In Memory of Diane Thomas (1946–1985)

25 years ago today, screenwriter Diane Thomas was killed in an automobile accident near Malibu, California. Per Wikipedia:

Diane Thomas (January 7, 1946–October 21, 1985) was a screenwriter. She was working as a waitress while writing scripts and then had the opportunity to pitch the script for Romancing the Stone to customer Michael Douglas who then bought, produced, and starred in the film with Kathleen Turner and Danny DeVito.

Diane Thomas died in a car accident in October 1985; only six weeks before the sequel to Romancing the Stone, The Jewel of the Nile was released. Ms. Thomas was busy writing for the movie Always for Steven Spielberg and was not available to write Jewel of the Nile. She was also working on a sequel to Raiders of the Lost Ark before she died.

In the Special Edition of Romancing the Stone DVD, Michael Douglas stated in an interview that he had purchased a Porsche for Thomas as a present for her work with him on Romancing and help with scenes on Jewel of the Nile. Thomas was a passenger in the Porsche, while her companion driving it caused the accident, killing her instantly. The accident, according to Michael Douglas, occurred on the Pacific Coast Highway. The companion was identified as male and was driving while intoxicated.

Following her death, the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program created the prestigious Diane Thomas Screenwriting Awards in her honor. Original judges included Steven Spielberg, Michael Douglas, James Brooks and Kathleen Kennedy.

Here is a link to a newspaper article from the Spokane Chronicle (October 23, 1985) about Thomas’ tragic death, including the only known photo of her I could find.

IMDB states that at the time she died, Thomas was working on a project called “Blond Hurricane” and had finished a draft of a sequel to Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981).

Romancing the Stone was one of probably the first 10 professional screenplays I ever read and I still remember how it opened. Here are the first three pages of her script:

FADE IN

INT. MOUNTAIN CABIN — DAY

A size 16-EEE boot kicks through the door, ripping the old board 
from the wall. GROGAN’s grisly body stands framed in the 
doorway, a dirty foul-smelling beast. The shotgun in his grip
is cocked. A strong-hearted beauty, ANGELINA, 34, in buckskin
poncho, eyes him guardedly from behind a table and surrepti-
tiously slides a boot dagger out of its sheath. In the rafters
a spider faints.

Flies BUZZ the smoked hides hanging from the beams, something
simmers in the pot over the fire. In the distance are HEARD the
TUMBLING WATERS of the South Fork of the Flathead River. All
else is mountain stillness. It is 1850.

Grogan clears trail dust from his throat.

GROGAN
What’s it gonna be, Angelina?

The woman does not blink. Grogan, with shotgun aimed at her
breast, swaggers over to the pot, one-handedly fills the ladle,
gulps its content.

GROGAN
(spitting it out)
What the hell is that?

ANGELINA
Left-overs.

GROGAN
(throwing down the ladle)
You can die two ways, Angel. Quick
like snake tongue or slower than
molasses in January.

ANGELINA
It’s April.

GROGAN
I’d kill ya if it was the goddamn
Fourth of July. Where is it?

Grogan’s beady eyes dart about the room and lock onto the
saddle-bags on the bunk. With one graceful movement, Angelina
grabs the dagger’s tip and flips it underhand; in a silver
flash the dagger cuts through the air and kills Grogan deader
than George Washington.

Angelina snatches up the shotgun.

ANGELINA (V.O.)
For a moment I started at Grogan, the
man who killed my father, raped and
murdered my sister, burned my ranch,
shot my dog, and stole my Bible.

She hoists the saddle-bags over her shoulder and heads out.

CUT TO:

EXT. CABIN

S.O. “ANGELINA’S THEME”

Angelina runs to the top of a small rise, and as the breeze blows
her hair, she pauses to scout the area. Seeing nothing, she
scrambles down toward a canoe at river’s edge.

ANGELINA (V.O.)
The hunt was far from over. Now
Grogan’s brothers would come for me.

CUT TO:

EXT. CAVE

Six of the meanest outlaws in the history of the west, the
BROTHERS, in matching ankle-length coats, on stallions, come at a
THUNDERING gallop out of a cave, pull up short, squinting into the
sun, seeing, recognizing (the hat particularly).

ANGLE

A man on horseback on the crest of a ridge, silhouetted against
the afternoon sun.

ANGELINA (V.O.)
But Jack would stop them. He
promised me that. It was the only
thing the man ever promised.

CLOSE ON

his eyes. The man is JACK COLTON, about 40. On the rim of
legend, he is a Willie Nelson/Waylon Jennings song. And were
cowboys immortalized on bubblegum cards, one Jack Colton would be
worth four Doc Holidays, six Wyatt Earps, eight Buffalo Bills, and
740 Roy Rogers’. 

ANGLE

The Brothers riding like hell back into the cave.

CUT TO:

RIVER

After stowing her gear, Angelina pushes off.

ANGELINA (V.O.)
Time to head down river. South. To
forget.

The canoe is grabbed up by the sudden current. Thundering
southward, the river turns into a raging white roller coaster.
A wind comes up, GROWING LOUDER with each twist of the river,
growing until it sounds like winter’s last stand.

ANGELINA (V.O.)
I started laughing. The world was 
stark mad, and I was laughing. But not
alone. The wind laughed, too. In
fact, howled. With each bend in the -

CUT TO:

INT. CLOSE ON PAGE IN TYPEWRITER APT. — DAY

ANGELINA (V.O.)
riber -

Angelina pronounces the word exactly as it is mistyped. A self-
correcting IBM Selectric backtracks, lifting the last three
letters off the page, replacing them with “ver.”

A cigarette is snuffed in an ashtray sporting a die-cast “Statue
of Liberty.” This Statue of Liberty belongs to JOAN CHARLES, age
34.

ROLL CREDITS

Though Joan Charles is the woman playing Angelina, she is her
antithesis. Introverted, cloaked in drab garments, an unnatural
hair style — she is barely recognizable. Joan Charles has the 
look of a woman who has forgotten herself, forgotten she has a
life of her own.

And off we go on a terrific comic-adventure romp. Clearly Thomas knew how to write and there’s a lot to take away from the script to Romancing the Stone. One thing that stuck with me when I read it for the first time back in 1987: make every character’s introduction memorable. From Grogan’s “size 16-EEE boot” to Angelina sliding a “boot dagger out of it sheath” to Jack Colton imagined as a bubblegum card hero, Thomas uses everything at her disposal — visuals, actions, comparisons — to create memorable character introductions.

Here is the IMDB summary of the movie’s plot:

Joan Wilder, a mousy romance novelist, receives a treasure map in the mail from her recently murdered brother-in-law. Meanwhile, her sister Elaine is kidnapped in Colombia and the two criminals responsible demand that she travel to Colombia to exchange the map for her sister. Joan does, and quickly becomes lost in the jungle after being waylaid by Zolo, a vicious and corrupt Colombian cop who will stop at nothing to obtain the map. There, she meets an irreverent soldier-of-fortune named Jack Colton who agrees to bring her back to civilization. Together, they embark upon an adventure that could be straight out of Joan’s novels.

It’s a delightful premise with some classic narrative dynamics in play including Protagonist metamorphosis (from head to heart) and FOOW (Fish-Out-Of-Water). Here is the trailer for Romancing the Stone:

Michael Douglas in a short feature about the making of the movie:

Romancing the Stone was a big hit as it did $76M at the box office and spawned a sequel The Jewel of the Nile.

One can only wonder what other stories might have emerged from the creative mind of Diane Thomas had she lived.

In memoriam: Diane Thomas.

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