WHAT WENT WRONG - Raiders Of The Lost Ark

Episode Date: August 7, 2023

6,000 snakes! A suitcase full of SpaghettiOs! Is Indiana Jones a sex offender? This week join Lizzie & Chris as they plunder the 1981 classic, Raiders of the Lost Ark! Learn how Spielberg and Lucas reinvented the B-movie by letting go of perfection and “just shoot(ing) the f*cker”.Go Ad-Free - Join Our Patreon!Check Out Our Merch!Follow Us on Instagram!What Movie's Next? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

And welcome back to another episode of What Went Wrong, your favorite podcast full stop that just so happens to be about movies and how it's a miracle any of them get made, let alone the good ones. My name is Chris Wintermower. I'm one of your hosts, and I'm joined, as always, by your co-host, who's name has changed? That's correct. Lizzie, can you give us the update?

I am now Lizzie Bowman, because David Bowman, producer, sometimes co-host and composer of this show. And I are legally wed. They're legally wed. And David didn't take Lizzie's name. Therefore, he is not a feminist. That's right. And congratulations, Lizzie, on your nuptials.

Thank you. I was not invited to the wedding. But, you know, we don't have to dwell on that. It's fine. It's fine. I mean, I know it was just three people, your parents and you guys. But I feel like I also should have been there because we make this point. podcast together.

Well, you were there in spirit, as were all you, dear listeners. Thank you for attending. Maybe, maybe we'll post a picture to our Instagram. We'll think about it. We'll see. I'm including myself in these decisions going forward. Now, Lizzie, this is, of course, the conclusion of season four of what went wrong. And we're going to take a brief hiatus until the beginning of season five.

Lizzie, what is the launch date of season five? I'm going to make you say it. Oh, thank you. It is September 11th. It's landing on a Monday. It's how the dates shook down. It's how the dates shook out. So.

But we're excited. Easy to remember. It is easy to remember. So that's why we did. Never forget. That's when we come back. So we will be back on 9-11. And in the meantime, if you are interested in getting your fair share of what went

wrong content, feel free to join our Patreon and to our patrons. You will be getting some bonus content between now and then, including a really exciting interview that we did with a script supervisor, which is an extremely important role on any film set. And we got Jessica Lickner, who not only is Martin Scorsese script supervisor, most recently on Killers of the Flower Moon. She also was the script supervisor on what films that we've covered, Lizzie? That would be the Twilight Saga Breaking Dawn Parts 1 and 2, which is actually why she reached out to us. And I was terrified because I saw the subject line. And it was like, hey, I was the script supervisor on these. And I was like, oh, no, what did I do?

What did I mess up? And so you can listen to this interview and learn how accurate our reporting was. I'll spoil it for you. It was pretty accurate. Very accurate. So we'll be off for about a month. We're back on 9-11. Feel free to join our Patreon if you would like to hear some more content in the meantime.

But let's not bury the lead. Lizzie. We have a very, very fun, classic, much-requested movie today, and that is Raiders of the Lost Arc, which I am very excited to talk about. It's time to swing back to 1981. This was a magical year. It featured NASA's launch of the first space shuttle. Ronald Reagan appointed Sandra Day O'Connor to the Supreme Court, making her the first woman to be nominated and appointed to the highest court in the land. And Raiders of the Lost Dark absolutely crushed it at the box office. Now, none of these developments were a sure thing, as we'll later learn, as inevitable as they may seem in retrospect. And there are many, many strands of the multiverse in which Raiders of the Lost Dark does not exist or was not a hit or starred a very different actor as the titular character, Indiana Jones.

So today, Lizzie, we're going to answer some crucial questions, including, but not limited to, are Spaghetti. Stephen Spielberg's favorite food. Is Copenhagen the secret snake capital of the world? And perhaps most pressingly, is Indiana Jones, in fact, a sex criminal? So, I know, your brain is melted. We're going to get to all of this and more. Why, because he, like, kind of traffic?

Never mind. We'll get there. We'll get there. We'll get there. Let's start with the details. Raiders of the Lost Ark, or colloquially known as Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark, although that's not. The title is just Raiders of the Lost Ark

for the first one. It is a 1981 action-adventure film directed by Stephen Spielberg. It was written by Lawrence Kasden, conceived by George Lucas and Philip Kaufman. It stars Harrison Ford as Dr. Henry Walton, Indiana Jones, Jr., or Indie, for short.

Karen Allen as Marion Ravenwood, Paul Freeman as Renee Belloc, John Reese Davies as Indy's Egyptian friend, Sala. Yeah, Chris is doing air quotes for anyone who can't see it. The film was produced by Frank Marshall under the Lucas Film Limited Production Company banner, and it was distributed by Paramount Pictures. As always, here is the IMDB logline for the film. In 1936, archaeologist and adventurer Indiana Jones is hired by the U.S. government

to find the Ark of the Covenant before the Nazis can obtain It's awesome powers. Lizzie, I'm sure you've seen this movie before. Yes. What was your opinion? Heading into the rewatch. And more importantly, how did you feel upon rewatching this classic adventure film? Well, I mean, I was excited to watch this because I haven't seen it probably, honestly, since I was a kid.

And it's one of those ones that, you know, you've seen like little bits and pieces of on TV a million times. So I was excited to watch it. We ended up watching it with my dad, who I think also was very excited to watch it. And then it sort of slowly dawned on all of us as we were sitting there that it wasn't quite what we'd remembered. I still enjoyed it. I feel like out of the three of us, I was maybe defending it the most while we were watching it. But it was surprisingly cartoonish, which I think must have been intentional and does kind of make sense, given that it's in the 30s, and it was sort of emulating like a sort of 1930s, almost like detective type

movie-ish. But, you know, it feels very much like it's the first draft of Indiana Jones to a certain degree. Like, he doesn't feel super comfortable in the role yet. Anywho's will be. It's fine. I was so surprised. It's like, it's. It's like, it's. It's. It's. I was so surprised. It's like, it's not amazing. No, it's really, it's, it's very fun. It's very silly. Yeah. In researching it, it makes a lot more sense. I, too, I watched this movie a ton as a kid, and then I owned the DVD box set later and rewatched it a lot in high school. And now that I'm older, I agree. It feels more like a theme park ride that does like a movie, which was the intent of the filmmakers, and we'll get to that. So I had a similar experience. I felt similarly with

the mummy where I remembered it being so scary and so epic. Oh no, that held up for me. Well, I'm just saying it was different than what I remembered. And this movie feels the same way. I agree his character, and we'll get to that, feels like it hasn't been fully fleshed out in the way that I'd remembered his character. And that's obviously I'd compressed three films worth of Indiana Jones or four, I guess, into one, five now.

But this movie is really a unique kind of miracle. And it marks a really important point in Hollywood. a really important point in George Lucas and especially Stephen Spielberg's careers. And I think it might be single-handedly responsible for turning Spielberg's career around at a very important inflection point. I was wondering about that because looking through his IMDB page, this is definitely a turning point. Yeah.

There are two things I want to call out for our listeners very quickly that David and I noticed while we were watching that are fun. if you decide to rewatch this or have decided to rewatch it for this podcast episode. One is that you can hear a very distinct Wilhelm scream, which you can also hear in our own theme song. And that happens, I think, when he has stolen the truck about two-thirds of the way through the movie. The Nazis thrown off the truck and lands on the front of the car. Yes. Exactly.

And then the other one is in another Marlon Brando bug eating moment. I don't know if you noticed this. Paul Freeman eats a fly and does not react. Doesn't even eat it. It just goes literally. in his mouth. It just goes right in. Okay. It was referenced in a review by the New Yorker actually at the time. And Pauline Kael, I think is her name, did not give the film a good review, but she did call out Paul Freeman as a consummate professional for swalling a fly and not reacting. It's the craziest thing I've ever seen. Crazyest part of the entire movie is that the fly just calls into his mouth. Steven Spielberg comments on it. He said that they watched that. They went frame by frame and just were like, where did the fly go? It just goes in. The only conclusion they could come to is it goes in Paul Freeman's mouth. It goes in and it lives there. All right. A lot of setup. this is a super fun movie. This movie is, I think, cherished by a lot of people and by a lot of our listeners. For good reason, it's a blast of a film to watch. We are going to get into a couple of things

about specifically Indiana Jones's character that are a little problematic. If you don't want to hear that, feel free to turn the podcast off. But this episode is really a celebration of what was a different approach to filmmaking for both Spielberg and Lucas at the time. So we're going to talk about all of this because a lot went wrong on Raiders of the Lost Ark, it turns out. Yeah, I believe it. So let's go back to the very beginning, which is George Lucas, who somehow comes up with the ideas for all the movies that we've been covering this season. He really does. Yeah, if you guys haven't listened to our episode on Howard the Duck, check it out. Also, we covered Star Wars, of course, which George Lucas is responsible for. So Lucas came up.

with the idea for a pulpy adventure revival. Okay. Lizzie, a laud the old Republic serial films and radio plays, RKO radio plays that he used to listen to as a kid. Back in 1973, this was just as he was finishing up American graffiti. I'm not going to deep dive on George Lucas again. He's in his late 20s. He's fresh out of film school,

and he is about to make one of the most successful films in film history with American graffiti. So he is about to blow up. And so he had come up this character, a James Bond-like character, but he's an archaeologist. That was kind of the gist of it. And he's decided, okay, I maybe want to do something with this, but at the same time, he wanted to do a Flash Gordon reboot. He decided to focus his time on that. That became Star Wars. So he put this idea of reviving these old serials on the back burner for a few years. Flash forward

to 1975. He meets up with Philip Kaufman. And if you don't know who Philip Kaufman is, he is a director. And at the time, he was not really well known. He'd only done about four films, but he would go on to make Invasion of the Body Snatchers in 1978 with Donald Sutherland, and then in 1988, the Unbearable Lightness of Being. But at the time, he was kind of not a very well-known director.

