Photo by David James/Paramount Pictures
Tom Russo here from the Sunday DVD page, stopping by the blog for a visit. After catching Sunday?s Boston media screening of ?Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull? ? my personal movie-going holy grail ? I ran home all anxious to take a look back at a piece I had written years ago for the late, hopefully lamented Premiere magazine.
It was a roundup of various never-produced screenplays with a notable fanboy pedigree. The best one of all? (BE WARNED ? SPOILERS START HERE.) ?Indiana Jones and the Saucer Men From Mars,? written way back in 1995 by Jeb Stuart, who presumably got the gig partly thanks to his then-recent work on Harrison Ford?s ?Fugitive? remake. (Stuart shared the broader Indy ?story by? credit with George Lucas.)
Doing my own archaeological dig through dusty files, I located my copy of the script ? and sure enough, you could see the roots of various story ideas that wound up in ?Crystal Skull.? There was Indy, now a Cold War spy, tangling with the Commies. There was a wedding. There was our hero stumbling, explosively, right into the middle of a desert A-bomb test, a scene that ultimately survived very much intact. Ford even name-checks the term ?saucer men from Mars? in the new movie as the action moves firmly into ?X-Files? territory.
But memory is a funny thing. Going back over my Premiere text, I was a little thrown to realize that I hadn?t actually included ?Indy IV.? And then, vaguely, it came back to me ? my editor and I had instead placed a safer bet, going with an ?Indy III? variation purportedly by Chris Columbus (?Harry Potter?) that featured a set piece recognizably incorporated into ?Last Crusade.?
Our rationale for cutting ?Saucer Men,? I think, was that the idea of Indy hunting for little green guys was entertaining and all ? but clearly just too far out there to be trusted. Go figure. Makes it all the more apt that our headline on the piece was ?Would Have, Could Have?Should Have??
