Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark: Everything You Didn't Know

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Speaker 1: Too Much Information is a production of iHeartRadio.

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Speaker 2: Hello everyone, and welcome to Too Much Information, the show that brings you the secret histories and little known fascinating facts and figures behind your favorite movies, music, TV shows and more. We are your two Nazi Hayton, Snake Fear and Artifact Recovering Whip Totin Raiders of the Lost podcast.

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Speaker 1: My name is Alex Heigel and I'm Jordan run Tug. That's very good.

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Speaker 2: Well, I didn't get the alliteration in there, but I wanted to still have a little bit of that ratit tad tad rhythm.

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Speaker 1: I'm not one of those things, but I'll let you figure out which one.

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Speaker 2: Today we're talking about possibly the greatest action venture movie of all time, the Devastating Right Cross and the one two jab of iconic characters played by Harrison Ford, Steven Spielberg, and George Lucas's collaborative love letter to the Mattine icons of their youth. That's right, we're talking about Raiders of the Lost arc. I'm told there's a new movie in the Indiana Jones franchise out, which is shocking to me because it ended in nineteen eighty nine.

00:01:04
Speaker 1: You like seeing him get blown up by an atomic bomb while hiding in a fridge in Crystal Skull. It didn't do it for you, didn't do it, didn't do it, damn thing for me.

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Speaker 2: Much like everything, really, the tide of critical reappraisal has come back around to Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, has it?

00:01:18
Speaker 3: Really?

00:01:19
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, there's defenders for that movie online. Those people are wrong. It's one of those I guess if you evaluate it on its merits, it's fine, but it's just something that didn't need to exist and looks like hideously dated.

00:01:33
Speaker 1: And then in the new one. Are you going to see the new one? No? Really? Now I don't give a shit.

00:01:38
Speaker 2: Ah three perfect, two pretty incredibly good films. I don't need to see the fifth one. This movie is gonna things up for Disney, and probably just for Disney really, because I forget they own Lucasfilm and everybody. But this is one of the most expensive movies ever made in D five. It was in development for so long. It costs like three hundred mil. And that was I think before marketing. Oh my god. So yeah, they're taking a bath on it, and good like I don't I like James Mangold, the director.

00:02:13
Speaker 1: He did my.

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Speaker 2: Favorite Wolverine movie, which was Logan, which's actually a beautiful, elegaic film that with shades of like Unforgiven and really really really great stuff. But yeah, no, I I everyone involved in this movie, with the exception of Harrison Ford, can go screw Maybe even Harrison Ford.

00:02:35
Speaker 1: No wait, what about you can't say that about Marian though she's in it for like five minutes. Oh yeah, but she's still in it. Karen Allen's amazing, Karen Allen is great. Everything about it pisses me off. They like they added just like a new character they like, and there's like a whole it's it's all just the CGI garbage. There's the daging.

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Speaker 2: It's just they hadn't such an opportunity to do something actually like cool with it. And then everything that I've heard about it, and and yes, I also wikipedia the plot because I'm not going to see it. Even the ending of it is like a cop out. You have to edit all this out, but like do you know, well, oh, you you're gonna see it. I'm not gonna spoil it for you, but like the ending is like a saccerin cop out, which means I love it.

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Speaker 1: Uh probably, Yeah. It takes place in the sixties, it's got Indiana Jones, it's got a saccharine ending. I'm gonna love it. What are you talking about?

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Speaker 2: I don't know that there's too much sixties stuff other than just like the opening where they're like, well the opening is is the d is daged? No, the opening is daged him on a train that somebody more compared more than one person compared it to Polar Express though based on how bad the CDI is.

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Speaker 1: Whit is it like the RFK Funeral Train? No?

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Speaker 2: No, this is It opens up with like a flashback, and that's where you have like really de aged Indie because it's still Harrison, but it's like it's got like Toby Jones and the main villain, and it's a flashback in World War Two and it takes place on a train and then they fast forward to nineteen sixty nine where he's like retiring and he hates the Beatles.

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Speaker 1: Oh, oh, well, I think they rake.

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Speaker 2: I think they wake him up, Like there's like a he gets like woken up by somebody playing. I think Magical Mystery Tour is like a it's like a bit that I read anyway, I'm spoiling this whole movie for you, which is what you deserve, because it's a piece of cash grab and I hate it.

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Speaker 1: But The First Raiders to the Lost Tark is a perfect film, though.

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Speaker 2: I just man, it's fitting that the last movie in this trilogy was about Eternal youth, the Promise of Eternal youth, because this is like one of those movies where it just gives you that like youthful rush of being a kid, like playing in your backyard again, you know. And and I saw it when I was like six, and it's just instantly you're just like like you have this dim glimmer in the back of your head that like this isn't a real thing. Even even as a child, I was like, this is not our archaeologists don't do this, because I was also a dinosaur kid, so I like I was at archaeologists actually do so I was, but I was like, this is just the coolest thing. And and this like sense of adventure and this you know, Gollie g whiz wide eyed, the good guys can defeat the Nazis with a really good punch and get the girl, just all this great stuff. It's just It's just one of the purest like distillations of that feeling in all of cinema, and I'm glad it hits the same. I'd be very sad if I went revisited this other than all the kind of you know, white savior stuff and blah blah blah, but other other than some of the like things that we look at with like a progressive lens. Now we're like that hasn't aged so well, but still a perfect film. Yeah, I mean, you were a dinosaur kid.

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Speaker 1: I was that you come as no surprise, a very indoor history buff nerd Even as a little boy. I remember in preschool the boy was teasing or being mean to a little girl I liked at recess or playing in the backyard, and I remember running up to him and like getting uncharacteristically like pseudo physical with him and being like, let her go, because I think I heard Harrison Ford say that in one of these movies. So that's my main memory of it. Must have been Raiders. Damn. I do love these movies. Although I mean, as I'm sure you we've talked about this a lot, I'm more of a last crusade guy as opposed to a Raiders or a Temple of Doom, mostly due to my undying allegiance to Sean Connery, who it's worth mentioning when the Last Crusade premiere in nineteen eighty nine, he was fifty eight. Harrison Ford is eighty and he just attended the premiere of the new movie. That's insane. Yeah.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, and Harrison's Ford will still punch you in the face too for looking at him.

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Speaker 1: Cross yeah, crosssiight, ask Grian Gosling. Yeah, Raiders. I hadn't really revisited this movie as much. Last Crusade is something I still watch like every couple of years. But yeah, Raiders. I'm glad to hear that it does hold up because it's been a minute since I've seen it.

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Speaker 2: It's just great because it doesn't have any of the baggage, Like even though they made this as a three picture deal, which is wild to me that they were, like they must have been really gassed on there, I mean, and rightly so. I mean, you know, Skpielberg had made Jaws and Close Encounters and Lucas had made two Star Wars, but to make a three picture deal right out of the gate on this. But it's the this is the one that doesn't have the baggage. You know, immediately, by the time you get to Temple of Doom, they're already self referencing, they're already like toying with the iconography. And then by the time you get to you know, Crusade, it is a little freighted with its own myth yeah, exactly, whereas this one is just such a like clean, no nonsense film.

00:07:58
Speaker 1: What do you think about Temple of Doom. I feel like that's the one.

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Speaker 2: The most divorced guy movie ever. It's fascinating. Lucas was getting divorced and that's why it's so mean. Uh, and Spielberg, I think was in the process of getting divorced and was like trying to date Cape Capshaw. But it's so like dark and violent, and you know, I'll mention this. I mentioned this later on, but it's it's actually interesting because it adds this shade to Indie's character where he set he returns the thing that he the mcguffin to the people at the end, which is I think something that gets overlooked in the mythology of the characters, that there's like an explicit moment where he's like, no, this does not belong in a museum, which is really funny.

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Speaker 1: But yeah, that movie is weird.

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Speaker 2: It opens with a musical number over with him in like a white dinner jacket, a Lah James Bond. It's just very, very bizarre. And that's what I mean, like they were already just kind of like hide on their own supply by that point. This one is almost like punk in its like manic energy and the way that it was done on such a shoe string. We're putting the card to the head of the horse here well, from the exact model and species of animal that Indy's whip is made from, to Harrison Ford's dogged insistence on placing himself in various shades of peril for the film, to how they pulled off that horrifying face Meltah, you forgot about the face?

00:09:26
Speaker 1: Melt Yeah, I did. I did.

00:09:28
Speaker 2: Here's everything you didn't know about Raiders of the Lost Arc. In a way, we got Raiders.

00:09:39
Speaker 1: Of the Lost Arc from Francis Ford Copple.

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Speaker 2: George Lucas explained to Van Ver that early on in his involvement with Coppola on Apocalypse Now, Coppola told him, for your next film, why don't you try something funny, warm and fuzzy. And he was working on Apocalypse Now with John Milius, and early in that film's development it was kind of like a doctor Strange law of satire, and Lucas is like, Eh, this isn't really coming together, and he decides to make American Graffiti instead. But by his own admission, he's working on a few different ideas at the time. One of them is what he called to the American Film Institute, the idea of kind of taking a thirty serial, using mythology and ideas from the past and creating an adventure film. He's talked before about wanting to make Flash Gordon. You know, he wanted to originally make an adaptation of Flash Gordon, but he couldn't get the rights. Then he just kind of took the idea of a space opera serial and did all of the stuff that he stole from Kurosawa Films to create Star Wars, right, But he also had this idea that he shelved, the idea for Indiana Jones that he shelved in favor of making Star Wars. But before that even happened, he was kicking this idea around and developing it with a guy named Phil Kauffman, who's a director and writer who's best known for his adaptation of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, the nineteen seventy eight version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers and the Right Stuff. And it's from Phil Kaufman that we actually get the lost Ark of the Covenant idea, this so called mcguffin. Lawrence Kasden, who is the other big three of this film, said that Kaufman's orthodontist told him the legend of the arc of the Covenant when he was eleven years old. Seems like a weird thing for a guy messing around in.

00:11:26
Speaker 1: Your mouth to do. Coffin was actually supposed to direct.

00:11:30
Speaker 2: Lucas wanted him to direct the project, but he abandoned this to go direct Clint Eastwood in The Outlaw Josie Wales, figuring it was a smart decision at the time that, hey, Clint Eastwood is making a Western.

00:11:46
Speaker 1: Clint Eastwood's a big star. Western's are big genres.

00:11:49
Speaker 2: My other choice is George Lucas and his adventure serial thing that is completely unproven.

00:11:55
Speaker 1: So fast forward to nineteen seventy seven, before we go to nineteen seventy seven, and I didn't realize that George Lucas was involved with Apocalypse Now. What was his involvement? Just like an early draft of it with Francisco Coppola, Yeah, and John Millius.

00:12:08
Speaker 2: The Millius is the uh, the guy widely credited with the surf characters.

00:12:14
Speaker 1: You know, these are all Bay Area.

00:12:15
Speaker 2: Guys, like Coppola lives in Napa, like you know, Lucas has always been in San Francisco and in the Bay Area.

00:12:22
Speaker 1: He's in Skywalker's and.

00:12:24
Speaker 2: Marin and they were I don't know what the exact connection is, but they I think might have been like kind of known through the USC Film Network.

00:12:34
Speaker 1: Anyway, Yeah, he did.

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Speaker 2: He did a draft of Apocalypse Now, but he left pretty early on.

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Speaker 1: But I love hearing stories of these guys who all went to school together and knew each other. It's like the it's like the Al Gore Tommy Lee Jones roommate thing from Harvard. I love that.

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Speaker 2: Well, there's that great book, Easy Riders Rabel Yeah. Yeah, yeah, they're loosely grouped under the heading of New Hollywood. I guess Copplo was actually like some of them mentor to him.

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Speaker 1: Oh, Yeah, what am I saying? They co founded American Zootrope together. That's their relationship. American Zootrope is a privately run production company that Coupla has funded all of I think all of his stuff through now is created for The Rain People, which was his first movie in nineteen sixty nine, and then Zoetrope financed THHX one one, three eight and American Graffiti. So call all that hemming and haullings that I did. That's their relationship.

