Raiders of the Lost Ark is wonderful," says Lawrence Kasdan, who rewrote the film's screenplay
from an original story by George (Star Wars) Lucas and Philip (Invasion of the Body Snatchers)
Kaufman. "It's beautifully made, but, as always, from the screenwriter's point of view,
the produced film is never everything that he wants it to be. A little bit of my script's logic
and character development fell out along the way. Like Star Wars, however, Raiders
moves so fast that I'm not sure if it matters. Raiders of the Lost Ark is simply very satisfying in that
it shows you things that you want to see in a movie."
Kasdan endeared himself to SF fans when he co-authored the script for The Empire
Strikes Back with Leigh Brackett. He first came to Lucasfilm's attention when Continental Divide,
an earlier Kasdan screenplay, was submitted to several studios in late 1977.
"Steven Spielberg (Raiders' director)," Kasdan recalls, "was the producer at Universal originally
connected with that company's interest in Continental Divide before they won the bidding for my
script. When Steven first read it, he told my agent, 'I'm going to make an adventure movie with
George Lucas (Raiders' co-executive producer) and I think that Larry would be a good person to
write it. ' That film turned out to be Raiders of the Lost Ark. Steven asked my agent if he could
show Continental Divide to George which, of course, was okay. Fortunately, George liked
it quite a bit. George and Steven then invited me to a meeting with themselves and Frank
Marshall, the picture's producer.' That conference - the first time that I had ever met
George and Frank - was when we made the deal for me to write Raiders, which made me
very happy.
"It took a while for everything to get going," Kasdan continues, "but Steven, George and I finally
got together again in early 1978. We sat for a week and discussed everything concerning the
movie. George and Steven talked a lot about doing something like the old Saturday morning
serials, which I think was always a little more important to them than it was to me. It would have
been hard to make one movie like a serial. Raiders is similar to the cliffhangers only in the sense
that Indiana Jones encounters danger after danger, which does work like crazy. I say my
responsibility as being to capture the spirit of the chapter plays. To me, however, that
represented not so much the flavor of the serials, but the mood of all of the great adventure
movies. Films, even more than the pulps and other adventure stories, have created a definition
in the universal subconscious of what adventure, daring, and action are. The younger TV
generation has never even seen this type of picture, mainly because it hasn't
been done that well since Errol Flynn, Clark Gable, and Burt Lancaster were doing it back
in the '30s, '40s, and '50s. Their movies are usually shown on the late show, which kids
don't always get to see. The fact that Raiders of the Lost Ark is going to be the first time
that many people are seeing this kind of grand adventure could be a reason for why it will
probably be very successful. "
It took Kasdan six months after his meeting with Spielberg and Lucas to pen
Indiana Jones' exploits.
"It took that long because writing Raiders was a big job," comments Kasdan. "Our
outlining was immense, but not detailed. We knew who the three main characters would
be, but there wasn't a word in anybody's mouth. There were no broad strokes and real
structure to Raiders' plot. I had to come up with all of that. I also had to do a good bit of
research. My first draft of Raiders had a lot of information about the Ark of the Covenant,
most of which has survived into the final film. It's been simplified and might sound like a lot
of hocus pocus, but the majority of the superstitions and history that the picture attributes to the
Ark are beliefs that have been held by people for years. Additionally, I did a
lot of reading about archeology, the attitudes and lifestyles of 1930's America, and that
time's international alliances."
1936's political climate gave Raiders of the Lost Ark the ostensibly perfect nemeses:
Nazis. Director Spielberg chose to depict the German soldiers as charicatures of the
Axis. This is potentially dangerous, for there is the possibility that the more audiences see
the Third Reich in entertainments (unlike pseudo-documentaries such as Patton), the
less they subconsciously - if only through familiarity - will remember them as the
monstrosity that they were.
"That theory may be true," Kasdan concedes, "but Raiders' Nazis aren't so much
identifiable as Nazis, but as villains. The whole filtn embraces the fictional world of
clear cut good guys and bad guys. you can't relate the story to any ideology. In fact, there
might be some confusion as to what group our villains are."
That ambiguity could be the core of the problem. While Raiders' Nazis certainly are
villainous, they are evil only in the same comic book type sense as Star Wars' Empire.
