Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Screenplay

“The only kind of writing is rewriting.” – Ernest Hemingway

A lot of new writers don’t take that quote seriously enough. The University System – in particular – encourages the “one draft wonder.” Those of us who went through that system quickly developed a sense that, if you can’t get it right the first time you won’t get it right at all. But the more you write and the better you get, the more you begin to feel the truth of Hemingway’s words at a bone-level. No one can get it right in a single pass. Not even industry legends.

With that in mind, as promised, this post is going to delve into two different versions of a scene in one of the most beloved action films of all time: Raiders of the Lost Ark. The first comes from Lawrence Kasdan’s third draft. It’s available online, and I’ll place a link for it at the bottom of this post. The second is the version that appears in the final film.

Before we get started, however, I want to remind you of a point I made in my last post: The Problem of Exposition. If you haven’t read it, I highly recommend going back and giving it a look-see before starting on this one. For those who are not inclined to do so, or for those who have read it but need a reminder, here’s the most important point:

Exposition, or laying pipe, is best done through conflict rather than shoe-horning it in through dialogue or narration.

Got that? Cool, on to the main event.

In this scene, Indiana Jones arrives at a bar in Nepal, searching for his old friend Abner Ravenwood, and for a vital clue to the resting place of the Lost Ark of the Covenant. Instead, he finds Abner’s daughter Marion.

In both versions, the scene begins with Marion ordering the bar’s patrons to clear out. But, in the first version, one patron refuses to leave-

Draft Three

Final Version

Now take a look at this clip on Youtube of the same scene in the final film. I’ll also include a transcription I made in case you’d rather not compare Crab Apples to Granny Smiths.

Comparison

So, what do you notice about these two different versions of the same scene? We’ll start with Economy, then move on to Exposition, and finally come around to Character Development.

Economy

This is an easy one. The final version that appears in the film is half the length of the one in the third draft. Now, shorter isn’t always better. After all, no one is going to say that reading the sentence – “Indiana Jones and Marion Ravenwood battled Nazis to find the Ark of the Covenant, only for the US Government to take possession of it” – is better than watching the full film.  That said, in most cases a shorter version of a scene will be superior to a longer one. This has nothing to do with the length, and everything to do with the concentration of action in the scene.

Both versions of this scene cover the same amount of narrative ground, but the final version covers it twice as fast as the draft version. The same action is condensed into a concentrated form. The result is a much more intense and engaging scene.

Exposition

Here we get to the reason I decided to write this post. This point flows directly out of Economy, because most of the additional content that was cut from the draft to make the final version as tight as it is came from unnecessary exposition.

Remember that exposition works best when it emerges from conflicts between characters.

In the draft version we get the following points of exposition:

1. Marion is Abner Ravenwood’s daughter
2. Abner died.
3. He died in an avalanche and the body was never found.
4. Marion survived in the meantime by prostituting herself.
5. She ended up running the bar when the old owner went insane.
6. She’s not happy there and wants to go back to the States, but she needs a lot of money to do it – at least to go back in style the way she wants to. She doesn’t know where she’s going to get it.
7. Marion and Indy once had an affair. It is implied that she was underaged. She was certainly young and naive. She blames him for her current circumstances, presumably because he left and never came back. But she still has feelings for him.

That’s seven bits of information that we get in as many screenplay pages (which ought to translate to roughly seven minutes of screen-time).

The structure of the scene happens in phases:

First, we get the expositional dialogue. Marion and Indy literally talk through all of the points above, crossing them off in conversation with only a thin veneer of conflict to tie things together. It’s basically a check-list.

Next, we get a mention of the plot conflict that brings Indy here and how Marion relates to it (the medallion), before taking off with the personal conflict between them (i.e. They had an affair of some kind when she was younger, he left her, she resents him bitterly but also still has feelings for him, so they argue).

Finally, as the personal conflict winds down, the plot conflict reemerges as the dominant force in the scene. They make a deal. We get a brief resurgence of the personal conflict as Marion demands a kiss, and Indy leaves.

I’ll get to the Character Development angle on all of this in the next section. For now we’re just focused on the delivery of Exposition, which is comparatively sloppy in this earlier draft.

It’s all handled upfront, effectively a “close your eyes and swallow the pill” scenario. That in and of itself adds to the length of the scene, because it means there needs to be whole extra section there exclusively for information. Worse, there is no conflict to drive that information, which means that the interactions between the characters are broken down by factoids rather than story beats. Put simply, the story stalls for several pages while the two characters vomit up the information we theoretically need to understand the story.

But, clearly, not all of that exposition is necessary. Take a look at the following three points:

• Abner died in an avalanche and the body was never found
• Marion survived in the meantime by prostituting herself
• She ended up running the bar when the previous owner went insane

None of these have much to do with the story and the conflicts at hand.

