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elmadman_99's Replies
Hi Mattc164,
Is that your way of saying that you agree that Kellerman is a crap hitman?
1. OK, point well taken, yes it's just a saying - I just wanted to express a little humour and see if I could start a debate.
2. Again, I just wanted to express a little humour.
None of this is really of any importance - I just wanted to get a reaction for people to enjoy themselves.
By all means continue to post...
Ford sided with Spielberg and let LaBeouf know it. “I think he was a f---ing idiot,” Ford told Details in 2011. “As an actor, I think it’s my obligation to support the film without making a complete ass of myself.”
LaBeouf was unrepentant. “I remember him [Spielberg] saying to me, ‘Tom Cruise never picks his nose in public,’” Laboeuf told Interview. “And all I thought was, I don’t want to be Tom Cruise.”
Ford has steadfastly refused to pick his nose over Crystal Skull, though a short snort when the film came up in a Vanity Fair interview perhaps said more than he meant it to. “I really enjoyed each of the films and the different experiences I had in each of the films,” he said diplomatically, “and the people that I worked with.”
In 2012, Dr Jaime Awe, an expert in Mayan culture and archaeology who taught at universities in Canada and the United States, filed a lawsuit against LucasFilm, Disney and Paramount Pictures because in his view Hollywood was exploiting Belizean culture for “illegal profits”. The crystal skulls of Crystal Skull were, he thought, designed after a skull “found” in Belize in 1924 by English adventurer FA Mitchell-Hedges.
“LucasFilm never sought, nor was given permission to utilise the Mitchell-Hedges Skull or its likeness in the film,” the lawsuit said. “Driven by its success in theaters, both LucasFilm and Paramount continue to profit from the continued distribution of the Film on home media and online video sources. To date, Belize has not participated in any of the profits derived from the sale of the Film or the rights thereto.” The suit was eventually dismissed.
Even if he was unhappy, Spielberg expected his cast to stay on message. Shia LaBeouf, who played Indy’s greaser son Mutt, did exactly the opposite in an LA Times interview at Cannes in 2010. “We [Harrison Ford and LaBeouf] had major discussions. He wasn’t happy with it either. Look, the movie could have been updated. There was a reason it wasn’t universally accepted.”
He was particularly critical of a sequence in which Mutt swung on vines through the jungle canopy with dozens of monkeys. “I think he’s [Spielberg’s] a genius, and he’s given me my whole life. He’s done so much great work that there’s no need for him to feel vulnerable about one film. But when you drop the ball you drop the ball.”
LaBeouf’s disinclination to defend the film irked Spielberg. “He told me there’s a time to be a human being and have an opinion, and there’s a time to sell cars,” LaBeouf later said. “It brought me freedom, but it also killed my spirits because this was a dude I looked up to like a sensei.” The director he found was “less a director than he is a f---ing company,” LaBeouf said.
When the film came out, critics and fans were quick to point out that even if Indy had managed to avoid being vaporised by the blast, he’d probably have struggled to avoid being turned into mush when the fridge was thrown hundreds of metres away from the explosion.
Soon, the phrase “nuking the fridge” had overtaken “jumping the shark” as a way of describing something collapsing under the weight of its own ludicrousness. “I’m proud of that,” Spielberg said. “I’m glad I was able to bring that into popular culture.”
Spielberg tried to shield Lucas from blame for the scene, but Lucas told the New York Times that it was the other way around; Spielberg wasn’t sure, but Lucas liked it so much he compiled a six-inch-thick dossier of evidence that Indy wouldn’t have been carbonised or pulverised. “The odds of surviving that refrigerator – from a lot of scientists – are about 50-50,” Lucas insisted.
After a drawn-out birth, there was a drawn-out aftermath to Crystal Skull too. Spielberg admitted to being less than thrilled with the way it panned out. There were “big arguments” between the two friends about the crystal skulls and their powers, he said later. “I didn’t want these things to be either aliens or interdimensional beings,” he said. “But I am loyal to my best friend. When he writes a story he believes in – even if I don't believe in it – I'm going to shoot the movie the way George envisaged it.”
The crystal skulls were still causing headaches after the film came out. They’re said by some to be ancient artefacts made by Mayan communities, though recent examinations have shown them to be 20th-century hoaxes. One academic from Belize took issue with the film co-opting them.
Tyler then blabbed that the Russians would blackmail Jones by threatening to kill Marion, the mother of his son Mutt, and that Blanchett – who had remained totally silent about what her involvement would entail – played an evil Russian operative. “I saw Harrison Ford strapped to a chair and being interrogated,” he added cheerily. The production team took a dim view, and a Supreme Court order which charged him with violating a confidentiality agreement was settled out of court. Nelson’s balalaika dancing was reportedly cut from the finished film.
