by Marc Eliot
By the time It’s My Turn started shooting, it was already supposed to have been in postproduction. This affected preproduction scheduling on Romancing the Stone. To save time, Michael and Clayburgh volunteered to rehearse evenings and weekends. It was also his first experience being directed by a woman, and Claudia Weill made it her business to get on Michael’s good side by appealing to his male vanity and his narcissism. As he recounted, “I have not had many directors come up to me and say, ‘You are such a dish.’ I was immediately spoiled, and comforted in an offhand sort of way. There is a moment in every actor’s life when he sees the director, normally male, go over to the leading lady, put his arm around her shoulder and whisper, ‘What’s wrong, darling? Let’s talk.’ Well, I’m sorry, but guys like to be complimented too. I just loved having the director come to me, put her arm around my shoulder and ask me if I’m okay.”
FILMING WAS COMPLETED on It’s My Turn in seven weeks at Columbia’s studios in Burbank and one week of location pickups in New York City. It was scheduled for release in the fall of 1980, but prior to its opening, a firestorm developed at Columbia. After several disappointing previews, Michael, who was still upset about that scene between him and Clayburgh that had been cut, announced he would do no publicity appearances for the film. At the same time, Marilyn Beck, who wrote a Hollywood gossip column, claimed that she knew that Michael hated the film: it had taken far too long to make, he wished he’d never gotten involved, and he was going to refuse to promote it.2 When Ray Stark found out, he blew a gasket. He believed that he and Columbia had done Michael a huge favor by giving him a lot of money for a role that he could do in a sleepwalk, and the least he could do was help sell the film. But Michael had a different view. Besides losing the one scene he felt he needed to give him some heat as an actor, the film had also cost him his start date on Romancing the Stone. To him, it was like giving up an executive position at the office to take on the more pressing task of becoming the head of the typing pool.
Michael was summarily called into Ray Stark’s office for a tongue-lashing, during which Stark implied that Michael’s entire future at Columbia might be at stake. Michael tried to calm Stark down by telling him that the whole thing had been blown out of proportion, a story planted in the press by someone who didn’t like him. Whether or not Stark believed the story, Michael got off with a mild rebuke—mostly, insiders believed, because privately, Stark, like Michael, was not overly fond of either the film or Claudia Weill and knew that Columbia was much more heavily invested in the more important Romancing the Stone.
IT’S MY TURN opened on October 24, 1980, and proved a $7 million dud. Weill was especially hurt by the fact that just before the film’s premiere Stark wanted to do yet another cut. At that point, though, the studio heads, perhaps fearing an avalanche of lawsuits, gave her cut the final green light.
Weill chose never to work for a major Hollywood studio again.3
Michael resumed preproduction activities on Romancing the Stone. However, three years would pass before a single footage of film would be shot, largely because of a serious skiing accident that sidelined Michael. To keep busy, he kept looking for new projects he could produce from his wheelchair.
The first was something called Virgin Kisses, a novel by Gloria Nagy about a woman who has a one-night affair with a married man and can’t let him go when he wants to return to his wife. Columbia hated it, and it was shelved, but Michael kept renewing the rights to Virgin Kisses, believing that one day he would get it made.
Another project he liked was something called Starman, a sci-fi flick about a space traveler from another world who accidentally lands on earth and then can’t leave. It was vaguely reminiscent of an old DC Comics character that appeared in the 1950s, John Jones (J’onn J’onnzz), Manhunter from Mars. (The character eventually became a member of the Justice League of America.) Michael’s choice was a prescient one. Within two decades comic books would rule the world of animated and special-effects cinema. But in 1982, Columbia was leery about such a project; finally the studio gave it the green light, if for no other reason than to keep Michael at Columbia.
At the same time, the hottest director in Hollywood, Steven Spielberg, was making his own space adventure film, E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial. He had already made Jaws (1975) and the blockbuster Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) and was about to release the most sure-fire film of the year, Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981). Every studio, including Columbia, wanted E.T., but Columbia had to pass because it already had Starman. Frank Price, the head of production, believed that between the two projects the studio had chosen the right one. A memo he sent around said that in his opinion, E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial was a children’s film, while Starman was an adult love story that happened to take place in space.