He'd done a couple of art house things. And Lucas, and he met up and decided, let's beat out this idea of what this adventure, pulpy cereal story could be. And so Lucas says, I want him to be a globe-trotting adventurer. He's an archaeological James Bond. He's, quote, equally likely to have a beautiful blonde on his arm

as he is to have some ancient relic in hand. They put their heads together, and they come up with the most amazing name for this character, Lizzie. It is just like, I mean, as you know, it's the perfect name, right? Indiana Smith. And that was their first draft idea for Indiana Jones was Indiana Smith. So they tease this story out, And Philip Kaufman apparently came up with the plot device of the Ark of the Covenant.

According to Lawrence Kasden, the screenwriter, Kaufman's orthodontist had told him about the arc when Kaufman was 11 years old, and he's wanted to put it in a movie ever since then. So Lucas asked Kaufman to direct the movie, but Kaufman at that point is attached to direct the Outlaw Josie Wales, starring Clint Eastwood. Okay. So Lucas says, all right, I can't do anything with this idea.

He puts it aside, and he goes to work on Star Wars again. Fast forward to 1977. Star Wars has opened, and it is the biggest thing that has ever hit the world. Everybody is obsessed with Star Wars. George Lucas has decided to retire from directing because he is so tired after directing Star Wars. He hates it. He wants to produce. He wants to come up with stories, and he loves editing.

So he flies to Hawaii to take a vacation, and who does he run into on Hawaii? Steven Spielberg. Steven Spielberg. There's 12 people in Hollywood. He runs into Stephen Spielberg on the beach. They're hanging out. Spielberg is vacationing because he just made close encounters of the third kind. So they both just made these two huge sci-fi movies and they're like, hey, we're hanging out on the beach.

And Spielberg goes, George, all I want to do is make a James Bond movie. And George Lucas says, I got one better. How much make a James Bond movie? But he's an archaeologist. And Lucas pitches Raiders of the Lost Ark to Spielberg. And apparently Spielberg just, like George Lucas is really good at pitching. story. Spielberg later said, I felt like I was eating a barrel of popcorn at a noon matinee. And so both men just wanted to recreate that experience of hearing these pulpy adventure films from their

childhood. And they were like very much aligned on that from the beginning. So Spielberg's like, George, you got to go direct this movie. And George is like, no, no, no, Stephen, I'm 31. I'm retired from directing at this point. And so he gave Spielberg the opportunity to direct. He confirmed that Kaufman was no longer available. So Spielberg comes in. And he, and he gave Spielberg comes in, and from January 23rd to January 27th, 1978, so for five days, George Lucas, Stephen Spielberg, and very new screenwriter, Lawrence Kasden, who had just broken into Hollywood with the sale of his script Continental Divide to Steven Spielberg's very new Amblin Entertainment production company, Lawrence Kasden, who would go on to co-write, The Empire Strikes Back, which we'll get to,

briefly. They locked themselves in a room for five days. in this room for nine hours a day, just pitching ideas back and forth. And what's amazing is there is a transcript of the recordings of these pitch meetings that they had together available online. It's about 100 pages long, and I read it, so you don't have to.

But if you want to, you should read it. It's a really, really amazing piece of movie history. So first of all, here are the highlights from this pitch document. Lucas and Kaufman conceived the film as a series of cliffhangers, which is how the Republic serials were made. Like, you watch one, ends on a cliffhanger.

So basically, there's an amazing setup where Lucas goes. The way I write a film is I decide if I want to have 30 scenes or 60 scenes, and then they're either four pages long each or two pages long each. And we should have a set piece every 10 minutes, but I suppose every 20 minutes will be fine. And I really look at it as like sort of a math and that. And he just goes on and on about how he very methodically writes his movies. And so basically they decided to create six increasingly difficult scenarios

for Indiana Jones to assess. escape from. Once they'd created those scenarios, then they would fill in the story around those scenarios. Okay, that makes sense. Right. So the movie feels a little bit like loosely connected set pieces. That's how they conceived it from the very beginning. And very slow-moving Nazis. Yes, exactly. Apparently, Lawrence Kasden spent five months after this meeting just trying to figure out how Indiana Jones gets from each set piece to the next one in a way that the audience would even semi-believe, including just breaking out of the well of souls and there's the airstrip, you know, was like the best he could come up with in one instance.

So here's some other fun facts. Indiana's whip was intended to be his version of a samurai sword because they really like samurai movies and they like this idea they could carry some sort of weapon slash tool on him. George Lucas gave him a PhD because he thought it would be funny if people called him Dr. Jones. Not wrong. Stephen Spielberg said he wanted as little of the film in the United States as possible. He wanted it to feel like a true globe-trotting adventure,

and they compromised with the museum scenes in the Washington, D.C. scenes. They wanted to keep the budget to $6 or $7 million. That was not a number that they held to. No. Steven Spielberg came up with the Boulder Chase, calling it a Disneyland ride. Apparently it's a pretty direct lift from an old Scrooge McDuck cartoon, where an idol is lifted off a pedestal and a giant, Rock nearly kills the hero.

They stole a lot for this movie very brazenly. That tracks along with how Indiana Jones' job works as well. Exactly, yeah. So when conceiving of the Belak character, Indy's rival, they considered making him German like the Nazis. And then George Lucas said, quote, he could be French or Italian. No, Italians are too crazy.

And I just thought I'd throw in. George Lucas, not an Italian guy. Okay. So the opening sequence from Temple of Doom, the prequel to Raiders, in Shanghai, then the following crashing of the plane, the Zodiac Tobagon down the mountain scene, the Mine Cart scenes. Those were all actually a set piece pitched for Raiders of the Lost Ark. Sure, got to use them somewhere. Yeah, those are conceived for the first movie, and they just never, they couldn't fit them in,

so they put them in the next one. Similarly, the speedboat chased in The Last Crusade was also supposed to be in Raiders at the submarine Nazi sub-base at the end. Sure, yeah. They just couldn't fit it in. and they threw it into Last Crusade. And then Marion Ravenwood was originally conceived as a German double agent working for the Allies. Oh. She was going to be a, quote, tavern spy, which was an archetype of World War II noir films.

And it's kind of very close to the character that Diane Krueger actually plays in Inglorious Bastards. That's so interesting. That must have been a throwback to that character. I did not know that. Yeah, yeah. Okay. So I mentioned something earlier because it's the subject of hot debate online, and that is, is Indiana Jones a sex criminal? I'm going to just go ahead and say no.

Okay. So this is a thorny issue online that I never noticed when I was younger, but I did notice upon rewatch. And that is the issue of the age gap between Marion Ravenwood and Indiana Jones. So if you don't remember when Marion and Indy first reunite in Nepal, and this is a lot of does go by very quickly. After Indy tells her that he never meant to hurt her, she responds, quote, I was a child, I was in love, it was wrong, and you knew it. And Indy says, you knew what you were doing.

And it's heavily implied that the root of the falling out between Abner Ravenwood, Marion's father, and Indiana Jones, was a romantic relationship between Indy and Marion when she was underage. I didn't think, okay. In defense, in possible defense of the filmmakers on this, I did, I remember this exchange, but to me it read her saying I was a child, like she could have been 19. Like that's something, I read it as she was young, but not. That would have been my go-to. I don't feel like they would, even in the 80s, Chris, I don't think they would have been like, listen, I know I was a pedophile.

but you knew what you were doing and then have her be like, you're right and I still want you even in me thinking out because your brain's about to explode. No, no, no, no. All right. Why?

