Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

[MacGuffin]

George Lucas says his new 'Indiana Jones' is 'just a movie'
Scott Bowles, USA TODAY

To hear him talk, you'd think George Lucas would have preferred to call his movie Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull: Don't Get Your Hopes Up.

Lucas, who co-wrote and produced the May 22 film, can sound downright sullen when it comes to his expectations of fan reaction to the year's most highly anticipated movie.

"When you do a movie like this, a sequel that's very, very anticipated, people anticipate ultimately that it's going to be the Second Coming," Lucas says. "And it's not. It's just a movie. Just like the other movies. You probably have fond memories of the other movies. But if you went back and looked at them, they might not hold up the same way your memory holds up."

The remarks appear to be part of a larger strategy to build interest yet temper expectations for the fourth installment of the Indiana Jones franchise. Only one trailer is playing, and when director Steven Spielberg shows up for talk shows, he doesn't bring footage.

Lucas says he learned his lesson about unrealistic expectations when he revived the Star Wars franchise in 1999. "When people approach the new (Indiana Jones), much like they did with Phantom Menace, they have a tendency to be a little harder on it," he says. "You're not going to get a lot of accolades doing a movie like this. All you can do is lose."

Except when it comes to money. Analysts expect it to rake in well more than double its reported budget of $125 million. But Lucas says that doesn't hold much sway for him, Spielberg and Harrison Ford.

"We came back to do (Indy) because we wanted to have fun," he says. "It's not going to make much money for us in the end. We all have some money. ... It would make a lot of money if you weren't rich. But we're not doing it for the money."

It's fan and critic reaction for which the team is bracing, but Lucas says he has quit trying to appeal to everyone. "It was really a blast" to make. "And it turned out fantastic. ... I like to watch it."

Lucas concedes that it will be impossible to water down expectations, even among fellow filmmakers.

The Dark Knight director Christopher Nolan met Lucas at the ShoWest convention this month and says he's impatient to see the competition. "Come on, he's George Lucas," Nolan says. "I felt like I should have kissed the ring."

[modage]

tv spot: http://www.indianajones.com/site/?deeplink=videos/1/v33

[MacGuffin]

Frank Darabont Won't Get Credit On 'Indy 4,' Won't Work With Lucas Again
Source: MTV

After a long script-writing process for "Indiana Jones 4″ that he told MTV News last spring was "a waste of a year," celebrated director Frank Darabont wondered in November whether there would be any arbitration over credit, given how many of his own ideas seemed to find a way into David Koepp's "Crystal Skulls."

So we wondered: Now that the movie has been finished, will Darabont at last get to see his name on the big screen for an Indiana Jones adventure?

"Nope. Not on this one," Darabont said when we caught up with him last week. "I know there are some common elements to what I gave Steven [Spielberg] and what was eventually shot, but I guess not enough to warrant credit. It's clearly a disappointment, especially after Steven loved my script."

In the Indy universe it's the penitent man who passes, and for his part, Darabont bows down before Spielberg, saying he "wouldn't hesitate to work with Steven again."

The same can't be said of George Lucas, however, who has probably seen the last of the "Shawshank" scripter. Would Darabont ever consider, for instance, working on the new "Star Wars" television series slated to hit airwaves in 2010?

"Honestly our storytelling sensibilities have diverged to the point where that would be a pointless exercise," he said of Mr. Lucas.

[MacGuffin]

Steven Spielberg and George Lucas: The Titans Talk!
The minds behind ''Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull'' share secrets and trade memories in a rare joint interview
By Steve Daly; EW

How exactly do you mediate a conversation with two of the most fertile minds in moviemaking? You hang on for dear life, that's how! When EW sat down with George Lucas and Steven Spielberg for a chat about Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (which opens May 22), the pace was fast and furious. But Spielberg and Lucas were so voluble, so passionately steeped in film history, and so funny that we had to bring you more of their historic summit meeting, in which the pair discuss how filmmaking has changed in the past quarter-century, the impact of websites like this one on the experience of moviegoing, and the fate of Indiana Jones and the Monkey King.

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: Gentlemen! This is like having Superman and Batman in the same room. [Laughter]
STEVEN SPIELBERG: But wait a minute — which is which? I wanna be Superman! With the big S.
GEORGE LUCAS: We should get some clinking glasses and stuff, just to screw up your tape.

So what took so long to get to installment No. 4? It's been 19 years since Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, the last of the original trilogy of films.
LUCAS: When we got to [the idea of making a fourth] one, I had already said, ''No. I can't think of another MacGuffin.''

Meaning, the mystical thingy everyone is chasing.
LUCAS: I said, ''I can't do it. It's too hard.'' We barely got through the last couple of 'em with smoke and mirrors. Sankara stones, for God's sakes?

But there's a lot of historical data about the Sankara stones!
LUCAS: There is, but nobody in the United States knows about it, so there's no resonance. The MacGuffin is the key. Before the Sankara stones [which became the focus of the second film in the trilogy, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom], we'd had ideas for all kinds of other MacGuffin things. Some of them were original ones, that were in the [proposed] stories that I did. Like a haunted castle and stuff. But then Steven went off and did Poltergeist and said, ''I don't want to do another haunted-castle movie.''

