Chapter 8, Part 2 - Harrison Ford: Indiana Jones is back

WHEN THE SHOOTING STARTS

Filming on Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom began on 18th April 1983 on location in Sri Lanka and in Macao. When the Chinese sequence was safely in the can, the Macao unit joined the crew in Kandy and, with the two crews working side by side, the location work was wrapped in three weeks. From that lush setting, the cast and crew came back to earth with a bump, spending the next twelve weeks toiling through the British summer at EMI’s Elstree Studios at Borehamwood, just outside London. 

Director Spielberg and his two principal actors arrive at
London's Heathrow Airport for the studio shooting 
of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.

Additional location scenes were filmed in Northern California in the United States, where Hamilton Air Force Base stood in for Shanghai Airport and the Tuolomne River played the part of the Ganges. Principal photography finished on September 8 1983 without incident, barring one mishap, though the special effects work would continue up until March 1984.

Like Raiders before it Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom is packed to overflowing with complex and dangerous stunt work. The ‘one mishap’ very nearly shuttered production on the movie when Harrison Ford fell from an elephant and aggravated an old back injury – with a third of the picture still to be completed! Ford was jetted back to Los Angeles to undergo emergency laser surgery and filming was halted while the star recuperated. 

Riding an elephant (and falling from one) are all in a day's
work for the average action movie star.

When he returned to the set, he found the most strenuous stunts – including his battle with the henchmen of Mola Ram and his climactic fight on the rickety rope bridge – were still before him. Fortunately for Ford, his doctors had patched him up perfectly and filming resumed without a hitch. Ford, as usual, was dismissive about the incident.

‘I’m now as fit as a fiddle,’ he said, ‘but I could never have done it without Vic Armstrong. Guys like Vic are invisible. They never get any credit. Nobody ever interviews them.’

Armstrong had worked with Ford several times before, on Raiders of the Lost Ark, Blade Runner and Return of the Jedi, doubling for Ford when the going got too rough. Armstrong was philosophical about Ford's remarks.

‘We have to be invisible,’ he conceded, ‘if people are going to believe in the film.’

Peas in a pod ... Vic Armstrong (left!) was often mistaken
for Harrison Ford on set

Maybe ‘invisible’ isn’t the right word, for Armstrong bears a striking resemblance to Harrison Ford. While working on the set of Raiders, so many people mistook Armstrong for Ford that it came to be something of a running gag. But there’s more to doubling for an actor than just physical resemblance. Of Ford, Armstrong said, ‘He’s a natural athlete and he wants to do it all. I say to him, “H, we can’t afford to get you smashed up in this scene because we’ve got a whole crew that needs to make a living.” And he says, “Yeah, you’re right,” and does the scene anyway. He could have made a great stunt man himself.’

THAT’S A WRAP!

When Steven Spielberg called ‘Cut!’ for the last time on 8th September 1983, it’s unlikely that he would have realised just how literally that order could be taken. As with Raiders, certain scenes had been cut from the screenplay before and during shooting, obviously with Spielberg’s blessing, but when Temple of Doom was presented to the censors, the word ‘cut’ began to take on sinister overtones.

On the plus side, the scenes that had been excised from Raiders had been modified and incorporated into Temple of Doom.

‘The idea of the plane crash and then jumping out of the door in a life raft had, at one time, been in the original,’ confirmed Huyck.

‘The other thing was the mine car,’ added Katz. ‘George had thought of the mine car race for Raiders. But I don’t know how it was written or what happened to it. He wanted a roller coaster ride.’ And he got one!

Though much of the mine-car roller coaster scene was shot
with miniatures, some of it was filmed full size,
with Harrison Ford and Ke Huy Quan riding the truck.

So there was every reason to believe, then, that scenes cut from Temple of Doom could find their way into some future Indiana Jones movie. Like the scene in which Kate Capshaw, as Willie, was to wrestle a boa constrictor.

‘We had a snake scene that Kate wouldn’t do,’ explained Huyck. ‘They had a boa constrictor and they had trained it. For weeks in advance, she had been trying to psyche herself up for this. She said she touched it and, the first time, it sort of ... undulated. And she thought she was going to die. She started sweating. Then they tried to put it on her shoulders to show her what it would be like, and she just freaked out. Steven (Spielberg) was sort of ashen and said, “That’s all right.”’

