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This topic comprises 7 pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
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Topic: Indiana Jones; Let's predict the first weekend gross
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John Wilson
Film God
Posts: 5438
From: Sydney, Australia.
Registered: Dec 1999
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posted 05-19-2008 10:25 PM
I stopped reading it about 1/3 of the way through...he was telling me too much of the story.
Here's a story on how the story got to be this story.
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Link
RAIDERS OF THE LOST STORY ARC
By REED TUCKER
May 18, 2008 --
Hollywood's best dreamed up dozens of new plots for Indy. Few survived in 'The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull'
LIKE Harrison Ford, you could grow old waiting for the next "Indiana Jones." The last time an installment of the franchise was in theaters, a guy with a mullet named Richard Marx ruled the charts, George W. Bush was merely ruining the Texas Rangers and the only place to see Lindsay Lohan naked was on the diaper-changing table. Now, 19 years after the whip-cracking adventurer literally rode off into the sunset in the last frame of "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade" - two decades filled with false starts, teases and a rainforest's worth of scrapped scripts - "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" finally arrives Thursday. For long-suffering fans, it'll be like spotting a Yeti.
But the movie is very real, and today audiences at the Cannes Film Festival are getting a first look. Can it possibly live up to the expectations set by the first three movies? Writer-producer George Lucas doesn't think so.
"I know the critics are going to hate it. They already hate it. So there's nothing we can do about that," Lucas told Vanity Fair. "The fans are all upset. They're always going to be upset. They write their own movie, and then, if you don't do their movie, they get upset about it."
The reason it's taken so long to get Indy back on-screen is that three Hollywood heavyweights - Lucas, Ford and director Steven Spielberg - have had a devil of a time agreeing on a story and script, despite stabs by some of the biggest names in Hollywood. This graveyard is littered with more bones than that cave at the beginning of "Raiders of the Lost Ark."
From spaceships to magic peaches, ideas came and went. But nothing gained traction until David Koepp pennned a script based on a story by Lucas and Jeff Nathanson. The action begins in 1957 and has Indy, former flame Marion Ravenwood (Karen Allen) and young sidekick Mutt (Shia LaBeouf) racing to beat Russian agents to a mystical artifact.
Sounds promising. But what about those other ideas? Let's take a look at what almost was with Indiana Jones IV.
INDIANA JONES AND THE
MONKEY KING
In the mid-1980s, Chris Columbus (writer of "The Goonies" and director of the first two "Harry Potter" films) wrote a script - alternatively called "Indiana Jones and the Garden of Life" - that had Indy searching Africa for the garden of a legendary Chinese monkey king, in which immortality-granting peaches grew. The script was reportedly later reconsidered for Indy 4. A purported draft leaked online, dated 1995, contains sequences bordering on the ridiculous, including one in which Jones chases a tank while riding a rhino, and another in which a pygmy army is assembled to battle Nazis.
The script was abandoned. "It was upbeat and full of the same nostalgia that we tapped into in 'Raiders of the Lost Ark,' so in that sense Chris was right on the money," Spielberg told theraider.net. "But I don't think any of us wanted to go to Africa for four months and try to get Indy to ride a rhinoceros in a multi-vehicular chase."
INDIANA JONES AND THE SAUCER MEN FROM MARS
In 1993, while working on an episode of TV's "The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles," Lucas hit upon a notion for the fourth movie.
"What it is that made it perfect was the fact that Harrison would be 20 years older," Lucas told Vanity Fair. "So that put it in the mid-'50s. So instead of doing a '30s Republic serial [like the first three films], we're doing a B science-fiction movie from the '50s. The ones I'm talking about are, like, 'The Creature From the Black Lagoon,' 'The Blob,' 'The Thing.' "
Both Spielberg and Ford were lukewarm on the direction, but Lucas insisted it was either his idea or nothing. He hired writer Jeb Stuart ("Die Hard") to begin working on a story.
"I wanted to be a part of that legacy, and I went out and saw George at Skywalker Ranch, and we hammered out the story," Stuart tells The Post. "He had a pretty good idea, but not a whole lot of details. We spent two weeks together, and then we went around the country trying to pitch it to Steve in Long Island, then out to Wyoming and pitched to Harrison."
The story involved aliens, a trip to Area 51, and, in a big shocker, Indy getting hitched to a fellow archaeologist. Stuart, though, is mum on the title, which was rumored to have been "Indiana Jones and the Saucer Men from Mars."
Even after multiple rewrites, this script, too, was ultimately rejected. Ford reportedly said, "No way am I being in a Steve Spielberg movie like that." Stuart blames himself. "I just don't think I nailed it," he says. "It was one of the best pieces I ever did, but that doesn't mean anything. Look, between Steven and Harrison and George, there are a lot of 900-pound gorillas, and to make a movie like that everyone has to be onboard behind the script. That group wasn't."