Though some reviews were lukewarm, Crystal Skull set a new mark for Indiana Jones at the box office with $790 million taken worldwide. But the moment that leapt out of Crystal Skull was one which had been floating around in the back of Spielberg’s head since he’d executive produced Back to the Future.
The original ending of Bob Gale and Robert Zemeckis’s script saw Marty McFly and Doc Brown sending Marty back to 1985 not with a lightning strike to the Hill Valley clock tower, but by driving the DeLorean straight into the blast zone of a nuclear bomb test and riding the explosion home.
The sequence would have entailed building and then destroying a “nuketown” – a collection of buildings in different styles and materials populated by mannequins which was used to measure the damage a bomb could do to a typical American town – and was dropped when an extra $1 million had to be knocked off the budget.
It was worked into Crystal Skull and much remained exactly the same: the bomb dropping from a metal tower; a dash around a perfect, clapper-boarded model home full of dummies; a montage of plastic people melting horrifically as the bomb’s fireball engulfs the town. The pay-off, though, was that Jones would survive a multi-megaton nuclear bomb and temperatures hotter than the surface of the sun by clambering into an empty lead-lined fridge.
Despite Spielberg’s disquiet, the shoot went smoothly. But there was one thing the production couldn’t control. The build-up to the release of Crystal Skull saw one of the earlier examples of fans swapping scraps of information and homebrewed theories about a film’s plot on the internet long before it actually arrived. With a lack of detail on what Crystal Skull would actually entail, the film’s tie-in Lego sets, released well in advance of the film itself, became oracles of what fans could expect.
Every tiny plastic piece was scrutinised and discussed at length, though the “River Chase” and “Jungle Cutter” sets revealed little other than that snakes would make their usual appearance, and that they’d be aided and abetted by giant ants.
A third set, based on the climax at the Mayan temple, was more helpful. Despite the attempts to keep things secret, fans worked out early on that the mini-figurines which looked like translucent skeletons were aliens and that the telltale Lego scowl on Cate Blanchett’s figurine meant she would turn out to be a villain. Spielberg was upset by the early reveals, but Lucas was more philosophical.
“Steven will say, ‘Oh, everything's out on the internet – what this is and what that is,’” he later told Empire. “And to that I say, ‘Steven, it doesn't make any difference!’ Look, Jaws was a novel before it was a movie, and anybody could see how it ended. Didn’t matter.”
Leaks kept coming though. Actor Tyler Nelson had been cast as a Russian soldier who celebrated Jones’s capture by dancing to balalaika music, and was apparently so excited he gave an interview to the Edmond Sun, his hometown 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,” Nelson said.
Much like the Phantom Menace nine years previously, eagerness for a new Indiana Jones was such that, initially, critics and audiences were inclined to look past Crystal Skull’s flaws. It grossed $780 million – impressive even considering the $185 million budget.
However, as the flying saucer debris settled, the movie’s stock rapidly plummeted and, within a few weeks, “nuke the fridge” memes were circulating. Spielberg and Ford would not abandon their dreams of a fifth and final Indy foray (in “development” and provisionally due 2020, with LeBoeuf’s character conspicuously absent).
But among the public enthusiasm for the series declined and, as with Lucas’s Star Wars prequels, the unexpurgated awfulness had the arguable effect of retroactively diminishing its predecessors.
In the end even Spielberg has seemed to turn his back on Crystal Skull, claiming that – fridge nuking aside – he was merely servicing his pal Lucas’s vision. He may have nuked the fridge. Now he was throwing Lucas under a bus.
"I sympathise with people who didn't like the MacGuffin because I never liked the MacGuffin," he would say. "George [Lucas] and I had big arguments about the MacGuffin. When he writes a story he believes in – even if I don't believe in it – I'm going to shoot the movie the way George envisaged it."
“You get there, and you realise you’re not meeting the Spielberg you dream of,” a still disillusioned LaBeouf told Variety in 2016. “You’re meeting a different Spielberg, who is in a different stage in his career. He’s less a director than he is a f______ company.”
LeBoeuf would subsequently go off at the rails and alienate much of Hollywood and his remarks are probably best read in the light of later eccentricities (appearing at Berlin premiere wearing a paper bag inscribed “I Am Not Famous Any More” etc).
But his comments were valid to the extent that Crystal Skull is indisputably one of Spielberg’s weakest and most generic excursions. Especially disappointing was his reliance on muggy CGI – a rejection of the scrappy pulp quality of the previous Jones films.
