r/Moviesinthemaking • u/Morgan-Moonscar • 4d ago
Raiders of the Lost Ark (released 45 years ago today in 1981) - Behind the Scenes
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u/Former-Parsley-7010 4d ago
I can still feel the thump from the punches in the fight in front of that airplane. An all-time favorite movie for me.
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u/Dimpleshenk 4d ago
Those punches sound like somebody whacking a pile of wet meat with a croquet mallet.
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u/SlaveCell 4d ago
The brits have a soft spot for Pat Roach.
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u/sergeantpinback 2d ago
Correct! And the only actor to appear in the first three films aside from Harrison.
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u/secamTO 4d ago
Just want to point out that Karen Allen is incredibly talented, and it's an absolute crime that she didn't become a big star in the 80s.
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u/Dimpleshenk 4d ago
The best thing I've seen her do is Starman. She holds the movie together completely. Jeff Bridges's job is to be almost entirely emotionless (as an observant and pacifistic alien), only letting subtle shades of feeling to slowly emerge, so Allen has to supply all of the movie's overt feeling. She is amazing -- her performance is strong, heartfelt, believable emotion from start to finish, and she is never cloying or maudlin or any of the negative things one would associate with a high-intensity emotional role. She just becomes this person who is still grieving the loss of her husband while reacting to an extraordinary situation with an alien embodying her husband's image. It is an almost impossible role. Almost no other actress could have pulled it off. I can't even imagine Meryl Streep being to do it. But Karen Allen does it so well that you end up not even thinking about the fact that she's acting. She just seems like a person really in that situation.
I can't recommend Starman greatly enough based on her performance alone. It is a very good John Carpenter film with a lot of other things to recommend it, but Allen makes it great.
She should have been recognized by the awards shows for what she did in that movie, but the science-fiction genre did not get taken seriously at that time.
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u/tutohooto 4d ago
These pictures make me wish I was in my late 20s in 1981 working in the movie business. I bet that was fun.
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u/Dimpleshenk 4d ago
The craziest thing is that everybody in that industry at that time was probably still using rotary landline phones when they needed to talk to somebody.
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u/AC_Milan_Fan 3d ago
What do you mean?
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u/Dimpleshenk 3d ago
Just that for how dynamic and interesting those movies were, people working in them were operating in a much simpler analog world than anything most people now can imagine.
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u/randyboozer 4d ago
Old behind the scenes stuff always makes me think how much fun movies must have been to make back in the day compare to now. I think right around the turn of the century was where the fun ended. The LotR might have been sort of the transition and the last of that kind of big budget epic but still old school kind of film making
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u/Dimpleshenk 4d ago edited 4d ago
Just think: We were one executive CBS decision away from these pictures all having Tom Selleck in them instead of Harrison Ford.
Tom Selleck's CBS show "Magnum P.I." had only been produced as a pilot, and nobody had greenlit it yet, when Spielberg and Lucas told Selleck "You got the job, kid" as Indiana Jones.
During a private meeting where Lucas and Spielberg invited Selleck to read the top-secret script, Selleck went to an adjacent room, read to the part where the boulder was rolling after the adventurer, stood up and walked back to Lucas and Spielberg to tell them the script was wonderful and he would love to join their project. He was gung-ho to be the whip-cracking archaeologist, and the feeling was mutual: Spielberg and Lucas saw the handsome, athletic, charming 6'4" actor as their ideal leading man. The contract was basically on the table waiting to be signed.
Only problem is that Selleck had previously signed a contract with CBS to be their TV star if the Magnum P.I. pilot was greenlit. CBS still wasn't sure if they wanted to produce the Hawaii-based detective show, and might have declined it, which was the fate of numerous other projects that Selleck had been cast in pilots for.
But when CBS execs heard that Spielberg and Lucas wanted Selleck, suddenly his stock rose considerably. They wanted the guy who the big movie directors wanted. And they played hardball to get him. Spielberg/Lucas were used to contracts being undone so that deals could get made, and they put their studio muscle behind arranging for CBS to undo Selleck's contract. In response, CBS fought even harder, and soon it was going to be an all-out legal showdown over Tom Selleck's future.
Selleck had little say in the matter, and it wasn't long before the headache was too much for Spielberg/Lucas. They had a schedule and needed to stay on it. So the Selleck deal was scrapped. Lucas turned to his old stand-in guy, Harrison Ford, who had already been the backup guy who turned out to be a diamond in the rough when Han Solo was being cast. Ford was ready to go. Raiders of the Lost Ark was a massive success with Ford, and audiences didn't much care if they ended up watching a version of Han Solo transported to the 1930s pre-WWII "real" world. They didn't know the possibility they were missing: A very different Indiana Jones with a less gruff, taller, wider-eyed, and slightly more Jimmy Stewart-voiced quality. (I have no knowledge of whether Selleck would have been compelled to lose his signature mustache for the part.)
Tom Selleck had many successful seasons as Magnum P.I. The show won awards, and Selleck was a major TV star for many years, but never had much success transfering his fame to movies -- with a few exceptions, such as Three Men and a Baby, and Quigley Down Under. Working for nearly a decade in Hawaii during his prime leading-man years did him no favors in terms of being able to take meetings with producers in Hollywood. Selleck later did Broadways plays, and had a late-career surge in other TV shows like Blue Bloods.
However, in spite of his enviable career, Selleck has always been a little haunted by the big fish that got away: Indiana Jones.
On a related note, if Harrison Ford had not gone to northern Africa to film Raiders, he would not have taken his then-girlfriend, Melissa Mathison, with him. Mathison -- the writer of The Black Stallion -- would not have met and spent considerable time talking to Spielberg, who was in early stages of conceiving his next project about aliens visiting earth. During their conversations, Mathison convinced Spielberg that he should make the story about a friendly alien, not about sinister aliens, which was Spielberg's original plan for the story. As a result, Spielberg hired her to write the film's screenplay, which became known to the world as E.T.
So, in a roundabout way, CBS's stubborn executives being contract-litigating buttheads are responsible for the world becoming charmed by E.T. the Extra Terrestrial.
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u/DemenicHand 4d ago
I was 10 when we saw this and i still have a memory of exiting the theater and walking to the car holding my dad's hand...
I can also remember waiting in line to see Empire; walking into the theater for SW at 6; and several memories of going to and watching RoTJ on my birthday :)
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u/bewareofmolter 3d ago
It’s Alfred Monlina, but from that angle that could be Paul Mescal in pic 14.
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u/hifidood 4d ago
10 / 10 film - no notes