In developing the third movie, there was a Christopher Columbus script early on, Indiana Jones and the Monkey King, set partly in Africa. And that one had a preamble involving a haunted castle.
LUCAS: We wrote complete scripts on other MacGuffins [for the third film]. 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 came along that we kind of pulled [the third movie] out of the fire. Because it then shifted from being about the MacGuffin. But ultimately, these are supernatural mysteries. They aren't action adventures. Everybody thinks they're action-adventure films, but that's just the genre we hang them on.
SPIELBERG: There's not one that hasn't been supernatural.
LUCAS: The supernatural part has to be real. [He taps the table] Which is why they're very hard, and you run out [of options] very fast. You have to have a supernatural object that people actually believe in. People believe that there was an Ark of the Covenant, and it has these powers. Same thing with the Sankara stones, same thing with the Holy Grail. We may have exaggerated some of its powers, but basically there are people who believe there is a Holy Grail, brought back by the Knights Templar.
SPIELBERG: Of course, I was worried that people would hear ''Holy Grail,'' and they would immediately think about a white rabbit attacking Monty Python. My first reaction was to say, ''Everybody run away! Run away!''

Well to bring us into Indy 4, what kind of developmental push and pull went on once you decided to set the new film in the 1950s?
LUCAS: The idea was to take the genre of Saturday-matinee serials, which were popular in the '30s and '40s, and say, ''What kind of B movie was popular in the '50s, like those B movie serials were popular in the '40s?'' And use that as the overall uber-genre. We wouldn't do it as a Saturday-matinee serial. We'd do it as a B movie from the '50s.
SPIELBERG: The Cold War came to mind immediately, because if you're in the '50s, you have to acknowledge the Cold War.

Would it have been weird to use cartoonish Nazis as villains again, as you did in Raiders of the Lost Ark and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade? Maybe take a Boys from Brazil tack, and follow fugitive Nazis to South America?
SPIELBERG: A lot changed for me after [1993's] Schindler's List, especially when I began working with Holocaust survivors, and being able to collect their testimonies. But I never look back with shame at Raiders or Last Crusade. We gave the Nazis the same spin that, I think, in a way, Charlie Chaplin was able to give them in The Great Dictator. There was always a bit of, We're not going to take them that seriously. It's just something I wouldn't choose to do right now. I would choose not to make them Saturday-matinee villains.
LUCAS: If you're going to make a movie about the 1930s, it's almost impossible to do it without the Nazis. And it's the same thing when we got [to the '50s] here. We have to deal with the Russians because that's where we were. It's not like we set out to make a film about Russians. It was, What was going on in the world? What were the issues? Who was doing what?
SPIELBERG: Totally.
LUCAS: You do a whole lot of research around the subject matter to try to get it as plausible as possible. We don't deal with time machines. We don't deal with phony notebooks that don't exist. We don't deal with pyramids in 10,000 B.C., because there weren't any.

So, Nazis out, Russians in. And that led you to a Russian villainess.
SPIELBERG: Well, we had a villainess last time, too [in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade].

But blonde Elsa wasn't bad from the get-go.
SPIELBERG: Right. Irina Spalko is a villain when she [first] gets out of the car.
LUCAS: She's an uber-villain.
SPIELBERG: The privilege for me was working with the great and talented Cate Blanchett. Because she is really a master of disguise.
LUCAS: She's just amazing.
SPIELBERG: She is so unrecognizable in this movie. But she's been unrecognizable in many of the choices she's made in her career, to play characters, like Bob Dylan, that are so removed from who she is as a mom and a wife in real life. She's a very threatening villain. Of all the villains I've been able to work with in the Indiana Jones movies, I can say she's my favorite. And I think Cate made her that way. We gave her a template for this, but she invented the character.

You've made Indiana much older in Crystal Skull — the character is nearly 60. And Harrison Ford turned 65 while you were making the film.
LUCAS: There was never any question about the fact that we were going to have Harrison play his age.
SPIELBERG: There's a line that was thematic for me, and it's not a line that's actually in the movie. And it illustrates why I was comfortable letting Harrison age 18, 19 years. In the first movie, he says, ''It's not the years, sweetheart, it's the mileage.'' Well, my whole theme in this movie is, It's not the mileage sweetheart, it's the years. When a guy gets to be that age and he still packs the same punch, and he still runs just as fast and climbs just as high, he's gonna be breathing a little heavier at the end of the set piece. And I felt, Let's have some fun with that. Let's not hide that.

Plus he's got a sidekick to show him up — Shia LaBeouf, who plays a young ''greaser.'' Did he even know what a greaser was?
SPIELBERG: He didn't.
LUCAS: I had to train him. Shia got sent to the American Graffiti school of greaserland. And I became the consultant on his comb.
SPIELBERG: [Looking bemused] That's right.
LUCAS: And Steve would call on me every once in a while. If I wasn't there, he'd call me up and say, ''Look, there's a leather jacket we have in this shot, and we need to know — should it be unsnapped, or snapped?''
SPIELBERG: I remember that stuff too. I remember Ed ''Kooky'' Byrnes [from the TV series 77 Sunset Strip] with his comb....