• Abner is a character we never meet, and who we only hear about incidentally. We therefore don’t much care how he died, or what happened to his body.
• Marion’s survival in between Abner’s death and Indy’s arrival does not have direct bearing on the story. That’s a point that could have made it in as ammunition to be hurled at Indy in their fight, but as exposition it’s irrelevant.
• Similarly, there’s no story reason to tell us how she ended up running the bar. We only need to know that she’s there, she doesn’t like it, and she can’t get out without more cash than she can currently lay her hands on.

The final version of the scene quite rightly cuts all three of these pieces of information out. All they do is slow things down, diverting the audience’s attention from the facts and the events that do have real bearing on the events of the film.

The final version therefore has a little over half as many points of exposition to deliver. Moreover, its structure is designed to fold that information much more seamlessly into the scene’s real conflicts.

The scene begins with Indy walking in, all swagger. He tries to set things off with the plot conflict, asking about the item that Abner collected.

Significantly, he says: “I need one of the pieces your father collected.” On its surface, that’s a simple declaration of desire, a line drawn in the sand. He wants this thing; it’s his goal in this scene. But when he says, “your father,” he is also eliminating the need for any additional dialogue tying Marion and Abner together. We now know the relationship between those two, and it didn’t take any extra exposition to draw it out.

Marion, however, doesn’t give a damn about the film’s central plot at this point. She has a personal conflict to pick with Indy, and she immediately hijacks control of the scene by walloping him across the jaw.

They argue, and in the course of that argument they use facts from their shared past against one another. The conflict is driving this dialogue, not the information.

Nothing is stated directly. And nothing is said with the sole intention of informing. We learn the backstory almost as an incidental feature of witnessing a moment of conflict between these two characters. As a result, it all feels smooth and effortless, practically below the level of conscious thought.

From there, Indy tries to bring the conversation back to the story’s main conflict. Marion doesn’t cooperate, and so Indy asks after Abner in the hopes that he will prove more willing to help.

Only, it turns out Abner is dead, which is Marion’s lever to bring the personal conflict back into the foreground. Again, the exposition becomes ammunition for the characters in their conflict. Indy seeks to use Abner to get what he wants, but instead Marion does (Yes, I know ‘use’ is too calculating a term here. She’s not thinking, “Ooh, I can use my dead dad as leverage.” But Indy bringing him up when he does changes the fact of Abner’s death from mere exposition to a key factor in the scene’s shifting balance of power).

Indy brings up the medallion and the film’s central plot again, but this time he introduces something that Marion needs: money. The central plot conflict and the personal conflict thereby snap back together, because both characters now have a vested interest in the same conversation.

We then learn about Marion’s desire to go back to the States as “a goddamn lady,” when she refuses the initial price he offers: “That will get me back, but not in style.” She doesn’t say why she wants to go back in style. She doesn’t need to.

All of the vital points of exposition from the earlier draft thereby make it into the final scene, but they are presented in a subtler and pithier way. Put simply, the information is made to serve the scene, the characters, and the conflicts between them, not the other way around.

Character Development

Finally, I’d like to say a brief word about character development in the two versions of this scene.

In the draft version, we are presented with two rather flat characters. The Indiana Jones we see here is not the Indiana Jones we know and love. He’s too calm, too in control, too bland. The quintessential uncomplicated tough guy, like James Bond, Conan the Barbarian, or a dozen other pulp heroes.

Marion is an equal cliché, summed up when Indy calls her – to our cringing sensibilities – a “tough broad.” She brings to mind all of the two-dimensional women we find in the old hard-boiled novels: a hard shell protecting a soft heart.

The final version of the scene presents us with the characters as we know them. For a fuller rundown of my thoughts on Indy, see my earlier post on The Curious Case of Indiana Jones. In the meantime, let’s just say that Indy thinks he’s an unflappable pulp hero, but he’s more characterized by his weaknesses than his strengths.

When it comes to Marion, the character we see in the final scene is – despite being less complex in terms of backstory and having spent a shorter time onscreen – rather interesting and multifaceted. She’s a woman who finds herself in a rut with no way out, life refusing to break her way, and who finds her past suddenly showing up to haunt her. Despite that, she is able to stand her ground and hold out for what she wants. But, more importantly, we get the distinct impression throughout the scene that she, like any real human being, only reveals half of what she’s thinking. Between the earlier draft and this version, she goes from a two-dimensional cliché to a character with real depth.

The key lesson in that is that informational complexity does not equate to strong characters. If not used carefully, sweeping backstories actually get in the way of character development. Subtext and conflict do far more to make a character multifaceted than brute exposition ever could.

Conclusion

And that brings us to the end of my argument. I’d like to thank you for sticking with me all the way through this monster of a post. I promise to make the next one shorter.

