Why are we blogging about this film? Why do we even care? Mostly because of our perennial distaste for George Lucas who has time and time again proven himself to being one of the biggest, loathsome boneheaded jackasses in the history of cinema (see destroying Star Wars Pts. 1-3 among the many dubious revisionist moves he’s made over the years).
First off it was Lucas’ way or the highway, Steven Spielberg and Harrison Ford (another crusty jackass), the director and fucking star, be damned:
Lucas supervised The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, a TV series which ran first on ABC, then on the USA Network, and won 10 Emmys. While filming a 1993 episode in which Ford made a cameo appearance, Lucas happened on something that gave him the idea for a fourth movie installment. He mentioned it to [Ford], who wasn’t too impressed. Lucas later told Spielberg about his new concept, only to find that the director wasn’t so hot on the idea, either, although generally warm to the notion of a fourth film.
But Lucas was adamant. It was this idea or nothing.
Anyone who knows Lucas well enough won’t find this a huge surprise, but it is sort of amusing. More.
When Ford and Spielberg both rejected the idea, Lucas dug in. He hired screenwriter after screenwriter to make his MacGuffin the linchpin of a new Indy story. “So this went on for 15 years,” he says. “And finally we got to a point where everybody said, ‘Look, we’re not doing that movie.’ And I said, ‘Well, look, I can’t think of another MacGuffin. This is it. This works. I know this works.’ And then we stopped. I just said, ‘O.K.,’ and that’s about the time I started Star Wars again. But then Harrison was kind of interested. And I said, ‘I won’t do it unless we can have that MacGuffin. Without the MacGuffin, I will not go near this thing.’”
A MacGuffin by the way, popularized by Alfred Hitchcock, refers to an object or goal that kicks the story into action and drives it to the third act (and the way Hitch did it, it was usually a side-dish to the story’s real narrative – see “Psycho” and the bag of stolen money that starts the story, but has nothing to do with the film’s outcome).
Ford can now (repeat “now”) laugh at Lucas’ asshole obdurateness.
“He’s a stubborn sucker,” the actor says, “and he had an idea that he kept pushing into script form, and then they’d run it by me, and I’d usually rebel, and, finally, you know, one script came along that really struck me as being smart, not working too hard to give reference to the other films, but that carried on the stories we had told so far in a logical way. The character was allowed to age, and we found ourselves in a different period of time, and what I read was a great script, so I said, ‘Let’s go, let’s make this one.’”
Well, at least if it sucks donkey balls (which it probably will), everyone in the universe knows who to blame. We’d like to think that the reason Sean Connery couldn’t be coaxed out of retirement for this thing was his contempt for Lucas.
Spoilers and More Revisionism
Apparently Indy 4 won’t have the supernatural twist everyone was expecting and instead it will move towards the realm of science-fiction.
Oh and the best part of Lucas revisionism idiocy? Apparently “Raiders of the Lost Ark” has now been renamed. It’s new title? “Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark.” Cause you know, at this point if there were no Indiana in the title, no one would know what this movie was about. Retarded.
The God for Luca’s involvement with the now virtually unwatchable Star Wars series…otherwise he would have been the director of Apocalypse Now – can you imagine Lucas at the helm of that movie? – rather than one of the ten best all time pieces of cinema, it would have been part of a 10 part prequel-sequel cinematic bowel movement starring Jaba the Hut as Kurz and CHARLIE Sheen as Captain Willard!