Okay, let's talk another kind of nostalgia: Movie technology nostalgia. There was virtually no computer-graphic imagery available when you started making the original Indy films in the '80s. Digital imagery wasn't really there yet.
LUCAS: It wasn't there at all.

So was there a temptation with Crystal Skull to use CG to make life easier?
SPIELBERG: Here's the difference. The [background] matte paintings that you saw, let's say, in Raiders of the Lost Ark, when the carload of Nazis went off the cliff? Or the Pan Am clipper sitting in that obviously painted dockside waterfront? Our digital paintings now look like we were there on location. We have just as many matte-painting shots in this movie as we had in the other movies. The difference is, you won't even be able to tell that there's a brushstroke. For a while, I wanted to make them look bad, so they looked exactly like they did in the other movies.

Which is to say, easily detectable — as they were in actual old movies, so it's sort of an homage to old-fashioned artistry.
SPIELBERG: But I didn't do that.

You're opening Crystal Skull in late May all over the world in one fell swoop — not territory by territory over months, like studios used to do in the 1980s.
LUCAS: Well...the growing majority of revenue from a movie comes from overseas. It used to be sort of 50-50, then it was 60-40, and now it's way beyond that. Every year it keeps growing. So the United States is becoming a much smaller market.

You guys first became filmmakers at a time when European directors were arguably the most inventive and the most artistically acclaimed in the world. Do you miss that atmosphere?
LUCAS: When Star Wars was being made, all the independent art films [still] came from Europe. There were practically no American independent films being made. Now about 30, 40 percent of American films are independent. And the films coming out of Europe, a lot of them look like American films. You can't really tell the difference. There's a globalization of entertainment, and it's good, because you still have personal art films and big audience pleasers.
SPIELBERG: You also have films being made and released on the Internet, little films, five- to six-minute shorts. They come from all over the world, and it's really interesting to see and to sense how this world has shrunk down to size of a single frame of film.... More people can pick up video cameras, and more individuals can express who they are as artists through this collective medium. That's what's so exciting. What makes me really curious to see as many short films, especially, as I possibly can, is that everybody is coming out of a different box, and is free to express themselves because budget is no longer a limiting factor. You can make a movie for no money and basically get it out there on YouTube for everybody to see.
LUCAS: Movies are now becoming like writing, like books. It's opened up to the point where anybody who has the urge or the talent to do it, there's not that many impediments to making a film. And, there are not that many impediments to having it be shown. That's where the Internet comes in. Now you can actually get it in front of people, and have them decide whether they like it or not. Before, that depended on the decisions of a very, very small group of people — executives who in a lot of cases didn't even go to the movies, and didn't even like 'em. And they were deciding what the people were and weren't going to like. It's much more democratic now. The people decide what they want.

Of course, there are downsides to the burgeoning Internet age — and one of those downsides is, when a popular movie is coming up, people sort of peck it to death before it even opens. There's been a huge amount written on the Internet about the development of Crystal Skull, including lots of spoilers on chat boards — though most of it is clearly labeled. Is it getting harder to protect the development process?
SPIELBERG: It really is important to be able to point out that the Internet is still filled with more speculation than facts. The Internet isn't really about facts. It's about people's wishful thinking, based on a scintilla of evidence that allows their imaginations to springboard. And that's fine.
LUCAS: Y'know, Steven will say, ''Oh, everything's out on the Internet [in terms of Crystal Skull details] — what this is and what that is.'' 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.
SPIELBERG: But there's lots and lots of people who don't want to find out what happens. They want that to happen on the 22nd of May. They want to find out in a dark theater. They don't wanna find out by reading a blog.... A movie is experiential. A movie happens in a way that has always been cathartic, the personal, human catharsis of an audience in holy communion with an experience up on the screen. That's why I'm in the middle of this magic, and I always will be.

Do you think the sanctuary of the dark theater is being eroded?
LUCAS: No! Look, it's like sports —
SPIELBERG: Yes. I think it is being eroded, by too much information and too much misinformation, especially.
LUCAS: But look, it's like sports. This isn't new. When March Madness gets started with the NCAA [basketball tournament], there are thousands of blogs out there. Rampant speculation. If you follow it enough, you go crazy. [With Crystal Skull], you don't know what's actually gonna happen till you walk into that theater. I don't care if you know the whole story, I don't care if you've seen clips. I don't care how much you've seen or heard or read. The experience itself is very different, once you walk in that theater.
SPIELBERG: Well, here's my debate on that. I've always been stingy about the scenes I show in a teaser or a trailer. Because my experience has been — and my kids' experience has been, 'cause they talk out loud in theaters, like everybody else does today — that if a scene they remember from the trailer hasn't come on the screen yet, and they're three quarters of the way through the movie, they start talking. ''Oh — I know what's gonna happen! Because there was that one little scene they haven't shown yet in the movie I'm experiencing, and it's coming up!'' And it ruins everything.

