Tales From Development Hell (17 page)

Less than a fortnight after the initial posting, the
Sword of Arthur
script was revealed to be the work of two aspiring screenwriters, Steven Frye and Michael Prentice. “The two of us wrote
Sword of Arthur
back in 1996 as a lark idea,” Prentice admitted to Micah Johnson, host of website
Indyfan.com
. “Neither of us are professional writers, we’re just fans who enjoy the Indy series. The whole
Sons of Darkness
fiasco had happened and we felt a better job could be done, so he and I wrote up the story, [while] I went ahead and did a first draft of the script. We hoped maybe something could happen with it, but mainly, we wrote it in the spirit of fun. We just wanted to write a halfway decent story.” Prentice went on to say that, in mid-1997, he had been duped into sending the script to an unscrupulous character with purported connections to Spielberg, but who was subsequently found to be selling it as a script by Jeffrey Boam. (For the record, Boam died on 24 January 2000 without ever commenting on the
Sword of Arthur
affair.)

Although imitators had been plentiful in the years since
The Last Crusade,
notably in the bestselling Tomb Raider video games, the success of
The Mummy
in May 1999 suggested that the audience’s appetite for Indy-style period adventures with a supernatural twist had not been fully sated. Two months later, on 14 July 1999, Rick McCallum revealed some official Indy IV info at a joint Lucasfilm/LucasArts press conference in London. “We’ve got a fantastic script, and everyone really wants to do it,” he said. “We’ve now got to wait for everyone to be free,” he added. “George is tied up, as you know; Steven is busy for a couple of years; and Harrison is committed for the next
eighteen months. But the script is great and age is not a problem. I think we’ll get it together in about three or four years.” Although no title had been agreed on, McCallum concluded with an elliptical reference to the storyline: “Watch the stars... and watch the desert.” Could this have been a none-too-cryptic reference to the widely circulated
Indiana Jones and the Saucer Men from Mars
script, credited to Jeb Stuart?

Just three days after McCallum’s comments, an Ain’t It Cool scooper named ‘Makman’, who claimed to be an insider at a “San Francisco company” — Lucasfilm and several of its subsidiaries are based in San Francisco — announced that the fourth Indiana Jones film only existed as a twelve-page treatment, with the working title
Indiana Jones and the Red Scare.
“It takes place in the early fifties,” Makman revealed, “Indy is retired from gallivanting across the globe. He is the department chair of the archeology department at Princeton. Henry Jones Sr is gravely ill and lives with Indy in their modest home just off of campus. Papa Jones has maybe six months to live. He has a live-in nurse. Indy is weathered and very much looking his age. He longs for excitement but knows his days are over. He wants to marry, pass on the Jones name. He spends most of his time with his father and a middle-aged history professor named Gladys, whose affection he wins from another colleague at a faculty dinner — a hilarious opening sequence in the true Indy form.”

The gist of the story, Makman went on, sees Indy employed by President Eisenhower’s administration to obtain information about the Russians’ retrieval of some dubious artefacts found in Hitler’s bunker after the raid on Berlin at the end of the Second World War. “Hitler, as we know, was into the occult and it seems Russia is now in possession of all the documents and oddities found with the Nazi Führer. Sallah returns,” he/she added, “and Indy’s new lady friend is a blacklisted author well versed in the occult and deemed a Communist.” Although the chronology and ‘Red menace’ aspects of the storyline seemed to chime with Lucas’ developing story, it is unlikely that
Indiana Jones and the Red Scare
was ever anything other than yet another fake.

Towards the end of 1999, genuine news came thick and fast. First, Spielberg admitted that he, Lucas and Ford were considering three separate scripts. Secondly, Ford rebutted suggestions that, having recently turned sixty, he was too old to play Indy, being virtually a relic himself — “I’m still quite fit enough to fake it,” he told
Entertainment Tonight.
“It’s all smoke and mirrors anyway.” Lucas told the same show that the script search had been narrowed to two possibilities. “All I’m waiting for is a phone call from Steven and Harrison,” he said. “I’m ready to go.” A week later, Ford told E! Online that he was “ready
when they’re ready”, suggesting that it was Spielberg who was causing the delay. The director admitted as much in one of the interviews accompanying the 26 October 1999 video release of the Indiana Jones Trilogy — featuring the retitled
Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark
— although his reasons for hesitating were laudable: “We don’t want the fourth Indiana Jones movie to leave a bad taste in anyone’s mouth.”