‘It was a very funny scene,’ added Katz, ‘because there she is, being strangled by a snake, and Indy is just helplessly standing there!’

‘So they didn’t do it,’ continued Huyck. ‘Kate just couldn’t do it. That’s when Steve said, “Okay, if you’re not going to do this, there’s no way you’re not going to do the bug scene.”’

But Lucas, never one to waste a good idea, did recycle the sequence for Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, almost twenty-five years later.

Another cut, involving the child Maharajah, ended up causing the film to be a little less clear than it should have been. It comes as something of a surprise to audiences to discover, late in the film, that the young monarch is under the control of the Thuggees. A couple of explanatory scenes had been written, but had never been filmed. During the banquet sequence, the prime minister Chattar Lal is seen talking to the shadowy figure of Mola Ram in the gardens outside the Palace. Later, Indy is teaching the young Maharajah how to use his whip. When the child comes to try it himself, he gets it wrong and hurts himself. Short Round laughs and a scuffle follows. During the scrap, Short Round sees the Maharajah’s eyes glow red, and understands something weird is going on. Presumably these scenes were taken out, sacrificing clarity for pace, as the dinner sequence was long in itself.

A far different kettle of cuts was the chunk of Temple of Doom hacked out by overzealous censors in their never-ending quest to protect those who share their sensitive dispositions, but not their incorruptibility. The film was given a PG rating for its American release and immediately came under fire from journalists and parents’ associations across the country.

‘The movie,’ said The New York Times, ‘in addition to being endearingly disgusting, is violent in ways that may scare the wits out of some young patrons.’

Parents who had taken their young children to early preview screenings said their offspring were particularly disturbed by the scene in which Mola Ram tears the still-beating heart from the chest of a living sacrifice victim and the victim’s subsequent immersion in boiling lava. The PG rating was called into question in some quarters, and the distributing company, Paramount, added a warning line to the newspaper ads, which read: ‘This film may be too intense for younger children’.

OK, this probably is a bit intense for eight year olds ...

In the UK the British Board of Film Censors took a harder line. Numerous changes were requested from Paramount before the BBFC would grant the picture the desired PG rating. Secretary of the Board, James Ferman, felt that the US version of the movie couldn’t even get a fifteen rating under the British system. To obtain a fifteen, the scene in which ‘the slow burning of a man in absolute agony’ is shown would have to go. Faced with the threat of an eighteen certificate, Paramount decided to make cuts to the British release print. Yet, even in this toned down version, the film drew some flak for its violence. The late Alexander Walker, admittedly not noted for his tolerance towards youth-oriented movies, dismissed the picture as ‘Indiana Jones meets the Marquis de Sade.’

Harrison Ford took such criticisms in his stride. ‘This is a completely moral tale,’ said the actor, ‘and in order to have a moral resolve, evil must be seen to inflict pain. The end of the movie is proof of the viability of goodness.’

... and, of course, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom does
provide the statutory Happy Ending.

Still, in spite of all the fuss, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom was yet another in a long line of box office records for George Lucas, Steven Spielberg and Harrison Ford. No matter what the critics and the censors thought, the cinema-going public gave the movie the best vote of confidence they knew how. Between them, they spent enough ticket money to propel Temple of Doom to the top end of the movie charts for 1984, putting it in the number three slot, just a whisker behind Ghostbusters and Beverley Hills Cop in the battle for the number one slot and raising it to number 88 in the all-time box-office champs list with a take of almost $180 million in the US and $333 million worldwide. In addition, the American Academy nominated the film in the category of Best Score and awarded the movie an Oscar for Best Special Effects. And no one can argue with that kind of success.

And while the critics and the audiences were chewing over Temple of Doom, Ford was moving onto another of his ‘small time’ films, Witness. ‘It’s a calculated departure,’ stated Ford. ‘This movie is the story of an Amish woman and a Philadelphia cop and the intelligence of the script gives me some wonderful cloth to cut.’

And despite their earlier denials, Spielberg announced in the early part of 1984 that he would be directing the third Indiana Jones film, and Ford, too, had been signed for the project. ‘Playing Indy,’ said Ford, ‘is just a fun thing to do!’

WHAT NEXT FOR THE HARRISON FORD STORY?