What about creating deliberate disinformation, the way, say The Sopranos' producers did?
SPIELBERG: I did that, but I don't do that any more 'cause it takes too much effort.
LUCAS: We have managed to keep the fact that Will Ferrell is the main villain in Crystal Skull out of the blogosphere.
SPIELBERG: Exactly. But it did get out that it's Steve Carell, last week.
LUCAS: Except people don't know that they're a team...
SPIELBERG: [Laughs] And by the way, when you run this? There'll be people that believe it!

[B.C. Long]

new bootleg trailer leaked.

http://www.nightly.net/featured/new-indy-4-trailer-leaked/

[Pozer]

[Sleepless]

That is a much better trailer than the first one. Starting to get really excited about this again, especially after seeing Indy all over Snickers, M&Ms and cornflakes!!!

Hooray for god-awful Russian accents!

[MacGuffin]

Indiana Jones and the Savior of a Lost Art
By TERRENCE RAFFERTY; New York Times

"THIS is a recreational activity for me" is surely among the last things you'd expect to hear from the director of a huge, costly, dauntingly complex summer action movie as it nears completion, with its release date just a few weeks away.

But that is what Steven Spielberg said not long ago, speaking by phone from a dub stage where he was supervising the sound mixing of "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" (opening May 22), the first new installment in 19 years of the crowd-pleasing adventure-movie franchise that began in 1981 with "Raiders of the Lost Ark." "In 1989," Mr. Spielberg said, referring to the year "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade" came out, "I thought the curtain was lowering on the series, which is why I had all the characters literally ride off into the sunset at the end. But ever since then the most common question I get asked, all over the world, is, 'When are you going to make another Indiana Jones?' "

It's a fair guess that theater operators and executives at Paramount Pictures have asked that question at least as frequently as the ticket-buying public has, and perhaps with a shade more urgency: the three Indy pictures — "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom" (1984) was the one in the middle — have raked in well over a billion dollars worldwide from their theatrical releases alone. The anticipation, on the part of both the fans and the suits, falls somewhere between keen and breathless. And for most filmmakers that level of expectation might appear in their clammier dreams as a giant boulder bearing down on them and picking up speed.

"I'm having a great time," Mr. Spielberg said. And, unlikely though this may seem, you can't help believing him; he certainly sounds excited, and the secret of the Indiana Jones movies' success has always been their free-spirited inventiveness, a what-the-hell quality that can't (or shouldn't) be faked, even on a gigantic budget.

Weirdly, authenticity — not faking it — is very much on his mind when he makes one of these unabashedly preposterous movies, whose hero (still played by Harrison Ford) is a two-fisted, bullwhip-wielding academic archaeologist zipping around the globe in search of rare mystical artifacts and in the process running afoul of Nazis, creepy human-sacrifice cults and other exemplars of unambiguous, unadulterated evil.

Even by the extremely flexible standards of high-adventure pulp, the Indy pictures are a pretty stern test of the audience's willingness to suspend disbelief. (At times you feel as if it were hanging, as the hero periodically does, over a mass of writhing, fang-baring snakes, or a river full of famished crocodiles.) The authenticity Mr. Spielberg is concerned with here is something other than the historical realism of, say, "Schindler's List" or "Munich"; what he wanted to talk about was the physical integrity of the action, of which there is, in an Indiana Jones movie, plenty.

The tone and style of the films derive from the movie serials of the 1930s and '40s, which Mr. Spielberg, growing up in the '50s, used to see on Saturday mornings at a revival theater in Scottsdale, Ariz.

"They made a great impression on me, both because of how exciting they were and because of how cheesy they were," he said. "I'd kind of be involved in the stories and be ridiculing them at the same time. One week they'd give us a cliffhanger with the good guy going off the cliff, the car crashing on the rocks below and blowing up, and then the next week he's fine. They forgot to show us the cut of the guy jumping out of the car? That we weren't going to do in the Indiana Jones series."

In fact, Mr. Spielberg said, he tries to cut as little as possible in these movies' action sequences, because "every time the camera changes dynamic angles, you feel there's something wrong, that there's some cheating going on." So his goal is "to do the shots the way Chaplin or Keaton would, everything happening before the eyes of the audience, without a cut."

Warming to the subject, he went on: "The idea is, there's no illusion; what you see is what you get. My movies have never been frenetically cut, the way a lot of action is done today. That's not a put-down; some of that quick cutting, like in 'The Bourne Ultimatum,' is fantastic, just takes my breath away. But to get the comedy I want in the Indy films, you have to be old-fashioned. I've studied a lot of the old movies that made me laugh, and you've got to stage things in full shots and let the audience be the editor. It's like every shot is a circus act."

And in 1981, in "Raiders of the Lost Ark," that approach was so old-fashioned it looked new. (It's difficult to remember now just how stodgy and joyless the action genre had become; even the James Bond movies, reliably sprightly in the '60s, turned into slow-footed, campy behemoths in the '70s with entries like "Moonraker.")

In the 27 years since, practically every action filmmaker has tried to drink from the grail of Indiana Jones, to tap into the movie's quasi-mystical kinetic (and commercial) power: the pace had to be blindingly fast; the stunts insanely elaborate, the villainy extra-villainous; the hero's attitude blithe, insouciant, almost sociopathically cool. Mr. Spielberg and George Lucas — who produces the movies and who dreamed up the basic idea of the series — have a lot to answer for.

