‘Romancing the Stone’ & Its Screenwriter’s Tragic Tale
by Bob Mehr (NY Times) 3/29/2024
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Diane Thomas was a waitress when she made headlines for the script sale of what would become a box office smash. But the Cinderella story had a sad ending.
Each day, before her waitressing shift began, Diane Thomas would plop herself onto the floor of her tiny Malibu studio apartment, in front of a low-slung desk, and begin typing. Throughout late 1978 and early 1979, she worked daily, hours on end, conjuring the tale of Joan Chase, a mousy romance novelist suddenly thrust into a life-or-death adventure.
“I wanted to write about a woman who became her own heroine,” Thomas would offer of her inspiration. “The notion that we can be whatever we imagine ourselves to be interested me.”
Forty years ago, Thomas’s story, “Romancing the Stone” — and its heroine, renamed Joan Wilder — reached big screens, becoming one of the top box office hits of 1984 and an enduring classic, owing to a perfectly measured blend of action, comedy and romance. “It’s still the most well-rounded script I’ve ever read,” Michael Douglas, the film’s producer and co-star, said in an interview. “In many ways, it was a reflection of Diane — she wasn’t quite as shy as Joan Wilder, but she poured a lot of herself into this story of a writer who experiences a metamorphosis.”
During a golden era of action-adventure pictures, the novice Thomas turned the genre on its head. “A woman being the impetus for that kind of movie hadn’t been done, certainly not in that way,” said Kathleen Turner, who played Wilder. “I mean, the girls in those types of movies were just that — they were always sidekicks or scenery.”
Thomas’s friends, like her fellow writer Betty Spence, said the sweep of the story — which moved from the posh Upper West Side of Manhattan to the raw jungles of South America — was the product of a fertile imagination. “Diane was a pure storyteller,” Spence said. “She could sit there and spin a tale out of nothing, and it would have a perfect beginning, middle and end.”
When Thomas sold her script in the summer of 1979, she went from minimum-wage worker to one of the highest-paid screenwriters in Hollywood. It was the start of a meteoric career that would include a pair of major movie hits and multiple projects with Steven Spielberg. Yet “Romancing the Stone” would be the only film to ever bear a Thomas writing credit because her life was tragically cut short.
At the height of her success, in late 1985, Thomas, just 39, was killed in a car accident. As Spence would note later, Thomas “strove to make her life the stuff of fantasy” — and, for a little while, anyway, she succeeded.
LONG BEFORE DIANE THOMAS became part of Hollywood’s dream factory, her life had been shaped by it. Born in 1946 in northern Michigan, she attended the University of Southern California business school and worked for years in advertising. “That came out of the Doris Day-Rock Hudson movies,” Thomas once told a journalist, “where advertising was always this glamorous profession.”
She eventually tired of writing ad copy. She went on to study with the Actors Studio sage Jack Garfein, write short sketches, perform with an improv troupe, attend grad school for clinical psychology and work at a halfway house. “What made Diane such an interesting writer,” Douglas said, “was that she’d done a lot of different things before she ever got to the movies.”
In her mid-30s, Thomas finally decided to channel her storytelling instincts into screenwriting. To pay the rent, she began waitressing at the Corral Beach Cantina, a Mexican cafe on Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu, while she developed “Romancing the Stone.”
She’d gleaned the title — a bit of jewelry industry jargon referring to the mythmaking surrounding precious gems — from an old boyfriend, but the premise was all hers: Joan, a romance writer is shaken out of her staid world after her sister is kidnapped in Colombia. She sets out to save her sibling while pursing the film’s titular stone, dodging a small army of villains, finding both herself and romance with a charming rogue, Jack Colton. “The best part for her was conjuring that character,” Spence said, “coming up with the man of her dreams.”
The screenwriter John Hill, a friend of Thomas’s, read her script and called his agent, Norman Kurland, raving about it. In a long career, Kurland had read thousands of spec scripts. “But Diane’s was unique,” he said, and he agreed to represent her. “Actually, I had one other experience that was similar, and that was a script sent to me by an ad copywriter from the Midwest, who turned out to be Larry Kasdan. And it was the screenplay for ‘The Bodyguard.’”
In August 1979, Kurland was about to shop the script when Sherry Lansing, an executive at Columbia Pictures, suggested he funnel the project to Douglas, who’d just brought his production company to the studio. Douglas had given up a successful TV career (as co-star of “The Streets of San Francisco”) to produce films, winning a best-picture Oscar for “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” and earning accolades for the political drama “The China Syndrome.”
