Romancing the Stone

One of the most enjoyable movies of my 1984 revisit is Romancing The Stone, which was not anticipated as being any kind of blockbuster when it was released forty years ago and was not all that well reviewed. After viewing the rough cut, everyone at 20th Century Fox expected the film to be a huge bomb, but it turned out to be the studio's only major hit of the year. The movie scored with audiences of its day due to the fresh perspective and light touch it brought to the action/adventure genre and the wonderful chemistry between its leads. It was a major milestone in the then-uncertain careers of its star Kathleen Turner, its producer/star Michael Douglas, and, most significantly, its director Robert Zemeckis.

The project began as an idea in the mind of Diane Thomas, a waitress at a Malibu restaurant in the 1970s. Thomas modeled her lead character, Joan Wilder, on herself, an attractive blonde with an adventurous spirit but a shy, reserved nature. She wrote the screenplay in her spare time as a way of living out her fantasies, much in the way her protagonist writes romance novels. The script had some buzz that landed Thomas an agent and caused a bit of a bidding war when it was offered to producers. Douglas made the highest offer at $250,000, which, at the time, was a lot of money for a spec script by a first-time writer (one who was a girl, no less!). Insiders thought Douglas had overpaid, but he loved Thomas's story of a woman without much of a life outside of her imagination who must fly to South America and deliver a treasure map to save her sister from kidnappers.

At the time, Douglas was far more successful as a producer (winning the Best Picture Oscar at age 30 for One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest) than he was as an actor in films like Coma, The China Syndrome, The Star Chamber, and the TV series The Streets of San Francisco. He did not buy Thomas's script for himself but with the assumption that he could easily convince a big star like Jack Nicholson, Sly Stallone, Burt Reynolds, Paul Newman, Christopher Reeve, or even Clint Eastwood to play the male lead of rapscallion adventurer Jack T. Colton. But none of those movie stars responded to the script, which was unmistakably written with the female lead at its center. Douglas worried that he was not a big enough star to make the picture successful but figured he could carry the movie if he could convince Debra Winger to play Joan Wilder. Winger was the brightest young female star of the day after her success in Urban Cowboy, An Officer and a Gentleman, and Terms of Endearment, but Douglas did not jibe with "the turbulent brilliance of Debra Winger," as her Terms co-star Shirley MacLaine characterized Winger's working style in her Oscar speech for that film.

Kathleen Turner had only been in two films by 1983, and after Body Heat and The Man with Two Brains, she was known as a sexy and deadly vamp. The idea that she could play the mousey and insecure Joan wasn’t an easy sell. But just as she convinced Carl Reiner and Steve Martin that she could be funny as well as sexy, one meeting with Douglas and costume designer Marilyn Vance demonstrated how easy it would be for Turner to play an ordinary-looking housebound writer who slowly transforms into a stunning adventure heroine over the course of the movie—something this film does better and more organically than nearly any other movie featuring a similar transformation, which usually draws unnecessary attention to the physical change. The success of the movie had a lot to do with the chemistry between the two leads, and Douglas and Turner sealed their stardom with this picture.

But the movie was far more important for its director. 20th Century Fox production chief Sherry Lansing believed in Douglas as a movie star but was only going to greenlight a picture with him in the lead if it had a limited budget, which necessitated an inexpensive, hungry director. Zemeckis was a protege of Steven Spielberg, who executive produced the director's first two films, I Wanna Hold Your Hand with Nancy Allen and Used Cars with Kurt Russell; both of which Zemeckis co-wrote with his partner Bob Gale. The two Bobs had also penned Spielberg's only major flop, 1941. With literally every film he'd been associated with a box-office failure, Zemeckis was not in demand and was desperate to prove himself as a director of something he didn't write and where he wasn’t riding on the coattails and reputation of Steven Spielberg. This made him cheap, which was exactly what Douglas was looking for. The runaway success of Romancing the Stone turned Zemeckis's career around and enabled him and Bob Gale to make their dream project, Back to the Future (with Spielberg again serving as executive producer), which became one of the biggest movies of all time.