Let's go to the transcript, shall we? No, no, no. George, 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. No, dear. Had an affair with her when she was 11.

Kastin, and he was 42. Lucas. He hasn't seen her in 12 years. Now she's 22. It's a real strange relationship. Spielberg, she had better be older than 22. Lucas, he's 35 and he knew her 10 years ago when he was 25 and she was only 12. It would be amusing to make her slightly young at the time, Spielberg and promiscuous. She came on to him. Lucas, 15 is right on the edge. I know it's an outrageous idea, but it is interesting. Once she's 16 or 17, it's not interesting anymore. But if she was 15 and he was 25 and they actually had an affair the last time they met and she was madly in love with him, goes on a little bit. Quote, Lucas, it's something he'd rather forget about and not have come up again.

This gives her a lot of ammunition to fight with. Spielberg, in a way, she could say, you've made me this hard. They then go on to hone the exact dialogue, softening it by never mentioning explicit ages. Oh, okay. So Indiana Jones is a sex criminal. Hold on. Hold on. We're getting there.

We're getting there. So that's Exhibit A. This is from the original pitch meeting. This is a first draft idea. I'm never going to try and defend men again. So it seems like an open and shut case, Indiana Jones was 25, and he had a relationship with the 15-year-old daughter of his mentor. Again, not exactly.

And I'm trying to get to the bottom of this because people online are like raging at each other about it. So Karen Allen later stated in an interview that her understanding And the understanding that she brought on set and discussed with Steven Spielberg was that Marion was 26 during the events of the film and that her dalliance with Indy had occurred 10 years prior when she was 16. She also says it was never disclosed to her whether or not they had much of a physical relationship. She interpreted it as something innocent, a kiss, not much more. How old is Indy, 45?

No, he's 10 years older. He would have been 26 and she was 16. And that is actually reflective basically of the difference in age between the actors. Karen Allen was older than that. She was, I believe, about 30 when the film was made, and Ford was closer to 40. So, again, when she presented Spielberg with this backstory, Spielberg simply told her this isn't that kind of movie. What he means by that is Spielberg wasn't interested in the backstory of these characters. He was making a B movie.

And so it really seems like Spielberg was not fixated on the AIDS thing at all. It was mostly coming from Lucas, who thought it was, quote, interesting. Yeah, which, by the way, you can kind of tell. from the transcript you just read because it's George Lucas being like, wouldn't it be cool if she was 12 years old? And Spielberg's like, yeah, yeah, yeah, but also she's an adult. And so is he. And he's like, no, but what if she was 12?

And he's like, oh, who, up we go. Yeah. Now, let's assume she's 16. Still not good, by the way. Well, hold on. So, I mean, I guess. Not good. Don't well, hold on me.

That's not good. Hold on, Lizzie. Hold on. It's important to remember this movie takes place in 19, Oh, right. Anything goes. Not anything. However, by the 19th century in the Western world, the age of consent was beginning to go up to a whopping 13 in Napoleonic France. The U.S. actually lagged a bit behind offering state-by-state ages that ranged from 10 to 12, which is terrifying all the way through the 19th century. I did not know this. That law also didn't apply to boys for whatever reason. However, there was a big push by moral reformers against child prostitution, which was a very big problem. at the time, and by 1920, most U.S. states had raised the age of consent to 16 years old. What I do think is interesting is that it was during the 1930s, during Indiana Jones' time, that the slang jailbate was first registered in the cultural lexicon,

specifically because of the common practice of older men pursuing illegal relationships with young women, like possibly Indiana Jones. Further, Marshall College, the fictional institution at which Indiana teaches, is supposedly in Bedford, Connecticut, where sadly, the age of is apparently still 16 years old today. Long story short, is Indiana Jones a sex criminal unclear? If George Lucas's backstory is to believe, then yes. He was 25 and Marion was 15 when he assaulted her committing a statutory rape. However, it seems like Spielberg didn't feel that that was necessary and didn't want to draw attention to it. It seems like Karen Allen played it

as if it were illegal, though I would, and I know you would agree, still argue a very problematic relationship. And it seems like they really tried to minimize it as much as possible. Larry Kastin lamented how he had written this dynamic relationship between Marion and Indy that got stripped down to the studs in the movie. And I think Spielberg was like, people are going to think this is really creepy if we focus on it. And he just took out. He's right. He's right. And he just took out. And they blew right past it in the movie. And I was like, seems fine to me. Ship it. Yeah, exactly. Furthermore, they tried to like retcon it a couple times in the novelizations, but they mixed it up. So in the 2008 ultimate guide to Indiana Jones,

they peg Marion's age as a year older than Karen Allen even said. So she would have been 17 when she first took up with Indiana Jones. But apparently the novelization of the film that came out back in the 80s had pegged her at 14 a year younger. So they just really were all over the place. What I want to get to is why does this feel, it feels a little weird and jarring in the middle. movie, I think, given the character that we're introduced to. This is a professor who seems

totally unprepared for the amorous gazes of his female students, right? One of his students closes her eyes. It says, Love You in ink on her eyes. That was improvised, by the way, is that was something that they came up with on set. And he seems totally flabbergasted by it. Now, this is actually very different than the script. So Kasden's script actually called for him to be a ladies man who was actively sleeping with his students. That scene where he goes out with Marcus to talk to the Army intelligence officers while they're walking there in the script, he gets interrupted by one of his students who's like, Dr. Jones, can I talk to? And he's like, yeah, Marcus, I'll be with you in a minute. And like attempts to ditch the Army meeting to go sleep

with his student. And then when Marcus shows up at his house later in the novelization and in an early draft of the script, he's in a bathrobe and it's implied, Indiana Jones, that he had had that student over that night. following the James Bond model as closely as they can. They were trying to follow the James Bond model, and I think Spielberg, and eventually I'm sure everyone in the editing room, like very quickly realized, like, this character's not relatable if we make him a Lothario in this way.

So TLDR, if you wanted to skip by that section, Indiana Jones, definitely a creep. Probably don't want him hanging around your teenage children, but maybe a felon, maybe not in the end. Definitely a felon for stealing antiquities. can't say on the sex crime front. Okay, back to the pitch document, Lizzie. The idea for making Indy a relentless Nazi puncher came from Spielberg.

He said, quote, with Nazis, you have to use your fists because they're despicable people. And I do think it's really fun that when you think about this movie, it's an amazing Jewish adventure fantasy. It follows a man beating up Nazis, and it culminates with said Nazis attempting to perform a Jewish ritual only to have God melt their faces off, electrocute them, and blow up their head. Also, like, if you're looking for a villain, you cannot do better than the dumbest Nazis on the planet. That's why Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, he says Russians, it doesn't have the same impact as Nazis. Not as good. Nothing as good as beating up Nazis. In fact, speaking of Nazis, they spent a lot of time figuring out the Nazi monkey because they knew they were going to kill the monkey and they had to make it so unlikable that the audience wouldn't be upset that they killed the monkey.

I was just confused by the monkey's motivations. How did they do that? They made the monkey do the SIG-Hile salute, and then they were like, we could kill the monkey. I didn't even remember that. Hitler salute. Watch your movie more closely. That shot took over 50 takes to try to get it right. Well, maybe they shouldn't have spent that long on it. Well, yeah.

Indy's Fear of Snakes was retroactively added when they decided they needed an obstacle for the tomb scene when he discovers the Ark. After deciding that water traps, sand traps, lions, and tigers were too expensive or obvious. They opted for snakes. Then they added that to the top of the... the movie, giving them a phobia for humor. Lucas then said, quote, mechanical snakes will not be used on this movie. Then there's the joke in Last Crusade. They used a very mechanical snake at the opening of that movie when they establish Indies

phobia. When Kazden was asking Lucas who he saw in this role, he said a young Steve McQueen and Spielberg tossed in Bert Reynolds. Okay, Bert Reynolds, I could totally see. Very interesting. And finally, Stephen Spielberg did not. like the last name Smith. Yeah.

Not because it sounded bad. It's just because Steve McQueen had a movie called Nevada Smith, in which he plays a character named Nevada Smith. And he's like, we can't do a movie with another character with a state for his first name. Yeah, no. Smith for his last name. So Lucas picked Jones because it was the second most common American last name

that he could think of. Also, fun story. Indiana was the name of his Alaskan Malamute, a huge dog, which was also the inspiration. For the Wookie. Oh. So George Lucas' dog gave you Indiana Jones and the Wookiee. So if you guys are interested, I highly recommend checking this transcript out.

