Chapter 4b

The African Queen with Hepburn and Bogart.

Okay, quit monkeyin' around, here's the story so far on Indy 3 - not the one you saw at the cinema, but the one you DIDN'T see, scripted by Harry Potter director Chris Columbus at the dawn of his career. In a rip-roaring tribute to The African Queen, Bringing Up Baby, and various Grade-Z jungle comedies from the 1930's, Columbus sent Indy and assorted sidekicks to Africa. His quest is to find the legendary half-man, half-monkey King Sun Wu-Kung, his lost 'City in the Clouds', (no relation to Bespin) and his Garden of Immortal Peaches, which, err, give immortality. Indy's adversaries are Nazis, and along the way he takes part in a thrilling speedboat chase in a Mozambique dock, a fight with river pirates, and encounters various jungle traps, lions, scorpions, cannibals, and more. Eventually they and the cannibals join forces to dig a giant pit in which to hide from a stampeding herd of wildebeest. When the stampede passes we discover what caused it - a giant tank, driven by the pursuing Nazi goons.

Just as the speedboat chase found its way into Last Crusade, but in a much inferior form to the way Columbus scripted it, so the tank sequence in Last Crusade is a pale reflection of how it appears in the Monkey King script. Columbus imagines a vast super-tank 'TEN TIMES the size of a normal tank. Nearly 100 FEET LONG. Over 25 FEET WIDE'. Okay, so perhaps having a Nazi tank be the size of a AT-AT is a little unrealistic, but still, it would have been an incredible sight on the screen. Indy and friends run to escape it across the African plain, but Indy trips over and then gets up, only to be chased by a... rhinoceros. 

As if a giant Nazi tank wasn't enough. Indy somehow manages to get onto the rhino, by running in a circle and narrowing the circle lap by lap until he is alongside the animal - then leaping onto it and riding it. And no, you can read this paragraph in the script over and over again, and it still won't make sense or be any more plausible. The rhino spots the tank and being short-sighted mistakes it for a giant rhino - and attacks. Indy manages to scramble on (jumping from a horse to a truck seems fairly easy by comparison). Meanwhile Indy's friends (an African called Scraggy, his love interest Dr. Clarke, a river pirate called Kezure, and an annoying female student called Betsy) are being pursued by the tank, but have come to a ravine. With no way out they climb up into a tall tree ("Scraggy: Safest place from bad spirits is in the branches of tree...") but the Nazis take aim. Indy jams the gun barrel with a headlamp and the gun backfires, killing some of the Nazis. A furious fight then begins, like the one in Last Crusade - only better! - while the tree holding Indy's friends teeters over the edge of the ravine, and the driverless tank heads towards the tree. Columbus has a knack of writing action sequences like this, well-choreographed with a number of different elements in play, totally absurd and fantastical but with an internal logic which saves them from our scorn (the rhino episode aside). He also likes to heap trouble on top of trouble - as if the tank battle wasn't enough a Nazi biplane suddenly appears and begins to strafe the tank! Indy gets a hold of Gutterbuhg, a Nazi with a machine gun in his mechanical arm, aims it at the biplane and shoots it down. He then knocks out the Nazi, leaps into the tank's cabin, and brings it to a halt. 

Earlier, Gutterbuhg had kidnapped Tyki, a pygmy from the lost Cloud City. They release him, and Indy radios Gutterbuhg's boss, the 'Nazi nightmare' Lieutenant Mephisto, taunting him with the Nazi's failure. This is a mistake; as Mephisto informs Indy, he has a whole army at his command, and 'the battle has only just begun'. They set off again, with Tyki guiding them to the specific mountain on which the clouds shrouding its peak carry the Cloud City of Sun Wu-Kung. Indy drives the tank with difficulty up the steep mountain path, until they reach a point two miles from the Cloud City - and suddenly see the Nazi forces in pursuit! Indy uses the tank's guns to cause a landslide which blocks Mephisto's path, and drives on up into the clouds, but now the tank itself is attacked, not by the Nazis, but by giant gorillas, hurling enormous boulders. The sequence is a great piece of writing, and would have been very atmospheric on screen:

INT. TANK

Indiana looks through the periscope. His view blinded by the clouds.

