Behind the Scenes: Romancing the Stone (Zemeckis, 1984) with Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner

My career sort of started with the television series called The Streets of San Francisco. And the transition then for actors from television into feature films was much more difficult. I was looking for something that would be just fun and lighter than the other things that I produced. I thought it had the elements of romance and action and comedy. And I liked the idea of shooting something like in the jungle or down in Mexico. It's tough in the jungle. There have been a few injuries, yes. I think she's had seven stitches so far in the picture. To handle both these jobs, I can't understand how he can do it and keep as sane, as completely concentrated in the acting. I mean, at one moment I can see him handling where we're going tomorrow, there's a problem with the location. And then we're ready to start a scene and he's completely there with me. You form a bond on pictures like that in foreign countries that just doesn't exist in the normal kind of films where you go home every night or you go back to your hotel rooms. I also made you feel like a true war veteran. Once you had been through a couple of those type of pictures, you could take on anything. Nothing fazed you or threatened you. You really felt like you met your maker, you won, and you came out the other side. It was a tremendous experience to have something have this kind of durability. It has just to be a solid story with strong characters that can hold up over the decades. They were a lot of fun and I'm certainly glad I did them early in my career. The thing about Diane Thomas is that her story is very similar to J.K. Rowling. J.K. Rowling was a woman who struggled and no one really believed in her and she sat down in a little cafe in Edinburgh and wrote these Harry Potter stories. And for Diane Thomas it happened the same way. She sat down and wrote this really new kind of script, something that started a whole new genre in Hollywood. There weren't a lot of women writers then, but it was still really hard for a woman to break into the business. And it was in a bidding situation and paid a lot of money for it. And was always accused of, you know, it's ridiculous to pay that much money for a first-time writer. And my take is if it's a first-time writer or it's a tenth screenplay they've written, if it's there, it's priceless. And, you know, she and I became dear friends. Action! And then there was this young director named Robert Zemeckis who'd gone to the USC film school, made two pictures, I Want to Hold Your Hand and Used Cars, which didn't quite work, although they were good at particularly used cars. And at 23 his career was over. And I brought it to him at 28 and he liked it and off we went. I tried to get a number of actors to play the role of Jack Colton, none of whom accepted. And so I then said, all right, well, you know, I'm going to do the role, but I wasn't accepted as an actor. You have to understand this as a producer, yes, but as an actor, no. It's just a guy trying to get out of a television series into feature films. No, no, originally I wasn't even thinking about playing the part. And I've always been pretty much thinking in terms if a production company thinking as a producer and not thinking of parts for me as an actor, which I've come to realize is a mistake because there's so few good parts anyway that you might as well, if you're going to produce, find something for yourself to act in. I don't think I was the first to be considered for the role. But then I did meet with Michael and Bob Zemeckis was directing Romancing the Stone. They wanted to see if I could look dowdy. And so we set up kind of a screen test where I ambled around in sweat clothes and no makeup. Kathleen plays that very well. She plays befuddled very well and she plays confused, but you can see her get tough as well. Michael and Danny have this long history together. Danny DeVito is, you know, my oldest buddy. He and I were roommates together in New York when we first started. We shared the bread. That was cool. And then he went off and did Streets of San Francisco. And I was still out of work in New York, doing like off-Broadway, off-off-Broadway work. And the good thing about that relationship was he still paid half the rent. So it was pretty good. He inherently, you know, is a nice Italian from New Jersey. I'd ask him about it. I'd say, what's going on with that movie? Pardon for me? He says, oh, yeah, it's part of Ralph. It's like a really great part. It's part of Ralph. He says, oh, yeah, well, I'll send you a copy of the script. Ralph peeks around corner. Oh, pops into trunk. So I said, well, you know, look, if he couldn't win me an Academy Award, maybe. But it might get me a little exposure. As it turned out, they rewrote it and changed it up and stuff. He really worked over time in creating his own part and creating that kind of manic energy. He is so funny. He really is. And, of course, he's so little. You know how someone would put their arm around your shoulder? Well, Danny has to put it sort of around your waist. Or he likes to go a little lower. They created three characters that are permanent. You could do movie after movie with them. I think we're kindred spirits in terms of the risk factor. Just a sense of adventure we have. The great idea that Diane Thomas came up with is this is a woman who writes women's romances. And her life becomes one of those women's romances. My character, Joan Wilder, she's not pretentious. She doesn't even have much confidence in the very beginning of the film. And, of course, it grows along with staying alive, basically. What she finds out is that the hero that she kept writing is not the hero that she could control. And it's a hero with rough edges. I ain't cheap, but I can be had. That was all written. He's got a little bit of a con artist in him. And he's a little bit of a scoundrel. And he loves her, but he might have said I love you to lots of women. We seem to suit each other well. We're