It's amazing. There are certainly things in it that haven't aged well. The use of the word Oriental comes to mind. But if you're curious to see a story be broken in real time by really three of the best storytellers that we've had in film, I would argue, it's an amazing resource. They let each idea die and give way to better ideas, and it's just really amazing, and they're very funny, the three of them. And it's just a really cool resource, so definitely check it out.

So Casson goes to write the script. Lucas focuses on Lucasfilm and The Empire Strikes Back, and Spielberg goes to direct 1941, which is a movie that we will cover on this podcast at some point, and it's basically his, at this point, only critical failure in his career. and it really throws a wrench in the gears. So 1941 is a satirical look at a panic that arises in Los Angeles after the December 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, and critics just totally tanked it.

It actually ended up making its money back, but people wanted to go after Spielberg. He was the Wiz Kid, right? Sure. And so they were like, ah, he's not perfect. He can't just do anything that he wants. And not only that, he'd gone way over budget on Close Encounters of the Third Kind and then 1941.

So he'd had two films in a row where he'd gone way over budget and over schedule, and 1941 was not a huge hit. Kazden turns in the script. He brings it to Lucas. Lucas sets it aside, says, come to lunch with me. They go to lunch. Lucas says, I want you to write the Empire Strikes Back. Kazan's like, you haven't even read Raiders of the Lost Ark yet.

And Lucas goes, don't worry, if I think it sucks, I'll take the job off her back. So it was kind of a tragic turn of events. Lee Brackett, a young screenwriter, had written the first draft of Empire Strikes Back. She passed away unexpectedly. Yeah, so Lawrence Kasten was then given the role of the Empire Strikes Back. And his first two big movies in Hollywood are Raiders of the Lost Ark and Empire Strikes Back. That's insane. Which is an amazing one-two punch.

They do rewrites on the script. They start assembling the production team. They bring in Frank Marshall as producer Howard Kazanjian as EP, Douglas Slocum as their cinematographer. He had shot some of the Indias, scenes with Spielberg on Close Encounters. Michael Kahn, who had edited Close Encounters and 1941, comes in to edit. And then they bring in Norman Reynolds to do the production design, which is amazing in

this movie. Yeah, it looks great. And he had just won the Oscar for Best Production Design for Star Wars. So basically, this is Spielberg and Lucas bringing in the best people that they've been working with for the last few years. They have all the Star Wars people and whatever Spielberg people that they want. Shocking lack of Richard Dreyfus, though. That was a mistake.

Yes. Now, according to Dave Pollock, George Lucas's biographer, George Lucas wanted to finance the movie himself. He was so tired of the studio system. He's like, I need to do this movie myself. The problem is Lucasfilm actually was in a cash flow problem. Despite making a shit ton of money off the first Star Wars, Lucas's finances were in disarray, and he had to take out a bunch of loans to finance the Empire Strikes back. When that movie went over budget, he had to go back to Fox to back another loan. And so he was stuck with another studio, so he couldn't finance the movie himself. So he had to swallow his pride and tell his employees to go sell the movie for him because he didn't want to talk to the studio. So Tom Pollock and Charles Weber, the top two executives at Lucasfilm, they send the script out with an unprecedented set of requirements for whatever studio wants to finance this movie. So for the right to distribute the film, they have to pay the $20 million now plus budget. They have to pay George Lucas a million dollars up front as a producing fee and give him a percentage of net. profits. They have to pay Lucasfilm a million dollar producing fee and give them a percentage of net profits. They have to give Spielberg a million dollars to direct and a percentage of gross

revenue. Oh, wow. So not even net. And in addition, Lucas and Lucasfilm would control and own any and all sequels merchandising and licensing. So basically, he was offering studios. Nothing. Nothing. Yeah. And there's this rumor online that all the studios turned down Indiana Jones. that's apparently not true at all. The only one that turned them down was Fox because Alan Ladd Jr. had left. And so there was no longer a relationship there. So Universal Warner Brothers, Paramount, Columbia, and Disney all pick up the phone and call saying, this deal is awful.

What can we do to make it happen? And it seems like the reasonable expectation would be that it would land at Universal because Spielberg, three of his four films, theatrical films, have been at Universal. Sugarland Express, Jaws, and 1941, and that Lucas had done American graffiti at Universal. However, it was paramount that stepped in and said, we want to make this movie. And one of the reasons is that a couple of the studios,

apparently, according to Lucas, actually said that they would only make the movie with him and those terms if he fired Spielberg because of 1941. They wanted to work with a, quote, more trustworthy director. Yeah. That's dumb. People can make... one, you know, kind of okay movie.

Yeah. Tell me about it. I mean, too. So Paramount CEO, Michael Eisner, loved the script, but hated the deal. He countered with a few changes. He wanted distribution rights to up to five sequels, giving us Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. And a reduced budget of exactly $20 million.

And if they went over budget, there would be financial penalties that Lucas would have to pay for himself through Lucasfilm. The final sticking point sounds really simple, and I really don't know if I understand it entirely, but basically, George Lucas wouldn't put his name on the contract. He said, I'm not going to guarantee that I'm going to be an executive producer on this movie. And so what it sounds like happened, he was so pissed about the whole Star Wars thing, studios dangling things over him and making him run in circles, that he basically said, if you want to make this movie with me, you have to trust me that I'm going to produce it. He doesn't have a contract.

He is Don Drapering it. And Eisner's like, no, get fucked. And Eisner goes to sleep that night thinking, I just, this is the best script I've ever read. What am I doing? He calls William Hike and Gloria Katz, the co-creators of American Graffiti, who also directed Howard the Duck, listened to our episode. They knew George Lucas very well. And he goes, how do I get George to listen to me? And they're like, you have to trust him.

George is a crazy person. He will absolutely set this movie on fire just to screw you. And so Isner the next day called him, signed the deal. and said, quote, I trust you, like through gritted teeth. But apparently, from Eisner's perspective, it was actually one of the best productions that they had during his run at Paramount because he wasn't on set dealing with dysentery.

But we'll get there. So George Lucas and Steven Spielberg decide that they cannot afford to go over budget. Lucas is bleeding money on Empire Strikes Back. Lucas has no trust in Hollywood. So even though that Paramount says they have 85 days to shoot the movie, they actually come up with a schedule to shoot it in 73 days. So over 10% faster than what the studio is saying. And they're going to do that by storyboarding almost the entire movie,

which is unusual for Spielberg. So they actually did 6,000 storyboards in pre-production, covering 80% of the film. And you can see a lot of these online on the DGA website. Spielberg also decided early on, I'm not going to do 15 takes, I'm going to do three to five takes, and we're going to treat this like a silent film.

We're going to put the camera in one position, shoot a couple takes, move it to the next position, shoot a couple takes, and they're just going to blast through it like it is a B movie. They decided to shoot the movie in the way that they wrote it. All right. Now they're going to cast the movie. Lucas wants an unknown actor in the lead role. He always wants an unknown actor in the lead role,

because then it's a George Lucas movie and not a lead actor movie. So they hold auditions for Indiana Jones at Lucasfilm in the production office kitchen. And apparently it was a very unusual process. They would bring actors in in the morning, and they would cook. with Stephen in front of the producers, make cookies, have a conversation, take a photo. Then in the afternoon, another set of actors would come in and they would eat whatever the first actors had cooked,

have a conversation, eat some cookies. And then they did callbacks where they actually read a short scene, and then they did screen tests for the final candidates. And what they really wanted to get a sense of just like, what's this person's personality? Because this character's just going to be this person's personality at the end of the day. And so at the end of the few rounds of auditions, Fenton, the film's casting director, had a top choice. Lizzie, any guesses?

I don't know. Not Kurt Russell. Jeff Bridges! Jeff Bridges! Very good, Lizzie. You got it. When I said Kurt Russell, I meant Jeff Bridges. Jeffrey Bridges. They do look similar. They do. So according to a 2011 movie phone article, Bridges turned... Oh, he would have been good. He turned the roll down. I don't know if that's true, but that is what I read.

I couldn't find it confirmed elsewhere. Other names that they were also considering included Nick Nolte. Steve Martin. Kind of want to see that. Whoa. I would watch Jeff Bridges or Steve Martin, Indiana Jones. Bill Murray, Chevy Chase, and Jack Nicholson. No.

Marsha Lucas, George Lucas's then-wife, and more importantly, the woman who made sure his movies actually had some humanity in them, listen to our episode on Star Wars. She saved that movie in post-production. Notice his Star Wars movies got a lot worse after they got divorced. Her top choice was a little-known television actor at the time

who would have a very important recurring guest role on Friends. I didn't watch Friends, Chris. You didn't watch Friends? Oh, my God. Tom Selleck, the man with the mustache. Magnum P.I. Tom Selleck was the top choice. Lucas and Spielberg agreed.