EXT. MOUNTAIN

The tank is a large, gray blur through the clouds. Several dark, bulking figures appear! They climb along the ravine sides and tops. The mysterious figures surround the tank. All are holding enormous boulders over their heads. Aimed at the tank.

INT. TANK

Indy eases up on the gas. The tank slows. Suddenly, there is a loud crash! The tank is hit. Rattling. shaking. Everyone is tossed. Save for Indy, who stays at the controls. He continues to guide the tank forward. There is another crash. And another. And another.

EXT. MOUNTAIN

The dark figures shower the tank with heavy boulders. The tank's gun barrel snaps in two. Headlights smash. Its body becomes dented. Cracked.

INT. TANK

Indiana is tough. Persistent. He continues to move the jolting tank forward. As the surrounding walls cave in. Shatter. Everyone panics. Screaming.

EXT. MOUNTAIN

The injured, wobbling tank moves out of the clouds. Arriving around the corner from the mountain top. The countless dark figures continue to follow the tank. Scurrying along the ravine sides and tops. The figures emerge from the clouds. For the first time, they are visible. And we see that the figures are tall... hairy... muscular... Gorillas! They continue to assault the tank with boulders.

The tank breaks down, and Indy has no choice but to get out and see what is happening. The giant gorilla's toss him around like a plaything, taking off his hat, jacket and whip, and dressing up one of their own kind as Indy. They then make to throw him off the mountain's edge, but before they do so Tyki, (who, being from the Cloud City, obviously speaks fluent Gorilla) commands them to put him down. This would have been a great sequence, but it is difficult to see how it would have been done effectively in the mid-Eighties; it seems about fifteen years ahead of its time. Now, with CGI, it could be done without too much trouble. The gorillas give Indy his stuff back, having dented only his pride, and lead the group up into the Lost City:

Tyki continues to shoot orders to the other Gorillas. The pygmy suddenly appears strong. Authoritative. He obviously has power over the beasts. The Gorillas gather together. They move toward the people. The apes gently take the hands of the various humans. It is a warm, enchanting sight, as the friendly Gorillas lead the humans forward. Clare, using her Gorilla motions and sounds, communicates with the beasts. The group moves around a twisting corner of the path. Toward the mountain top.

AROUND THE CORNER

Indiana and the others are met with an awesome sight! Indy stops. His mouth drops open. Clare is equally astounded. Betsy and the others stare ahead. In total wonderment. Even Gutterbuhg is amazed. The soundtrack music explodes into a thundering crescendo!

THE LOST CITY OF SUN WU-KUNG

Lies ahead of the group. A spectacular sight! A city whose every building and tower is cast in solid gold! Sparkling! Glistening! A heavenly place. The City is protected by a deep moat. The fins of several sharks
move through the moat waters. A thick stone wall surrounds the city. A large, golden drawbridge is built into the wall. Passageway into the city.

They enter the city, and the Guard at the gate begins to shout, in Tyki's language, "Our Prince has returned home". The city itself is a magical place, suffused with a golden light - the streets are literally paved with gold - and bursting with the bright colors of exotic fruits and plants in beautiful gardens, crystal lakes, and other wonders. Indy and friends are taken to meet the city's ruler, Bohbala, who is also Tyki's father, and he welcomes them to stay for as long as they wish. But at that moment, disaster strikes. During the tank battle, Indy had removed the bullet clip from Gutterbuhg's mechanical gun-arm. Now Gutterbuhg removes a spare bullet he has had hidden in his mouth, inserts it into his gun arm and shoots Bohbala dead. But worse is to come. As Indy attacks Gutterbuhg he is prevented from doing so by the palace guards, and then everyone turns and kneels before the Nazi. A distraught Tyki explains that 'when a ruler is defeated by a greater power, he who possesses that power... shall become ruler!'. And as an exultant Gutterbuhg raises his mechanical arm in a 'Hail Hitler' salute, the entire city imitates him.