Does this mean that children will now be playing with little Nazi dolls?
"l wonder," muses Kasdan earnestly. "I don't think, though, that little kids will leave
Raiders of the Lost Ark liking Nazis. Some kids do like pretending that they're Darth
Vader, so it's an interesting thought as to whether or not they'll now be pretending that
they're one of Raiders' Nazis. There have always been people who identify more with
villains, so I guess that the Nazi question should be considered, but it doesn't seem to
be a serious problem."
Albeit the Nazis participation in Raiders stems from history, the picture's protagonist,
Indiana Jones, was based largely on the author's memories of "yesterday's heroes."
"When I was developing Indy's character, I didn't specifically think about Flynn, Lancaster or
Gable. I wanted to capture their essence. For example, one of my favorite
actors is Steve McQueen. I loved the poetry in the way he moved - his stylized movement. I
wanted Raiders to have that heightened reality. That's where I came together with
George's love of serials and Steven's fascination with kinetic thrust. One of my great
delights with Indiana Jones is the way in which Harrison Ford brought him to life.
Harrison has great charisma without being cocky and shows that he's a real movie star.
His performance is actually very close to what Gable used to do. Gable was an odd mixture
because he wasn't an athlete or a muscular guy, but he always had an enormous
masculinity that never left him. That could be most evident of Gable in Too Hot to Handle
which I've seen four times. Gable had this attitude of 'Here's the adventure. Let's go!',
which I think is also true of Ford in Raiders. In fact, the scene where the natives are chasing
Indy during Raiders' beginning is very similar to a sequence in Too Hot to Handle. "
At one point, George Lucas wanted to make Indiana Jones more of a James Bond-
esque character.
"I had to write, under duress, a different version of the scene where Brody (Jones' col-
lege supervisor) goes to his house," reveals Kasdan. "George wanted Indy to be a playboy, so
Jones was going to answer the door wearing a tuxedo . Then, when Brody went into the house,
he would see a beautiful, Harlow type blonde sipping champagne in Indy's living room. My
feeling was that Indiana Jones' two sides (professor and adventurer) made him complicated
enough without adding the playboy element. One of the factors that's so great about Harrison's
performance is that he makes that combination believable. He didn't overdo it. There's
real charm to Ford's performance as the professor, yet you can also believe what Indy
does later on is part of the same person. Luckily, that 'playboy' scene was never
shot. "
What helps make Ford's Indy so believable is that his adventures, for the most part, are
logically unfolded.
"One of the things that I loved about Raiders," says Kasdan, "is that its action is
extravagant in the classic style of the old adventure films. It almost never moves over
into the area - which I don't care for - of unbelievable action that the recent James
Bond films have dealt with. To me, that's beyond a reality that' s interesting. During our
original conversations, George and Steven always stressed how fundamental it was to
have all of Indy's perils and his solutions to those dangers be relatively plausible. There're
wonderful heroics in Raiders, but they're never super-human. Again, that has a lot to
do with Harrison Ford. He made Indy come across as a very likeable and competent guy.
That brand of capable hero was a very important element of the great adventure pictures."
Some of Raiders' most sensational moments occur in the film's opening ten minutes, when
Indiana Jones narrowly escapes trap after trap after trap ... Unfortunately, Indy's
escalating hazards prompt some moviegoers to incredulous laughter.
"Laughing at Raiders' thrills is a perfectly fine reaction," Kasdan states, "as long as the
audience is laughing with the film. When I first saw Raiders, I had a big smile on my face.
We were always a little worried that people might laugh at the picture, but I think that we
avoided that happening by never condescending to the material. We also knew
that we couldn't hold back on the adventure; we had to go all out. A lot of the stuff I put in
the opening ten minutes was there to keep on topping the last peril, so smiling at that is a
normal reaction. Raiders tickles you. There were a few adventures that we eliminated,
however, because we felt that they would either be too expensive to produce or too far
fetched. "
One sequence that had to be eliminated concerned the film's creators' original desire
to have the headpiece of the Staff of Ra be divided in two pieces. One half was possessed
by Marion Ravenwood (who, in the film, has the entire medallion), and the second part was
kept in the Shanghai museum of General Hok, a Chinese warlord. After leaving
America, Indy went directly to Shanghai.
