Cracking the Indy IV “Mysteries”

A question for all my fellow screenwriters out there:

How would you have handled Indy IV?

Now that the final story is locked and going into production, let’s speculate. In the first announcement, Lucas said it’s a “character piece” involving “very interesting mysteries.” Hmm…

There are 3 things I think we can safely assume about the new film:

1. Indy will search for artifact(s) that have not been previously reported or rumored.
2. On the other hand, we could still see any number of rumors involving Indy’s personal life, such as him having a daughter or the return of all his ex-girlfriends.
3. He’ll probably have a damn character arc. The bastards.

So here’s the $100,000,000 question:

Had you been given the opportunity to pitch Lucas, how would you approach the final film of an iconic franchise? What would the artifact(s) be? How would you handle Indy’s love life? Who would the villains be? How do you end this franchise?

Of course, you’d have to be familiar with the long history of stories that have already been rejected, and you’d have to prove your worth as a writer by bringing NEW ideas to the table. (Thus, you might want to study up on my Indy IV post) Not only that, you should probably have multiple ideas handy so that if one got shot down, you’d have other ideas in your bag of goodies to bring to the table.

For the sake of our hypothetical discussion, let’s pretend that you are just being asked to pitch Lucas and he isn’t giving any hints about what he’s looking for.

Countless writers have been unable to crack this story. Can you?

I might. I’d have to think about it.

I'll share my thoughts later in another post.

(Disclaimer - this is not a call to write fan fiction. This is just a hypothetical about what your ideas would have been and how you would have pitched the fourth film. This is the kind of discussion that says more about who you are as a writer than anything else.)

If ya like, leave a comment here or write about it on your blog.

-MM