The sad truth is that the enormous influence of the Indiana Jones films has been a distinctly mixed blessing. Action movies are, over all, a good deal snappier than they were 30 years ago, but they also tend to be a good deal less intelligible. They skimp on the exposition and go straight for sensation, as if cutting to the chase were not a metaphor but literally the cardinal rule of filmmaking. And that's true not only of the most egregious Indiana Jones knockoffs — the "Mummy," "National Treasure" and "Lara Croft" movies spring, unwelcomely, to mind — but of nearly every studio picture that features more action than, say, "My Dinner With André." It's no accident that movies of this sort, ubiquitous in summertime, are so often blurbed as "thrill rides": they can be that exhausting, and that pointless.

Pointlessness is, however, in the eye of the beholder. When asked what kind of films he enjoyed most as a boy, Mr. Spielberg replied, simply, "Anything with a lot of movement," and quite a few of us would say the same. Swift, thrilling motion is the hook that pulls young imaginations into movies, and although your taste might get a tad more refined over the years, vivid, intricate, ingeniously choreographed action can still give you that Saturday-matinee charge of pleasure.

The perilously long and complicated opening sequence of "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom" for example — in which a song-and-dance number ("Anything Goes," sung in Mandarin) turns into a wild slapstick action scene involving a diamond, a poisoned drink and an elusive vial of antidote, and ends with Indy and his companions jumping out of a plane in a rubber raft — delivers that sort of giddy, mildly deranging stimulation. The staging and the cutting have the "can you top this?" audacity of a silent comedy, and the timing is slyly impeccable: it's about the length of a Keaton two-reeler.

It hardly matters that the "Anything Goes" set piece was originally planned for "Raiders of the Lost Ark." The big action scenes in the Indiana Jones movies are almost risibly inorganic to the narratives that contain them. This kind of randomness is risky — not to be tried at home, or by any filmmaker less prodigiously gifted than Mr. Spielberg. You need a rigorous imagination for visual comedy to make movies as exhilaratingly ridiculous as these.

"John Williams and I have a word we use when we have something we think the audience will love," Mr. Spielberg said, referring to the composer who has scored all the Indiana Jones movies. "Maybe it'll be a little over the top, and we ask each other, 'Are we being too shameless?' In a way I think we've both grown kind of proud of being shameless."

When the jokes are good, as they frequently are in the Indy pictures, there's every reason for pride. These goofy movies tell you as much about Steven Spielberg as his more serious work does. Movies truly are a form of recreation for him, and he's the kind of artist who reveals himself fully in the intensity of his play. In the Indiana Jones movies he revives the spirit of silent comedy in the adventures of an intellectual with a bullwhip. And that's a feat that, whether you think it's worth doing or not, at least deserves high marks for degree of difficulty. If only everybody else in Hollywood hadn't tried to imitate him, he'd have nothing to be ashamed of at all.

[MacGuffin]

Will Spielberg take a walk on the wild side?
The director has said he's out to challenge himself in his 50s. The results could be fascinating -- if he's really willing to take the risks.
By Peter Rainer, Special to The Times

Steven Spielberg, who at 22 was hired by Universal to a long-term contract, started out his career as the teacher's pet of the Movie Brat generation. With the unveiling of his first Indiana Jones escapade in 19 years today at Cannes, he's proffering yet another polished apple.

It's been something of a class reunion lately. Francis Coppola made his first film in 10 years, "Youth Without Youth," a muddled mood-memory fantasia that attempted to recapitulate the handmade approach of his "Rain People" days. Martin Scorsese brought out his Rolling Stones documentary "Shine a Light," which hearkened back to his apprenticeship as editor of rock documentaries such as "Woodstock." Brian De Palma made his Iraqi docu-thingamajig "Redacted," which, in its shape-shifty experimentalism, recalled his earliest, French New Wave-influenced movies such as "The Wedding Party" and "Hi, Mom."

And now Spielberg is set to deliver the biggest blast from the past yet. "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" is not exactly the movie you might expect to follow "Munich." But then again, he once shuttled between "Schindler's List" and "Jurassic Park." Of his contemporaries, Spielberg has probably undergone the greatest sea change throughout his career. The "Indiana Jones" franchise, like the "Jurassic Park" movies, are a palate cleanser for him -- a cackle in between epic kvells. For this teacher's pet, the class syllabus changed a long time ago.

The directors of Spielberg's generation who came up in the late '60s and early '70s, many of them film-school-trained, were the first in America to push their encyclopedic passion for movies right into the forefront of their work. Their rebellion against Old Hollywood was essentially a pose, since directors like John Ford, Howard Hawks and Frank Capra were mainstays of their mindscapes. Old movies functioned for these filmmakers as primary experiences -- touchstones of inspiration -- in the same way that poetry or literature might have functioned for an earlier generation of artists.