It’s my hope that you will come away from this feeling inspired to go out there and write. The improvements we see between the draft version of the script for Raiders of the Lost Ark and the final version are immense. And remember that the version I found online was already the third draft of the script. There were two that came before it, and who knows how many that came after it. The truth is that no work of art worth experiencing was ever made without revision, often drastic revision. So, whether you consider yourself a screenwriter, a novelist, or just a bungling amateur with an idea you can’t shake, get out there and write something. Then rewrite.

As promised, here‘s the link to the full third draft of Raiders of the Lost Ark. I have to warn you, it’s really different.

Dunkirk, and the Importance of Movie Trailers

I went to see Dunkirk this past week. The film itself is very well put together, though not at all what I expected from the trailers.

(Some minor spoilers below)

Dunkirk’s trailers imply a sense of tension, but they also emphasize the “miracle at Dunkirk.” Phrases like, “When they couldn’t get home, home came for them,” and, “Survival is victory,” spring to mind. The emotional balance implied by most of the trailers is therefore a kind of pendulum, swinging back and forth between the horror of defeat and the heroism of the British civilians out to rescue their troops. The trailers make us expect a film that will pit those two emotions against one another more or less equally: we will experience horror, then heroism, then horror again.

But the emotional balance present in the film itself is very different. If it is a pendulum between horror and heroism, then the pendulum remains stuck on horror for much of the film. It actually reminds me a little of a nightmare. In a nightmare, no matter what you do you end up in the same unpleasant situation, over and over again until you wake up. And so, the vast majority of the film shows characters being stuck in this horrifying situation, waiting for a rescue that seems impossible. We know (from the trailers if not from our knowledge of history) that a good ending is on the way, but we cannot see from the film how it could possibly happen. And then, almost at the very end, we wake up from the nightmare. The civilian boats arrive, there is a tense climax, and the British forces go home to the tune of Churchill’s famous speech: “We will never surrender.” One brief moment of relief at the conclusion of a movie that otherwise grabs hold of your gut and clenches unrelentingly for almost two hours.

This is actually an incredibly interesting tension model, using the intense contrast with the long nightmare to make the brief awakening all the more powerful, but it isn’t what the trailers sold us. And that hampers the success of the film’s model. If the trailers had emphasized the nightmare, then the resolution might have been an incredibly satisfying culmination of that nightmare. Instead, the final frame left me feeling vaguely dissatisfied: “It’s great, sure, but it’s not what I thought I was going to the theaters to see.”

That isn’t a criticism of the film itself, but I do think it’s interesting how often the experience of a trailer affects the experience of watching a film. A good trailer can set us up to experience a film even more powerfully. A bad one can actually take away from the ultimate experience of watching the film.

Take another example: The Man from U.N.C.L.E. I actually really enjoy this film. It’s cheesy, goofy, full of bad accents, and so on and so forth. And, for all that, it’s also a lot of fun. But I didn’t like it all that much the first time I saw it. Why? Because the trailer showed the whole film. It told me too much, and so the experience of watching the film turned into checking boxes off of a list provided by the trailer. I felt like I’d seen it all recently. The trailer sabotaged its own film.

Some of my favorite trailers actually have nothing to do with films: they are cinematic trailers for video games. Like movie trailers these can be good or bad, but they take an interesting approach to the problem of selling the larger experience. In the case of movie trailers, segments of the larger work are cut down into a smaller one. In other words, we see the physical pieces of what we are buying. But cinematic game trailers often take a different approach. They take the characters and themes of the game in question, and they create a short film that tells the audience what those qualities are. The images onscreen are only circumstantially related to anything in the actual game, but that doesn’t matter. So long as the characters and emotional tone make an appearance, we get an idea of what we are buying (at least on a story level). For examples, check out the original cinematic trailer for Assassins Creed 2, the “Rendez-Vous With Death” trailer from Gears of War 2, and the “Killing Monsters” trailer for The Witcher 3. The principal at play is this: tell a smaller story, to make the viewer want to experience the bigger one. When done well it can be incredibly effective, and I’d be interested to see more feature films make use of it.

The bottom line is that a good trailer should give us an accurate picture of a film’s emotional content without exhausting it. It’s an emotional snapshot, giving us a taste of what we’re buying. That’s all marketing. The idea is to get peoples’ butts into theatre seats. But it’s a mistake to think of trailers solely as marketing. Because trailers can’t help infecting that first pristine viewing of a film. They are our prior experience. On some level we judge the final film by its trailer. Trailers aren’t just a marketing ploy; they are actually in dialogue with the films they represent.

Making use of that dialogue both for better marketing and to improve the audience’s experience of the film is an exciting and under-explored area of the filmmaking process. It isn’t set in stone that a trailer has to be cut from the same footage as the final film. As we see in the games industry, a trailer could be a short film in its own right, one designed specifically to give an idea of the emotional tone set by the larger piece. Such a trailer might resemble something like the opening sequence of Raiders of the Lost Ark, a separate but related story that informs our experience of the larger adventure.

