Leaked transcript of Raiders of the Lost Ark story-meeting

Here's a leaked, 125-page transcript of the brainstorming session that begat Raiders of the Lost Arc, a sit-down in 1978 with Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, and Lawrence Kasdan. Spielberg and Lucas veritably fizz with ideas.

G — What can he chase them with? What if he jumps on a camel?

S — I love it. It's a great idea. There's never been a camel chase before.

L — Is this camel going to chase a car?

S — You know how fast a camel can run? Not only that, he can jump over vegetable carts and things. It could be a funny chase that ends in tragedy. You're laughing your head off and suddenly, "My God, she's dead..."

S — We still have the big fight in the moving truck to do. And now we have a camel chase.

G — We've added another million dollars.

S — Not really. How much trouble can a camel be?

The “Raiders” Story Conference (via Waxy)

[#1 posted by The Lizardman , March 10, 2009 12:30 AM]

"S — Not really. How much trouble can a camel be?"

Now there is a line that is just waiting to come back and bite you in the ass

[#2 posted by Lea Hernandez , March 10, 2009 12:44 AM]

Or spit in your face.

[#3 posted by Anonymous , March 10, 2009 1:15 AM]

Am i the only one who thinks it's weird that Speilberg and Lucas both thought it was a good idea to have him be a pedophile? They said it made it interesting.

[#4 posted by codereduk , March 10, 2009 2:00 AM]

What's interesting about these is how much vibrant and interesting input is given by George Lucas. He basically dominates a lot of the conversation, but with really solid ideas.

God, where was THAT George Lucas when they were making Indy 4?

[#5 posted by Crispinus211 , March 10, 2009 2:25 AM]

Uh, it's "Ark," right? (Not Arkwright.) Unless you mean a story arc?

[#6 posted by Geoffrey Sperl , March 10, 2009 5:21 AM]

@CRISPINUS211: I thought Cory was joking, too... until I read the actual post. I think Daylight Saving Time has found another victim.

[#7 posted by urshrew , March 10, 2009 6:22 AM]

@#3 codereduk

Yeah, what the hell? I sometimes think that Patton Oswalt is right, we've been sucked into the evil alternate universe. Spock has a goatee, George Bush ruled for 8 years, and George Lucas had nothing but bad ideas.

[#8 posted by Anonymous , March 10, 2009 6:59 AM]

@3: "God, where was THAT George Lucas when they were making Indy 4?"

Page 29 of the transcript, Lucas about the Ark of the Covenant. Emphasis mine:

"The Israelis used to set up these tents and they would talk to God and God would tell them what to do. And then they would march with it in front of their army. The other Armies would be destroyed. Our idea was that there must actually be some kind of super high-powered radio from one of Erick Von Daniken's flying saucers. The fact that it's electrical charges makes it vaguely believable."

Oh, there's THAT George Lucas.

I also like how Lucas goes on a 15-page ramble about the temple's traps, and then Spielberg upstages him even then with the rolling-boulder trap in one paragraph. And how Lucas wants Indy to know Kung Fu, on which Spielberg isn't too keen. And how Lucas names him "Indiana Smith," and Spielberg suggests "Jones."

Lucas was an idea machine, but Spielberg at his prime was the only person who knew when to turn the damn machine off.

This talk about "Raiders" was back when the only thing Lucas had under his belt was the first Star Wars, but Spielberg was hot off "Jaws" and either about to release or had just released "Close Encounters of the Third Kind". Lucas was a wunderkind, but Spielberg was the real deal. Larry Kasden, the third person in the room, was going to get the "Empire Strikes Back" job for his treatment of the script, which would excise a bunch of other Lucas ideas (the Chinese are allied with Germans and steal the Ark, the love interest is a Nazi double agent, Indy knows kung fu).

By Indy 4, Spielberg was still a creative heavyweight, but Lucas was a multi-billionaire whose ego had surpassed his talent. Kasden was out of the Lucasfilm picture after "Jedi". What you saw in Indy 4 was the same Lucas a little more unhinged, but more importantly, in absolute control and unswayable.

[#9 posted by godfathersoul , March 10, 2009 7:32 AM]

OK, and this past time what -

"Ok, shia is in the tree. then what?"

"well, monkeys live in trees!"

"cool the monkey will join him. They'll teach him how to swing in the trees."

it'll be like tarzan.

only, for kids. and then the monkeys will fuck up the bad guys.

why and how do they teach shia?

who cares why? No one will be asking why. On the one hand people will be laughing and on the other hand they'll be like 'o god this is terrible'.

[#10 posted by nanuq , March 10, 2009 8:11 AM]

"God, where was THAT George Lucas when they were making Indy 4?"

That's just the fake George Lucas they keep for public appearances. The REAL George Lucas was accidentally sealed in carbonite during the making of The Empire Strikes Back.