They reached out to Seleck's agent, the William Morris. It was just, remember there was no way. It's just one person. William Morris. and they offer him the role, but Tom Selleck had just shot the pilot for Magnum P.I., which was testing very well, and CBS had them locked up in a contract.

So when Spielberg reaches out and says, hey, can we get them out of that contract early, CBS realizes we have a hot commodity on our hands. So they immediately green light, Magnum P.I. They cock-block Selleck, and they say, no way you're getting out of your contract. The tragic irony, Lizzie, is that there was an actor strike later that year, and Magnum P.I's shoot ended up being delayed

whereas Raiders could keep shooting because it was in the U.K. So Tom Salick technically could have done both projects if CBS had let him out of his contract. I have to say, though, I think that worked out the best for both of them. I mean, he would have been fine, but he is iconic as Magnum P.I. And I don't think he would have been as successful in this. I actually think he would have been, the movie would have been goofier with him.

Yes, funnier for sure. Funnier, yeah, and maybe that could work. But anyway, I agree. I'm glad they landed with Indiana Jones, excuse me, Harrison Ford, which they did three weeks before they started production. So they're three weeks away from starting principal photography. Paramount is breathing down their necks. They need a lead man.

And Steven Spielberg is watching a screening of the Empire Strikes Back, which had just come out. And he noticed Hoddy McTaz. Oh, my God. Who's this smoke show, Han Solo? And he calls George Lucas. and he goes, I know who we should cast. And Lucas goes, I already know who you're going to say.

And Spielberg goes, who? Harrison Ford. You see, Lucas had been thinking about Harrison Ford this whole time. George Lucas, you slippery trickster. You slippery trickster. So he didn't want him for two reasons. One, Ford was a known actor. He had become, he was a big name now.

Yes, by Star Wars, of course. Exactly. Lucas, who had also cast him in American graffiti, didn't want Harrison Ford to become his, as he said, Bobby De Niro, referencing Martin Scorsese's relationship with Robert De Niro. He also didn't want to make a second trilogy that would be dependent on the same actor, and he didn't think that Ford would want to do the movie. So Harrison Ford famously wanted to do more character work. He was not into the mumbo-jumbo world building that Lucas was obsessed with. So I think for fair reason he didn't think that he would want to do it. But Ford, being a smart businessman, read the script and was like, this is another great.

They have an intent to do a trilogy. This is a fun adventure movie. And he got a hell of a contract drawn up because they're three weeks out from a shoot and he has them over a barrel. Hell, yeah. He gets a seven-figure upfront salary. So over a million dollars, he got paid in the 80s. Maybe more than Spielberg. He also got a percentage of gross revenue, just like Spielberg.

I read 7%, but I think that's actually way too high. That's crazy. I would imagine it's 1 or 2%. He also got the exclusive option to rewrite all of his dialogue, not wanting Indiana Jones to become some kind of Professor Solo, which he did on the 10-hour flight to London with Steven Spielberg. They went through the script and he rewrote a lot of his dialogue. And so Harrison Ford, good for you.

I think the dialogue's great in this movie. Yeah. There's not very much of it, but it works. So for the role of Marion Ravenwood, George Lucas wanted Deborah Winger. Okay. She passed. Not 12 years old enough.

No. Steven Spielberg wanted his then-girlfriend Amy Irving for the part. She was unavailable. Sean Young. Of course. Of Blade Runner fame. She actually played Marion Ravenwood during the test shoots for the casting of Indiana Jones. So she was reading across from all of the Indies that they were reading.

And they considered her, along with Barbara Hershey, who is also connected to Blade Runner, because she dated the screenwriter of Blade Runner before that film became a film. Again, 10 people in Hollywood. 10 people. Spielberg had liked Karen Allen in Animal House. She was an accomplished Broadway actress, and she ultimately won the part. Ironically, after screen testing opposite Tim Matheson,

also from Animal House, 12 people in Hollywood. So the role of Sala, which means bean sprout in Bedouin, and was originally described as a 5-foot-2-inch skinny Egyptian, was originally offered to, who's Hollywood's favorite short king? Tom Cruise. Danny DeVito. Oh.

Yeah. Sala was offered to Danny DeVito. He wanted to do it. Yeah, he apparently had to turn it down because of his shooting schedule for taxi. So once again, TV schedule is getting in the way. The role lands in the hands of John Reese Davies. He is a Welsh actor who is no more...

A six-foot-one. Well, he's no more Egyptian than he is five-foot-two, as Lizzie said he's six-foot-one. Ironically, he would later go on to play Gimley in Lord of the Rings. Nothing took me out of this movie more than Jonathan Reeves. Because every time he spoke, I was just waiting for... Indeed, welcome to Cairo. Yes, and my axe.

Yeah, exactly. So, Klaus Kinski, noted German actor and crazy person, was offered the role of Tote, the sadistic SS agent, who always wants to torture Marion. but he turned it down for two reasons. And if you don't know who Klaus Kinski is, he's acted in a number of Werner-Hurtzog films, including Fitzgeraldo. He's great, but he's in Rita's autobiography.

It's absolutely insane. First of all, he was offered a higher salary to be in the simultaneously shot horror film Venom. And second, he described the script for Raiders as moronically shitty. And yes, he did say that in his autobiography. The role went to English actor Ronald Lacey instead, and finally, English actor, not French actor, Paul Freeman, was brought in to play the sophisticated belloc. Apparently, Spielberg cast him without knowing if he could do a French accent.

He calls him, and he's, according to Freeman, says, Stephen suddenly panicked that he hadn't even heard me speak in a French accent, so I had to get on the train from Brannbury to just say, Hello, I can do a French accent. And apparently it was that exaggerated, and Spellberg was like, great, you're hired. Oh, no. Again, not a lot of fidelity in a B movie. He is doing like the mildest.

I have to say his accent is very nice, I feel like. It's very nice. It's almost not there. Yeah, it's super subtle. You can barely tell, but it's enough. I actually think he's really good in this movie. He's great. I loved him.

He might be my favorite performance overall. He's got a really, really dialed in. All right, so production. Filming starts on June 23rd of 1980. Remember, the draft was sent out to studios, I think, at the end of 1979, December of 1979, or January of 1980. Yeah, this is moving fast. So they start off the coast of France near the town of La Rochelle. They shoot the U-boat scenes first out on the water.

They could not get the 12 U-boats that were scripted because they don't have the money, but what they could do was rent the sub that Wolfgang Peterson had just used in Das Boot. And with the rental, they also got some footage that he'd shot of it inside a U-boat pen near La Rochelle, which they used in the movie. Perfect. So a common theme is Spielberg just used to be. footage from other movies in this movie to fill in the gaps that he didn't have. Great. So Spielberg just blasts through these location shots.

Even though they got rained out the first two days that they were on the water, they were done with all that sub and ship stuff in seven days. They then fly to Elstree Studios in the UK, which is where they shot Star Wars, and they're shooting on largely the same sound stages. And they do the Cairo interiors and the booby-trapped Peruvian temple run sequence that opens the film. Great. couple of notes on that opening sequence.

First of all, in Kasden's script, Indiana is actually supposed to use his whip to wrap the treacherous guide around himself. Basically, he uses the whip to get the guide to shoot himself with his own gun. And Spielberg gets to set

and wisely decides that's way too complicated unless just have him disarm the guy with his weapon. Again, Spielberg constantly making decisions to simplify things on this movie as he's shooting it, I think, in a really smart way. Raiders was also. Alfred Molina's on-screen debut, if you recognize him at the beginning. Oh, wow. And he says his first, yeah.

Yeah, he plays a smarmy Peruvian, and Alfred Merlina is no more Peruvian than John Ruse Davies is Egyptian. Apparently the spiders that get placed on him just didn't move. They put like 25 tarantles on him and they were frozen solid because they were all male. So they didn't want to like move next to each other. So they get the camera rolling and then they add one female to him and all the spiders go insane over his body.

at which point, Molina freezes, because he doesn't know what to do. It's Spielberg screaming at him like, be scared, be scared. And Malina's thinking, I am so scared, I am so scared. So when they shot the boulder scene, they built a 12-foot-across fiberglass boulder that weighed over 300 pounds, and that really goes behind Indiana as he's running. A lot of people think, oh, that's a miniature and a composite shot. No, that's him running with a giant boulder following him. Yeah, it looks real.

Harrison Ford decided he wanted to do it himself. Stunt coordinator Glenn Randall agreed that Ford was athletic enough to outrun the real 12-foot fireglass ball. Now, normally it's like, oh, we do it once for a close-up. Spielberg's like, all right, if you want to do it, you can do it. And they did it 10 times in a row. They did it for five different setups at two setups per two takes per setup. And Ford, I'm sure, was getting more and more tired with each run.