The worst example was a jungle chase toward the end in which Mutt and Blanchett’s Ukrainian killbot Dr. Irina Spalko engage in a sword fight across speeding vehicles. One minute they are bearing down on a tree, the next it’s gone and they parry on regardless; later LaBeouf seemingly blinks from the front to the back of his Jeep in a single frame – sloppiness not usually associated with the meticulous Spielberg.
At Lucas’s insistence the creaking science fiction components of the story were retained too, with Indy chasing the eponymous mineral-based cranium to the Peruvian jungle. There he discovers it belongs to an alien with mind control powers, who has thoughtfully parked his flying saucer under a Mayan temple.
Crystal Skull also suffers a profusion of secondary characters, with Dr Jones variously aided and opposed by Mutt, John Hurt’s “Ox” Oxley, Winstone’s traitorous “Mac” McHale and Indy’s old lover Marion Ravenwood (Karen Allen back for the first time since Raiders). The resulting film makes you wish someone had come up with a collective noun for irritating sidekicks (an “Indy” of sidekicks perhaps?)
Ford even urged Jurassic Park screenwriter David Koepp – author of a final revised screenplay on which everyone could agree – to include more references to Indy’s decrepitude.
“What astonishes me,” Ford said at the time, “is that people can't imagine Indiana Jones ageing at all. Why expect any character to be frozen in time? The appeal of Indiana Jones isn't his youth but his imagination, his resourcefulness.”
“His physicality is a big part of it, especially the way he gets out of tight situations. But it's not all hitting people and falling from high places. My ambition in action is to have the audience look straight in the face of character and not at the back of a capable stuntman's head. I hope to continue that no matter how old I get.'"
A honking lack of chemistry between Indy and his protege (and, it is ultimately revealed, son) Mutt (Shia LaBeouf) was one of the movie’s other big stumbles. As already pointed out, LaBeouf, regarded as potentially the next Tom Cruise on the back of the Transformers movies, had said “yes” to Indy and Spielberg on the spot.
He had expected a film-making masterclass with one of the greats. What he got, by his telling, was a soulless stint on a blockbuster production line.
You can see the tension between LaBeouf and Ford in an early scene in which they spar in a diner and the older actor shouts at his co-star to calm down. It’s not clear whether he’s acting or telling his fellow actor to dial down the method acting (with his bike leathers and wincing pout LaBeouf was doing his best mini-me Brando impersonation).
In 2000, he met Spielberg, Lucas and husband-and-wife producers Frank Marshall and Kathleen Kennedy (today the custodian of Disney’s Star Wars sequels) at an American Film Institute event in his honour and once more pressed the case for an Indy revival.
This time, the response was more receptive. Having won his Oscar for Schindler’s List perhaps the director felt he had proved himself as a grown-up filmmaker and was prepared to play in the blockbuster toy box once again. After several dark features – Munich and AI:Artificial Intelligence – he was, moreover, in the mood for something brisker and brighter.
“Harrison…said, "Why don't we make another one of these pictures? There's a fan base out there that wants it,” Spielberg would recall. ‘He was tenacious. He called George and George got to thinking about it, and then George called me and said, "Well Steve, what do you want to do? It could be fun to make another movie."
Strangely, little of Ford’s evident fondness for the character was discernible the screen. The 66 year-old Dr Jones we meet fighting Soviets in the midst of the Cold War is crotchety with bells on. Ford delivered his lines in a grumpy rasp and seemed disconnected from that old Indy charm.
In his defence, Ford must be credited with going to lengths of acknowledge Jones’s age. His Indy is a grumpy old man with the emphasis as much on the “old” as the “grumpy”. He winces after every punch thrown and received and, in an early fight scene, looks puffed jumping into a car driven by Russian agents.
With the Star Wars prequels occupying more and more time, Lucas handed the scriptwriting to Jeb Stuart (Die Hard, The Fugitive), whose screenplay for Indiana Jones and the Saucerman from Mars sees the eponymous hero marrying a US government agent named Molly and tasked with protecting a live alien. With further revisions from Jeffrey Boam (The Lost Boys, Lethal Weapon 2) in 1995, the script was presented to Lucas and Spielberg.
The timing could not have been worse. Independence Day was about to become a huge hit and Lucas was wary of the spaceman plot line. Spielberg, meanwhile, was doubtful about the sci-fi overtones, feeling they would make Indiana Jones look silly.
Enter Frank Darabont, writer and director of the Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile, who revised the screenplay, toning down the extra terrestrial elements while retaining the b-movie aspects. Alas, his take didn’t find favour either – as the combative Darabont wasn’t slow in revealing.
