Did Romancing the Stone really rip off Indiana Jones?💎

This week’s recommended movie is Romancing the Stone (1984)

Since Romancing the Stone is, in essence, a movie about a writer who goes on a wild adventure, it seems both appropriate and important to acknowledge the strangely tragic story of the film’s screenwriter: a woman called Diane Thomas.

Thomas only has one produced screenplay credit to her name because she sadly died at the age of thirty-nine in a car accident. The car in question was a Porsche Carrera. The car that Michael Douglas had bought for Thomas as a thank you for her help in strengthening the first thirty pages of Jewel of the Nile - the less-impressive sequel to Romancing the Stone.

In her short lifetime, Thomas reportedly had to endure the mockery of a less-than complimentary article in Time magazine which labelled her sole cinematic achievement a rip-off of Raiders of the Lost Arc. In fact, Thomas wrote her script years before Spielberg and Lucas even cast Harrison Ford in the role.

She was dealt a further creative blow when she was under contract with Spielberg himself. The reason she wasn’t available to write the sequel to her first movie in full is because she was under contract to write a draft of the third Indiana Jones movie, set in a haunted house. She completed the work but Lucas and Spielberg decided to go in a different direction so her vision for the beloved action-adventure character never saw the light of day. I hope she was able to rationalise this as just one of those things that tends to happen in the biz but, as a writer myself, I know that such disappointments can often hit hard.

Thinking of Diane Thomas, I can never help but feel sad, even in spite of all the joy she delivered with Romancing the Stone. My sadness is rooted not just in the fact that she died so young and so pointlessly, though obviously those factors do weigh heavy. But the loss of her is made even more tragic by just how damn good Romancing the Stone really is.

A lot of people might dismiss it as a lightweight movie, but if it was so easy to write lightweight movies that entertain for ninety minutes non-stop, everyone would do it and make a fortune. Even to this day, I don’t see many examples of it being done that well. And certainly not as well as Diane Thomas did it.

It’s painful to think of all the wonderful stories cinema has likely missed out on due to that accident on the Pacific Coast Highway in October 1985. Thomas’s boyfriend, who was driving the car at the time of the crash, was later charged with the manslaughter of Thomas and one other passenger who also perished in the crash. The contribution to cinema Thomas might have made also died that night and it will always be my conviction that the world of filmmaking is all the worse off for it.

Paid subscribers can find my carefully curated notes on Romancing the Stone, with spoilers, below.