Douglas was searching for a different kind of project, and was wowed by “Romancing” and the bravura of its first-time author. Thomas “was not cautious,” Douglas said at the time. “Unlike so many screenplays by people who have had material rejected, there was a total lack of fear to the writing.” He persuaded the Columbia studio head Frank Price to pre-empt the sales process and buy the script outright for a hefty $250,000 (roughly $1.1 million today). “People criticized me for paying so much for a first-time screenwriter,” Douglas said in an interview. “My feeling was, first time or 10th time, the script is the script, and hers was wonderful.”
Still, The Los Angeles Times noted that she had become “something of a symbol to the legion of would-be writers” waiting for their big breaks. Suddenly everyone in Hollywood was inundated with scripts from amateur writers who all thought they were the next Diane Thomas. Among the many inquiries Kurland received was a call from another service-industry worker with a screenplay. “Get it over here right away,” he told her, “this is my week for waitresses.” The script wasn’t any good. “Which just goes to show,” Kurland said, “how unusual Diane and ‘Romancing the Stone’ were.”
THE SALE HAD BEEN EASY, but bringing “Romancing the Stone” to the screen would prove to be a challenge. Douglas struggled to get the film off the ground for years while Thomas — along with other writers — continued to refine her script. (She would also contribute to another Douglas project, “Starman.”) Further complicating his effort was the 1981 release of a vaguely similar treasure-hunting adventure, “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” (“Romancing” would later occasionally be dismissed as a “Raiders” ripoff, even though Thomas had written her script years before.)
In 1983, “Romancing the Stone” fell apart at Columbia, but Douglas managed to revive the project at Fox, tapping Robert Zemeckis to direct. Zemeckis’s only credits were a pair of comedies that had underperformed, “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” and “Used Cars.” But, Douglas said, “I thought he would be a great match for the tone that Diane had set, given the tongue-in-cheek thing that Bob did so well.”
For the principal role of Joan Wilder, the studio suggested the up-and-comer Kathleen Turner, who’d made a memorable debut as the femme fatale in “Body Heat” (1981). Turner met with Thomas, who thought she was right for the part, but the actress still had to persuade Douglas and Zemeckis. “There was a question of whether I could play this wilting wallflower of a woman,” Turner said in an interview. “So I put on some sloppy old clothes, went in and stumbled around during the test, and that seemed to reassure them.”
After offering the Colton role to his friend Jack Nicholson, who passed, Douglas got further rejections from Burt Reynolds and Clint Eastwood — largely because the part was secondary to that of Wilder. Out of options, Douglas cast himself. “After all the better-known actors had turned us down, Fox was open to me doing it,” he recalled.
The cast — which included Douglas’s old pal, Danny DeVito, as a comic baddie — set out for Mexico in the summer of 1983 for an arduous shoot, plagued by apocalyptically bad weather and production mishaps. Rumors from the set were so bad that Zemeckis was fired from his next project, “Cocoon,” because that film’s producers were convinced that “Romancing the Stone” would bomb. (Ron Howard eventually directed “Cocoon,” which became a 1985 hit.) “We weren’t even sure we were going to be allowed to finish the film, honestly,” Turner said. After some last-minute reshoots the film wrapped that fall.
Expectations were decidedly low when “Romancing the Stone” arrived in theaters in the spring of 1984, but the picture would become the surprise hit of the season, earning $115 million on a budget of just $10 million and going on to become a Top 10 release in a year filled with iconic blockbusters (“Ghostbusters,” “Beverly Hills Cop”).
The unexpected success elevated the careers of everyone involved. Thomas was immediately tapped by Steven Spielberg to adapt Jeno Rejto’s 1939 novel, “The Blonde Hurricane,” and to script a remake of the 1943 fantasy “A Guy Named Joe.” (That remake was eventually released in 1989 as “Always,” with several writers listed in the credits, but not Thomas.). Thomas also found herself being courted by top directors like George Lucas and Sydney Pollack. “She was a hot writer,” Douglas said, “and I was very happy for her.”
Thomas was so in demand that she was unavailable when Fox prodded Douglas to turn out a quick sequel to “Romancing the Stone.” Instead, he hired Mark Rosenthal and Lawrence Konner to pen the follow-up, “The Jewel of the Nile,” but Turner balked at their story. “They’d turned Joan into a figurehead,” she said, refusing to take part, and was promptly slapped with a $25 million breach of contract suit by Fox.
Douglas hired another team, Ken Levine and David Isaacs, to rewrite the script, but the story’s opening act still needed work. Thomas agreed to spend a long weekend with the new writers, helping strengthen the first 30 pages of the screenplay. “She’d created those characters and had an incredible feel for them,” Levine said, “which made it very easy to do the work.” (He added that much of what he and Isaacs wrote ended up getting thrown out during the film’s chaotic shoot in Morocco, though Thomas’s contributions remained intact.)
