by Marc Eliot
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 mil
lion), and Ron Howard’s Splash ($69 million).
CHAPTER 12
My first responsibility is to producing, but I love acting. It’s fun. It’s make-believe. It’s a license to steal. Whether you’re playing dramatic parts which allow you a certain amount of self-analysis, or doing a comedic part. It’s all fun. My seven-year-old son Cameron sees me acting and says, “Gee dad, that’s what I do in the park every day.”
—MICHAEL DOUGLAS
UPON COMPLETING ROMANCING THE STONE, Michael sheepishly returned home to an increasingly unhappy Diandra, who, even as he was preparing for his promotional tour for the film, had decided to give him one last chance in the form of an ultimatum: either they move east, away from Hollywood and all that came with it, or she would make good on her promise and file for divorce.
Her newest demand came as a shock to Michael. He knew that Diandra was not ecstatic about living mostly by herself in Santa Barbara. Even though it is one of the most beautiful places in the country, it was just too laid-back and casual for her tastes and lacking in the culture and high society she felt far more comfortable among. She did not like anything about Hollywood. She thought it was sleazy and that it took Michael away from her for long periods of time, when he surrounded himself with beautiful and available women. She did not like living in the shadow of her husband the superstar while their marriage (and his fidelity) took a backseat.
At first Michael tried to reason with her, patiently explaining that his career was based in Hollywood and therefore he had to be based there, but Diandra didn’t care. He pointed out all the privileges his career had given them, but Diandra wasn’t impressed. She came from money and already had all the privileges she needed.
By the end of the summer of 1984, as Romancing the Stone’s first theatrical run was winding down, Michael told interviewer Jane Ardmore, “To balance my family life and work is really tough. I promised my wife, Diandra, that the minute [the film’s run] is over, I’ll give her and our son, Cameron, all my time. Focus totally. That’s how I do it. I go from one extreme to the other. I’ve been gone seven and a half months [making Romancing the Stone]. Diandra came to visit me several times. This summer, when Cameron finished first grade, she brought him to me in Morocco [where I was scouting sites for the sequel to Romancing the Stone] while she visited her mom in Spain and found us a house in St. Tropez, where we could get a bit of a break together.” And, together with Diandra, he sat for an interview with Michael Gross for the New York Times. “I had to make a living,” Michael told Gross, a way of somewhat disingenuously explaining why he worked so hard. “It was a logistical nightmare.” To which Diandra icily countered, “Being young, I [found] it difficult to grow in an environment where I was always surrounded by people in one profession. It was like being surrounded by dentists for the formative years of your life.”
After that interview was published, Michael agreed to move east on a trial basis, for a minimum of three years.
A YEAR EARLIER, Michael had bought a high-ceilinged four-bedroom apartment in a prewar building on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. It offered twenty-four-hour doorman and butler service and a spectacular view of the park. He had purchased it for Diandra when it first appeared she was going to leave him, primarily so their child would have a comfortable place to live. Now that they were moving into it together, she agreed to let him keep the Santa Barbara house as a West Coast vacation home.
Diandra was reenergized by being back in New York. She immediately organized a fund-raiser for the American Red Cross to help the homeless. Michael, meanwhile, tried to put a happy face on the move, which had raised eyebrows all over Hollywood. To one interviewer, he sounded conciliatory, like a man trying to save his marriage. The move, he insisted, was something they had both decided was best for the family: “She [Diandra] really wasn’t crazy about California.… I enjoyed living in Santa Barbara and Los Angeles, but we came to feel that the business was all-consuming.
“For the gift of life itself and for all our good fortune, you have to make some input into this world, I feel, and my wife feels the same way. We had different political points of view when we married, but over a period of time, those points have sort of congealed. She has very high principles and strong ideals; and she maintains them.”
To another interviewer, Michael laid it on even thicker: “One of the reasons I came back here was I wanted to look into other activities. The film business becomes totally consuming, especially producing. You never get a break, it’s always on your mind. I want to get a break.… I want to kind of get back to basics and have some roots again. I need to have a little more fun taking care of business more. It seemed like an appropriate time for everybody. My son was asking for a punk haircut because everyone in his pre-school class had one. My wife is European and has a lot of friends back here. So [the move is] for all of us.”
In addition to reluctantly letting go of his Ferrari, Michael had to give away his favorite pet, Sangral, a two-year-old serval—an African feline with a body like a cheetah and spots like a leopard. He often jokingly referred to Sangral as the best personal assistant he’d ever had. The animal was really too big for the house in Santa Barbara, and out of the question for an apartment in New York City. He turned the cat over to the Charles Paddock Zoo in Atascadero, California, along with $2,000 to build her a proper cage.