Not all of the movie references were drawn from favorite Hollywood films. De Palma had his Godard phase before he entered his Hitchcock phase; Coppola drew heavily on Visconti's "The Leopard" (for "The Godfather") and Antonioni's "Blow-Up" (for "The Conversation"). Scorsese's "Mean Streets" is blood brother to Fellini's "I Vitelloni" and owes a debt to the scruffy, free-form spirit of the John Cassavetes indies. Even George Lucas, in his chilly debut feature, "THX 1138," piled on the art-house references to Jean Cocteau ("Blood of a Poet") and Carl Theodore Dreyer ("The Passion of Joan of Arc").

Spielberg, however, came from a somewhat different place. He never officially attended a major film school. His heroes were the big-picture guys like David Lean and Stanley Kubrick or versatile old studio hands like Michael Curtiz and Victor Fleming -- directors who could be counted on to deliver reliable commercial entertainment (and sometimes more than that). While many of his '70s confederates, who also were to include such directors as Terrence Malick, Jonathan Demme and Philip Kaufman, were attempting to work outside the industry, or subvert it from within through sheer force of artistry, Spielberg was directing episodes of "Night Gallery" and "Marcus Welby, M.D." and then moving on to sharks and flying saucers.

In the more "serious" film circles, his prodigious filmmaking skills were held against him as proof that he lacked substance. Even Pauline Kael, his most ardent critical champion early on, wrote of his uncommonly touching first feature "The Sugarland Express": "Maybe Spielberg loves action and comedy and speed so much that he really doesn't care if a movie has anything else in it. . . . I can't tell if he has any mind, or even a strong personality, but then a lot of good movie-makers have got by without being profound."

Resenting Mr. Blockbuster

AND OF course, as Spielberg began to rake in the riches, this was held against him too. It has always been a truism of popular culture, no more so than in the '70s, that artistry and commercial success are mutually exclusive. And where exceptions to this rule were made, as in the case of "The Godfather" films, it was because they were recognized as gangster films in name only. They were really about the corruption of the American dream. Spielberg's early movies are rife with broken families and intimations of child abandonment, but they are glittery baubles when placed beside the dungeon-like Coppola and Scorsese pictures (especially "The Godfather" films, "Mean Streets," "Taxi Driver," "Raging Bull") with their floridly Catholic sense of sin and redemption. Spielberg, by comparison, at least up through "The Color Purple," specialized in uplift, in the exaltation of the American dream. He himself became its personification.

Spielberg's "personality" does indeed come through loud and clear in those early films -- "Sugarland Express," "Jaws," "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" and "E.T." -- because of his delight, which we share, in how preposterously wizardly he is. Spielberg's genius was not simply to think like his audience -- any good hack can do that -- but to be his audience. His aesthetic instincts and his commercial instincts were twinned, and not in a calculating way, either -- at least not until "Raiders of the Lost Ark," which is when his large-scale entertainments, followed by the two "Indiana Jones" sequels and the "Jurassic Park" movies, turned into corporate theme parks themselves.

The career trajectory of Hollywood directors before the '70s typically followed the winding path from unpretentious to "prestigious" (i.e., Oscar-worthy). Take, for example, George Stevens, who went from "Alice Adams," "Swing Time," "Gunga Din" and "The More the Merrier" to "A Place in the Sun," "Giant," "The Diary of Anne Frank" and "The Greatest Story Ever Told." Most of the '70s directors did their best to avoid this syndrome or at least held out for as long as they could. Coppola's "Apocalypse Now," a deranged movie about a deranged war, could never have been mistaken for a respectable war epic. Scorsese's biblical movie was "The Last Temptation of Christ."

But Spielberg, being the most attuned of his generation to the mojo of Hollywood, was naturally the director who most wholeheartedly fell into the prestige trap. Whatever their merits, and in some cases they are considerable, films such as "The Color Purple," "Empire of the Sun," "Schindler's List," "Amistad," "Saving Private Ryan" and "Munich" are all deeply conventional in terms of how the world is comprehended. Some of these films may be better made, or, in the case of "Schindler's List," more richly felt than their Old Hollywood counterparts. But all are afflicted with a kind of transcendent Stanley Kramerism. We are made to understand that moral lessons are being imparted and that, in the end, tomorrow will somehow be a better day.

And yet, Spielberg's career trajectory is by no means simple, for in the wake of "Saving Private Ryan," he made two consecutive films, as well as a third several years later, that in many ways upend his beloved early work. "A.I," which was originally developed by Stanley Kubrick, is the dark side of "E.T." "The War of the Worlds" is the anti-"Close Encounters of the Third Kind." The Philip K. Dick-derived "Minority Report," which has no antecedent in Spielberg's career, is a scabrous freakout. None of these films are overwhelmingly successful -- they're more fascinating as psychodrama than as drama. But they demonstrate, much more so than his "prestige" entries do, how spooked Spielberg's mind-set had become in the decades since he closed "Close Encounters" with a stirring snatch of "When You Wish Upon a Star."

In "Close Encounters," aliens from outer space are benevolent emissaries who descend from the heavens in a dazzling cathedral glow and belt out boom tones of peace and love. In "War of the Worlds," the aliens are arachnoid horrors who erupt from underground. Their call to arms is a bellicose bellow. The skies may have roiled in "Close Encounters" and Richard Dreyfuss' Roy might have made too much of his mashed potatoes, but we were never in any doubt that benevolence was upon us.