Where I go next with this blog is something I have to think about. My original plan was to put the whole of The Harrison Ford Story online. In my day job, I manage websites and in that arena, the conventional wisdom is that no one wants to read extended chunks of text on a screen. We all find it difficult and we all read far slower from a screen than we do from the printed page. And The Harrison Ford Story can be bought in its printed form very inexpensively online from Amazon.co.uk or from any number of online retailers.

So I'm probably doing everyone, myself included, a disservice by continuing down this route. I have no evidence that anyone is reading this, so I think I'll hold off for a while - unless you tell me differently.

Alan McKenzie, Aug 2013

Chapter 8, Part 1 - Harrison Ford: Indiana Jones is back

From Box Office Draw to Box Office Phenomenon

‘Playing Indy is just a fun thing to do.’ Harrison Ford

Every time a big, successful movie looms over the cinematic horizon, you can bet, sure as sunrise, that the same relentless movie-making machinery will grind into motion.

The first stage of this process is that every bozo with a budget in Film City, USA will think he can reproduce the elements that made the original the success it was. Within months, a flood of dismal, copycat movies will be jostling for space on screens around the world. Then, the makers of the film that started it all will begin work on a sequel – if only to show the rip-off merchants how it should be done.

Which is exactly what happened with Raiders of the Lost Ark.

In rapid succession, film-goers were forced to suffer High Road to China (ironically starring George Lucas’ first choice for Indiana Jones, Tom Selleck), Invaders of the Lost Gold (actually just an Italian horror movie Horror Safari opportunistically retitled), Hunters of the Golden Cobra, a kind of spaghetti Raiders starring ex-model David Warbeck and directed by Italian hack-meister Antonio Marghereti, and Treasure of the Four Crowns, another cheesey Italian effort, this time in 3D. Then, in early 1983, the American screen trade paper Variety announced that work had begun on the follow-up to Raiders of the Lost Ark.

INDIANA JONES AND THE TEMPLE OF ... WHAT?

‘Steven Spielberg is helming Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom on location in Sri Lanka (with lensing in Hong Kong and London’s Elstree Studios to follow) for Lucasfilm Ltd and Paramount, with Harrison Ford reprising his title role characterisation first seen in Raiders of the Lost Ark and Douglas Slocombe back as cinematographer, Kate Capshaw, who had roles in A Little Sex and the current sci-fier Dreamscape is Ford’s new leading lady.’ All of which must have come as something of a surprise to certain American fan magazines which were getting excited about a Raiders sequel called ‘Indiana Jones and the Temple of Death’.

Other than that, information was hard to come by. Not that Ford would have put talking to the press very high on his list of priorities anyway. He had married Melissa Mathison on March 14, 1983, a short time after obtaining his final divorce from Mary and mere weeks before beginning work on Temple of Doom.

What was known was that Lawrence Kasdan, busy with directing his latest film, The Big Chill, had passed on the scripting chores. Lucas had turned to his old friends Gloria Katz and Willard Huyck, who had worked wonders with Lucas’ original draft of American Graffiti.

George Lucas himself had hinted at the contents of further Indiana Jones films around the time Raiders was released and confessed that Indy was his personal favourite of the characters he had created. ‘If I could be a dream figure, I’d be Indy,’ He told American magazine Rolling Stone. ‘It’s not just that I’m interested in archeology or anthropology; a lot of that got into Star Wars too. It’s just that Indy can do anything. He’s a lot of Thirties heroes put together. He’s this renegade archeologist and adventurer, but he’s also a college professor, and he’s got this Cary Grant side, too. In some stories, we’ll see him in top hat and tails. We don’t want to make him Superman – he’s just open to all possibilities. Raiders will be the most action oriented of the Indiana Jones movies – the others should deal more with the Occult.’

OK, maybe not top hat and tails, but definitely another side to
Indiana Jones ... kind of a "Bogart in Casablanca" look

Lucas had no problems convincing director Steven Spielberg to re-sign on the dotted line. ‘I’d hate to let it slip through my fingers into some one else’s hands,’ said Spielberg. ‘I’ll certainly not be involved in the third or the fourth one, but I really want to do the follow-up, because the story is even more spectacular than Raiders.’

Coincidence? I think not ...

