Jeffrey Boam

"Dr. Jones, what you look at?"

This article would greatly benefit from the addition of one or more new images.
Please upload a relevant image and place it on the page. Once finished, this notice may be removed.

INDIVIDUAL
Jeffrey Boam
Birth	November 30, 1946 Rochester, New York, USA
Death	January 26, 2000 Los Angeles, California, USA
Nationality	American
Occupation	Screenwriter
Indiana Jones work	Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade

Jeffrey Boam (November 30, 1946 - January 24, 2000) was an American screenwriter and producer. Some of his work includes the scripts of The Lost Boys, Lethal Weapon 2 and 3 and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.

The third film in the Indiana Jones series went through several discarded scripts before Boam was hired. Diane Thomas had written a haunted house story, but Steven Spielberg rejected the concept. Chris Columbus developed a a second concept and George Lucas eventualy brought in Menno Meyjes to help develop a third concept the Holy Grail. Lucas and Spielberg then chose Boam, who spent two weeks developing the story closely with Lucas.

Boam signed a contract on April 14, 1987. He wrote his first draft that summer, and turned it in on September 15, with another revision on September 30. He expanded Henry Walton Jones, Senior's role from a late-revealed "MacGuffin" to a key figure found mid-film. With input from Sean Connery, the character became livelier. Connery also suggested both father and son had slept with the same woman, which Boam included for comic effect.

A practicing Catholic, Boam used religious symbolism in the Grail plot, making it a metaphor for faith. He invented new mythology, including the idea that the Grail cannot be removed from its resting place.

In the mid-1990s, following on from Jeb Stuart's Indiana Jones and the Saucermen from Mars, Boam was brought in to work on a fourth Indiana Jones film's screenplay – Variety reported on October 18, 1995 that Boam was penning the scripts of Indiana Jones 4 and Lethal Weapon 4. - which led to hoax drafts such as Indiana Jones and the Sons of Darkness and Indiana Jones and the Sword of Arthur floating around the internet that falsely attributed authorship to him. The Complete Making of Indiana Jones credits Boam and Lucas as having conceived the set-piece of Indy surviving an atomic blast inside a fridge in a Doom Town, which survived through the various iterations of the screenplay that ultimately became Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull in 2008.

Indiana Jones work

• Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade

External links

• Jeffrey Boam on Wikipedia
• Jeffrey Boam at the Internet Movie Database