73 - Raiders of the Lost Ark

Craig and John spend the entire episode discussing and dissecting Raiders of the Lost Ark, looking at both its structure and scene work.

This amazing and iconic 1981 film established so much of what we expect of out movie heroes and set pieces -- but a lot of what it does would have a hard time getting through modern studio development. Five-minute exposition scenes! Nazi monkeys! Helpless heroes at the climax!

And yet it works so well. There are great lessons to be learned for screenwriters in every genre.

This episode originally aired on January 22, 2013.

Links:

Tickets are on sale for the Holiday Live Show! The Scriptnotes Listeners’ Guide Raiders of the Lost Ark on Wikipedia, on IMDb, iTunes and Amazon George Lucas, Steven Spielberg and Larry Kasdan’s Raiders story conference transcripts “Apple for teacher? Why’d he do that?” thread on theraider.net (via @sethgs) T-shirts are available here! We’ve got new designs, including Colored Revisions, Karateka, and Highland2. John August on Twitter Craig Mazin on Twitter John on Instagram Find past episodes Scriptnotes Digital Seasons are also now available! Outro this week is A British Tar from the HMS Pinafore by Gilbert and Sullivan, performed by John Rhys-Davies (send us yours!)

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

UPDATE 1-25-13: The transcript of this episode can be found here.