Despite Price’s memo, Columbia was gun-shy about taking on Spielberg one-on-one and put the brakes on Starman—not enough to kill it, but just enough to slow it down until E.T. was in theaters. But even as E.T. was released in 1982, a host of directors, including Adrian Lyne, John Badham, Michael Mann, and Tony Scott, came in and out of Starman, while Columbia never came up with a firm start date. “We had Tootsie in development for four years,” said Frank Price, in defense of the Starman delays. “If you’re trying to make exceptional pictures, which is what Michael and all of us are trying to do, it takes time.”
“What has happened to the movie business,” Michael told Esquire magazine, “is market research. You would think, and I did think, that here I am, I’ve produced two big movies, and I go to the studio with a new thing I want to do. I’ve got a track record, but it turns out that doesn’t matter.”
Instead, the studio turned its attention to Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi, an epic, widescreen biography of the Indian pacifist leader meant to be the next Lawrence of Arabia (1962), except that Attenborough, a British actor turned director, was no David Lean, and Ben Kingsley, as good an actor as he is, was no Peter O’Toole.
But if Michael thought that Starman was going to be kick-started by Columbia after E.T.’s success at the Academy Awards, he was wrong.4 The studio continued to drag its feet on Starman, demanding rewrite after rewrite, to make sure there was no way it could be considered a “copy” of ET. It wasn’t until the summer of 1983 that Columbia announced production would begin that fall.
Now Michael set about finding a director. He chose John Badham, whose biggest film to date was 1977’s Saturday Night Fever. However, even before production began Starman was delayed yet again by the studio, and Badham left to make Blue Thunder followed by the sci-fi youth adventure WarGames.
At that point, Michael gave up on Starman, and Columbia. Starman was made a year later at Columbia, directed by John Carpenter, and released in 1984, starring Jeff Bridges and Karen Allen, and while not a big moneymaker ($28 million domestic on a $24 million budget) it is considered today one of the better ’80s sci-fi films. Michael received a producer credit, but except for hiring Carpenter, he had little to do with the film and severed his ties with the studio before it was released. “My father taught me that a good business deal is one which is beneficial to both parties. In that sense, the Columbia deal was not a good business deal. I discovered that I work best in a funky little office somewhere, with just a reader and a secretary.”
Whatever story he wanted to tell about what had happened to Starman and his relationship with Columbia, five years had passed without Romancing the Stone or, for that matter, any new Michael Douglas film being made. He managed to retrieve the name Bigstick from the studio (it was of no value to them), left his spacious Columbia offices in Burbank, and went back to his small office in Hollywood to try to turn his career around. The one sure project he had was Romancing the Stone, the still-undeveloped script he had always liked but that had somehow gotten away from him. Instead he had taken dumb acting parts and followed the lead of the post-Lansing corporate heads at Columbia, the same geniuses who had turned down E.T. for Starman and then screwed that up.
HOWEVER, BEFORE he could resurrect Romancing the Stone, another acting assignment came his way, via Fox, something called The Star Chamber. He liked the script and decided to do it. He was cast as an idealistic judge who gets drawn into a secret vigilante law group—a plot with echoes of Clint Eastwood’s popular 1973 Dirty Harry film, Magnum Force.
The Star Chamber takes its title from the feared seventeenth-century English court. It was written by Roderick Taylor and directed by journeyman Peter Hyams. Also in the film was Hal Holbrook (who, coincidentally, had played a major role in Magnum Force). Despite an extensive television promotion campaign, the film, released on August 5, 1983, after the season’s big summer openings, flopped badly, pulling in just under $2 million on opening weekend and grossing a total of $5.5 million before it quickly disappeared.
