2 great articles with Young Indy references

T.E.Lawrence

New member
2 great articles with Young Indy references...

In the text below I have extracted only Young Indy sections. You can read complete articles at the supplied links below. Second Businessweek article (in my 2nd post) has the best details that I have ever read about acquisition of Lucasfilm.

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LA TIMES
He can't let go of this adventure
October 21, 2007|Geoff Boucher | Times Staff Writer

Complete article at:
http://articles.latimes.com/2007/oct/21/entertainment/ca-indiana21

The artifact in need of rescue is an early 1990s television series, "The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles," which is, by the stellar standards of the 63-year-old filmmaker's career, a beautiful loser. It was also, he says, "the single most fun I ever had with any project." For both of those reasons, he is back for more.

Over the past four years, Lucas and Paramount Home Video have pumped millions of dollars into reframing "Young Indiana" as a lavish, three-volume library of DVDs with a staggering number of extras, including 94 highly polished documentaries on famous people and moments in history. That grand content and the packaging and marketing commitment to the project are the sort you might expect for an anniversary reissue of "Gone With the Wind," not a show that was dropped by ABC after two seasons and moved on to the smaller stage of the Family Channel.

From a distance, the reverential treatment of "Young Indiana" might look like pure Lucas overkill. But to the filmmaker who changed the course of American cinema by creating his own universe, all of it is the logical conclusion of a project he considers one of his great achievements.

"Believe it or not, I've never been that involved in making commercial product, that is just not what I do," said Lucas, whose "Star Wars" films have a global box office gross of $4.3 billion. "What I do is get an idea of something I want to do, and I do it. It's about coming up with a great idea . . . in terms of the commercial [risks], I knew I was breaking all the rules."

Lucas said he won as soon as he persuaded Paramount and ABC to let him make "Young Indiana," which was filmed in unprecedented ways.

"They let me do it and do it in the way I wanted to do it," he said. "The main thing I was really after was to see how many shows I could get done before they woke up and said enough is enough. And, you know, we managed to get 44 hours of material out there. I felt grateful I got as much done as I did."

Critics and cultural observers were grateful too. "By far," the New York Times weighed in, "the most impressively mounted weekly show on television." Time said no show had "more ambition or style," and the Wall Street Journal said it raised the standards of television production to "the caliber of theatrical film." James Michener expressed awe and called the series a "daring venture," and Bill Moyers wistfully wished that the series would be "my grandson's companion far into the 21st century." Industry peers embraced it as well, handing the show 11 Emmy Awards. Looking back too, the show was a gathering point for an impressive amount of talent, both on-screen and off, with actors such as Max von Sydow, Catherine Zeta-Jones and Daniel Craig passing through its stories and directors such as Mike Newell working with writers like Frank Darabont.

But the ratings revealed that the show was more respected than loved. Lucas, always savvy to the desires of a mass audience, understood the problem; he had given the world the Indiana Jones he wanted, not the one they wanted. In 1993, talking to the The Times about the show's decline, he sounded weary. "It didn't matter how many times I said it was a coming-of-age series about a young boy's exploration of history," he said, "people still expected to see that rolling boulder."

Things 'you just can't do'

"Young INDIANA" alternately presented the hero as a boy of about 9 (portrayed by Corey Carrier) and a young man between 16 and 19 (Sean Patrick Flanery), which, Lucas said with a bit of pride, is another "thing you just can't do on television" if you're following the rules.

The pace and tone of the episodes jumped around in a jolting way too; some were funny, others scary, some action-packed and others wistful and at times a bit windy. In each episode, the hero meets a key historical figure and learns a valuable lesson. His travels put him next to Ernest Hemingway and Franz Kafka, Woodrow Wilson and Ho Chi Minh, Sidney Bechet and George Gershwin, Mata Hari and Al Capone. "He is," Lucas said, "sort of like Forrest Gump with a whip."

Lucas came to "Young Indiana" with a vision that was more heart-warming than it was heart-pounding. Like Walt Disney decades before, Lucas saw a chance to reach into the living rooms of America with something that aspired to be both wholesome and thoughtful and educational between the chase scenes.

That's one reason Lucas has always described "Young Indiana Jones" as an "old-fashioned television show," a term that must have landed with quite the thud during concept discussions at ABC. But "Young Indiana" also came with the promise of visual innovation (it was a pioneer in digital production for television) and an outlandish production plan that now seems like a mix between Phileas Fogg and "The Amazing Race."

Lucas basically sent a 29-member film crew across 35 countries to use exotic locales as backdrops, which put them at the mercy of armed bandits, snakes, storms, dysentery, customs agents and crocodiles. Meanwhile, like some old newspaper tycoon monitoring a distant war, the impresario waited in Marin, where he watched the fruits of their labor and answered with dispatches regarding the next day's story and mission.

