From page 20.
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"Italians are too crazy?" What does that even mean? I can't tell if Lucas thinks Italian characters are too crazy or Italian actors are. Like, is he worried that the audience won't believe an Italian dude would be interested in something banal, like the Ark of the Covenant? Or is he's suggesting that Italian actors are, by nature too crazy to be captured on film? Does Lucas think Italian people are so clouded by their own madness that they wouldn't be able act? Too crazy to travel all over the world looking for the Ark of the Covenant? Too crazy to fight Indiana Jones in the fictional universe you're creating? What the hell rules are you operating under, Lucas?
Potential racism aside, the transcript is also interesting because we get to see what George Lucas is like when he's speaking extemporaneously. On page 16, for example, he's just riffing, but take a look at the dialogue Lucas conjures up for the character who I think would eventually become Marcus Brody:
From page 16.
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Sure, Lucas is just sort of going off the top of his head here, but, if you look at some of the clumsy, thoughtless lines that actually make it in to a lot of Lucas's scripts, you'll notice that there's not that much of an improvement. There are lines that are worse than the line above that made it into the final draft of the Star Wars films. We learn, I suppose, that when George Lucas makes dialogue up in the spur of the moment, it's just as shitty as when he actually sits down to really write it. Which is remarkable.
Actual line from the movie.
There are also just some flat out terrible ideas. In the story as Lucas dictated it, Jones is stuck on a plane as it's crashing, and he and the screenwriter decided...
From page 31.
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Yes. There was almost a scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark where Indiana Jones took a bunch of life preservers, curled up into a ball, and leapt out of plane. Thankfully, Lucas and company had the good sense to really look at that scene and objectively say "Hey, this is pretty retarded." This happens a few times, in fact. In addition to the sphere of life-preservers, there's a bumbling child sidekick character and a toboggan ride down a snowy mountain (???), all of which Lucas and Spielberg recognized as shitty. By leaving these cheesy, lame moments out, they saved