Video Scripts: Race with the Devil, Speed, Romancing the Stone
Sharing videos Cody wrote for JoBlo Originals and JoBlo Horror Originals.
I have been writing news articles and film reviews for ArrowintheHead.com for several years, and for the last couple years I have also been writing scripts for videos that are released through the site's YouTube channel JoBlo Horror Originals. Recently I started writing video scripts for the JoBlo Originals YouTube channel as well. I have previously shared the videos I wrote that covered
Three more videos that I have written the scripts for can be seen below; one was for the JoBlo Horror Originals channel and the other two were written for JoBlo Originals.
For the Best Horror Movie You Never Saw series I wrote about one of my favorites, the 1975 classic Race with the Devil. There was a vowel mix-up on my credit at the end of this video, but I wrote it nonetheless.
Race with the Devil script:
From Rosemary's Baby to The Exorcist and The Omen, the devil was big business at the box office in the 1960s and ‘70s. Also popular at that time were motorcycle movies, most notably the pop culture sensation Easy Rider. That’s how we get the 1975 film Race with the Devil, which very smartly mixes two popular concepts together and puts Easy Rider’s Peter Fonda in a lead role that allows him to both rip around on motorcycles and battle rampaging devil worshipers. Add in some connections to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and you get a drive-in era movie that’s a total blast to watch. Race with the Devil is definitely the best horror movie you never saw.
CREATORS / CAST: Directed by Jack Starrett from a screenplay by Lee Frost and producer Wes Bishop, Race with the Devil stars Peter Fonda and Warren Oates as Roger and Frank, friends who run a successful motorcycle dealership in San Antonio, Texas. When Frank and his wife Alice get a new RV, they decide to break it in by taking Roger and his wife Kelly on a vacation road trip to Aspen, Colorado… but they don’t make it very far before their vacation turns into a hellish nightmare.
The motorhome has all the amenities you could possibly need, which Frank says will allow them to be “self-contained” – a line Quentin Tarantino lifted for From Dusk Till Dawn. When Harvey Keitel’s family says they don’t stay in motels because they’re self-contained in their RV, that’s a nod to Race with the Devil and Frank’s reasoning for not stopping at a park for the night. Instead, he decides they should set up camp at a random spot in the countryside. Which turns out to be a terrible mistake. After a pleasant evening of off-road motorcycling and having too much to drink, Roger and Frank see a bonfire light up nearby. Gathered around this fire are a bunch of figures in robes, some people scampering around naked, and a masked man who is obviously the leader of the pack. At first, Roger and Frank think they’re about to see a bunch of hippies having a fireside orgy… but then it becomes clear that they’re witnessing a Satanic human sacrifice. Unfortunately, the devil worshipers become aware of their presence as soon as the sacrifice is carried out, and they don’t want witnesses.
Our heroes are able to escape from the cultists that night, but this story is just getting started. As the road trip continues, Roger, Frank, Alice, and Kelly keep crossing paths with shady characters they suspect may be involved with the cult. They just can’t be sure. It is certain that members of the cult are following them, as they make their presence known through escalating acts of violence, building up to some great high speed action sequences.
Race with the Devil was the third of three movies Fonda and Oates made together, their previous collaborations being the Western The Hired Hand, which Fonda also directed, and the drama 92 in the Shade, which ended up being released after Race with the Devil. Frank’s wife Alice is played by Loretta Swit, who at the time was just a couple seasons into the eleven years she would spend playing “Hot Lips” Houlihan on the M*A*S*H TV series, while Roger’s wife Kelly is played by Lara Parker, who had recently wrapped up a two hundred and sixty-nine episode run on the supernatural soap opera Dark Shadows.
Jack Starrett and Wes Bishop have acting roles as a couple of the suspicious characters that are encountered, with iconic character actor R.G. Armstrong making a memorable appearance as a sheriff who isn’t particularly helpful. Fans of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre should keep an eye out for a cameo from Paul A. Partain, the legendary Franklin himself, early on in the movie. Arkey Blue, a country band that had some songs on the Chainsaw soundtrack, also shows up on screen in this film, playing their tunes at a bar the characters stop by. “Misty Hours of Daylight”, one of the songs from Chainsaw, is next on their set list when a barroom brawl breaks out. There’s a connection to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 in here as well: when Roger and Frank buy a shotgun for self defense, the gun store owner is James N. Harrell, the same guy who sells chainsaws to Dennis Hopper.
Starrett would claim that he cast real Satanists as the cult members in the film for the sake of authenticity, but that was probably not the case.
BACKGROUND: Screenwriter Lee Frost directed a lot of movies during the drive-in era, most famously the ridiculous 1972 film The Thing with Two Heads, in which the head of a racist white man played by Ray Milland gets grafted onto the body of a black man played by “Rosey” Grier. Frost was originally intended to direct Race with the Devil, and was actually at the helm for the first few days of production. But the film was set up at 20th Century Fox, and when the executives there saw the footage Frost was getting, they were so underwhelmed that they fired him. They were hoping to repeat the success they had with the Peter Fonda movie Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry the previous year... and they no longer had faith that Frost could deliver a movie capable of doing that. So Jack Starrett was hired to take over as director, and executive producer Paul Maslansky was brought in to oversee the filming.