In "War of the Worlds," the aliens initially are mistaken for terrorists. The film is, I suppose, Spielberg's post-9/11 movie, but even without 9/11, he might eventually have made his way to this scorched terrain. "A.I.," which was made four years earlier, is about a robot boy who yearns to be human to win back the love of the flesh-and-blood mother who abandoned him, and for most of the way it's frighteningly creepy. "Minority Report," about a future in which cops, guided by all-seeing "pre-cogs," arrest killers before their crimes are committed, is a ghastly fusion of sci-fi and noir.

Some audiences, still wishing upon a star, experienced these films as intimate betrayals. And yet they cut the closest to his psyche. "Right now I'm experimenting," Spielberg said at the time of "Minority Report." "I'm trying things that challenge me, I'm striking out in all directions trying to discover myself in my 50s."

Exploring the dark side

FOR A director of conscience who can make his camera do anything, the realization that he has it in him to inspire absolute dread must be supremely unsettling. (I'm not thinking of "Jaws," which was comic-book dread.) What surely must prey upon Spielberg as he gets older are not the bliss-outs he is uniquely capable of creating but the horrors. The Normandy Beach landing in "Saving Private Ryan" goes way beyond the usual technical exercise; it's a fury against the flesh. In "Minority Report," Tom Cruise's John Anderton, the chief of the Department of Pre-Crime in the District of Columbia, stands before a floating computer interface and, arms waving like an impresario, whisks around its midair crime scene visuals. It's a nightmare representation of the director as puppet master, and it comes with a kicker: Anderton, whose mind is a mausoleum of horrific images, is himself a murderer-to-be.

The filmmakers of Spielberg's generation wanted to take over Hollywood and change the face of an art form. And for a brief period, until the blockbuster syndrome kicked in in the mid-'70s, they did just that. Along with Lucas, Spielberg is often blamed for shutting down the renaissance, as if without "Jaws" and "Star Wars" it never would have occurred to anybody in Hollywood to come up with high concepts and saturation marketing. "I hate Spielberg," a young filmmaker told me at a movie festival recently when he heard I was going to be writing about him. "He killed the indie film." And then he added, "But I loved 'Jaws.' "

Spielberg has long been in a position to pretty much direct or produce whatever he wants. This makes him the only kind of auteur Hollywood truly understands. (Forget the Lubitsch touch -- it's the Midas touch that makes the studio chiefs slobber.) He's taken more creative chances than any other director of close to his clout. Early films such as "E.T." and "Close Encounters" were experienced by audiences all over the world as invocations to a more ecstatic life. Plus they were playful and goofy. But there was no safety net for "Schindler's List," neither was there one for "Amistad" or "A.I."

This doesn't mean Spielberg gets a free pass. Some of the cottages in his cottage industry have all the allure of McMansions. He has yet to make a movie that revels in the commonplace; for him, the ordinary is always (yawn) a springboard to magic. He has never made a movie with more than a trace of carnality. His world view is cut-rate Manichean -- darks and lights and not much gray in between. It's a pity he shelved his plans to make a movie about his childhood idol, Charles Lindbergh, the all-American aviator and Fascist sympathizer. Now there's a character who would have put Spielberg to the test. Instead, he's gearing up to make "Lincoln" with Liam Neeson, which sounds like a snooze. And "Jurassic 4" is on the radar.

Spielberg is still the teacher's pet of his class, but the difference is that now he owns the schoolhouse. Maybe for a while he should try being a truant.

[Redlum]

Has anyone else been anticipating the Cannes response all day, looking for some relief from the anxiety of not only a let down but a rapage of prequel proportions? I suppose part of it is coming to terms with the realisation that not even the original films are ever going to affect you the way that they did when you were a kid. Despite the sensation that here might be an opportunity to experience the magic of seeing it on the big screen amidst the media frenzy and cereal box promotions - a spectacle that you missed the first time round. Not that I buy into the notion that these films are simply a childish past time - I think Raiders of the Lost Ark is pure cinema that captivates the 'inner child' (sorry) more than any other Spielberg film.

Going through the process of watching the original films again - not for the first-time in a long-time but with the change in perspective that only a move event like this can give you - it is abundantly clear that Raiders is just an unflinchingly great film. Yes it's an homage to Saturday morning serials, B-movies and all that jazz, but for me Raiders is the point of reference for every adventure film that has followed, in the same way that Sinbad and those serials were to Spielberg and Lucas. To me, calling Raiders of the Lost Ark tongue-in-cheek is like calling Jaws homage to monster movies.

What makes the sequels feel inferior is that Raiders is such an explosion of Spielberg in his sandbox that what follows can only come across as feeling self-referential. Obviously Raider's has the leisure of constructing the world of Indiana Jones whereas the sequels have the obligation and weight to provide some consistency and not simply cater to the whim of the need for new love interests, more impressive set-pieces etc like Bond does. I somehow need to reconcile these realisations and try and enjoy Crystal Skull as an all out adventure romp in the same way I enjoy The Temple of Doom. And if that doesn't work there is always this:

[Ghostboy]

The first hour of this movie is pretty decent. From that point on it just gets embarassingly bad to ever greater degrees. Yikes.

