“Raiders of the Lost Ark at 30”

Yesterday was the 30th anniversary of the opening of the movie Raiders of the Lost Ark. And here is a nice article with some interesting historical bits of business about the movie’s development and place in history. For example:

Although Indiana Smith/Jones first came into existence in 1973, when Lucas wrote a treatment called The Adventures of Indiana Smith, the roots of the character reach back to Lucas’ childhood. Growing up in Montecito, Calif., young George Lucas loved escaping into the serialized adventures of movie characters like Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon, and the excitement he felt at the cliffhanger conclusion of each week’s “thrilling episode” permanently imprinted on his imagination. Just like Lucas’ other great pop-culture creation, Star Wars, Indiana Jones is a tricked-up tribute to the juvenile entertainment of yesteryear.

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For all his ideas, however, Lucas is, by his own admission, someone who hates writing so much that he avoids the task whenever possible. So as Lucas toyed with the idea of making an Indiana Smith movie as his follow-up to American Graffiti, he recruited fellow Bay Area-based writer-director Philip Kaufman to come up with something terrific for Smith’s first screen adventure.

Kaufman’s great contribution to the franchise was the mythical object Indy and the Nazis chase throughout Raiders. “Phil Kaufman had provided the [plot device] of the Lost Ark of the Covenant, which his orthodontist had told him about when he was 11 years old,” Raiders screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan told interviewer Graham Fuller in 1993.

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Once Star Wars was done, Lucas recruited a friend for a quick excursion to the Aloha State. Luckily, Steven Spielberg was able to get away from his postproduction work on a little movie called Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

As Spielberg told Vanity Fair interviewer Jim Wildolf in 2008: “He had called me up and he said, “Do you want to come to Hawaii? I need to get away for the opening of Star Wars.’ So I got on a plane, and joined him and his wife, and we were just waiting for the grosses.

“We got word about three in the afternoon or so,” Spielberg told Wildolf. “The sun was still up. I remember George got word that all the 10-o’clock-in-the-morning shows had sold out all across the country. And at that point George was the most giddy I had ever seen him in all the years prior to that that I had ever seen him. He was just beside himself, with relief more than anything else. He had been inward for a long time, waiting for those numbers, and then he turned to me, he said, ‘So what are you going to do next?’

“I told him that I wanted to [make] a James Bond movie. And George said, ‘I’ve got something better than that. It’s called Raiders of the Lost Ark.’ He pitched me the story, and I committed on the beach. We started a tradition of building lucky sandcastles. So we used to build sandcastles in Hawaii, and if the sandcastle withstood the first high tide, the film was a hit. If the high tide overran the sandcastle, we were going to have to struggle to make our money back.”

Needless to say, that first sandcastle survived.

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In January 1978, Kasdan, Lucas, and Spielberg holed up for a weeklong series of nine-hour story sessions, during which they hashed out narrative elements and visual ideas, combining Lucas’ character, Kaufman’s device of the Ark of the Covenant, and brand-new concepts into (more or less) the story of the final film. “Lucas spent most of his time at the story conference talking Spielberg and Kasdan out of their more elaborate ideas,” Dale Pollock wrote in his 1983 book Skywalking: The Life and Films of George Lucas. “Kasdan rote Raiders in six months, reshaping the story, fleshing out the characters, and giving them snappy dialogue. Lucas acknowledges that Raiders is one-third his movie, one-third Spielberg’s, and one-third Kasdan’s.”

Basing his screenplay on a lengthy transcript of the story sessions with Lucas and Spielberg, Kasdan struck a balance between Lucas’ original conception of the character, a suave playboy in the James Bond mode, and Spielberg’s vision, a violent character with a dark edge.

Of those famous Indiana Jones story sessions between Lucas, Spielberg and Kasdan, you can go here to download a remarkable transcript.

I can still remember seeing Raiders on opening night in a theater in Ventura, California. That was one of the most memorable movie experiences of my life. Such a terrific piece of entertainment.