I acquired a transcript of some or perhaps all of the conversations between Spielberg, George Lucas and Larry Kasdan that took place in a little office across the street from Paramount studios back in the late 70's when laying down the outline for the Raiders of the Lost Ark script.
I've heard many times over the years that they left a cheap tape recorder on so that Kasdan could go back and use the cassettes for reference but I never have ever seen bootlegs of them in any fashion until a while ago when I saw this on Evilbay. In back is about 8 pages of transcript between Kasdan, Phillip Kaufman (co-story creator) and Deborah Fine who was the person in charge of the research into the MacGuffin items of the occult for the Indy films. These 8 pages are all about the research done on the Ark and a few other things for Raiders.
Now, I can't be 100% certain as the guy who I got it from wouldn't name his source for the tapes, but he said he had copies of them and wrote it all out in transcript form, word for eligible word. I have to think that if it is a fake, it is a damn good one, but I think not. You can just hear Lucan and Spielberg saying these things as you read it. Besides, it would take someone a large ammount of creativity to invent all this conversation, especially 121 pages of it.
There are some interesting things like the backround they had for the Marion character was actually scraped and they ended up using it for Elsa Schneider in Last Crusade. Many of the set pieces were also scraped and used in the next two films so they really had alot of TOD and LC in mind when writing Raiders.
I think this is a great find because it really gets you into the mind of the creators so well. You really don't have this kind of material out there too often and are so indepth in the very earliest stages of the creative process of the entire film.
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I'm not sure about hosting this on the main site for two reasons.
First, I still am not 100% certain that these are authentic and I know Steven, you pride yourself on that aspect of things on this site, which I respect.
Second, I did pay for this and whoever made this took alot of time to get it done. If it were posted on the main site, nothing would stop anyone from copying it and then selling their own copies, even if it is available here for all to see. If there was a way to stop that, I may be game to let everyone in, but in all my time online, that has not been the case. In fact, it's been the opposite alot ofo the time. Trying to find people you completely trust online is hard. People who won't exploit something good when you are simply trying to share.
I hope this makes sense to all of you as this has been a topic of interest on many boards, with those in the 'I'll share everything with everyone' camp, and the 'I'm a little sceptical' camp in another. I've seen guys who have had nothing but good intentions in their hearts to share with others, ripped off by someone who's only intention was to make some quick, easy cash. I know it's bad and those like that are truely in the minority. Still, it happens and being that it does puts me in the sceptical camp, I guess.
Perhaps I can work something out to get some copies into the hands of those who really want it. I'd rather put my trust in a small few with legitimate interest than in the entire internet.
I hope I didn't come off as a jerk and I hope you can all understand.
I'm open to suggestions.
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SS does come up with some weird ideas but I think they all needed to be put out there to get them on the table and flesh them all out to get a roadmap for where they wanted to take this film. Lucas does sort of bring him back to reality on a few occasions with his original intentions of the character. They constantly site old serials and movies as their inspiration. The Dobb's character was the number one inspiration for Indy. They also say how they'd like the villain's to be more like the ones of the Leone spaghetti westers in the fact that even though they are evil, the audience should still like them. All in all there's lots of great stuff in there.
I think SS was just picking his brain for ideas and set pieces and at first he had sort of a different idea of what Raiders could be but over time it was all worked out and everyone was on the same level. It was just a way for them to get all of their ideas out on the table to discuss how relevant they may be or if they would work in the context of the film. It is cool to get into some of their thought processes. It's almost like the Big Bang. We're here, right at the beginning. Stage 1. It's a rare part of Hollywood we rarely get to take part in.