George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, and Larry Kasdan sat around talking through all the ideas they had for “Raiders of the Lost Ark”. They tape recorded their meetings. This is a transcription of those tape recordings.
I read it a long time ago, and the most interesting thing that stuck in my mind had to do with the headpiece with a crystal in the center that Indiana Jones had to obtain.
A quote from the movie itself to refresh memories: "And what you did was you take the staff to a special room in Tanis... a map room with a miniature of the city all laid out on the floor and if you put the staff in a certain place, at a certain time of day, the sun shone through [the crystal] and made a beam that came down on the floor... and gave you the exact location of the Well of the Souls. [Which is] where the Ark of the Covenant was kept."
Lucas, Spielberg, and Kasdan got into a discussion about why it had to be a physical thing like a crystal. It couldn't be a map, diagram, or document that gave the exact place to dig. Because valuable information like that, even if it were engraved or printed on a gold artifact, would have been photographed and distributed to museums around the world. Then Indiana wouldn't have needed to go to Nepal to retrieve the original. Hence the headpiece with a crystal -- which isn't easily copied.
There was so much attention to the logical flow of the story.
> There was so much attention to the logical flow of the story.
In some ways, but the most famous observation (that I've heard) about the first Indiana film is that the outcome -- all the bad guys getting fried when they open the ark -- would have also happened had Indiana done nothing.
I have seen this kind of criticism against several other movies (e.g. also much of "The Last Jedi", although I don't like that one for different reasons) and I don't get it. In real life, the things we do aren't part of a great scheme that always leads to some grand goal, sometimes they can be just inconsequential. I don't understand what's wrong with that happening in a movie, in fact I even find it refreshing when a movie forgoes the standard clichés where everything has to "fit" perfectly and if they focused on a seemingly irrelevant object in the initial parts of the movie, you know it has to play a role in the end.
The character did live experiences and learn, and we were entertained along the way.
It's bad storytelling. In stories you break up routines by introducing characters and problems which then eventually get reintegrated.
If a big part of the story cancels out during reintegration it doesn't feel right and the ending won't feel satisfying.
Obviously in this case the story doesn't get ruined, but in general it's a good idea to not introduce things into a story that won't be needed later on.
Big Trouble in Little China is an example where I think they did this intentionally and it worked; Kurt Russell’s character (arguably the main character) doesn’t actually do anything but witness the story, and everything would have turned out more or less the same if he hadn’t been there. In the case of Raiders, I don’t think it was intentional and it didn’t work (though like you say the rest of the movie was so strong and fun it doesn’t matter).
I do love the warehouse scene at the end, however, and think about it all the time.
I think the great Top Men comments is another excellent detail. When I was a kid I thought there might be some secret team that could work for the government and Indy would have to believe. But now that I’ve worked in research, it’s clear that whatever research field you work in, you absolutely know who the best is. We talked about the best Synthetic chemists all the time.
It would be next to impossible for Indy to not know those big names (in the same “notorious” way he knew of Belloq) so it really adds more to the government BS.
"Fast reflexes" wrapped up perfectly the movie, though. You see it at the start, you forget it because Burton is mostly useless, then bam, Chekhov's gun ending.
You're right - I should have said 'done nothing until that point'.
That leads to the question 'how could he have followed them?' but that's not a terribly difficult question to entertain, as there's several junctures in the story where he could have safely transitioned into an 'observe from a distance' mode.
Certainly once landing in Egypt that's the case, but even the early Nepal detour becomes optional if you assume the Nazis would have continued to excavate everywhere until they found the Well of the Souls (or lost the upcoming war before doing so).
From Egypt-arrival onwards, if he'd kept an eye on things, then followed the bad guys into the desert, kept his eyes shut (he's the only one to know that was important) he could have transported the ark away without interference once that all went down.
So now goint meta: is this actually a fault? I mean this flaw is only in hindsight, from the perspective of the character everything was done right (at the moment to moment decisions without the gift of clearvoyance). Maybe the criticism shd be more that opening the ark is actually a deus ex machina (literally and figuratively), since nothing else could have saved indy in that situation).
Yup, and as Al-Khwarizmi says in a sibling comment, we are entertained through the journey.
Whether it diminishes your entertainment, once you get to the end of the story, to realise almost everything was pointless
- in the fictional universe you just partook - well that's a question for you.
For me, it does not. But I also really enjoyed Joseph Heller's second novel.
A well-made film can also get away with one or two plot points that it doesn't bear to think too deeply about so long as the film as a whole is good.
The letters of transit signed by General De Gaulle[1] in Casablanca is a case in point. As someone once wrote, that would have been the equivalent of US forces being forced to accept letters of transit signed by Osama bin Laden.
[1]Maybe Peter Lorre actually says another name which would make more sense but De Gaulle is the general assumption.
The Nazis may never have found the headpiece if they hadn't followed Indy. That's his primary contribution. He clearly knew exactly where Marion was, even though he bullshitted the spooks about it. So he was careful with that information, and it's not likely anyone else would know.
