CHAPTER 11 CHAPTER 11Romancing’s script included mudslides, problem alligators, multiple stitches for cast and crew. But it had a wonderful virginal quality. After China Syndrome I’d O.D.’d on grimness. The only way I find a project is if I fall in love. And like when you fall in love with a woman, you wake up at night thinking about it.
—MICHAEL DOUGLAS
IT WAS LATE 1982. MICHAEL WAS FAST APPROACHING thirty-nine and, despite the Oscar and acclaim he had won in the seventies, he was feeling very much a failure. Nearly a decade had slipped by following the success of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and The China Syndrome, the latter’s box office was helped immensely by a freakish real-life nuclear disaster. For the longest time Michael found himself without a project to produce, and now having been given a green light at Fox he put himself on a fast track to get Romancing the Stone made, and, in behavior reminiscent of his father’s when Michael himself was a young child, he had very little time left for playing daddy.
Diandra was not pleased with Michael’s decision to move back to L.A. full-time and resume his film career, leaving her holding the baby. It wasn’t just Michael’s obsession with the film that bothered her. She found the entire film industry personally distasteful. She would never feel at ease in the role of the good Hollywood wife. After six years of marriage, during which time Michael had not spent any significant amount of time at home, she asked him for a legal separation.
She did it almost as a formality, which was even more unsettling to Michael. She spent virtually all of her time in Santa Barbara, she pointed out, while Michael remained at his office in Hollywood. Their marriage had come to a crossroads, and she had taken the first step to end it.
Diandra made her decision after Romancing the Stone was picked up by Fox. She knew it meant Michael would be away from her for long stretches of time, on location and in pre- and postproduction. She no longer could keep pretending they had any kind of real, i.e., traditional, marriage, which was the only kind she had bargained for.
There was nothing Michael could do about Diandra’s decision to legally separate, even if he had wanted to, which he wasn’t sure he did. By now, whatever heat was in their relationship had long cooled. In truth, Michael was not that upset. Although he would miss five-year-old Cameron, Diandra had assured him he could visit the boy whenever he wanted to. She had no desire to deprive her son of a father, nor her husband of his son. Nor did she want to get divorced. She was as reluctant to take that final step as Michael was. For Diandra, remaining married, even if separated, had to do at least in part with her awareness of her social standing. For Michael, it was more a question of passivity.
SHERRY LANSING’S DEAL with Michael and his new partner at Bigstick, Jack Brodsky, came with a proviso that they make Romancing the Stone for under $10 million, modest for an action film shot on location. Michael had no problem with the budget; he knew he could both produce and act in this film with relative ease, because Joan Wilder was the leading role, the bigger part, the true heroine of the story.
To direct, as he had with Cuckoo’s Nest and China Syndrome, Michael wanted someone relatively unknown who would take a relatively small salary to help keep the film within its budget. Thomas’s script was fresh and original, and Michael wanted a director who also was fresh and original.
After considering several candidates, he settled on thirty-three-year-old Robert Zemeckis. If Zemeckis’s résumé was notable, it was also notably thin, but there were things about him that Michael liked. For one thing, he had been among the early students at USC’s burgeoning film school. What was different about USC from other film schools, particularly those back east, was that these students’ heroes weren’t Truffaut, Godard, Rohmer, or Chabrol, the heart of the French New Wave that had led 1970s film students to Andrew Sarris’s theory of auteurism. To most West Coast film schoolers, auteurism was already passé, as were the current crop of directors who fancied themselves auteurs, including Martin Scorsese, Francis Coppola, and Brian De Palma. Instead, these film schoolers’ heroes were Walt Disney, Clint Eastwood, and Sean Connery (as James Bond), and they sought to emulate their films. They had no artistic rage or fear or guilt about making popular commercial films. The studios weren’t their enemies, they were their banks. They longed to swim in the waters of the mainstream, and that was exactly the type of director Michael was looking for. Romancing had no message; it was simply meant to be a good time at the movies and make a lot of money.
Early in his career, Zemeckis become friendly with Steven Spielberg, who soon became his mentor and executive-produced Zemeckis’s first two features.1 The financial failure of those films made it more difficult for Zemeckis to find work away from Spielberg because they had become so closely linked. And Spielberg had just laid a colossal bomb of his own, 1941 (1979), also written by Zemeckis with a friend from film school, Bob Gale, and John Milius. The disastrous 1941 made any further collaborations between Zemeckis and Spielberg, at least for the moment, out of the question.
