Who doesn’t like Indiana Jones? Later millennials, perhaps. But for those of us in Gen X, or in the vague territory between the two, he’s right up there with Luke Skywalker and ALF. As increasingly dispirited updates on the threatened Indiana Jones V trickle out, I took the opportunity to check out some of the crazy backstage history of the franchise. Over the years, there‘ve been many writers who have tried their hand at cracking the formula, and a surprising number of those scripts are out there, available to anyone who’s looking. So, let’s look at one!
Indiana Jones and the Monkey King is a script commissioned after Temple of Doom, and written by 80s wunderkind Chris Columbus, who would of course go on to direct Home Alone and Harry Potter 1 & 2. With he possible exception of Frank Darabont’s City of the Gods, this is probably the most famous unproduced Indy script out there. Lots of plot elements have made it into the ether, such as the Haunted Castle sequence. As the script was intended to follow up Temple of Doom, it’s full of elements that made their way into Last Crusade in one form or another, from entire sequences (the boat chase and the giant tank/ravine action setpiece) to grace notes (the swarm of students waiting outside Indy’s office at Barnard college). This article will offer a full overview of the script, from the good to the bad to the insane, but another option available to you is to read it online, right now. And if you’d prefer, there’s plenty of fan productions, like radio dramas or even pandemic script reads over zoom, uploaded to YouTube. You get what you pay for, in those cases.
The first thing you should know about this script is that it exists in a world where there are two Indy films, Raiders of the Lost Ark and Temple of Doom, and this one follows in their tradition. Indiana Jones has virtually no character arc to speak of, and the tone is much more in line with Temple’s cartoon gruesomeness, featuring quite a few Spielbergian physical jokes and violent deaths, often at the same time. In fact, the cited reason that they moved on to what eventually became Last Crusade is this freakish tone, but who can say? At no point are you asked to get emotionally involved in what’s transpiring, and in the final act, things get so outlandish that I can barely imagine how this even gets made, pre Jurassic Park CGI effects. It is, top to bottom, a ghoulish 80s adventure in the Gremlins mode, and while it’s certainly not a final draft (reportedly, it’s a first draft), it’s hard not to be at least a bit enchanted by the big swing this takes.
The opening is that Haunted Castle sequence, which has been rumored to be the basis for an entire screenplay, but in this script exists only as the traditional Indy opener (the Amazon temple in Raiders). In the highlands of Scotland, Indy’s trying to unwind and do some fishing, only to be interrupted by Scottish policemen (led by Indy’s old friend Mac, the first of several bits that oddly reminded me of Kingdom of the Crystal Skull). They need Indy’s help to investigate the haunted castle atop the moors, where a light just appeared in an abandoned window, an omen of death. What follows is highly reminiscent of Walt Disney’s Haunted Mansion, a ghost hunt through a gothic mansion. It’s easy to imagine Spielberg nailing a lot of this, and there’s some effective ghostly gags throughout (the lights go off and someone disappears, only to turn up later as a corpse, acting as the clapper in a giant bell). The sequence culminates in Indy fighting a pair of enchanted suits of armor while the ghostly Lord of the Manor, Seamus Seagrove, observes. This is a fun idea, although it’s over before it begins, and leaves you with more questions than it answers. In the end, the police arrest the ghost, which would maybe pass muster on Duck Tales, but feels a touch incomplete here.
Then, back to good old Barnard college. Which is not, at this point, established as the obvious home base, to be returned to after the opening action sequence. By returning here, as Raiders does, both Monkey King and Last Crusade codify Barnard (and Marcus Brody) as Indy’s starting point. This has the previously mentioned horde of aggressive students outside Indy’s office (which also establishes Indy to be a lazy, disinterested educator, and a disappointment to most of the kids). Brody, in a brief appearance, directs Indy towards the MacGuffin, the Golden Hooped Rod of the Monkey God Sun Wu Kung, something Indy’s been after his whole life, apparently. Brody doesn’t do anything in this script, but I suppose anyone nostalgic for his more dignified portrayal in Raiders would find it to be of a piece with what he does here.
