(Putting on my “Screenwriter Rant” hat. Buckle in.)
I know I’m asking for a lot of heat by saying this, but Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull was a movie with a lot of good ideas in it. Another Indiana Jones movie? Yes, please! Acknowledging star Harrison Ford’s age with humor? Smart! The high degree of physical stunts, director Steven Spielberg’s gift for visual gags – these are all series trademarks that were welcome back on the big screen. There is a palpable joy in the way he shoots sequences like the opening hot rod race, and many moments in the film have maintained their entertainment value (for me, at least) through multiple viewings.
But the movie as a whole disappointed and upset a lot of people, and I won’t lie by pretending it’s anything but my least favorite entry in the franchise. The scuttlebutt (as much as it can be trusted) is that both Spielberg and star Harrison Ford were against the alien MacGuffin, but series creator/godfather George Lucas made it an ultimatum – do Indiana Jones with aliens or never do Indiana Jones again. I don’t want to dig into the costs of that compromise; CGI gophers, the flying fridge – I am confident you can find people on the Internet happy to discuss these details as strikes against the movie. I don’t feel the world needs my words on that subject.
But I believe that most movies succeed or fail at the story stage, and that this is particularly-pertinent with the Indy series. If you can find it, there is an absolute treasure of a document floating around out there relating to Raiders of the Lost Ark. It’s the transcript of a multi-day story conference between Lucas, Spielberg, and screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan (many story elements had already been developed by Philip Kaufman at this point), during which they broke out the essential scenes and sequences of what would become Raiders.
You can watch some iconic moments at their genesis, such as Spielberg proposing the giant rolling boulder. And you get to read, step-by-step, how they release their original concept for the female lead (a Dietrich-style blonde cabaret singer) and create in its place the unforgettably-feisty Marion Ravenwood. Bonus pervyness – young Lucas and Spielberg negotiate just how much below the age of consent Marion would be when Indiana Jones raided her.
But that aside, what you can see in this transcript is all the elements that make for great screenwriting – a sense for tone and influences (Lucas’s expertise), the instinct for the visual language of cinema (where Spielberg is unparalleled), and the delicate balance of emotional satisfaction and narrative flow within the story (Kasdan’s gift) – all working in concert. Magic resulted.
Marion’s creation during this process is essential – you see how they started from seeking a way to make her a logical part of the plot (someone needs to have the headpiece everyone is seeking), but that in building the WHY of her having it, they discovered something that enriches both hers and Indiana’s character. In that one, passionate introduction scene, we learn about the rift between Indy and his mentor/surrogate father Ravenwood, and about the real and mutual attraction between Indy and Marion, which he abused when she was too innocent to understand.
This is crackling good stuff. This is the moment where Indiana Jones surpasses the pulp icons that inspired him and is now a flawed, relatably-human character – the “gifted bum” that traffics in the disreputable shadows of a noble profession, struggling to do right but leaving mayhem in his wake. And then there’s a big shootout and the bar burns down. AWESOME.
When casting Indy and Marion – there’s no question, this is the scene they both had to nail
Marion was always the most-beloved of the Indy leading ladies, and I think it all starts with this scene and the way Karen Allen knocked it, along with the rest of the role, out of the park. Bringing her back for Crystal Skull was an easy call to make.
Giving Indy a son was another promising idea – it allows a reversal of the father-son dynamic that worked so well in Last Crusade, it serves as another acknowledgment of the passage of time, and it creates a way to reveal aspects of Indiana Jones we have yet to see.
Now, as a writer on a movie like this, your job is to take those impulses, as handed to you by the filmmakers, and try to make them work within a story in a way that is narratively-satisfying and emotionally-resonant, and navigates the audience to all the action set-pieces. The purpose of the Indiana Jones movies is to make people feel excitement and joy, so you set that as your target, brainstorm like hell, and try to eliminate everything that won’t work. To apply the argot of the franchise, you’re trying to reach the treasure without tripping any of the many lethal traps hidden in the path.
And here is where something went damagingly-wrong with Crystal Skull; something which I believe would have resulted in a failed movie even without the aliens or that damned fridge. This is the thing I want to break down. Let’s call it –
Indiana Jones and the Labyrinth of Three Dads.