Douglas had wanted to shoot on location in Columbia but had trouble with the studio and insurance companies because of a series of high-profile kidnappings of Americans that had occurred in the country, mirroring the events that incite this story, so they shot in Mexico. The jungle locations and conditions were far from deluxe. It was the rainy season, and during the first week of shooting, the cast and crew experienced an unexpected landslide that played out almost exactly like the one in the script. All the stunts were done practically on location, with the actors doing as much of that work as possible. And almost all the alligators were real (with one biting the hand of its wrangler, which also mirrors the screenplay). Both Douglas and Turner got badly bruised, banged, and scratched up but enjoyed "roughing it." Danny DeVito, an old friend and former roommate of Douglas, had been cast in the small role of Ralph, a smuggler from Queens who is part of the inept duo who takes Joan's sister hostage. With DeVito in that part, Ralph rapidly became a major supporting character, building up the movie's humor that the filmmakers wanted to enhance. DeVito's career was also transformed by this film, making the diminutive star of the sitcom Taxi, whose film roles were limited to nonverbal parts that capitalized on his odd looks—like Cuckoo's Nest and Terms of Endearment—and made him an A-list movie star for decades.

DeVito described Douglas as the kind of producer who can talk anyone into anything because he’s right there with you, under the same conditions, taking the same risks, and loving every minute of it, which is infectious. Turner claimed that, despite the rough conditions, the chance to make movies like Romancing the Stone was exactly why she got into the business of film acting. She didn’t get along well with Zemeckis, feeling he was a "film-school director" with little understanding of the actor's craft, but she loved working with Douglas and DeVito. The fun these three actors had making the movie comes across when watching it, and they would go on to work together twice more. Legend has it that the iconic dance scene between the two leads, a key turning point in the story, came about one night when Douglas and Turner tore up the dance floor at a local watering hole after a night of shooting, and Zemeckis decided to add it to the movie. Actors don't have to actually get along to generate heat on screen, but it sure helps! Douglas and Turner were clearly into each other, which translates directly to their characters and the audience.

Diane Thomas was primed to have a major career as a screenwriter. Even before Romancing the Stone came out, Steven Spielberg had been so taken with the script he hired her to write the remake of A Guy Named Joe, which he would eventually make as Always, as well as a third Indiana Jones movie. But Thomas was tragically killed in a car accident after completing first drafts of both screenplays, and most of her work wasn't used in either film, making Romancing the Stone her only produced script and sole screen credit—aside from her "base on characters created by" credit in the terrible sequel The Jewel of the Nile. Her cut-short career is one of the biggest what-ifs of the '80s, and many wonder what the trajectory of high-profile female screenwriters might have looked like had she lived. Because of the marketing value of Thomas's waitress-turned-screenwriter Cinderella-story at the time of the release, and out of respect for Thomas after her premature death, very little has been made of the major rewrites other screenwriters contributed to Romancing the Stone. The biggest contributor was Lem Dobbs (Dark City, The Limey, The Company You Keep), who was the on-location script doctor working with Zemeckis and the cast as the logistics of shooting required rewrites and beefing up Devito's part. Howard Franklin (The Name of the Rose, Someone to Watch Over Me, Quick Change) apparently also did a pass on the script before it went into production. And Treva Silverman, the Emmy-winning sitcom writer best known for her memorable scripts for The Mary Tyler Moore Show, is also rumored to have made major contributions. I have no way to be sure, but based on my love of Silverman's TV writing; my guess is that she was brought in after the disastrous rough cut and early test audience screenings of the film to make Joan Wilder "more likable."

These days, people love to talk about reshoots as if they represent some kind of failure or disgrace, but they have always been standard operating procedure for Hollywood movies, even productions with limited budgets like this one. Romancing the Stone looked like it was going to be the final nail in Zemeckis' coffin when Lansing and other 20th Century Fox execs saw his rough cut. He'd been hired to direct Cocoon as his follow-up to this film but was immediately fired off that project and replaced with Ron Howard. When Romancing the Stone was first screened for a public audience, the test scores were dismal, with the main complaint being that people didn't like either of the main characters! Douglas and Zemeckis were given a limited amount of time and money for reshoots, but they made the most of them.