Although Zemeckis continued to write scripts, including one about a boy who manages to travel across in time in a DeLorean car, he could not generate any interest from the studios. He directed no more films until 1983, when Michael decided to take a chance on him for Romancing the Stone. After screening his earlier work, Michael was convinced Zemeckis could handle it. As Michael later recalled of the director, “At twenty-eight his career was over. At twenty-three [sic] his career was back, thanks to Romancing the Stone.” (When he began the film in 1983, Zemeckis, born in 1951, was thirty-two years old.)
Everything was now in place except one last and crucial element—the casting of Joan Wilder. Word was that Michael had settled on Debra Winger, who had become hot after her turn in Taylor Hackford’s 1982 smash An Officer and a Gentleman, which had earned her a nomination for an Academy Award for Best Actress (she lost to Meryl Streep for her performance in Alan J. Pakula’s Sophie’s Choice) and even hotter after James L. Brooks’s 1983 Terms of Endearment, a tour de force for Shirley MacLaine and Jack Nicholson that was all but stolen by Winger, who was again nominated for an Academy Award, this time for Best Actress (and who lost again, this time to Julie Andrews in Blake Edwards’s Victor Victoria). Michael reportedly wanted Winger badly, but Fox didn’t think she was glamorous enough or physically fit for the part. Fox productions president Joe Wizan suggested instead, but really insisted upon, Kathleen Turner. After spending a few years in TV soap opera limbo, Turner’s film debut as a femme fatale came in 1981’s Body Heat, Lawrence Kasdan’s loose remake of and homage to Billy Wilder’s 1944 dark and exciting Double Indemnity, in which she gave a performance the New York Times called “jaw-dropping.”
Turner got the part.
ROMANCING THE STONE finally went into production on July 5, 1983. The plot centers around Joan Wilder, a writer of romantic novels, whose life turns into one of her own stories when she receives a map from her dead brother-in-law and a phone call from her sister pleading for her to come to Cartagena, Colombia, where she has been kidnapped by a couple of antiquities dealers, played by sleek-headed stand-up comic and actor Zack Norman and Michael’s buddy Danny DeVito. There Joan meets American bird exporter Jack T. Colton (Michael), who reluctantly agrees to help her find her sister for the grand sum of $375.
All of it is silly and goofy, and rightly played that way by Michael and Turner. Their on-screen chemistry elevated the spirited interplay between the physically awkward Joan and the physically superior Colton. The film’s turning point comes when Joan suggests to Colton that they find the treasure themselves, a gigantic emerald, and rescue her sister as well. The picture then shifts into overdrive, and the action becomes nonstop.
Colton fancies himself as something of a ladies’ man, one of the reasons Michael wanted to play him. Here, finally, was a chance to show some of his sex appeal on-screen, cartoonishly set as it may have been.
Zemeckis and Michael’s first choice of location was Colombia, South America, but it was about to start its rainy season, and so they settled instead on Mexico—where it rained for nearly half the ninety days allotted for production. As Michael later recalled, “I remember arriving on location in Mexico and saying to Bob, ‘I don’t remember a river being here. Do you remember a river being here?’ It was a nightmare.” Fox had given Michael his $10 million budget, and there was little room for error. To save money, much of Romancing wound up being shot in Veracruz and Mazatlán.
One of the scenes in the film is a major mudslide. The crew spent almost two weeks filming it. As Michael recalls, “Poor Kathleen’s double was beat to hell and she’d come back crying, ‘I can’t do it again.’ We had about 200 gallons of water that we would dump behind the stunt people into a trough. It would hit them in the back, all 200 gallons, and they would just take off. We had to have cargo nets in place every once in a while so they could grab onto something because they couldn’t do the whole fall—it would kill them, they’d be flying down.”
Kathleen Turner later said of the film’s production, “I remember terrible arguments [with Robert Zemeckis] doing Romancing. He’s a film-school grad, fascinated by cameras and effects. 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. I’d say, ‘This is not helping me! This is not the way I like to work, thank you!’ ”2
Word spread quickly among the crew and cast that Michael and Kathleen were going at it hot and heavy whenever they weren’t on set together. When the rumors hit the press, Michael, who had reverted to his penchant for extramarital escapades but was always careful not to let any of it leak, blew a gasket and took it out on everybody on the set. He shed his nice-guy actor guise and turned into something he had never been before, a tough-guy producer, and because of it everyone gave him a wide berth.
