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A Firsthand look at the Indiana Jones creative process
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In January
of 1978, the two newly crowned kings of Hollywood, George Lucas and Stephen Spielberg met with screenwriter Lawrence Kadsan for a series of meetings over the course of a week to discuss their plans for a adventure film about an archeologist with a bullwhip. The result of those meetings was the fleshing out of all the details that would eventually become the Indiana Jones series.
The meetings were taped and an intern would later type up a transcript of their conversations from which screenwriter 
Lawrence Kadsan (he would eventually become a successful director in his own right) wrote the script that is now Indiana Jones.
Recently, this transcript got posted to the internet and it can be downloaded here.
Reading the transcript is an immensely interesting experience that teaches one exactly how people at the top of their game go about creating a storyline and in this case, one that goes on to become the greatest action movie of all time. Most of the meeting's ideas began with Lucas who came into the room with a draft of the storyline to bounce off the other two.
One thing this transcript teaches someone is that planning out a movie is not easy. The three looked at each plot point from every angle taking into account how each event in the story would impact the believability and likeability of the characters and how each detail would maintain the level of suspense throughout.
The three started out with the model of the main character and how exactly they wanted their hero. Interestingly enough to define what they wanted out of their main hero, they had to define what he wasn't in relationship to iconic heroes in movie history. Spielberg and Lucas discussed Clint Eastwood's character in Sergio Leone's "Man with No Name" trilogy and James Bond as role models except for the fact that they wanted to make their hero more realistic and brainier. They also wanted him to have the look of Humphrey Bogart in The Treausre of the Sierra Madre
(see below).
In fact, the trio reference everything from the Maltese Falcon to Akira Kurosawa to Gone with the Wind, to Flash Gordon Adventures and back in discussing what they want for the film. George Lucas and Stephen Spielberg, along with Rob Altman, Woody Allen, Francis Ford Copolla, Martin Scorsesee and Billy Friedkin were part of a generation of film school brats who knew a lot of film history and incorporated that knowledge in their work. While I was aware that they had a good working history of all the films that came before them, I was surprised to the sheer extent through which they communicated with each other purely by talking about films (as in "I want a little bit of film X in this scene, but I want the climax to occur like Film Y with a villain that you might find in the films of director Z").
George Lucas also drew inspiration from history. The co-creator of the Indiana Jones story (the person who drafted the Indiana Jones storyline alongside George Lucas) Philip Kaufman, researched that Hitler had a certain obsession with archeological artifacts and felt that by securing the spear that killed Jesus from some Czechoslovakian excavation site that it would give his army power and Lucas was adamant about using that.
If anything, the script made me aware of how uniquely talented George Lucas once was when he envisioned the ideas for Star Wars and Indiana Jones. Never before or since has a blockbuster film successfully channelled so many historical and filmic references into such a massively entertaining product. For someone who came up with two such original concepts and created excellent film out of them, it is a shame that he hasn't branched out into anything new over the last 30 years.
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