Indy's friends are dragged off to the Palace dungeons (dungeons? In this supposedly perfect society?) while Gutterbuhg tells Indy that when Mephisto and the Nazi army reaches them they will slaughter the inhabitants and take the city apart for its gold - and to find the Garden of Immortal Peaches, so that the Fuhrer can live as long as his 'thousand year' Reich. The action cuts to the Coliseum of the Lost City, an enormous stone arena. Indy is brought shirtless into the vast arena, as Gutterbuhg sits watching in the elaborate ruler's box, which is covered with a protective gold grating. Indy is tied between two enormous buffalo, ready to be ripped apart; his friends are suspended in a large metal cage over a deep pit filled with ferocious tigers. Just as Gutterbuhg is about to give the order to release the buffalo, Indy screams 'Hail Hitler!' and Gutterbuhg reflexively raises his mechanical arm in a Nazi salute, catching his fingers in the grating. It gets stuck, and as he tries to pull it out, his arm comes away from his socket. Indy's friend Scraggy (who Gutterbuhg had forced to act as his translator) grabs the arm and holds it above his head. Now he possesses the power, and is acclaimed as the new ruler by the crowd in the arena. Scraggy gives orders for Indiana to be untied, while Gutterbuhg flees the arena, pursued by the crowd. Scraggy gives the arm to Tyki, who is cheered as the new rightful ruler. Meanwhile Gutterbuhg escapes from the city and catches up with Mephisto and the Nazis, who blast their way through the landslide and begin to move on the Lost City.

Readers who are also Star Wars fans, and make a point of avoiding spoilers, might like to skip this paragraph. The scene in the arena is far-fetched even by the standards of this script, and has no internal consistency with the character of the Cloud City people as we know them. How can their civilization be so wonderful if they allow their leaders to rule only by right of conquest and are happy to watch barbaric games and executions in a Roman-style arena? The scene is of interest to Star Wars fans however, given the recent revelations about certain scenes in Star Wars: Episode 2. We know that there will be a climactic battle in an alien arena, with action taking place both in the 'royal box' and on the arena floor, and involving ferocious new creatures known as 'Reeks'. Obi-Wan Kenobi will be tied to a pillar, to be killed by the Reeks, much as Indy is here, but he will be rescued by the Jedi. George Lucas is known for being as careful with ideas as he is with his money, and it is at least possible that while he couldn't find a home for an 'arena scene' in the Indiana Jones series, he remembered it when writing Episode 2 and transplanted it into the Star Wars saga.

As the Nazi attack begins, Indy gives a rousing speech to the Cloud City dwellers, pygmies who are armed only with bows and arrows, spears and blow pipes. In the (intentionally?) funny speech he tells a story of 'a little guy... a scrawny runt' who wanted to be in the football team, but 'the big guys made his life miserable... always shoving his head in the drinking fountain... putting mustard in his pants... throwing me... err, HIM!... in the shower with all his clothes on'. But, he goes on, Indy - that is, the little guy - didn't quit, and became the star of the football team:

(Music rises, so does Indy's voice)
'Cause that little kid had something
that those big guys never heard
of... He had heart! And nothing can
stop that! Nothing'!
(we hear the Nazis approaching, Indy screams)
Now let's go out there and show 'em
JUST HOW TOUGH THE LITTLE GUYS ARE!

Everyone breaks into a loud cheer. Ready to fight.
The sound track music soars. Indiana raises his sword.
He turns and runs toward the drawbridge.
The people follow, as Indy leads them into battle!

A huge (and well-choreographed) battle begins, involving pygmies, pirates, birds, gorillas, Nazis, Ewoks, Gungans (no, scratch those last two!) and a private battle between Indy and Gutterbuhg, who has acquired a new mechanical arm, one that shoots bolts of electricity! The Nazis plant a huge pile of dynamite in the city, intending to destroy it, and the fuse is suspense fully lit, put out, and relit a number of times before Indy puts it out, seconds from disaster, with his bullwhip. Gutterbuhg is finally tricked into electrocuting himself on a lake (shades of the Bond villain Oddjob in Goldfinger). Then Indy goes after the Nazi leader Mephisto. They go back into the arena, and have a fight over the tiger pit which ends with Mephisto falling into it... but not before he has shot Indy in the chest. Indy staggers out, then falls to the ground and - dies!?! 

Outside the battle has ended with the Nazis defeated but many of the pygmies are dead also. Indy's limp body is carried out of the arena, to the grief of everyone present, and the entire city gathers around it. That night an elaborate funeral procession takes place. It doesn't seem right somehow merely to paraphrase an account of Indiana Jones's funeral, so here it is in full:

CLOSE-UP: INDIANA'S BODY.

