The Return of Indiana Jones

[Sylph]

The return of Indiana Jones

The most hotly awaited film of 2008 sees Indiana Jones return after 19 years. Steven Spielberg, Harrison Ford, George Lucas and co explain why they’re dusting off their tribute to a lost era of movies – and give a few hints about the closely guarded plot

Christopher Goodwin

It’s almost upon us, with a premiere at Cannes a few days before a simultaneous worldwide release on May 22, but Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is a mystery. There is a television trailer for the film, and now a cinema one, but just a handful of stills have been released, and there have been no clues whatsoever about the plot. The action is set in 1957, the baddies are Russian, the object of the traditional quest, this time, is a powerful crystal skull. That’s about the sum of what Steven Spielberg, the director, and George Lucas, the producer, want fans to know.

Spielberg and Lucas are taking huge gambles on this fourth Indiana Jones movie. Big-budget sequels are seldom released more than a couple of years apart these days, but it’s been a full 19 years since Harrison Ford last put on his fedora and cracked his bullwhip, in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Most of the youthful audience at which Hollywood aims its movies today weren’t even born then. And whoever heard of having a 65-year-old actor - which is how old Harrison Ford is now - as the star of a bone-crunching action movie?

The film-makers have taken other gambles. Spielberg decided early on that he wanted the film to have a distinctly old-fashioned feel. He and his cinematographer, Janusz Kaminski, watched the three previous films so they could match their style, itself based on the cliffhanger Saturday-matinée serials of the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s. (Douglas Slocombe shot the first three Indy films.)

“Both Janusz and I had to swallow our pride,” Spielberg says. “Janusz had to approximate another cinematographer’s look, and I had to approximate this younger director’s look that I thought I had moved away from after almost two decades.”

To achieve this look, Spielberg deliberately used few computer-generated shots and employed much less fast cutting than most modern action movies feature. Spielberg says he wanted to keep much longer shots than modern audiences have become used to in films such as the Bourne series, which he says he admires, because, “every time the camera changes dynamic angles, you feel there’s something wrong, that there’s some cheating going on”. Partly that’s because, for all the action, the Indy films are also comedies, and Spielberg wanted “to do the shots the way Chaplin or Keaton would, everything happening before the eyes of the audience, without a cut. To get the comedy I want, you have to be old-fashioned”.

Spielberg and Lucas also took a decidedly old-fashioned approach to the marketing of the film. While whole new divisions of studio marketing departments have grown up to exploit the attention movies now get on the internet, Spielberg and Lucas have done everything they can to try to make sure people will know as little as possible about the film when they file into the cinema. Extraordinary measures have been taken to keep the script a secret. Shia LaBeouf had to read the script in Spielberg’s office, while the director flew over John Hurt’s to the UK when Hurt insisted on reading it before signing on to do the film - and flew it back to LA on the next plane.

Despite their best efforts, which included everyone connected with the film signing cast-iron agreements not to divulge anything, aspects of the story have seeped out. One extra playing a Russian soldier leaked key plot elements to a newspaper in Oklahoma. “Apparently, the Soviet army was searching for a skull in the jungles of South America, and Indiana Jones was searching as well,” said the extra, whom Spielberg is said to have had digitally removed from the film as punishment. “We took Indiana Jones hostage and managed to find the skull.”

It has taken a long time to get a story that everyone - specifically Lucas (whose original idea Indy was), Spielberg and Ford - could agree on. The first script was written in the early 1990s and was called Indiana Jones and the Saucer Men from Mars. Lucas’s idea was that, as the first three films had replicated the movie serials of the 1930s and 1940s, with their emphasis on Nazis as villains, the fourth should take its ideas from the serials of the 1950s, when there was much more emphasis on space and aliens. But Ford didn’t like it.