A trailer might also bend the truth when it comes to what happens in its feature film. Many films reach for big reveals, but how many of those are undermined by the content of their trailers? The trailer shows too much, and suddenly the reveal isn’t such a big surprise after all. But that sword has two edges. I can easily imagine a film trailer being used to mislead the audience, presenting a sequence of events that would suggest (though not state outright; we don’t want anyone to feel lied to) that, say, “The butler did it.” When the truth lies down a very different path. In such a case, the filmmakers would actually be using the trailer to create a set of expectations, reinforcing the surprise we feel when those expectations are shattered. It’s a classic filmmaking technique taken a step beyond the contiguous body of a single film.

The possibilities for making interesting trailers are extensive compared to the run-of-the-mill work that we see on a day to day basis. There is a great deal of competition out there, all vying for our movie dollars, and if filmmakers want to get ahead of the pack they ought to take a more creative approach to creating movie trailers. Like films, trailers tell stories and express ideas, and that makes them an essential part of the filmgoing experience. It’s a cliche, but, so long as the trailer shows us what kind of emotional experience to expect from the finished film, the possibilities really are endless.

The Curious Case of Indiana Jones

Raiders of the Lost Ark is one of my all time favorite films. I know, I know, that doesn’t exactly make me one of a kind. Everyone loves Raiders. And part of that is simply its understated competence. It isn’t flashy the way, for instance, Tarantino’s films tend to be. Spielberg is the master of the workmanlike film style. His films aren’t usually loaded with bells and whistles. You hardly notice them on a stylistic level. They simply work. But none of that means that his films don’t innovate. And Raiders works all the better for the unusual way Spielberg structures its conflicts and resolution.

Raiders is fundamentally a work of genre fiction. In the same way that Star Wars takes the old pulp-paperback space opera books and updates them for film audiences, Raiders builds upon the pulp adventure stories: stories of adventurers, explorers, and “archeologists,” men who always manage to find more magical artifacts and damsels in distress than valuable scientific data. But Spielberg makes one significant change to the old genre, and that change is the groundwork of what makes the Indiana Jones series so much more compelling than its source material. He takes the hardbitten and unflappable James Bond types who fill their pages, and he cuts their hamstrings.

The traditional model of conflict for pulp adventure stories was almost entirely physical: falling boulders, pits of vipers, enemies with guns (sound familiar?). But, in those stories, the heroes were always up to the challenge. They were smarter, faster, stronger, more macho than normal people, and therefore more than a match for the physical challenges thrown at them. Indiana Jones, on the other hand, is not cut from such a super-human cloth. He’s smart, and fast, and strong to be sure, but he’s always a little out of his depth. The challenges thrown at him, whether physical or otherwise, are always just a little bigger than he can handle. The great innovation of Indiana Jones’s character is that he tends to lose.

And that means two things. First, it means that we can relate to him much more intimately than we can relate to other pulp heroes. No one identifies with James Bond, unless they’re some kind of sociopath. We watch Bond because he’s cool and unflappable, and that’s fun to watch. But we don’t see ourselves in him. We do see ourselves in Indie though, and that gives the story a much more personal and intimate feeling. Second, placing Indie’s abilities just below the level of his challenges keeps the tension high. No matter what he’s doing, no matter how hard he tries or how much he learns, Indie is always going to be outmatched. He’s always going to be the underdog, desperately trying to play catch-up. And that makes the danger feel far more real.

This pattern follows through to the resolution of the film. Indie loses. There’s no two ways about it. He ends his final gambit of the story tied to a stake beside Marion, the helpless captives of their Nazi antagonists. The film’s happy resolution comes, not through any agency on Indie’s part, but because the Nazis go a step too far. They open the Ark, and God literally smites them. Talk about a Deus Ex Machina ending. It’s everything a writer is taught not to do, and it’s brilliant.

In general we avoid Deus Ex Machina resolutions because they feel tacked on. They take the story out of the hands of the character and put it in the hands of an outside force. But in this case it’s incredibly appropriate. The story up to that point isn’t really about Indie’s quest for the Ark. It’s about him and Marion, their love, and their struggle to survive the Nazis’ quest for the Ark. The resolution distills that fact. Indie isn’t up to the challenge of finding the Ark and taking on the whole Nazi army in the process. But he is up to the challenge of surviving.

In the end Indie is finally shorn of his pulp-heroic trappings. He doesn’t have the whip, he doesn’t have the gun, he doesn’t even have freedom of movement. He’s just an ordinary human being in over his head. But the secret of the film is that he’s never been anything more than that. And that’s what makes him such a compelling character.