And Spielberg later said, he went 10 times and beat the odds. He was lucky, and I was an idiot for letting him try. I mean, yeah, it would have been terrible in the first few weeks of filming to lose your star. If you smush, yeah. Yeah. On July 14th, they began the two-week stretch of filming the infamous well-of-souls sequence, which if you don't remember, this is the sequence where Indy finds the arc. So the well of souls is where the ark is stored.

It's the snake pit. Okay. Lucas and Spielberg had agreed to use the least amount of snakes possible to save money. They'd use darkness and fake snakes to fill in the gap. They then had 2,000 snakes brought in. to fill the room. Well, Spielberg felt that that wasn't enough.

No. So he shut down production for a day, and he reached out to the nearest snake haven, which apparently was Copenhagen, Denmark, and had 4,500 more snakes flown in overnight, snake capital the world. So they had 6,500 snakes in this room. They then realized that their anti-venom supply

was two years out of date, so they had to shut the production down. again for a day to get fresh anti-venom flown in. And once they had the anti-venom there, they actually had the back of the set open with an ambulance backed into the opening with its doors open, with two dudes just holding anti-venom syringes ready in case anyone got bit, the first AD did,

so they could rush them into the ambulance, inject them and send them straight to the hospital. I also read that the production was slowed down by the unexpected arrival of Vivian Kubrick, Stanley's daughter, who reportedly was walking into the set while visiting his shoot for the Shining. Now, these dates don't 100% line up. The Shining wrapped a year earlier. So, like, unless Kubrick was there shooting, like, pickups or he was doing posts there,

this doesn't actually make sense. But I did read in two different sources that Vivian Kubrick walked on a set, saw that they were using all these snakes, thought it was animal abuse, and called the Royal Society. for the prevention of cruelty to animals on the production, and they lost another day of shooting when they had to just spend the day explaining to the RSPCA that they weren't hurting the snakes.

Again, take this with a grain of salt, the dates don't entirely line up, but I did read it in two different places, Vivian Kubrick, snake lover. In the end, Karen Allen was the most exposed to all the snakes. If you remember, she does this scene in a dress. Yes. With her legs exposed.

She was never bitten, but her stunt double had to take over for a lot of, of the shots, and when it actually got too dicey for her stunt devil, they shaved the snake handler Steve Edge's legs and put him in Marion's dress to shoot the close-ups of him walking. So some of those leg shots are actually the snake handler who's a guy and has very nice legs that look great. Great. In these shots. Apparently, the snakes were not afraid of the fire, so those torches wouldn't have done anything. In fact, the snakes crawled towards them for warmth because it was cold on the sound

stages. That's good. Also, Steven Spielberg did a, what are we going to call this? The shotgun and the exorcist method. He threw a dead snake on Karen Allen because he didn't feel he was getting a legitimate scream off of her. And I don't think that she appreciated that. Bit of a real skeletons in the pool and poltergeist move. Exactly.

Which also might have been Stamunds. Yeah, we're not sure. So apparently one of the cobras did bite and kill one of the pythons. and that was the only big fiasco here. Fun fact, Harrison Ford, when asked about the snakes, said, quote, they don't bother me much. It's just acting. Which is just such a Harrison Ford quote.

Yeah. Also, R2D2 and C-3PO appear in the hieroglyphics in the Well of Soul scene. That's right. You can go back and rewatch for those. The production then moved to Tunisia, where they had shot Star Wars, all of the desert tattooing scenes,

and things got a lot harder. The average daily temperature was 125 degrees. They had over 600 local extras and not enough water for everybody that was on set. Spielberg responded by

increasing their shooting pace, averaging up to 35 camera setups a day, which is insane. For film, it varies, but I'd say under 20 setups per day would be the average, and 20 would be a lot.

He was working at a television pace on this movie. Lucas intentionally stayed away from the Raiders set as much as possible because he was a director too. He didn't want to interfere with Spielberg. However, when he did show up, he was actually extremely helpful. He would sit next to Steven Spielberg, and when he disagreed with how a scene was being shot, he would say, well, it's your movie. If the audience doesn't like it, they're going to blame you. Oh, my God. Apparently, it was a very friendly back and forth banter and Spielberg would say,

well, now if they don't like it, I'm going to tell them, you made me do it. And they would just, go back and forth on that on set. He showed up in Tunisia. He's a very fair, skinned man, he got so sunburned that his head, his skin got inflamed and his head enlarged to twice its normal size. They called him, they called him Howard Hughes, instead of Howard Hughes, because his head was so big, and he had to cover it with wet tissues. I think he looked like Marlon Brando in the island of Dr. Rowe when he was filming these scenes. This actually caused permanent skin damage, and George Lucas since then can't go in the sun, because when he does, his skin immediately just blanche is like complete red right away,

and it's extremely painful. However, he did act as the second unit director for a lot of the movie. So he shot a lot of the action shots. He shot the silhouette shot of Indiana leading the diggers as they find the well of souls. He got the shot of the Nazi salute that the monkey does that you don't even remember. Rube. Sorry, George. So I think having Lucas around was a really great thing for Spielberg on this movie.

The Flying Wing, the prototype German plane, was custom built for the production. And while filming the fight scene with the German mechanic, Harrison Ford got pinned under the plane's wheel and was nearly crushed. They braked just in time, and it took 40 crew members

and nearly an hour to get the plane off of his leg. Oh, my God. Yeah. Now, of course, by the time they hit filming this scene, a lot of the crew had dysentery, much as they had on Star Wars. Spielberg was avoiding that

by eating SpaghettiOs every day. Spielberg had reportedly brought a giant suitcase of Spaghettios from the UK and was eating three cans of spaghettios a day and not eating any of the local food, and that's how he never got sick. Well, that's how he never got dysentery. I don't know what's ever got dysentery. His insides are falling out of his body right now,

but he avoided dysentery on this set. Now, he had run out of stuntmen by the time he hit this plane fight scene because so many of them had dysentery. So he turns to producer Frank Marshall, and he says, I need a pilot in the cockpit of this flying wing. And Frank Marshall's like, I'm not an actor, Stephen, I can't do this. And he goes, all you got to do is be in the cockpit. It'll be one day.

Well, it turns out it was 150 degrees in that cockpit in the summer. And it turned into three days. And then he improvised the action so that Karen Allen would go on top of the plane and beat Frank Marshall over the head with the chocks that blocked the brakes of the plane's wheels. Sure does. And Frank Marshall said it turned into three days of heat fatigue and getting beat over the head by Karen Allen. Karen Allen had not done stunt work before, so apparently she punched everyone that she had a stunt punch with on this movie. She just punched them in the face.

She punched Harrison Ford in the face. She punched the Nepalese extras in the face. She hit Frank Marshall in the face. Great. The truck chase really did involve a stuntman being dragged under a truck at 30 miles an hour. So that's a real person under the truck that is not a dummy or a mannequin. They dug a narrow trench for the trucks to drive over, and Harrison Ford actually did that stunt for the close-ups,

which resulted in him bruising his ribs. He also tore his ACL during the fight scene with the German beefcake, who he boxes, when that German beef cave rolled over his knee. Oh, God. So Harrison Ford, pretty beat up by the end of this shoot. Yeah. Harrison Ford also got dysentery, unfortunately. Everybody's got dysentery.

There's this big fight scene planned, Lizzie. It's going to be epic. There's going to be a giant Arab swordsman with a huge sword, and Indiana Jones is going to use this whip, and they're going to have, it's a lightsaber fight, but it's a giant sword and a whip. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sounds great.

Yep, they're ready to film it, and Harrison Ford is going to the bathroom every 15 minutes. He is pooping everything out of his body, and apparently the guy that was playing that Arab swordsman didn't really learn the choreography very well, so Harrison Ford was like, this is going to look good. So Harrison Ford, clutching his belly, turns to Spielberg and goes, hey, let's just shoot the fucker.

And Spielberg turns to him and goes, I had the exact same idea. So they just had Indiana Jones pull out his gun and shoot the swordsman, cutting the entire choreographed fight scene. And resulting in one of the movies funniest sight gags, I think. Yeah, it's very funny. Watching it now as an adult, you're like, wow, that's not fair. No, exactly. Yeah, yeah. Such a dick move.

But it's a great aspect of his character, too. It's great. Like, I really like that about it. He does not care. Yeah. Another Tunisia, fun fact, the canyon where Indy holds up the Nazis with a bazooka at the end. That's actually the same canyon where the Jawaas take R2D2 and he's rescued by Obi-1 in Star Wars. So the last stretch of production takes the crew to Kauai for the exteriors of the opening scene of the film.

