Tales From Development Hell (15 page)

“I was done with the Indiana Jones series, and Harrison got very proactive with both George and [me] and said, ‘I want to play Indy one more time.’ So he started this. Blame him.”

— Steven Spielberg

W
hen
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
was released in 1989, director Steven Spielberg, producer George Lucas and actor Harrison Ford insisted that after three blockbusting adventures — two of them in the all-time box office top ten — the whip-cracking archaeologist Dr Henry ‘Indiana’ Jones Jr was hanging up his battered fedora for good;
The Last Crusade
would also be Indy’s last adventure. “There was a reason I invented the shot of Harrison Ford riding a horse into the sunset,” said Spielberg, “because I thought that brought the curtain down on the trilogy.”

Fans continued to pester the triumvirate about the possibility of another sequel though, and in 1994, at a Venice Film Festival press conference, Harrison Ford let slip that he was “reading scripts” for a fourth Indy film — and the rumours began. Although it would be another fourteen years before ideas coalesced, schedules aligned and enthusiasm returned to make
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
in 2007/2008, the intervening period saw no shortage of proposed storylines and scripts for the fourth film, all purporting to be the real ‘Indy IV’.

Lucas first dreamed up the character of Indiana Jones in 1973, four years before
Star Wars
made movie history. Named after Lucas’ enormous malamute
dog (also the inspiration for Chewbacca), ’Indiana’ Smith was conceived as an archaeologist-adventurer who used the spoils of his relic hunting expeditions to finance a lavish playboy lifestyle. Although Indy’s rough-around-the-edges appeal also channelled everyone from Cary Grant to Humphrey Bogart, Indy had a quality seldom found in his silver screen forebears: he was generally either out of his depth, or deep in trouble. “Indy was always in over his head,” Lucas noted. “He wasn’t up to what he was supposed to be, to be what the old classic Republic serial hero was.”

Lucas fleshed out the idea with his friend and fellow filmmaker Philip Kaufman, who would later direct an update of ’50s sci-fi classic
Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
“He got very excited about it,” Lucas recalled, “and we started working on it for three or four weeks. He had the idea of making the supernatural, sacred object that we were looking for the Ark of the Covenant. Then Phil went off to work on a Clint Eastwood movie,” he added, referring to Kaufman’s script for the 1976 Western,
The Outlaw Josey Wales,
“so I put it back on the shelf and let it gather some more dust. And then I shot
Star
Wars.”

It was while Lucas and Spielberg were holidaying in Hawaii, to escape the furore of
Star Wars’
opening weekend, that Lucas first mentioned his idea to his friend. “I said, ‘I’ve always wanted to direct a James Bond picture,’” Spielberg recalled, “and George said, ‘I have a better idea, called
Raiders of the Lost Ark.’”
Spielberg, who, like Lucas, grew up on swashbuckling adventure serials, immediately responded to the tales of derring-do. “I told him how it was about an archaeologist,” said Lucas, “and how it was like a Saturday matinee serial, and he got in one mess after another, and he said, ‘Fantastic. Let’s do this.’” There was only one thing Spielberg didn’t like: the name, ‘Indiana’ Smith. “I said, ‘All right, what if we called him ‘Indiana’ Jones.’ He said, “Okay, that’s fine.’”

Next, they needed a writer to turn their story outline into a fully-fledged first draft. Spielberg had just optioned
Continental Divide,
a script by a young writer named Lawrence Kasdan, whom he felt might be suitable for the job. Three days were spent outlining the character, the plot and the set pieces, the results of which, Kasdan has said, closely resemble the final film. “Larry added so much wit and humour, and brought in such a 1930s Preston Sturges meets Michael Curtiz [vibe],” Spielberg recalled. “Larry layered it and flavoured it and brought it to life.”

By now, the sheen of Spielberg’s first two theatrical blockbusters,
Jaws
and
Close Encounters of the Third Kind,
had been tarnished somewhat by the critical and commercial failure of
1941
, and the director saw
Raiders of the Lost Ark
as
the perfect comeback. “I was really tired when
1941
came out,” he told
Empire
in 2006, the 25th anniversary of
Raiders’
release. “I didn’t know how to take a punch, and I kind of took the sting of all the criticism and verbal abuse the movie was receiving. I wanted to go back to work and make a movie that didn’t take 178 days and go so far over budget. I wanted to have fun.” But if Spielberg and Lucas thought the combined clout of
Star Wars
and
Jaws
was enough to guarantee a green-light for their $20 million action-adventure, they were wrong:
Raiders of the Lost Ark
was turned down by every studio in Hollywood, before Paramount decided to give it the go-ahead. Now all they needed was a leading man.