If there was any rationale for his doing the film besides wanting to be at Fox where, not coincidentally, Sherry Lansing was now calling the shots, it was to make himself bankable as an actor again, a plan that decidedly hadn’t worked. The studio was hesitant about making Romancing the Stone with Michael playing the lead and preferred either Burt Reynolds or Clint Eastwood, both actors red-hot at the time, but getting Clint was impossible. He had solidly landed at Warner with his Malpaso production company, a total-control setup that Michael could only envy. Whatever Clint wanted to do, he did; unfortunately, he passed on Romancing the Stone. And Burt Reynolds said no too. At one point Columbia had gone after Sylvester Stallone to play the lead, but he didn’t work out either.
Sherry Lansing believed in Michael’s abilities and potential star-power and wanted to keep him at Fox. To do so, before he could make a deal anywhere else, she gave him the green light to both produce and star in Romancing the Stone at the studio.
1 The studio agreed to honor the deal after Lansing’s departure but reserved the right to approve all projects; it didn’t want Michael making anything but popular mainstream (i.e., nonpolitical) movies.
2 The scene, written by Bergstein, was cut by Weill at the urging of Stark, who didn’t like anything approaching explicit sex in his strictly PG films. The most erotic scene in the script, it had Michael and Clayburgh dancing together. Bergstein later used it as the basis for another screenplay that became a huge hit, Emile Ardolino’s Dirty Dancing (1987).
3 It’s My Turn was Weill’s second feature film. Her first, Girlfriends, was independently made and sold to Warner. It was on the basis of that film that It’s My Turn was green-lighted. Afterward she returned to independent features, documentaries, and teaching.
4 That year Gandhi won eight Oscars; ET won four. Tootsie, another Columbia Pictures film, was nominated for ten Oscars but only won one, for Best Supporting Actress (Jessica Lange).
Michael with Kathleen Turner in Romancing the Stone. REBEL ROAD ARCHIVES
CHAPTER 11
Romancing’s script included mudslides, problem alligators, multiple stitches for cast and crew. But it had a wonderful virginal quality. After China Syndrome I’d O.D.’d on grimness. The only way I find a project is if I fall in love. And like when you fall in love with a woman, you wake up at night thinking about it.
—MICHAEL DOUGLAS
IT WAS LATE 1982. MICHAEL WAS FAST APPROACHING thirty-nine and, despite the Oscar and acclaim he had won in the seventies, he was feeling very much a failure. Nearly a decade had slipped by following the success of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and The China Syndrome, the latter’s box office was helped immensely by a freakish real-life nuclear disaster. For the longest time Michael found himself without a project to produce, and now having been given a green light at Fox he put himself on a fast track to get Romancing the Stone made, and, in behavior reminiscent of his father’s when Michael himself was a young child, he had very little time left for playing daddy.
Diandra was not pleased with Michael’s decision to move back to L.A. full-time and resume his film career, leaving her holding the baby. It wasn’t just Michael’s obsession with the film that bothered her. She found the entire film industry personally distasteful. She would never feel at ease in the role of the good Hollywood wife. After six years of marriage, during which time Michael had not spent any significant amount of time at home, she asked him for a legal separation.
She did it almost as a formality, which was even more unsettling to Michael. She spent virtually all of her time in Santa Barbara, she pointed out, while Michael remained at his office in Hollywood. Their marriage had come to a crossroads, and she had taken the first step to end it.
Diandra made her decision after Romancing the Stone was picked up by Fox. She knew it meant Michael would be away from her for long stretches of time, on location and in pre- and postproduction. She no longer could keep pretending they had any kind of real, i.e., traditional, marriage, which was the only kind she had bargained for.
There was nothing Michael could do about Diandra’s decision to legally separate, even if he had wanted to, which he wasn’t sure he did. By now, whatever heat was in their relationship had long cooled. In truth, Michael was not that upset. Although he would miss five-year-old Cameron, Diandra had assured him he could visit the boy whenever he wanted to. She had no desire to deprive her son of a father, nor her husband of his son. Nor did she want to get divorced. She was as reluctant to take that final step as Michael was. For Diandra, remaining married, even if separated, had to do at least in part with her awareness of her social standing. For Michael, it was more a question of passivity.