Starrett is best remembered for playing the role of Galt, a cop who gives Rambo a hard time in First Blood and then becomes that film’s one confirmed casualty. But that was just one of more than thirty acting roles he took on over the years, and he had an almost equal amount of directing credits. His work directing the biker movies Run, Angel, Run! and The Losers, as well as the Blaxploitation action movies Slaughter and Cleopatra Jones, had convinced Fox that he was the director to deliver a satisfactory version of Race with the Devil.
Maslansky didn’t think Frost’s footage was as bad as Fox did, but he started mostly from scratch with Starrett – and calmed the studio’s worries about the project by making sure Starrett’s first days were dedicated to gripping action and character moments. Production went smoothly from that point on and Fox let Starrett and Maslansky do their thing without any interference.
Fonda had signed on to do Race with the Devil because he knew that he and Warren Oates would have fun working together on something like this. Aside from the bump in the road that came when the director had to be replaced, that’s exactly how it turned out. Fonda described every day on the set as being a “labor of love”. He said in an interview, “It was an exciting, scary, spooky script and I’d not done that type of film before. I knew that me and Warren would have a good time doing this. We made good paychecks up front and had big percentages in the film. It was a fun shoot. It was like going to camp. We’re gonna go camping with some friends of ours, we’re gonna have a grand time, we get paid, and we’re making a motion picture.”
It’s easy to understand why Fonda would have so much fun working on this. He got to hang out with a good friend of his and drive motorcycles, he brought his own shotgun to set to blast away at Satanic cultists with, and he did some of his own stunts in the action sequences. That sounds like it should rank highly as one of the best experiences he ever had on a movie, and it got even better when Race with the Devil was released and became a solid hit for Fox – which means those percentages that Fonda and Oates had in the film paid off, too.
Despite being a box office success in 1975, the film hasn’t received as much attention as it deserves over the decades since. It seems to have burned bright at the time of its release and then faded away for the most part. There was a special edition DVD release for the thirtieth anniversary, and a few years later it was brought to Blu-ray in a double feature with that other Fox and Fonda car chase money maker, Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry. Those releases did earn the film some new fans, but it still should have a lot more. In 2005, it was announced that Project Greenlight producer Chris Moore would be directing a remake of Race with the Devil, and it might have given the film’s popularity a boost if that new take on the material had gone into production. Instead, it fell apart before filming could begin. While we didn’t get another telling of this exact story, Race with the Devil did serve as a source of inspiration for a couple different films that were released in 2011: Kevin Smith would refer back to it while making his movie Red State, and screenwriter Todd Farmer named it as one of the films that influenced the “Nicolas Cage escapes Hell to destroy a cult” action movie Drive Angry. Smith was quoted as saying, “Race with the Devil is such a favorite movie of mine. When I was a kid it was just such a terrifying notion. It’s where you’re on vacation and you just happen to see some (people) sacrificing a virgin, they kill your dog, and then chase you in your Winnebago. There’s nothing more horrifying than that!”
WHAT MAKES IT GREAT: Race with the Devil is so effective because it hooks you in with its relatability. The four characters at the core of the film are regular people who find themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time, and from the moment they cross paths with the cult it feels like they’re stuck in an impossible situation. You can imagine yourself in the characters’ place, you can feel how scary it would be if you couldn’t trust anyone around you, if it felt like it wasn’t safe anywhere you go. The film also benefits from being a product of its time, before people had cell phones or access to the internet. When the characters need to find out information on cults and human sacrifice in this movie, they have to go to a library… where the librarian may or may not be part of the cult. When they need to call for help, they have to find a public phone that might have been tampered with. Even though they’re traveling the wide open road, there’s a claustrophobic feeling because it seems like the cult has managed to cut them off from the outside world. There’s nothing but danger outside the RV. And occasionally it gets dangerous inside the vehicle, too.
Roger, Frank, Alice, and Kelly aren’t the deepest or best written characters, but you come to care for them because the cult is making things so bad for them, and because of the actors’ performances. The fact that Fonda and Oates actually were good friends comes through in the film, it’s clear that Roger and Frank have been buddies for a long time. Swit does well in her role, and Parker managed to enhance the horror of the movie with her performance. Coming from Dark Shadows, she had the most genre experience going into this project, and she put that familiarity with horror concepts to use. It was already in the script that her character Kelly was the most intuitive of the bunch, that she would be able to tell before any of the others that something was wrong. Parker played that up even more, so that it seems like Kelly has a bit of extrasensory perception at times. She gets an uneasy feeling as soon as she sees the tree the cultists will be gathered around, even though she notices it during the day, long before the cult will get there. She gets that same uneasy feeling at other points in the movie, and Parker has great eyes for all the troubled looks her character has to give. Maslansky admits on the audio commentary that he was concerned Parker was pushing Kelly’s ESP too far during filming, but in the end felt that she found the correct balance – she plays it just right to show that she feels something bad is going to happen, but it’s also obvious that she doesn’t know exactly what the bad things are going to be.