As a thank you for her time, Douglas offered to buy Thomas a new car. Spence urged Thomas to pick something practical, a Mercedes sedan — but she opted for a Porsche Carrera instead. “The last time I saw Diane,” Douglas said, “was when I took her out to the parking lot to show her the Porsche.”
That fall, Thomas was dating a young actor named Stephen Norman. On Oct. 21, 1985, Thomas, Norman and another friend, Ian Young, attended an evening writing workshop at Pepperdine University, then stopped off at a bar. Afterward, Norman got behind the wheel of Thomas’s Porsche and headed down Pacific Coast Highway. On a rain- slicked stretch near Topanga Canyon, the car spun out of control when Norman misjudged the accelerating power of the Porsche, striking a wooden power pole at 80 mph, and shearing it at the base. Norman survived with only minor injuries. Young was airlifted to U.C.L.A. Medical Center and died a short time later. Thomas, who had been in the back seat, was pronounced dead at the scene. Although Norman was not legally drunk, he was cited for gross negligence and was later convicted of manslaughter in the deaths of Thomas and Young, receiving five years’ probation. (Norman did not respond to requests for an interview.)
Thomas didn’t live to see the release of “Jewel of the Nile” a few weeks later. The sequel would become another hit, grossing nearly $100 million worldwide, though critics would note that the screenplay lacked the inventive spark Thomas had brought to the original.
In the wake of her death, Spielberg established a memorial writing award in Thomas’s honor at the University of California, Los Angeles, but “Romancing the Stone” would become her legacy. Over the years, another sequel, a remake and TV adaptation have all been discussed but never materialized. Meanwhile, several recent movies like “The Lost City,” “Argylle,” even “Wonder Woman,” have attempted to copy the premise of “Romancing” and recreate its alchemy with varying results. “When you try and imitate something, it’s never going to be as enticing as the original,” Turner said. “Diane broke ground with that film.”
Four decades on, the pain of Thomas’s passing lingers with Douglas. “Her death is still one of the biggest losses of my life,” he said. “Diane was a lovely woman and a great writer, who would’ve gone onto a wonderful, magical career. She would have been right up there with the best.”
by Bob Mehr (NY Times) 3/29/2024
Diane Thomas was a waitress when she made headlines for the script sale of what would become a box office smash. But the Cinderella story had a sad ending.
Each day, before her waitressing shift began, Diane Thomas would plop herself onto the floor of her tiny Malibu studio apartment, in front of a low-slung desk, and begin typing. Throughout late 1978 and early 1979, she worked daily, hours on end, conjuring the tale of Joan Chase, a mousy romance novelist suddenly thrust into a life-or-death adventure.
“I wanted to write about a woman who became her own heroine,” Thomas would offer of her inspiration. “The notion that we can be whatever we imagine ourselves to be interested me.”
Forty years ago, Thomas’s story, “Romancing the Stone” — and its heroine, renamed Joan Wilder — reached big screens, becoming one of the top box office hits of 1984 and an enduring classic, owing to a perfectly measured blend of action, comedy and romance. “It’s still the most well-rounded script I’ve ever read,” Michael Douglas, the film’s producer and co-star, said in an interview. “In many ways, it was a reflection of Diane — she wasn’t quite as shy as Joan Wilder, but she poured a lot of herself into this story of a writer who experiences a metamorphosis.”
During a golden era of action-adventure pictures, the novice Thomas turned the genre on its head. “A woman being the impetus for that kind of movie hadn’t been done, certainly not in that way,” said Kathleen Turner, who played Wilder. “I mean, the girls in those types of movies were just that — they were always sidekicks or scenery.”
Thomas’s friends, like her fellow writer Betty Spence, said the sweep of the story — which moved from the posh Upper West Side of Manhattan to the raw jungles of South America — was the product of a fertile imagination. “Diane was a pure storyteller,” Spence said. “She could sit there and spin a tale out of nothing, and it would have a perfect beginning, middle and end.”
When Thomas sold her script in the summer of 1979, she went from minimum-wage worker to one of the highest-paid screenwriters in Hollywood. It was the start of a meteoric career that would include a pair of major movie hits and multiple projects with Steven Spielberg. Yet “Romancing the Stone” would be the only film to ever bear a Thomas writing credit because her life was tragically cut short.
At the height of her success, in late 1985, Thomas, just 39, was killed in a car accident. As Spence would note later, Thomas “strove to make her life the stuff of fantasy” — and, for a little while, anyway, she succeeded.