00:13:33
Speaker 2: And yeah, and Lucas was working on Apocalypse Now with him and John.

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Speaker 1: Millius Johnny Carson voice. I did not know that, Thank you. Moving on to nineteen seventy seven, Yes, back Indiana Jones and Raiders of the Lost Arc. Steven Spielberg is taking his customary post picture vacation in Hawaii, having just wrapped Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Well, George Lucas was basically there in hiding. He was terrified that Star Wars was going to be a flop, so he was hiding out in Hawaii. Steven Spielberg told The Guardid in twenty twenty one, George and I happened to be in Hawaii at the same time. Apparently they were building a sand castle together, which, if that's true, and I choose to believe it is, is adorable but also a beautiful metaphor for what was to come. Ooh yeah see yeah yeah, and then Disney would be the wave that would crash and carry it all out. I guess, Spielberg continued. We started complaining to one another about the problems you get making these big films. He'd tell me about his difficulties with the robots on Star Wars, and I'd tell him about my nightmare stories about the mechanical shark in Jaws, which he named Bruce, after his lawyer. Then I mentioned I'd always wanted to make a James Bond picture, and George said, I've got something better than Bond. He told me the plot of Raiders, and he said, the very best thing would be we wouldn't have to make a single piece of hardware in the film. Spielberg, I guess he really really wanted to make a Bond film so bad, which is also kind of adorable. But he was turned down by James Bond producer Albert Cubby Broccley twice, not once, but twice, first for being too unknown and then the second time because Broccoley assumed that he'd be too expensive now that he was the biggest director in Hollywood.

00:15:19
Speaker 2: Really the catch them in between the rock and a hard place of like not getting to do your dream project first because you're not big enough, and that it's because you're too big.

00:15:27
Speaker 1: What about now? Though? I feel like I bet you be In our lifetime, or rather his lifetime, there will be one Spielberg directed Bond movie. Do we think it'll be good? He'll reboot one? No?

00:15:38
Speaker 2: Yeah, No, he's only going to do one if he can make it all sad and about his parents and about movies and the stories we tell and who gets to tell them and all that other high food and crap.

00:15:49
Speaker 1: I mean, we got a reboot coming up for Bond. Maybe that's we got it. We gotta know more about bonds backstory with his parents. That could be great, or it could be what the franchise neats question fat. I mean Bond in the post woke Bond, we get to Delos trauma. I guess you're right. Actually, I know.

00:16:14
Speaker 2: If he makes the yeah gets okay, new pitch gets Steven Stielberg to do meet the Fableman's.

00:16:18
Speaker 1: Style of Bond Meet the Bond with no action and no set pieces, Bonds by blood. There we go. That's it nice, Thank you anyway. But Spielberg, having failed to secure a Bond film, inserted all sorts of little nods to double O seven into the Indiana Jones franchise, from having Indie appear in a white tux in the opening the Temple of Doom, which he just mentioned, to having James Bond himself Sean Connery play Indie's dad in the Last Crusade. What is his dad's name in those movies, h Henry Henry Jones. Yes, yes, that's what he calls India.

00:16:56
Speaker 2: Yeah, you're right, Junior. No it is Henry Jones. Yes, you're right, je. So Lawrence Kasden comes onto the project next, and that happens because Spielberg purchased Kasden's script for a film called Continental Divide. And these guys sit down for what is over like a week of hour long days of brainstorming. But let me, let me set the stage for that first, Kasden said in the fourth entry of the backstory book series by a guy named Patrick McGilligan, George had already had the idea of the way that Indie dressed, and Phil Kaufman had provided the mcguffin of the Lost Ark of the Covenant, so we sat down and decided on what kind of hero Indiana Jones would be his name. His whip talked about the mcguffin in surial films. After that, we created the film by jumping through our favorite moments from those kinds of films, the sort of thing we'd really like to see. But Jordan, what is a mcguffin. Yes, I'm glad you asked, Kygel the phrase mcguffin. It's a cinematic device, the terms generally accredited to Alfred Hitchcock for an object on which the plot of a movie revolves, but it doesn't really have any intrinsic value otherwise. And a great example of a mcguffin in the sort of more modern era is the briefcase in pulp fiction, which I don't think we ever learned what's in the briefcase, So it's kind of the perfect mcguffin.

00:18:14
Speaker 1: You don't even know what it is. Alvin Hitchcock explained the genesis of the term mcguffin in a nineteen thirty nine lecture at Columbia University, saying it might be a Scottish name taken from a story about two men on a train. One man says, what's that package up there in the baggage rack and the other answers, oh, that's a mcguffin. The first one asks, what's a mcguffin. Well, the other man says, it's an apparatus for trapping lions in the Scottish Highlands. The first man says, but there are no lions in the Scottish Highlands, and the other one answers, well, then that's no mcguffin. So you see, a mcguffin is actually nothing at all. So I guess it's based it's based around an old vaudeville joke.

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Speaker 2: I guess oh you got you got chahm. Well this is this is a really fascinating thing that I uncovered doing this. There's a recording of one of these brainstorming sessions that these guys did, Larrence Cassen, Steven Spielberg, and George Lucas, and someone transcribed it so you can actually go and read the entire live processing of their brains as they fleshed out the character and the first movie you can't.

00:19:23
Speaker 1: Hear it, but I'd love to hear it. And as opposed to reading, it's not on YouTube.

00:19:28
Speaker 2: Sure it might be. No, I think it's just a transcript. I don't think the recording is up.

00:19:35
Speaker 1: Ah. But yeah, they did this at the They did this at the Sherman Oaks apartment of Lucas's assistant because George Lucas doesn't live in LA and hates it.

00:19:47
Speaker 2: But it's got all these amazing quotes in it. Spielberg says at one point, each cliffhanger is better than the one before. What we're doing here really is designing a ride at Disneyland. They name drop all of these these influences for Indy, from like Bond and Clint Eastwood to Alan Quartermain, who's a you know, old timey adventurer, and then less obvious ones like Clark Gable. They pretty much I don't think I have this pinned down, but they pretty much pinned that. The idea that the way Indie dresses is like Humphrey Bogart in Treasurer Sierra Madre. The leather jacket, the felt hat, the khakis, and that look actually comes together thanks to a famous comic book artist named Jim Stirranco, who was commissioned to do these four paintings of Indie based on these descriptions from Lucas and Spielberg and Kasten, and he delivers them these paintings to them in August nineteen seventy nine, less than two months after getting the prompts. They're these beautiful men's health style like oil.

00:20:44
Speaker 1: Paintings that.

00:20:46
Speaker 2: Have like you know, Indie with like on a tank and like punching a Nazi and it's but there.

00:20:52
Speaker 1: They're everyone should google them. They're beautiful.

00:20:54
Speaker 2: But in this in this transcript, in this recording, Lucas very succinctly just sketches out the second act of the movie. He says, in essence, it's just bullshit stuff where he wanders around Cairo trying to uncovery the mystery of his puzzle, and at the same time you meet all these interesting characters, and every once in a while someone throws a knife at him, or he beats somebody up, or somebody beats him up, typical Middle Eastern stuff. Yeah, there's a lot of casual, uh other ring that happens in there.

00:21:22
Speaker 1: There.

00:21:22
Speaker 2: There's like they talk about like oh, well, you know, we want that oriental influence, so like guys and like Middle Eastern guys, like you know, thin mustaches and simtars, and it's like.

00:21:31
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, yeah.

00:21:32
Speaker 2: I mean the whole unspoken part about this is that these adventure serials that they were like modeling this stuff out are wildly racist.

00:21:39
Speaker 1: So there's that.

00:21:41
Speaker 2: Uh And it's in this in this recording you hear, and I've heard a couple different versions of this, but it's in this transcript. You also see there's a line in here. God, how do I want to phrase this? I should just read what I wrote. The name Indiana comes from George Lucas's Alaskan malamute dog that all also inspired the character of Chewbacca. Whoa, And that's why they put it in the third film that we named the dog Indy.

00:22:08
Speaker 1: I hope they stuffed that dog and have it on display at Skywalker rants Jesus right next to the Ark of the Covenant. In The Ark of the Covenant. Oh yeah, uh so.

00:22:19
Speaker 2: He in this transcript one at this session, Lucas refers to him as Indiana Smith and then yeah, well they immediately backtrack it He's like or something else, like Jones.

00:22:32
Speaker 1: And then everyone can call Jones.

00:22:33
Speaker 2: And I've also heard that Lucas stuck to this until like very late in the development process, and it was Spielberg who hated the name, correctly surmising that people would see it as a very obvious ripoff of the nineteen sixty six Steve McQueen film Nevada Smith. So they lobbied for Indiana Jones instead, which is less blatant of a ripoff, but a ripoff none the same. But hilariously, all of this fun brainstorming did not help get the actual script written, and Lawrence Casden told Empire Magazine when I started, I was intimidated, but I realized the reason they hired me was they wanted someone to do all the hard work, put it all together, and come up with all the connective material. They had all these great set pieces in mind, but that's different from a screenplay. I actually wrote it in Steven's office while he was making nineteen forty one. Speaking of nineteen forty one, Jordan tell us why Steven Spielberg was in a downturn when he made Writers a Lost Ark.

00:23:32
Speaker 1: Yeah, you mentioned this at the top of the episode that Raters of the Lost Ark was made on a relative shoestring. What twenty million? Which twenty mil still, I mean, considering the scope of it, is pretty impressive. It's because Spielberg made a little movie called nineteen forty one with John Belushi. Is about all I know about it, and the fact that it's supposed to be very bad. It was extremely costly and underperformed in a big way or a small way. Do you underperform in a big way a small way? That's a great question, questions every time. Okay, Spielberg later told The Guardian after nineteen forty one, I got fed up with endless expensive productions. Afterwards, I went back and looked at my favorite films from the thirties and forties and thought how quickly and cheaply they were made. I think I'm basically a reincarnated director from the nineteen thirties. Ray I'd watch that Raiders owes a lot to the Tarzan books, the Amazing Adventures, the pre comic book books of that era. It was kind of a whiz bang time.

00:24:31
Speaker 2: And in that interviewer, if I were that interview I would have gone LENI riefenstalled.

00:24:39
Speaker 1: And in that recorded brainstorming meeting that you mentioned, George Lucas hammers down this whole budgetary thing. He said, we have to figure out a way of making this cheap, meaning six or seven million dollars. I mean, want to spend our money on stunts for production value and entertainment value. It's much better to have a terrific stunt than to have a scene with eight thousand extras. You got to do it.

00:24:57
Speaker 2: In the George Luca's dead pan voice, we have to figure out a way of making this cheap, meaning six or seven million dollars.

00:25:05
Speaker 1: Just the most uninteresting man in the world. Well, at the time of Indiana Jones, I didn't realize this. George Lucas had retired from directing and even retired as a producer because he'd nearly lost everything that he had on the second Star Wars film, The Empire Strikes Back. He told Vandydfera that nearly every major studio had turned down Raiders, partly because of his projected twenty million dollar budget and partly because Lucas was driving a very hard deal. He learned a lot of lessons from the Star Wars experience retaining licensing rights and creative control, and Michael Eisner was the president of Paramount at the time. He eventually caved to his demands, but his biggest concern was actually Spielberg directing Lucas recalled, Steve had just come off of three giant, huge, mega disaster movies, nineteen forty one, Close Encounters and Jaws. I think the disaster is referring to the plot line and not Yes, not, they weren't all bombs. Both went double over budget, double over schedule. Of course, he was forgiven over Jaws because it was a mega hit. He was sort of forgiven over Close Encounters because it was a big hit, but nineteen forty one was not, and therefore they don't forgive anymore, which is all you need to know about Hollywood in the film industry. And I had talked with Steven because he was a friend of mine. He was caught in some circumstances beyond his control. And I said, we'll just do this very lightly. We'll do it like television, which I think they both had their start in, or at least Spielberg did, And these are the rules, and this is how we're going to play. And Spielberg agreed, and so I had complete confidence in him.