Once the characters witness the human sacrifice and escape the initial confrontation with the cultists, there’s still an hour of the film’s eighty-eight minute running time left, and that hour is a masterpiece of paranoia and building tension. Is the sheriff a cult member? Is the mechanic in on it? What’s up with those weird people at the RV park, or that staring steel guitar player? From time to time, that building tension is released through bursts of terror – like when Kelly’s adorable little dog is found dead, or when the characters realize a couple rattlesnakes have been left inside the RV.
BEST SCENE(S): The rattlesnake sequence is one of the most frightening parts of the movie, especially since it was filmed with real snakes interacting with the cast. The snakes are coiling and striking, and Fonda, Parker, and Oates are shown actually handling them and throwing them around inside the confines of the RV. Swit was no fan of snakes, so she refused to be on set for most of the filming of this sequence, but there are a couple shots where you can see that she did have to participate in some of the live snake moments.
Although we see one of the snakes sinking its fangs into Frank’s pant legs, the actors made it through the filming of the sequence unscathed – and of course the snakes had been milked of their venom anyway. Some viewers may be bothered by the shots that show someone poking at a live snake with a ski pole, and in fact those shots were cut out of the film for the UK DVD release. The snakes couldn’t accomplish anything by biting people, but one did get its revenge by urinating on Fonda’s shirt.
Soon after the rattlesnake attack, we reach the film’s biggest selling point: the extended climactic action sequence, featuring almost 17 minutes straight of vehicular mayhem. The cultists have clearly gotten tired of playing games with the couples and have decided they’re just going to try to take them out while they’re driving down the road. Trucks and cars are smashed and flipped, you get the obligatory explosions, and cult members try to infiltrate the RV while it’s still moving. Which doesn’t work out too well for them. It’s a classic, old school chase and stunt sequence, and it’s a whole lot of fun to watch.
PARTING SHOT: Just like the RV has all the amenities you could want, Race with the Devil has pretty much everything you could want from a movie. It’s a perfect blend of horror and action. If you like movies from the grindhouse days but haven’t seen this one yet, it’s highly recommended you seek it out immediately, whether on Blu-ray, Amazon, iTunes, Vudu… However you can get your eyes on it, it’s worth a look.
In the film, there are cult members everywhere, the characters are surrounded by them at all times. The movie deserves to have a cult following that’s equally as large. We need to pull Race with the Devil out of obscurity and start celebrating it as the all-time classic that it is.
For the non-horror Revisited series, I took a look back at the 1994 action movie Speed, which I watched a whole lot of times back in the day.
Speed script:
It could have been a disaster. A first-time director handling an action movie that was supposed to be exciting while taking place primarily on a bus moving through L.A. traffic. A lead role that had been rejected by most of the biggest stars of the time, whittling the options down to an actor best known for playing a goofball teenager. A prominent supporting cast member who made it clear he thought they were making a piece of crap. The studio didn’t have the highest hopes for this movie… but it turned out to be a major hit when it was released in the summer of 1994, and to this day it’s considered to be one of the best action movies ever made. The movie is Speed, and it’s time for this one to be Revisited.
SET-UP: We really owe the existence of Speed to the fact that writer Graham Yost had been given an inaccurate description of what the 1985 film Runaway Train was about. Yost had heard that the train couldn’t stop because there was a bomb on it – but when he saw the movie, he found that there was no bomb. The train was just out of control because it didn’t have brakes or an engineer. He enjoyed Runaway Train as it was, but that bomb idea stuck with him and he decided to write his own screenplay about a vehicle that couldn’t stop because there was an explosive on board. Instead of a train, he decided to put the bomb on a bus.
The story doesn’t begin on the bus, though. It begins in an office building, where the bomber traps a group of innocent civilians inside an elevator and demands that the city fork over three million dollars. If he doesn’t get paid, he’ll set off more charges that will send the elevator crashing to the ground thirty stories below. Enter our hero, young LAPD SWAT officer Jack Traven, who – with the help of fellow SWAT officer Harry Temple – manages to save the hostages and ruin the ransom plan. Jack is also able to deduce that the bomber has been monitoring the situation from inside the building… and after a confrontation, the bomber appears to blow himself up.
The bomber isn’t really dead at that point, otherwise Speed would have been a short film. He’s still out there, he still wants to receive three million dollars in exchange for some hostages. And now he’s interested in messing with Jack as well. So when he places a bomb on the bottom of a mass transit bus, he calls Jack to let him know about the bomb, tells him exactly which bus it’s on, and tells him how it works: the bomb will be activated once the bus hits the speed of fifty miles per hour, and will detonate if it ever drops below fifty after that. In Yost’s first draft of the script, the speed the bus couldn’t drop below was just twenty miles per hour. A friend advised him to change it, correctly feeling that twenty was too slow for an action movie. Can you imagine watching a movie where we’re supposed to be thrilled by the sight of a large vehicle cruising along at twenty-one miles per hour?
