‘Bites Me! Bites Me!’: Michael Douglas Reveals How Debra Winger Lost Chance To Co-Star In ‘Romancing The Stone’ | Eastern North Carolina Now

    Publisher's Note: This post appears here courtesy of the The Daily Wire. The author of this post is Hank Berrien.

    Speaking on the Literally! With Rob Lowe podcast, actor Michael Douglas revealed the reason why Debra Winger lost her chance to co-star with him in "Romancing The Stone": he says she bit him on the arm.

    Lowe prompted Douglas - who had become a TV star with "The Streets of San Francisco" but then turned to producing highly successful films including the multi-Oscar winning "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" - by mentioning director Bob Zemeckis "who really turned you into the leading man movie star you were meant to be in 'Romancing the Stone.'"

    "He was great," Douglas recalled. "'Romancing the Stone' was one of those projects I was, again, producing. I didn't really have the intention of doing anything; 'Romancing' was written, first time, by a woman named Diane Thomas, who was working as a waitress at Alice's Restaurant on the pier in Malibu. ... This was her first script, and it was great. I had a studio relationship at that time at Columbia, Sherry Lansing, who I had met, was the executive I had met on "China Syndrome," was there, and ended up buying the script for a substantial amount of money and was criticized, supposedly, for why would you pay that much money for a first-term writer?"

    "My take on the material was first-time, tenth-time, if it's good, why should somebody be punished when it's good?" Douglas remarked.

    "So I was really happy, it was a great piece, and then I was trying to figure out who the right director was to do it, and Bob, bless his soul, had gone to USC film school and had done a couple of movies, one was called "Used Cars" and the other one was "I Want To Hold Your Hand," and he had Steven Spielberg as his sort of mentor and also executive producer, and those two pictures didn't work out very well, so poor Bob had sort of fallen in with Bob Gale, his writing partner, into this sort of writing thing, he was all of 25 or 26 years old," Douglas continued.

    "He was a has-been at 25," Lowe joked.

    "He was a has-been at 25," Douglas echoed. "And I loved 'Used Cars,' I thought he had a great sense of humor and the right kind of tone, and so I went after Bob, and also they're really good writers and all of that."

    Then Douglas told his story about Winger:

    So we go down to Mexico to do a pre-production thing to figure out how to do this thing. And like the classic story of the script where it says two words, "Rome burns," which means about a month of shooting and production and all that ... in Diane's script we had this thing called the mud-slide. And anyway, we got down to the realities of what we were going to do, down there in terms of shooting, this is really tough, and on the way back we stopped back to see Amy Irving, who was the studio's, no sorry, I'm getting it wrong, it was Debra Winger. It was Debra Winger, she was the studio's first choice. We were in Mexico, she was in Texas doing "Terms of Endearment." And she normally doesn't deal with actors while she's doing a film, which I understand. She was like, "I'll hear what they have to say."

    We didn't actually go to the set; she was spending her time in the hospital because she plays terminally ill in the picture. So she was doing method work, I guess, staying and living in the hospital. She comes out with us to have dinner one night, we all have dinner together, we're talking and knocking back tequilas and this and that, and we walk out and, just as you would kind of go "Oh you!" and give somebody a little a punch in the arm, she goes "Oh you!" and she reaches over and she bites me - on my arm. "Aaargh! "Aaargh!" Bites me! Bites me!

    So I go, she's like joking and I'm looking at her and I go, "I don't know man," and I'm thinking, "This could be rough, she seems interested," I go back and she's broken the skin and all that.

    So I go back, we get back, Bob and I go back, we go back to Hollywood and we go down to see the studio to talk to them about our scout and our location scout and what happened and about Debra Winger and all that, and we're saying the whole thing and we come to Debra Winger and I break down in tears and say, "I can't go to the jungle with her - she bit me on the arm! I said I can't do it!" "Now, Michael, calm down." "It's just not worth it! It's just too hard a picture to do." So they said, "Okay, all right.'"

    And fortunately one of the executives at that time was living in a condo and said "You know, this actress came up to me the other day asking for sugar, knocked on my door. And I just saw this movie she did called 'Body Heat.' Kathleen Turner, maybe we should think about her." And that was how Kathleen Turner came about.

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