Tales From Development Hell (16 page)

Fan feedback was mixed, regardless of whether the commentators believed the script to be genuine or bogus. “I was paid the ultimate compliment by those fans who believed the script was the real McCoy,” added Smith. “I thank them sincerely. And to the naysayers I bow to your abilities at sniffing out a forgery.” Lucasfilm was not prepared to sit back and watch its copyright violated, however. “Four ‘cease and desist’ orders later I pulled the plug and shut down,” Smith explained. “At that point, I felt I’d rocked the boat sufficiently enough that Lucasfilm had no choice but to deal with me.” They did: by sending the police round to his friend’s workplace. “To make a long story short, my friend ratted me out and I was obliged to give the constable a call... I assured the constable that I wouldn’t do anything like that again (wink) and hung up with the constable’s promise that he’d put in a good word for me at Lucasfilm.” Smith concluded by apologising for his actions, dissuading anyone else from emulating them, and thanking Lucasfilm for its tolerance. “My Internet fugitive days are over,” he said. “In my letters to Lucasfilm I apologised and explained that my actions weren’t malicious in any way and that I simply wanted someone to read my script. I guess one could chalk it up to the actions of a desperate screenwriter.”

Almost a year passed before any further mention of Indy IV. Then, on 24 March 1997, during an interview with Barbara Walters, Harrison Ford was asked if he would play Indiana Jones again. “In a New York minute,” he replied swiftly. “It’s a question of Steven Spielberg and I finding a slot we have
in common.” Two months later — while the ever-reliable London
Daily Mail
was ‘reporting’ that
Indiana Jones and the Sons of Darkness
would feature Kevin Costner as Indy’s ‘bad seed’ brother — Spielberg told
Time
magazine that he expected to direct a fourth Indy movie, but needed to do “a lot between now and then that will frighten me.” In July, during a press conference for
Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace,
George Lucas went further, stating: “We’re working on a screenplay for [a fourth] Indiana Jones and it’s really now a matter of trying to get Steven and Harrison and all our schedules so that we can actually work on it, because everyone is so busy.”

In October of the same year, archaeologists at the website Ain’t It Cool News unearthed a sacred find: what appeared to be a genuine Indy IV script, labouring under the multiple-choice title
“Indiana Jones IV
aka
Indiana Jones and the Monkey King
aka
Indiana Jones and the Garden of Life,”
and written by Chris Columbus — who wrote
Gremlins
and
The Goonies
for Spielberg, and later directed
Home Alone, Mrs Doubtfire
and the first two Harry Potter films.

The script put Indy, Marcus Brody (Denholm Elliot’s character), an attractive English anthropologist named Dr Clare Clarke, and ‘Scraggy’, a Portuguese guide, on the trail of a legendary Chinese artefact believed to hold the secret of eternal life. “The script had to do with the lost city of Sun Wu-Kung, a stone monkey, a golden hooped staff and ‘The Garden of Immortal Peaches’,” said Harry Knowles, Ain’t It Cool’s redoubtable webmaster. “The only recurring character from the past besides Indy was Brody,” he added, “but [in the story] he has been on the other side for quite some time now. Nazis and evil Chinese Pirates are the bad guys.” Compared to the first three Indy films, he added, Columbus’ script was “by far the most ‘fantastical’ in terms of mysticism and such.” Despite the fact that the script was purportedly dated 10 February 1995, it seemed obvious from the setting (the year 1937) and the theme (immortality) that this was more likely a rejected script for the third installment of the Indiana Jones series, not the fourth.

A few months after the appearance of Columbus’ rejected draft, on 15 January 1998, another website, Dark Horizons, posted what it claimed to be the opening pages of another script, entitled
Raiders of the Fallen Empire,
which supposedly concerned Indy’s discovery of the Garden of Eden. Although even the title seemed dubious — for the 1999 video release,
Raiders of the Lost Ark
would be quietly retitled
Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark
to tie it in with its prequel and sequel, much as Lucas had appended
Star Wars
with the sobriquet
Episode IV: A New Hope
— confirmation of the script’s religious theme seemed to come from a respected theologian in
Moscow, Idaho, who claimed to have been hired to fact-check a script with this subject matter. The script segment, amounting to just a few pages, was subsequently taken down — not, this time, due to pressure from Lucasfilm, but at the request of the extract’s author, who claimed that the whole thing was a misunderstanding.