But of particular note, at Barnard we meet Betsy Tuffet, who is far and away the character in this script who makes the biggest impression. You know that thing in Raiders, where Indy kinda had an inappropriate relationship with the much younger Marion, ‘it was wrong and you knew it’? Well, Monkey God decides that’s worth really going all in on, and asks, ‘what if Indiana Jones slept with his students, and was kind of an asshole about it?’ Enter Betsy, an adoring 21-year-old teacher’s assistant who’s deep in puppy love with Indy. Which would be weird enough, for a major character, essentially the girl from Raiders with ‘Love You’ written on her eyelids. But we quickly find out that she and Indy have indeed been fucking. Indy calls it ‘a momentary lapse into passion’, but Betsy is full on infatuated, and upon discovering Indy’s headed off to Africa, resolves to murder herself, unable to go on without him. This is all presented as slapstick comedy, with Betsy attempting to hang herself with Indy’s whip, douse herself in bourbon and light herself on fire, and crush herself with a large stone urn. Indy scrambles to stop her, to his increasing irritation. It’s all quite mad, and makes any unsavory Willie Scott moments from Temple of Doom seem downright tame in comparison. More to come from Betsy.
Indy hops a steamer for Mozambique, and once there, we quickly get introduced to the majority of principle characters, of which there are many. There’s Scraggy, a crazy old wilderness guide, one of the many old friends that tend to pop up in Indiana Jones adventures. He’s a spry seventy-year-old, very much this story’s version of Sallah, and is mostly characterized by a lot of superstitious hokum and pronouncements about good or evil spirits. I don’t much care for Scraggy. Then there’s Clare, a familiar type as well, the stunning female scientist, and the age-appropriate romantic foil for Indy. Clare’s pretty dull. She’s an anthropologist who has come into contact with a two-hundred-year-old pygmie named Tyki, who may well be able to lead Indy and friends to the golden city of Sun Wu Kung, the hooped rod, and the garden of immortal peaches, where whomever eats them is granted everlasting life. It’s kind of interesting to discover that the eternal life aspect of the story predated the Holy Grail in Last Crusade, but to be fair, it’s a solid improvement on magic peaches.
This is also where the villains enter the story. More Nazis, in this case, and we’ve got two prominent ones. The first is Sgt. Helmut Gutterbuhg, an extreme SS type, very much in the mold of Toht from Raiders. His gimmick is he’s got a mechanical arm that’s also a rifle. Above him is the even more outrageous Lt. Werner Von Mephisto, described in the script as looking like a demon from hell. He is six and a half feet tall and has alopecia. These guys are pretty out there, making Walter Donovan seem like a fully formed and emotionally resonant villain in contrast, but hey, I’m not made of stone. You need some Nazi-ass Nazis in your Indiana Jones movie, and these two go hard.
Oh, and Betsy stowed away in a barrel of bananas. She’s here too, and will be for the rest of the script. Her role quickly becomes clear, the clumsy ditz who irritates everyone, and the comedy bits come fast and heavy. We’re talking getting comically drunk, we’re talking closing her eyes in expectation of a smooch from Indy only to end up kissing a dead fish, lots of that kind of business. There’s even a bit where she smells like bananas, due to her long sea voyage spent in a barrel, and thus arouses the attention of an amorous chimpanzee, who attempts to manhandle her, mirroring her own attempts to manhandle Indy. Woof! A huge comic runner is that Betsy attempts to seduce Indy, who rebuffs her, only to have Clare arrive just in time to misinterpret the situation, much to Indy’s chagrin (this happens three times). Here’s the big twist with Betsy: I ended up liking her. She’s described, by the script and by herself, as a tough Brooklyn girl, and eventually begins to feel very much like the Harley Quinn to Indy’s grumpy Mr. J. If the role was well cast, I could see this kind of broadly played broad actually working, and becoming the standout character. Or it could be Willie Scott, but much worse. Reportedly, the second draft of this script completely axed the character, which was probably wise.
So, the Nazis kidnap Tyki the pygmie. This leads into the first big setpiece, familiar as Last Crusade’s boat chase, though much longer. All the stuff you remember from that sequence are here - dashing between two large ships, the propeller blades (which actually chop someone up in this version) - and also has an improbable bit where Indy whips a departing speedboat and waterskis behind it. There’s a character named Dashiell who shows up to assist, very much a nod to Casablanca’s Rick Blaine, but he’s in and out in the blink of an eye. The Nazis escape with Tyki, so Indy and friends follow in pursuit, and end up on a boat sailing down the Zambesi river, and the movie slows down for a bit of Monkey God exposition and some Anaconda style riverboat adventures. Here’s where the movie’s structure becomes apparent, and surprisingly, it’s almost the same one that Kingdom of the Crystal Skull has, a race through the jungle to the magical city.
