As if you needed another reason to think ‘ol Georgie was a gigantodouche, now it looks like he wanted everybody’s favorite archaeologist/adventurer to commit statutory rape. According to a transcript of a story meeting between Lucas, Spielberg, and Lawrence Kasdan, George expressed his windowless-van-full-of-candy side:
GL: I was thinking that this old guy could have been his mentor. He could have known this little girl when she was just a kid. Had an affair with her when she was eleven.
LK: And he was forty-two.
GL: He hasn’t seen her in twelve years. Now she’s twenty-two. It’s a real strange relationship.
SS: She had better be older than twenty-two.
GL: He’s thirty-five, and he knew her ten years ago when he was twenty-five and she was only twelve. It would be amusing to make her slightly young at the time.
SS: And promiscuous. She came onto him.
GL: Fifteen is right on the edge. I know it’s an outrageous idea, but it is interesting. Once she’s sixteen or seventeen it’s not interesting anymore. But if she was fifteen and he was twenty-five and they actually had an affair the last time they met. And she was madly in love with him and he …
Read the whole article at Cinematical.
Wow, that really is creepy. And he basically put that in Raiders. This just makes it clear that the dialog with Marion isn’t just exaggeration.
You know I’m pretty sure their conversation continued like this:
SS: Fuckin’ Indy… that creep can roll, man.
GL: Yeah, but he’s a pervert.
SS: Yeah.
GL: No, he’s a sex offender. With a record. He served 6 months in Chino for exposing himself to an eight year old.
SS: Oh!
GL: When he moved to Hollywood he had to go door to door to tell everyone he was a pedophile.
Yeah, I’m reading that transcript as we speak. RAIDERS is easily my second-favourite film of all time. JAWS being number one.
That excerpt is rather unfortunate. But the whole thing is an amazing read. These guys were unstoppable back then, and you can’t help but be in awe of George Lucas at this point. The sheer amount of creativity and ideas that come out of him during these story meetings is amazing.
You can’t help but wonder where it all went.
The dynamic is very clear; Lucas has the story and set-piece ideas, Spielberg has the practicality and visualization of those ideas, and Kasdan is all about the characters.
And another thing I’m glad to finally have cleared up is about Philip Kaufman’s involvement. If you remember he has co-story credit with Lucas, but is rarely mentioned or interviewed about it. Well it seems that he provided most of the mythology of The Ark and the backstory of what it was and why Hitler wanted to get his hands on it. So I guess he provided Lucas with his precious ‘MacGuffin’.
If Kaufman hadn’t done that we might have gotten flying saucers a good 25 years earlier…
“If Kaufman hadn’t done that we might have gotten flying saucers a good 25 years earlier…”
And no one would have bitched about it!