I see no news articles about it, it was more than 40 years ago (the speaker has been relegated to a rightholder, no longer making film), and it was stopped in the spitballing stage of the (bad) idea. Does anyone care?
Here's why people care: It surprised a lot of people how casually these 3 famous intelligent creative people were talking about making their main character an abusive creep. Except...they didn't think it would make him an abusive creep. This tells you something about the normalization of the idea of a 25-year old man sleeping with a twelve year old girl. Either by the parties involved or their perception of the audience.
By modern sensibilities, this would be an irredeemable character trait. Does that say something about how things have changed in the last 40 years? Is that worth acknowledging? etc.
Lucas doesn't. Both Kasdan and Spielberg seem to push back (lightly, but ina collaborative creative environment, that's what you do if possible, and ultimately it didn't make it in) with Lucas’ suggested age (and Lucas keeps pushing the really young age).
Spielberg also pushes making her explicitly the instigator, perhaps also as a way of mitigating the “abusive creep” impression.
> Does that say something about how things have changed in the last 40 years?
Does it? I mean, without a broad sample of similar writers rooms forty years ago and today, I don't think we know: (1) that that kind of idea got tossed around and cut more than than today, or (2) that when it came up, the discussion was much different then than today.
Saying it says something about a change requires extrapolating a lot about 40 years ago from one data point, and then extrapolating as much about today from no equivalent data points. Most likely, its just spinning the story of this discussion into a preconceived narrative of what the difference is, rather than really reasoning from it at all.
Well, it's clear from the movie Marion was very young when they had an affair. We don't know exactly how old, but she says, "it was wrong, and you knew it" and "I was a child".
I love the movie. This was one of his big flaws. He's not supposed to be a moral paragon - he was a grave robber and antiquities trafficker, after all.
Edit: Supposedly, the actual script says she was 25 when they meet again, which would have made her 15 at the time.
Of course, it's not really remarkable in the film because, in addition to both of them being 10 years older, it's very much a norm in Hollywood to have younger (so long as not too young) women and older men.
That doesn’t have a good ring to it either as pedophiles often claim they were in fact seduced by their victims.
Guilty people often claim things that would be mitigating or exonerating if true; that doesn't make it a “bad ring” to have fiction in which the mitigating or exonerating thing is true. (And, just to be clear, what Spielberg was suggesting would, IMO, only be modestly mitigating, and only even that in combination with Spielberg’s pushback on age, and even then not really appropriate background for with the rest of the film. But it was definitely reeling things back from what Lucas was suggesting.)
Here's three men who have had an immense impact on popular culture having a casual chat about statutory rape and a lot of racist stereotypes, and no one raises an objection. They didn't record this in the 1830s or the 1930s. It was 1978.
I've always loved their work, but wow, this is disappointing to read.
Are you aware that the age of consent in Georgia used to be 12? Then they decided that 12 was a bit young, so they raised it. All the way to 14.