00:26:36
Speaker 2: Yeah, they called it Lucas's killer deal because this thing was so like creat or friendly and hard driving. Both of them got points, they got their they got their fee, but both of them got points and obviously licensing and all those rights. Like it's insane for something that was based on completely original property from a guy who had just had a huge flop.

00:26:58
Speaker 1: You know.

00:26:59
Speaker 2: I think it was definitely Luke is his clout that got this because he was fresh off of even if even though Empire had almost bankrupted him, he didn't that was still another big hit, and I think he had kind of the clout to push it in a way that or at least residual stuff from the first Star Wars that enabled them to drive this.

00:27:19
Speaker 1: Why did it almost bankrupt him? I don't. I mean, I know that's a whole other episode.

00:27:22
Speaker 2: But I think they just I don't. I mean, I don't know. I'm completely speculating, but I don't know. I think he might have just tried to It might have just gone way over budget, because I think that's.

00:27:36
Speaker 1: The one where is that the one where Mark Hamill got like a car accident in between the first two that can get back shooting and yeah, Empire strikes Back was one of the most expensive films of its day thirty three million dollars, and the bank threatened to pull his loan, so he had to go to twentieth Century Fox to get the rest floated. Whoa.

00:27:55
Speaker 2: It was initially budgeted at eighteen million, which was fifty percent more than the first Star Wars.

00:28:01
Speaker 1: But yeah, that's hilarious. At thirty three million, was the most expensive movie at the time. I mean, I know it was what nineteen seventy nine, but gez.

00:28:08
Speaker 2: Now, fifty years later we have one that's a rock cop. Yeah, a billion with marketing. Good god, we live in hell.

00:28:19
Speaker 1: See you've got Spielberg directing, and we've got George Lucas writing. What all you do? Got sunburned? They still needed a producer, so they got Frank Marshall on board to keep things under budget, or at least try and paramount. The studio insisted on severe penalties if the film went over it's twenty million dollar budget, and one way Spielberg managed to keep things a little bit trimmer was he used stock footage. It is kind of adorable. The shots of the DC three flying over the Himalayas is lifted from nineteen seventy threes lost to Horizon. Well, nineteen thirty street scene was borrowed from nineteen seventy five's Hindenburg. Just love the fact that he was penny pinching whatever. He's like, yah stock fuddage. That's the other reason they do the you know, the classic the maps. Yes, the script originally called for montages and they were going to have him bouncing around street.

00:29:14
Speaker 2: Seas on all those maps. Yeah, and they were like, no, that's not sorry, Bud, that's not happening.

00:29:19
Speaker 1: So they just did the line bouncing around on the That's the best part that it's so perfect. It's exactly what it makes the movie. It's wiz bang if I may wiz bang exactly. Yeah.

00:29:31
Speaker 2: So for the film's lead, George Lucas told Empire, I was wary of Harrison and I becoming like scorsesean de Nero.

00:29:39
Speaker 1: I thought, let's create a new icon.

00:29:41
Speaker 2: We found Tom Selik, but as soon as the network heard his option on Magnum Pi got picked. Lucas told Total Film the show magnum P I had sat there and nobody wanted it. We were desperate to get going. We called CBS and asked if he could be let out of his option agreement. It literally had ten days to go. So that's one of the most famous bits of trivia about this movie. And you can actually see selk in like a screen test. You can see him in the in the costume for it. I mean, it got that close to the wire. But he was hardly the only guy that they had floated for this. Pretty much every brunette male in Hollywood seemingly was floated for this role at one point, Chevy Chase and Bill Murray. Bill Murray, they wanted the humor thing in there. They wanted him to be kind of wise cracking. They didn't necessarily want the they didn't want like a big he man character. Harrison Ford was actually kind of scrone coming off Han solo, and they actually made him. They went and worked out a bunch for this. Nick Nolty, Steve Martin, Tim Matheson from Animal house Men who I don't know named Nick Mancuso and Peter Coyote.

00:30:47
Speaker 1: Peter Coyotes, Ken Burns narrator.

00:30:49
Speaker 2: Voice incredible, Jack Nicholson, Jeff Bridges, John Shay, Sam Elliott, and Harry Hamlet were all in the running. I think the casting director, Yeah, the casting director liked Jeff Bridges the most, but the ultimate indignity for Tom Selleck would be that the nineteen eighty Actors Strike put magnum Pi on hiatus for three months, which would have allowed for him to star as Indiana Jones and do magnum Pi.

00:31:16
Speaker 1: What do you think of all these almosts? Jeff Bridges would have been great. I'm in the Nicholson. Sam Elliott probably would have been pretty good too.

00:31:23
Speaker 2: Sam Elliott's a yeah, he's a That man's a fine piece of ass.

00:31:29
Speaker 1: With a great voice. So he's a.

00:31:33
Speaker 2: Snack My god, him and Roadhouse. He's that as a hot old dude, and he would have been young.

00:31:40
Speaker 1: He's probably scorching in the in this era. You love a mustache, douncha? Oh yeah, okay, you know what, I take it back, you're right. Oh yeah, he looks like Clint Eastwood. He's got that. Yeah.

00:31:55
Speaker 2: Man, without the mustache, he looks like a matinee Idol. He looks a little bit like on Fry, which kind of throws me, why did.

00:32:03
Speaker 1: You Why did you bring that into this? It does. It's just like.

00:32:09
Speaker 2: So with literal weeks left to go before they started shootings and with them being without a star. Spielberg was at a screening of The Empire Strikes Back and he called George Lucas. He was like, I think the answer has been under our noses this entire time, and Lucas wasn't sure that Harrison would sign on for a three picture deal with also being contracted for the third Star Wars and four. When he did sign on, got quite the deal. He got seven figures seven percent of the gross and he got to come in and rewrite all of the dialogue because, in his own inimitable words, I don't want to be playing Professor solo here, so they wanted him. He wanted to come in and just throw out a lot of the dialogue and put his own spin on it. But he threw himself into the role. He worked out extensively to get in shape, and he trained with a bullwhip. Coach guy came to his house and they practiced with the bull whip to get Indy's iconic weapon down. Ford did a boatload of stunts for this film without managing to severely injure himself, but he did tear his acl He explained this in a twenty fourteen Reddit ama.

00:33:16
Speaker 1: He says he can't remember.

00:33:17
Speaker 2: Which knee, but it's a scene when he's fighting the German mechanic on the on that airplane called the Flying Wing. They it actually ran over him at one point, and it didn't run over his knee, it ran over his uh, I think foot and ankle. But the only thing that saved him was because they were shooting in Tunisia and the macadam or whatever had become so soft and was already covered by sand that when the landing gear rolled over his foot, it pressed it down into the ground and they were able to roll it off him. But he still tore his acl doing this.

00:33:51
Speaker 1: You can't remember which one, presumably because he's torn both of the.

00:33:54
Speaker 2: Get yeah, guess yeah yeah uh and then he for for that another probably the high water mark of the movie in terms of pure action, the truck chase. He was actually dragged behind the moving truck for some of those shots, and he bruised some ribs in that.

00:34:08
Speaker 1: There's a book by a guy named J. W.

00:34:10
Speaker 2: Wrinsler called The Complete Making of Indiana Jones, and in that he outlines how Steven Spielberg and the stuntman Terry Leonard designed that truck chase, and specifically the part where India is underneath the truck as an homage to the stuntwork of a guy with a fantastic name of Yakima Knutt, who pulled off similar feats using horses and a stage coach in nineteen thirty nine. Stage Coach and the serial Zorro's fighting legion. Terry Leonard almost died trying to recreate that stunt for a movie called The Legend of the Lone Ranger in nineteen eighty one, and he played the truck's original driver, and then he doubled for Ford when India is underneath the truck and in some of the scenes where he's being dragged behind it. Stunt coordinator named Glenn Randall Junior, who I believe is the guy whose whip it was u That guy drove the vehicle, and the truck was designed to accommodate it. They lifted it up, you know, obviously to give as much clearance underneath it, but they also dug out a trench underneath it so that he could be both sunken into the ground and the truck be super high up above it, which you can see in the shots. And then when Harrison is in front of the truck. He's on a bike seat, you know, when he's like trying to climb up the climb up the hood and the Mercedes Benz hood ornament snaps off, which some people have interpreted as being a jab at the company for being loathsome Nazi collaborators. But he's like that, Yeah, they just rigged like a bicycle seat to come out of the undercarriage, and like he sat on it and pretended to scrabble around on the hood while the thing was moving. As Spielberg recalled in Paul Honeyford's biography of Harrison Ford, there are four or five very risky scenes that Terry Leonard Jr. Randall and Vic Armstrong did for him.

00:35:54
Speaker 1: J R.

00:35:55
Speaker 2: Randall's our stunt gaffer, and he wouldn't let Harrison do any stunts that were potentially fatal. Person did most everything else, anything that simply promised serious injury or total disability. Harrison did anything that promised death through fatal miscalculation. Terry Vick and Jr.

00:36:12
Speaker 1: Did you think they get a better term than stunt gaffer, because to me that just sounds like a guy is always screwing up stunts. I mean, we still have a Norm McDonald joke, but I mean it. I mean we still have.

00:36:25
Speaker 2: One of the most well used terms in the film industry is best boy, So gradon on a curve here. One of the film's iconic scenes that actually did not injure for but could have, was the boulder chase at the top of the film. Spielberg wrote in an American Cinematographer retrospective that we went to great lengths to make a twelve foot rock out of fiberglass and wood and plaster, precisely so that it wouldn't weigh as much as a real twelve foot boulder. But whether weighed three hundred pounds, which it did, or whether it weighed eighty tons, as it would have, it could have still done bodily harm to anyone beneath it. And Harrison was not doubled in those scenes. Not only that, but the sequence was shot in the second week of principal photography in London. I mean, the absolute worst time to eliminate your leading man is in the second week. But because the rock was more effective chasing Harrison with Harrison running toward camera, it just didn't work as well having him doubled. A double would have cheated with his head down, so Harrison volunteered to do it himself.

00:37:21
Speaker 1: He succeeded.

00:37:22
Speaker 2: There were five shots of the rock from five different angles, each one done separately, each one done twice, so Harrison had to race the rock ten times. He won ten times and beat the odds. He was lucky, and I was an idiot for letting him try it.

00:37:37
Speaker 1: So he would risk a man's life to get a preferable camera angle. My understanding this properly. That's why he's the best.

00:37:45
Speaker 2: That's why him and him and Jim Cameron baby total disregard, total disregard for human life in the pursuit of art.

00:37:54
Speaker 1: We stand.

00:37:56
Speaker 2: The sound effects for that border were created by fun Fact iconic sound designer Ben Burt, who is the guy who does all of the sound effects in Star Wars, the lightsabered noise, the tie fighter, that.

00:38:10
Speaker 1: Noise sorrow. Wow, that was good.

00:38:13
Speaker 2: That's hard for doing that without prompting you. He's also the voice of Wally. How awesome of CV does that guy have?

00:38:19
Speaker 1: Anyway?

00:38:20
Speaker 2: The sound of the Bowler is him just rolling his Honda Civic over his gravel driveway.

00:38:26
Speaker 1: In my mind, I just hear like a bowling ball. Yeah yeah, yeah.

00:38:29
Speaker 2: Also that, as Vic Armstrong told Newsweek, if Harrison wasn't such a great actor, he would have made a really great stunt man. Indy's Whip is a four hundred and fifty series. That is the name of it, Kangaroo leather bull whip, made by David Morgan, a company that is still making these things.

00:38:48
Speaker 1: So kangaroo leather, it's made from kangaroos. Just what it sounds like, just what it says on the tin. Wow.