So Marion is back and Indiana Jones has a son. What do we do with those two facts? He might have had a son by some other woman, but we always liked Marion best, and another Mom takes a lot of explaining, because we know he didn’t stay with Willie and the Nazi lady fell into that hole. Apply the Keep It Simple, Stupid rule and we decide – Indy had a son with Marion.
So far we’re feeling good.
Nobody has yet forced us to write “And then Mutt sees a monkey with his own hairdo”, so we’re still safe.
Now, maybe the son is young enough to have come along in the time since Last Crusade, which means Indy and Marion reconciled and settled down before the beginning of the movie. But a younger son invites comparisons to Short Round from Temple of Doom; we risk repeating ourselves. Plus it means that Indiana Jones went and did all this family-building off-screen, which gives us whiplash when we meet the new family man at the beginning of the movie. Opening an Indiana Jones movie with big, Indy-centric action is a tradition we don’t want to part with, and a stable Husband/Dad Indy probably isn’t involving himself in as much of that. It would be irresponsible. Thus we spy a deeper problem with such an idea – stable Indy has less emotional growth available to him for this adventure, and without emotional growth Indiana Jones is just a toy with dialogue.
But unless we’re pushing the chronology of the movie all the way into the 60’s, a young-adult son would have to have been already alive during Last Crusade. Maybe our narratively-ideal offspring was conceived in some boots-knocking that happened immediately after (or possibly during, who knows?) Raiders. This is thoroughly reasonable – Indy would have to be super-pervy not to want to get back with Marion now that she’s a real grown woman.
So far so good, but watch what happens now…
I don’t know about you, but the words “Indiana Jones – Deadbeat Dad” don’t make me feel good. And we’re trying to make people feel good, and give Indiana Jones credit that he’s a better man than he was back when he defiled younger Marion. So we have to deal with the fact that Indy sired this child and then wasn’t a part of his life all this time – it’s not like he mentioned to Henry, Sr. in Last Crusade that he’s got a grandson now.
Aha – maybe his and Marion’s speculated post-Raiders fling was brief, passionate, and then fell apart all over again before she realized she was pregnant. She then didn’t tell him out of pride. This has some integrity with the characters as created, solves the Deadbeat Dad problem, and creates an opportunity for all to meet and reconcile on-screen during whatever adventure we have plotted for them all. Once again, it all feels dangerously right.
Can’t we all at least agree that we felt good when this happened?
Springing the fact of a son on Indy is a huge surprise, and for good or ill, the filmmakers chose to hold that back so we can experience it with him at a moment of real tension. Nine times out of ten, that’s the right call – something this juicy you don’t blow in the opening act if you can help it.
So if the son is going to be part of the adventure at any point before this reveal, we’ve got to hide them in plain sight; introducing him as “Indiana Jones, Jr.” (or “Henry Jones III”), kind of gives the game away. Even if he introduces himself as the son of Marion Ravenwood, Indy is going to be doing math in his head right away and then the thread becomes suspense (“IS this kid my son?”) rather than surprise (“I have a son WTF?”)
For the sake of surprise, then, enter “Mutt Williams”. Like Indy before him, Mutt has branded himself with a new name rather than his birth name “Henry”. That’s a good parallel; screenwriters like a good parallel. Mutt is the son of “Mary Williams”, which is enough unlike “Marion Ravenwood” to throw off the scent.
But where does the “Williams” come from? Now things start going squonky…
Marion married someone else. Um, okay. She never seemed the type to settle for an inferior man. And she tells everyone who will listen that this new husband is “Mutt”’s father; which, wow, means it was a fast courtship to pull off that lie. These sorts of bipolar soap opera shenanigans seem ill-suited to that dame we met drinking Himalayans under the table with a rock-steady gaze; but it’s not an utterly impossible scenario.
Only now we’ve created a new character, and now we have to deal with him. If Dad #2 is still alive, having raised Mutt, then either Indy doesn’t end up with the girl and the kid (we feel bad), or he does, which makes him a homewrecker who steals everything from the Dad who did the real work of raising Indy’s abandoned son (we feel worse).