Over the years, five other writers wrote treatments or scripts, the closest to getting made being one by Frank Darabont (who wrote The Shawshank Redemption). It was Darabont who brought back Marion Ravenwood, among other story elements that have remained in the movie. Spielberg loved the script, but Lucas, who has power of veto over such things, didn’t like the story, much to Darabont’s fury. He called Lucas “insane” for rejecting it and provoked much internet ire against Lucas, who is almost universally derided for the incredibly clunky scripts he wrote for the recent Star Wars movies. In the end, the writer to get the script credit on the film was David Koepp, who had co-written Spielberg’s 2005 film War of the Worlds. Koepp put the emphasis on what Lucas was interested in, the mythology of “crystal skulls”, which Ford calls “the mysto-crypto stuff that’s part of every Indiana Jones movie”. Ford’s voiceover in the latest trailer makes it clear that possession of the crystal skull is the MacGuffin – the narrative device – that drives the movie. “Whoever returns the skull to the city temple will be given control over its power,” Ford intones.

The leaks apparently quite depressed Spielberg, according to Lucas, who has said he told his friend audiences would not be “coming to see the plot. They’re coming to see Steve Spielberg interpret a story. You can’t get that any other way than by seeing the movie”. Which, of course, millions of us will.


http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/film/article3889716.ece

[Sylph]

May 10, 2008

Indiana Jones Is Battling the Long Knives of the Internet

By MICHAEL CIEPLY

LOS ANGELES — Now comes the part where Indiana Jones dangles over the snake pit of public opinion.

Actually, a handful of Web reviewers have already struck at the film “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull,” despite an intense effort by the director Steven Spielberg, the executive producer George Lucas and Paramount Pictures to keep this highly anticipated sequel out of sight until Sunday, May 18.

On that day, this fourth Indiana Jones movie is scheduled to make its debut at the Cannes Film Festival with an afternoon press screening, and another one at night.

At about the same time, the picture, which opens in theaters on the following Thursday, is expected to be screened for the news media and industry insiders at multiple showings in Manhattan and Los Angeles, while other screenings are scheduled around the world.

Mr. Spielberg is unusually fastidious when it comes to protecting his films from advance word that can diminish excitement or muddy a message planted by months of carefully orchestrated publicity and expensive promotions (including, in this case, a February cover article in Vanity Fair, complete with Annie Leibovitz photos of the cast, and leather bullwhips delivered weeks ago to newsrooms).

Mr. Spielberg customarily avoids leaky test screenings. Even Marvin Levy, his publicist of more than 30 years, said he had not yet seen the new movie.

Still, there it was, at 6:42 a.m. on Thursday: a harshly critical review on aintitcoolnews.com, from a poster who identified himself as “ShogunMaster.” Rife with details from the film, the review said, “This is the Indiana Movie that you were dreading.”

By that afternoon two other less critical, but less than sparkling, reviews also appeared on the Web site.

The man who posted as ShogunMaster, reached via the Web site, said he is a theater executive who saw the film at an exhibitors’ screening this week. He spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid reprisal from the studio.

Paramount had shown the film to a handful of theater company executives at its Los Angeles lot and elsewhere.

Movie studios increasingly tend to protect their biggest bets from advance showings. Two years ago, for instance, Sony Pictures screened “The Da Vinci Code” for critics at the Cannes Film Festival only two days before its opening in the United States. But exhibitors’ screenings can open a window for determined reviewers.

Such screenings are required in about two dozen states that have laws against blind-bidding, a practice in which theater owners were once asked to bid on films they had not seen.

As a practical matter, there is little or no actual bidding in the contemporary theater business, which relies instead on negotiations between distributors and theater owners. But distributors continue to hold screenings for theater company executives in the weeks before a film’s release, whether as a courtesy or as a way to avoid conflict with a patchwork of state laws.

Theater executives may have an incentive to play down a movie’s prospects after such a screening, to get better terms. In any case, many fans will most likely flock to “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull,” if only to make their own judgments about Mr. Spielberg’s decision to revisit the franchise fully 19 years after its last installment. Still, bad notices could keep the more ambivalent moviegoers from attending and thwart a truly huge box office haul.