[#11 posted by Zan , March 10, 2009 8:29 AM]

The most disturbing part is that George Lucas wanted Marion to be ELEVEN when she and Indy had an affair. Speilburg was only able to talk him up to her being 15 after a bit of wrangling:

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. 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...

S — She has pictures of him.

[#12 posted by nutbastard , March 10, 2009 8:52 AM]

"Once she's sixteen or seventeen it's not interesting anymore"

Amen.

[#13 posted by Zan , March 10, 2009 8:53 AM]

The other interesting thing is that George Lucas keeps referring to writing the opening scene as building a "Disneyland ride", which is appropriate since the arguably best ride at Disneyland is currently the Indiana Jones Adventure.

S — I would just love to see the guys walking in and there's a whole pile of skeletons, but they're like cardboard, completely flattened, really completely flat. They know that something around here is going to squish them. They don't know what's causing it, but something if they walk the wrong way is going to come out and make them pancakes. The piece should be like a real, horror ride, like a Disneyland ride. Once you're committed to going into that cave, there's seismic rumblings all the time and there's stalagmites and things going drip, drip.. It's going to really be a sound experience going through that cave. There's nothing more terrifying than skeletons.

G — There's also things like spiders, snakes. It's very dark, and all you have to do is cut to a snake slithering across the ground, and he's walking through. You never know when a snake's going to be curled up on his leg. As he walks through the dark there's tarantulas all around him. That kind of stuff. You don't know what's going to happen.

S — This is the first scene in the movie. This scene should get at least four major screams. The audience won't trust anyone after that. They won't trust the film.

G — There's also the thing you can do which is your famous "Jaws", or what I call the hand on the shoulder trick, which is not only skeletons, but we can have skeletons-that aren't that old, they just have drawn skin all over them, that are lurking in the shadows.

S — Falling into their arms. A skeleton comes out of the cobwebs, and just embraces the guy. The guy eases him to the ground.

G — At the more tense moments in that whole thing.
We'll work on that more specifically. Anyway, he goes through a series of really spooky scary things.

S — What we're just doing here, really, is designing a ride at Disneyland.

[#14 posted by Vanwall , March 10, 2009 9:21 AM]

I find it interesting that they came up with a cartoony version of Charlton Heston's Harry Steele, from "Secret of the Incas", for Indy. The look especially, but the professional tomb-raider lifestyle, and even the light trick inside the tomb, were lifted wholesale.

[#15 posted by codereduk , March 10, 2009 9:23 AM]

nanuq@#8

I'm sure that happened to Paul McCartney too, around 1972 or so.

Damn you, carbonite freezing!

[#16 posted by Anonymous , March 10, 2009 10:08 AM]

I just like the more "Northrop-y" flying wing in the art. It has the propellers of a xb-35 and the fins of a Yb-49. And tires off of a truck for some, strange reason...

[#17 posted by nehpetsE , March 10, 2009 10:09 AM]

re: Zan

I was pretty disturbed by marion being 11 too.

A while back back Crispin Glover wrote an essay questioning whether Spielberg was a pedophile.

This transcript would seem to imply that Lucas is part of the same club

[#18 posted by Anonymous , March 10, 2009 10:24 AM]

What does it mean if you actually creep out Crispin Glover?

[#19 posted by Falcon_Seven , March 10, 2009 11:26 AM]

The illustrations in the article have convinced me that IJATROTLA would have been much more interesting had it been an animated film with the style portrayed in those scenes.

[#20 posted by arkizzle , March 10, 2009 11:36 AM]

Nehpetse, that's pretty far fetched (that's me being polite).

They were exploring ideas and brainstorming. Trying to make the ages fit, playing with timelines and discussing the audience reactions to differing situations.

Maybe you don't like the conclusions, but don't call Lucas a pedo based on that. Was Vladimir Nabokov a pedo? Seems entirely more likely, based on your assessment.

[#21 posted by Anonymous , March 10, 2009 12:35 PM]

@18

It doesn't change the fact that they wanted Indiana Jones to be a pedophile, which is just weird. I'm hoping they were just joking. Like they realized the ages didn't match and they were joking about it being more interesting. It's hard to tell what the tone of what they were saying was.

[#22 posted by Johnny Cat , March 10, 2009 1:11 PM]

Well, I know what I'll be reading tonight.

[#23 posted by Cowboyshoe , March 10, 2009 9:02 PM]

I like the quote from the first page,
"G - The trouble with cliffhangers is, you get somebody into something, you sort of have to get them out in a plausible way. A believable way anyway.That's another important concept of the movie -- that it be totally believable."

Cut to 30 years later...

"G - So when the Soviet psychic dominatrix places the crystal skull back onto the skeleton of the inter-dimensional alien he grows his skin back and shoots lasers into her eyes...

S - Flames.

G - Whatever. My point is that's when they escape."