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

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Too Much Information is a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:09):
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.

Speaker 1 (00:25):
My name is Alex Heigel and I'm Jordan run Tug.
That's very good.

Speaker 2 (00:29):
Well, I didn't get the alliteration in there, but I
wanted to still have a little bit of that ratit
tad tad rhythm.

Speaker 1 (00:34):
I'm not one of those things, but I'll let you
figure out which one.

Speaker 2 (00:38):
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

(00:59):
because it ended in nineteen eighty nine.

Speaker 1 (01:04):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:13):
Much like everything, really, the tide of critical reappraisal has
come back around to Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, has it?

Speaker 3 (01:18):
Really?

Speaker 2 (01:19):
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.

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

Speaker 2 (01:38):
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

(01:58):
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.

Speaker 1 (02:13):
He did my.

Speaker 2 (02:13):
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.

Speaker 1 (02:35):
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.

Speaker 2 (02:55):
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

(03:17):
cop out, which means I love it.

Speaker 1 (03:19):
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?

Speaker 2 (03:28):
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.

Speaker 1 (03:45):
Whit is it like the RFK Funeral Train? No?

Speaker 2 (03:48):
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.

Speaker 1 (04:08):
Oh, oh, well, I think they rake.

Speaker 2 (04:11):
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.

Speaker 1 (04:28):
But The First Raiders to the Lost Tark is a
perfect film, though.

Speaker 2 (04:32):
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

(04:55):
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,

(05:18):
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

(05:40):
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.

Speaker 1 (05:54):
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

(06:15):
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

(06:39):
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.

Speaker 2 (06:49):
Yeah, and Harrison's Ford will still punch you in the
face too for looking at him.

Speaker 1 (06:52):
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.

Speaker 2 (07:10):
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

(07:31):
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,

(07:53):
whereas this one is just such a like clean, no
nonsense film.

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

Speaker 2 (08:01):
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.

(08:23):
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.

Speaker 1 (08:45):
But yeah, that movie is weird.

Speaker 2 (08:47):
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

(09:08):
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?

Speaker 1 (09:26):
Melt Yeah, I did. I did.

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

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

Speaker 2 (09:41):
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,

(10:04):
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

(10:24):
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

(10:45):
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

(11:06):
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.

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

Speaker 2 (11:30):
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.

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

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

Speaker 1 (11:55):
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.

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

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

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

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

Speaker 2 (12:24):
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.

Speaker 1 (12:34):
Anyway, Yeah, he did.

Speaker 2 (12:35):
He did a draft of Apocalypse Now, but he left
pretty early on.

Speaker 1 (12:38):
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.

Speaker 2 (12:46):
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.

Speaker 1 (13:03):
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

(13:26):
eight and American Graffiti. So call all that hemming and
haullings that I did. That's their relationship.

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

Speaker 1 (13:37):
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

(14:00):
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

(14:21):
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,

(14:44):
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

(15:06):
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.

Speaker 2 (15:19):
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.

Speaker 1 (15:27):
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?

Speaker 2 (15:38):
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.

Speaker 1 (15:49):
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.

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

Speaker 1 (16:18):
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

(16:40):
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.

Speaker 2 (16:56):
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

(17:19):
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

(17:39):
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

(18:00):
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.

Speaker 1 (18:14):
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,

(18:36):
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.

Speaker 2 (18:54):
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

(19:15):
go and read the entire live processing of their brains
as they fleshed out the character and the first movie
you can't.

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

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

Speaker 1 (19:35):
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.

Speaker 2 (19:47):
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

(20:10):
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

(20:32):
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.

Speaker 1 (20:44):
Paintings that.

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

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

Speaker 2 (20:54):
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

(21:18):
of casual, uh other ring that happens in there.

Speaker 1 (21:22):
There.

Speaker 2 (21:22):
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.

Speaker 1 (21:31):
Oh yeah, yeah.

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

Speaker 1 (21:39):
So there's that.

Speaker 2 (21:41):
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

(22:04):
put it in the third film that we named the
dog Indy.

Speaker 1 (22:08):
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.

Speaker 2 (22:19):
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.

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

Speaker 2 (22:33):
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,

(22:58):
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,

(23:18):
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.

Speaker 1 (23:32):
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

(23:53):
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.

(24:16):
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.

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

Speaker 1 (24:39):
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.

Speaker 2 (24:57):
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.

Speaker 1 (25:05):
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,

(25:26):
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,

(25:51):
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

(26:11):
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.

(26:33):
And Spielberg agreed, and so I had complete confidence in him.

Speaker 2 (26:36):
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

(26:57):
just had a huge flop.

Speaker 1 (26:58):
You know.

Speaker 2 (26:59):
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.

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

Speaker 2 (27:22):
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.

Speaker 1 (27:36):
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.

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

Speaker 1 (28:01):
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.

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

Speaker 1 (28:19):
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

(28:42):
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.

(29:04):
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.

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

Speaker 1 (29:19):
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.

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

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

Speaker 2 (29:41):
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

(30:02):
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

(30:26):
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.