The film crew was led by Rick McCallum (who would go on to be producer of the second trilogy of "Star Wars" films), who compares his hearty team to "the French Foreign Legion with camera equipment" and said their mission was "a great adventure none of them will ever forget, and one that ended a few marriages and started a few others."

Directors who worked on the series included Newell, Terry Jones, David Hare and Bille August.

On-screen, Vanessa Redgrave and Christopher Lee were among the veterans who joined the expeditionary project, while a number of new faces appeared and later went on to bigger things, among them Zeta-Jones, who portrayed a belly-dancing spy when Indy meets T.E. Lawrence, and Tony winner Jeffrey Wright, who blows the horn as Bechet. McCallum said he especially remembers a performance by Elizabeth Hurley, who played the daughter of a London suffragette.

"She just lit up, it was amazing to see her in that performance," McCallum said during an interview at the ranch. "There were so many shows where we caught people at interesting points in their careers, and there was a sense that we were doing something very different and important."

And, at times, dangerous. While traveling in Kenya, a raiding party descended on the crew's encampment looking for the weapons they had heard firing. "They had real guns, ours were plastic," McCallum said. "But they didn't get it, they took them anyway. They thought there was just some new kind of American gun, real lightweight and made of plastic instead of metal. No one got hurt, that's the good news."

The show itself, though, didn't have that same knack for survival. The network likely contributed to the downfall by moving it around to different nights and, at one point, putting it opposite "Seinfeld." (Lucas said it was "common sense" that the show should have been on Sunday nights, like "Disney did it" years ago.)

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He said the notion of creating a massive history lesson wrapped inside an adventure series was the plan all along for "Young Indiana Jones," it just took this long to deliver it in the way he deemed worthy. "That was actually the original idea when I started the whole thing, and it's just taken me this long to get it all done," he said with a chuckle. "It's a lot of hours of material, and it was expensive and hard and, of course, it was something that the industry wasn't interested in."

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The best part of the DVD series may be the new documentaries (there are 38 in Volume 1), which were led by CBS News veteran David Schneider. They are replete with rare photos and footage, as well as new contextual interviews with notable names such as Henry Kissinger, Gloria Steinem, Martin Scorsese, Colin Powell and Deepak Chopra. In a Skywalker Ranch screening room, Schneider gave a preview of one documentary, a biography of Paul Robeson that gave a measured but poignant account of his rise in American consciousness as a star of stage and screen and the dismantling of his life after he became a target of the anti-communist movement in America.

"Our goal was to tell the stories of history but also capture the drama of these lives, which sometimes is missing from documentaries," Schneider said. He talked in awe about lives that zigzagged between triumph and ignominy and how moments of serendipity and awful luck changed the course of nations. "There's incredible drama if you treat these as stories waiting to be told."

One core mission that Lucas gave Schneider was to make sure the documentaries would have a shelf life, that they were constructed in a way that would make them hold the attention of a student sitting in a classroom in 2020 or beyond.

That makes sense for a man who knows artifacts don't become less valuable as the years pass, nor do they suffer if they were underappreciated at first. The filmmaker laughed out loud as he imitated one of the naysayer opinions that confronted his young fedora-wearing hero in the 1990s. "The show, well, it's about history," he said in a mock voice dripping with disdain, "and, you know, forget that."

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T.E.Lawrence

New member
Businessweek
How Disney Bought Lucasfilm and Its Plans for 'Star Wars'
By Devin Leonard March 07, 2013

Complete article at:
http://www.businessweek.com/article...-bought-lucasfilm-and-its-plans-for-star-wars

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After that first trilogy, Lucas was wealthy enough to do whatever he pleased. He could produce director Paul Schrader's Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters, a brooding art film with a Philip Glass score that made only $500,000 at the box office. Or he could produce a television series about the early years of Indiana Jones, the swashbuckling archaeologist he created with Steven Spielberg. Unlike Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles were intended to be history lessons. In one episode, Young Indiana would befriend Sidney Bechet, the seminal New Orleans saxophonist, and learn to play jazz.

In the early 1990s, Lucas pitched the show to Iger, who'd risen from TV
weatherman in upstate New York to chairman of ABC. They met at Skywalker
Ranch, Lucas's 6,100-acre property in Marin County, Calif. Iger had misgivings, but Indiana Jones was one of the most popular movie characters of all time. 'I wanted it to work very badly,' Iger says. 'It was George Lucas, come on.' Iger green-lighted the series and kept it on ABC for two seasons even as it failed to find an audience and solidify creatively. 'It struggled,' Lucas says of Chronicles. 'But he was very supportive of the whole thing.'

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