SHERRY LANSING’S DEAL with Michael and his new partner at Bigstick, Jack Brodsky, came with a proviso that they make Romancing the Stone for under $10 million, modest for an action film shot on location. Michael had no problem with the budget; he knew he could both produce and act in this film with relative ease, because Joan Wilder was the leading role, the bigger part, the true heroine of the story.
To direct, as he had with Cuckoo’s Nest and China Syndrome, Michael wanted someone relatively unknown who would take a relatively small salary to help keep the film within its budget. Thomas’s script was fresh and original, and Michael wanted a director who also was fresh and original.
After considering several candidates, he settled on thirty-three-year-old Robert Zemeckis. If Zemeckis’s résumé was notable, it was also notably thin, but there were things about him that Michael liked. For one thing, he had been among the early students at USC’s burgeoning film school. What was different about USC from other film schools, particularly those back east, was that these students’ heroes weren’t Truffaut, Godard, Rohmer, or Chabrol, the heart of the French New Wave that had led 1970s film students to Andrew Sarris’s theory of auteurism. To most West Coast film schoolers, auteurism was already passé, as were the current crop of directors who fancied themselves auteurs, including Martin Scorsese, Francis Coppola, and Brian De Palma. Instead, these film schoolers’ heroes were Walt Disney, Clint Eastwood, and Sean Connery (as James Bond), and they sought to emulate their films. They had no artistic rage or fear or guilt about making popular commercial films. The studios weren’t their enemies, they were their banks. They longed to swim in the waters of the mainstream, and that was exactly the type of director Michael was looking for. Romancing had no message; it was simply meant to be a good time at the movies and make a lot of money.
Early in his career, Zemeckis become friendly with Steven Spielberg, who soon became his mentor and executive-produced Zemeckis’s first two features.1 The financial failure of those films made it more difficult for Zemeckis to find work away from Spielberg because they had become so closely linked. And Spielberg had just laid a colossal bomb of his own, 1941 (1979), also written by Zemeckis with a friend from film school, Bob Gale, and John Milius. The disastrous 1941 made any further collaborations between Zemeckis and Spielberg, at least for the moment, out of the question.
Although Zemeckis continued to write scripts, including one about a boy who
manages to travel across in time in a DeLorean car, he could not generate any interest from the studios. He directed no more films until 1983, when Michael decided to take a chance on him for Romancing the Stone. After screening his earlier work, Michael was convinced Zemeckis could handle it. As Michael later recalled of the director, “At twenty-eight his career was over. At twenty-three [sic] his career was back, thanks to Romancing the Stone.” (When he began the film in 1983, Zemeckis, born in 1951, was thirty-two years old.)
Everything was now in place except one last and crucial element—the casting of Joan Wilder. Word was that Michael had settled on Debra Winger, who had become hot after her turn in Taylor Hackford’s 1982 smash An Officer and a Gentleman, which had earned her a nomination for an Academy Award for Best Actress (she lost to Meryl Streep for her performance in Alan J. Pakula’s Sophie’s Choice) and even hotter after James L. Brooks’s 1983 Terms of Endearment, a tour de force for Shirley MacLaine and Jack Nicholson that was all but stolen by Winger, who was again nominated for an Academy Award, this time for Best Actress (and who lost again, this time to Julie Andrews in Blake Edwards’s Victor Victoria). Michael reportedly wanted Winger badly, but Fox didn’t think she was glamorous enough or physically fit for the part. Fox productions president Joe Wizan suggested instead, but really insisted upon, Kathleen Turner. After spending a few years in TV soap opera limbo, Turner’s film debut as a femme fatale came in 1981’s Body Heat, Lawrence Kasdan’s loose remake of and homage to Billy Wilder’s 1944 dark and exciting Double Indemnity, in which she gave a performance the New York Times called “jaw-dropping.”