Kooshmeister said:
I do and I don't. Sort of. He did originally want to do sequels, but the pap about how the story was too big to contain in one film and got spread out over three, is just pure fabrication. Lucas made up the trilogy's story as he went along and it was always intended as a franchise, but not the way Lucas claims these days. A few decades ago, he was claiming entirely different things.
To hear him tell it in old interviews (quote in the book The Secret History of Star Wars), Lucas' original idea for a sequel was to film Splinter of the Mind's Eye as a movie. In fact, I believe he had Alan Dean Foster write the novel the way he did, with minimalist settings, so it'd be an inexpensive shoot in case the first movie didn't do as well as Lucas hoped (which would mean smaller budgets for sequels). When Star Wars far exceeded Lucas' wildest dreams, he scrapped this idea entirely, and came up with the story for The Empire Strikes Back, and Splinter of the Mind's Eye was left as a novel.
Of course, this doesn't necessarily mean he didn't have the ideas for the sequel we did get knocking around in his head at the time Foster was writing his book. It just means we would've gotten a much different sequel if the first film hadn't performed as well as it had. But I don't wanna turn this into a Star Wars discussion thread. I'm merely clarifying that Star Wars was intended to be a franchise. Just not in the way Lucas often claims.
At least lately. He's very much a revisionist when it comes to his own personal creative history and I don't want to draw too many conclusions, but it seems he has some problems with people ever thinking the trilogy's story was ever anything but set in stone from day one.
In fairness, I don't think he ever actually claimed the entire thing was written out; he simply had a general idea of what he wanted to do, but not the specifics, and all the public statements of his I've seen over the years (and I've seen quite a few) are in line with that. I think it's more a case of people reading his words and then reading more into them than they actually said (and than he actually meant), and taking them to mean he had this grand vision chiseled in granite down to the tiniest detail from day one, and then going "aha! Gotcha!" when they find indications otherwise, when it was never actually the case (nor did he really portray it as such).
Kooshmeister said:
Turning the discussion back to Indiana Jones, I do agree that unlike Star Wars, it wasn't originally intended as a franchise, but as a standalone film. It is pretty self-contained (far more than even the first Star Wars) and has no "sequel bait" type ending like one of the principal villains escaping, as in Star Wars. Everything is wrapped up neatly. Not entirely to the audience, or Indy's, liking, perhaps, but wrapped up nonetheless. All the villains die, the Ark is recovered, and our hero and heroine return safely.
If Spielberg and Lucas did have sequels in mind, they were of the purely episodic variety rather than any plan to continue any existing threads as Lucas did with The Empire Strikes Back. Which, now that I think about it, would be very much in keeping with the movie serial feel the Indy movies are meant to have. Each movie being a new adventure. So maybe they
did want a franchise, but just had kernels of story or setpiece ideas (like the unused mine cart scene that got ported over to Temple of Doom).
Oh, I'm sure it was always intended to be a franchise, just that it was always intended as an episodic one, made of standalone episodes (which is the way it in fact was until
The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, and I suspect is probably still the way most people perceive it now). It's well-known that the original "Raiders" deal with Paramount talked about a total of five movies eventually, and the suitability of the character toward that kind of ongoing adventure series (in the manner of something like James Bond) was clear and obvious from the start. I'm sure Lucas very much did hope / intend from the start to keep making "Raiders" / Indiana Jones movies as long as the first one was successful.
The interesting thing here (at least to me, from my perspective as a particular lover of the Indy TV series) is how after the first decade of the franchise, it began to evolve from the episodic format of self-contained adventures into more of a climactic, arcing series - one still made up of essentially self-contained adventures, but also one in which we do see how the character grows, changes and develops over the course of his life, and how his adventures reflect the times, changing with the different decades across the twentieth century. I
have seen statements from Lucas in which he acknowledges that Indy wasn't originally intended that way, that there wasn't originally any backstory developed beyond the bare minimum for the movie(s) but in which it came to pass when he decided to do Young Indy, etc. He contrasted it to
Star Wars, which always had a wealth of background even if it wasn't fully-formed and was subject to substantial revision as he began work on each new movie; Indy was really a case of "making it up as he goes," until the TV show.
But that's not the same as saying they didn't really plan to do sequels. I hate to bring up Bond again, but it's kind of like that - the makers of the 007 movies aren't following any sort of grand plan beyond simply making another movie every so many years, but they
have been doing that, and I think that's what they've always wanted to do (even if back in 1962 they never saw the series going on this long). I think Lucas is the same with Indy - he didn't have any sort of grand scheme in mind for this character back in '77/'78, but did still think it could be an ongoing adventure series, and fully intended to do it as long as it was successful, even if he didn't have specific adventures in mind yet beyond the Ark quest (let alone an entire character biography spanning the century).
Montana Smith said:
That's what I take for the facts as well. Along with Alan Dean Foster being the writer of the original Star Wars novel, to which Lucas put his name. (A bit like Jeffrey Archer who was allegedly good at making up stories, but never actually wrote one of his own books).
There's an edition of the novelization from the '90s with a foreword by Lucas, in which he himself points out that Foster was the one who actually wrote the novelization, even though that same edition still bears Lucas' name as author.
Kooshmeister said:
EDIT: Just realized that even when I returned the discussion to Indiana Jones, I was still wildly off-topic. Oy.
Pfft, no worries - happens to me all the time!
I'd say, at the very least, 60 to 75 or so....But, as you said, the numbers aren't important.