The easiest, cheapest, but most critical parts of the story to redo were the early scenes in New York, which introduce us to Joan Wilder. These were almost completely reshot, replacing the character of Joan's bearded male book publisher, a lame dude with a crush on her who can't take a hint, with a female publisher played by TV actor Holland Taylor. With the publisher now played as a sharp, aggressive, but encouraging friend, rather than a leering creep whom Joan is always passively ducking, and the addition of a cute kitty cat given to Joan to make her seem more friendly, the introverted, vulnerable, hopeless-romantic nature of the protagonist came into sharper focus. Audiences were now "with Joan" from her minutes on screen. (The reshoots also enabled Zemeckis to indulge in his favorite type of exposition: photographs and wallhanging the post across key pieces of narrative foreshadowing and character development in the most unsubtle of ways). I would guess that Treva Silverman wrote all these revised scenes. Taylor's character, in particular, feels like a Silverman creation (though, again, this is all speculation on my part). The cast also did some reshooting in Mexico, replacing many of the earlier beats between Joan and Jack to make them less hostile and adversarial. Many of the early jungle scenes of Joan and Jack's relationship were dropped so as to get to the romance sooner. The changes worked like a charm. Part of the reason the picture was such a surprise hit was that anyone with inside knowledge about the project knew it had a stink on it from bad word of mouth.

The film never hit #1 at the box office, but it stayed in theaters through the spring and summer, doing solid business despite the competition from so many great movies in release. It ended up the #8 highest-grossing film for 1984, but it was not universally praised when it arrived. Part of the reason so many critics of its day were dismissive was that they lumped the film into the succession of bad Raiders of the Lost Ark clones that were flooding movie screens since the runaway success of the Spielberg/Lucas blockbuster. But this is not a Cannon Films knock-off like King Solomon's Mines. Aside from the way Douglas's Jack T. Colton dresses and the fact that he's a bit of a scoundrel like Indiana Jones, Romancing the Stone bears little resemblance to Raiders. It is a much intimate, small-scale adventure story, with just a small handful of characters pursuing a very simple MacGuffin. The film has a light and breezy quality that makes it endlessly rewatchable, though it hasn’t really lived on in the culture apart from attempts to recapture its tone in movies like the 2022 quasi-remake The Lost City.

The picture is certainly "of its time" in that it's an adventure movie aimed at people over twenty-five, and it's a sexy romance that’s rated PG. It's not a perfect film, but the flaws are not ones that have anything to do with its age. Its Western perspective of Latin America was always cliché, but it undercuts the then-popular conception of Latin America in many ways, such as Jack constantly being surprised whenever anyone can speak perfect English. The best undercutting of expectations is the character of the drug smuggler Juan (played by the great Mexican comic actor Alfonso Arau, who would go on to direct films like Zapata: The Dream of a Hero, Like Water for Chocolate, and A Walk in the Clouds). I can also assure you that Alan Silvestri's sax-heavy, drum-machine-driven score seemed just as cheesy in 1984 as it does today. The soundtrack was actually a temp score Zemeckis had commissioned from the then-untried composer that he liked well enough to keep, launching Silvestri's career and marking the start of the decades-long collaboration. I've never been a big fan of Silvestri; even his iconic Back to the Future score has always felt overwrought to me, but there is one cue late in this film that I really love, and you come away from the picture with such a good feeling that you can't help humming its smooth jazz score.

Romancing the Stone is a terrific little movie that—despite its success necessitating a terrible, hastily written sequel that everyone involved tried to get out of—stands on its own as an example of what made mid-80s mainstream studio pictures so much fun. There is zero pretension to this movie. It unapologetically capitalizes on tropes and styles from Hollywood's golden age without simply copying them—all while reminding viewers that at least 50% of the films made in the '30s, '40s, and '50s were aimed squarely at women. But, most of all, the picture is memorable for its stars. Turner and Douglas are just so much fun to go on an adventure with. They both look and act like relatable people, not the impossibly jacked and sculpted movie stars of today. And their playful approach to the material never feels self-conscious or winky. The cinematography by the great Dean Cundy is warm and inviting, and the picture's overall vibe is relaxed and pleasurable. It's a gem.