So the Peru exteriors, those are in Kauai. The initial donkeys they filmed with went lame. That's actually a term for the inflammation of the film. the hoes of donkeys, so they won't walk anymore. So they needed replacement donkeys, which was very hard to find on Kauai on short notice. They eventually found two of them that were the wrong color and in the wrong part of the island. So they spray-panied them brown with hairspray. They blindfolded them, put them in a crate, attached them to a helicopter, and flew them to the

Nepali coast where they were flying. No donkeys were harmed in the making of this movie. Well, maybe not physically, but they had lasting mental trauma from that. Yeah, for the next three years of their dumb little lines. Now, the mountain that the Paramount logo dissolves into is Kalalea Mountain. And that was a last-minute decision by Spilberg, which sent Frank Marshall scrambling around the island to find a nearby peak that could accommodate this request. And of course, the production wouldn't be complete without one last accident. The shot where Indiana climbs on board the plane and it takes off from the water, that's all one shot.

That stunt was actually performed by Harrison Ford. And on the first take, they got up over the trees. and then lost altitude and disappeared on the other side of the trees and the plane crashed. But apparently miraculously, Ford and the pilot were both unharmed. What? And they piloted the plane back around and they did another take. So Lizzie, in the end, despite all of these problems,

Steven Spielberg kept the train running. And they wrapped production in the planned 73 days. That is crazy. Despite losing, I believe, over seven days to rain, snakes, injuries, dysentery, etc. That's 12 days faster than Paramount had mandated, and they came in on budget. Damn.

Which is amazing. So Spielberg dives headfirst into the edit. He comes up with the first cut of the film. It's three hours long. They cut all the character stuff, as I mentioned. Yeah, it's gone. It's just all gone. They're just like, we need the action, and that's it.

They filled out the missing pieces of the film with stock footage. the plane that the DC3 plane that Indiana is always traveling on between locations like when he goes that's just footage from other movies that they took and they just put in this movie they're like it works it's totally fine I believe that specifically

was from 1973's The Lost Horizon So Spielberg eventually gets the film down to two hours he sends it to George Lucas Lucas says it's amazing and then the next morning Lucas goes I have some ideas and so Lucas then went into the edit and Lucas's only ideas were to cut the film even shorter

so then they got it to well understand two hours, the hour and 55 minutes. And then, most importantly, they show the movie to Marsha. As we mentioned, George Lucas's wife, who is like the humanity whisperer for these men, and she saves the end of the movie. So they show her the rough cut, and she looks at them and she says, the ending doesn't work. They're like, what do you mean? It's great.

Indiana kills the Nazis or the God kills the Nazis, shows up in Washington. And she goes, where the hell's the girl? Apparently in the original ending, the last time you see Marion is tied up on the German Island. That tracks. And the audience is just left wondering, like, is she still there? And they're like, oh, my God, why did we put her in the last scene? So Steven Spielberg did a reshoot with Karen Allen and Harrison Ford in San Francisco at the Capitol

building there in order to add Marion to the post-briefing scene with Army intelligence officers because she was like, there's no emotional resolution to this film if you never see her again. Which, by the way, her character, this entire movie, and also in that sequence on the stairs at the very end, is just kind of like scrambling around trying to keep up with, like, clearly not being paid enough attention to. Always being left behind by Indiana Jones. And even at the end, she's like, ah, how'd it go? And he's just like, eh, just like barreling on down the stairs. Well, I'll talk about this now. I was going to save it for the end.

Apparently this was, it was a very tough shoot for Karen Allen. And she's a really wonderful Broadway actress, and she wanted more for her character. Yeah, there's not a lot. She kept pitching Spielberg. Why couldn't my character also want to find the arc? Like, if my father was obsessed with finding it for so long, couldn't I have a motivation of wanting to complete his life's work? But Spielberg didn't want to touch the script by the time Karen Allen showed up on set.

And I think justifiably so. He's moving at lightning pace. But she was pretty dissatisfied with this character, it sounds like. And then she was really disappointed when she saw the final film and realized that they had cut all of the character stuff that she thought she had even had to begin with with her character. And she talks about how the scene where you're introduced to her, she drinks the guy and the giant Sherpa under the table.

In the original version, she shoes the men out of her bar. She goes outside. She's a little drunk. She laughs. She puts some snowballs on the side of her head. She comes back inside. And then the reason that her hands are on the side of her head when Indy walks up is because she had just had the snow on the side of her head.

And then they have a much longer conversation where they discuss their past. And she discusses the death of her father. and all of that stuff disappeared. And so I think that she, you know, understandably, even though she has fond memories of the movie and she appreciates that a lot of women come up to her and talk to her about the part and they appreciate her,

she felt like she was given kind of the short end of the stick when it came to the balance between character and action. And if you look at her filmography, she didn't do a lot of movies like this after Indiana Jones. She went into smaller indie work, more character-driven work. I'm going to go through the, post stuff super fast. ILM did the effects work. I don't want to get into. They did great stuff

with the arc scene. It's very technical. You can read it online. Basically, three artists pitched three different ideas for what came out of the ark to Spielberg. One says a firestorm. One says ghosts. The other one says a light show. And Spielberg goes, yes. All three. Yeah, he goes, yes. And Joe Johnston, who would later go on to direct, you know, Jurassic Park 3. And I think he did Captain America, Winter Soldier was actually one of those artists that had conceived some of this work on Raiders the Lost Dark. It should be noted that the work that they did on the exploding head for Belloc was so good that the movie was initially given an R rating.

And the reason that there are flames superimposed in front of Belich's head when it explodes is to get rid of the R rating and drop them to a PG. PG-13 did not exist at the time that this film was released. That would not happen until Temple of Doom, which we'll be covering. at a later date. So of course, John Williams gets brought in to provide the iconic score. He had scored almost out all of Lucas and Spielberg's work up until that point. So it's just the dream team on this project constantly. He did his four themes, the Indiana Jones theme, Marion's theme, the arc theme, and the Nazi theme. There's actually a really pretty piece of music

that I'm sure David could identify. It's when Indian Marion are kind of first walking through Cairo. And the movie has kind of a wistful quality for a couple of minutes when they first arrive in Cairo, and that was actually a specific request from Spielberg, and if it feels a little out of place in the movie, he actually asked Williams to do it in a slightly different style for that reason. Iconic sound effects supervisor Ben Burt recorded the sounds for the film, The Snakes. He ran his hands through a wet casserole, and then he also dragged a wet sponge across tape. He rolled his Honda Civic down a gravel hill for the boulder that Indy runs from.

Great. The arc lid opening is actually him lifting the bow. backplate of his toilet, and the arc spirits are sea lions and dolphins run through a vocoder, which I thought was pretty cool. Oh. And Indiana's whip crack is actually a recording of Harrison Ford using Indiana Jones's whip. So no movie magic there. All right, rounding the corner.

We're approaching the summer of 1981. The movie's ready to be released, and the film industry has been in the toilet that Ben Burt used to record that sound. Studios have prepared 60 films for 1981, even though the box office is down 10% year on year, and the hottest of all of them is not Raiders of the Lost Dark. It is Superman 2. And then in second is History of the World Part 1 and also the James Bond film for Your Eyes Only. Cinema Score, the audience polling service, which is still in existence today, has shown that nobody's looking forward to Raiders of the Lost Dark,

because nobody knows what to think of this throwback movie to 1940. Republic Serial films are. But Raiders is about to go sea biscuit on some others. So, Raiders at Lost Dark is released on June 12th, 1981 in the United States and Canada. It opens in 1100 theaters, and it grosses a modest $8.3 million in its opening weekend. It gets the top spot at the box office that weekend, barely beating out Class of the Titans, $6.5 million, history of the world part one, $5 million. Its second weekend, it basically doesn't dip at all. It hits $8 million again. That's crazy.

Movies dip 40, 50. God, I think the flash dip's like 75% you know, weekend on weekend recently. There's no drop. So then let's pop forward to the next weekend. No drop. Now it's got some competition. Superman 2 comes in, 14.1 million. Cannonball run, 12 million.

But Raiders won't quit. Fourth weekend, 8 million. It holds strong. By its sixth week, it's back to the number one spot at the box office. after which it holds at number one for basically the next nine weeks. And for 40 weeks, 40 weeks, it holds almost an entire year as one of the top 10 grossing films in the country. This movie ran for nine months. Did they just keep running it?

They kept running it. They did re-releases later. This was a continuous run. It didn't officially leave theaters. it opened June 12th, 1981, and it left theaters March 18th, 1982. That's nuts. I mean, they did also leave movies in theaters longer than they do now. But not like that, I don't think.