"In 1936,"Kasdan elaborates, "Shanghai was a battleground between the Japanese and
the Chinese. General Hok was such an outlaw, though, that he was aligned with the
Japanese. I had Indy being taken to Hok's museum by two CIA agents. Indy then broke
into the museum where he saw a complicated alarm system, part of which was a ten-foot
diameter gong. Suddenly, two Samurai burst in on Indy. Indy shot the first warrior and
then had an interesting confrontation with the second Samurai involving Jones's whip
and the Japanese's sword. Indy wound up choking him with his whip. Indy took the
fallen Samurai's sword and used it to break open the glass container holding the medallion-half.
That, naturally, set off the gong alarm. Hok came running into the room,
holding a submachine gun, which he then started firing at Indy. Indy managed to push
the gong off its hook and then rolled it across the floor, running behind it, using it as a
shield. The gong was so heavy that it cracked the marble Floor as it was rolling. There was
also a tremendous amount of interesting noise as the blasting of Hok's gun merged
with the almost musical sound of the bullets bouncing off the gong. That scene would
have been great, but we cut it before shooting because it would have broken up the film's
pace and it also probably would have been too costly to shoot.
"After that sequence, we had Indy in the DC-3 flying to Nepal to find Marion. Now,
there's one spy on the plane looking at Jones. Originally, however, we had Indy falling
asleep. Suddenly, all of the other passengers - a little old lady, a European, some
Chinese got up and tip-toed and parachuted off the plane! All of the passengers
were in on it. Indy was left by himself on the plane, heading towards a crash in the
Himalayas. He finally woke up and then couldn't get into the cockpit. Indy pulled out
an inflatable raft and wrapped it around his body. He didn't inflate it inside the plane,
because it would have been too big for him to jump out the doors. Indy jumped out of the
plane, pulled the inflator, and landed in the snowy Himalayan Mountains. He then rode
the life raft down the slopes to Marion's bar. We took that scene out because we thought it
would be too unbelievable."
Considering Lucasfilm's judicious editing of Kasdan's script before filming commenced,
it's surprising that a couple of incredibly confusing scenes did make it into the
movie. One such sequence is when Indiana Jones and a crew of Arabs are surreptitiously
digging at the real site of the Well of Souls in direst view of the Nazis! To accept the picture's not
having the Germans discover Indy and his men immediately, one has to either
believe that the Nazis, thus far shown as a shrewd menace, have suddenly become absurdly
stupid, or chalk it up to poetic license.
"I don't condone that kind of story element," Kasdan admits. "When that scene
was written, there was no way that Indy's group was supposed to be so close to the
Nazis. Indy was digging on a totally separate site several sand dunes away from the Nazis.
They were discovered much later only when the Nazis spotted the smoke rising from the
Arab's torches. When Steven asked me about what I thought of the film after I saw it, that
was one of the few things that bothered me enough to mention it to him. Obviously, the
logistics of their location dictated that shot set-up, but I told Steven that if he took out the
daylight establishing shot showing how close the two groups are, the sequence wouldn't
have been as bothersome. Then I asked Steven, 'Why are the Arabs singing?' That
makes it even worse."
Another perplexing moment for audiences comes when the film shows Indy swimming
towards the German's submarine and then abruptly cuts to the sub inside its pen with
Indy in an adjoining hallway.
"Indy got to the pen by swimming to the sub and then climbing on top of it until he
reached its periscope," Kasdan explains. "I know that part was filmed, because I saw it at one of
the first previews. It's since been cut. What I'm not sure was ever shot was how
had Indy lash himself to the periscope with his whip. I liked that a lot, because it made good
use of the whip. Then there was some complicated underwater business about his getting off of
the submarine before it reached the pen. Once he did that, Indy realized that he left his whip up
on the periscope, where there was now a German standing under it. Then, he had a close call
with the of fixer, but finally got his whip back . Not filming Indy's getting off the sub is the type of
thing that I have a lot of sympathy for, because very often the geography of where you're
shooting dictates what you can and cannot do as a director. At the same time, however, you do
have a responsibility to solve the problems that you put your hero into. Steven just found that
there was no way to tie the submarine sequence into the picture."