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

Speaker 2 (30:49):
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

(31:12):
him to star as Indiana Jones and do magnum Pi.

Speaker 1 (31:16):
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.

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

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

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

Speaker 1 (31:40):
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.

Speaker 2 (31:55):
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.

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

Speaker 2 (32:09):
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

(32:29):
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

(32:49):
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

(33:10):
did tear his acl He explained this in a twenty
fourteen Reddit ama.

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

Speaker 2 (33:17):
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

(33:39):
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.

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

Speaker 2 (33:54):
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.

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

Speaker 2 (34:10):
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

(34:33):
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

(34:53):
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

(35:16):
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

(35:38):
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.

Speaker 1 (35:54):
J R.

Speaker 2 (35:55):
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.

Speaker 1 (36:12):
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.

Speaker 2 (36:25):
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

(36:46):
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,

(37:07):
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.

Speaker 1 (37:21):
He succeeded.

Speaker 2 (37:22):
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.

Speaker 1 (37:37):
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.

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

Speaker 1 (37:54):
We stand.

Speaker 2 (37:56):
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.

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

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

Speaker 1 (38:19):
Anyway?

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

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

Speaker 2 (38:29):
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.

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

Speaker 2 (38:53):
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

(39:17):
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

(39:39):
he whips the gun out of the guy's hand.

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

Speaker 2 (39:45):
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.

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

Speaker 2 (40:03):
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.

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

Speaker 2 (40:23):
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

(40:44):
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

(41:06):
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.

Speaker 1 (41:18):
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.

Speaker 2 (41:33):
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

(41:55):
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.

Speaker 1 (42:15):
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.

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

Speaker 1 (42:27):
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.

Speaker 2 (42:49):
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

(43:10):
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.

(43:30):
She screen test with John Shay she's talked about, and
Tim Matheson.

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

Speaker 2 (43:38):
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

(44:00):
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.

(44:22):
There's that scene where she she and Bellock.

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

Speaker 2 (44:29):
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.

Speaker 1 (44:38):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (44:39):
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

(45:00):
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

(45:23):
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.

Speaker 1 (45:35):
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

(45:55):
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

(46:16):
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

(46:41):
can see the actual frame.

Speaker 2 (46:43):
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.

Speaker 1 (46:52):
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.

(47:14):
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

(47:36):
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.

Speaker 2 (47:58):
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.

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

Speaker 2 (48:21):
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,

(48:42):
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.

Speaker 1 (48:56):
And so Kate Capshaw is.

Speaker 2 (48:59):
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.

Speaker 3 (49:15):
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.

Speaker 1 (49:25):
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.

Speaker 2 (49:41):
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?

Speaker 1 (49:48):
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.

Speaker 2 (50:02):
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

(50:24):
is the snake filled pit where you get the classic
line snakes.

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

Speaker 2 (50:34):
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

(50:56):
snakes is what I've read, which is too many to
be around.

Speaker 1 (51:04):
Period.

Speaker 2 (51:06):
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

(51:28):
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.

Speaker 1 (51:45):
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.

Speaker 2 (52:09):
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

(52:30):
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.

Speaker 1 (52:46):
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

(53:07):
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.

Speaker 2 (53:25):
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.

(53:47):
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.

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

Speaker 2 (54:03):
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,

(54:24):
he's a star, which feels like another labor violence cigar choppings.

Speaker 1 (54:31):
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.

Speaker 2 (54:50):
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

(55:12):
that they flare up.

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

Speaker 2 (55:16):
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.

Speaker 1 (55:30):
Uh.

Speaker 2 (55:30):
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.

Speaker 1 (55:45):
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.

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

Speaker 1 (56:06):
Oh man?

Speaker 2 (56:08):
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.

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

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

Speaker 2 (56:33):
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,

(56:53):
We'll just you know, make him a big guy.

Speaker 1 (56:56):
Uh.

Speaker 2 (56:56):
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

(57:20):
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

(57:41):
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

(58:02):
just toying around with the Walkman and they were like.

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

Speaker 2 (58:08):
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.

Speaker 1 (58:17):
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.

Speaker 2 (58:32):
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.

Speaker 1 (58:37):
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

(58:58):
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.

(59:19):
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.

(59:42):
You can pauseive freeze frame and ce C three po
and R two D two are carved as hieroglyphics.

Speaker 2 (59:46):
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.

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

Speaker 2 (01:00:01):
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.

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

Speaker 2 (01:00:24):
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

(01:00:45):
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

(01:01:06):
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

(01:01:27):
he is the German mechanic who gets purade by the
flying Wings propeller.

Speaker 1 (01:01:36):
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

(01:02:00):
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

(01:02:23):
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

(01:02:46):
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

(01:03:09):
that is, but I imagine.

Speaker 2 (01:03:11):
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

(01:03:33):
say that? Did I mention that earlier? The first location
they shot at was in La Rochelle, France, one hundred
miles north of Bordeaux.

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

Speaker 2 (01:03:44):
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

(01:04:04):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:04:22):
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

(01:04:44):
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

(01:05:06):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:05:22):
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

(01:05:44):
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

(01:06:04):
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

(01:06:24):
get debriefed by the US governments, that's not in d C.
That's the interior of San Francisco City Hall.