LONG BEFORE DIANE THOMAS became part of Hollywood’s dream factory, her life had been shaped by it. Born in 1946 in northern Michigan, she attended the University of Southern California business school and worked for years in advertising. “That came out of the Doris Day-Rock Hudson movies,” Thomas once told a journalist, “where advertising was always this glamorous profession.”
She eventually tired of writing ad copy. She went on to study with the Actors Studio sage Jack Garfein, write short sketches, perform with an improv troupe, attend grad school for clinical psychology and work at a halfway house. “What made Diane such an interesting writer,” Douglas said, “was that she’d done a lot of different things before she ever got to the movies.”
In her mid-30s, Thomas finally decided to channel her storytelling instincts into screenwriting. To pay the rent, she began waitressing at the Corral Beach Cantina, a Mexican cafe on Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu, while she developed “Romancing the Stone.”
She’d gleaned the title — a bit of jewelry industry jargon referring to the mythmaking surrounding precious gems — from an old boyfriend, but the premise was all hers: Joan, a romance writer is shaken out of her staid world after her sister is kidnapped in Colombia. She sets out to save her sibling while pursing the film’s titular stone, dodging a small army of villains, finding both herself and romance with a charming rogue, Jack Colton. “The best part for her was conjuring that character,” Spence said, “coming up with the man of her dreams.”
The screenwriter John Hill, a friend of Thomas’s, read her script and called his agent, Norman Kurland, raving about it. In a long career, Kurland had read thousands of spec scripts. “But Diane’s was unique,” he said, and he agreed to represent her. “Actually, I had one other experience that was similar, and that was a script sent to me by an ad copywriter from the Midwest, who turned out to be Larry Kasdan. And it was the screenplay for ‘The Bodyguard.’”
In August 1979, Kurland was about to shop the script when Sherry Lansing, an executive at Columbia Pictures, suggested he funnel the project to Douglas, who’d just brought his production company to the studio. Douglas had given up a successful TV career (as co-star of “The Streets of San Francisco”) to produce films, winning a best-picture Oscar for “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” and earning accolades for the political drama “The China Syndrome.”
Douglas was searching for a different kind of project, and was wowed by “Romancing” and the bravura of its first-time author. Thomas “was not cautious,” Douglas said at the time. “Unlike so many screenplays by people who have had material rejected, there was a total lack of fear to the writing.” He persuaded the Columbia studio head Frank Price to pre-empt the sales process and buy the script outright for a hefty $250,000 (roughly $1.1 million today). “People criticized me for paying so much for a first-time screenwriter,” Douglas said in an interview. “My feeling was, first time or 10th time, the script is the script, and hers was wonderful.”
Still, The Los Angeles Times noted that she had become “something of a symbol to the legion of would-be writers” waiting for their big breaks. Suddenly everyone in Hollywood was inundated with scripts from amateur writers who all thought they were the next Diane Thomas. Among the many inquiries Kurland received was a call from another service-industry worker with a screenplay. “Get it over here right away,” he told her, “this is my week for waitresses.” The script wasn’t any good. “Which just goes to show,” Kurland said, “how unusual Diane and ‘Romancing the Stone’ were.”
THE SALE HAD BEEN EASY, but bringing “Romancing the Stone” to the screen would prove to be a challenge. Douglas struggled to get the film off the ground for years while Thomas — along with other writers — continued to refine her script. (She would also contribute to another Douglas project, “Starman.”) Further complicating his effort was the 1981 release of a vaguely similar treasure-hunting adventure, “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” (“Romancing” would later occasionally be dismissed as a “Raiders” ripoff, even though Thomas had written her script years before.)
In 1983, “Romancing the Stone” fell apart at Columbia, but Douglas managed to revive the project at Fox, tapping Robert Zemeckis to direct. Zemeckis’s only credits were a pair of comedies that had underperformed, “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” and “Used Cars.” But, Douglas said, “I thought he would be a great match for the tone that Diane had set, given the tongue-in-cheek thing that Bob did so well.”
For the principal role of Joan Wilder, the studio suggested the up-and-comer Kathleen Turner, who’d made a memorable debut as the femme fatale in “Body Heat” (1981). Turner met with Thomas, who thought she was right for the part, but the actress still had to persuade Douglas and Zemeckis. “There was a question of whether I could play this wilting wallflower of a woman,” Turner said in an interview. “So I put on some sloppy old clothes, went in and stumbled around during the test, and that seemed to reassure them.”