It is lying in state. Resting on a bamboo stretcher. It is covered with exotic, colorful flowers. CAMERA PULLS BACK. Indy is being carried by several, elaborately dressed pygmies. At the head of a long funeral procession. Betsy, Clare, Scraggy and Kezure march beside Indy's body. They also wear the ceremonial funeral flowers. Behind them, the body of Bohbala is being carried. And behind the ruler, the bodies of all dead pygmies are being carried by the remaining villagers and Gorillas. It is nighttime. All mourners are carrying flickering candles. At the rear of the procession, a lone pygmy strums an unusual strong instrument. This creates a haunting melody.

CAMERA PULLS BACK TO A LONG SHOT, as we see the procession move through the city. The hundreds of flickering candles against the dark night sky create a beautiful image. The procession arrives at a large stone wall. It appears to be a dead end. Tyki walks to the wall.

He falls to his knees and begins to chant. Clare, Betsy, Scraggy and Kezure watch. There is a small rumble. A hairline crack begins to form in the mountain. As if it were being drawn by an invisible hand, the crack forms a large door in the wall. The door slowly opens. An almost blinding white light emanates from inside. Tyki enters. The procession follows.

All mythical heroes, from Odysseus onwards (and probably before), have this in common; they visit the underworld, the lands of the dead. Indiana Jones is certainly a mythical hero, from his outfit (which is basically American national costume - the cowboy outfit) to the quests which he undertakes, to defeat evil and increase his tribe's knowledge of the world and its powers, both natural and supernatural. The Star Wars saga will be deficient as a modern mythology if Anakin Skywalker does not perform a similar journey in Episodes 2 or 3. It is a shame that Monkey King was never filmed, so that Indy could perform a journey made by heroic archetypes since the dawn of storytelling. Maybe Indy 4...? 

Anyway, on to the important stuff; just how does Indy manage to get out of being dead? Tune in next week... no, I wouldn't be so cruel. The funeral procession enters the blinding light and ascends a twisting stone staircase, spiraling upward where the light becomes brighter and brighter. At the top there is another doorway and the procession goes through it to enter the Garden of Immortal Peaches. This is a 'breathtakingly beautiful forest of never ending luscious green trees, filled with succulent, ripe peaches', a magical and intense place, where the sun shines even in the middle of the night. They proceed to a clearing where the bodies, including those of Indy and Bohbala, are placed in freshly dug graves. Before them is a huge tree which has a small, glass encased tomb built into its side, and inside it is a tiny skeleton, no more than four feet tall, adorned with a lion skinned robe and a golden crown. In its hand is an elaborate staff, the 'Golden Hooped Rod' of legend.

The pygmies begin to lower the bodies into the ground and at that moment there is a rumbling sound and a tremor; a howling wind fills the Garden, and the tomb of Sun Wu-Kung glows with a bright light. The glass surrounding the tomb suddenly shatters, and, unbelievably, the skeleton steps out of the tomb. It screeches and an 'ectoplasmic green smoke' leaves its fingers, traveling over the human's heads to the gorilla's, and encircling their bodies, then lifting them in to the air, carrying them towards the skeleton... and as they draw close, the gorilla's shrink, becoming tiny hair like substances that attach themselves to the skeleton's body, then become individual hairs, until finally the skeleton is transformed into Sun Wu-Kung! He is half-human, half-monkey, with a 'devilish, but charming smile'... a 'heavenly figure'. He shouts up into the heavens:

SUN WU KUNG
We cannot bury these men!... This is a garden of life...
Not of death!...

And he demands that Heaven 'returns their souls'. A few moments pass, then a thick white cloud eclipses the sun, allowing only a single ray of light to shine on one of the peach trees... Peaches fly from its boughs into the graves, and as each fruit hits the dead men it bursts and they begin to wake and climb out of their graves, their wounds healed, their lives restored. Indy too stands, completely bewildered, and his friends rush to embrace him. He speaks with the Monkey King, who, to his astonishment, knows his name - then tells Indy that he has been following his career from the heavens. He thanks him for saving his city, and as a sign of appreciation gives him his Golden Hooped Rod, a priceless artifact, and more - as we discover at the very end of the film. With his city safe, the soul of the Monkey-King returns to the heavens, while his body, now just a skeleton again, returns to its tomb. Meanwhile Kezure the Pirate King has been busily stuffing his pockets with peaches...