Harrison Ford was also expressing his pleasure at the prospect of appearing in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. ‘Of course I’m doing the second Raiders film,’ he said. ‘With great pleasure. And for the first time, I think, in the history of sequels and good directors, Steven Spielberg is going to direct it. So this is very exciting for me. It was one of the best working relationship experiences of my life working with Steven.’

Pleased as he was, Ford was a little disturbed to hear from Starburst’s Tony Crawley that there were a total of five Indiana Jones films on the Lucasfilm launching pad, in varying stages of development. After completing filming on Return of the Jedi, the actor said, ‘Actually, I’m only committed to one film at the moment. That’s another Indiana Jones film. I had hoped to have a year off between the end of Jedi and the beginning of the next Indy film. Five (Indiana Jones films) is okay with me. I mean I really enjoy working on them. And I really enjoy the character very much. And certainly I couldn’t hope for better company than Lucas and Spielberg. But having done one, I don’t think I’d do four more of anything. They must be talking to Roger Moore ... one at a time for me!’

THE WRITE STUFF

Though they were newcomers to the Indiana Jones series, script-writers Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz were no strangers to Lucasfilm Ltd. They had written the screenplay for Lucas’ first big hit, American Graffiti, succeeding in producing a workable script where others, including Lucas, had failed.

Huyck and Katz, a husband and wife team, had met at University in California, worked together at Francis Coppola’s studio where they first encountered Lucas and went on to write Graffiti (1973), Lucky Lady (1975) and French Postcards (1979).

The writers were first contacted about writing Temple of Doom in February, 1982. ‘We flew up to George’s house with Steven Spielberg and spent four days there,’ said Huyck. ‘In the first hour, George told us what he had in mind. Essentially, the story started in Shanghai and had Indy get into a situation in which his plane crashes. Then he’s asked by villagers to recover a sacred stone. That’s the basic outline we were given and we started building from there.’

The events in Temple of Doom take place a year before those in Raiders. Consequently, the new script called for a completely new cast of supporting characters, notably Short Round, Indy’s child companion and ‘bodyguard’ and Willie Scott, a nightclub singer.

‘We sat around trying to come up with names for the new characters,’ explains Huyck, ‘and we said that since George named Indiana Jones after his dog, Steven Spielberg and us should be able to name the characters after our dogs. So Steve named Willie after his dog and we named Short Round after ours. But our dog is named after a Korean child in the Sam Fuller movie The Steel Helmet (1951).’

‘Short Round really came out of the notion that George wanted a child in the movie,’ adds Katz. ‘He wanted a girl, but we didn’t like that idea too much, and Steve didn’t feel comfortable with it, either. So we thought of the idea of Short Round and then of his character. How he participated in the script developed out of the story conferences.’

The script went through three full drafts on its way to completion, with pauses for less major rewrites along the way. The first draft took Huyck and Katz six weeks, ‘because we wanted to get something we could talk about immediately,’ says Huyck. The second draft took another six weeks, with the third draft being completed in a breakneck four weeks of work. From there, the writers were called away to attend to their next project, Best Defense, though throughout the period of shooting on Temple of Doom, they were continually called upon by Steven Spielberg for polishing on the final draft.

FINE TUNING

With the script out of the way, the production crew could turn their attention to the casting of both the supporting actors and the locations. In the September of 1982, the ‘line’ producer of Temple of Doom, Robert Watts, set off for Asia with the movie’s production designer, Elliot Scott.

‘First we went to Hong Kong,’ said Watts, ‘looking for locations for the Chinese sequence. Hong Kong was too modern and we had to rule it out. From there we went to Macao, which hasn’t been developed as much as Hong Kong, and we found locations that would do for Shanghai. Then we went to India, where the bulk of the movie is supposed to take place, and we found most of the locations we wanted. The only problem was that they were miles apart.

‘Carrying on to Sri Lanka, we found, to our surprise, that we could get almost everything we wanted in the environs of one town, Kandy, with the exception of the Maharajah’s Palace.’

It was decided to base the production location at Kandy with only three days set aside for filming the Palace sequences on mainland India. Then Watts ran into hurdles. The Indian Government has rigid policies concerning the making of movies within its borders. A number of changes to the script were asked for. Too many for Lucasfilms’ liking.

