Over the next five days, according to a story conference transcript, the three concocted a swashbuckling archaeologist who fused Humphrey Bogart to James Bond.
Indiana Jones’s narrow escapes from Nazis, boulders, blow darts, poisoned dates, speeding trucks and, of course, snakes, tip a fedora to the cliffhanger serials of the 1930s — the kiddie adventures that shaped his creators — even as they calibrated their nostalgia into a cross-promotional blockbuster that would define Hollywood’s future.
Yet, like Indy’s exploits around the globe, the film’s production history is itself a tale of misadventure, lucky breaks and inspiration.
Even at a mere 300 pounds — mere, that is, relative to 80 tons of genuine granite — the fake behemoth shattered the prop stalagmites in its path and they had to be replaced between each take.
In an article she wrote for The Washington Post that recalled her time on set, the photographer Nancy Moran observed Spielberg moaning that he wanted to go home, while fearing that Lucas, sunburned and exhausted, “will be arriving with his feet in Kleenex boxes soon.” Their suffering excuses the continuity errors in the Well of Souls sequence, where bricks, rocks and even a truck shift restlessly in the frame as though they, too, are anxious for an iced tea by the hotel pool.
Alas, Ford, too, was stricken with dysentery when it came time to shoot an epic sword-versus-whip duel for which Spielberg had budgeted a day and a half of filming, according to the 1996 biography “Spielberg: The Man, the Movies, the Mythology.” Ford asked if they could wrap the scene in an hour.
Apart from a few nips at the calves of the animal handler Steve Edge, who shaved his legs to double as Karen Allen, the snakes — all 6,500 of them — mostly behaved themselves, so much that Spielberg, when anxious, could cradle one in his hands like a rosary.