The following morning Indy and his companions leave the city, but on the mountain path down Kezure double crosses them - he and his men steal the Golden Hooped Rod and are about to kill Indy when Kezure, beginning to eat one of the peaches, suffers the same fate as Donovan would in Last Crusade, ageing rapidly until he crumbles to dust. His men run off. As Indy explains, the peaches promise immortality, but only to those who are pure of heart.

At Mozambique Indy catches a liner home, alone; romantically he has no luck at all in this script. But he leaves the Golden Hooped rod behind on the dock side! Clare takes it back with her for safe keeping. That night we see the crate holding the Golden Hooped Rod in her room; the box's nails begin to turn as if being twisted by invisible hands and drop to the floor. In a triumphant re-modeling of the scene in Raiders where the Nazi insignia on the side of the Ark crate is burned off, the crate opens and the Golden Hooped Rod, shimmering in the moonlight, emerges from the box transformed into a Golden Eagle! It flies out through the window as Clare continues to sleep peacefully. As Indy's liner sails across the wide ocean the Golden Eagle flies in through his cabin porthole, and the sleeping Indy wakes just as the Golden Eagle transforms itself back into the Golden Hooped Rod:

The rod leans against the wall. The moonlight reflects the rod, shining into Indiana's eyes. Indy wakes. He sits up and sees the Golden Hooped Rod. At first, he is shocked. He touches the rod... then comes upon a realization. The creaky voice of Sun Wu Kung fills the soundtrack.

SUN WU KUNG (V.O.)
The Golden Hooped Rod will be a
faithful friend. It is capable of
one hundred transformations... and
will always remain by your side.

Indy stands. He turns and looks out of the porthole. A dreamy... satisfied smile covers Indy's face, as he stares at the stars above. SOUND TRACK MUSIC SOARS. CAMERA PULLS BACK, TO EXTREMELY
LONG SHOT of the ship sailing across the ocean.

THE END

What do we make of the climax in the Garden and the script as a whole? The scenes in the Garden are as audacious in their own way as the opening of the Ark was in Raiders of the Lost Ark, but with a positive rather than destructive force emerging into the 'real world'. Certainly there has been nothing like them anywhere else, and if the reader finds them laughable, the script takes itself seriously. There is no self-parody here. The whole scene is fantastic, but it requires no more suspension of disbelief then anything else in the Indiana Jones series. The only difference is that it's slower paced than the pyrotechnics at the end of the Raiders, (it literally borrows its pace from a funeral procession) and for this reason perhaps may not have worked - audiences would have had too much time to reflect upon the scene. But then, the ending of the Last Crusade slows down considerably too, once Indy finds the Grail, although at least there we have the tension of the threat from Donovan and the life ebbing out of Indy's dad.

Why wasn't Monkey King made? There were a number of reasons why the script was never produced, aside from the obvious ones, like it would have cost $150 million and been over three hours long. The first and most important is the response of critics towards Temple of Doom, many of whom accused it of racial stereotyping, being patronizing towards other races and creeds, and promoting a colonial mentality. I mentioned something about this in the chapter of this article devoted to Temple of Doom, and will say more in the final chapter, where I propose to appear as defense counsel for Indy against all his critics, ever!!! Leaving aside the validity of the criticisms, Spielberg and Lucas knew that Indy 3 could not show foreigners (unless they were Europeans) as being in any way evil, stupid, or primitive. And to be fair, parts of the script are fairly patronizing towards Africans, in particular through the 'childlike' Scraggy. But even rewritten, the script simply could not contain 'native peoples' in it of any kind, so sensitive had critics become to stereotyping. Any criticism of Indy 3 on similar grounds to the criticism leveled at Temple of Doom would have been extremely damaging to Lucas and Spielberg personally. Spielberg was particularly cautious as he had just embarked on a new career of making 'grown-up' pictures, like The Color Purple, whose central theme is racial injustice. Spielberg's new found 'grown-up' side was the other major reason why the script was never made. As he said when the Last Crusade was released:

"It [the Monkey King script] was upbeat and full of the same nostalgia that we tapped into in Raiders of the Lost Ark - so in that sense Chris [Columbus] was right on the money. But I don't think any of us wanted to go to Africa for four months and try to get Indy to ride a rhinoceros in a multi-vehicular chase... Once I got into the script, I began to feel very old - too old to direct it, anyway." 