In April,
Cinescape
magazine reported receiving yet another script, entitled
Indiana Jones: The Law of One,
which dealt with Indy’s pursuit of a powerful ancient device responsible for the destruction of Atlantis. The magazine’s editors judged it “a fake or at the very least a ‘spec’ script”, and a month later, broke the real story in an interview with
Star Wars
producer Rick McCallum. “We finished the script about three years ago,” he said, presumably referring to Boam’s early draft. “[But] at the time we finished it, Harrison Ford had two years’ worth of commitments, Spielberg was just starting DreamWorks and George Lucas and I were in the middle of
Star Wars: Episode I.
The plan is that in the next five years, George and I finish
Episode II
and
Episode III
of
Star Wars
and then we will definitely do another Indy,” he added. “Our plan is that viewers can take the forty-four hours we did of the
Young Indiana Jones
[TV series], where you watch Indy born in 1899, and then you follow him in the movies through the end of the 1950s. We see these movies as a chronicle of the century.”

The same month, Ain’t It Cool claimed that the title
Indiana Jones and the Lost Continent
was what “they would probably stick with [now that] the ‘Area 51’ story has been dropped in favour of the new one that follows the lines of the lost city of Atlantis.” Ford dismissed such rumours during an appearance on Earvin ‘Magic’ Johnson’s talk show on 9 June 1998. “We just haven’t really settled on a script idea yet,” he said. “Hopefully, something will come along.” A month later, the Chicago Herald-Tribune’s Cindy Pearlman quoted Steven Spielberg as saying “The Indiana Jones 4 hat is halfway on my head,” while Ain’t It Cool went further: “We don’t have a start date for it because we still don’t have a script, but we do have an idea of what type of villain it should be, but it won’t be a Nazi. Everyone’s on board for the picture but don’t look for it for a couple of years.” A few months later, a spokesperson for Paramount Pictures told
Empire
magazine that the official position was that “there is no official position. They may all be on the verge of signing contracts, but since no public announcement has been made, officially there is no Indiana Jones 4.”

On 2 December 1998, a little over a year after Ain’t It Cool unearthed Chris Columbus’ rejected screenplay, website
Indyfan.com
published a synopsis of a script entitled
Indiana Jones and the Saucer Men from Mars,
purportedly written
by Jeb Stuart
(48 HRS, The Fugitive)
from a story by Stuart and Lucas. “The script, labelled as the final draft and dated 1995, involves an alien artefact which continuously changes possession between Indy, Russian baddies, and saucer men [ie, extra-terrestrials],” the report stated.

Indiana Jones and the Saucer Men from Mars
opens in Borneo in 1949, as Indy manages to keep a stolen idol from falling into the hands of pirates. Later, he meets a beautiful and brilliant linguist, Dr Elaine McGregor, who hires Indy to join her at a dig site, where she is captured by the same pirates, and rescued by Indy. Elaine and Indy fall in love and decide to get married, but the wedding is interrupted by the arrival of Elaine’s ex-husband, Bolander, who spirits her away to White Sands, New Mexico, where a spacecraft has crash landed, killing its alien occupants. While the Americans and (Communist) Russians engage in a race to discover the secrets of the alien ship’s fuel supply — a stone cylinder covered in hieroglyphics — Indy finds himself at the test site of an atomic bomb, and later on an out of control aircraft which he and Elaine escape as another alien spacecraft appears to retrieve the cylinder.

They subsequently hide out in a hot-wired pickup truck at a desert drive-in movie theatre (showing, for good measure, a cheesy ’50s sci-fi movie), meet Sanskrit-speaking aliens, get arrested, escape, witness Bolander’s incineration by the cylinder and the departure of the aliens, and finally get married, driving off into the sunset with Short Round at the wheel. “Besides being convoluted and unbelievable,”
Indyfan.com
’s correspondent complained, “the storyline ends in indulgent sappiness, with Indy marrying the lady linguist who accompanied him throughout the adventure. The ceremony is witnessed by Sallah, Marion, Willie, Short Round, and Henry Jones Sr.”

