Nice article about Romancing the Stone on its 40th anniversary

Randomly caught it on tv a few weeks ago, still so much fun.

After offering the Colton role to his friend Jack Nicholson, who passed, Douglas got further rejections from Burt Reynolds and Clint Eastwood — largely because the part was secondary to that of Wilder. Out of options, Douglas cast himself. “After all the better-known actors had turned us down, Fox was open to me doing it,” he recalled.

The cast — which included Douglas’s old pal, Danny DeVito, as a comic baddie — set out for Mexico in the summer of 1983 for an arduous shoot, plagued by apocalyptically bad weather and production mishaps. Rumors from the set were so bad that Zemeckis was fired from his next project, “Cocoon,” because that film’s producers were convinced that “Romancing the Stone” would bomb.