Of course, the bus hits fifty before Jack can warn the driver and passengers. Then the movie becomes all about trying to make sure the bus stays above fifty while driving around a city that is known for its traffic jams. It has to maintain speed long enough for Jack to figure out how to save the people on board – whether that means defusing the bomb or getting the passengers off the vehicle and letting it blow up. Problem is, the bomber is watching, and has said he will detonate the bomb as soon as he sees any attempt to remove the passengers.
Yost managed to sell his script to Paramount at a time when the studio was trying to turn martial artist Jeff Speakman into the next big action star. Speakman had a three picture deal with them that started with The Perfect Weapon in 1991, and for a while it looked like Speed was going to be his second Paramount movie. Not only did that not happen, but Jeff Speakman’s second Paramount movie never came at all. And while the studio liked this “bomb on a bus” script well enough to buy it, they also had an unexpected issue with it: they felt there was too much time spent on the bus. Yost’s story ended when the bus situation was resolved. Paramount didn’t want to ride the bus all the way to the end credits, so they asked Yost to switch things up in the third act – and he wrote a new action sequence set in the subway. This subway sequence still feels kind of tacked on in the finished film, but it’s what Paramount wanted. Even though Paramount didn’t end up making the movie.
Speed actually happened at 20th Century Fox, the studio that picked up the project after Paramount set it aside. This being a Fox production makes a lot of sense, because the film is often referred to as “Die Hard on a bus”, and Fox is the home of the Die Hard franchise. Fox asked Die Hard director John McTiernan to take the helm of this movie, but he turned it down. It ended up being passed over to McTiernan’s Die Hard cinematographer Jan de Bont, who was interested in making his feature directorial debut after almost thirty years in the business. When he first heard that most of the script was set on a bus, he was concerned that it would be boring, but as he read through it he began to see how he could make it work.
Fox received more rejections once they started searching for someone to play Jack Traven. Apparently they offered the role to all the usual action suspects and were turned down. That’s how we end up with Keanu Reeves in the lead role. In the special features on the DVD and Blu-ray releases of the film, there’s a lot of talk that makes it sound like Speed was Reeves’ first experience in the action genre. De Bont says he had to convince him that making an action movie could be fun and coach him to embrace his inner action hero. It’s said that the studio still saw Reeves as “the guy from Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure” and worried that he couldn’t handle action. This is very odd, because Speed was not Reeves’ first action movie. He had already starred in Point Break, which was a big hit for Fox and proved to them that he could handle action three years before this.
Well, if they still didn’t have faith in Reeves when Speed went into production, he certainly went on to prove himself all over again. Sporting some added muscle and a haircut so short that it was another thing to cause the studio anxiety, Reeves gives a terrific action hero performance in the film. De Bont also surrounded him with an awesome supporting cast, from Jeff Daniels as Harry Temple and Joe Morton as their superior Lieutenant Mac to Alan Ruck, Beth Grant, Carlos Carrasco, and Hawthorne James as people on the bus. After Halle Berry, Ellen DeGeneres, and a long list of others were considered, Sandra Bullock was cast in the role of Annie Porter, the bus passenger who ends up having to drive the bus and becomes Jack’s love interest along the way. Bullock was a rising star at the time, having just worked with Sylvester Stallone on Demolition Man, and this movie boosted her career to a whole new level. Glenn Plummer has a fun role as the guy who helps Jack catch up to the bus – and then we have the villain.
Yost originally planned for Speed to have a shocking twist where we would find out that the bomber was just the sidekick to the real bad guy: Jack’s own friend Harry. The role of Harry was offered to the likes of Ed Harris and Randy Quaid when this idea was in play, but before filming began the studio said they only wanted there to be one bad guy from beginning to end. So Harry got to remain a noble character throughout and Dennis Hopper was cast as the bomb-making madman Howard Payne – perfect casting that allowed Hopper to play unhinged in his own wonderfully unique way.
REVIEW: Speed seems to be one of the occasions where the deluge of studio notes actually helped improve the movie, for the most part. They had a solid script in place as the project headed into production, and a then-virtually-unknown Joss Whedon was brought in to punch up the dialogue and do some character tweaks that were also beneficial. Jan de Bont then proceeded to show that working as cinematographer on movies directed by action masters like John McTiernan and Richard Donner had trained him to be a hell of an action director himself.
Fitting its title, Speed moves fast. That opening elevator sequence gets your blood pumping right away, and de Bont makes sure there aren’t many quieter scenes to bring your excitement level down as the film goes on. Within seven minutes of the elevator sequence ending, there has already been another explosion and Howard Payne is telling Jack about the bomb on the bus. The threat to bus number twenty-five twenty-five is established by the thirty minute mark, and a full hour is dedicated to Jack trying to save the people on that bus.