The next big action sequence involves river pirates, and introduces the last major character, the pirate king Kezure. Described as ‘oriental’ in the script (as are many other things, by the way), he’s an evil pirate with golden teeth, very much the kind of character you’d find in Temple of Doom. Kezure’s pretty cool. The pirates attack Indy’s ship, and the movie turns into an Errol Flynn action sequence for a while, with Indy and Kezure sword fighting while pirates pour over the boats as they head toward a giant waterfall. All pretty fun stuff, full of the kind of grace notes you expect from an Indy action scene, it’s maybe the best sequence in the script. They ultimately come to an uneasy truce, agreeing to find the city of gold together and share the reward. From this point on, Kezure and the pirates are firmly on Team Indy, helping him plot traps for the Nazis, handling their own share of the action sequences and generally becoming more endearing as things go on. Then, in the last six pages of the script, they turn evil again, and Kezure dies fucking hard. It’s a bit of an unresolved character issue, because he’s got evil Jack Sparrow moxie for most of the script, and would almost certainly be the coolest Funko Pop figure produced, but it’s an early draft, so I assume if they’d have gone forward, they’d have figured Kezure out.
There’s some more trek through Africa adventures, including the giant tank sequence from Last Crusade, a bit of ooga booga tribal racism with shrunken heads, and few animal attacks involving rhinos and the like. All pretty fun! Then the third act hits, as Indy and his friends reach the city of gold, and its population of immortal pygmies. At this point, the script goes full on bananas, with armies of sentient gorillas (like in Congo!), Indy sentenced to death by dismemberment (ripped apart by wild oxen in a big execution ampitheater), and Gutterbuhg losing his rifle arm and replacing it with one that shoots electricity. The craziest shit of all is Clare demonstrates an incredible superpower, the ability to make noises that bring down leagues of birds to peck the Nazis to shreds, like in The Dark Half. It all culminates in a finale that, more than anything, reminded me of Army of Darkness, with Indy leading armies of pygmies, pirates and gorillas in a defense of the Golden City from invading Nazi hordes. It’s absolutely wild, and even though I have a hard time imagining how such a ridiculous series of events could be visually dramatized in the 1980s, I cannot help but wish I could see the attempt. In the end, the good guys prevail, although Indy is mortally wounded. The grateful pygmies bring him to the Garden of Immortal Peaches and the Monkey God Sun Wu Kung rematerializes from bones and heals Indy. They have a nice little chat, and Indy receives the magic Golden Hooped Rod. Kezure steals some immortality peaches, and when he tries to eat them, he gets the Last Crusade treatment, aging into a skeleton in seconds. Betsy decides Clare would make a better aspirational figure than Indy, and decides to stay in Africa. Indy, for his part, gets blue balls, but is content at having once again passed through the veil of mortal understanding and communed with the infinite. And he’s got a magic Golden Hooped Rod, that can sometimes turn into an eagle.
So, is it good? Yeah, kinda. It’s silly as hell, and would need some major changes to reach a final draft state. There’s probably too many characters, and too much action. It’s just under 120 pages, but those are pages are pretty black with stage direction. A lot of it is either retrograde (the Betsy stuff) or outrageous to the point of being silly. But it moves quick, and it has an over the top quality in common with Temple of Doom that too few films have been able to duplicate effectively. One thing I couldn’t get enough of was the gruesome deaths in this thing. Aside from the aforementioned expiration by propeller, Dark Half birds and life-sucking peaches, you’ve got people getting electrocuted, devoured by tigers and sharks, crushed, immolated, and in one case, drowned in a sea of scorpions. It’s nutty! I’d never trade the (comparatively) heartfelt and elegant Last Crusade for something this garish, but it is exactly the sort of movie I could get behind if Indiana Jones movies were treated more like James Bond entries. Consider this a Roger Moore era Indy film, something wild and loose and over the top, and it becomes a lot easier to wish it existed in some form.
I’m hoping to keep taking looks at famous unproduced screenplays, if there’s an audience, and I can find them. There’s more unmade Indy scripts out there, such as Indiana Jones and the Saucer Men from Mars, or the famous Darabont version of part four, Indiana Jones and the City of the Gods. I’ll see what I can find beyond that as well.