Well, you might suggest, maybe the Dad’s an asshole. Maybe he’s a villain. Maybe he’s THE villain. We would feel okay about Indy taking everything from him and killing him in the process; James Bond did that sh*t all the time.
Because you’re the villain’s girl, I’m going to bone you and destroy your life and career. Not because it’s part of my mission; just because I can
Judging by some script drafts I have read, they did test-drive variants on this idea. The problem is that we have always admired Marion’s spunk and resistance to nonsense, and the idea of her marrying a megalomaniacal jerkface doesn’t ring true, even if he’s really good at hiding it. And then you’ve got the fact that, if the climax involves Indy murdering the only real Dad his son has ever known, you don’t have a lot of time for the two of them to get over that, grow, and bond. You want that bond sealed before the end credits roll – we’re not doing the unresolved Empire Strikes Back finish here; we want this business equilibriated in a happy way.
So congratulations – you’ve created a character and, because his being alive would ruin everything, you now have to kill him. If you do this on-screen – even if Mr. Williams dies nobly in aid of the quest – it is uncomfortably audacious for Indy to move in on the widow and child so quickly. Under the circumstances, he an untimely death is probably your “least worst option”. And in screenwriting, if you find yourself exploring least worst options, you are probably in trouble.
It’s not in the narrative tradition of the franchise to flash back mid-story, especially to a scene where our hero was presumably absent. So the only way you have left to communicate the structure and import of this back story is through dialogue. There are a lot of tricks to dress up a scene where a character has to explain something to another character with dialogue – Raiders has one of the all-time best with the humor and foreshadowing Kasdan installed in the mission scene with the two government men. But when writing your script you went to put yourself in that predicament as absolutely few times as possible.
And the foreshadowing that so sweetened that Raiders scene won’t work for Dead Dad in Crystal Skull. Why? Because we are trying to preserve the surprise about Mutt (Remember – all of this crap work we’re doing now is to hide Mutt’s real last name.) The more import the facts of Mr. Williams’s life are given in the narrative, the more it blows the obvious reason WHY we are hearing them. So our storytellers have to do their best “move along, nothing to see here” act and bury this information.
Got all that, Mr. Screenwriter? You have to write scenes that not only have to consist of one character explaining something to another in dialogue, but they have to explain it in dialogue specifically-constructed to appear as if it has nothing at all to do with the story. That is a dog-ass drag of a scene to end up with, and when it comes to moments within the Indiana Jones franchise, ranks pretty far below Chilled Monkeys Brains.
The thing is, when you’re logicking your way into a bad scene, it’s like knowing that you’re headed for a dead end in the labyrinth – you shouldn’t just go all the way there and assume you’ll be able to MacGyver together a weed whacker to cut through. What you are supposed to do is stop, back up until you can see where you went wrong, and then set out again in a different direction.
But the makers of Crystal Skull didn’t do this. Instead, they forged ahead, and made their mistake worse while sincerely trying to do something good. Here’s how:
There is a parallel in Raiders and Last Crusade: in both cases, Jones is chasing someone else’s obsession; a hero acting in an older man’s stead. The Ark was Ravenwood’s life’s work – it is his research, and his finding of the headpiece, that is the springboard for everything Indy does. Likewise, in Last Crusade, his father is the acknowledged Grail expert, whose diary serves as a substitute holy book in the excellently-aligned quest for both a treasure and a father-son reconciliation. Ravenwood was a surrogate father whose trust Indy betrayed, Henry Sr. was the real father whose emotional distance first drove Indy out into the world. The quest to do right by both led to growth for Indiana Jones, a fuller and better manhood.
But where do you go from there? One of the perils with sequels is that you can trap yourself into plot structures that pertained to emotional lessons your characters ostensibly already learned. You either undercut the previous film by seemingly backsliding the character, or else what you produce is a pale echo of the previous conflict because you haven’t found a way to go deeper. Lucas understood this well enough in the first Star Wars trilogy, and grew Luke Skywalker through three stories from a kid with nothing to lose zooming through the Death Star canyons to a young man with friends, a sister, and a cause facing the same path of spiritual death his father walked and making the noble, mature, but possibly-fatal decision to try, with no guarantee of success, and bring Vader back from the Dark Side rather than simply kill him.