Sure, an hour is a lot of time to spend focused on a bus, but deBont and the writers never let this stretch of the film get dull. They throw a constant barrage of complications at Jack and the bus passengers – starting with the fact that Jack has to get on the bus himself. Keeping the bus at fifty means needing to smash through traffic jams, take hard turns, nearly run down inattentive pedestrians. One of the passengers is a criminal who freaks out when Jack gets on the bus and ends up accidentally shooting the driver – a change from Yost’s first draft, where the driver had a heart attack just like the engineer in Runaway Train. The driver being injured is why Bullock’s character Annie, who just lost her driver’s license, has to take the wheel.
It was de Bont who suggested the most famous complication of all. Lieutenant Mac advises Jack and Annie to get the bus onto the one-oh-five freeway, which at the time of filming had just been completed but wasn’t in use yet. Mac just neglected to realize that construction of the freeway wasn’t entirely finished; there’s a fifty foot gap looming ahead of the bus. This fifty foot gap did not exist in reality, de Bont thought it up and it was created on screen through the use of some early digital trickery. And it’s quite an obstacle for a bus that can’t slow down or turn around – all they can do is hit the gas and hope they’re going fast enough to be able to jump fifty feet. Decades down the line, this doesn’t sound like a big deal. A bus could make a fifty foot jump in the middle of a Fast & Furious movie and it would just be one action beat surrounded by a hundred other stunts that are just as big, if not bigger and more ridiculous. But this jump was something spectacular at the time, the big, standout moment that everyone was talking about during the summer of 1994. Although the gap wasn’t real, the stunt was: a bus going sixty-one miles per hour was ramped through the air and went higher and further than the crew was expecting. A camera was smashed, part of the bus unexpectedly went out of frame, but they got the shot.
In reality, Annie wouldn’t have been able to drive the bus very well any more after making this jump, because the tires blew out on the stunt bus, but in the movie the bus comes out of it just fine. Watching the movie now, it’s kind of surprising to see that the coverage of this stunt is rather modest. We don’t even see a shot of the bus actually clearing the gap, we just see it jumping from one side and landing on the other… but that’s what was possible for them to convincingly show at the time.
De Bont also takes credit for deciding to have the bus drive on the runways at the LAX airport, but there’s some disagreement over who actually came up with that idea. Whoever suggested it gave the movie a more interesting location than alternative options that would have had the bus driving in circles around Dodger stadium or a race track. It also allows a plane to get involved with the action before we move on to the climactic set piece in the subway.
Yost is no fan of the subway sequence, still feeling that the movie truly ends as soon as the bus situation is resolved… but it does provide a cool setting for the final confrontation between Jack and Howard. The problem with the subway sequence, the reason why it comes off as being poorly thought out and repetitious, is the fact that the exact same thing happens in the subway as we just saw happen on the freeway: the subway system is under construction and the speeding train Jack and Annie are on is heading down a track that hasn’t been completed. All they can do is accelerate and jump the track. This is the sort of “how can the same thing happen to the same people twice” event you’d expect to see in a sequel, but instead we’re seeing it happen just a little while later in the same movie. The subway sequence doesn’t damage the overall film, it’s just not on the level of what came before it.
While de Bont made Speed a one hundred and sixteen minute adrenaline rush, the cast has to be commended for the performances they give in the midst of all the action. Reeves plays Jack Traven like a hero with a heart of gold; not only is he tough, smart, and capable, we also see that he’s so dedicated to his job because he truly cares about the people he’s trying to save. There’s a lot of warmth to Jack, and it’s easy to understand why Annie falls for him during their time together. Bullock also makes the love interest angle work while making Annie a very likeable character. She’s in way over her head, but with Jack’s help she’s able to be heroic as well. Jeff Daniels is endearing as Harry Temple, the partner and mentor who quizzes Jack about scenarios they might find themselves in while at work – setting up Howard Payne’s famous line, “Pop quiz, hot shot.” Daniels is the cast member who thought they were making a piece of crap during filming, figuring this was just another run-of-the-mill action movie. But as time went on, he began to realize they were working on something special. We come to care for Harry so much that he’s involved in one of the most emotionally effective moments of the movie, which we wouldn’t have gotten if they had stuck to the plan of making him the surprise villain. And Dennis Hopper… it’s always a joy to watch Dennis Hopper act crazy.
LEGACY/NOW: It’s baffling, but somehow Fox wasn’t convinced they had a crowd-pleaser on their hands with Speed, so they were originally planning to push it into theatres at the end of summer, in August of 1994. It wasn’t until they saw the positive scores from test screenings that they started to see the film’s potential – and then they decided to have Speed kick off their summer movie slate with a June release. That release date shift paid off. Made on a budget somewhere in the range of thirty to thirty-seven million, Speed earned about ten times more than it cost, with its worldwide box office total surpassing three hundred and fifty million. With a return on investment like that, it’s no surprise that Fox wanted a sequel. Unfortunately, that sequel was a mess. While Bullock and de Bont returned for 1997’s Speed 2: Cruise Control, Reeves opted out and the script was lacking, coming off more like an underwhelming version of an old school disaster movie. It’s quite dull compared to the frenetic action of the first film, building up to the sight of a cruise ship slowly smashing into a seaside town. Expensive, but not exactly thrilling. Speed 2 had a budget more than three times bigger than its predecessor’s and ended up making less than half of what Speed made at the box office.
