INTRO: Today, Michael Douglas is a highly respected actor and Robert Zemeckis is known as the Oscar-winning director of some of the biggest and best movies ever made, like Back to the Future and Forrest Gump. But in the early 1980s, both of them had something to prove. In this episode of Revisited, we’re looking back at the project that gave them the chance to prove themselves, the lighthearted adventure Romancing the Stone.
SET-UP: The script for Romancing the Stone had been sitting on Douglas’s desk for a few years before the film actually went into production. It was written in the late ‘70s by Diane Thomas, who was working as a waitress in Malibu to support herself while hoping to break into the entertainment industry. Although legend has it that Thomas pitched the idea directly to Douglas when he came into her restaurant one day, that didn’t really happen. Thomas had an agent who had sent the script out to various studios and producers, and a copy ended up in Douglas’s hands because he had a production company called Bigstick.
In fact, Douglas’s greatest success at that point had come as a producer, as he was behind the Oscar-caliber films One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and The China Syndrome. Although he was a decade into his acting career, he was still trying to figure out how to approach it – and trying to avoid roles that would draw comparisons to his father Kirk Douglas. When he read the script for Romancing the Stone, he was blown away by it, feeling that there was a “wonderful spirit” to Thomas’s writing.
The story centers on romance novelist Joan Wilder, a character Douglas felt that Thomas had modeled after herself. While living a low-key life, Joan writes exciting adventure stories. She gets drawn into an adventure herself when her sister is kidnapped in Colombia, and to get her sibling back she’ll have to hand-deliver a treasure map that was mailed to her by her brother-in-law. Right before he was murdered. After traveling to Colombia, Joan gets lost in the jungle and crosses paths with rough-around-the-edges ex-pat Jack T. Colton… and it’s good for her that she has his assistance, because she’s caught between two groups that want the treasure map: the criminals who have her sister, and the trigger-happy private military run by a man named Zolo. While dodging bullets, traversing the Colombian countryside, and trying to save Joan’s sister, Joan and Jack also find some time to fall in love with each other.
Douglas was looking to produce something lighter than his previous films, and this script – which had romance, action, and comedy – was just what he wanted. He was also drawn to the role of Jack T. Colton, despite the fact that it was a Kirk Douglas type of character. Not only did he want to produce this movie, he was ready to accept being compared to his dad and wanted to play the hero himself.
Douglas had a deal with Columbia Pictures, and the studio agreed to purchase the script for two hundred and fifty thousand dollars – a nice amount of cash for a first-time screenwriter. It briefly looked like Romancing the Stone might be on the fast track to start filming in February of 1980… but that plan was derailed when the studio decided they wanted the script they had just paid so much for to undergo a major rewrite. So the project was shelved for a while. If it had gone into production in February of 1980, it would have had a several month head start on a movie that it ended up being called a rip-off of: Steven Spielberg and George Lucas’s Raiders of the Lost Ark. But it wasn’t released until three years after Raiders; coincidentally, in the same year as Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.
While Romancing the Stone was gathering dust, Douglas tried to push his acting career forward. He starred in a Razzie nominee, followed by a flop. Meanwhile, Columbia had his producing project Starman trapped in development hell. It was looking like that Diane Thomas script was his best chance to get something good made. So he took the project to 20th Century Fox. The studio was interested in making the movie, but they weren’t sure about Douglas playing Jack. They had a list of actors they would rather see in the role: Clint Eastwood, Burt Reynolds, Jack Nicholson, Paul Newman, Christopher Reeve, Sylvester Stallone. Some of them were even offered the part and turned it down. Luckily, Douglas had an ally at Fox: Sherry Lansing, who he had worked with on The China Syndrome when she was at MGM, was now Fox’s president of production. She said Douglas could star in the movie, he just had to make sure the budget came in under ten million. Done deal.
To keep the budget down, Douglas needed to find a promising director who wasn’t well known yet. His choice was Robert Zemeckis, whose career was basically dead at that moment, thanks to the back-to-back failures of Steven Spielberg’s 1941 and his own comedy Used Cars. Zemeckis had co-written 1941, the most maligned film of Spielberg’s career, and Used Cars was one of several Kurt Russell movies of that time that weren’t able to find their audience right away.