The script appeared to be the sticking point. “If there was a script they all loved, they would kill themselves to clear their schedules,” Ford’s agent, Patricia McQueeney, told
USA Today
columnist Jeannie Williams. “They love [Indiana Jones] so much, but they can’t seem to get their heads together on a script they are all enthusiastic about.” Interviewed in the London
Sunday Express
around the same time, however, Rick McCallum suggested that work had been completed on the script as early as 1999, and that the delay was due to “everybody having commitments years in advance.” Indeed, appearing on the British TV show
The Big Breakfast
to promote
Random Hearts,
Ford said, “Steven and George will not be available until 2005, and I don’t know whether I’ll be fit or interested at that point. I hope it could happen before that.” Appearing on
Larry King Live,
Spielberg subsequently promised that the film would happen eventually, so long as “Harrison isn’t too old to jump, and I’m not too old to yell.”

Spielberg, Lucas and Ford continued to keep hopes for a fourth film alive, not least because the question came up so often. “I want it to happen,” Ford announced during the taping of his appearance on
Inside the Actor’s Studio
in early 2000. “There is no script yet that everybody is really happy with. George is a bit preoccupied with that other movie,” he added, referring to the ongoing
Star Wars
saga, “but Steven and I are very ambitious to do it. But we all realize it has to be great.” A month later, at a Director’s Guild of America honouring Spielberg with a Lifetime Achievement Award, Spielberg admitted that the question he was asked most often is “Dad, when are you going to make a new Indiana Jones film?” and delighted Indy fans everywhere with a promise: “Indiana Jones is coming back soon.” How soon was difficult to say: with
A.I.
due to begin shooting in July 2000, followed by
Minority Report
in April 2001, Spielberg’s definition of “soon” appeared to grow less and less distinct.

Around the same time, an intriguing new development occurred in the saga of Indiana Jones IV. On 15 February 2000, eight days after Spielberg underwent kidney surgery, the Coming Attractions website posted a rumour, “completely unconfirmed and graded as an 8 on the rumour-mongering scale,” that M. Night Shyamalan, acclaimed writer-director of
The Sixth Sense,
had
been approached by Spielberg to discuss the possibility of writing an Indiana Jones script. (Shyamalan had been inspired to become a filmmaker himself after seeing
Raiders of the Lost Ark
at the age of twelve.) Coming Attractions’ effort to distance itself from the rumour appeared to have been unwarranted when, on 22 June,
Variety
published a story entitled “Arnold & Indy: They’ll Be Back” which appeared to confirm that Spielberg, Lucas and Ford were “in the process of drafting” Shyamalan to pen the new script, although, even if he accepted the assignment, Shyamalan would not be available to start work until he wrapped production of his next film,
Unbreakable.

A week later, the MovieHeadlines website called Lucasfilm’s Jeanne Cole to clarify the story, which turned out to be only partially correct: Shyamalan was apparently only one of several writers being considered; no deal was in place, but the project was being actively worked on, being one that Spielberg, Lucas and Ford were all enthusiastic about. In November, MovieHeadlines quoted Shyamalan as saying that he would “have to think about” writing Indy IV. “There are a lot of things on my plate.” It was not until July of the following year that Ain’t It Cool finally laid rest to the rumours by quoting Shyamalan as follows: “I was never contacted formally to do the project. I did publicly express interest, but nothing really ever came to fruition. I have talked with all of them besides George,” he added, “and it sounds exciting. They have their ideas and I, of course, as a fan, have ideas of how they should do it.”

Other, less high-profile fans continued to have their ideas, however. In mid-2000, a forty-two-page treatment entitled
Indiana Jones and the Tomb of Ice
began circulating on the Internet, its format somewhere between a script, a treatment and a work of prose fiction (stage directions, scripted dialogue and scene transitions are juxtaposed with sections of reported speech). Set in 1949, the story follows Indy, his father and pretty palaeolinguist Abigail Shaw to northern Siberia, where Russians have discovered what appears to be King Arthur’s mortal remains, along with his magic sword, Excalibur. The sword proves to be merely the tip of the iceberg, as Indy and Abby discover when they reach northern Siberia and discover the titular tomb, which is none other than Valhalla itself, and guarded by an army of Viking ghosts. Unlike
Indiana Jones and the Sword of Arthur,
another script which used Excalibur and the legend of King Arthur as its basis, there was little doubt that
Indiana Jones and the Tomb of Ice
was a work of fan fiction — albeit one for which, somewhat mysteriously, no one has since claimed authorship...

