Monday, August 4, 2008

If Adventure Had A Different Name...


When we all heard there was going to be a fourth Indy picture nobody knew what it was going to be called until Lucasfilm registered several names to control the copyright.

We could then narrow the field of what it was called and hopefully get an idea as to what the story would be about...

Those names were:


* Indiana Jones and the City of Gods
* Indiana Jones and the Destroyer of Worlds
* Indiana Jones and the Fourth Corner of the Earth
* Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
* Indiana Jones and the Lost City of Gold
* Indiana Jones and the Quest for the Covenant



Pretty swanky names don't you think? I think that Lucas chose the least desirable of those names for the title... perhaps he was trying to tell us something?

What most people don't know is that Lucas commissioned quite a number of scripts for another Indy film before he finally decided that "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" was the right one...

Ever wonder if he was right to chose IJATKOTCS instead of one of these other scripts?

I'm going to be posting a synopsis of each of these scripts that George Lucas commissioned as a possible idea for Indy 4 in the coming weeks.

Stay tuned...

6 comments:

Michael said...

Y'know, I kind of think it didn't really matter. Having read the "Complete Making of" books, it's apparent to me that everything that kind of sucked about Indy 4 was the very stuff Lucas was adamant about the movie including. The fridge, the monkey/Tarzan bit. . . and Darabont's script, my God, what a disappointing mess, and chock to the gills with fanboy rib-nudging.

Why on earth they don't base one around the Fountain of Youth, bring Short Round into it as an adult, base it on the cusp of the 60s. . . so much you could do here. The world getting smaller, less room/need for the explorers of old, one last adventure for Indy. . .

. . . or the Garden of Eden! That could work, bringing in the nascent Age of Aquarius stuff, lots of things to riff on there.

Oh, so many interesting possibilities. As long as Indy faces implausible threats and gets out of them plausibly, I'll take another adventure, any day of the week.

Michael said...

Oooh, and I would like to add -- George cares to much about the Indy "MacGuffin." He was adamant about aliens in IJ4 (and I am fine with that in principal, it was just handled poorly in this film) -- if you read the book there are some quotes in there that just boggle the mind. But a MacGuffin by definition is "something the characters care about but the audience does not." In other words -- IT DOESN'T MATTER GEORGE -- it just has to be something he audience is convinced Indy cares about going after. This was manifestly not the case in IJ4. A lot of time was spent trying to get the audience to invest in the whole Crystal Skull/aliens angle, so much harder to pitch at us than a semi-obscure, human artifact that we already believe exists. It's really a shame that George Lucas really doesn't seem to have any understanding of what made his greatest movies work. Spielberg makes movies for audience, sometimes for good and sometimes for ill -- but Lucas makes them only to please himself, and if his audience likes them, that's just a bonus.

The $$$ generated by Indy make a strong case for a fifth installment. But if George has any sense he'll listen to Steven, who according to the Times of London interview with Lucas wants to make another one more akin to the originals, while George wants to take them further away. Please, George -- get far away form INdy with all these small independent movies you have been threatening to make. I know you think you "own" Indy -- but he's bigger than you, and he's ours. If you're gonna give us one more shot, make it the best one yet.

Anonymous said...

If Lucas really wants to do something different with Indiana Jones, he should give it to Spielberg to manage outright, and have no input in it whatsoever. It'd be interesting to see what would come out of that.

Anonymous said...

I thought this was a Disney site not a Lucasfilm site. If I wanted to read about Indiana Jones I'd go to Indianajones.com

Anonymous said...

Ever go to a Disney park? Guess you didn't know Indy was a character there.

Anonymous said...

You're absolutely right Kevin, Indy has become a Disney character. He's not the great adventure hero he once was. He's become just another cartoon character to sell to the kiddies.