Saving his marriage was important to Michael. He had already been traumatized by one divorce—his parents’—and didn’t want to go through anything like that again, even if it meant giving up everything he’d worked for in L.A. At least he would be physically close to his mother, whom he had rarely seen while he lived on the West Coast.
No sooner had they arrived in Manhattan than Michael became involved with two new film projects. After Romancing the Stone he was white-hot as both actor and producer and wanted to stay hot. He knew firsthand how easy it was for a career to cool off: nobody calls you anymore or takes your calls, no one gets up from their table at a restaurant to come over and shake your hand, no new scripts arrive by messenger to your office or home.
The first was strictly an acting job, playing Zach, the director, in the screen production of the fabulously successful stage musical A Chorus Line. The second was The Jewel of the Nile, the sequel to Romancing the Stone.
A Chorus Line was stage director and choreographer Michael Bennett’s semi-autobiographical performance piece about the individual lives of the auditioning hopefuls for a Broadway musical’s chorus line. The power of the presentation lay in their stories, metaphors for everyone’s hopes, fears, and dreams. Its bare-stage, no-name production had begun as a workshop at the Nickolaus Exercise Center and eventually moved to the Public Theater, where it was directed by Bennett with a book by James Kirkwood and Nicholas Dante and a score by Marvin Hamlisch. It debuted on Broadway in 1975 and became, for a time, the longest-running musical in the American theater, giving 6,137 performances.1 It won nine Tony Awards and the 1976 Pulitzer Prize for drama.
Bennett’s A Chorus Line takes place on a bare stage, with dancers auditioning for a spot on the chorus line. They present and respond to an unseen director, whose omnipotent voice suggests the voice of God, lifting the show to a whole other level.
Despite its enormous success on Broadway, early on A Chorus Line was deemed untranslatable to the screen (with rare exceptions, Hair being one, most unconventional musicals usually are). In fact, it remained strictly a stage presentation for nine years until Joseph E. Levine’s Embassy Pictures, an independent production house, bought the film rights for $5.5 million and agreed not to release the movie until five years after the current Broadway production closed.2 Embassy then partnered with Columbia and found a producer, Cy Feuer, a notable Broadway director with three Tony Awards under his belt but only two films in his producer credits, David Butler’s Where’s Charley (1952) and Bob Fosse’s Cabaret (1972). His Broadway forte was conventionally structured star-vehicle musicals, including Guys and Dolls and How to Succeed in Business Without
Really Trying, neither of which fit the concept of A Chorus Line.
Film director after film director turned down A Chorus Line, believing, as so many did, that it would not transfer well to the screen. In addition, Feuer wanted to hire unknowns for the chorus line, and that made it an even harder sell. When Richard Attenborough agreed to direct, industry insiders saw it as one more impediment: how, they wondered, could a Brit transfer to the big screen the ultimate New York stage show?
Several name actors turned down the role of the director, Zach, before it finally came to Michael, who jumped at it, despite a crucial and ultimately disastrous script change in veteran screenwriter Arnold Schulman’s adaptation. Looking to open up the stage production, Schulman made the director a visible character. By doing so he took away the original book’s crucial spiritual aspect and thus destroyed the show’s mystical and metaphorical reach, where all its power lay; these kids were auditioning not just for the show of their lives but to show off their lives, the confessional aspect to their songs reaching much higher and deeper than a simple audition. When the director was made accessible, he was reduced in stature, humanized—one might say secularized—and brought down to earth. However one interpreted it, the move diminished the power of the production. Worse, in the film version, the director became something of a lech. Onstage, the show’s biggest showstopper, “What I Did for Love,” was about the character’s love of theater; on film, it became about her relationship with Zach.
Why did Michael take the role and how did he feel about it? It was a New York–based job. To one interviewer, Michael said he’d done it “for the joy of it, without any [producer’s] responsibility.” To another he said the character of Zach “is closer to a prick than what I usually play, a guy insensitive to how other people feel.”
When the production began to have problems and the director asked Michael to help, he put his hands up and graciously backed away, preferring to simply enjoy the horde of half-naked girls parading around the set. As he told yet another interviewer, “And when we fell behind schedule I turned to Attenborough and said, ‘I’m sorry to hear that.’ … I’ve never seen so many leotards in my life. It’s always been nuclear-power plants and medical equipment in the background of my pictures.”
