by David Hughes
On 11 November 1994, five years after The Last Crusade and a few weeks after Harrison Ford set the Indy IV ball rolling at the Venice Film Festival, a story appeared in UK tabloid The Daily Mail claiming that Speed star Sandra Bullock would play Indy’s “sparky” sidekick in the fourth installment of the franchise, entitled Indiana Jones and the Lost Continent. According to the article, which appeared in Baz Bamigboye’s column under the headline “From Speed to Ford Escort”, The Lost Continent begins as one of Indy’s students (Bullock) uncovers an ancient artefact which she believes holds a clue to the whereabouts of the lost continent of Atlantis. “When Jones gets wind of his student’s find, he prepares to set off on one last quest,” the story continued. “However, his plans are scuppered since the girl refuses to allow him to go along without her. The lost continent and its otherworldly inhabitants are ultimately discovered in an air pocket beneath the ocean bed, just as the nuclear testing begins on Bikini Atoll, threatening the lost tribe of Atlantis with total extinction.”
Nothing further surfaced with regard to this potential storyline — which bore a passing resemblance to a 1992 computer game, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis — and it has since been revealed as the work of a highly-paid hoaxer who bamboozled Bamigboye into thinking it was the real deal. “Baz Bamigboye was hungry for stories at the time,” admits the story’s anonymous source. “I’d broken a story about Pierce Brosnan being cast as James Bond, and ever since then, Baz had been hounding me for stories. So finally, I gave him one — mainly to prove to my mum that most of the stories in the Mail are made up.”
On 21 March 1995, Variety reported that a fourth installment was unlikely to happen any time soon: “While Nazis and various cultists couldn’t stop Indy, the lack of a suitable script has pushed back the fourth installment in the series for the time being. Ford, director Steven Spielberg and producer George Lucas hoped to make the Indy pic the actor’s next project after Sabrina for Sydney Pollack. They turned loose screenwriter Jeb Stuart on a story conceived by Lucas. Stuart... has just turned in his second draft. Early indications are more work is needed [on the script].” Around the same time, The Last Crusade screenwriter Jeffrey Boam privately admitted to having been asked to write a script, with subsequent rumours suggesting that the 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 — possibly both. Although this was the first indication that aliens might have something to do with the fourth film, no story details were given when the Lucasfilm Fan Club confirmed to its members that Boam, who wrote several Indiana Jones-style set pieces into his script for The Phantom, was working on a story that Lucas reportedly liked.
Besides, Spielberg — who had already explored extra-terrestrials in Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T. — was cooling on the idea of Indy vs aliens. “I said, ‘George, I don’t want to do any more aliens.’ But George insisted, he said ‘This’ll be like one of those 1950s B-movies Earth vs The Flying Saucers.’” “It was the idea of taking the genre from the adventure serials of the 1930s to the science fiction B-pictures of the 1950s,” Lucas explained. “I said if we move the whole thing into the fifties, which would be age-appropriate for Harrison, that would be the cinematic equivalent.” When, in 1994, Roland Emmerich’s Independence Day, an action-adventure spectacle based around an alien invasion, became a global success, Spielberg felt that the idea of ‘Indy vs The Flying Saucers’ had run out of mileage. “I called George up and said, ‘Hey this movie’s really a lot of fun, it’s brilliantly directed by Roland Emmerich, it’s just got everything you want in a movie, it’s got humour, it’s got drama. We can’t do aliens!’” Lucas agreed — up to a point. “I thought, maybe I can do ‘ancient civilizations developed by aliens’ without flying saucers, and see if that might work,” he said, alluding to ground covered in Erich von Däniken’s 1971 bestseller Chariots of the Gods, and later by Emmerich’s StarGate. Thus, the extra-terrestrials of early Indy IV treatments became “inter-dimensional beings” that merely looked like aliens, and flew in what looked suspiciously like spacecraft — one of which crashed in Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947.
