The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

‘Raiders of the Lost Pretty Baby’?

Posted on | March 27, 2013 | 18 Comments

Ace of Spades stumbled across transcripts of the brainstorming sessions that led to the Indiana Jones movies, and the backstory of this dialogue:

Marion Ravenwood: “I was too young, it was wrong and you knew it.”
Indiana Jones: “You knew what you were doing.”

Ace says: “I assumed it was actually Contrived Filler Dialogue To Establish That These Characters Have Conflict to Justify Their Arguing Later.” Except, no, it was worse. Much worse:

George Lucas: I was thinking that this old guy could have been the mentor. He could have known this little girl when she was just a kid. Had an affair with her when she was eleven.
Lawrence Kasdan: And he was forty-two.
George Lucas: He hasn’t seen her in twelve years. Now she’s twenty-two. It’s a real strange relationship.
Steven Spielberg: She had better be older than twenty-two.
George Lucas: 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.
Steven Spielberg: And promiscuous. She came onto him.
George Lucas: Fifteen is right on the edge. I know it’s an outrageous idea, but it is interesting.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot? The best explanation I can think of: It was 1978, the same year that Brooke Shields starred in Pretty Baby, and so this theme might have been considered “edgy” in Hollywood at the time. Also, maybe they were snorting up lots of coke and just got crazy.

But . . . wait a minute: Remember the scene in American Graffiti — Lucas’s breakthrough film — where the underage girl (played by Mackenzie Phillips) gets in the hot rod driven by Harrison Ford’s Paul Lemat’s character? So this jailbait theme was something Lucas has used before. A generation of film critics will spend the next two decades scouring Lucas’s work for clues: Was there some kind of Woody Allen/Roman Polanski thing?

And then Lucas will finally be hailed as a genius in France.

 

Category: Hollywood, Movies

Comments

18 Responses to “‘Raiders of the Lost Pretty Baby’?”

  1. Bob Belvedere
    March 27th, 2013 @ 7:55 pm

    Heh and Ick.

  2. Mike G.
    March 27th, 2013 @ 7:58 pm

    It’s the Lolita syndrome. Remember the movie with James Mason, Shelley Winters and Sue Lyon by Stanley Kubrick? Maybe it’s a prerequisite for Hollywood movie directors to have a fetish for underage girls ala Roman Polanski.

  3. Prophet Mohammed
    March 27th, 2013 @ 8:20 pm

    Hey, that sounds hot! They should have expanded on that theme. Of course the difference in age (45 man vs. 12 year old girl) is not that wide. They are old maids by then. Now a 54 year old guy with nine year old girl, now you are talking!

  4. Prophet Mohammed
    March 27th, 2013 @ 8:22 pm

    It is certainly a prerequisite for prophets of Allah, at least this one!

  5. Shawn Gillogly
    March 27th, 2013 @ 8:42 pm

    The novelization actually hinted pretty strongly at this. Though when they actually cast the two, they were too close for that to really pan out.

    Thankfully.

  6. richard mcenroe
    March 27th, 2013 @ 8:47 pm

    The hallmark of a decaying society: Pedo becomes the new normal.

  7. Steve Skubinna
    March 27th, 2013 @ 9:01 pm

    Good Lord. So long before he decided to wreck the Star Wars trilogy George Lucas was an idiot.

    I mean, even if you think pedophilia’s neat-oh and spiffy, shouldn’t you have some sense of preservation that keeps you from blurting it out? Mel Gibson had to get drunk and goaded by his viscous ex to spout racist filth, but Lucas, in the cold light of day, during a creative conference, earnestly tosses out kiddy diddling as edgy and provocative.

  8. Proof
    March 27th, 2013 @ 9:32 pm

    Now you know why Indy carried a whip!

  9. jetty
    March 27th, 2013 @ 9:50 pm

    Yep. Now that gay is normal and legal and good, the next battle will be to legalize pedophilia. Gotta hand it to the liberals, when it comes to destroying the traditional family, the traditional church and the free market, they stay focused.

  10. Gerard Vanderleun
    March 27th, 2013 @ 10:33 pm

    As a commenter on my site remarked on the item: “An industrious but not necessarily exceptional federal prosecutor could put most of Hollywood in prison for life. I’d tune in to a big Hollywood show trial. Pay per view would make a billion.”

  11. Gerard Vanderleun
    March 27th, 2013 @ 10:33 pm

    Even money Lucas deals in boys.

  12. jakee308
    March 27th, 2013 @ 11:10 pm

    That’s not an affair. It’s statutory rape.

  13. K-Bob
    March 28th, 2013 @ 4:53 am

    Hey, if they got Tom Delay to plead out over that thin gruel they were working on him, seems like they could mine Hollywood for decades.

  14. K-Bob
    March 28th, 2013 @ 4:57 am

    Creation can be an ugly process. A lot of the Beatles first cuts at songs were unsellable dreck until they found the right combination. Same thing in painting, writing, producing, architecture, etc.

    Folks who make the actual work part look easy have spent decades to get there, and if you go back in time, their early stuff is almost always “full of promise.”

    This is so common that even Apple screws up a design now and then.

  15. SDN
    March 28th, 2013 @ 9:18 am

    Apparently there’s a new rule for George Lucas films: at some point, every series will have its’ “Midichlorian Moment”; this is Indy’s.

  16. richard mcenroe
    March 28th, 2013 @ 12:02 pm

    It’s already started in the universities.

  17. Rob Crawford
    March 28th, 2013 @ 12:09 pm

    Now you know why Natalie Portman was in the prequels.

  18. Bob Belvedere
    March 28th, 2013 @ 1:30 pm

    I’m not surprised at all. After all: Lucas favors The Republic over The Empire and, as Jonathan Last proved, the latter was the force [pun intended] for good in the SW Universe.