Lucas reframes TV series as Young Indiana DVDs
Posted on Thursday, November 8, 2007
SKYWALKER RANCH, Calif. — There might be nothing George Lucas enjoys more than watching someone’s jaw drop in astonishment. That explains the existence of this leafy 5, 200-acre retreat, which has a hilltop observatory, a vineyard and its own fire department.
The man who once aspired to be an anthropologist now has a personal Smithsonian of sorts. In the Victorian-style main house, you can find Charlie Chaplin’s cane and slightly dimpled bowler sharing a bookcase with the badges worn by the Keystone Kops. Norman Rockwell paintings hang on the walls, and Rudolph Valentino’s whip is perched on a shelf near the parlor.
Remember how hard it was for Indiana Jones to track down the Ark of the Covenant and the Holy Grail ? Now they’re safe and sound here in an immaculate warehouse along with R 2-D 2 and C-3 PO, all museum pieces in a museum that never opens to the public.
But the most underappreciated treasure that belongs to Lucas is the one that, when he speaks of it, makes him sound a bit like an archaeologist cradling a long-lost relic.
“We have another chance to let the world see it,” he says, “and that’s exciting for me.” The artifact is the 1992-93 ABC television series, The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, which is, by the standards of the 63-year-old filmmaker’s career, a beautiful loser. It was, he says, “the single most fun I ever had with any project.” Over the past four years, Lucas and Paramount Home Video have pumped millions of dollars into reframing Young Indiana as a lavish library of DVDs with a staggering number of extras, including 94 highly polished documentaries on famous people and moments in history. Volume one, with 12 DVDs, is in stores with a $ 129. 98 list price. Volume two is due Dec. 13.
That grand content and the packaging and marketing commitment to the project are the sort you might expect for an anniversary reissue of Gone With the Wind, not a show that was dropped by ABC after two seasons.
From a distance, the reverential treatment given Young Indiana might look like Lucas overkill. But to the filmmaker, it is the logical conclusion of what he considers one of his great achievements.
“Believe it or not, I’ve never been that involved in making commercial product,” says Lucas, whose Star Wars films have a global box-office gross of $ 4. 3 billion. “It’s about coming up with a great idea... in terms of the commercial [risks ], I knew I was breaking all the rules.” Lucas said it was a victory persuading Paramount and ABC to let him make Young Indiana.
“They let me do it, and do it in the way I wanted to do it. The main thing I was really after was to see how many shows I could get done before they woke up and said enough is enough. And, you know, we managed to get 44 hours of material out there. I felt grateful I got as much done as I did.” Critics loved it. “By far,” The New York Times weighed in, “the most impressively mounted weekly show on television.” Time said no show had “more ambition or style,” and The Wall Street Journal said it raised the standards of television production to “the caliber of theatrical film.” Bill Moyers wished that the series would be “my grandson’s companion far into the 21 st century.” It won 11 Emmy Awards.
The show was a gathering point for an impressive amount of talent, on-screen and off, with actors such as Max von Sydow, Catherine Zeta-Jones and Daniel Craig passing through its stories, and directors such as Mike Newell working with writers such as Frank Darabont.
But the ratings revealed that the show was more respected than loved. Lucas understood the problem; he had given the world the Indiana Jones he wanted, not the one they wanted. In 1993, talking to the Los Angeles Times about the show’s decline, he said, “It didn’t matter how many times I said it was a coming-of-age series about a young boy’s exploration of history; people still expected to see that rolling boulder.” Young Indiana alternately presented the hero as a boy of about 9 (played by Corey Carrier ) and a young man between 16 and 19 (Sean Patrick Flanery ), which, Lucas says, is another “thing you just can’t do on television” if you’re following the rules.
In each episode, the hero meets a key historical figure and learns a valuable lesson. His travels put him next to Ernest Hemingway and Franz Kafka, Woodrow Wilson and Ho Chi Minh, Sidney Bechet and George Gershwin, Mata Hari and Al Capone. “He is,” Lucas says, “sort of like Forrest Gump with a whip.” Like Walt Disney decades before, Lucas saw a chance to reach into the living rooms of America with something that aspired to be wholesome and thoughtful and educational between chase scenes.
But Young Indiana also came with the promise of visual innovation (it was a pioneer in digital production for television ) and an outlandish production plan. Lucas sent a 29-member film crew across 35 countries to use exotic locales as backdrops.
The film crew was led by Rick McCallum, who would go on to be producer of the second trilogy of Star Wars films.
Directors who worked on the series included Newell, Terry Jones, David Hare and Bille August.
On-screen, Vanessa Redgrave and Christopher Lee were among the veterans who joined the project, while a number of new faces appeared and later went on to bigger things, among them Zeta-Jones, who portrays a belly-dancing spy when Indy meets T. E. Lawrence, and Tony winner Jeffrey Wright, who blows the horn as Bechet. McCallum said he especially remembers a performance by Elizabeth Hurley, who played the daughter of a London suffragette.
“She just lit up. It was amazing to see her in that performance,” McCallum says. “There were so many shows where we caught people at interesting points in their careers, and there was a sense that we were doing something very different and important.” The notion of creating a massive history lesson wrapped inside an adventure series was the plan all along for Young Indiana Jones, Lucas says. “It’s just taken me this long to get it all done,” he says. “It’s a lot of hours of material, and it was expensive and hard and, of course, it was something that the industry wasn’t interested in.” The best part of the DVD series might be the new documentaries (there are 38 in Volume 1 ), which were led by CBS News veteran David Schneider. They are replete with rare photos and footage, as well as new contextual interviews with notables such as Henry Kissinger, Gloria Steinem, Martin Scorsese, Colin Powell and Deepak Chopra. One documentary, a biography of Paul Robeson, gives a measured but poignant account of his rise in American consciousness as a star of stage and screen and the dismantling of his life after he became a target of the anti-communist movement in America.
“Our goal was to tell the stories of history but also capture the drama of these lives, which sometimes is missing from documentaries,” Schneider says. He talked in awe about lives that zigzagged between triumph and ignominy and how moments of serendipity and awful luck changed the course of nations. “There’s incredible drama if you treat these as stories waiting to be told.” One core mission that Lucas gave Schneider was to make sure the documentaries were constructed in a way that would make them hold the attention of a student sitting in a classroom in 2020 or beyond.
That makes sense for a man who knows artifacts don’t become less valuable as the years pass, nor do they suffer if they were underappreciated at first. The filmmaker laughed as he imitated one of the naysayer opinions that confronted his young fedora-wearing hero in the 1990 s. “The show, well, it’s about history,” he said in a mock voice dripping with disdain, “and, you know, forget that.”
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