On 29 May 1996, a script entitled Indiana Jones and the Sons of Darkness and credited to Boam (from a story by George Lucas) appeared on the Internet, supposedly posted by a courier who claimed to have lifted it from Lucasfilm’s offices in San Francisco. The script concerned a race by Indy (complete with wife and daughter) to beat the Russians to the remnants of Noah’s Ark — a Judeo-Christian artefact which fit nicely into the pattern (Ark of the Covenant, Holy Grail) of previous Indy films, but which had already been the focus of a Lucasfilm-approved novel, Indiana Jones and the Genesis Deluge, set twenty years before (and, therefore, canonically incompatible with) the events of the script. A day after its initial posting, the script was removed from the site at the specific request of Lucasfilm Ltd — an occurrence that did nothing to stem the tide of conspiracy theories, since the company would have wanted the script removed whether it was genuine or not. Nevertheless, after a week of frenzied newsgroup activity, guesswork and/or detective work on behalf of Indy fans, a Lucasfilm spokesperson confirmed to America Online that the script was a work of copyright-violating fan fiction. It would be a further four months before the true story behind the fake script emerged, when ambitious Indy fan and aspiring screenwriter Robert Smith owned up to writing the bogus Sons of Darkness script and posting it to the Internet, having failed to submit it to Lucasfilm through legitimate channels.
Talking to Charles Deemer of the Internet Screenwriters Network, Smith admitted that he had sent the 166-page script to an agency that initially promised to submit it to Lucasfilm, but then went back on its word. Smith got no further when he called to plead his case to Lucasfilm itself — unsurprising, since no legitimate production company accepts unsolicited material. “About a year later it occurred to me to try and get Lucasfilm’s attention by posting my Indy script on the Internet,” Smith continued. “I knew I’d have to take a radical approach, so I concocted a courier theft story and posted it to all the film discussion groups. In a matter of days the site ‘hit’ counter jumped from 0 to 300 and snowballed from there on.” A week later, Smith received his first ‘cease and desist’ order by e-mail. “I got Lucasfilm’s attention, but I felt it wasn’t enough. So with the help of some brave friends of mine, we moved the script to a new site and set up a comments page where readers of the script could leave their two cents’ worth. At the same time, the Harrison Ford and Steven Spielberg news groups were all abuzz with chatter of the stolen script posted on the net.”
Fan feedback was mixed, regardless of whether the commentators believed the script to be genuine or bogus. “I was paid the ultimate compliment by those fans who believed the script was the real McCoy,” added Smith. “I thank them sincerely. And to the naysayers I bow to your abilities at sniffing out a forgery.” Lucasfilm was not prepared to sit back and watch its copyright violated, however. “Four ‘cease and desist’ orders later I pulled the plug and shut down,” Smith explained. “At that point, I felt I’d rocked the boat sufficiently enough that Lucasfilm had no choice but to deal with me.” They did: by sending the police round to his friend’s workplace. “To make a long story short, my friend ratted me out and I was obliged to give the constable a call... I assured the constable that I wouldn’t do anything like that again (wink) and hung up with the constable’s promise that he’d put in a good word for me at Lucasfilm.” Smith concluded by apologising for his actions, dissuading anyone else from emulating them, and thanking Lucasfilm for its tolerance. “My Internet fugitive days are over,” he said. “In my letters to Lucasfilm I apologised and explained that my actions weren’t malicious in any way and that I simply wanted someone to read my script. I guess one could chalk it up to the actions of a desperate screenwriter.”
Almost a year passed before any further mention of Indy IV. Then, on 24 March 1997, during an interv
iew with Barbara Walters, Harrison Ford was asked if he would play Indiana Jones again. “In a New York minute,” he replied swiftly. “It’s a question of Steven Spielberg and I finding a slot we have in common.” Two months later — while the ever-reliable London Daily Mail was ‘reporting’ that Indiana Jones and the Sons of Darkness would feature Kevin Costner as Indy’s ‘bad seed’ brother — Spielberg told Time magazine that he expected to direct a fourth Indy movie, but needed to do “a lot between now and then that will frighten me.” In July, during a press conference for Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace, George Lucas went further, stating: “We’re working on a screenplay for [a fourth] Indiana Jones and it’s really now a matter of trying to get Steven and Harrison and all our schedules so that we can actually work on it, because everyone is so busy.”
In October of the same year, archaeologists at the website Ain’t It Cool News unearthed a sacred find: what appeared to be a genuine Indy IV script, labouring under the multiple-choice title “Indiana Jones IV aka Indiana Jones and the Monkey King aka Indiana Jones and the Garden of Life,” and written by Chris Columbus — who wrote Gremlins and The Goonies for Spielberg, and later directed Home Alone, Mrs Doubtfire and the first two Harry Potter films.