Here's a question: how do we know those were government spooks at all? Maybe they were Nazis trying to setup Indy just so that they could follow him :D
One of the most famous scenes - positioning the artifact at just the right moment to reflect the rays of sun to reveal... - straight out of the 1954 movie.
Secret of the Incas was filmed on location in Cusco, before it was a tourist destination. The city is raw, colorful, a snapshot in time. The script is full of humorous sarcasm, with an interesting (but fairly slow) story, based in fact.
As for Charlton Heston's character? The prototype for Indiana Jones: fedora hat, leather jacket, pistol, mannerisms...
I think that was intentional as they really wanted to reach back into the golden age of Hollywood as something of a reaction to the “new Hollywood” styles of the 1970’s.
Interesting it was filmed on location way back then as that must have been very expensive and difficult with the tech they had in the 50’s.
I'm pretty sure that Secret of the Incas didn't invent that trope, although it may be the inspiration for Raiders. Journey to the Center of the Earth also has a scene involving standing at the correct place at the correct time for the sun's rays to cast a shadow in the correct place, and I'm sure it's even older than that.
If you're referring to the version of Journey to the Center of the Earth featuring James Mason, that came out in 1959, five years after Secret of the Incas. Not sure if that scene was included in Verne's original 1864 novel.
What do you know, it has a TV Tropes page[0]. Journey to the Center of the Earth does seem to be the oldest thing on there, after all - not that TV Tropes is necessarily comprehensive.
As I understand it, the provenance of the transcript itself isn't really known. It was eventually acknowledged by one of the participants (Kasdan, I think).
Dunno why whoever has the recording hasn't released it, but I'd personally guess they just haven't bothered trying to get the permission from everyone involved, which may involve studios too, or at least they think it might.
Lucas seems like the well-spring of ideas here. He goes on long rambles, almost free-associating, and then Kasdan or Spielberg will have a one sentence reply. And then another rant. It's like they're providing minor course corrections while he generates ideas and ideas and ideas...
Anyone familiar with writing rooms or the like, is this asymmetrical pattern common?
I've participated in storyboard brainstorm sessions (more on the design/drawing side) and the kind of asymmetrical energy you're talking about definitely exists. Largely depends on the personalities in the room - if there's one particularly "extrovert" personality that tends to think out loud, the others tend to shift into an editor mindset.
It sounds like Lucas has been thinking about this for a long time and has already worked on it a little with others + done a little research, whereas the idea is newer to the others.
Lucas had been thinking about it for a while. His initial premise was some kind of Archeologist James Bond type action/adventure film that pays homage to the Saturday matinee cliffhanger serials Lucas enjoyed as a youngster.
I really miss the sense of world-spanning (and era-spanning) adventure that Indiana Jones had (which culminated in the epic game Fate of Atlantis that sorely deserves a movie more than anything).
Has anyone found anything relatively recent which generated the same feeling for you?
Yup that sense, which existed when I was younger has evaporated. Adventure overload I guess.
I vaguely remember reading a while back Spielberg wanted to go back to that theme for the 5th Indy movie (currently in production) but Ford wanted something new and Spielberg dropped out as Director.
I know what you mean. Same with James Bond, when the first books and even movies came out such travel and places were almost inaccessible to almost everyone. Just the places alone were so exotic and mysterious. It’s a different world now.
L — I like it if they already had a relationship at one point. Because then you don't have
to build it.
G — I was thinking that this old guy could have been his mentor. He could have known
this little girl when she was just a kid. Had an affair with her when she was eleven.
L — And he was forty-two.
G — He hasn't seen her in twelve years. Now she's twenty-two. It's a real strange
relationship.
S — She had better be older than twenty-two.
G — He's thirty-five, and he knew her ten years ago when he was twenty-five and she
was only twelve.
G — It would be amusing to make her slightly young at the time.
S — And promiscuous. She came onto him.
G — Fifteen is right on the edge. I know it's an outrageous idea, but it is interesting.
Once she's sixteen or seventeen it's not interesting anymore. But if she was fifteen and
he was twenty-five and they actually had an affair the last time they met. And she was
madly in love with him and he...
Is there actually controversy here, or is it some twitter rage-baiting?
I see no news articles about it, it was more than 40 years ago (the speaker has been relegated to a rightholder, no longer making film), and it was stopped in the spitballing stage of the (bad) idea. Does anyone care?
There were LOTS of news articles about it when the transcript first came out a few years ago. Just Google "raiders of the lost ark transcript controversy"
Here's why people care: It surprised a lot of people how casually these 3 famous intelligent creative people were talking about making their main character an abusive creep. Except...they didn't think it would make him an abusive creep. This tells you something about the normalization of the idea of a 25-year old man sleeping with a twelve year old girl. Either by the parties involved or their perception of the audience.
By modern sensibilities, this would be an irredeemable character trait. Does that say something about how things have changed in the last 40 years? Is that worth acknowledging? etc.
> Here's why people care: It surprised a lot of people how casually these 3 famous intelligent creative people were talking about making their main character an abusive creep. Except...they didn't think it would make him an abusive creep.
