Tales of the Gold Monkey

[MikeKardec]

I enjoyed the change in pace of Indy when he shifted to the fifties and the story became a pastiche of the fifties sci-fi that was the equivalent by then of the pulp stuff in the 30s.

Actually I loved that too but, as you've probably guessed, I'd have greatly appreciated a more period and 'serious' take on the 1950s stuff. Have you noticed that whenever there is a movie within a movie, the movie with in the movie is stupid and poorly made. It's as if filmmakers have an unbelievably low opinion of their own product or their audience. I found the later Indy films to have a touch of this style. As if they couldn't take what they were doing seriously. I ran into a lot of this when I produced The Diamond of Jeru. My producing partner and I wanted to create a much grittier picture but we were forced into the sort of Disney-fied version that appeared on USA by the people at USA and the director. Now that I think of it, a different interpretation of Jeru, given it's 1955 time frame, would have been the whole Men's Adventure "Jaguars Ripped My Flesh" approach. That might have been droll but I really thing only about four people in the whole world would have understood what we were up to.

 

[wallypop]

Prisoner

The Prisoner with Patrick McGoohan, which ran in the US in
the 70s is a favorite series--surreal and odd but still timeless.

one of the best EVER made!

 

[wallypop]

It was a TV series in the early 80s, set in the 1930s, about the adventures of a Bush pilot called Jake Cutter and his talking dog, One-Eye Jack! I used to watch it religiously!

http://www.goldmonkey.com/index.html

Actually, I think it was part of a "model" for Indiana Jones.?? I enjoyed it.

 

[Doctor Strange]

Uh, no. It was made afterwards in response to the big success of Raiders of the Lost Ark.

And I am not just reporting this from Wiki articles, I was already in my mid-20s then and saw both the day they premiered.

 

[Tiki Tom]

Help! There is simply nothing that is filling that market niche at the moment. If I talk about my cravings, people think “Indiana jones”. No, that’s not quite it ...although, in a pinch, I’d take it. No one gets it. Nor would I expect that they would.

 

[MikeKardec]

Help! There is simply nothing that is filling that market niche at the moment. If I talk about my cravings, people think “Indiana jones”. No, that’s not quite it ...although, in a pinch, I’d take it. No one gets it. Nor would I expect that they would.

There is a whole series of cultural issues here: Most particularly is the tendency to "turn inward" in our thinking. Focusing on relationships within a group rather than the outward adventure is a good deal of the issue. Given that the most profitable form of entertainment right now and the place where most writers spring up is TV series we have this trend toward soap opera ... even in features. There's no reason why relations can't play a major role in adventure stories, if fact they do in many of the best, but they can come to dominate the plot making process in a way that is a trap.

The "High Adventure" genre is mostly locked into the real world (or we'd find ourselves satisfied by SF) and the sense that "we could go there," or "it's within the realm of possibility for me." No that the real world is so well known, mapped, and mostly within a day's travel, the genre seems, to some, a bit dated. Personally, I think that's dumb. I see no reason why today's world couldn't be a great source for Adventure Fiction. In fact the only real Raiders copycat that worked, Romancing the Stone was set in contemporary times.

I keep harping on taking the stores seriously, something period High Adventure works did but the modern ones, mostly do not. I remembered just the other day that the Peter Jackson King Kong suffered from a great deal of the problems of the later Indy films ... it was silly. Now I don't mean that it shouldn't be light-hearted or funny, FX's series Justified was always a serious crime drama but never failed to produce a solid laugh several times an episode, but I've always felt that you do Adventure set in the real world because you want to ground it so that you can emphasize some outrageous aspect. If the entire film is silly then Skull Island and King Kong get our attention less. As I keep going on about, the genre is not "comic book."

The Daniel Craig Bonds have done a pretty good job. They are more locked into reality, and they release that "lock" just enough to show us a world that is just a bit more exotic than reality actually is. Previously the Bond films had a problem with this, not to be taken very seriously even within their own universe. These recent Bonds have even split the soap opera hair fairly well making them about his "family" relationships with the character that Eva Green played, then Judy Dench's "M" and finally with his brother. I'd say that there was just enough of that to allow us to connect better with the character.

Though we love them Hollywood has a mild allergy to period pieces. They tend to be nervous about the expense and the fact that, if you set something in the past then, by definition, it is over and thus loses some of its sense of stakes. Plus there might be the requirement that the audience might be required to know something, and if there is one baseline belief of development executives it is that audiences are stupid.

My Dad wrote a classic of the Cold War Thriller genre, Last of the Breed. An American test pilot is shot down and abducted by the soviets. After escaping he must flee across Siberia to Alaska. The twist, he is a Native American and he is retracing his ancestors migration from central Asia to the New World. When it wasn't made into a movie immediately and the Cold War ended, suddenly all the filmmakers who called me up didn't know what to do. For a while it was in some demand but everyone insisted on "updating it", setting it in China or North Korea or some idiotic thing like that ... but at the same time you could tell that they knew as well as I did that it needed the background of a colossal confrontation like the Cold War and it needed the Siberian landscape and its relationship to the migration of people to North America. Every time I talked to producers about it I said, if you want to succeed at this you'll have to set it in the past, between 1950 and 1980. And every time they heard that it became: "Period piece. Can't be exciting. Please shut up."

We know it's not true. It's a rule that is broken constantly. Writers and directors know it. Executives, however, live in a world of "let me get rid of anything that can embarrass me." In fact many actually LOATH the idea making movies. They like being in the film biz ... but actually having to make movies is filled with career ending risk.