‘George Lucas had very clear ideas on how the film should be,’ said Watts. ‘It is an adventure and the things that happen couldn’t possibly happen in real life. But the film, if it is to work, has to have the look and feel of reality. We were prepared to go so far to meet the Indian Authorities’ demands, but to have gone the whole way would have robbed the film of that element. In the end we decided it wasn’t worth it, least of all for three days shooting, and we closed our Bombay office.’

To get around the problem of being denied the necessary location, the filmmakers decided to build the Palace on the backlot at Elstree Studios and use matte paintings – a special effects technique to incorporate realistic artwork into live action footage – for the long shots.

Watts’ next objective was to take care of casting the actors. ‘The film has a very small cast,’ said Watts, ‘though this is not always apparent because there are always lots of people on the screen. In fact, I would say that it is possibly the smallest and most difficult casting I’ve ever worked on.’

That Harrison Ford would appear as Indy was never in dispute. But finding the right actor to portray Short Round caused all concerned headaches.

‘We had open casting calls in New York, Vancouver, London – anywhere with a substantial Chinese community,’ explained Watts, ‘and out of hundreds of boys there was only one who was really suitable.’

Ke Huy Quan was discovered during casting sessions in Los Angeles. A Vietnamese refugee, his English was good, but not so polished as to sound like a native American.

Ford with supporting cast members Ke Huy Quan and Kate Capshaw.

For the key role of villain Mola Ram, Indian star Amrish Puri was cast. ‘The only trouble was,’ said Watts, ‘that being such a popular actor in India, he was working on eighteen films at once. Scheduling him was a nightmare!’

Top Bollywood star Amrish Puri was cast as as the
dastardly villain Mola Ram.

The casting of Kate Capshaw for the part of Willie Scott was a lot more straightforward. Capshaw had been introduced to the character of Indiana Jones when she was dragged, under protest, to see Raiders of the Lost Ark in 1981. ‘I went, very petulent and sulky,’ admitted Capshaw, ‘and stayed that way for about two minutes! When I came out, I would have been a great advertisement for going to see that movie.’

Kate Capshaw got to perform a spectacular cabaret routine
in the opening sequence of Temple of Doom.

A couple of years later, Kate Capshaw’s agent just happened to be out jogging with one of the casting directors on Temple of Doom ... and the rest is history. ‘Every director has a gut feeling for who a character is, what their special qualities are. They don’t know who has “got it”, but they’ll know it when they see it. Steven felt I had it when he met me.’

With Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom the plan was to set it apart from Raiders, with Indy himself as the only linking factor. This was underlined in the filmmakers’ approach to the character of Willie Scott. Kate Capshaw was at pains to make Willie as different from Karen Allen’s Marion Ravenwood as she could. Where Marion was tom-boyish, Willie was feminine, Where Marion was tough and capable – up to a point – Willie was nervous and flappable.

‘Willie has led this pampered life,’ explained Capshaw, ‘and feels that’s what’s due to her – to be cared for and looked after. She meets Indiana Jones, a person unlike anyone she has ever been involved with, and ends up going off with him. In the course of their adventures, all of her earlier life is stripped away from her and Willie must fall back on her own resources. She discovers that she is a strong woman and a very gutsy lady.’

The screen writers Huyck and Katz don’t necessarily share Capshaw’s vision of Willie. Their intention was to depict Willie as an ordinary person caught up in extraordinary situations, whose first reaction to the assorted plights she finds herself in is to crack up, not an attribute that Huyck particularly admired; ‘I never really cared for the character very much in the first place,’ he said. ‘But we felt that she was reacting realistically to the kind of things Indiana Jones goes through ... the kind of situations where, since she’s not so tough – as few people would be in those situations – she’d scream.’

Kate Capshaw spent most of the movie squealing and complaining,
which didn't endear the character to fans ...

I thought that this take on the film’s female lead was its biggest liability. Willie did little more than scream throughout the whole picture, and ended up as little more than a typical ‘damsel in distress’, but that kind of talk tends to upset Gloria Katz.

‘People have very mixed feelings about Willie,’ said Katz. ‘I’m a little offended by the idea of a macho woman. I think that’s a woman as conceived by men. I don’t think that’s a woman that necessarily, realistically exists. When you’re covered in insects, your instinct is to scream! So I think Willie represents the audience’s realistic point of view, what they would be like if they were thrown out into the jungle. True, it’s not a brave, strong woman but it’s a different kind of woman and, I think, a more realistic one.’

Next: More Temple of Doom