Indy 4 Dossier: What We Know to Date
by Tom Burns

[Disclaimer: If you DON'T WANT TO KNOW anything about Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, catch up to the already available online information, read any STORY SPOILERS or SPECULATION, see new theories on what might happen in the movie, or see SPOILERS OF ANY KIND concerning Indiana Jones IV, this article isn't for you and we urge you to TURN BACK NOW. You've been warned. Proceed at your own risk. This article isn't designed to spoil the new Indiana Jones movie for anyone, but instead aggregate all of the information to date into one place.]

This may seem hard to believe - and any child of the 1980s will find this almost terminally depressing - but a child born the same year that the last Indiana Jones movie was released would be nineteen years old today. NINETEEN. That child, possibly conceived during the steamier Harrison Ford/Allison Doody Venice scenes in 1989’s Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, could today smoke, drink (in Canada), or legally start a career in the porn industry. That’s ridiculous. But, even though half our reading audience now probably feels like they drank from the wrong grail, there’s reason to be happy, old farts. After almost two decades, the man with the hat is back, putting down his AARP card and picking up his whip in this summer’s highly-anticipated Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

To say this movie has been in "development hell" for years would be the understatement of the century. Sure, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, and Harrison Ford often publicly expressed their keen interest in returning to the world of Henry Jones Junior, but after Spielberg’s multiple Oscars for his more serious work, Lucas’ resurrection of the Star Wars franchise, and... well... Firewall, it never really seemed like the project would ever officially get off the ground. But after going through countless script drafts and coordinating the schedules of some of the biggest players in Hollywood, principal photography on Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull officially commenced on June 18, 2007, and fandom held their collective breath, desperate to find out where that big red line would follow Indy across the map this time.

So what do Spielberg and Lucas have in store for Dr. Jones this time and what exactly IS the "Kingdom of the Crystal Skull"? Simply put, we have no idea. But The Deadbolt’s top men have been building a dossier on Indy 4 ever since the good doctor rode off into the sunset in Last Crusade, and we’ve been able to piece together lots of data (and a few wild theories) based on the official (and unofficial) info that’s leaked out about the production.

Join us as we sift through the fragments, gossip, and rumors surrounding Indiana Jones 4 and remember - Harrison may look old, but it’s not the years, it’s the mileage.

THE DEADBOLT DOSSIER ON INDIANA JONES 4:

BACKSTORY:

There have been constant rumors flying around potential Indiana Jones sequels since 1989 and, if you believe them, Lucas wanted Indy flying off after haunted Scottish castles, the Chinese Monkey King, Noah’s Ark, and the Spear of Destiny (which, we all know was found by John Constantine in Los Angeles... whoa). The thing is - it was all fanboy fantasy league stuff. It’s been more or less confirmed that writers like Frank Darabont, M. Night Shyamalan, and Jeff Nathanson were all commissioned to write drafts of the next Indiana Jones chapter, but what were those scripts about?

Raiders of the Lost Ark’s central idea - or MacGuffin - was steeped in the history of Judaism (the Ark of the Covenant), Temple of Doom (Sankara Stones) in Hinduism, and Last Crusade (the Holy Grail) in Christianity, so what was the logical next step for Indy 4? Islam? Buddhism? According to a recent interview with Vanity Fair, Lucas claims that there was always only one central idea - or MacGuffin - behind every Indy script in development over the past almost two decades, and it has very little to do with world religion. Well, maybe Scientology. Let’s just say that, this time, Indy has to be less worried about divine retribution and more worried about little green men. That’s right. Indiana Jones is going sci-fi.

In Lucas’ words: "What it is that made it perfect was the fact that the MacGuffin I wanted to use and the idea that Harrison would be 20 years older would fit ... So that put it in the mid-50s, and the MacGuffin I was looking at was perfect for the mid-50s. I looked around and I said, ‘Well, maybe we shouldn’t do a 30s serial, because now we’re in the 50s. What is the same kind of cheesy-entertainment action movie, what was the secret B movie, of the 50s?’ So instead of doing a 30s Republic serial, we’re doing a B science-fiction movie from the 50s. The ones I’m talking about are, like, The Creature from the Black Lagoon, The Blob, The Thing. So by putting it in that context, it gave me a way of approaching the whole thing." And, although Spielberg and Ford apparently resisted the idea for years, Lucas himself rejected countless script drafts, and Ford publicly declared that if the movie wasn’t completed by 2008 it would never be made at all. It wasn’t until screenwriter David Koepp was hired to combine the best aspects of several previous attempts that the Indy team felt comfortable to proceed with Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

OUR OPINION: Bringing sci-fi into Indy’s world seems like a bad fit and rejecting a Frank Darabont script (The Shawshank Redemption) for a David Koepp script (Jurassic Park 2) doesn’t seem like such a great call either. We definitely need more selling on the concept.

Indy 4 Dossier Page 2 - The MacGuffin and Time Period (CAUTION SPOILERS)