Moriarty’s One Thing I Love Today! THE COMPLETE MAKING OF INDIANA JONES!

Hey, everyone. “Moriarty” here. Quint shames me with his column. Point taken.

I know I’ve taken some time off from this column just as I got it up and running and working well, but sometimes that’s just how things stack up. After the intense creative process (which is actually ongoing as we wrassle with casting issues) on BAT OUT OF HELL, I needed to take a little time to recharge the batteries. One good thing about that is I’ve found all sorts of great stuff to feature in the column in the weeks ahead. To kick things off again, let’s talk a little more about Indiana Jones. After all, he’s been on everyone’s mind this month, and people have been watching the first three films again. I assume it’s no accident that Del Rey published THE COMPLETE MAKING OF INDIANA JONES this month. What’s interesting is just how much this new book reaffirms my love for RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK and my varying degrees of annoyance with every single one of the Indy sequels. J.W. Rinzler wrote that awesome MAKING OF STAR WARS book that I reviewed last year, so it’s not a shock that he managed to turn this accounting of every detail of the making of these films into a gripping and entertaining narrative. What did surprise me is how this is actually a collaboration with Laurent Bouzereau, who has become Spielberg’s video documentarian of choice. Bouzereau is, of course, the author of THE ANNOTATED SCREENPLAYS, one of the best archival books about the development process that led to the STAR WARS we all know and recognize now. Putting these two guys together to trace the evolution of Indiana Jones as a character seems like a pretty sure bet for a great book. And... it is. Buy it for the first 150 pages alone. It’s a day by day, blow by blow accounting of the making of RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK, and it is a portrait of two friends who had a big crazy idea that turned to be the greatest adventure movie ever made. It’s better than fiction. See, I don’t think nostalgia is an inherently evil thing in pop culture. For example, I spent yesterday afternoon on the set of LAND OF THE LOST, and I’m not going to downplay the nostalgic rush I got out of meeting Sid and Marty Krofft and standing in the middle of a group of Sleestaks. So no matter how much I may intellectually rail against the way nostalgia is eating the film industry, I understand some of the impulse. What made RAIDERS different, and the reason you can’t lump it in with the lazy remakes and reboots that clog our cinemas right now, is that Lucas and Spielberg took their nostalgia for things like 1930s adventure serials and James Bond films and instead of just writing fan-fiction or waiting until they got the rights to do some official remake, they took that energy and that enthusiasm, and they channeled it into an original creation. It’s the same sort of giddy invention that fueled the first STAR WARS film by Lucas, that same drive to somehow get these ideas that had been inspired by their own early flirtations with film and wrestle them up onto the screen. These days, the thing that depresses me most is seeing how many people spend massive amounts of time and energy creating fan films that are all about someone else’s copyright. If those same fans took that same energy and passion and poured it into telling stories of their own creation that still tapped into those same fun types of iconography, who knows what the blockbuster landscape might look like? Because maybe those original shorts, even if they are cheap and handmade, would be enough to convince some studio to take a chance on one of those original voices. As it is, there aren’t a lot of development execs chomping at the bit to sort through hundreds of hundreds of hours of bad lightsaber duels on the off-chance that there’s a great natural filmmaker waiting to be discovered. So all of that energy is expended on doing something someone else already did instead of creating something new. If Lucas and Spielberg had done that, we would have never had Indiana Jones. Another reason I think this book is not just a fun read but an essential read for people actually working in the industry is because it serves as such a potent reminder of just how economically responsible RAIDERS was. $22,805,000. All in. Even with inflation, that’s a remarkable figure, due in no small part to the idea that Lucas and Spielberg were partnered with the studio on this one, and they all had something to prove. Money’s a funny thing in Hollywood. The more of it you have, the less problems you have on-set, but as I get older and as I spend more time making films and on other people’s sets and as I see certain patterns play themselves out over and over, I’ve realized something: problems are your friends. Some of the greatest moments in our favorite films were the result of someone having to creatively solve some problem on-set. Obviously one of the greatest moments in RAIDERS is the Cairo swordsman scene, where Indy just shrugs the guy off with a single gunshot. I’ve heard several stories about the evolution of that moment, but the version here in this book seems to be the most carefully researched and definitive version of how that scene came to be. What I never realized is that they actually completed the entire swordsman fight on location and that Michael Kahn and George Lucas actually cut the fight together for the film. It came down to a test screening to convince Lucas that the version with the single gunshot was the one audiences preferred. That revelation flies in the face of every story I’d heard about the making of this film, and there are plenty more like it throughout the book. I would love to see the teaser trailer they made that they played a few times at the Chinese Theater during the Christmas season in 1980, then never used again. There’s so much ephemera connected with the production of the film that I’ve never laid eyes on, and I say that as a hardcore fan of the film from the day of release. I read every magazine back then, every book, every anything that had to do with RAIDERS. And even so, there’s plenty here that’s brand new. I really do envy Rinzler and Bouzereau and all the guys who have access to the archives as they put together these amazing books that have been coming out over the last few years. And even though I have problems with each of the Indy sequels as movies, I also enjoy them as Indiana Jones movies. The character is fun. Period. I like watching Harrison Ford put through the wringer and when the films do work, they are like nothing else. The rest of the book traces the stutter-start development process on each of the sequel scripts, and you can see how, since day one, George Lucas has been reluctant to throw an idea away. He is the original recycler, holding on to set pieces, locations, supporting characters, or action gags for years or even decades. Reading about how DOOM or CRUSADE came to be makes me appreciate them more. I wish the book actually stopped at CRUSADE, with an eventual update about CRYSTAL SKULL coming only after some time had passed, so it could be set into context with some clarity. After all, there's nothing here really regarding YOUNG INDIANA JONES, so the title's already not quite accurate. Right now, I’ve read a lot of radical sound and fury about CRYSTAL SKULL online and in print, both pro and con, and I think some distance would benefit anything written about the movie by anyone. That’s why the material on RAIDERS, DOOM, and CRUSADE is so great... it’s had time to marinate. People have had time to reflect on these events. The new interviews that Bouzereau did are interesting because he’s managed to really dig deep into the movies, asking people about things that a real fan would want to know. That’s why there are so many great questions answered throughout, so many great stories told. Time’s passed, and whatever you think of the Indy films, you’ve had time to live with them. They are familiar. CRYSTAL SKULL, love it or hate it, is still too fresh to really allow this level of attention. It’s the weakest stuff in the book, which is to say it’s solid and interesting and well-written, but it doesn’t carry anywhere near the charge of everything that comes before it. A minor complaint about an otherwise essential addition to the library of any real fan of the films. Thanks to Herc for pimping this, since I didn’t realize it was coming out, and thanks to David at DelRey for making sure one was sent for review. It hasn’t left my desk since it arrived, and Toshi’s spent as much time poring over it as I have. And thanks for nothing to Quint, who is determined to shame me more than I shame myself with his relentless seven day a week pace. You don’t scare me, Quint. You hear me? You don’t scare me! Well, okay, you scare me a little. But I’m still gonna try to keep up. Game on, Crusty Seaman. Game on.

Drew McWeeny, Los Angeles