00:38:53
Speaker 2: However, in the original film they couldn't do that because there was an embargo on certain animal products. So I believe the original ones, some of the original ones in this first film, are not actually a kangaroo leather. Sorry disappoint on you kangaroo haters out there. They made about thirty for the original trilogy, ranging in length from six to sixteen feet, and Harrison had fallen off of a ladder while doing carpentry or painting work early on his career, and so he broke his wrist and due to that injury, he had to basically figure out how to like a different way really to work the bull whip, and although he did by his own admission, hit himself in the face and shoulders and head quite a bit while training. He got good enough with the thing that shot where he whips the gun out of the guy's hand.

00:39:41
Speaker 1: That is that was that was real. Harrison actually did that.

00:39:45
Speaker 2: And the guy playing that character, who I think appears twice in the movie. There's a bunch of people who were in this movie twice because they were, you know, pinching pennies. And that guy said to Empire Magazine for that scene in the jungle where Indy whips away my gun, I'm standing there aiming it.

00:40:00
Speaker 1: Bielberg says, don't move. It's my hand, damn it.

00:40:03
Speaker 2: It's scary and the risk is there because all Harrison has to do is come half an inch forward to hit my hand, but he never did so. For Jones's Look, there's a costume designer who at the time her name was Deborah Nedolman, and she has since married John Landis, so her name is now Deborah norlmand Landis.

00:40:20
Speaker 1: Yeah, yes, so for the ret for the.

00:40:23
Speaker 2: Non weaponry parts of Jones's Look, costume designer Deborah Nadelman Landis has said in various interviews that his wardrobe came from Charlton Heston in nineteen fifty four's Secret of the Incas and a nineteen forty three movie entitled Simply China starring Alan Ladd. It's hard to google because it's just called China, but if you look it up and on the poster, just guy looks just like Indiana Jones. She sourced ten leather jackets for Indy from Wilson's House of Swede and Leather in Los Angeles. They custom made these based on a prototype that she made, but when they arrived they just fell apart. She said they were too low quality for them to use, and so she actually because the budget on this was such a it was so tightly controlled, she had to have Ford go to production and say they needed another ten. So that came together at the legendary London costumier Berman's and Nathan's.

00:41:18
Speaker 1: You Know Who. Burman and Nathan's also provided costumes for Who's That The Beatles. They provided the sergent pepper costumes for the album cover excellent. I can always bring it back to the Beatles, make that a moment of every episode.

00:41:33
Speaker 2: The hat, meanwhile, came from another iconic London spot, New Bond, streets Herbert Johnson. Landis told Deadline. I had gone to Herbert Johnson and they had nothing to suit, absolutely nothing, no brown fedoras. But they did have a hat which is called the Australian think crocodile dundee. It was up on one side and had a very large brim, so I said, I'll have that one. We remade it. So they had to age all of this gear up, though, and so the first night of filming when they got to France, she told Town and Country magazine. The first night we were in La Rochelle, after dinner, I went down to the pool. I had brought sandpaper, follows earth mineral oil, a steel brush. Harrison came and sat with me and we just drank and I aged the jackets and the hats.

00:42:15
Speaker 1: I can't believe they left it to the knight before you think you want to like get that yeah, squared away, before you're like on the set.

00:42:21
Speaker 2: I have also heard apocryphy that Harrison used his own pocket knife to help age the jackets, which is great.

00:42:27
Speaker 1: I believe it. He was a carpenter. Yeah, he's a handyman. We're gonna take a quick break, but we'll be right back with more too much information in just a moment.

00:42:49
Speaker 2: For the role of one of my most searing childhood brushes, love a gimlet eyed brunette, Marion Ravenwood. So named Marion Ravenwood is funny. She's named after Lawrence Kasden's wife's grandmother, An Ravenwood Drive or court or something in LA that he would take every day to get to work. Karen Allen nabbed the role after Spielberg's then girlfriend Amy Irving couldn't do it, and Alan recalled it. Barbara Hershey, Deborah Winger, Sean Young were all floated as well, which is funny because Sean Young would then go on to be in Blade Runner opposite at Harrison Ford. But Spielberg said that he had his eye on Alan ever since Animal House. She met with him and then flew to LA to screen test against the other actors being considered as indie. She screen test with John Shay she's talked about, and Tim Matheson.

00:43:33
Speaker 1: Who's also Otter in Animal House along with Karen Allen.

00:43:38
Speaker 2: She told The Hollywood Reporter in twenty twenty one, I don't remember how long it was, but I got a call that they were offering me the film. They wanted me to read the script and give them an answer within two days. They had a courier bring the script and he had to sit in my room the whole time while at the hotel. Then I had to give it back to him. This project was shrouded under a great deal of secrecy. They were apparently very very h shush about the whole thing, which is understandable given the names that were involved. But it's just still funny that this this swing and home run swing of a movie pitch, they were treating it like it was in fact the Grail. Even though she was still fairly young and unknown, Alan was actually able to lobby for changes to the character. There's that scene where she she and Bellock.

00:44:26
Speaker 1: I think his name is I think so, Yeah, I'm never.

00:44:29
Speaker 2: Sure if it's pronounced, because he's supposed to be French, so it's supposed to be like it should be like Bellock, but they all just call him Bellock anyway, because we're American.

00:44:38
Speaker 1: Yeah.

00:44:39
Speaker 2: They improvised that scene apparently because they thought they thought it would be funnier to have them be like drinking and kind of have that lucy goosey feel to it, so that scene is like largely improvised, but she made it mandated that apparently their their dynamic was supposed to be that she actually like had feelings for for Bellock even though he's the villain, and that was like a thread that she wanted removed from her character's arc because she wanted her to always be, you know, INDI's gal. So when she, like Foe, seduces him and has the knife under her dress, that was her addition that she pushed for because she said she wanted to give the character a kind of integrity and a real sense of loyalty and love to Indiana Jones and Marian's feistiness, shall we say it was there from the beginning. The first time Spielberg met Karen Allen, he asked her, how well do you spit which phrasing especially in seventies Hollywood.

00:45:35
Speaker 1: Oh well. Despite their chemistry on screen, Karen Allen, who is a classically trained theater actor, wasn't used to Harrison Ford's method of working, which was very very private. She told the Hollywood Reporter, the thing that was challenging for me at the time was Harrison very much worked privately. He liked to work on his lines and a scene by himself and his trailer. He did much like to run lines with other actors. In the beginning, I didn't know how to take it. I didn't know whether to take it personally. Coming out of the theater. I was so used to working with other actors and running lines, so it took me a while to make an adjustment to that. But then we got into a groove with each other. And in their first scene when Karen Allen Cold Cocks Indy, Karen actually hit Harrison Ford in the face for real. She said. He was slightly annoyed. She's talking to up rocks in twenty twenty one, But I mean it happens. I had never punched anyone in a film before, so they were showing me how to do it, and I was doing my absolute best, and as far as I was concerned, his chin just got in the way of my hand. Which is funny because didn't Harrison Ford sock Ryan Gosling. He shouldn't. Yeah, yeah, And you can see the actual frame.

00:46:43
Speaker 2: People have people have identified the exact moment in the film where Brian Gosling got punched in the jaw, and it sure looks like he did.

00:46:52
Speaker 1: But yeah, the look at his face is like, oh my god, I just got punched by Harrison Ford and I'm not even that mad about it. And Harrison Ford looks like the same look horror that I imagine would be on his face when he pulled down the wrong runway in his plane. And it's cute. Oh man, that's cute. Yes, sexism. Much has been made of the age gap between mary And and Indy. Karen Allen said that she envisioned the character was sixteen in Indiana was twenty six when they had their initial relationship, which not great. In that up Rocks interview that I mentioned earlier, Karen Allen says that what actually happened between the pair is ambiguous. She said they could have kissed a few times and she was just completely bold over and he could have just not wanted to get involved with someone so young. I don't think of him as a pedophile, which is good, good. Yeah. What's much worse is that I believe it was Lucas who was like Marion's eleven. No. Spielberg was like no George Jesus Christ.

00:47:58
Speaker 2: The more you read about George Lucas, the more you like, at least I am somewhat of the opinion that he was a very lucky man because some of his ideas are awful and frequently mitigated by his collaborators.

00:48:13
Speaker 1: I'm thinking about the Mackenzie Phillips character in American Graffiti who was like fourteen and driving around with the twenty year old.

00:48:21
Speaker 2: Yeah, it gets grosser because I'm pretty sure in Temple of Doom, like, so nobody wanted to make Temple Doom apparently, like they were all just like, even even though this was like a three picture deal, they just had no like they were all checked out at that point in their careers or whatever. We're like, we don't want to do this. And George was the one pushing for it because he had read about the thuggee cult in India, which is the central crux of that movie, even though it is hilariously offensive and so offensive in fact that India would not let them film there. We learned what the film is about, and it's filmed in Malaysia I think anyway.

00:48:56
Speaker 1: And so Kate Capshaw is.

00:48:59
Speaker 2: Like Indie's you know, nominal love interest co lead, and before they landed on her, George Lucas wanted to make it a like a princess character, like a virginal princess character that Indy had to like rescue, and it was just like.

00:49:15
Speaker 3: What is this fixation you have with young women, my dude, because I'm pretty sure Princess Leo was also supposed to be like fifteen or sixteen like in his original docs.

00:49:25
Speaker 1: So yeah, I mean you watch all those speeches and American film ins too, like awards ceremonies where Carrie Fisher would like honor slash roast him. Yeah, and the venom is very real like.

00:49:41
Speaker 2: Yeah, oh yeah, I mean the famous thing that she kept being like I have to do all this running and like my costume doesn't have a bra, Like what are you doing, George?

00:49:48
Speaker 1: He's like, they don't have bras from space. There's no gravity, little underwear in space. Yeah. But for all of Karen Allen's many talents, she wasn't quite as intense as Harrison. It was when it came to stunts.

00:50:02
Speaker 2: But but she was surrounded by actual fire during that bar scene in the in her Bar and Nepal, there were no doubles used in that scene for her or Ford, and she said that much of the fire in that was real. And then there's the Well of Souls scene. For those of you who don't have the entire command of the film at your fingertips, the Well of Souls is the snake filled pit where you get the classic line snakes.

00:50:29
Speaker 1: Why did it have to be snakes? Because Indie hates snakes.

00:50:34
Speaker 2: So they descend into a snake filled pit that took eight days straight to film at Elstree Studios. Famously, they had something like twenty five hundred snakes and Steven Spilberg was like, we need more snakes, so they flew in a bunch of snakes from all over Europe, including Denmark, and ended up with somewhere the neighborhood of seven thousand snakes is what I've read, which is too many to be around.

00:51:04
Speaker 1: Period.

00:51:06
Speaker 2: Karen Allen remembered to the Hollywood Reporter the cobras were handled in a very special way, and there was an ambulance just outside the set and a nurse who had anti venom. Often there was plexiglass between us and them. Still, there were a few people on the set who were bitten by the pythons, which aren't poisonous, but it is a nasty bite. No one was in terrible danger with them unless you were in the wrong place at the wrong time. I think it was our first assistant director who was trying to protect someone else who got bit in one. So for that sequence, snake handler Stephen Edge ended up shaving his legs and putting on a dress to serve as a double for Marian's character, because neither Karen Allen nor her stunt double wanted to wanted to take that plunge.

00:51:45
Speaker 1: Is that a verse from Lou Reed's Walk on the Wildside. Shaved legs and then stood in the snakes. He said, hey, you did, there's a bidden here about the anti venom. I didn't put in that. I wanted to. Oh please. They didn't use a lot of rubber snakes, but you know why, there's seven thousand real snakes.

00:52:09
Speaker 2: Harris and I were just kind of having snakes dumped on us because the minute they hit the ground, they were trying to go away into cool, dark places and instead of being in the light, Karen Allen told the Los Angeles Daily News in twenty twenty one, and they dumped snakes on us, and then Stephen would scream action. Don't worry though, because the snake that Spielberg dumped on her was dead. Alan explained it was a dead python which Stephen had left on ice for three days until it was completely decayed. Apparently she wasn't screaming. She wasn't screaming convincingly enough, was what I heard. Spielberg stayed say, so that he had to Yeah, yes, it's.