A supporting cast was then built around Douglas. Comedian Zack Norman was cast as Ira, the crocodile-loving antiquities smuggler who kidnaps Joan Wilder’s sister Elaine. Zemeckis gave his then-wife Mary Ellen Trainor her film debut as Elaine, and brought in Used Cars cast member Alfonso Arau – who is best known now for directing Like Water for Chocolate – to play a drug smuggler called The Bellmaker. Who happens to be a big fan of romance novels. Douglas cast his former roommate Danny DeVito as Ira’s cousin-slash-lackey Ralph. Manuel Ojeda was chosen to play Zolo. Holland Taylor was cast as Joan’s publisher. Veteran stuntman Ted White, who would soon earn a lot of fans by playing the slasher Jason Voorhees in Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter, appears as a villainous cowboy in an opening fantasy sequence, a glimpse into Joan’s latest novel.
For Joan herself, Douglas had his mind set on Debra Winger, who had received an Oscar nomination for her role in An Officer and a Gentleman and would soon be nominated again for Terms of Endearment. There are conflicting reports as to why Winger didn’t end up playing Joan. Some say Fox didn’t think she was glamorous enough. Others say Douglas had a dinner meeting with Winger that ended with her biting him. Whatever the case, Fox executive Joe Wizan suggested Kathleen Turner, who had just made her film debut in the steamy thriller Body Heat. She got the job.
It’s a good thing Romancing the Stone had such strong motivation driving it, with Zemeckis needing to revive his career and Douglas wanting to improve his own, because it has been said that this was a “tremendously difficult” movie to make. The initial idea was to film in Colombia, the country the story takes place in, but news of Americans being kidnapped and the fact that Colombia was entering its rainy season caused a change in plans. Filming ended up taking place in Mexico… where it rained for about half of the ninety day shooting schedule. This resulted in roads being washed away, which the production would have to rebuild so they could get around. Life also imitated the script at times. There’s a scene where a character has their hand bitten off by a crocodile, and one of the production’s animal trainers had their hand mauled by a crocodile during filming. Another crocodile nearly knocked Douglas out with a whack from its tail. There’s a standout stunt sequence where Jack and Joan get caught in a mudslide – and Turner really got caught in a mudslide at one point. When she was pulled out of the mud, the skin on one of her legs was torn up. This was one of several times she needed to get stitches during those ninety days. She also cut her arm on the side of plane wreckage that Jack and Joan discover in the jungle. And during a fight scene with Zolo, she cut her head open on the stone ground.
REVIEW: The fact that this was an uncomfortable movie to make comes through in the movie. The actors rarely look comfortable. But if they weren’t enjoying themselves in the midst of all this, that doesn’t come through, because the movie has a very fun feeling to it. Zemeckis was hired to make a piece of light entertainment, and that’s exactly what he delivered. The action starts early on in the film, and we never go too long without something exciting happening because Zolo’s men are never far behind Jack and Joan. We get shootouts, mudslides, vehicular chases, fight scenes, crocodile attack, a near-miss with a snake. There’s a lot going on here. It’s not clear how much the script changed between the time when Thomas sold it to when filming began. It did pass through the hands of multiple uncredited script doctors. But she clearly provided a great foundation for a crowd-pleasing adventure film.
Douglas certainly proved that he was capable of playing the romantic hero. He made Jack a likeable guy, and this is despite the fact that he is scheming behind Joan’s back for a large portion of the film. Even while he’s doing this, we get the sense that he’s going to come through and do the right thing in the end.
Turner undergoes a great transformation over the course of the story. When we first meet Joan, she’s an inhibited writer who cries over her own love stories and only has her cat to celebrate success with. Although she daydreams of adventure through her writing, in reality even catching a flight to Colombia seems like a daunting task to her. But she catches that flight for the sake of her sister, and grows more courageous as she faces a series of dangers. By the end she’s swinging over ravines and driving a car through a chase sequence. And into a river. For a moment in the climax, it looks like the movie is going to let the character down. Facing off with Zolo, she appears helpless, relying on Jack to save her. Thankfully, even when filming took place in 1983 the filmmakers already knew our heroine had to get herself out of this jam.
The relationship between Jack and Joan plays out in typical romantic comedy fashion. They start out at odds, Joan doesn’t like Jack and could never imagine being with someone like him. But she falls for him anyway. He’s more like the heartthrob character in her novels than she realized. When their interactions turn romantic, it’s quite believable because Douglas and Turner have great chemistry in the film – and apparently had great chemistry off screen as well. Since she was single and he was legally separated at the time, there was some intense mutual attraction going on during this production.
Turner didn’t get along very well with Zemeckis, as she was irritated by his focus on getting specific camera angles. This caused arguments between them on set. Turner would later say, “I never felt that he knew what I was having to do to adjust my acting to some of his damn cameras. Sometimes he puts you in ridiculous postures.” But again, this is a behind-the-scenes issue that wasn’t detectable on screen at all.