Spielberg’s first suggestion was Harrison Ford, a supporting actor in two of Lucas’ earlier films,
American Graffiti
and
Star Wars.
Lucas, however, resisted. “I didn’t want him to be my Bobby De Niro, where he was in every one of my movies,” he explained, referring to Martin Scorsese’s long-term partnership with the star of
Mean Streets, Taxi Driver
and
Raging Bull.
After testing Tim Matheson, Peter Coyote and others, it was Tom Selleck’s screen test (with future
Blade Runner
actress Sean Young) that convinced Lucas and Spielberg they found their man. Unfortunately, Selleck was committed to a TV show,
Magnum P.I.,
and would not be available to shoot Raiders. “I said, ‘What will we do now?’” Lucas recalled. “Steve said, ‘What about Harrison?”

Raiders of the Lost Ark
opened in US cinemas on 21 June 1981, instantly making stars of both Harrison Ford and Indiana Jones. When the film grossed $242 million in the US, a total of $432 million worldwide (equivalent to over $1 billion in today’s box office), and was nominated for eight Academy Awards, it was clear that Indy would be back. Sure enough,
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
and
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
appeared in 1984 and 1989 respectively, grossing $348 million and $418 million worldwide. A television series,
The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles,
followed in 1992, which spanned Indy’s life from age ten, travelling with his father, to ninety-three — with an elderly, one-eyed Indy relating stories from his younger days at the beginning of each new episode. (Except for 1993’s
Young Indiana Jones and the Mystery of the Blues,
which featured a cameo from Harrison Ford, who took time off from filming
The Fugitive
to appear as a bearded, fifty year-old Indy in the story’s framing sequence.)

On 11 November 1994, five years after
The Last Crusade
and a few weeks after Harrison Ford set the Indy IV ball rolling at the Venice Film Festival, a story appeared in UK tabloid
The Daily Mail
claiming that
Speed
star Sandra Bullock would play Indy’s “sparky” sidekick in the fourth installment of
the franchise, entitled
Indiana Jones and the Lost Continent.
According to the article, which appeared in Baz Bamigboye’s column under the headline “From
Speed
to Ford Escort”,
The Lost Continent
begins as one of Indy’s students (Bullock) uncovers an ancient artefact which she believes holds a clue to the whereabouts of the lost continent of Atlantis. “When Jones gets wind of his student’s find, he prepares to set off on one last quest,” the story continued. “However, his plans are scuppered since the girl refuses to allow him to go along without her. The lost continent and its otherworldly inhabitants are ultimately discovered in an air pocket beneath the ocean bed, just as the nuclear testing begins on Bikini Atoll, threatening the lost tribe of Atlantis with total extinction.”

Nothing further surfaced with regard to this potential storyline — which bore a passing resemblance to a 1992 computer game,
Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis
— and it has since been revealed as the work of a highly-paid hoaxer who bamboozled Bamigboye into thinking it was the real deal. “Baz Bamigboye was hungry for stories at the time,” admits the story’s anonymous source. “I’d broken a story about Pierce Brosnan being cast as James Bond, and ever since then, Baz had been hounding me for stories. So finally, I gave him one — mainly to prove to my mum that most of the stories in the
Mail
are made up.”

On 21 March 1995,
Variety
reported that a fourth installment was unlikely to happen any time soon: “While Nazis and various cultists couldn’t stop Indy, the lack of a suitable script has pushed back the fourth installment in the series for the time being. Ford, director Steven Spielberg and producer George Lucas hoped to make the Indy pic the actor’s next project after
Sabrina
for Sydney Pollack. They turned loose screenwriter Jeb Stuart on a story conceived by Lucas. Stuart... has just turned in his second draft. Early indications are more work is needed [on the script].” Around the same time,
The Last Crusade
screenwriter Jeffrey Boam privately admitted to having been asked to write a script, with subsequent rumours suggesting that the story concerned an attempt to foil a Soviet plot to establish a missile base on the moon, or had something to do with the UFO crash at Roswell, New Mexico — possibly both. Although this was the first indication that aliens might have something to do with the fourth film, no story details were given when the Lucasfilm Fan Club confirmed to its members that Boam, who wrote several Indiana Jones-style set pieces into his script for
The Phantom,
was working on a story that Lucas reportedly liked.