00:52:46
Speaker 1: Very Cubrician who also filmed at Eustrie a lot. And speaking of yes, that's right. Wow, not even mean to make that seguey. John Baxter, in his book Steven Spielberg an Unauthorized Biography, claims that production of writ As a Lost Arc was delayed for a day when Stanley Kubrick's daughter Vivian showed up to visit the set and was horrified by the treatment of the snakes, and she called the British version of the ASPCA on the production, who shut things down while Spielberg made the mandated charges. Fortunately, Vivian apparently didn't know about the deaf rat. Oi'll tell us about the deaf rat.

00:53:25
Speaker 2: So they had a bunch of rats brought in and do you know, actually, in That's crusade they had to breed all of those rats because they couldn't use native rats because they would have been riddled with disease in Venice, so for that scene, those are all specially they were specially bred for the film. Fun fact, but in this it so it's like a blink and you'll miss it shot. It's when the arc is being transported, right and they're down in the ship's hold and it's like thrumbing with huha power or whatever, and one of the rats is like doing like your head stuff uh and and.

00:54:01
Speaker 1: They're like, oh, that's the power that the arc.

00:54:03
Speaker 2: Has, not so uh. Kathleen Kennedy producer. Legendary producer Kathleen Kennedy says that it was their animal wrangler. They were like, why is that rat doing that? And he was like, I've had it since it was a baby. I can't bear to get rid of it. It's deaf, so it's like not useful as like a trained rat, but it's it's like my my pet deaf rat. And they were like, great, he's a star, which feels like another labor violence cigar choppings.

00:54:31
Speaker 1: Get me that rat, got me the deaf rat. Mikey's on his way out, this cigar falls out of his mouth. In the screening room, He's like, that rat's a star. It's like a all about Eve, but it's just about Mickey Mouse and the deaf rat.

00:54:50
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, okay, so I found this the serum thing they had. They they tried because they had this cobra uh, and they had to The snake wrangler said, you had to intentionally piss them off to get their hood to come out right, because that's the iconic coverd thing. So they're intentionally like patting them on the heads, the same thing you see snake charmers do, and they just like boop them on the boop them on the head so that they flare up.

00:55:14
Speaker 1: But they little bunny fu food.

00:55:16
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly exactly. But they needed anti venom around the serum. This is what Frank Marshall producer Frank Marshall called the serum man. He was the only guy in the country who had it.

00:55:30
Speaker 1: Uh.

00:55:30
Speaker 2: They went to a local hospital to try to get some, but theirs was expired and finally the anti venom arrived after being airlifted by the American embassy, the Air Force hospital and the Naval hospital.

00:55:45
Speaker 1: That was how they ended up getting it. On set was like this diplomatic trifecta of organizations. I mean, I kind of would wish that most hospitals, if not all, had a little bit of anti venom.

00:55:58
Speaker 2: And yeah, yeah, but now this was expired. Apparently the cobra killed a python amore all right?

00:56:06
Speaker 1: Oh man?

00:56:08
Speaker 2: Anyway, for Indy's sidekick partner Salah, they're digging the wrong place there digging the role. I just remember him singing that what a great voice that guy has. Jonathan Davis, Uh, that role was initially supposed to go to Danny DeVito. That's insane.

00:56:26
Speaker 3: They're digging in the wrong place Indy.

00:56:31
Speaker 1: Uh, he couldn't do it because of taxi. Uh.

00:56:33
Speaker 2: Jonathan Riss Davis had been in a movie called Shogun that Steven Spielberg had seen, and when they talked over the part. Uh Ris Davies, who is six foot one, told Empire Magazine I went to see him and said, well, look it says here that Sala is a five foot two skiddy Egyptian bidowin. Are you proposing surgery? He said, no, We'll just you know, make him a big guy.

00:56:56
Speaker 1: Uh.

00:56:56
Speaker 2: He also told to Empire, I remember meeting one of the snake wranglers who had caught a crew member with this large snake. The guy said I just want to take it home for my kid. It'll only die anyway. The snake wrangler stuck it in the glove compartment of his car and forgot all about it. By the time he remembered, the snake had gone. Later, he was taking his wife and mother in law for a drive, and of course the snake reappeared. Oh God, classic bit mother in law snake in the car works every time. Paul Freeman, who played the slimy archaeologist Belloc, was pitched as the Champagne adversary to Indy's Beer. Among the candidate role was the Italian actor gian Carlo Janini, and he almost signed for the part, but Spielberg saw Freeman in a BBC film called Death of a Princess. I guess this is just hilarious to me that Stein Speword just watches all these movies. He's like, I want that guy because it seems like he's just his own casting director, which is based on the movies that he watches, which is great. H He cast him the day that he met Paul. The day that he met Paul Freeman, and Paul Freeman talks about this. He went in and just saw Steven Spielberg and George Lucas on the floor the Walkman, like just toying around with the Walkman and they were like.

00:58:04
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, check this out. Man hit it off. He was like, great, you're in the movie now.

00:58:08
Speaker 2: The most famous contribution that Paul Freeman makes to this role is the scene in the Canyon where Indy has the rocket launcher aimed at the gray at the at the arc and he's like, I'm gonna.

00:58:17
Speaker 1: Blow it up. I'm gonna blow it up. And he's like, you won't do it, mister Dr Jones. That's a great movie. That's good. Thanks. Good compressions on both Dr Jones.

00:58:32
Speaker 2: No, that's a little too British. I got that guy's British, but he's supposed to be playing French. His accent is just kind.

00:58:37
Speaker 1: Of broadly transatlant broadly, yeah, broadly European. So there's a scene where fly lands on his face and it seems to go into his mouth, and it's become such a thing that Pauline Kale wrote about it in her review for the film and Got what Paul Freeman calls his favorite reviews of his acting career, where she cited his extraordinary devotion to his craft. However, he didn't actually eat the fly. In post production, the editors removed a few frames in between the fly strolling down his face and when it flew off to make it look like he had eaten it, and then the sound team also added extra buzzing into the mix to call attention to it. Fun fact, that is the exact same canyon in Tunisia where the Jawas take R two D two in the first Star Wars movie and they pop up like that in India and R two gets shocked by the thing is wow. You know that scene. There's a bunch of Easter eggs going back and forth between these two movies. You can pauseive freeze frame and ce C three po and R two D two are carved as hieroglyphics.

00:59:46
Speaker 2: In the Well of Souls no way. Yeah, yeah, it's a famous one, I think. And then the plane that he takes off in that at the beginning of the film has the its call sign is OB for obi wan and three po.

01:00:00
Speaker 1: So that's that's cute. Uh.

01:00:01
Speaker 2: Freeman's favorite memory of filming was finding a lot of extremely cheap champagne in the hotel in Tunisia. The labels had washed off in a flood, but that was rather frivolous. I just love that much of the rest of the cast was rounded up by Brits. We have Denim Elliott playing Marcus Brody. I couldn't find anything about Denham Elliott being in this movie.

01:00:21
Speaker 1: He did like as much as I love him.

01:00:24
Speaker 2: And last Crusade, I couldn't find a single interview where we talked about making this movie. But there's a lot of other you know, British dudes in here. The creepy, giggling Nazi interrogator who gets the thing burned into his hand was that was originally offered to Klaus Frigginkinsky, which would have been horrifying because Klaus Kinski is a legitimately insane man, but he instead chose to appear in the horror film Venom because of the money was better. So Spooberg picked this guy Ronald Lacy, because he reminded him of Peter Lourie. And in the one creative decision, I don't agree that Steven'sberg made for this. When George Lucas originally pitched this character, he was going to have an antenna sticking out of his head and a robotic arm like Doctor Strangelove that he would shoot people with, and the gun barrel was going to be his index finger and that rules. Yeah, and Spielberger was like, come on, George, dial it back. And maybe also for budgetary reason, probably British wrestler Pat Roach is killed twice in the film. He's a giant shirpa in the Nepalese bar and then he is the German mechanic who gets purade by the flying Wings propeller.

01:01:36
Speaker 1: No, no, I didn't like that. I just he didn't hear me. I was silent laughing well. With the strict budget considerations in place, Spielberg hired four illustrators and gave each of them parts of the script, and he managed a storyboard about eighty percent of the film, or nearly six thousand images, and Spielberg kept to about sixty percent of that. But he also had the art department builds scale models for each set, which helped him pre plan all the angles and shots for each scene. Principal photography for Raiders began in June nineteen eighty on again a twenty million dollar budget. It concluded that September, just seventy three days of filming, which, considering how elaborate this was, is pretty pretty spry. That's nuts, especially with all the location stuff they had to do. Like just imagine you like lose a week in somewhere and that throws your entire thing off budget, and then you get financially reamed in the ass by paramount Like I can't believe they pulled it off. Filming took place on sets at Elstree Studios in England, as well as on location at La Rochelle, France, Tunisia and Hawaii. Spielberg wrote an American cinematographer, we had almost four million dollars in sets alone, and when you multiply that against one hundred thousand dollars per day shooting on distant location and everybody's salaries and what it costs to day to shoot a movie internationally, you see why it made the film cost twenty million dollars. He also said that they couldn't even afford to use specific cameras like a luma crane. Luma crane, I don't know what that is, but I imagine.

01:03:11
Speaker 2: I think it's the well, I think it's the crane rig they used to move cameras around. It's what they used in the Nepal lar scene or panaglide. They also couldn't afford that for the entire thing. They had to literally cam. Yeah, it's the steady it's the non steady cam one, but it is the same effect. As I mentioned earlier, the first location that they Why did I say that? Did I mention that earlier? The first location they shot at was in La Rochelle, France, one hundred miles north of Bordeaux.

01:03:39
Speaker 1: For the subscene. Things got off to a rough start for the first two days.

01:03:44
Speaker 2: The weather kept them from filming anything, so again, that sucks when you have seventy three days to film. But before they could even shoot a single frame, production faced a headache in securing a boat that could serve as the nineteen thirties era tramp steamer called the Bantu Wind, which is what Indy and Marian take to London. There was a replica in Berlin, but it couldn't be taken out to sea, so they found an Egyptian boat in Ireland, fitted it according to production needs and then just sailed it to France. Which I love. Love boat stuff, Jordan. Let's speak of boat stuff. Let's move on to Jordan's Boat Corner.

01:04:22
Speaker 1: My favorite I love large boat Trivia. The sub that Indiana Jones boards, and we'll use that term loosely in this movie is the very same one that appears in Wolfgang Peterson's Dos Boot. Both films were in production around the same time, and Spielberg opted to work at a deal to rent their sub rather than building one from scratch. But the contract with the German owners of this sub had the production specify that it couldn't go out to sea under certain conditions, and an engineer from Munich who'd helped build this sub was attached to the production to act as its handler sub handler. Imagine that being an IMDb page, but that is a real German U boat penn Is where they dock you boats. And incidentally it was actually covered in Nazi graffiti and carvings, with a lot of bomb scarring and damage. And this is why Wolfgang Peterson and Steven Spielberg became close, and why Spielberg did a lot of uncredited help on Wolfgang Peterson's child traumatizing classic The Never Ending Story a few years later in the eighties.

01:05:22
Speaker 2: Another apocryphal bit from that is that apparently the doss Boot Production didn't know that their sub had been rented out, so they all showed up to work one day and they were like, where's the sub And they're like, Steeve, what Spielberg's using it in France. I guess take the day off, go get some schnitzel. After France, production began shooting interiors on location in England. You mentioned earlier Elstree, very famous studio, is where a lot of the interiors were done, but the Rickmansworth Masonic School in England stood in for the interiors of India's fictitious Marshall College. The exteriors of that are actually in Stockton, California, at the University of the Pacific. One of the only other US locations that they filmed in was in Kauwhai in Hawaii, which is beautiful island where they also did Jurassic Park, apparently a big fave of Spielberg and Lucas. And another one of the other scant US locations is San Francisco City Hall. At the end of the movie after they get debriefed by the US governments, that's not in d C. That's the interior of San Francisco City Hall.

