script for Terminator. Now, the quote above is NOT in the final interview (I have the physical issue, plus you can read it here), because purportedly, the editors of Starlog were asked (forced?) by one of James Cameron’s assistants to alter the piece before it went to print. Still, it’s widely acknowledged that the studio paid Ellison something in the range of 65,000 as a settlement.