I don’t know that there is a deeper paternal bond for Indy to fight for after he has already moved from surrogate father to real father. So the power of that finishing-someone-else’s-work storyline is so clearly diminished that, despite its proven effectiveness in two of the first three adventures, it should have been resisted. But instead we ended up with another familial surrogate/true expert who provides a lot of the research and artifacts that pulls Indy into the quest.
Enter Professor Oxley.
Now, as a moviegoer I treasure every single minute of celluloid that John Hurt is captured on, and he does absolutely nothing wrong in this movie except to exist in it at all. First problem – Indy is so old now that surrogate fathers aren’t going to be fit for adventuring; so Oxley, the Crystal Skull expert, is a surrogate father for Mutt instead.
This helps Oxley feel emotionally-linked to the story rather than as just some random old academic, and creates a nice character mystery when this dull lecturer everyone describes instead appears as a dancing lunatic in the jungle. Further, it supplies a rationale for Mutt to have absorbed the knowledge necessary to be a participant in and potential heir to Indy’s adventures. He fell asleep listening to Oxley’s lectures – that’s a screenwriter making the best he can of a bad situation.
But look where we have arrived after all that: Now Mutt has unknowing-biological-Dad (Indy), emotionally-true-fake-Dad-created-to-conceal-his-surname-but-killed-so-Indy-isn’t-stealing-from-him (Mr. Williams), and still-living-surrogate-Dad-who-lived-to-educate-Mutt-but-is-emotionally-removed-enough-that-it-doesn’t-feel-like-Indy-would-be-breaking-up-the-family-to-move-in (Oxley). That’s three dads and a crapton of narrative sailor knots to explain their existence, none of which provide any support or enhancement to this search for a UFO. All they do is drag on the movie. While well-intentioned in trying not to make us feel bad, it all ends up making it a lot harder to feel good.
As a sidebar – Oxley’s existence is a significant ret-con to Indy’s past with Ravenwood, as the two were apparently contemporaries studying under him. Thick as thieves they were, so familiar and intimate among this whole Jones gang that we apparently got through three whole movies without ever hearing about him. Admittedly, it’s plausible he didn’t come up in any of the urgently-present conversations in the other movies, but it is still a bit of unavoidable storytelling hiccup that I know Mr. Lucas and Mr. Spielberg must have recognized, swallowed hard at, and decided to just shrug and hope to make the best they could from.
And that’s what I see time and time again in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull: very brilliant filmmakers – including final credited screenwriter David Koepp, who in his field will win any fair fight and a lot of unfair ones too – trying to make the best of what they must have recognized as a horribly-tricky situation. They made a list of everything they wanted to give us – Marion coming back and finally settling with Indy, a surprise son, and a reprise of the finishing-someone-else’s-quest plot structure – and then trusted themselves to make it all work together. Oh yeah, and to have it all have something to do with aliens.
They built this flawed contraption, and I give them enough credit that they built it with the very sincere desire to entertain us and leave us feeling at least as good as we did after all the other Indiana Jones movies. But it didn’t, and I will be the first to admit that it is a lot easier to see in hindsight than it must have during the long process of developing, imagining, rejecting, and refining so many, many story ideas. Until you have tried making one, you have no idea how lost you can get in a story.
I cannot say it would have been impossible to reconcile all these desires into a fantastic film, and it is educational to go through the exercise of trying. But every choice has unintended consequences, and the only real end product we have to go by is the one they made. By examining all this, I genuinely sympathize with a series of decisions that I can see were all made for what seemed like good, sensible-screenwriting reasons, but which nonetheless added up to catastrophe.
I believe I’m pretty good at this screenwriting business, but under the conditions the Crystal Skull writers faced, I would bet I couldn’t have come up with anything better; ultimately their fates were stamped by forces far more powerful than themselves. As Tom Stoppard (who ghost-penned some dialogue for Last Crusade) had one of the doomed Hamlet backgrounders assert right before his death in the classic stage play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead:
” There must have been a moment, at the beginning, were we could have said — no. But somehow we missed it. Well, we’ll know better next time.”
With due love and respect for those who have given me so much as a film fan – if they cannot figure stuff like this out like I know they have the intelligence to do, I would like to cast a vote in favor of there not being a next time.