[3] While drifting through Mexico, American engineer Joe Wiley meets well-heeled woman Liliana Holbrook, who sets him up with a room in an expensive hotel.

Holbrook agrees to help and they set off to return with a shipment of emeralds but are stopped by the same army patrol that killed her sister.

With the help of Wiley's old friend Claude, he and Miguel use cloudhopper one-man hot air balloons to land on the roof of the skyscraper undetected.

The navy commander does not find the emeralds, but inadvertently releases them into the sea while destroying illegal fishing bait.

Argenti and his men track Wiley and Holbrook to a secluded holiday home near Miami, where a violent confrontation ensues.

Holbook recovers and Wiley then takes delivery of a shipment of coffee from Colombia, inside which is concealed a package of emeralds from the rebels' plantation.

[4] In July 1978 David Niven Jr, who had just made Escape to Athena, arrived in Hollywood to commence pre production on the film adaptation.

[5] In October 1978 ITC announced the film was part of a slate of movies that also included Raise the Titanic, The Lone Ranger, The Chinese Bandit, Eleanor Roosevelt's Niggers, The Golden Gate, The Gemini Contenders, Trans-Siberian Express, and The Scarletti Inheritance.

Simmons says the original novel "was a huge book with about five different stories, any one of which would have been perfect action thriller, and the producers wanted to do the section set in Bolivia.

He says he worked on the script and the "set action pieces" for over a year and ITC "spent a million dollars looking for locations first in Spain, then in Mexico.

He also says Ryan O'Neal "found he couldn’t work with" Anne Archer as "they both had very different ideas about what kind of film we were making.

"[9] O'Neal almost drowned while filming a scene in the ocean in Las Hadas and he had to be rescued by stuntman Vic Armstrong.

[13] Anne Archer later got Ernest Day to direct a film she starred in and helped produce, Waltz Across Texas.