Skip to main content

That Image in Your Head



Suppose I say the phrase "Raiders of the Lost Ark."

What is the first image (not the first word or phrase) that pops into your mind?

I'm guessing for many of you the first image is of a man in a fedora running frantically away from a giant boulder through a narrow cavern, in imminent danger of some nasty flattening.

Thanks to Mad Dog Movies, we have available a recreation of the moment at which that scene came into the head of director Steven Spielberg, under prodding from  producer George Lucas.

Lucas, just coming off the success of the Star Wars opening, met Spielberg and screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan for some old-fashioned spit-balling. Some of the ideas discussed in that first meeting were immediately discarded, others were left open at the time but never made it into the movie, still others like the boulder became images permanently affixed in our heads.

Here's the transcript.

At the top of p. 4, Lucas says, "I thought it would be interesting to have him be an expert in the occult, as an offshoot of the anthropological side of this thing. He has a tendency to get into situations where there are taboos, voodoos, things, especially when you start dealing with pyramids you get into all that."

At the top of page 5, Spielberg asks, "What's he afraid of? He got to be afraid of something."

You have to whisper the word "snakes" to yourself when reading that question, doncha?

And you have to get to p. 11 before Spielberg comes up with the idea for that boulder. The 3 men are planning at this point that Indiana will have a partner with him in that opening character-establishing adventure in the jungle. Spielberg says:

"I have a great idea. he hears the sand... When he goes into the cave, it's not straight. the whole thing is on an incline on the way in. He hears this, grabs the thing, and comes to a corridor. There is a sixty-five foot boulder that's form-fitted to roll down the corridor coming right at him. And it's a race. He gets to outrun the boulder. It then comes to rest and blocks the entrance of the cave. Nobody will ever come in again. This boulder is the size of a house."

Lucas adds, "It mashes the partner."

The scene works better without the mashed partner.

This look into the creative process is a lot of fun.






  
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.   We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a majesti
9 comments
Read more

Five Lessons from the Allegory of the Cave

  Please correct me if there are others. But it seems to be there are five lessons the reader is meant to draw from the story about the cave.   First, Plato  is working to devalue what we would call empiricism. He is saying that keeping track of the shadows on the cave wall, trying to make sense of what you see there, will NOT get you to wisdom. Second, Plato is contending that reality comes in levels. The shadows on the wall are illusions. The solid objects being passed around behind my back are more real than their shadows are. BUT … the world outside the the cave is more real than that — and the sun by which that world is illuminated is the top of the hierarchy. So there isn’t a binary choice of real/unreal. There are levels. Third, he equates realness with knowability.  I  only have opinions about the shadows. Could I turn around, I could have at least the glimmerings of knowledge. Could I get outside the cave, I would really Know. Fourth, the parable assigns a task to philosophers
Post a Comment
Read more

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere.  At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak
17 comments
Read more