Speed 2 is often named as one of the worst sequels ever made, but that doesn’t do anything to tarnish the reputation of the first Speed. Not only was Speed a financial success, it also went over very well with critics, and it remains a highly popular and respected film. It ranks among the best movies of the action genre, with Empire magazine putting it on their list of the Five Hundred Greatest Movies of All Time. Some things about it seem a little quaint now, but in a way that makes you sort of wistful, as we could use more action movies that are like this these days. Speed still holds up as a very entertaining viewing experience and stands the test of time thanks to a great cast that brought to life likeable and memorable characters, a good script with a gripping concept, well-shot action sequences that are exciting and involving, and a fast pace. What worked in 1994 still works perfectly today.
And also for the Revisited series, I dug into a movie I wasn't as familiar with, the 1984 adventure Romancing the Stone:
Romancing the Stone script:
INTRO: Today, Michael Douglas is a highly respected actor and Robert Zemeckis is known as the Oscar-winning director of some of the biggest and best movies ever made, like Back to the Future and Forrest Gump. But in the early 1980s, both of them had something to prove. In this episode of Revisited, we’re looking back at the project that gave them the chance to prove themselves, the lighthearted adventure Romancing the Stone.
SET-UP: The script for Romancing the Stone had been sitting on Douglas’s desk for a few years before the film actually went into production. It was written in the late ‘70s by Diane Thomas, who was working as a waitress in Malibu to support herself while hoping to break into the entertainment industry. Although legend has it that Thomas pitched the idea directly to Douglas when he came into her restaurant one day, that didn’t really happen. Thomas had an agent who had sent the script out to various studios and producers, and a copy ended up in Douglas’s hands because he had a production company called Bigstick.
In fact, Douglas’s greatest success at that point had come as a producer, as he was behind the Oscar-caliber films One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and The China Syndrome. Although he was a decade into his acting career, he was still trying to figure out how to approach it – and trying to avoid roles that would draw comparisons to his father Kirk Douglas. When he read the script for Romancing the Stone, he was blown away by it, feeling that there was a “wonderful spirit” to Thomas’s writing.
The story centers on romance novelist Joan Wilder, a character Douglas felt that Thomas had modeled after herself. While living a low-key life, Joan writes exciting adventure stories. She gets drawn into an adventure herself when her sister is kidnapped in Colombia, and to get her sibling back she’ll have to hand-deliver a treasure map that was mailed to her by her brother-in-law. Right before he was murdered. After traveling to Colombia, Joan gets lost in the jungle and crosses paths with rough-around-the-edges ex-pat Jack T. Colton… and it’s good for her that she has his assistance, because she’s caught between two groups that want the treasure map: the criminals who have her sister, and the trigger-happy private military run by a man named Zolo. While dodging bullets, traversing the Colombian countryside, and trying to save Joan’s sister, Joan and Jack also find some time to fall in love with each other.
Douglas was looking to produce something lighter than his previous films, and this script – which had romance, action, and comedy – was just what he wanted. He was also drawn to the role of Jack T. Colton, despite the fact that it was a Kirk Douglas type of character. Not only did he want to produce this movie, he was ready to accept being compared to his dad and wanted to play the hero himself.
Douglas had a deal with Columbia Pictures, and the studio agreed to purchase the script for two hundred and fifty thousand dollars – a nice amount of cash for a first-time screenwriter. It briefly looked like Romancing the Stone might be on the fast track to start filming in February of 1980… but that plan was derailed when the studio decided they wanted the script they had just paid so much for to undergo a major rewrite. So the project was shelved for a while. If it had gone into production in February of 1980, it would have had a several month head start on a movie that it ended up being called a rip-off of: Steven Spielberg and George Lucas’s Raiders of the Lost Ark. But it wasn’t released until three years after Raiders; coincidentally, in the same year as Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.
While Romancing the Stone was gathering dust, Douglas tried to push his acting career forward. He starred in a Razzie nominee, followed by a flop. Meanwhile, Columbia had his producing project Starman trapped in development hell. It was looking like that Diane Thomas script was his best chance to get something good made. So he took the project to 20th Century Fox. The studio was interested in making the movie, but they weren’t sure about Douglas playing Jack. They had a list of actors they would rather see in the role: Clint Eastwood, Burt Reynolds, Jack Nicholson, Paul Newman, Christopher Reeve, Sylvester Stallone. Some of them were even offered the part and turned it down. Luckily, Douglas had an ally at Fox: Sherry Lansing, who he had worked with on The China Syndrome when she was at MGM, was now Fox’s president of production. She said Douglas could star in the movie, he just had to make sure the budget came in under ten million. Done deal.