Despite the failure to win agreement from Spielberg and Ford, Lucas continued to push on with his sci-fi idea. The late Jeffrey Boam, who wrote "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade," also took a run at a UFO-heavy script. "Finally," Lucas said, "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 [idea]."
INDIANA JONES AND THE prodigal brother
By 2000, word came that yet another writer had been hired: twist-ending specialist M. Night Shyamalan. "Steven Spielberg told me he had seen 'The Sixth Sense' three times," Shyamalan told the Chicago Sun-Times.
A year later, he too was out. No script was reportedly ever produced. "[It] didn't work out with everybody," Shyamalan told Cinescape. "It's a tricky, tricky thing to get four of us together at the same time on the same page."
Shortly thereafter, more names were attached, including Stephen Gaghan ("Syriana") and Tom Stoppard ("Shakespeare in Love"), though no deals were announced. The Internet began buzzing with plot descriptions of what tipsters guaranteed was the next Jones adventure, including a search for Excalibur, a journey to Atlantis and a battle against H. P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu monster. All turned out to be bunk.
With Harrison Ford getting older and all three principals getting more frustrated, "Young Indiana Jones" and "The Shawshank Redemption" writer Frank Darabont was tapped in 2002. He eventually produced a script set in the 1950s, with Jones being hunted by latter-day Nazis. Spielberg and Ford loved the work, but Lucas was adamant that "this was not the story he wanted to tell at this point in the Indiana Jones saga," according to Spielberg. Rumor has it that Lucas was unhappy with a subplot involving Indy's brother.
In 2004, that script, too, was abandoned, souring Darabont's relationship with Lucas, perhaps forever. "It showed me how badly things can go," Darabont told MTV. "I spent a year of very determined effort on something I was very excited about, working very closely with Steven Spielberg and coming up with a result that I and he felt was terrific. Then the whole thing goes down in flames because George doesn't like the script."
Darabont declined to comment further.
INDIANA JONES AND THE FINAL DRAFT
In late 2004, Jeff Nathanson was hired to start fresh, working on a story with Lucas.
"They were realizing after so many years that things had changed, and they realized that this would be the last Indy film with this core group of George, Steven and Harrison," Nathanson tells The Post. "And in some ways, I think the [previous scripts] never really addressed the magnitude of that."
It was at this point that Mutt, the young sidekick, was created and the crystal skull was cemented as the object of Indy's search.
Nathanson says working on such an iconic character was a surprisingly loose experience. "They had been trying for so long, and it wasn't happening, so I didn't feel all that much pressure," he says. "Worst-case scenario, I was another writer who was part of the process. It's really just approached from a sense of fun.
"I did most of my work with George up at Skywalker Ranch. You're sitting in a room working with him, and there's the whip and hat sitting in a case next to you. It takes a while to get used to that. Once you adjust to that, it becomes about figuring out the pieces of the puzzle and making it work," he says.
Once Lucas and Nathanson had the outline in place, frequent Spielberg collaborator Koepp ("Jurassic Park") was handed all the previous work and asked to make sense of it.
"I liken it to remodeling a house from the inside," Koepp tells The Post. "You know how contractors will say, 'Well, it's much easier to tear it down.' And you'll say, 'No, no! We just need cabinets.' That was how I felt, because it had been 15 years of development and none of the people who worked on it were dumb."
He saved Darabont's notion of bringing Marion back, preserved a desert chase Stuart had imagined, and fleshed out Mutt and the mythology of crystal skulls.
"My feeling early on was that there were too many good ideas over the years. It had to be focused a little bit," Koepp says. "It was really hard, one of the hardest [scripts], because there are some very opinionated people to please. I kind of went in - maybe it's heresy - saying it will never be as good as 'Raiders,' because that was the first one. Let's get that out of the way and try to make a good movie."
And as for the heavy sci-fi influence that was evident in Stuart and Boam's scripts? Koepp says "Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" has its share. "This movie reflects the spirit of B-movies in 1957," he says. "I can't give anything away, but don't go in not expecting any [sci-fi], because it's there."
And what about Stuart's idea that Indy ought to get married? After all, former fling Marion is back, and he's roaming with a kid who shares at least his sense of adventure. Koepp suddenly falls silent when asked about nuptials.
Now it just remains to be seen whether all this work will pay off. Will audiences embrace the latest adventure, or will fans who've been waiting 19 years stumble out of the theater dissatisfied?
Stuart, who's read the final script, is optimistic. "It's great - it's a solid script," he says. "You stand on the shoulders of the writers that went before. You've got ['Raiders' writer] Larry Kasdan and Jeff Boam and all these great guys that have created the lineage of this story. It's not going to disappoint."
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![[Wink]](wink.gif)
I'm revising my weekend gross estimate upward, based on mostly-positive reviews at rottentomatoes.com. I now say $140M for Thursday thru Sunday. ![[Smile]](smile.gif)
I just pulled that number out of my ass but it's going to be plenty big.![[thumbsdown]](graemlins/thumbsdown.gif)
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