Spielberg Throws Lucas Under the Bus for Indy 4 (In the Nicest Way Possible)

?Good friends are good wingmen. If someone want to flirt with a girl in a bar, it’s his best friend’s role to chat up the girl’s friend; even if it means taking a chubby, a good friend will suck it up. Now, in this case, the friends are Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, and the chubby is the script for Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Spielberg admitted in an interview with Empire magazine:

“I’m very happy with the movie. I always have been … I sympathise with
people who didn’t like the MacGuffin because I never liked the
MacGuffin. George and I had big arguments about the MacGuffin. I didn’t
want these things to be either aliens or inter-dimensional beings. But I
am loyal to my best friend. When he writes a story he believes in–even
if I don’t believe in it–I’m going to shoot the movie the way George
envisaged it. I’ll add my own touches, I’ll bring my own cast in, I’ll
shoot the way I want to shoot it, but I will always defer to George as
the storyteller of the Indy series. I will never fight him on that.”

While it’s kind of admirable that he’s standing so firmly by Lucas, it’s also kind of shitty. Not because he’s assigning Lucas the blame (although that, too) — I thought the whole point of waiting 20 years after Last Crusade is because Spielberg, Lucas and Harrison Ford couldn’t agree on a good script. So suddenly Spielberg decided to make a piece of crap just because his BFF wrote it? Fuck, I’d have gladly waited another 5-10 years if it meant no Shia the Beef, King of the Monkeys. Or if Spielberg was so content to make a piece of shit Indy flick, why did he wait until 2010? Why not do it in ’95 and get it out of the away so other, better Indiana Jones movies might be made afterwards? Oh well. At least Spielberg’s honest about his contribution to Crystal Skull‘s shittiness:

“What people really jumped at was Indy climbing
into a refrigerator and getting blown into the sky by an atom-bomb
blast. Blame me. Don’t blame George. That was my silly idea. People
stopped saying ‘jump the shark.’ They now say, ‘nuked the fridge.’ I’m
proud of that. I’m glad I was able to bring that into popular culture.”

Ha ha! It’s funny because he wrote one of the dumbest scenes in entertainment history which was so wretched it entered the popular lexicon as a metaphor for something being totally irrevocably ruined by pure stupidity! He’s right to be proud. (Via Blastr)