To keep the budget down, Douglas needed to find a promising director who wasn’t well known yet. His choice was Robert Zemeckis, whose career was basically dead at that moment, thanks to the back-to-back failures of Steven Spielberg’s 1941 and his own comedy Used Cars. Zemeckis had co-written 1941, the most maligned film of Spielberg’s career, and Used Cars was one of several Kurt Russell movies of that time that weren’t able to find their audience right away.
A supporting cast was then built around Douglas. Comedian Zack Norman was cast as Ira, the crocodile-loving antiquities smuggler who kidnaps Joan Wilder’s sister Elaine. Zemeckis gave his then-wife Mary Ellen Trainor her film debut as Elaine, and brought in Used Cars cast member Alfonso Arau – who is best known now for directing Like Water for Chocolate – to play a drug smuggler called The Bellmaker. Who happens to be a big fan of romance novels. Douglas cast his former roommate Danny DeVito as Ira’s cousin-slash-lackey Ralph. Manuel Ojeda was chosen to play Zolo. Holland Taylor was cast as Joan’s publisher. Veteran stuntman Ted White, who would soon earn a lot of fans by playing the slasher Jason Voorhees in Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter, appears as a villainous cowboy in an opening fantasy sequence, a glimpse into Joan’s latest novel.
For Joan herself, Douglas had his mind set on Debra Winger, who had received an Oscar nomination for her role in An Officer and a Gentleman and would soon be nominated again for Terms of Endearment. There are conflicting reports as to why Winger didn’t end up playing Joan. Some say Fox didn’t think she was glamorous enough. Others say Douglas had a dinner meeting with Winger that ended with her biting him. Whatever the case, Fox executive Joe Wizan suggested Kathleen Turner, who had just made her film debut in the steamy thriller Body Heat. She got the job.
It’s a good thing Romancing the Stone had such strong motivation driving it, with Zemeckis needing to revive his career and Douglas wanting to improve his own, because it has been said that this was a “tremendously difficult” movie to make. The initial idea was to film in Colombia, the country the story takes place in, but news of Americans being kidnapped and the fact that Colombia was entering its rainy season caused a change in plans. Filming ended up taking place in Mexico… where it rained for about half of the ninety day shooting schedule. This resulted in roads being washed away, which the production would have to rebuild so they could get around. Life also imitated the script at times. There’s a scene where a character has their hand bitten off by a crocodile, and one of the production’s animal trainers had their hand mauled by a crocodile during filming. Another crocodile nearly knocked Douglas out with a whack from its tail. There’s a standout stunt sequence where Jack and Joan get caught in a mudslide – and Turner really got caught in a mudslide at one point. When she was pulled out of the mud, the skin on one of her legs was torn up. This was one of several times she needed to get stitches during those ninety days. She also cut her arm on the side of plane wreckage that Jack and Joan discover in the jungle. And during a fight scene with Zolo, she cut her head open on the stone ground.
REVIEW: The fact that this was an uncomfortable movie to make comes through in the movie. The actors rarely look comfortable. But if they weren’t enjoying themselves in the midst of all this, that doesn’t come through, because the movie has a very fun feeling to it. Zemeckis was hired to make a piece of light entertainment, and that’s exactly what he delivered. The action starts early on in the film, and we never go too long without something exciting happening because Zolo’s men are never far behind Jack and Joan. We get shootouts, mudslides, vehicular chases, fight scenes, crocodile attack, a near-miss with a snake. There’s a lot going on here. It’s not clear how much the script changed between the time when Thomas sold it to when filming began. It did pass through the hands of multiple uncredited script doctors. But she clearly provided a great foundation for a crowd-pleasing adventure film.
Douglas certainly proved that he was capable of playing the romantic hero. He made Jack a likeable guy, and this is despite the fact that he is scheming behind Joan’s back for a large portion of the film. Even while he’s doing this, we get the sense that he’s going to come through and do the right thing in the end.
Turner undergoes a great transformation over the course of the story. When we first meet Joan, she’s an inhibited writer who cries over her own love stories and only has her cat to celebrate success with. Although she daydreams of adventure through her writing, in reality even catching a flight to Colombia seems like a daunting task to her. But she catches that flight for the sake of her sister, and grows more courageous as she faces a series of dangers. By the end she’s swinging over ravines and driving a car through a chase sequence. And into a river. For a moment in the climax, it looks like the movie is going to let the character down. Facing off with Zolo, she appears helpless, relying on Jack to save her. Thankfully, even when filming took place in 1983 the filmmakers already knew our heroine had to get herself out of this jam.
The relationship between Jack and Joan plays out in typical romantic comedy fashion. They start out at odds, Joan doesn’t like Jack and could never imagine being with someone like him. But she falls for him anyway. He’s more like the heartthrob character in her novels than she realized. When their interactions turn romantic, it’s quite believable because Douglas and Turner have great chemistry in the film – and apparently had great chemistry off screen as well. Since she was single and he was legally separated at the time, there was some intense mutual attraction going on during this production.
