Bruce Feiler - Where God Was Born, Abraham, Walking The Bible

Indiana Jones and Noah's Ark
Monday, January 1, 2007

I've spent quite a lot of time in recent years both trekking up Mt. Ararat in eastern Turkey, reading about all the people, from Czar Nicholas to astronauts to photographers on Air Force One, who claim to have found Noah's Ark, to the endless number of websites that track the hunt. In the course of that time, I once stumbled onto a "real actual script" that purported to be the fourth installment of the Indiana Jones series, in which he races to find the ark. Makes sense. I flipped through the script online, then thought little about it.

Suddenly, today, Steven Spielberg confirmed that he will begin shooting the fourth episode this year, for release in 2008. No word on topic. Within minutes, the blogosphere erupted with speculation about the topic, and a movie buff in the UK has provided the backstory to the script I saw.

In the spring of 1995, Last Crusade screenwriter Jeffrey Boam privately admitted to having been asked to write a script, with subsequent rumours suggesting that the story concerned an attempt to foil a Soviet plot to establish a missile base on the moon, or had something to do with the UFO crash at Roswell, New Mexico - or both. Then on May 29, 1996, a script entitled Indiana Jones And The Sons Of Darkness, credited to Boam (from a story by George Lucas), was posted on the internet by someone who claimed to have lifted it from Lucasfilm's offices. The script, which concerned a race by Indy to beat the Russians to the remnants of Noah's Ark, was removed fro the web a day after its initial posting, fuelling rumours that it was genuine. But four months and several cease-and-desist notices later, ambitious Indy fan, Robert Smith 'fessed up to having written the bogus script. "I was paid the ultimate compliment by those fans who believed the script was the real McCoy," he said later. Smith's confession didn't stop the ever-reliable Daily Mail from reporting that Sons Of Darkness was going ahead, with Kevin Costner as Indy's 'bad seed' brother.

Labels: Middle East, The Bible in Pop Culture

Posted by B Feiler at 9:25 PM
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