According to Mr. Levy, who spoke by telephone on Thursday, Mr. Spielberg has kept a watchful eye on virtually every aspect of the film’s marketing campaign. “He gets involved with everything,” Mr. Levy said. “Every TV spot, every line in every ad, every advertising concept.” (Among the marketing tie-ins were Indiana Jones fedoras, available at Blockbuster stores.)

The current campaign has been engineered to create excitement around the opening date, May 22 — some billboards feature the date, in flame-colored letters, and little else — without telling too much about the film. Last year the movie’s producers went so far as to file a lawsuit against a bit player who had publicly discussed the film’s plot, which involves the exploits of an aging archaeological adventurer, still played by Harrison Ford, now 65.

The campaign has been effective so far. Fandango, which sells film tickets online, said this week that it was “seeing brisk advance ticket sales” to “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull,” identified as the summer’s most anticipated film in a poll Fandango conducted of moviegoers.

But a better gauge of success is likely to be the extent of online sales in the few days after the film screens at Cannes — and after many reviewers have weighed in.

Tim Ryan, a senior editor at Rottentomatoes.com, which compiles film reviews, said he expected those of “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” to surface “maybe an hour or two” after the Sunday afternoon press screening in France. His company will have someone on hand to post them immediately, Mr. Ryan said.

As rated by Rottentomatoes, the earlier “Indiana Jones” films enjoyed strong reviews. The worst-reviewed of the three — the second, “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom,” released in 1984 — was still the third-most-popular movie of the year.

Mr. Spielberg, Mr. Levy said, may not be the first to know if the aging Indy manages to wriggle past any negative early notices to score another hit. “When a movie opens, he usually disappears,” Mr. Levy said. “He usually doesn’t want to know all the details about how it’s doing.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/10/movies/10indy.html?_r=1&oref=slogin&ref=movies&pagewanted=print

[PAsoapfan]

Can't wait I'll be there at the midnight showing.

[DevotedToAMC]

I am excited to see this film! I love Indiana Jones movies!

[dragonflies]

I can't wait to see it! The Last Crusade is my favorite of all of them. I hope this one is just as good

[DevotedToAMC]

My favorite is the one in the middle-Indiana Jones And The Temple of Doom

[sheilaforever]

Can't wait to see it!

Love Indie! Love Harrison Ford! LOve Cate Blanchet! This is such a childhood memories movie series... Hopefully Spielberg and Lucas can hold the level of excellence of "The last crusade" I gonna miss Sean Connery though.

[Sundance]

I recently went to watch the movie, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. I do recommend going to see if you haven't done so yet. Its full of action, as to be expected

[EricMontreal22]

I liked it. It's at least as good as the overated Last Crusade (yes I'm one of hew rare fans who prefered Doom to Crusade), even if of course it doesn't hold up to Raiders. Nothing groundbreaking and I think the Indiana movies may be overestimate din people's memories--most of the bad reviews I thinka re unfair and are comparing it to their memories more than the actual films, but...

E

[Adam]

Great action packed film and worth seeing, but not really offering anything the previous installments did not.... the plot was a little predictable and cliche.

Worth watching though. Great action sequences as I said. Strangely enough most were reserved for Shia. Harrison is moving a bit slower these days.

[EricMontreal22]

Being 68 will do that

[soapluva]

I noticed that too!!! The movie was good though

[Sylph]

God, this film is awful. The script makes no sense at all.

Is he trying to get the skull back? Or is he trying to stop it from returning into the lost city? Does he trust Mac or does he not?

Dumb.

And Cate Blanchette showed no acting skills in this one. Such a disappointment.

[bandbfan]

I think she was limited by the character and the accent.

[KMan101]

I was somewhat disappointed. I saw it about a month ago. I felt a lot of it was really good and fun, but a lot of it was either too cliche, too boring, or made absolutely no sense. The ending was ludicrous. I was the most disappointed in that. Not that last 5 minutes but the overall ending to the plot itself.

Karen Allen was wasted, IMO.