Turner didn’t get along very well with Zemeckis, as she was irritated by his focus on getting specific camera angles. This caused arguments between them on set. Turner would later say, “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.” But again, this is a behind-the-scenes issue that wasn’t detectable on screen at all.
Beyond the great work Douglas and Turner did in their roles, the supporting cast members were given their chances to shine as well. Ojeda’s Zolo is an intimidating presence. Norman didn’t have a lot to do as Ira, but he has some memorable lines and deliveries. Arau is really amusing during his few minutes. And of course DeVito is a standout. There wasn’t much to Ralph in the script, because he spends most of the time just sneaking around and observing, so DeVito had the chance to build the character on set. As DeVito does, he made the guy fun to watch.
Romancing the Stone was Zemeckis’s first time working with someone who would become a very important collaborator; composer Alan Silvestri. Silvestri was hired to put together a temporary score for the movie, but his music was so impressive that it ended up being the permanent score. Zemeckis and Silvestri have been working together ever since.
LEGACY/NOW: There was a time when Fox was so keen on Zemeckis that they planned to have him go straight from making Romancing the Stone to directing another film for them, Cocoon. That fell apart when the studio saw a rough cut of Romancing the Stone and became convinced that they had a complete failure on their hands. They were so displeased that they fired Zemeckis from Cocoon and replaced him with Ron Howard. But Zemeckis knew where his movie was lacking and was able to fix it through reshoots. Much of this is right up front in the film; those scenes that do such a good job of establishing who Joan Wilder is came from the reshoots. Once they had smoothed out the opening twenty minutes, the movie worked a lot better.
Fox didn’t have anything to worry about. Zemeckis was able to complete the film for the agreed upon ten million dollar budget, and when it was released in March of 1984 it ended up earning over one hundred and fifteen dollars at the box office. This was Fox’s only big hit of the year – and it wasn’t only a financial success. It received a lot of good reviews as well. Some critics dismissed it as a Raiders of the Lost Ark knock-off, but others complimented it for being better than many of the other Raiders copies that were out there. Some reviews – and some fans – would even say that it turned out better than the year’s real Indiana Jones movie, Temple of Doom.
Romancing the Stone did so well that Fox put a sequel on the fast track to production… But they ran into some trouble because the movie had been so successful that key members of the creative team had been offered other projects that kept them from returning for the follow-up. Since Cocoon had been taken away from Zemeckis, he was free to go over to Universal and get Back to the Future made. Diane Thomas couldn’t write the script because Steven Spielberg had her writing the third Indiana Jones movie and helping him develop Always. She did consult on a rewrite when the script for the sequel The Jewel of the Nile fell short of expectations.
Sadly, Thomas didn’t have the chance to write Always, and her Indiana Jones script wasn’t used. Romancing the Stone turned out to be her only produced screenplay. As a reward for the success of the film, Douglas had given her a Porsche. When she let her boyfriend drive the vehicle after they had some drinks with friends, he lost control of it. Thomas was killed in the crash, seven weeks before the December 1985 release of The Jewel of the Nile.
The sequel did well, but the script was lackluster and the reviews were largely negative. The experience of making it was miserable for Douglas and Turner. It was so troublesome and disappointing that even though Fox commissioned the script for a third film that would have been called The Crimson Eagle, Douglas decided not to hurry into making that one. It has come back up from time to time over the years. Douglas dropped out of the 2000 movie U-571 and was replaced by Matthew McConaughey because he thought there would be a scheduling conflict with a Romancing the Stone sequel. When promoting The In-Laws in 2003, he again seemed certain that he’d be reprising the role of Jack T. Colton soon. But the sequel never went into production. A few years later, we started hearing rumblings of a remake. There was a possibility that it would reunite The Ugly Truth director Robert Luketic with that film’s stars Katherine Heigl and Gerard Butler. That didn’t happen. Neither did the NBC TV series that was announced in 2011.
It makes sense that Romancing the Stone has been dormant for so long. The movie was a success and is still fondly remembered. But it also seems like a movie that was very much of its time. You don’t hear it referenced very often. It has its fans, but not exactly the sort of fan base that’s clamoring for more stories set in this world. Especially if Joan Wilder and Jack T. Colton wouldn’t be played by Kathleen Turner and Michael Douglas anymore. Who cares at that point?
Jack and Joan had their great adventure with Romancing the Stone, and The Jewel of the Nile was already pushing it. Sometimes franchises just don’t work out. But the sequel wasn’t the last time we saw Douglas, Turner, and DeVito work together. They re-teamed for the 1989 dark comedy The War of the Roses, and recently Douglas brought both Turner and DeVito in for appearances on his Netflix series The Kominsky Method. They may not be playing Jack, Joan, and Ralph in those projects, but it’s still satisfying to see them share the screen. And if you revisit Romancing the Stone now, nearly forty years after its release, it still holds up as a good way to spend a couple hours. It’s simple, fun, and exciting. Exactly what it was always intended to be.
More video scripts have been written, so another batch of videos will be shared here on Life Between Frames eventually. In the meantime, keep an eye on JoBlo Horror Originals and JoBlo Originals!
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