Michael denied the affair and insisted that everything during the making of the film was professional and aboveboard. He told one reporter there to do a story about the making of the film: “Kathleen’s a real trouper. It’s not always easy working with an actor who’s also the producer. Even Bob Zemeckis would sometimes say, ‘I don’t know whether to talk to you as an actor or a producer.’ But Kathleen was great.… [A]s for my part [as Colton], I must say it requires some expertise to dive between a lady’s legs.’ ”
Years later, but before his divorce became final, both Michael and Kathleen confessed to having had the affair. MICHAEL: “Mind you, during the making of the film we were carrying on.”
“When we were doing Romancing the Stone I was unmarried and unattached,” Kathleen said later, “and he told me he was separated. We worked so closely together, and he was just so gorgeous and smart and funny and capable. And I fell for him.”
MICHAEL: “We carried on like bandits, onscreen and off.”
ROMANCING THE STONE opened on March 30, 1984, among the first in an unusually crowded slate of spring and summer films that year that included Neal Israel’s Bachelor Party, with Tom Hanks in his pre-superstar days; Stan Latham’s Beat Street; Willard Huyck’s Best Defense, which starred at the time super-hot Eddie Murphy and Dudley Moore; Hal Needham’s Cannonball Run II; Bruce Bilson’s Chattanooga Choo Choo, with Barbara Eden and George Kennedy; Thomas Chong’s Cheech and Chong’s the Corsican Brothers; Richard Franklin’s Cloak and Dagger, with Henry Thomas and Dabney Coleman; Richard Fleischer’s Conan the Destroyer, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger; Joseph Ruben’s Dreamscape, starring Dennis Quaid; Ivan Reitman’s Ghostbusters; Joe Dante’s Gremlins; John G. Avildsen’s The Karate Kid; Nick Castle’s The Last Starfighter; Barry Levinson’s The Natural, with Robert Redford; Sergio Leone’s Once upon a Time in America; Stuart Rosenberg’s The Pope of Greenwich Village, from the hugely popular novel; Albert Magnoli’s Purple Rain, starring Prince; John Milius’s Red Dawn; Bob Clark’s Rhinestone, starring Sylvester Stallone and Dolly Parton; Leonard Nimoy’s Star Trek III: The Search for Spock; Gene Wilder’s The Woman in Red; and Steven Spielberg’s Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, the much-anticipated sequel to Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Romancing the Stone benefited from an early opening, as some of the monster releases, including the sequel to Raiders and Prince’s surprise hit Purple Rain, wiped out all competitors in the respective weeks they were released. Coming out prior to the Easter holiday, Romancing had relatively little competition and grossed an astonishing $77 million in its initial domestic release, $10 million overseas, and another $37 million in the new venues of video rentals and sales, and went on to become the eighth-highest grosser of the year.3 Michael happily agreed to do an extensive PR tour, showing up everywhere and even doing a stint as guest host on Saturday Night Live despite the fact that the show had two resident stars in the competing summer film Ghostbusters.
Until now, Michael had consciously avoided making the type of films that had turned his father into a superstar, hard-action adventures with healthy doses of romance thrown in for good measure. Even Spartacus had managed to include a love story in between crucifixions. Michael had made his name based primarily on two non-genre (nonaction, nonadventure) films, one that dealt with the subject of legal insanity, the other with the dangers of nuclear power plants. Now Romancing the Stone had not only brought him back to prominence but also put him up there as an actor with the big boys. When reporter Roderick Mann pointed out how much Michael in Romancing resembled his father’s familiar film character—same determined jaw, same piercing eyes, same way of talking—Michael shrugged it off: “I’ve been told that.… [A]nd if it reminds anyone of my dad, that’s fine with me.”
In private, Michael knew Romancing the Stone was no Spartacus, but it didn’t have to be. If audiences loved Romancing, it was good enough for him. Still, everything he did, it seemed, reminded someone of Kirk Douglas—even himself, when eight years into his own marriage, Diandra read about Michael’s reported affair with Kathleen and informed him she was considering filing for divorce.
1 I Wanna Hold Your Hand (1978) and Used Cars (1980). They were both well received by the critics but underperformed at the box office.
2 Despite their difficulties on the film, Zemeckis would go on to work with Turner again, casting her as the voice of Jessica Rabbit in 1988’s Who Framed Roger Rabbit?
3 According to Variety, the top ten films of 1984, according to initial domestic release, were Martin Brest’s Beverly Hills Cop ($235 million), Ivan Reitman’s Ghostbusters ($229 million), Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom ($180 million), Gremlins ($148 million), The Karate Kid ($91 million), Hugh Wilson’s Police Academy ($81 million), Herbert Ross’s Footloose ($80 million), Romancing the Stone ($77 million), Star Trek III: The Search for Spock ($76 million), and Ron Howard’s Splash ($69 million).