> 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.

> and ultimately it didn't make it in

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.

> Spielberg also pushes making her explicitly the instigator, perhaps also as a way of mitigating the “abusive creep” impression.

That doesn’t have a good ring to it either as pedophiles often claim they were in fact seduced by their victims.

> 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.