For years, it remained unclear whether or not the
Saucer Man from Mars
script was genuine. One paragraph of the synopsis, however, appears to prove its veracity. “The Russians, having packed Indy into the trunk of their car, drive out into the desert to a secret rendezvous. They get lost and stop in a town called Boomsburg. They go into the gas station to ask for directions. As they do so, Indy jimmies the trunk and escapes. He checks the houses and finds that they are all fake, full of props and mannequins. Suddenly, the civil defense siren goes off and the Russians bolt for their car, burning rubber. Indy runs into a kitchen and leaps into a 2’ deep crawlspace on the floor. He then pulls a lead-lined refrigerator over top. An A-Bomb goes off, blowing away the two Russians and destroying the town. Somehow, the concrete-lined hole and the fridge protect Indy. A decon team arrives, finds him alive and scrub him radiation free.” The fact that this scene, evidently conceived
by Lucas, appears in later drafts as well the final film (and Frank Darabont’s subsequent draft, also based on Lucas’ story) — along with the line, “Saucer Men from Mars,” spoken by an incredulous Dr Jones — would appear to confirm that the Stuart script was genuine after all.

Less than a fortnight after the
Saucer Men from Mars
synopsis leaked, Ain’t It Cool described yet another potential storyline, this time supposedly taken from a treatment an unnamed writer had submitted to Creative Artists Agency. “Indy, working in Egypt, circa 1947, encounters a mysterious Egyptian at the great pyramids. It turns out that he has escaped from Atlantis and needs to prevent the destruction of the Atlanteans. He is to marry the King’s daughter, but his fellow Egyptian has heard of the surface world and wants to raise Atlantis. This second Egyptian is none other than the ancient Pharaoh-God, Ramses. He is now a mummy and plans to destroy the Atlanteans, who are alien in origin, and raise the continent through the triggering of a massive earthquake. Indy finds Atlantis at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean — [apparently] the city was spared because they trapped themselves inside a giant dome. There an Egyptian minority population still thrives. Indy must choose between the rise of the world’s greatest archaeological find and the death of the Atlanteans, or to help preserve the marriage of the Egyptian to his Atlantean love by joining him to defeat Ramses.”

The pseudonymous poster, ‘KABOOM’, was perhaps unaware that the Atlantis theme had been the subject of numerous other rumours over the years, or that Universal was already filming an Egyptian-themed Indiana Jones clone entitled
The Mummy.
More tellingly, KABOOM’s post was accompanied by the following subjective (not to mention immodest) endorsement of his or her story outline: “As you can see, the story is magnificent, with room to add tremendous conflict and spectacular visuals. Imagine when Indy approaches Atlantis and enters the dazzling city! It also introduces an awesome villain and great supporting characters that we will actually care about their fate! I hope they go with this treatment, it would be awesome.”

Barely a month passed before another, only slightly more credible story emerged. On 12 January 1999,
Cinescape Insider
reported the existence of a script entitled
Indiana Jones and the Sword of Arthur,
credited to Jeffrey Boam, with pages marked ‘Property of Lucasfilm Ltd’ and ‘Final Draft’. (The latter marking casts some doubt on the legitimacy of the script, since professional screenwriters will seldom, if ever, tempt the fates by writing ‘final draft’ on a script. It could, however, be a reference to the best-selling screenwriting software of that name, though in practice scripts written and/or printed out in
this format display no reference to the software with which they are written.)

As expected from the title, the script concerned a search by Indy for King Arthur’s magical sword, Excalibur, reputedly hidden on Enigma Island, a small isle off the Spanish coast, six centuries earlier. The Nazis are after it too, as are the surviving descendants of the original Knights of the Round Table, who help Indy and his companions — Anthony Brody (Marcus’ son) and new friends Arianna Smith (a kind of female Indy, as might be guessed from the name) and Sebastian Collins (a dead ringer for
Frasier
actor David Hyde Pierce, and soon revealed to be the villain of the piece) — recover the sword, only to have it snatched from their grasp by the arm of a woman who reaches up from beneath the Atlantic Ocean to reclaim it forever. (One of the script’s more imaginative moments is a battle with Collins, during which Indy loses an eye, leaving him sporting a very fetching eye patch — thus explaining the elderly Indy’s appearance in the TV series.) At the end, Indy goes back to teaching, and prepares to embark on his next adventure: settling down with Arianna.