Raiders. (Though, by Temple of Doom, Lucas will exorcise some of his Bad Ideas Demons by creating Short Round, a character who is both aggressively Asian and a bumbling child sidekick, which for him must have been a total twofer. If Short Round was sassy and CGI, he would be the perfect storm of s****y Lucas ideas.) Oh, also of noteworthy importance is how weird Spielberg is. Check out page 32, where he's talking about a chase scene through a village: From page 32.

It's just sort of interesting to me to see what exactly Steven Spielberg thinks is important in a brainstorming session. In five days, they never decide a name for Marion Ravenwood, they don't quite settle on too many geographic locations and they still don't know exactly what Indiana's last name should be, but if there's one thing Steven Spielberg can concretely say, it's that Indiana Jones should knock a llama over. "Guys, I don't give a s**t about what else happens in this movie, but if the credits roll and there's so much as one f*****g llama standing I swear to God I am going to lose it." Still, despite all this, just about every cool scene that ended up in Raiders starts as a seed and takes root in these spontaneous conversations. The snake pit, the face-melting finale, the giant boulder- they all just suddenly came to the creative forces in unpredictable flashes of genius. That's cool. Hey, you know what's even stranger than the fact that these early spit-balling sessions made it to the intern? The fact that Lucas and Spielberg continued these kinds of spit-balling sessions later on in their careers. In fact, when they decided they were going to bring back Indiana for a fourth installment, they got together with screenwriter David Koepp, though only for, like, a half an hour this time, and it was at an Arby's, not someone's house. They bounced ideas around, recorded their conversations and wrote out those conversations, same as before. Wanna know what's even MORE remarkable? Well, instead of making these transcripts available for download, they just emailed them directly to me. Weird, right? Pretty unbelievable, I know. Anyway, here are some excerpts from the Lucas, Spielberg, David Koepp spit-balling session for Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. The first thing you'll notice is that the racism is still very much a part of their creative process. From page 22.

You should also note that there's less of a focus on tying up loose ends. In the original transcript, every plot point was analyzed from several different angles until they settled on something they liked. Here, they're just sort of tossed around. From page 10.

From page 113.

And, of course, their hearts just aren't quite in it as much anymore, and it's a little depressing to look at the evolution here. If you look at the old transcript, it's clear that they had ideas, (the shittiness of which admirably rivaled the shittiness of Crystal Skull), the difference being that they had the good sense to cut those ideas back in the eighties. If something as awful as fridge-nuking had come up in the spit-ball session for Raiders, it never would've made it to the screen, (where "never" can also mean "until Temple of Doom"). The old Lucas and Spielberg could look at a scene where Jones forms a ball of life preservers and wisely cut it, but the new Lucas and Spielberg can see a scene where a greasy teenager swings through the jungle with a bunch of CGI monkeys and all they can say is "More monkeys." Something was lost along the way, folks. Something profound. From page 90.

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