Another annoyance for filmgoers are some of Raiders' incongruous comedic moments,
including Sallah's bursting into song after bidding farewell to Indy, and Marion Ravenwood's
accidentally hitting Indy on the head with a full-sized mirror. These off-beat touches suggest
that perhaps Spielberg couldn't get his last film, 1941, a slapstick World War 11 comedy, totally
out of his mind. "Those broader comedy elements were created independently from me," says
Kasdan. "They bothered me quite a bit, but it balances out, because some really good things in
Raiders, such as lndy's confrontation with the Arab swordsman, the classroom scene, and the
Nazi's coat hanger, were also innovated by Steven."
What bothers Kasdan the most about Raiders of the Lost A rk' s final form is its lack
of character development. A prime example is Indiana Jones's first meeting with Marion
Ravenwood at "The Raven" bar. Even Raiders's most ardent fans admit that that
scene's lines are horribly stilted.
"It's really weak," Kasdan concurs. "Some of the best writing I've ever done was
in that scene, but all that's left is its beginning and end. Those lines actually make sense, but
only when the rest of the dialogue is played out. "
In addition to Kasdan's more subtle character exchanges, some of the missing footage
from that scene explained how Marion came to own the "The Raven." After her father
died, she went to work at the inn. "And I wasn't the bartender," she was supposed to
have said. When the man who owned the bar went crazy, he was dragged away by the
authorities. His last words bequeathed "The Raven" to Marion.
"Another scene that hurt," adds Kasdan, "was Marion's bit with Belloq in the tent.
They had me write that scene four times and then they wrote an entirely new scene which
they shot. The way it is now, some people get the scene's drift, and some don't. What
you 're supposed to understand is that Marion is not faking being drunk and that she actually
does have a certain admiration for Belloq. I had had that scene set up in the story
beforehand by having Indy be suspicious of Marion's feelings towards Belloq. All that's
left of that subplot now is his line after the tent scene when Indy says to her, 'Where did
you get that dress?'
" I guess that all of this bothers me because I did have the character background in the
script," Kasdan confides. "With Indy and Marion's first scene, Steven even shot the
whole thing. We always knew that it was a little long, but it's been chopped down to
almost nothing. My feeling was that we should have edited a little of the chase sequences so that
we'd have time to properly establish the characters. George Lucas, though, doesn't put as much
emphasis on personal development as he does on action.
His success has confirmed that attitude for him. That's kind of strange, because that
wasn't true of American Graffiti (Lucas' second directorial outing), which is a wonderfully warm,
subtle and personal movie."
It's important for Starlog readers to know that when Kasdan talks about some of
Spielberg's and Lucas's changes, his tone is even - and entirely - unhostile. One must
remember that he truly loves Raiders of the Lost Ark.
"What's great about Raiders is that it moves so fast and its conclusion is so incredible, that by
the time I got to the ending, I didn't care about the flaws," Kasdan admits. Those tiny little
problems never touch Raiders's wonderful spirit. What emerges upon a first viewing of Raiders
of the Lost Ark is enormous, captivating excitement.
That energy is directly attributable to Steven. He has a unique talent in that he knows
what's thrilling to an audience in a way that very few other directors do. He also moves
the camera like no one else can. I don't want to sound cliched, but there's a sense of
wonder that we have as children that we never grow out of. Steven's very much in touch
with that feeling. In that sense, there was no one in the world better suited to direct Raiders
than Steven.
"As a screenwriter, I was thrilled that Steven changed as little from my script as he
did. What happens when you write a screenplay is that you make the entire movie. The
director then comes in and totally remakes it. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that
process. That's the nature of the screenwriter's job. The only major difference
between my script and the film is that my screenplay was much more of a story. I think
that most of the plot's details are still there, but it will just take people a second and third
viewing of Raiders before all of the elements fall into place. What's delightful for me is
that Steven's realized the huge percentage of the movie that's stayed the same in a
marvelous way."
Kasdan acknowledges that he's able to have his practical view of Raiders's revisions
because he's already had his first experience with seeing a script, The Empire Strikes Back,
produced and inherently being disappointed by changes that were instituted.
("You only lose it once, " he quips) Paradoxically, Kasdan wrote the screenplay for
Raiders of the Lost Ark before working on Empire.
By James H. Burns
Starlog Magazine
September 1981