The script put Indy, Marcus Brody (Denholm Elliot’s character), an attractive English anthropologist named Dr Clare Clarke, and ‘Scraggy’, a Portuguese guide, on the trail of a legendary Chinese artefact believed to hold the secret of eternal life. “The script had to do with the lost city of Sun Wu-Kung, a stone monkey, a golden hooped staff and ‘The Garden of Immortal Peaches’,” said Harry Knowles, Ain’t It Cool’s redoubtable webmaster. “The only recurring character from the past besides Indy was Brody,” he added, “but [in the story] he has been on the other side for quite some time now. Nazis and evil Chinese Pirates are the bad guys.” Compared to the first three Indy films, he added, Columbus’ script was “by far the most ‘fantastical’ in terms of mysticism and such.” Despite the fact that the script was purportedly dated 10 February 1995, it seemed obvious from the setting (the year 1937) and the theme (immortality) that this was more likely a rejected script for the third installment of the Indiana Jones series, not the fourth.
A few months after the appearance of Columbus’ rejected draft, on 15 January 1998, another website, Dark Horizons, posted what it claimed to be the opening pages of another script, entitled Raiders of the Fallen Empire, which supposedly concerned Indy’s discovery of the Garden of Eden. Although even the title seemed dubious — for the 1999 video release, Raiders of the Lost Ark would be quietly retitled Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark to tie it in with its prequel and sequel, much as Lucas had appended Star Wars with the sobriquet Episode IV: A New Hope — confirmation of the script’s religious theme seemed to come from a respected theologian in Moscow, Idaho, who claimed to have been hired to fact-check a script with this subject matter. The script segment, amounting to just a few pages, was subsequently taken down — not, this time, due to pressure from Lucasfilm, but at the request of the extract’s author, who claimed that the whole thing was a misunderstanding.
In April, Cinescape magazine reported receiving yet another script, entitled Indiana Jones: The Law of One, which dealt with Indy’s pursuit of a powerful ancient device responsible for the destruction of Atlantis. The magazine’s editors judged it “a fake or at the very least a ‘spec’ script”, and a month later, broke the real story in an interview with Star Wars producer Rick McCallum. “We finished the script about three years ago,” he said, presumably referring to Boam’s early draft. “[But] at the time we finished it, Harrison Ford had two years’ worth of commitments, Spielberg was just starting DreamWorks and George Lucas and I were in the middle of Star Wars: Episode I. The plan is that in the next five years, George and I finish Episode II and Episode III of Star Wars and then we will definitely do another Indy,” he added. “Our plan is that viewers can take the forty-four hours we did of the Young Indiana Jones [TV series], where you watch Indy born in 1899, and then you follow him in the movies through the end of the 1950s. We see these movies as a chronicle of the century.”
The same month, Ain’t It Cool claimed that the title Indiana Jones and the Lost Continent was what “they would probably stick with [now that] the ‘Area 51’ story has been dropped in favour of the new one that follows the lines of the lost city of Atlantis.” Ford dismissed such rumours during an appearance on Earvin ‘Magic’ Johnson’s talk show on 9 June 1998. “We just haven’t really settled on a script idea yet,” he said. “Hopefully, something will come along.” A month later, the Chicago Herald-Tribune’s Cindy Pearlman quoted Steven Spielberg as saying “The Indiana Jones 4 hat is halfway on my head,” while Ain’t It Cool went further: “We don’t have a start date for it because we still don’t have a script, but we do have an idea of what type of villain it should be, but it won’t be a Nazi. Everyone’s on board for the picture but don’t look for it for a couple of years.” A few months later, a spokesperson for Paramount Pictures told Empire magazine that the official position was that “there is no official position. They may all be on the verge of signing contracts, but since no public announcement has been made, officially there is no Indiana Jones 4.”
On 2 December 1998, a little over a year after Ain’t It Cool unearthed Chris Columbus’ rejected screenplay, website Indyfan.com published a synopsis of a script entitled Indiana Jones and the Saucer Men from Mars, purportedly written by Jeb Stuart (48 HRS, The Fugitive) from a story by Stuart and Lucas. “The script, labelled as the final draft and dated 1995, involves an alien artefact which continuously changes possession between Indy, Russian baddies, and saucer men [ie, extra-terrestrials],” the report stated.
