Spend Friday Night At the Flicks with Elizabeth Ellen Carter
As an author you’re often asked how many of your characters are taken from real life.
Friends might start to look at you nervously, conversations are cut short and dinner party invitations become fewer and fewer. Unless you belong to that group where, as soon as anyone learns you’re an author, they’ll go ‘oh, do I have a story for you!’, or ‘can I be in your next book?’*
*Note: The above scenarios happen less frequently when writing historicals.
But what people little realise is that all the world’s a stage and we are merely players. In some cases playwrights and everything we do is taken somewhere from real life and experiences gained by actually living life make for the most potent fiction.
Taking this idea to the greater extreme is the great 1984 classic Romancing The Stone, the film showcased some great chemistry between Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner and Danny Devito at his weasly best.
Kathleen Turner plays a lonely, single but successful romance writer whose characters get to see more lovin’ than she does.
In a lovely self-referential trope, the film begins with a scene from Joan’s own book:
Grogan: What’s it gonna be, Angelina?
Joan Wilder: [voiceover] It was Grogan: the filthiest, dirtiest, *dumbest* excuse for a man west of the Missouri River.
Grogan: So, you can die two ways, angel: quick like the tongue of a snake, or slower than the molasses in January.
Joan Wilder: [voiceover] But it was October.
Grogan: I’ll kill you, goddammit, if it’s the Fourth of July! Where is it? Uhh. Get over there!
Joan Wilder: [voiceover] I told him to get out, now that he had what he came for.
Grogan: Not quite, angel.
[spits]Grogan: Take ’em off. Do it! Come on!
[Angelina kills Grogan by throwing a concealed knife]Joan Wilder: [voiceover] That was the end of Grogan… the man who killed my father, raped and murdered my sister, burned my ranch, shot my dog, and stole my Bible! But if there was one law of the west: Bastards had brothers, who seemed to ride forever.
And another clue that this is not going to be an ordinary film is in the trailer in which Devito brings us up to speed on all we need to know in a telephone conversation that ends with him turning to us, the audience and saying: “This time, you’re coming with me.”
Kathleen Turner in the 1980s bears a passing resemblence to…
Not only does Joan have an amazing adventure in the beautiful wilds of Columbia, she also meets the roguish Jack Colton, the devil-may-care adventurer who might be wanting to steal more than Joan’s heart.
Unsurprisingly Romancing The Stone is a perennial favourite, right up there with the likes of the Princess Bride as an action filled film that not only hits all the right romantic notes but also runs full steam on fun and adventure.
The combination of both elements together makes the ultimate date night movie – because, let’s face it ladies, the only reason why your boyfriend, husband or significant other is going to sit down and watch The Notebook, Sleepless In Seattle, Chocolat, The Bridges of Madison County or the Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood with you is if you’re going to have sex with him afterwards.
And that is the only reason.
… Lauren Bacall
Sadly, the only films of the past 20 years that has not been so desperately skewed to either one demographic (big bang action for blokes) or the other (light romantic comedies or melodramatic tear jerkers).
The only exception I can think of are the first two Stephen Sommers’ Mummy films.
Romancing the Stone harvests the very best from the action, adventure films of the 1940s and 1950s and as mentioned before, the smoking hot chemistry between Turner and Douglas which is reminiscent of Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn in the African Queen or even Bogart and Lauren Bacall at their finest – think Key Largo andTo Have And Have Not.
No surprises there, Turner’s smoky voice is very reminiscent of Bacall. They even bear a passing physical resemblance.
Well there’s no point in spoiling the plot if you haven’t already seen the film, but you know, since it has romance in the title and the author is a romance writer, that it ends with a Happily Ever After and a sequel.