both good sports, let's say. She was extraordinarily patient and don't know any other actress who could put up with as much tough conditions as we had down there. The first movie was like what a struggle to get made. I mean, the first day I got to work, it was pouring rain. I mean, like pouring rain. Serious pouring rain. I get into a car with a guy. His windshield wipers are going like this. And we just shot one little sequence of us walking. And we had just moved the crew down a little bit. The rain was going when the hillside gave way. We had a huge mudslide that came down. And I was sort of sitting on the makeup man's case. And then the whole side of the mountain started to come down. So I was almost buried. And they pulled me out of there. And I'm saying, please don't pull, please dig. But they just yanked me out, tore all the skin off my left leg. I liked Bob tremendously. I really did. He had a great enthusiasm. And between Michael Douglas and him, there was a sense that we could do anything. Bob Zemeckis is just a very sick young man. Hey, that's not funny. Action! He sees things wonderfully. And I think he has a tremendous sense of the build of the film. Which I tend to lose after a while. It's very hard when you're going very much out of sequence. This is the line on No, I'm Not Crazy. And you're going to have to stay closer together. We decided that. Let's try again. We had a great time doing it. And Michael always makes it really fun to be in the movie. And he kept us always energized and churned up. We all had a ball. Well, hi! Hey, how you doing? When we got washed out by rains half the time up in the mountains of Mexico, we began to call it Douglasland. Where when the road was washed out, first thing you knew we'd have five dump trucks filled with gravel there. Michael would rebuild the road, essentially. We did a fair amount of the stunts, but the mudslide, they had scooped out these troughs down the mountain. And they basically had these about 200 gallons, you know, like five big barrels of water atop. So the stuntmen and woman would get down in the trough, and they would dump this water, and they would take off like, you know, anything ever seen. For us, they put us on a kind of board so that I wasn't just bumping along. And then when we got to the bottom, they had me up on a high ladder, and I had to dive off the ladder and land in the water. But I love that stuff. And of course, we have to thank a good storyboard artist who came up with the famous splash between her legs. There's a scene that's not in the film where I walk through this field of crocodiles. The guy in charge of the crocodiles, I guess, said to me, look, if they start to open their jaws, that's when they're weakest. It's when the jaw is open and starts to come back down, they have the strongest muscle. So if you see them start to stand on their head, I said, oh yeah, sure, I'm doing that, yeah. Well, I remember the first time we had a screening. It was in a theater in Westwood, I think, in L.A. Michael and Danny and I met before. Had a couple margaritas, I think, you know, to prepare ourselves. And we were very nervous, very, very nervous. The measure of the audience's attention isn't always whether they're laughing or not, it's if they hold their breath, you know, and we'd hear all these... I'd say, yeah, we got them. For me, it was like a really big break because the picture was a success. You know, a lot of that was attributed to the combination of the people in it. And I think for Diane, it was, you know, a magical experience of watching what happened with that picture. It was her original dream. And, you know, it's a great gift she gave to everyone. You know, whether it established a new genre, I'm not sure, but it gave Michael and I and Kathleen a real fun time. You really become a war veteran producing movies, you know, countries around the world and dealing with the elements. It's an exciting part, but it's for the young. Diane Thomas, the screenwriter of Romancing the Stone, who was working as a waitress up at Alice's Restaurant up in Malibu in the pier, and was writing this in her spare time. Michael read the script and thought it was breaking new ground. At that time, the idea of doing action, comedy and romance together didn't fit. Diane Thomas found a way to do a classic American comedy, put romance in it, and to give the audience scale. It was a very tough balance to get, and I thought she did a particularly good job in creating that. Every writer in town knew that Diane Thomas had caught this magical tone in a comedy. It wasn't just a romantic comedy, although it had great romantic comedy elements. It wasn't just an action movie, although the action in it was a lot of fun. It was comedic, but it wasn't just stupid and silly. It really was this special tone. With all of the success that we had had on Romancing the Stone, when I came to The Jewel of the Nile, Diane was not available to do the screenplay because Steven Spielberg had hired her to work on a movie called Always. But I got her to help on some scenes and some character stuff. She was incredibly gracious to us when we were working on Jewel of the Nile. I mean, Romancing the Stone was really her baby. And she gave a lot of notes on the script and suggestions of what the characters would do. And as a gift to her, I bought her a Porsche, bought her a new Porsche car. The difficult thing was the last time that I saw Diane was she came over to show me the new car that I got her. And I think it was three weeks later, she got killed in the Porsche. She had a boyfriend at the time. I think he was an ex-stuntman. He was actually driving. But she always kind of liked those kind of Jack Colton characters in real life. And unfortunately, had an accident down on Pacific Coast Highway, and we lost her much too young. She sat down and wrote this really new kind of script, something that started a whole new genre in Hollywood. For years until today, the idea of the big action adventure with that level of comedy and romance is really coming out of Romancing the Stone.