How to Fix Indiana Jones

If you haven’t seen “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull,” stop reading right now.

I’ve been thinking all week about this movie and why it seemed so much less compelling than the original “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” And I came up with some suggestions for improving it.

Yeah, I know. Monday morning quarterbacking. So be it.

Here are my modest proposals for making “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” truly memorable.

•When you have Cate Blanchett, one of the finest actresses on the planet, give her something to do, for cryin’ out loud.

I’m not talking about letting her wave her rapier. She gets to do plenty of that. I’m talking about giving her some character traits that would make KGB wolf Irina Spalko interesting as a person.

As it now stands she’s just plain evil. And evil, like unrelenting goodness, gets boring fast if there’s nothing else to keep our interest.

There’s a scene where Spalko has Indiana strapped in a chair and is preparing to torture him (or probe his mind … or something) with the crystal skull. She stands before our hero and places her hands on his knees while staring into his eyes.

Uh … am I the only one who sensed a vaguely kinky/sexy thing happening in that moment?

So why not run with that? Let’s make Spalko a woman who is as demanding and in control in the bedroom as she is with her crew of secret ops guys from the Kremlin. A sexual sadist if you will (surely a good screenwriter could suggest this without freaking out the kiddies).

I’d like to see how Indiana Jones handles a woman who expects to be in charge.

•Put Indy in the middle of a three-way.

Seriously.

Remember in “Raiders” when the French villain, Belloq, got the hots for the captive Marion and tried to seduce her? Or maybe she was trying to seduce him to make good her escape.

Either way, it was a scene that humanized the bad guy, made him a lot more interesting than the stiff Nazis around him.

So why not have Spalko become — ahem — interested in our Dr. Jones? It would make her character more fully rounded and at the same time would…

•Give Karen Allen something to do.

She mostly stands around on the sidelines. She does get to race a jeep through the jungle with a maniacal grin on her face, but I don’t call that acting.

She’s largely wasted in this movie. Even her big reunion with Indy is flat. The least she could have done was punch him for past transgressions. That’s the Marion we all remember.

Now if we had Marion and Spalko competing for Indiana’s favors, things could get really interesting.

•Give Shia LaBeouf something to do.

The character of Mutt consists of a motorcycle, switchblade and comb. Who is this kid? What kind of personality does he have?

If you’re going to dress him like Marlon Brando in “The Wild One” you might as well go whole hog by making the kid a genuinely surly malcontent.

I’d even suggest ripping off some “Wild One” dialogue. For instance:

Indy: “What are you rebelling against?”

Mutt: “What’ve you got?”

I’d also find a way to put into Mutt’s mouth some of James Dean’s lines from “Rebel Without a Cause”:

“Ten years. I want it now, I want an answer now. I need one.”

“You know something? You read too many comic books.”

“If he had guts to knock Mom cold once, then maybe she’d be happy.”

OK, maybe that last one’s a bit too harsh.

•Get rid of Mac.

Mac is the most inconsequential Indy sidekick ever. Given that the competition for that honor includes both Short Round and Willie from “Temple of Doom,” this is saying something.

It’s not the fault of Ray Winstone, the fine English actor (“Sexy Beast,” “The Departed,” “The Proposition”) who plays Mac. It’s the screenplay, which gives him little to do … and what he does get to do is irritating.

Is Mac a turncoat? A double agent? Triple agent? Just in it for himself? Darned if I know. After the second or third time this character switched allegiances, I gave up trying to figure it out. I gave up caring long before that.

Worse, there’s no payoff to Mac’s story arc. When he finally got his in the end, I didn’t know what I was supposed to be feeling — because the movie had never established who the character is.

My answer: Get rid of him and devote that screen time to developing the other characters.

Effective Exposition

I recommend looking at the HBO movie RECOUNT as an excellent example of how to handle exposition. Danny Strong is telling the story of the 2000 Presidential Election Florida recount. He had lots and lots of very technical material to deliver to the audience. And never once does he just shove a chunk of it at the viewers, hoping to get past it as quickly as possible. It's usually delivered by one character explaining something to another character who genuinely doesn't have the information, and there is always an attitude behind either the giving or the getting of the information, usually both. Incredulity, amusement, shock, anger, even blank incomprehension -- these attitudes make expositional moments into character moments.

Notice also his use of intercutting. He frequently cuts between the Democratic and Republican camps discussing the same point of law. The intercutting puts the emphasis on the different approaches to the problem and, again, makes the scenes about attitudes, not legal procedure.