01:06:29
Speaker 1: When Indian Mary and walk off arm in arm. The opening temple scene is also noteworthy, not just because of the boulder chase, which you already covered, but it's Alfred Molina's first ever on screen role, and for the scene when when Molina turns around he's covered in Tarantula's Spielberg was annoyed because the spiders were being too sluggish for his tastes, and the animal wrangler said, well, they're all men. They're all males, so they don't have any impetus to behave aggressively because there's not a female in there. So Spielberger was like, well, then put a female in there, and of course they all started running all over Alfred Molina.

01:07:05
Speaker 2: And another fun Star Wars connection, there's a long, woody species of vine called old Man's beard that they used to dress the outside of the temple, which is the same they used for the Dagoba set in the Empire Strikes Back.

01:07:18
Speaker 1: Are you a big Star Wars guy? I was.

01:07:21
Speaker 2: It's one of the biggest disappointments of my adult pop culture life, you.

01:07:26
Speaker 1: Know, the prequels and beyond.

01:07:29
Speaker 2: Yeah, And I was thinking about that because that didn't happen with Indiana Jones until I was already dead inside, like twenty one or whatever, so.

01:07:41
Speaker 1: It didn't hit his hard.

01:07:43
Speaker 2: But man, the first Star Wars movies that I remembered coming out in theaters were like even as yeah, I was like as a twelve year old, I was like, these are not good anyway, but far and away. The biggest hurdle production faced was Tunisia, specifically the seventy acres in the desert of Sadala where it was one hundred and thirty degrees and then sometimes the breeze would come along and drop it down to around one hundred and fifteen. They had hired six hundred Tunisian extras for the dig scene, and Spielberg was working at a frantic pace to keep the film on schedule, averaging thirty five shot setups a day. That is bananas. He's called Raiders the film that I learned how to compromise on describing each scene, averaging three to five takes instead of something like seventeen, which is partially why the film feels so quick and.

01:08:34
Speaker 1: Kind of add and loosey goosey.

01:08:36
Speaker 2: Paul Freeman, who played Bilock, told Total Film, I've never seen a crew work so flat out. You'd see them asleep with their faces and their lunch. Complicating matters was the fact that enormous percentage of the cast and crew got sick. Jonathan Ris Davies supposedly sh himself in costume at one point while bending over, And of course, the film's biggest laugh line comes out of Ford's own battle with his guts. Originally the scene with the Swordsman that he you know, spoilers. There's a scene of this guy who's this big simtar and he's like waving the sword around and you think it's gonna be this big fight scene and he just shoots him tremendous. That originally took up like two pages in the script, and it was supposed to be this big showstopper for how Indy uses his whip.

01:09:17
Speaker 1: They like pitched it.

01:09:18
Speaker 2: They were like, Okay, it's gonna be this big, badass thing where one guy has a sword in India.

01:09:21
Speaker 1: As his whip and blah blah blah blah.

01:09:23
Speaker 2: And then but Harrison Ford had dysentery and even worse, Karen Allen told Total Film, the Swordsman was kind of inept. He had not really learned these choreographed moves and it was looking like it wasn't gonna come off. So Harrison Ford told Entertainment tonight, I wasn't able to stay away from my trailer for more than the length to shoot a magazine, which is the load of a film stock that a camera has on average, about ten minutes. I thought about it. We had about an hour and a half ride into our location. By the time I got to the location, I was convinced it was too much. I went up to Stephen as soon as I arrived and I said, Stephen, why don't we just shoot this some bitch? And Stephen said I was thinking that too, and movie Magic was born.

01:10:08
Speaker 1: Yes, things got so bad on location that they literally ran out of extras, and Spielberg conscripted producer Frank Marshall to act as the pilot of the Flying Wing during the runway fight, and Marshall told Empire, Stephen said, go and put that outfit on and you could be the pilot. I said, how long is this going to be? Stephen? I'm also the producer. He said, oh, just a morning. It was about one hundred and fifty degrees fahrenheit in that cockpit, and you have Karen Allen hitting me over the head with the chalks. That wasn't much of a stunt. It just hurt. It took three days, by the way, And that flying wing was designed by artist Ron Cobb, and that actually more closely resembles a look of a US prototype developed in the nineteen forties. And the version of the film was built by Vickers Aircraft Company in England and painted at Elstree Studios and then disassembled, shipped and rebuilt on location and then abandoned and then subsequently disassembled again over the years by souvenir hunters, which I find cool. I wish I had a piece of that. They used to do that when they were shooting in Tunisia. Yeah, they left the sets for like TATTOOI right, Yeah, they said the Yeah, it's just like it was just out there.

01:11:16
Speaker 2: Apparently I can't remember where I was reading this now, but I think this was like sort of a Wild West era for shooting in that part of the world, and then they sort of wised up and made it harder for people to shoot there or more expensive or whatever.

01:11:30
Speaker 1: So yeah, they would just build these sets and then just be like, eh, We're done with it. Bye.

01:11:35
Speaker 2: Just imagine coming across a replica over World War two era bomber with your camel or whatever.

01:11:41
Speaker 1: Is that racist? I mean, I just can't believe all the you know, Luke Skywalker's home and stuff was just left out there. I mean, you know what I have to say about that belongs to the museum. Well. Of the two brains behind Raiders, Steven Spielberg fared a little bit better in Tunisia were George Lucas's horror stories from shooting Star Wars there. So he arrived armed with cases of bottled water and can Spaghettio's which he stored in his hotel room and he ate cold three times a day. And also my favorite, he also gaffer taped his mouth shut while he showered to prevent water borne illnesses. George Lucas, meanwhile, who again should have known better, considering he had dealt with all of the unique horrors of shooting in Tunisia, he had already been sent home from France with severe seasickness, so when he arrived in Tanisia to help to shoot the second unit footage, he was just absolutely hammered health wise. He got badly sunburned, to the point where his head and face swelled up and he suffered permanent redness for the rest of his life.

01:12:44
Speaker 2: I don't think I realized that because he always looks like ruddy and uncomfortable. Apparently it is because he got like severe sun poisoning in this Yeah, Steven Spielberger like sent him out with a camera. He was like, yeah, you can shoot some second unit stuff for me, and George Lucas came back and.

01:12:57
Speaker 1: Was like, put it right here on the fridge, no one can see it.

01:13:03
Speaker 2: George Lucas came back like, Stephen, I'm very sunburned.

01:13:07
Speaker 1: It's like Jesus, Chris, I can't trust you for one damn thing.

01:13:11
Speaker 2: The film Them's Cairo that stands in for the City of Cairo is the holy city of Cawuron in northern Tunisia, the fourth holiest city in Islam. I don't know how they grade such things, but didn't make the top three. She goes home to the Great Mosque of City Ukba. He is know the Great Animal story from the film The Nazi Monkey Spy.

01:13:32
Speaker 1: Can't believe we made it this far. To bad bad dates.

01:13:36
Speaker 2: The Nazi Monkey Spy Frank Marshall, producer Frank Marshall told Empire that was quite a day when Stephen said, get the monkey to salute.

01:13:46
Speaker 1: An amazing sentence one I was privileged to read.

01:13:49
Speaker 2: I said to the animal handler, I said to the animal this is Frank Marshall. Again, I said to the animal handler, showed me the monkey saluting. He went over, took a stick and tapped the monkey on the head. The monkey sort of protected himself with his arm, and that was supposed to be saluting. So we divived a process. Put a grape on a fishing pole, pulled the grape just out of his reach, and he would reach. After about fifty takes, finally looked like he was doing his hile Hitler five takes for dialogue, fifty takes to get a monkey to do the Nazi salute.

01:14:15
Speaker 1: That's why he's the greatest of all time.

01:14:19
Speaker 2: From Tunisia, production treked to Kawai in Hawaii a week Awapa for the opening scene of the film. To get the requisite misty mountain atmosphere. They brought smoke machines and were just running across these open meadows to properly fog up the terrain and stay just ahead of the wind to get the shots. And even though it looks like they're just like they took like a short hike to get to this temple. That was like ten acres of the island that they treked across for all these different setups, because Steven Spielberg is an obsessive and wanted very particular parts of the jungle to serve his vision. If you're ever on Kawai, the mountain that the Paramount logo dissolves into in that opening s is kallea mountain which is nicknamed King Kong. I had heard that that was a tribute to one of the first things that Stephen Ever did with the camera was like learn how to do like a match shot dissolve when he was making his little Super eight films. Sadly, they were beset by mosquitoes outside of the for the exterior of the temple that they picked. Despite being slathered with the stuff, they were all bitten to shreds, and they ran into further problems with the donkeys that they had hired. Namely, the donkeys crapped out and replacements had to be sourced, but the pickup donkeys were the wrong color and so had to be dutifully painted brown with hair color spray. And then one of the last shots in the film was on the coast of Nepali and that is only reachable by helicopter, so they brought a crate, blindfolded the donkeys and airlifted them one at a time onto location.

01:15:58
Speaker 1: Tremendous stuff. The blindfolding really does it for me.

01:16:02
Speaker 2: Well, you know you can't have a panic donkey man, that's just a recipe for bad luck. Jordan, Minie, you tell us a little bit about tell us a little bit about that plane, because I know you love aside from boats, you love planes. I just love Air Force one because of Harrison Ford read the damn.

01:16:18
Speaker 1: Graft, Jordan. The plane Indianna Uses to Escape was in nineteen thirti's Waco biplane located in Junction City, Oregon, owned by Henry and Alice Stratsch. The plane was redressed with little nods to Star Wars, which I think you mentioned earlier. It's identification I did, Sorry, yeah, Rob and three po and it was flown by a real life pilot named Fred Sorensen, who was originally hired by Spielberg and producer Frank Marshall to fly them around while location scouting in Hawaii. They actually crashed it once you write minorly, it was like twenty feet.

01:16:54
Speaker 2: Apparently it was enough that they just did it again, like it didn't mess them up to the point. You know, Harrison Ford does not care about his own life, so he was just like, get me back on the plane.

01:17:08
Speaker 1: Yeah, I guess I did it one more time, and that is the shot that appears in the film, and over a decade later, Sorensen wound up in their orbit again. He was working for Hawaiian Airlines when he and his crew volunteered for the Salvation Army to bring blankets and water across Kawhi after a Category three hurricane hit the island, and while there he ran into producer Kathleen Kennedy, was Spielberg's you know, right hand basically who enlisted him to help fly the Jurassic Park crew off the island.

01:17:36
Speaker 2: So that's cool. I just love that so much. He came back ten years later and rescued all of them again.

01:17:41
Speaker 1: Oh so good.

01:17:45
Speaker 2: As you meditate on that, we'll be right back with more too much information after these messages films Central mcguffin The Arc of the Covernant is sort of a real thing question mark. According to the Bible, the arc was a wooden chest covered with gold, carrying a stone tablet of the Ten Commandments, as well as the walking stick that Moses brother Aaron carried In the Old Testament, It's written that the arc helped move obstacles and poisonous animals out of the Israelites path, even stopping the flow of obstructing rivers. When the Babylonian Empire conquered the Israelites in five ninety seven BC, the arc seemingly vanished. One of the most consistent claims is that it is currently in Ethiopia in the Saint Mary of Zion Cathedral of Aksum in the north of the country, although, hilariously, much like the Mormon tablets, only one man is allowed inside to see it, so it's authenticity has never been verified.

01:18:45
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, we have the arc, May I see it?

01:18:49
Speaker 2: No raiders took the design from the ark by paintings by a guy named James Tissot, who is he did a bunch of Life of Christ and biblical paintings.

01:19:00
Speaker 1: He was a nineteenth century painter.