Lucas doesn't. Both Kasdan and Spielberg seem to push back (lightly, but ina collaborative creative environment, that's what you do if possible, and ultimately it didn't make it in) with Lucas’ suggested age (and Lucas keeps pushing the really young age).
Spielberg also pushes making her explicitly the instigator, perhaps also as a way of mitigating the “abusive creep” impression.
> Does that say something about how things have changed in the last 40 years?
Does it? I mean, without a broad sample of similar writers rooms forty years ago and today, I don't think we know: (1) that that kind of idea got tossed around and cut more than than today, or (2) that when it came up, the discussion was much different then than today.
Saying it says something about a change requires extrapolating a lot about 40 years ago from one data point, and then extrapolating as much about today from no equivalent data points. Most likely, its just spinning the story of this discussion into a preconceived narrative of what the difference is, rather than really reasoning from it at all.
Well, it's clear from the movie Marion was very young when they had an affair. We don't know exactly how old, but she says, "it was wrong, and you knew it" and "I was a child".
I love the movie. This was one of his big flaws. He's not supposed to be a moral paragon - he was a grave robber and antiquities trafficker, after all.
Edit: Supposedly, the actual script says she was 25 when they meet again, which would have made her 15 at the time.
It's ambiguous in the film. Karen Allen was 30 when Raiders was made so we could be talking college age which still fits with the dialogue for an affair with a 10+ year older man at that age.
Of course, it's not really remarkable in the film because, in addition to both of them being 10 years older, it's very much a norm in Hollywood to have younger (so long as not too young) women and older men.
> That doesn’t have a good ring to it either as pedophiles often claim they were in fact seduced by their victims.
Guilty people often claim things that would be mitigating or exonerating if true; that doesn't make it a “bad ring” to have fiction in which the mitigating or exonerating thing is true. (And, just to be clear, what Spielberg was suggesting would, IMO, only be modestly mitigating, and only even that in combination with Spielberg’s pushback on age, and even then not really appropriate background for with the rest of the film. But it was definitely reeling things back from what Lucas was suggesting.)
The notion that victims of sexual assault are somehow themselves to blame is fairly widespread and not restricted to this specific topic. That has been suggested about rape victims for millennia and is even now specifically protested against (I just now saw a postcard in a coffee shop advertising an upcoming “slut walk” in Denver to address this issue). To me, the societal stays of the notion makes the aforementioned pedophile’s claim different than a criminal’s usual denials. For them to put that into the movie would serve to legitimize the notion that adolescents seduce grown men, which seems rather non-progressive.
I wish I could remember where I heard about it--it may have been gossip back when I worked in a writers room on the Warner Brothers lot more than a decade ago--but when I saw this posted just now I remembered hearing about this section and went looking for it. I didn't go looking for something controversial just to rage bait, I already knew about it, for whatever that's worth.
No, dude. Don't wave off entirely valid concerns as "twitter rage-baiting".
Here's three men who have had an immense impact on popular culture having a casual chat about statutory rape and a lot of racist stereotypes, and no one raises an objection. They didn't record this in the 1830s or the 1930s. It was 1978.
I've always loved their work, but wow, this is disappointing to read.
It's interesting how much of Temple of Doom was actually pieced together out of deleted scenes from Raiders. In a few places you can actually see glimpses of Last Crusade in this.
Count the cliff hangers and make the characters interesting. No wonder the story is meaningless dribble that goes nowhere and means nothing. The conception was never anything more than a series of empty thrills disconnected from deeper meaning. The ending was just a way of cementing that the story didn't actually amount to anything or make any real statement. Great that this entertains some people, but also notable that watching this film is one of the least rewarding experiences I have ever had.
I mean the story of Indiana Jones 1 is about the power of religious symbolism, nostalgia , history in general. It's not just about the actions of the plot but about how we see that era the film is set.
Nazis aim to use the Ark for power, Indy wants to put in a museum, ultimately it ends up hidden again in a warehouse. I mean seems pretty meaningful statement about how knowledge is used and controlled.
I read it a long time ago, and the most interesting thing that stuck in my mind had to do with the headpiece with a crystal in the center that Indiana Jones had to obtain.
A quote from the movie itself to refresh memories: "And what you did was you take the staff to a special room in Tanis... a map room with a miniature of the city all laid out on the floor and if you put the staff in a certain place, at a certain time of day, the sun shone through [the crystal] and made a beam that came down on the floor... and gave you the exact location of the Well of the Souls. [Which is] where the Ark of the Covenant was kept."
Lucas, Spielberg, and Kasdan got into a discussion about why it had to be a physical thing like a crystal. It couldn't be a map, diagram, or document that gave the exact place to dig. Because valuable information like that, even if it were engraved or printed on a gold artifact, would have been photographed and distributed to museums around the world. Then Indiana wouldn't have needed to go to Nepal to retrieve the original. Hence the headpiece with a crystal -- which isn't easily copied.
There was so much attention to the logical flow of the story.