“It was very disappointing and a waste of a year. It showed me how badly things can go. I spent a year of very determined effort on something I was very excited about, working very closely with Steven Spielberg and coming up with a result that I and he felt was terrific.
“He wanted to direct it as his next movie, and then suddenly the whole thing goes down in flames because George Lucas doesn’t like the script. I told him he was crazy. I said, 'You have a fantastic script. I think you’re insane, George.' You can say things like that to George, and he doesn’t even blink. He’s one of the most stubborn men I know.”
With no screenplay and other pressing responsibilities – in Lucas’s case, torching the Star Wars legacy with his prequels – Indiana Jones and the Saucerman from Mars winked into deep space.
Or at least it would have were it not for Ford, whose eagerness to crack the Indy bullwhip seemed to increase in inverse proportion to the woes attending the franchise.
They’d almost run out of MacGuffins by Last Crusade which the duo had briefly considered setting in Africa and populating with killer monkeys and a haunted castle.When that idea fizzled out they had turned, in some desperation, to the Arthurian pursuit of the Holy Grail. Spielberg, almost more attuned to the real world than the geeky Lucas, initially blanched, fearing unkind comparisons to Monty Python and the Quest for the Holy Grail.
“We wrote complete scripts on other MacGuffins [for the third film],” he said. “And finally I said, look, let’s just try the Holy Grail. [Adopting another voice] ”Ohhh, it’s too cerebral, we’ll never make it work….” So we turned it into a tangible magic cup with healing powers, instead of an intellectual thing. It wasn’t until the idea of introducing the father [Sean Connery as Dr Jones Senior] came along that we kind of pulled [the third movie] out of the fire.”
The only person seemingly not fed up with Indiana Jones was Harrison Ford. He was attached to the whip-snapping archaeologist to a far greater degree than to Han Solo from the Star Wars movies (curious considering they are essentially the same wise-cracking protagonist, with different outfits).
Every so often Ford would badger Lucas about a possible fourth installment. In 1993 Lucas, who was already thinking about a new trilogy of Star Wars prequels (a fantastic idea that would obviously do very well) relented and bashed out a treatment.
With Ford getting older – he had just turned 50 – Lucas felt it prudent to leave behind the pulp universe of Nazis and buried treasures.He provisionally set the new adventure in the Fifties, envisioning a tribute to the b-movies of his adolescence (Indiana Joneshad started as a 1973 Lucas script, The Adventures of Indiana Smith and was intended as a homage to pulp cinema). There would be diners and greasers on bikes – and, obviously, flying saucers too. And, in the middle of it all, reunited with his bullwhip and hat, Indiana Jones.
Twenty-three years on he repurposed the idea with gusto with a scene which even the deadpan Ford struggled to carry off (it ends with a freshly nuked Dr Jones communing with a CGI gopher). Yet even setting Indy-in-the-fridge to one side, Crystal Skull was tentpool goo, a career low-point for almost all involved.
Spielberg’s auto-pilot directing and overuse of computer effects (and fridge nuking) were abetted by Lucas’s simultaneously linear and preposterous storyline about aliens with elongated heads hiding in the South American jungle. There were also creaking performances by Ford, Blanchett, LaBeouf and, yes, our old mucker Ray Winstone. Nobody walked away with their figurative felt hat un-dented.
How could so many talents cook up such a calamity, in the process burning through the stockpile of goodwill accumulated by the previous Indiana Jones film? One problem was the project’s torturous gestation, dating all the way back to 1993 and the immediate aftermath of its predecessor, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.
When they had collaborated in 1981 on Raiders of the Lost Ark, the swashbuckling first entry in the
series, Spielberg and Lucas had planned a total of five Indy movies. However, after 1989’s Last Crusade, Spielberg was eager to take his filmmaking in a more “mature” direction. Lucas, meanwhile, fretted they’d run out of ancient artefacts around which to build compelling stories. There was a chronic “MacGuffin” shortage.
It would be really fantastic if we could get the core team of frequent contributors back on the board for Salem's Lot after the demise of the IMDb boards.
What does everyone else think?
Post with any thoughts you might have.
Cheers for now.
Looks like fighting for the IMDb boards did not help us out much. Glad to have an interim site such as this one to help us out. It would be good to see the core members of the frequent contributors to the boards back here once again.
Cheers for now.
Thanks to Jim @ Movie Chat we could be back in business after the silly decisions of IMDb.
Hat's of to Jim. I hope the other frequent posters will drop by here soon.
Cheers to all.