Indiana Jones and the Saucer Men from Mars opens in Borneo in 1949, as Indy manages to keep a stolen idol from falling into the hands of pirates. Later, he meets a beautiful and brilliant linguist, Dr Elaine McGregor, who hires Indy to join her at a dig site, where she is captured by the same pirates, and rescued by Indy. Elaine and Indy fall in love and decide to get married, but the wedding is interrupted by the arrival of Elaine’s ex-husband, Bolander, who spirits her away to White Sands, New Mexico, where a spacecraft has crash landed, killing its alien occupants. While the Americans and (Communist) Russians engage in a race to discover the secrets of the alien ship’s fuel supply — a stone cylinder covered in hieroglyphics — Indy finds himself at the test site of an atomic bomb, and later on an out of control aircraft which he and Elaine escape as another alien spacecraft appears to retrieve the cylinder.
They subsequently hide out in a hot-wired pickup truck at a desert drive-in movie theatre (showing, for good measure, a cheesy ’50s sci-fi movie), meet Sanskrit-speaking aliens, get arrested, escape, witness Bolander’s incineration by the cylinder and the departure of the aliens, and finally get married, driving off into the sunset with Short Round at the wheel. “Besides being convoluted and unbelievable,” Indyfan.com’s correspondent complained, “the storyline ends in indulgent sappiness, with Indy marrying the lady linguist who accompanied him throughout the adventure. The ceremony is witnessed by Sallah, Marion, Willie, Short Round, and Henry Jones Sr.”
For years, it remained unclear whether or not the Saucer Man from Mars script was genuine. One paragraph of the synopsis, however, appears to prove its veracity. “The Russians, having packed Indy into the trunk of their car, drive out into the desert to a secret rendezvous. They get lost and stop in a town called Boomsburg. They go into the gas station to ask for directions. As they do so, Indy jimmies the trunk and escapes. He checks the houses and finds that they are all fake, full of props and mannequins. Suddenly, the civil defense siren goes off and the Russians bolt for their car, burning rubber. Indy runs into a kitchen and leaps into a 2’ deep crawlspace on the floor. He then pulls a lead-lined refrigerator over top. An A-Bomb goes off, blowing away the two Russians and destroying the town. Somehow, the concrete-lined hole and the fridge protect Indy. A decon team arriv
es, finds him alive and scrub him radiation free.” The fact that this scene, evidently conceived by Lucas, appears in later drafts as well the final film (and Frank Darabont’s subsequent draft, also based on Lucas’ story) — along with the line, “Saucer Men from Mars,” spoken by an incredulous Dr Jones — would appear to confirm that the Stuart script was genuine after all.
Less than a fortnight after the Saucer Men from Mars synopsis leaked, Ain’t It Cool described yet another potential storyline, this time supposedly taken from a treatment an unnamed writer had submitted to Creative Artists Agency. “Indy, working in Egypt, circa 1947, encounters a mysterious Egyptian at the great pyramids. It turns out that he has escaped from Atlantis and needs to prevent the destruction of the Atlanteans. He is to marry the King’s daughter, but his fellow Egyptian has heard of the surface world and wants to raise Atlantis. This second Egyptian is none other than the ancient Pharaoh-God, Ramses. He is now a mummy and plans to destroy the Atlanteans, who are alien in origin, and raise the continent through the triggering of a massive earthquake. Indy finds Atlantis at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean — [apparently] the city was spared because they trapped themselves inside a giant dome. There an Egyptian minority population still thrives. Indy must choose between the rise of the world’s greatest archaeological find and the death of the Atlanteans, or to help preserve the marriage of the Egyptian to his Atlantean love by joining him to defeat Ramses.”
The pseudonymous poster, ‘KABOOM’, was perhaps unaware that the Atlantis theme had been the subject of numerous other rumours over the years, or that Universal was already filming an Egyptian-themed Indiana Jones clone entitled The Mummy. More tellingly, KABOOM’s post was accompanied by the following subjective (not to mention immodest) endorsement of his or her story outline: “As you can see, the story is magnificent, with room to add tremendous conflict and spectacular visuals. Imagine when Indy approaches Atlantis and enters the dazzling city! It also introduces an awesome villain and great supporting characters that we will actually care about their fate! I hope they go with this treatment, it would be awesome.”