[MacGuffin]

Lucas: 'Indy 5' a Possibility
Source: Fox News

George Lucas tells me it's more than a strong possibility there will be a fifth "Indiana Jones." He says that he and director Steven Spielberg have left the door open for a sequel to "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull."

Lucas, looking dandy with slicked-back gray and white hair in a snappy tuxedo, was a guest Thursday night at Paramount/DreamWorks's party for "Kung Fu Panda" at the 61st Cannes Film Festival.

The swell event was set up on the pier across from the Carlton Hotel, where the studio spared no expense recreating sets and treating guests to haute Chinese cuisine. There was even one of the 40 pandas from the publicity stunt the day before, dancing in the crowd to Carl Carlton's old hit "Kung Fu Fighting."

Lucas had a lot to say about the new "Indy" and its future.

"I haven't even told Steven or Harrison this," he said. "But I have an idea to make Shia [LeBeouf] the lead character next time and have Harrison [Ford] come back like Sean Connery did in the last movie. I can see it working out.

"And it's not like Harrison is even old. I mean, he's 65 and he did everything in this movie. The old chemistry is there, and it's not like he's an old man. He's incredibly agile; he looks even better than he did 20 years ago, if you ask me."

Lucas says he's not concerned about early mixed buzz on "Crystal Skull."

"This movie is the exact same experience as the other three were. The difference is, the novelty of discovery is gone. I get worried when I hear fans say they're expecting something different that will change their lives. This is 'Indiana Jones' just as you remember him."

But that's exactly the gamble Spielberg and Lucas took with reviving their icon. Expectation grows into a frenzy and then no one in that frame of mind can be satisfied.

You already can see this with "Sex and the City: The Movie" and it hasn't even opened everywhere. Fans and even some critics want some transcendent experience. They almost seem upset that all they got was ... "Sex and the City."

Lucas has been here before, when he revived and extended the "Star Wars" series. The build-up to the release of the fourth installment (aka now Chapter 1), "Phantom Menace," was huge until it reached a fever pitch. Then, almost before it could be absorbed, "Phantom Menace" became the target of scorn from fanatics. Computer-generated character Jar Jar Binks was public enemy No. 1.

But "Star Wars" continues to thrive. In August, Lucas says, he's releasing an animated 90-minute "Star Wars" movie to theaters via Warner Bros. called "Clone Wars." It will be followed in September by an animated series on the Cartoon Network and TNT.

"No one wanted it," he told me. "Every studio rejected it, including Fox, and I'm very loyal to them. They have right of first refusal. Eventually I brought it to Warners. It's the first time that three components of the studio have acted together. It's very exciting.

"But the story is that everyone said, 'No one gets this. It's just ... 'Star Wars.'' I said, 'That's right, It's just 'Star Wars.' Just like this is ... 'Indiana Jones.''"

Oh, yes, and by the way: If "Crystal Skull" breaks records when it opens on May 22, Lucas could wind up having his name on a fourth title in the all-time box office top 10 (it would be Spielberg's second).

"But these movies — the 'Indiana Jones' ones — were never big hits right away. They were always slow starters that built up to big numbers," Lucas insisted.

I don't think that will be the case with this one. And the notion that a sequel already is playing around in his head should only fuel the heady numbers about to be posted.

[Pozer]

it is awful.  fuck Lucas, but more so, fuck Spielberg for not having the balls to say fuck Lucas and go with Darabont's script.

p.s. i havnt seen the movie.

[72teeth]

... Cannes response... ?

from IMDB:

Indiana Jones Triumphs At Cannes
Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull has proved a huge hit at the Cannes International Film Festival on Sunday - receiving a standing ovation from critics at its world premiere. The fourth installment of Steven Spielberg and George Lucas' famous adventure franchise was one of the most eagerly awaited screenings at the French event, attracting a huge amount of hype and publicity. But weeks of speculation threatened to tarnish the premiere after rumors suggested the film had been panned by movie bosses at an exclusive initial screening in Los Angeles last month. However, the film - which sees 65-year-old Harrison Ford return to the role of Indiana Jones after a 19 year gap - was praised by the world's media, reportedly garnering a three and a half minute standing ovation by the select few who were invited to watch it, according to American industry publication Variety. Before the screening, manic crowds gathered to catch a glimpse of the movie's returning star Ford, who told awaiting reporters he didn't care if the movie received bad reviews, as long as moviegoers enjoyed the action. He said, "I expect to have the whip turned on me. I'm not really worried about it. I work for the people who pay to get in. They are my customers and my focus is on providing the best experience I can for those people." And although legendary moviemaker Lucas admitted last month he had hatched plans to revive the action hero for a fifth film, he kept tight-lipped about the plans at the Cannes premiere. He told reporters, "Harrison, Steven and I haven't talked about it. We can't do it unless I can come up with a good idea, which I haven't." The original trilogy - the last being 1989's Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade - was one of the highest-earning franchises in film history, grossing over $1 billion at the global box office

[SiliasRuby]

Whole lotta fun but some moments filled with cliches....