He also found real-life obstacles for his characters. The guy who had to chase Gore down to prevent him from making a concession speech? He really did have a busted knee. The lawyer who argued the case before the Supreme Court? He really is dyslexic and has to work without notes. These are the kinds of character details -- one more little thing to overcome -- that you want to invent for characters that you make up, and Danny was smart enough to discover and exploit them (in a good way) for his script.

Narration Bleeds Into Dialogue

(Note: The episode this comes from actually suuuuucks.)

INT. GALACTICA - CORRIDOR
Athena, frantic, wild-horse eyes, bolts down another part of the corridor, no sign of...

ATHENA
HERA! HERA!


I've talked about this before, and this is a great example. And I'm not even talking about the stunning description of Athena's "wild-horse eyes".

See what he did structurally? By creating a sentence that bridges over the change in formatting ("...no sign of Hera"), he's making the inherently choppy structure of a script read more like prose, like a short story. This reader-friendly technique can be part of making your spec script feel enjoyable, not just as a description of a good potential filmed product, but in itself. Angeli's scripts are always literary objects in their own right and if the Battlestar scripts are ever published, I encourage you to devour them.

Short, Focused, Strong Scenes

One of the things I've been doing is making last-minute cuts to shorten too-long scenes. It's been making me think a lot about how to keep a scene short and focused and strong.

If you're tackling this in your own script, I suggest trying what I've been doing: recreating a beatsheet like the one you wrote at your pre-outline stage, only even shorter. Just make a list of the one crucial thing that happens in each scene. Sometimes two crucial things happen in a scene, especially if an A-story and a B-story are both involved, but usually no more than that. So I mean, literally a couple words for each scene: "Joe tells Carrie his secret." "Leslie starts the house fire." "Jeremy blames his father for his failings." "The soldier starts to regret his actions." Then look at the scene and find the part where that happens -- sometimes it's all in one line or one action. Decide on the absolute minimum you'd have to keep to fulfill the promise of your little beatsheet. Declare all the rest expendable.

Now, this isn't really true, of course. The heartbeat of a script is in all the stuff that might not be strictly necessary for this scene, but that gives a world its texture, and fleshes out a character so that their actions reflect a full and believable person. If you cut everything but story, you'd have a synopsis, not an episode. But keeping your eye on the function of the scene within the story is crucial and sometimes surprisingly difficult. If you know exactly what the scene needs to do, you can bring a slightly more objective eye to the cutting process. I've been amazed sometimes when I've realized that some four-page scene I've written actually plays better -- is sharper and more emotional -- as a one-page scene. You don't always lose when you cut. The bones of your story show up better when you take some of the fat off.

Even if you don't need to lose length off your script, I recommend that at some point you make one of these little reconstructed beatsheets, just to keep your focus on the most basic shape of your story, the real function of every scene. It will keep you from wandering off into the maze.

We realize....

Did you see my episode of Battlestar Galactica that aired last night? I myself did not, as I was on a soundstage, watching even fresher Battlestar being made. So instead, to celebrate, I reread the script this morning and I thought I might show you all a little excerpt to illustrate how simple it can be to do something that might look tricky on the screen.

SPOILERS... if you haven't seen the episode yet, you might want to wait. Anyway, there's a moment in the episode where something plays out and then you realize it didn't really happen, that it was just one character's fantasy/fear/hallucination/projection/SOMETHING.... Here's how I scripted it (I'm just showing you a scene fragment here):


...Awkward pause. Adama signals the bartender, then says:


ADAMA
We all miss her, Chief. I understand if you want time off. Or even if... if you want more shifts, want to keep busy. None of us knows how we�ll react to a loss. What we�ll need.
TYROL
Don�t need anything special, sir.


The bartender slides a drink to Adama (he knows his preference without asking).

ADAMA
I guess it was just more than she could take, huh? Being married to a Cylon who made her the mother to a half-breed abomination.


Tyrol blinks at Adama. Who is JUST NOW BEING SERVED HIS DRINK. We realize that was a small moment of surreal fantasy (a la Tigh�s imagined shooting of Adama in episode three).

ADAMA (cont�d)
(to bartender)
Thank you.
(then)
She was a good woman.


See what I did? Almost nothin'. I just said what happened using emphasis so the eyes of careless reader wouldn't miss it, and then with a "We realize..." sentence. I love "We realize," because what you're really doing is conveying to the reader the intended experience of the viewer. You're not forcing them to guess about what you want the viewer to understand at that moment, and you're not using dialogue to over-explain something that a character wouldn't say out loud. I find it incredibly useful as long as it's not being used to try to convince a reader that something would be clear to a viewer when in fact it would not. It's a powerful weapon, use it well.