The “Raiders” Story Conference
The 1978 brainstorming sessions among George Lucas, Lawrence Kasdan, and Steven Spielberg that led to Raiders of the Lost Ark are now available for your reading pleasure. 45 hours of discussion are transcribed in a 125-page .pdf, but you can see the highlights before downloading the whole thing. Here’s Spielberg (S) and Lucas (G) discussing the backstory of Indy and Marion:
G — I was thinking that this old guy could have been his mentor. He could have known this little girl when she was just a kid. Had an affair with her when she was eleven.
L — And he was forty-two.
G — He hasn’t seen her in twelve years. Now she’s twenty-two. It’s a real strange relationship.
S — She had better be older than twenty-two.
G — He’s thirty-five, and he knew her ten years ago when he was twenty-five and she was only twelve. It would be amusing to make her slightly young at the time.
S — And promiscuous. She came onto him.
G — Fifteen is right on the edge. I know it’s an outrageous idea, but it is interesting. Once she’s sixteen or seventeen it’s not interesting anymore. But if she was fifteen and he was twenty-five and they actually had an affair the last time they met. And she was madly in love with him and he…
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