Besides, Spielberg — who had already explored extra-terrestrials in
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
and
E.T.
— was cooling on the idea of Indy vs aliens.
“I said, ‘George, I don’t want to do any more aliens.’ But George insisted, he said ‘This’ll be like one of those 1950s B-movies
Earth vs The Flying Saucers.’”
“It was the idea of taking the genre from the adventure serials of the 1930s to the science fiction B-pictures of the 1950s,” Lucas explained. “I said if we move the whole thing into the fifties, which would be age-appropriate for Harrison, that would be the cinematic equivalent.” When, in 1994, Roland Emmerich’s
Independence Day,
an action-adventure spectacle based around an alien invasion, became a global success, Spielberg felt that the idea of ‘Indy vs The Flying Saucers’ had run out of mileage. “I called George up and said, ‘Hey this movie’s really a lot of fun, it’s brilliantly directed by Roland Emmerich, it’s just got everything you want in a movie, it’s got humour, it’s got drama. We can’t do aliens!’” Lucas agreed — up to a point. “I thought, maybe I can do ‘ancient civilizations developed by aliens’ without flying saucers, and see if that might work,” he said, alluding to ground covered in Erich von Däniken’s 1971 bestseller
Chariots of the Gods,
and later by Emmerich’s
StarGate.
Thus, the extra-terrestrials of early Indy IV treatments became “inter-dimensional beings” that merely
looked
like aliens, and flew in what looked suspiciously like spacecraft — one of which crashed in Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947.

On 29 May 1996, a script entitled
Indiana Jones and the Sons of Darkness
and credited to Boam (from a story by George Lucas) appeared on the Internet, supposedly posted by a courier who claimed to have lifted it from Lucasfilm’s offices in San Francisco. The script concerned a race by Indy (complete with wife and daughter) to beat the Russians to the remnants of Noah’s Ark — a Judeo-Christian artefact which fit nicely into the pattern (Ark of the Covenant, Holy Grail) of previous Indy films, but which had already been the focus of a Lucasfilm-approved novel,
Indiana Jones and the Genesis Deluge,
set twenty years before (and, therefore, canonically incompatible with) the events of the script. A day after its initial posting, the script was removed from the site at the specific request of Lucasfilm Ltd — an occurrence that did nothing to stem the tide of conspiracy theories, since the company would have wanted the script removed whether it was genuine or not. Nevertheless, after a week of frenzied newsgroup activity, guesswork and/or detective work on behalf of Indy fans, a Lucasfilm spokesperson confirmed to America Online that the script was a work of copyright-violating fan fiction. It would be a further four months before the true story behind the fake script emerged, when ambitious Indy fan and aspiring screenwriter Robert Smith owned up to writing the bogus
Sons of Darkness
script and posting it to the Internet, having failed to submit it to Lucasfilm through legitimate channels.

Talking to Charles Deemer of the Internet Screenwriters Network, Smith admitted that he had sent the 166-page script to an agency that initially promised to submit it to Lucasfilm, but then went back on its word. Smith got no further when he called to plead his case to Lucasfilm itself — unsurprising, since no legitimate production company accepts unsolicited material. “About a year later it occurred to me to try and get Lucasfilm’s attention by posting my Indy script on the Internet,” Smith continued. “I knew I’d have to take a radical approach, so I concocted a courier theft story and posted it to all the film discussion groups. In a matter of days the site ‘hit’ counter jumped from 0 to 300 and snowballed from there on.” A week later, Smith received his first ‘cease and desist’ order by e-mail. “I got Lucasfilm’s attention, but I felt it wasn’t enough. So with the help of some brave friends of mine, we moved the script to a new site and set up a comments page where readers of the script could leave their two cents’ worth. At the same time, the Harrison Ford and Steven Spielberg news groups were all abuzz with chatter of the stolen script posted on the net.”