At this point in his career Spielberg had convinced himself that to be taken seriously as a filmmaker, by his peers (and more importantly, the Oscar Academy) he had to make the kind of film that generally won Oscars - stirring, usually historical pictures with issue-led narratives, about men and women triumphing over something. He handed the making of 'popcorn' entertainment films over to directors like Joe Dante and Robert Zemeckis, and between 1985 and 1987 concentrated on making 'grown-up' films. Spielberg's cinematic master, Hitchcock, had taken an 'inferior' cinematic genre, the thriller, and turned it into a subtle, complex form capable of harboring great psychological insight. Spielberg did not try to do anything similar with the kind of film he was known for making, but instead tried to give the critics what he thought they wanted. Not until the early 1990's did he realize that an exploitative costume drama like Schindler's List could be made alongside a film like Jurassic Park, rich in ambiguity and the interplay of ideas.

After the Columbus script had been placed on the shelf, Lucas began to look at a story involving the Holy Grail. One problem was that the Holy Grail, the Cup of Christ, is essentially a mythological object, and no one had actually defined what it does before. Lucas added the notion of immortality, prompted by the Columbus script, and thus giving the Nazis a particular reason to go after it, just as they had gone after the Lost Ark. He also invented the notion that a sip from the 'false Grail' would age the drinker into dust (again, borrowed from Kezure's fate in the Monkey King script).

Having established an object for Indy to chase, the bad guys were quickly decided upon. They had to be the Nazis, because the film had to avoid casting any non-European ethnic grouping in a negative light. For settings, Lucas went back to a desert environment, the Republic of Hatay, which was safely reminiscent of Raiders. Lucas thrashed out a script with Spielberg collaborator Menno Meyjes which established the basic storyline, reusing a number of action sequences from the Columbus script (although these had probably been Lucas's idea in the first place). A final draft screenplay was then written by Jeffrey Boam, with Meyjes receiving a story credit.

Both Spielberg and Lucas take credit for the notion of having Indy search for his father in the film. Spielberg makes contradictory statements about it, saying on the one hand that the first draft featured Indy's father being rescued only at the very end of the script, and that he insisted Indy's father appear half-way through. On the other hand he claims to have come up with the whole idea in the first place - in which case why did he not have Indy's father appear earlier in the first draft? Jeffrey Boam claimed the idea was Lucas's , saying that the idea of a 'search for a father' is much more characteristic of Lucas's work than Spielberg's. However, this isn't really true; one of the main themes in, for example, E.T. is that of the absent father. The truth is probably that while Lucas came up with the idea, Spielberg really developed it. It is obvious from what he said on the subject that the idea of Indy searching for his father really caught his imagination:

"I did not want Indy on a headlong pursuit without a subplot that was almost stronger than the actual quest itself. So I came up with the father-son story because the Grail is symbolic of finding the truth in one's life - the truth we are always looking for, consciously or unconsciously. For me that was represented by Indy and Henry meeting. In this context, the Grail made sense to me. They actually go after the Holy Grail, but their quest is also symbolic of their search for each other."

Fatherhood was very much on Spielberg's mind at that time. Himself the product of a broken home, his own marriage had broken up, affecting his children. The Last Crusade gave Spielberg the perfect opportunity to take a break from 'serious filmmaking', but at the same time explore important personal issues. 

Last Crusade had a mixed response from fans. Some loved it (how can you not love Sean Connery?) and viewed as a triumphant climax to the series. Others found it uninspiring and too jokey, with one (me) declaring that Last Crusade looked like it had been written by Steven Spielberg and directed by Jeffrey Boam... Whatever the response, one thing was for certain - Last Crusade would positively, definitely be the last Indy, with Lucas declaring that he had run out of ideas, and Spielberg saying it was time to move on.

Will Indy ever return? What is his most incredible adventure - fighting men from Mars, or getting married? And just where might Indy 4 take him? Find out in the final shattering chapter of Raiders of the Lost Drafts!!

Continue to Chapter 5 >>