Raiders of the Lost Ark

By Derek

I was about 9 or 10 when Star Wars came out and right after that we were all treated to Raiders of the Lost Ark. This was one of those movies that now, 30 years later (man, I'm getting old) I can still watch with as much enjoyment and excitement as the first time I saw it. So today I needed a break from the political circus and found this link to the original story meeting between Lucas, Spielberg and Kasdan. I haven't finished reading it yet, but its exciting stuff to see how the they saw it before we saw it, so to speak. here's the opening paragraph:

Some background first. Spielberg suggested that Kasdan write Raiders because he admired his Continental Divide script. Lucas agreed. Now, imagine with me: Lucas had just released Star Wars, the biggest film in the history of Hollywood and a cult phenomenon. Spielberg had just released Close Encounters of the Third Kind and before that, Jaws. Now Kasdan was called in to have a story conference with the biggest names in Hollywood who wanted to talk about their next blockbuster. The conference took place at the L.A. home of Jane Bay, who was Lucas’ assistant. They had 5 consecutive 9-hour days to talk about the story. This .pdf is a transcript from taped recordings of those meetings.