Not like that. Total domestic box office gross, $212 million highest for 1981. The second highest on Golden Pond. Hell yeah. Okay. Movie rules. It also earned $141 million in the foreign box office. So total worldwide gross, 354,000.

million dollars. On a 20 million budget. Yep. It's still, to this day, the quote, legiest film of all time. So the gap in time between its highest box office weekend and its end of run is the longest of any film, I believe, to this day, Titanic may have eclipsed it. I'll look that up. The film was re-released, Lizzie, as you mentioned, in July of 1982, so three months after it had finished its first run, it made another 21.4 million. And then again in March of 1983, making another 11.4 million. Oh, my God. Harrison Ford's so rich. It became one of the top four highest grossing films ever, a list which was literally just George Lucas and Steven Spielberg,

Jaws, The Empire Strikes Back, Star Wars, and Raiders of the Lost Dark. Wow. Which is crazy. Now it's James Cameron and the Russo brothers. Paramount netted $49 million in profit off the film. Spielberg himself cleared 20,

2 million on the back end. Oh my God. Lucas made only 2.5, but Lucasfilm made 21. And I've read a lot of conflicting reports on what Ford made. But on the low end, I read 5 million. On the high end, I read just north of 20 million that he made on the back end. It's probably somewhere in between. Damn.

And typically, he'd been paid around $500,000, I believe, on Empire Strikes Back. So this was a huge bump for him. Raiders was released to near universal critical acclaim. It would go on to win five Oscars at the 1982 Academy Awards, Best Art Direction, Best Film Editing, Sound, Sound Editing, and Visual Effects. It was nominated for Best Director, Picture, Cinematography, and Score. Raiders put Lucas and Spielberg back on top in Hollywood, and it kickstarted a 10-plus-year run of pure hits for Spielberg.

If you look at what he did between 1981 and 1983... 81 to 93. To 93. Yeah, 81 to 93. It is insane. And it is over a movie per year, and they are all bangers. And he's just crushing it and winning Oscars. The craziest run, I think any filmmaker has ever had.

It ends in 1993 with the double whammy of Jurassic Park and Schindler's List. It's crazy. I just actually want to pull it up and read it really quickly because it is so amazing. So in 1981, Raiders of the Lost Dark, he then, in 82, did ET the extraterrestrial. He then did Twilight Zone the movie. Temple of Doom, the color purple, Empire of the Sun,

Last Crusade, Always, hook, Jurassic Park, Schindler's List. So I think always is the miss in there? Well, Twilight's on the movie also, famously.

Not so good. But he was only one third of it, so I don't count it quite as much. And he was one of the less lethal portions of it. True. We talked about Karen Allen and her response to the film, of course, for Harrison Ford,

this would prove to be become, I would argue, the defining role of his career. Oh, yes. The point that it eclipsed Han Solo, which is funny because he had been worried about being remembered just as the lead in this, or co-lead in this goofy sci-fi series. And now he eclipsed it with the next thing that he did with George Lucas. Lucas Spielberg and Ford conceived of this as a trilogy that would go on to do Temple of Doom in the Last Crusade in 1989 and seemingly put the same.

series to rest until Lucas got restless and decided that Indy should fight some aliens, leading to 2008's Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. And of course, after Lucasfilm was sold to Disney in 2012, it was only a matter of time before they would bring this IP back, which they just did, with Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, which underperformed at the box office. Unfortunately, I haven't seen it. I think it looks totally fun. I like James Mangold a lot as a director. I really liked Ford B. Fri. I love Phoebe Wallerbridge. She's right. I love Harrison Ford.

So may there be further Indiana Jones movies? Only time will tell. But for this podcast, we still have four more that we get to cover. And Temple of Doom is way crazy. I'm very excited about that one as well. Raiders was preserved in the United States Library of Congress National Film Registry in 1999 for being culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant. And of course, of all of these films, Spielberg says it is his favorite because it's the only of the series in which he wouldn't change a thing.

And the last thing I'll leave you guys with is, interestingly, Raiders kind of marks a diverging path of fates for Spielberg and Lucas. So when Spielberg and Lucas started working on this film, Lucas was very much the one that was in the position of power. Spielberg was considered a Wiz Kid director, but Lucas was the true hitmaker in Hollywood. Hollywood with Star Wars. Sure. That makes sense. Well, that started to fall apart for Lucas with Return of the Jedi, which was not as well received as the prior to Star Wars installments. And then with Howard the Duck and a number of other films going through late 80s, his producing

clout waned. He went through a painful divorce. You can hear this on our Howard the Duck episode, whereas Spielberg cemented himself as a legendary filmmaker. And more importantly, decided that he wanted to mature into more emotionally resonant, mature pieces of filmmaking leading to movies like Schindler's List. And what's interesting is that George Lucas always wanted to stay with those more pulpy stories of his childhood.

And you've seen him return to Star Wars, et cetera, throughout his career, whereas Spielberg has tried to move on to other more, I would argue, serious fare. So it's just a really interesting intersection for these two filmmakers at this point in time. And maybe, I don't know, is it the only time that we've seen the two biggest filmmakers in the world? collaborate on a movie following both of their huge successes. I'm not sure. It is cool because it does feel unusual that also that they were able to get out of each other's way and that George Lucas was able to do that for him.

It was a good collaboration. It was a very solid collaboration. Yeah, I mean, that's a testament to both of them, but I think especially to George Lucas that he knew, like, I do need to stay out of his way. Apparently, Lucas, after he watched the first cut of the film, called Spielberg and just said, you're a very good director. Oh.

That's like all he said after he watched it, which he thought was a very cool quote. And that's what went wrong on Raiders of the Lost Ark. So I hope you learned something, guys. And as always, that brings us to our favorite segment, which is what went right on Raiders and Lost Ark. For you, Lizzie. You know, I just can't get past that fly,

just slowly crawling into Paul Freeman's mouth. He really, he commits. We rolled it back, I think, two additional times to watch it. I'm impressed you caught it in the moment. I just, well, it happened and I was like, did that fly just? David was like, yeah, right in his mouth. We went back and just watched it. I could watch it again and again.

So A, that fly, I loved it. Academy Award winning work for that fly. If you guys want to see this specific moment, so it's towards the end of the film, Indy is holding the bazooka up on the ridge over Belloc, the Nazis, Karen Allen, as they're walking the arc to the pedestal, and Belak addresses Indy for the first time, and in that close-up, the fly crawls into his mouth. It's the craziest thing you'll see in the entire movie.

So I would say that. And then, I mean, you know, it's the classic what went right from this. It's the fight scene where he doesn't fight him. He just kills him. It's great. There's like nothing like it prior to this. There's a fly on your microphone, and I think it's going to go on your mouth. I've been watching it all night, honestly, because I really don't want it to, and it will not leave me alone.

It's going to happen. Do not Paul Freeman me. My one more right, I think the stunt work in this movie holds up really well. It's really good. There are some, I actually think the map paintings look great, too, and there are just certain storytelling aspects where you're like, oh, yeah, this feels like the 80s. But I think the stunt works great. All of the truck stuff is awesome. It sells the sets, like that boulder feels really good, you know, because.

Because that stunt work is really impressive. So kudos to the stunt team. Kudos to Harrison Ford for pulling off a lot of stunts himself as well. Also, John Williams. Beautiful, beautiful score. I love Marion's theme. It's a great theme. All right, guys, that wraps our coverage on Raiders of the Lost Ark,

the first of many Indiana Jones films that we will be covering. As always, if you enjoy this show, give us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts. If you really enjoy this show, consider joining our Patreon. And if you really, really enjoy this show, tell a friend about it. Yes. Because we would love to expand our listenership. And, of course, we wouldn't be here without our full-stop supporters, Hannah Tripp,

Soman Chianani, Tom Kristen, true All-Stars, you to real MVPs. That's right. We'll be off for a few weeks, but we're back. When are we back, Lizzie? Could you remind? I will never forget. It's 9-11. And we will have some encore.

episodes, episodes that we will run. Episodes. That we will run in between for you. But yes, until 9-11, we will take a little break. Thank you so much, guys. Congratulations again to you, Lizzie Bowman and David Bowman. Thank you.

On bringing this podcast a little closer. I feel very much a part of it. As soon as they allow a thruffle, Chris, you marry right on in. Absolutely. We look forward to talking to you in season five. We're coming with a whole bunch fun new episodes, a couple of fun new things. Send us your recommendations. Thank you. We love you.

You're all the fly in our mouths. And with that, we'll see you next season. Bye. Bye. Go to patreon.com slash what went wrong podcast to support what went wrong and gain access to bonus episodes, video content, and more. What Went Wrong is a sad boom podcast presented by Lizzie Bassett and Chris Winterbauer. Editing music by David Bowman. with cover art from Yvesa Ae.