01:19:02
Speaker 2: But that image of it where it appears in the Bible when they're doing the exposition dump about what the arc actually is. That was designed by Ralph mcquarie, who is one of these concept artists with his fingerprints all over like the latter back half of twentieth century cinema. He is the one who did the concept art for Star Wars that initially helped George Lucas sell the idea to twentieth Century Fox. He did designs for Close Encounters the Third Kind and e t both of the original Star Wars sequels, and he went on to win an Academy Award for Cocoon. So he had a series of rough sketches and he created this the illustration that's in that book of the Arc destroying an army. And he said they needed an antique looking image to match the look of an old Bible they had showing the powers of the Ark of the Covenant. I did a couple sketches for the design until I arrived at one that looked best on the page. I took photos of some of the guys at ILM to use as a photo reference. I etched a plate and printed it on rice paper to match the paper in the Bible. I mounted the print I made in the Bible which was colored and washed by someone else.

01:20:03
Speaker 1: So that's insane to me. This guy created his own etching and printing plate and then printed it himself on rice paper. Nowadays, photoshop incredible and they didn't have steady cam, but they went for that. Hell yeah. Fun fact. While the original screen used ARC prop is on display or being held at gunpoint or whatever at Skywalker Ranch in Marin County. A prototype created by a prop man showed up on Antiques Road Show on twenty twenty after being discovered by the man's son. They used it to keep blankets in their San Francisco apartment when he was a kid. I love that. It was like it was pretty junkie. Yeah, yeah, I was gonna say it was kind of chinzy. It was like made from like a hot glue gun and all the statues on it were like trophy toppers and stuff, and I think they used like photo frame edges and stuff. Yeah, it was. It was just it was very much a proof of concept, but it was valued at one hundred and twenty thousand dollars. Hell yeah, it belongs in a museum. As for the horrifying powers of the ARC production didn't really have a lot to go on. In terms of ideas in the script, the line was they opened the arc and all hell breaks loose. Screenwriting major, I can say that's lazy. I just love how lazy that there are.

01:21:29
Speaker 2: All their concepts were where it was like Steven Spielberg and George Lucas were like, Yeah, we're gonna have its gonna He's gonna be on a truck, he's gonna chase the thing that they just handed it to Lawrence Kasi and we're like, now you do the rest.

01:21:38
Speaker 1: They meet some cool people, they beat him up, he beats them up. That's a fact too. Just fill it in. Isn't that how it works? I mean, sadly, yes, can confirm. But during pre production, a series of storyboard artists named Ed Verrowe, Dave Nigron, Michael Lloyd, and Joe Johnson each did a preliminary concept that ranged from ghosts to a firestorm to strange lights. George Lucas and Steven Spielberg liked them all and asked Johnson with combining all three. Richard Enlin and his team at Industrial Light and Magic were responsible for pulling off this effect, which was a royal pain because not only was Raido is very strictly budgeted, but ILM was also working on post production for the film Dragon Slayer at the time. They eventually went with the old cloud tank used in Close Encounters, which they combined with puppetry and other optical compositing techniques. Heigel tell us about cloud tanks. I know very little about cloud tanks. This is so cool. I love all this like in camera stuff. I mean it's not in camera, but it's close to in camera. Cloud tanks were developed by this SFX artist, Doug Trumbull for Close Encounters, and then you see him again in Flash Gordon, which is hilarious. It's really interesting. It's like simultaneously high and low tech. Basically, it is a tank in which different temperatures and densities of water, so you have different salinity levels of salt water to make it basically make them float on top of each other. It's the same principle as layered shots at a bar. So they create these different layers in the tank and then they use a remote control arm to squirt dyes and pigments into the tank at various intersections of these layers of water, and that's how you get this crazy like swirling but still very distinct colors. That happens, and then they basically just put this thing in front of a camera and film it like a matte painting almost And boy will get to the matte painting later. So one of the non puppets in that scene is actually the lady who floats up in front of the screen and then all of a sudden turns into a horrifying bool.

01:23:45
Speaker 2: She was a receptionist from ILM. They were just like, yeah, your.

01:23:52
Speaker 1: Ghost, come here to take the phone off the hoot. They just put her long white robes, painted her face and then had her sit on a trapeze like swinging seat in front of a blue screen and they had her swing away from the camera and then reverse that footage for the film so that her clothes and everything are all moving, all ghostly like. And then the sounds of the arc are sea lion and dolphin cries through a vocoder, which sounds like your average experimental show in Brooklyn. Prince's less successful follow up to when Dove's cry and the sound of the arc being lifted off is Ben Bert's toilet tank at Home. That's amazing. Yeah, So for the Nazis' grisly deaths.

01:24:38
Speaker 2: Spielberg, who is Jewish, envisioned that each of them would die horribly in different separate ways. So to achieve that end, they took molds of each actor, and then the makeup artist on this is a guy named Chris Wailas, who would go on to achieve his own masterpiece a few years later with The Fly, when he turns Jeff Goldblum into series of ever more disgusting titular insect men. So he made a series of artificial heads from these molds. The guy playing the Kernel was rigged with these air bladders that you know usually when you see like air bladder technology and films, it's for like a werewolf transformation, and that's how you get you fill. You put latex over it and then you pump air into it and it creates the impression that the flesh is like swelling. That's like one of the big American Werewolf in London transformation scene moves. But what they did in Raiders is they filled this head with the bladders and then that were already inflated, and then when it came time for his head to kind of shrink down and mummify, they just sucked all of the air out of it with a vacuum, which collapsed the thing.

01:25:44
Speaker 1: It's cool. It took eight or nine people to control that.

01:25:47
Speaker 2: Mechanism, just manipulating the different bladders and stuff that were inside the head. The interrogator tot who Tote who his face melts.

01:25:58
Speaker 1: It's the coolest thing in the world. His model head was made of a multi layered gelatin compound, specifically alginate, the same stuff that your dentist uses, and filled with yarn also to mimic sinews and tendon, and they just and they built it on a base of stone stone skull because they couldn't use anything that was more fragile. Because the way that they achieved the face melting was to actually melt the face. They just propped it and put two propane heaters on either side of it, and Chris Wayla stood under it with a hair dryer and they just melted the thing down and it just got all goopy and gross as it dissolved. And they just ran that in fast.

01:26:42
Speaker 2: It was shot at less than a frame a second, so they timed its time lapse. And then for Bellach they used a plaster skull with a bunch of latex and gel over it, and then they just blew it up. They literally destroyed it with not just an air cannon, not just miniature explosive charges like the kind you'd see for squibs, however, but shotguns.

01:27:08
Speaker 1: They literally seems like overkill.

01:27:09
Speaker 2: Yes it is, and I'll tell you why they did that because Chris Waylis, who.

01:27:13
Speaker 1: Worked on The Fly. That movie is directed by David Cronenberg.

01:27:17
Speaker 2: Wayalis had previously worked with David Cronenberg on Scanners, which features probably the most famous head explosion in all of cinema.

01:27:26
Speaker 1: And to achieve that, they simply cleared the set and fired a shotgun at this model. So when Spielberg was like, I want.

01:27:33
Speaker 2: To make this head explode, little light bulb goes off over Chris Wayliss has head. He's like, I got just the thing, and it's disgusting.

01:27:40
Speaker 1: They used four or five pieces of primer cord to sever the neck, three different detonators under the eyes and chin.

01:27:47
Speaker 2: Again in addition to an air cannon and shotguns. The head was filled with blood bags that they stuffed with just gross crap they had lying around, like dried latex and foam scraps. But also disgustingly bits of real, actual meat. And worst of all, this had to be done three times to get the shot, so they were just what a hoot and hauler man just firing a couple of shot guns at a head filled with old meat.

01:28:13
Speaker 1: That's the title of my memoir.

01:28:16
Speaker 2: And it was so disgusting that, because there was no PG thirteen at the time, this would have gotten them an R rating, so that they had to optically print the deflame effects over it to distract from how disgusting it was. Another fun fact for your Jaws and Temple of Doom specifically are two films that helped create the PG thirteen ratings.

01:28:37
Speaker 1: I was just gonna ask it.

01:28:38
Speaker 2: Same with Gremlins. I think I think it's a kind of all right in this era where they were there's all this stuff coming out that was should not have been shown to children, but was still getting PG ratings because they were like, well, it's not our rating. So thus PG thirteen was created. So probably the most famous Matt painting of all time. In the end that top men are taking care of it pant of the warehouse and the arc is being wheeled into the into that warehouse, the government warehouse that's just filled with thousands upon thousands of non aescript wooden crates containing all the wonders of the world. So they also used a matte painting for the when the Nazis fall off the cliff. There's like three of them in the movie. But the warehouse matt painting was by a guy named Michael Pengrozzio. Took him three months to paint that onto a sheet of glass and then what they do is just position that in front of the camera. The only thing in that are you looking at it?

01:29:29
Speaker 1: Yeah? The only thing in that scene that isn't a painting is the guy walking down the path. Like if you look at this matte painting and without the being composited in it's literally the nineties five percent of the frame. All that was actually filmed in there is just the dude pushing the cart down the path.

01:29:49
Speaker 2: It's incredible. It's one of the coolest pieces of movie movie magic. Whiz Bang. Pengrazzio did this off of a single reference image of some boxes that he took and he worked for Island and Lucasfilm.

01:30:02
Speaker 1: He went on to form his own company and won six Oscars for visual effects so hell of a career. You're just looking at this thing. Agog Yeah, it's a proper reaction, which is what I love. There's a great composite photo of the scene completed and just the matte painting, and yeah, it's just like this tiny little bit of the path that the guy's walking down. And speaking of jaw droppingly great elements of this movie, the score come on one of the all time great themes, courtesy of who else, John Williams, the other greatest of all time. Yes, he told Empire Magazine that the score took him a few weeks. He said, I remember playing Stephen a couple options on the piano. He loved them and simply said, why don't you do both, which is the same thing he said about what happens when the Archer Covenant stuff goes down. He really just is like, just do everything. Yeah, So those two tunes became the main theme and bridge what we call the Raiders March. The interesting thing about the Raiders March is that it's a very simple little tune. But I spent more time on those bits of musical grammar than anything else. The sequence of notes has to sound just right, so it seems inevitable, like it's always been with us. That's cool, it's so good.

01:31:19
Speaker 2: Yeah, it sounds like a it sounds like a like a non shitty Sousa march or something.

01:31:23
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, it is really crazy. I guess I'm just thinking of Jaws in the Innana Jones theme. How few notes he needs to make something that is instantly recognizable and iconic from the Jaws two notes Da da da da da da da. I mean that's just a handful right there.

01:31:44
Speaker 2: You know, he's just a he's like a pop songwriter disguised as a composer. Man, he has just the best melodies and tucked away in like these big, grand, sweeping things. And that's why I really think he is the best ever and maybe we'll be. I mean, because you look at other guys, like even the Newman's, like they have really good themes, and a lot of my other favorite film composers have these really great orchestrations and stuff. But John Williams man, he's like he's like the Beatles, Like how many of his those scores are just slammed dunks and and it's just part of our shared cultural grammar now. I mean, it's funny too, because you think of guys like Hans Zimmer, who's like more of a soundscape artist and like palette artist than he is, Like I don't know, you can't. The most famous Hans Zimmer thing is just you know, like, yeah, that's not a hook. But John Williams just has this stuff pouring out of him, just like another one, just tossing off these things that just become part of our They sound like they've always been there, you know, And people have said, people have said that he is he is a borrower.

01:32:52
Speaker 3: You know.

01:32:53
Speaker 2: Famously the Imperial March is from a Holst the Planet Suite, and you know, people have talked a little bit about how some of his big sweeping things like the Superman theme and some of the some of the Star Wars stuff can be a little derivative, derivative in like universal generic, like just they just to put it through the sweeping theme filter. But you know, those people, they haven't written this stuff, like, holy god.