In October 2000, in an interview posted on the Internet Movie Database, Ford said he was “looking forward” to doing a fourth Indy. “It’s a great character
that I’ve enjoyed playing in the past and I would like to revisit him,” he said. “I think the movies are great entertainment and Steven Spielberg and George Lucas and I have spent a lot of time discussing how we would like to proceed with the next Indiana story. We’re still hammering out the details,” he added, “but I’m pretty confident we’re going to do another Indy, although it might be at least a year or more before our respective schedules allow us to do it. I’d personally love to work with Sean Connery again. I think audiences would enjoy seeing us back together.” Asked if Indy would age gracefully, he responded, “I think we have to show that he’s suffered some wear and tear over the years. That’s going to make his character that much more interesting. For me, adding some flaws and layers is what is going to make Indy even more interesting. We can address issues like whether his character’s virtues are based on his youth or on other aspects of human nature like his wisdom, his toughness, his resourcefulness, his integrity. A lot of work went into creating Indy and giving him a certain history and identity, and I think it will be extremely fascinating to expand on that. It’s something that I think the public would enjoy watching.”

In a February 2001 interview with
The New York Times,
screenwriter Stephen Gaghan
(Traffic)
revealed that he had received a call in January asking if he was interested in writing the next Indiana Jones movie. By July, however, Kathleen Kennedy was telling the
Calgary Sun
that there had been a lot of discussion “but to be honest there is no script because there isn’t even a writer in place. It sounds like a slam dunk to do another Indiana Jones,” she went on, “but you have to get everyone available and committed and then you have to get a screenplay that excites everyone. In reality that could probably take years.” Even more alarming was the fact that the gross participation of the ‘Big Three’ could run to $150 million, leaving Paramount Pictures with little more than small change for financing the film. (20th Century Fox had found itself in a similar position with the second
Star Wars
trilogy, for which it was paid a small percentage for distribution of films which Lucas had financed himself.)

Nevertheless, at a party for the 2002 Golden Globe awards, a different triumvirate — Spielberg, Ford and Kate Capshaw
(Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
actress and now Mrs Spielberg) — confirmed to Fox News reporter Roger Friedman that Indiana Jones would return in a new adventure. “We have a title, but we’re not ready to announce it,” Spielberg said, adding that Capshaw’s character, Willie Scott, would also return — and not via a flashback. The following day, Spielberg’s publicist, Marvin Levy, was doing
damage control, insisting that Indy IV would not, as Spielberg had implied, be his next picture. Nevertheless, Levy told E! Online, “Right now, Steven’s been described as being in ‘development heaven’. They do have a story they like and they have a title... [but] they don’t have a script.” This was an odd admission, given Ford’s comment to Fox News the night before: “It was always about getting the right script, and now we have it.”

Apparently, they did not. On 23 April,
Variety
mentioned that Tom Stoppard, the acclaimed British playwright and screenwriter whose script for
Shakespeare in Love
won him an Academy Award, and who had worked uncredited on
The Last Crusade,
had been approached to write the next Indy installment. Barely a week later, producer Kathleen Kennedy dismissed the suggestion, stating that another (unidentified) writer would begin writing in June and submit a first draft by early autumn.

It was three weeks before IGN FilmForce broke the news that the mystery writer was none other than Frank Darabont, who wrote numerous episodes of
The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles
television series before turning writer-director with such films as
The Shawshank Redemption
and
The Green Mile.
(More recently, he had written an uncredited draft of Spielberg’s
Minority Report,
and directed Jim Carrey in the misfire
The Majestic.)
Speaking to MTV Movie House reporter Master P at Skywalker Ranch on 24 May, Lucas would neither confirm nor deny the Darabont rumours. “We’re in the process of hiring a writer,” he said, “and hopefully we’ll be able to start shooting... not next year, but probably the year after [2004].” By the end of May 2002, not only had
Variety
confirmed the rumours regarding Frank Darabont, but a release date had been set: 1 July 2005 — the beginning of the five-day Fourth of July weekend, and a few days short of Harrison Ford’s sixty-third birthday.