After offering the Colton role to his friend Jack Nicholson, who passed, Douglas got further rejections from Burt Reynolds and Clint Eastwood — largely because the part was secondary to that of Wilder. Out of options, Douglas cast himself. “After all the better-known actors had turned us down, Fox was open to me doing it,” he recalled.
The cast — which included Douglas’s old pal, Danny DeVito, as a comic baddie — set out for Mexico in the summer of 1983 for an arduous shoot, plagued by apocalyptically bad weather and production mishaps. Rumors from the set were so bad that Zemeckis was fired from his next project, “Cocoon,” because that film’s producers were convinced that “Romancing the Stone” would bomb. (Ron Howard eventually directed “Cocoon,” which became a 1985 hit.) “We weren’t even sure we were going to be allowed to finish the film, honestly,” Turner said. After some last-minute reshoots the film wrapped that fall.
Expectations were decidedly low when “Romancing the Stone” arrived in theaters in the spring of 1984, but the picture would become the surprise hit of the season, earning $115 million on a budget of just $10 million and going on to become a Top 10 release in a year filled with iconic blockbusters (“Ghostbusters,” “Beverly Hills Cop”).
The unexpected success elevated the careers of everyone involved. Thomas was immediately tapped by Steven Spielberg to adapt Jeno Rejto’s 1939 novel, “The Blonde Hurricane,” and to script a remake of the 1943 fantasy “A Guy Named Joe.” (That remake was eventually released in 1989 as “Always,” with several writers listed in the credits, but not Thomas.). Thomas also found herself being courted by top directors like George Lucas and Sydney Pollack. “She was a hot writer,” Douglas said, “and I was very happy for her.”
Thomas was so in demand that she was unavailable when Fox prodded Douglas to turn out a quick sequel to “Romancing the Stone.” Instead, he hired Mark Rosenthal and Lawrence Konner to pen the follow-up, “The Jewel of the Nile,” but Turner balked at their story. “They’d turned Joan into a figurehead,” she said, refusing to take part, and was promptly slapped with a $25 million breach of contract suit by Fox.
Douglas hired another team, Ken Levine and David Isaacs, to rewrite the script, but the story’s opening act still needed work. Thomas agreed to spend a long weekend with the new writers, helping strengthen the first 30 pages of the screenplay. “She’d created those characters and had an incredible feel for them,” Levine said, “which made it very easy to do the work.” (He added that much of what he and Isaacs wrote ended up getting thrown out during the film’s chaotic shoot in Morocco, though Thomas’s contributions remained intact.)
As a thank you for her time, Douglas offered to buy Thomas a new car. Spence urged Thomas to pick something practical, a Mercedes sedan — but she opted for a Porsche Carrera instead. “The last time I saw Diane,” Douglas said, “was when I took her out to the parking lot to show her the Porsche.”
That fall, Thomas was dating a young actor named Stephen Norman. On Oct. 21, 1985, Thomas, Norman and another friend, Ian Young, attended an evening writing workshop at Pepperdine University, then stopped off at a bar. Afterward, Norman got behind the wheel of Thomas’s Porsche and headed down Pacific Coast Highway. On a rain- slicked stretch near Topanga Canyon, the car spun out of control when Norman misjudged the accelerating power of the Porsche, striking a wooden power pole at 80 mph, and shearing it at the base. Norman survived with only minor injuries. Young was airlifted to U.C.L.A. Medical Center and died a short time later. Thomas, who had been in the back seat, was pronounced dead at the scene. Although Norman was not legally drunk, he was cited for gross negligence and was later convicted of manslaughter in the deaths of Thomas and Young, receiving five years’ probation. (Norman did not respond to requests for an interview.)
Thomas didn’t live to see the release of “Jewel of the Nile” a few weeks later. The sequel would become another hit, grossing nearly $100 million worldwide, though critics would note that the screenplay lacked the inventive spark Thomas had brought to the original.
In the wake of her death, Spielberg established a memorial writing award in Thomas’s honor at the University of California, Los Angeles, but “Romancing the Stone” would become her legacy. Over the years, another sequel, a remake and TV adaptation have all been discussed but never materialized. Meanwhile, several recent movies like “The Lost City,” “Argylle,” even “Wonder Woman,” have attempted to copy the premise of “Romancing” and recreate its alchemy with varying results. “When you try and imitate something, it’s never going to be as enticing as the original,” Turner said. “Diane broke ground with that film.”
Four decades on, the pain of Thomas’s passing lingers with Douglas. “Her death is still one of the biggest losses of my life,” he said. “Diane was a lovely woman and a great writer, who would’ve gone onto a wonderful, magical career. She would have been right up there with the best.”
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