Speaker 1 (01:06:29):
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

(01:06:50):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:07:05):
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.

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

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

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

Speaker 2 (01:07:29):
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.

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

Speaker 2 (01:07:43):
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

(01:08:03):
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

(01:08:25):
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.

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

Speaker 2 (01:08:36):
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

(01:08:57):
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.

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

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

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

Speaker 2 (01:09:23):
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

(01:09:43):
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,

(01:10:06):
and movie Magic was born.

Speaker 1 (01:10:08):
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.

(01:10:30):
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

(01:10:51):
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

(01:11:13):
said the Yeah, it's just like it was just out there.

Speaker 2 (01:11:16):
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.

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

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

Speaker 1 (01:11:41):
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

(01:12:01):
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

(01:12:22):
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

(01:12:43):
the rest of his life.

Speaker 2 (01:12:44):
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.

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

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

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

Speaker 2 (01:13:11):
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.

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

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

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

Speaker 2 (01:13:49):
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

(01:14:10):
hile Hitler five takes for dialogue, fifty takes to get
a monkey to do the Nazi salute.

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

Speaker 2 (01:14:19):
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

(01:14:39):
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

(01:15:02):
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

(01:15:22):
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

(01:15:43):
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.

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

Speaker 2 (01:16:02):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:16:18):
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

(01:16:38):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:16:54):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:17:08):
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

(01:17:29):
Spielberg's you know, right hand basically who enlisted him to
help fly the Jurassic Park crew off the island.

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

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

Speaker 2 (01:17:45):
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

(01:18:06):
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

(01:18:28):
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.

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

Speaker 2 (01:18:49):
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.

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

Speaker 2 (01:19:02):
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

(01:19:23):
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

(01:19:45):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:20:03):
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

(01:20:25):
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,

(01:20:49):
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.

(01:21:11):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:21:29):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:21:38):
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

(01:22:01):
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

(01:22:22):
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

(01:22:44):
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

(01:23:06):
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.

(01:23:29):
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.

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

Speaker 1 (01:23:52):
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

(01:24:14):
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

(01:24:35):
the Nazis' grisly deaths.

Speaker 2 (01:24:38):
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

(01:24:59):
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

(01:25:21):
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.

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

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

Speaker 1 (01:25:58):
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.

(01:26:21):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:26:42):
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

(01:27:05):
for squibs, however, but shotguns.

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

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

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

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

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

Speaker 2 (01:27:33):
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.

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

Speaker 2 (01:27:47):
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

(01:28:08):
a hoot and hauler man just firing a couple of
shot guns at a head filled with old meat.

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

Speaker 2 (01:28:16):
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

(01:28:36):
PG thirteen ratings.

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

Speaker 2 (01:28:38):
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

(01:28:58):
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

(01:29:21):
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?

Speaker 1 (01:29:29):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:29:49):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:30:02):
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

(01:30:23):
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

(01:30:44):
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

(01:31:05):
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.

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

Speaker 1 (01:31:23):
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

(01:31:43):
right there.

Speaker 2 (01:31:44):
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

(01:32:04):
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

(01:32:25):
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

(01:32:51):
he is he is a borrower.

Speaker 3 (01:32:52):
You know.

Speaker 2 (01:32:53):
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,

(01:33:15):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:33:24):
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

(01:33:46):
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

(01:34:09):
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

(01:34:30):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:34:38):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:34:49):
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,

(01:35:14):
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

(01:35:36):
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

(01:35:58):
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

(01:36:19):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:36:38):
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.

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

Speaker 2 (01:37:00):
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,

(01:37:21):
Paramount had provided theater owners with a more beneficial deal
than usual to ensure that Raiders was screened in the
best theaters and locations.

Speaker 1 (01:37:29):
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

(01:37:50):
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

(01:38:10):
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

(01:38:32):
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

(01:38:55):
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,

(01:39:18):
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,

(01:39:39):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:39:55):
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.

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

Speaker 2 (01:40:13):
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

(01:40:37):
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.

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

Speaker 2 (01:40:52):
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?

Speaker 1 (01:41:06):
Cool?

Speaker 2 (01:41:07):
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

(01:41:30):
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.

(01:41:51):
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

(01:42:13):
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

(01:42:36):
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

(01:42:57):
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.

(01:43:20):
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

(01:43:40):
to accept collections. Some archaeologists today employ a no collection
or repatriation policy in their work.

Speaker 1 (01:43:48):
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

(01:44:08):
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

(01:44:30):
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

(01:44:50):
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

(01:45:13):
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

(01:45:35):
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,

(01:45:57):
which I thought was at least a step in the
right direction.

Speaker 2 (01:46:02):
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,

(01:46:23):
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

(01:46:44):
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

(01:47:07):
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

(01:47:30):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:47:44):
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,

(01:48:04):
you gotta say it. It belongs to me.

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

Speaker 1 (01:48:13):
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

(01:48:34):
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
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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark: Everything You Didn't Know