01:33:24
Speaker 1: I don't tell you I met him. No, was he chill? Oh my god? Well, my mom went to Weird Story the premiere of Jurassic Park Lost World, and she met him there and then they she was flying back to Boston where we're from. And John Williams obviously conducted the Boston Pops at the time, or I don't know if it was at the time, but heavy Boston connection. They were sitting next to each other on the flight back like the next day, so they apparently had a really nice time flying back just chatting. And this was back when you could actually go meet people at the game. When they got off the plane and they got off together, Mom was like trying, come here, I want you to meet I want you to meet this my new friend John. And he was really sweet, super sweet. Yeah, he was really nice to really nice to me. I would have been like, what nine ten. Yeah, it was really cool. It was a nice guy. I think we like walked out like through security or whatever together, walked to like baggage claim or whatever with him and stuff too, and yeah he I mean I remember even at the time being like should she be leaving him alone now? But he was just like seemed to be down the chat and stuff, like it wasn't one of those like Okay, let me go now I have places to go moseying on down there together. Yeah he was cool.

01:34:38
Speaker 2: I mean, he's the guy who like when a bunch of people that, but not a bunch of some kids just like found out where he lived and we're playing like the Star Wars theme on his lawn. Rather than calling the police on him, he like came out and was like.

01:34:49
Speaker 1: Sounds good. Guys like blah blah blah blah blah. You know they played it like on instruments. Yeah, I was like two trombone players. Oh my god. Well for marrying in Indie's themes, John Williams took inspiration from old Warner Brothers love stories like now Voyager and what he called the kind of melodic sweep you would occasionally get from composers like Max Steiner. None of that means anything to me, he continued Empire. I also remember doing pastiches of dark orchestral stabs that would represent the evil Nazis as opposed to the good Nazis. The orchestra hits these nineteen forties dramatic chords the seventh degree on the scale on the bottom, which is like an old signal of militaristic evil. We just did it for the camp fun of it, and it seems that's admissible in the style of a film like Raiders. For the opening of the Arc. I wanted to try to evoke a biblical atmosphere, turning pages backwards to early antiquity. The role of the orchestra and chorus is a complicated one in pieces like this. The music is to lure us in so it seems like it's going to be a beautiful experience, and then turn itself into something much more terrifying. I think he does that a lot in the Last Crusade, when they're in the room with all the chalices in it. I feel like that's like a scene where it seems like it's he chooses poorly, and he chooses the wrong Holy Grail, and the music starts playing something beautiful and you think it might actually be the Yeah, like pull the rug out front of yeah. I love that the music has to lure us in so it seems like it's going to be a beautiful experience, and then turn itself around it something much more terrifying. That kind of sonic transformation often occurs in opera, and it's one of the techniques a composer has at his disposal. I'm not a composer, so none of this means that much to me, but I find it really interesting, and I'm happy for him.

01:36:38
Speaker 2: It's it's frustrating when I because I want to find out more about like the scoring and stuff, and it's frustrating to me when they speak about it in these very vague terms. But like, you know, having the seventh having in a what is that a first first inversions third and base second versions fifth in the base, So it's a third inversion chord that he's talking about, having the lowered seventh in the base.

01:37:00
Speaker 1: That's cool.

01:37:00
Speaker 2: That means something to me. Raiders opened at a time when the American film industry, hampered by the domestic recession, rising film production costs and inflation of ticket prices had been down for a year, but over sixty films were scheduled for release, with Richard Donner's Superman two expected to be the big hit of the season. The New York Times reported that with no brand awareness of the character, Paramount had provided theater owners with a more beneficial deal than usual to ensure that Raiders was screened in the best theaters and locations.

01:37:29
Speaker 1: A press event was held for the film, starring two camels, an elephant, and a python, that cost ten thousand dollars and Prince were delivered to theaters with unusually stringent security measures like lead sealed containers and letters to theater managers holding them responsible for any misuse of the film in the US or Canada. That's weird. I mean were talking about earlier how they sent the script off the people and they have to be in the room with a handler and for them and fly back to George Lucas and Steven Spielberg. Guess that continued even after it was released, which it was on June twelfth, nineteen eighty one, earning eight point three million dollars in its opening weekend and going on to spend forty weeks straight as one of the top ten highest grossing films in America. The film remained a steady success. It left theaters officially in March eighteenth, nineteen eighty two, which is geez nine months later, although some theaters were still playing it as of that July nineteen eighty two, which is over a year after it was released. Raiders earned an approximate total box office gross of two hundred and twelve point two million dollars, making it the highest grossing film of nineteen eighty one, and in total, it earned a worldwide gross of three hundred and fifty four million. It also scooped up five Academy Awards the following year for Best Art Direction, Best Film Editing, Best Sound, Best Sound Editing, and Best Visual Effects. The film also benefited from the burgeoning home media market of the time as well. In the early nineteen eighties, the VCR home market was rapidly gaining popularity, and in November nineteen eighty three, Paramount released a record five hundred thousand home video copies of Raiders, priced at a whopping thirty nine to ninety five. That's one hundred and twenty dollars in today's value. That's nuts worth it? Yeah, well, yeah, but I mean how good were your home theaters in that era? Too? Yeah? I see now, I'm like a small yeah right. By nineteen eighty five, over one million copies of the film had sold, making it the best selling VHS of its time. Well six years later, after the release of the third film in nineteen eighty nine, McDonald's launch possibly the largest video sales promotion to date, during which video cassettes of the first three Indiana Jones movies were sold at their restaurants for five ninety nine each. What a deal. Uh, you have skipped the critical roundup of Indiana Jones and Raiders of the Lost arc because, to read the script, everyone loved this film.

01:39:55
Speaker 2: They really did. I mean, like, can be all these all these eber I don't I couldn't find. I mean, someone has surely said a bad word about it, but they were wrong. And then I just got distracted looking at pictures of Alice and Duty and last Crusade.

01:40:08
Speaker 1: What a pretty lady she was. All I have to do is scream yeah.

01:40:13
Speaker 2: Well, now under the real question, though, how accurate is Raiders to the art of archaeology to anyone with the reef working knowledge of the discipline? And the answer is obviously not very But much like Top Gun, there was a subsequent increase in students wanting to major in archaeology after the film's success. The University of California Berkeley archaeologist Bill White told Smiths Sodian Magazine in twenty twenty one that Indiana Jones made him want to become an archaeologist in the first place, saying, these movies aren't escaped from many of us. I want non archaeologists to know that's not really how archaeology is but I don't want them to lose.

01:40:50
Speaker 1: The value of these movies.

01:40:52
Speaker 2: So probably the biggest thing from the get go is that indeed destroys quite a lot of historical sites, which is a pretty big no no, I'm told, do you think, yeah, okay?

01:41:06
Speaker 1: Cool?

01:41:07
Speaker 2: It is worth noting, though, in the second film, that he does have a line that he understands, at least in this particular concept, the idea that certain artifact should remain with the people in the societies that they actually belong to. He's returning the stone to the village and then his awful love interest asks why he doesn't keep it, and he says, what for? They just put it in a museum and be another rock collecting dust. More interesting to me is that the field of archaeology has evolved today into a realm broadly described as cultural resource management. And this is, according to the Smithsonian India, is ostensibly supported by his work at his college and by the British Museum. I think it is is where Marcus Burdy is supposed to work, and that is accurate towards the time. But in the nineteen seventies there was legislation passed, particularly the archaeological and Historical Preservation Act that opened up essentially in a lot of cases a for profit industry to get government grants and government money to rather than go places and retrieve things, or go on sort of unfettered wild goose chases to find sites that are in danger of being eradicated and preserve them, learn as much as they can about them. Adrian Whittaker, an archaeologist with the CRM Culture Resource Management firm Far Western Anthropological Research Group, which sounds threatening, told the Smithsonian Magazine that whereas Indiana Jones is basically a solo operator with a small supporting cast an adversarial relationship with local people, contemporary CRM relies on collaboration with the community to identify and protect resources from destruction, and sadly it would surprise no one that at this point archaeology is a lot less whip cracking, a lot more paperwork. Coordinating preservation work across multiple jurisdictions and different realms of legality like housing means a lot of people working the field have to become experts in things like residence law on urban planningarticularly when urban development beatends to encroach on one of these areas and they have to figure out how they can, you know, do courtroom maneuvering or file government briefs to stop it rather than punch Nazis, which is such a huge bummer. Sadly, even this podcast's favorite Indiana jonanline has evolved with the times. As conversations around repatriation of cultural items in museums continue. The idea that any artifact belongs in a museum is itself under question. Stacy Camp, who works at Michigan State University, told Smithsonian it belongs in a museum. Mentality has resulted in archaeological repositories being overrun with artifacts and even ceasing to accept collections. Some archaeologists today employ a no collection or repatriation policy in their work.

01:43:48
Speaker 1: I was just talking with somebody about that with the reck of the Titanic, about the complicated debate around because the wreck is deteriorating and in the next ten to fifteen years it's going to start apsing in on itself, and because right now the only things you're able to salvage are in the debris field and not anything from inside the ship. But they really want to be able to I think that the artifact that is up for debate now is trying to salvage the Marconi wireless system, which was used to call for help that night, and it's in a relatively accessible place and could be removed from the wreck, but it's in the last decade or so, the Titanic has gone from being history where the survivors were alive and their parents died on it and things like that, to be just sort of transitioning into I don't know what the term is history where there are no more living witnesses to it, and it's become something where the kind of skittishness to take items from it is starting to decrease because the people who can bear witness to it firsthand they're no longer here, and it's become something like, you know, you look at something like Pompeii, where obviously people died there, but preservation becomes the kind of the more critical focus than respect for the dead, which is again a whole issue that I don't really want to debate on here, but yeah, that's interesting to me that the whole notion of maybe it doesn't belong in a museum, which is something that I need to stop and think about more because I know that's my go to You know, I collect all sorts of weird little bits of historical ephemera, and I'm probably bording on being a hoarder a certain point. You're not traveling to remote locations and stealing them out of it and taking it from people. Yes, that is true, but that's also that is a very important I remember I studied abroad in London, and our dorm was not far from the British Museum, and there were I think, actually I remember there were a few pedestals of things that were like, yeah, we actually like sent it with a little like note on it and said, yeah, we actually sent this back to like where we found it so that they could enjoy it for a bit, but it will be back soon, which I thought was at least a step in the right direction.

01:46:02
Speaker 2: One of the biggest changes to the field is even the notion of who what an archaeologist looks like. Alexandra Jones, who's the founder of Archaeology in the Community, which is a DC area nonprofit, told the Smithsonian archaeology is dominated by women. White women have taken it over, and she said people don't usually expect me, as an African American female, to show up to these events. So I guess Phoebe waller Bridge and the New One is more true to life than we would have thought. Some of that new Indiana Jones movie focuses on the idea of Indie struggling to adapt to a modern world. It's a rich idea concept for a movie. You know, how does an antiquities hunter become an antique And it's kind of why I don't care for those movies, or the Crystal Skull one, because you know, I talked earlier about getting that kind of what we call the wizbang feeling from Raiders, and that's why I love the I prefer to think of this character and all of that as the last shot and last crusade where they're all riding off into the sun, literally riding off into the sunset, the platonic ideal of an adventurer that dates back to a time when the world had completely moved on from adventures even being a thing. I mean, that's the amazing thing about this right, like we're in this is created as a throwback a consciously backward looking character and consciously backward looking franchise by the late seventies, at which point, like were their places still left to adventure two. All of these concepts got so much more thorny and so much more complicated. And that's the real joy of this movie is how and these the first three movies, is how pure that they remain.

01:47:44
Speaker 1: So that's my final thought. Well said, I didn't have a joke, But are they stored in the Library of Congress? In other words, do these movies belong in the museum? I don't think this one is actually in the Library of COG. I think it's in in a five. Okay, you gotta say it. It belongs to me.

01:48:06
Speaker 2: It belongs to the Library of Congress. Folks, this has been too much information. Thank you for listening. I'm Alex Heigel.

01:48:13
Speaker 1: And I'm Jordan Runtag. We'll catch you next time. Too Much Information was a production of iHeartRadio. The show's executive producers are Noel Brown and Jordan run Talk. The show's supervising producer is Michael Alder June. The show was researched, written and hosted by Jordan Runtalg and Alex Heigel, with original music by Seth Applebaum and the Ghost Spunk Orchestra. If you like what you heard, please subscribe and leave us a review. For more podcasts and iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.