Good Luck, Indy.

Tomorrow marks the first official day of filming, although reports have indicated that they’ve already started. In any case…

Good luck, Indy.

Above is a video of the New Haven casting call, which was fun. You can read accounts of it here.

Thanks to everyone who has sent me links over the last few months. Spoilers don’t bother me, so please keep them coming. (And if you could find a way to send me Darabont’s script, I’d greatly appreciate it.) I’ve avoided blogging about Indy IV news because the point of the blog has always been to talk about the craft of screenwriting. Besides, you can get all the Indy IV news here, and these guys are pretty thorough.

And yet, my most popular article is the Indy 4 post. That little gem gets about 30-50 hits a day. (I sometimes wonder if I’ll ever write a post more popular than that one.) In the comments section of that article, I had a discussion recently with an anonymous person about Drew Babcock, and I’ve come to the conclusion that Drew Babcock never existed and he never interviewed Spielberg and all those rumors about the storyline involving the “Garden of Eden” was absolute bunk.

With respect to my City of Gods post, there is an idea that I seem to have missed. There have been rumors about a storyline involving the Crystal Skull (yawn), which pulls its ideas from Chariots of the Gods? book written in 1968 by Erich von Däniken. He theorized that technology and religion were given to ancient civilizations by aliens, whom the people worshipped as Gods. That might explain why Lucas was quoted as saying, 'We’ll have to go back to that original MacGuffin and take out the offending parts and still use that area of the supernatural to deal with it.'”

A lot has been said lately about aliens and how the opening scene involves Area 51, and how bits of various drafts will be used in the new film, including Darabont’s draft. I’ve come to the conclusion that David Koepp slapped together a script that uses what he thought was the best of all the previous drafts. And he did this rather seamlessly because most of the drafts basically had to do aliens just as we saw in Jeb Stuart’s script. But the idea involving aliens didn’t start with Stuart. It started with Jeffrey Boam way back in 1995. You may recall how Empire reported that Boam’s story concerned “an attempt to foil a Soviet plot to establish a missile base on the moon, or had something to do with the UFO crash at Roswell, New Mexico, or both.” I think the idea involving aliens came directly from Lucas, which Spielberg and Ford didn’t want to do, but Lucas stubbornly held firm to this concept FOR YEARS until Spielberg and Ford eventually agreed.

Yeah, good luck, Indy.