Beyond the great work Douglas and Turner did in their roles, the supporting cast members were given their chances to shine as well. Ojeda’s Zolo is an intimidating presence. Norman didn’t have a lot to do as Ira, but he has some memorable lines and deliveries. Arau is really amusing during his few minutes. And of course DeVito is a standout. There wasn’t much to Ralph in the script, because he spends most of the time just sneaking around and observing, so DeVito had the chance to build the character on set. As DeVito does, he made the guy fun to watch.
Romancing the Stone was Zemeckis’s first time working with someone who would become a very important collaborator; composer Alan Silvestri. Silvestri was hired to put together a temporary score for the movie, but his music was so impressive that it ended up being the permanent score. Zemeckis and Silvestri have been working together ever since.
LEGACY/NOW: There was a time when Fox was so keen on Zemeckis that they planned to have him go straight from making Romancing the Stone to directing another film for them, Cocoon. That fell apart when the studio saw a rough cut of Romancing the Stone and became convinced that they had a complete failure on their hands. They were so displeased that they fired Zemeckis from Cocoon and replaced him with Ron Howard. But Zemeckis knew where his movie was lacking and was able to fix it through reshoots. Much of this is right up front in the film; those scenes that do such a good job of establishing who Joan Wilder is came from the reshoots. Once they had smoothed out the opening twenty minutes, the movie worked a lot better.
Fox didn’t have anything to worry about. Zemeckis was able to complete the film for the agreed upon ten million dollar budget, and when it was released in March of 1984 it ended up earning over one hundred and fifteen dollars at the box office. This was Fox’s only big hit of the year – and it wasn’t only a financial success. It received a lot of good reviews as well. Some critics dismissed it as a Raiders of the Lost Ark knock-off, but others complimented it for being better than many of the other Raiders copies that were out there. Some reviews – and some fans – would even say that it turned out better than the year’s real Indiana Jones movie, Temple of Doom.
Romancing the Stone did so well that Fox put a sequel on the fast track to production… But they ran into some trouble because the movie had been so successful that key members of the creative team had been offered other projects that kept them from returning for the follow-up. Since Cocoon had been taken away from Zemeckis, he was free to go over to Universal and get Back to the Future made. Diane Thomas couldn’t write the script because Steven Spielberg had her writing the third Indiana Jones movie and helping him develop Always. She did consult on a rewrite when the script for the sequel The Jewel of the Nile fell short of expectations.
Sadly, Thomas didn’t have the chance to write Always, and her Indiana Jones script wasn’t used. Romancing the Stone turned out to be her only produced screenplay. As a reward for the success of the film, Douglas had given her a Porsche. When she let her boyfriend drive the vehicle after they had some drinks with friends, he lost control of it. Thomas was killed in the crash, seven weeks before the December 1985 release of The Jewel of the Nile.
The sequel did well, but the script was lackluster and the reviews were largely negative. The experience of making it was miserable for Douglas and Turner. It was so troublesome and disappointing that even though Fox commissioned the script for a third film that would have been called The Crimson Eagle, Douglas decided not to hurry into making that one. It has come back up from time to time over the years. Douglas dropped out of the 2000 movie U-571 and was replaced by Matthew McConaughey because he thought there would be a scheduling conflict with a Romancing the Stone sequel. When promoting The In-Laws in 2003, he again seemed certain that he’d be reprising the role of Jack T. Colton soon. But the sequel never went into production. A few years later, we started hearing rumblings of a remake. There was a possibility that it would reunite The Ugly Truth director Robert Luketic with that film’s stars Katherine Heigl and Gerard Butler. That didn’t happen. Neither did the NBC TV series that was announced in 2011.
It makes sense that Romancing the Stone has been dormant for so long. The movie was a success and is still fondly remembered. But it also seems like a movie that was very much of its time. You don’t hear it referenced very often. It has its fans, but not exactly the sort of fan base that’s clamoring for more stories set in this world. Especially if Joan Wilder and Jack T. Colton wouldn’t be played by Kathleen Turner and Michael Douglas anymore. Who cares at that point?
Jack and Joan had their great adventure with Romancing the Stone, and The Jewel of the Nile was already pushing it. Sometimes franchises just don’t work out. But the sequel wasn’t the last time we saw Douglas, Turner, and DeVito work together. They re-teamed for the 1989 dark comedy The War of the Roses, and recently Douglas brought both Turner and DeVito in for appearances on his Netflix series The Kominsky Method. They may not be playing Jack, Joan, and Ralph in those projects, but it’s still satisfying to see them share the screen. And if you revisit Romancing the Stone now, nearly forty years after its release, it still holds up as a good way to spend a couple hours. It’s simple, fun, and exciting. Exactly what it was always intended to be.