Before you read any further, be advised that the following conversation is going to drive up in a windowless van and ask your childhood if it wants to “ride a pony”. This is a snippet from the transcript of a brainstorming session when the makers of Raiders of the Lost Ark were creating the characters of Indian Jones and his love interest, Marion.
That’s right. Lucas wanted to make Indiana Jones a pedophile.
No bad ideas in brainstorming!
Now everyone knows why his bullwhip handle was so soft and supple…
how old was she in the film? isn’t she still a lot younger than he?
Yeah, there is certainly the implication left that she was young and he wasn’t.
In the movie, it felt like she’d been 17-18 and he’d been mid-20’s. Enough of a difference to create different maturity levels but close enough to not be totally skeevy.
Harrison Ford is nine years older than Karen Allen and it’s been ten years since Indy and Marion have seen each other at the start of Raiders.
So yeah, she would have been 17 or 18 during their affair while Indy would have been in his late 20s.
I’m reading Spielberg as incredulous, then as totally sarcastically joking in that second line. But it’s clear that Lucas doesn’t get the humor.
And that’s gross.
That’s what I always thought. I believe lndy was in grad school when the affair happened. That would’ve put his age somewhere between 22 through 26. As for Marion, I figured she was at least driving age (16).
I wonder who got to tell Harrison Ford about the pedo angle to his character. Considering his reaction to mere bad dialogue, I don’t think George would want to be around when this little tidbit was explained.
Assuming that the alleged sexual misconduct would have happened in the late 1920s… wasn’t that actually somewhat normal? Or at least more acceptable?
For marriage, that was very normal.
But Indy and Marion were likely knockin’ boots in the library hoping Professor Ravenwood didn’t catch them. That wasn’t so accepted.
Hey, she told him she was 18.
Try to keep up man, in the final script, she was 18.
Don’t make me crack the whip.
Was it normal for girls to be married at 16 in the early twentieth century in the United States? Because I’ve done some genealogy work and though I’ve never taken statistics it seems to me that most women married for the first time in their early twenties. My grandmother-in-law was married when she was 15 or 16 and a friend of mine has a grandmother who was married by the time she was 16 but I don’t think it was as common as some believe it was.
That’s Lawrence Kasdan in the second line, not Spielberg.
Here you go:
I don’t think marrying young was unusual - my grandmother married during WWII at the age of 15 - her mother married 20 years before that at the age of 16 - but the median age was around 21.
He meant Spielberg’s second line:
Steven Spielberg: And promiscuous. She came onto him.
I dont’t think of Lucas as evil, only stupid.
My grandmother was either sixteen or seventeen, I think, but she was pregnant and my grandfather was going into the Navy during WWII. Bonus info I learned at her funeral-- he wasn’t the father! He just stepped in to help support her when the other guy ran off. That would be in about '42