MacGuffin

The MacGuffin is a plot device in fiction that drives the action forward.

The Ark of the Covenant, the MacGuffin of Raiders of the Lost Ark.

The term "MacGuffin" was first coined by the English screenwriter Angus MacPhail and was popularized by director Alfred Hitchcock in the 1930s. Within the Indiana Jones franchise, the films in particular, this typically refers to the object that the titular archaeologist is searching for.

Although franchise creator George Lucas conceived of Indiana Jones as an archaeologist who sought out supernatural artifacts, it was Philip Kaufman who came up with using the Ark of the Covenant for Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), influenced by an old dentist of his who was "obsessed" with the powers of the Ark. For Lucas, the Ark was the perfect MacGuffin, but struggled to conceptualize suitable follow-ups on his own for the subsequent three sequels.

The Sankara Stones were settled on as the MacGuffin of Temple of Doom.

Lucas raised the idea of using the Holy Grail for what developed into Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984) but director Steven Spielberg pushed against it, feeling that the MacGuffin was not strong enough. He believed that even with paranormal properties tied to it, the relic was too static an object for the big screen. The Monkey King as the MacGuffin was also considered yet shelved. Eventually the production settled on the Sankara Stones. However, Lucas would ultimately look back on them as having been too esoteric.

After attempts at plots by Lucas and Chris Columbus connecting the Monkey King with the Fountain of Youth and Chinese mythology's immortal peaches, the Holy Grail was revisited for Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989). As Spielberg wanted to explore Indiana Jones' relationship with his estranged father, he realized that he could use Indy's search for the Grail as a metaphor for the search for Henry Jones, Sr.

Last Crusade used the Holy Grail as both a physical object and as a metaphor regarding the protagonist's father.

Following the release of the third film, Lucas let the series rest as a trilogy in part because he felt that he was unable to come up with a good MacGuffin so focused on The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles TV show. The series included a feature-length story called "Young Indiana Jones and the Treasure of the Peacock's Eye" in which Indiana Jones has an ultimately futile quest chasing the Peacock's Eye, an unseen MacGuffin (later retconned into being the diamond from the opening of Temple of Doom) that Lucas wanted to use as foreshadowing for the typical adventure the younger Jones would grow up to have on a regular basis.

During the production of Young Indy, Lucas took an interest in the mythology of the crystal skulls, having researched them for an unmade episode of the show. In December 1992, while they were shooting Harrison Ford's guest appearance in the episode "Young Indiana Jones and the Mystery of the Blues", as the older Indiana Jones framing "bookends" set in 1950, Lucas was struck by an epiphany: bringing the character, set and based on the 1930s matinee serial, forward in time to around the 1950s would place him in the era of the sci-fi B movie and saw potential in a fourth film centered around aliens as the MacGuffin. For him, the movie would still be like its predecessors as long as it focused on a supernatural object, but given how much time had passed out-of-universe, Lucas felt the need to reflect that time difference in the story setting, finding inspiration in B-movies like Christian Nyby's The Thing from Another World (1951), Jack Arnold's It Came from Outer Space (1953) and Gordon Douglas' Them! (1954) He pitched the idea to Ford who, while keen to make another film, was put off by the choice of MacGuffin. Motivated to present his ideas with a screenplay, Lucas recruited Jeb Stuart to write a draft which focused on the Roswell incident's alien and flying saucers.

Spielberg was also reluctant to have an Indiana Jones mix genres, having made his own films involving aliens in the past with E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982) and Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). Perceiving that Ford and Spielberg weren't understanding the franchise's malleability to experiment with different film genres to avoid repeating the same plot over and over as long the franchise's formula of the title character looking for a supernatural artifact was kept, Lucas had also chosen a MacGuffin that could be felt believable through a "certain code of reality", having either an historical or archaeological basis, citing a time machine as an example of what wouldn't work. Jeffrey Boam, writer on Last Crusade, took over from Stuart in trying to find a version of the story that would satisfy both Lucas and Spielberg. However, the huge box office success of Roland Emmerich's film Independence Day (1996), which prominently featured an Earth versus the flying saucers premise, solidified Spielberg's disinterest in tackling them on-screen. Seeing themselves at an impasse, Lucas turned his attention towards launching the Star Wars prequel trilogy.

Otherworldly beings and crystal skulls informed the direction of Indy IV.

The fourth film received renewed momentum when many members of the then-Indiana Jones trilogy production team were reunited during an AFI tribute to Harrison Ford in 2000. Unwilling to give up on the alien MacGuffin, Lucas instead set about trying to find a compromise that held his interest but didn't draw heavily on flying saucers. Recalling the crystal skull research, he looked to combine it with an alien presence. The concept was eventually tweaked into "interdimensional beings" after Frank Darabont's draft was discarded, taking the shape of what ultimately became Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008). David Koepp, who wrote the final screenplay, didn't like the idea of using aliens and went as far to suggest an alternative idea which he considered more in line with the tone of previous entries in the franchise but Spielberg and Lucas refused to change it. Despite his own reservations with the MacGuffin, Spielberg felt part of his responsibility to the film was to defer to Lucas' vision for the story, and Lucas considered the Crystal Skull of Akator as the franchise's greatest MacGuffin since the Ark of the Covenant, calling the Sankara Stones and the Holy Grail "stuffy museum pieces" in comparison.

Following the announcement of a fifth film, Spielberg stated back in 2016 that both Koepp and he had already decided on what the MacGuffin would be. However, as both stepped back from the story development, director James Mangold, writing the screenplay with Jez and John-Henry Butterworth instead, decided to utilize a new plot device as he considered the proposed MacGuffin present in Koepp's early draft too similar to prior relics and not connected enough to Indiana Jones' position in life.

"A dial that could change the course of history".

Mangold would find inspiration for the MacGuffin in the form of the Antikythera Mechanism, a device associated with Archimedes from ancient Greece often cited as history's oldest "analog computer" and thought to be used to calculate and display information about astronomical phenomena. Mangold felt that for a story themed around getting older, the best artifact would be one which offered the opportunity to fix time itself. He found out in his research that the Antikythera Mechanism was speculated to be a time compass, leading him and the Butterworths to add "a little extra magic" to craft the perfect MacGuffin. Although the object lacked the religious aspects of the MacGuffins from the original trilogy of films, Ford deemed it to be a "genius choice" as it meddled with science's very nature.

In 2021, during the filming of what was later named as Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023), when asked by a fan on his Twitter account about the MacGuffin, Mangold expressed his hopes that it would be considered "decent" enough by the fans. He later clarified, upon the release of the film's first trailer, that the titular Antikythera was indeed the MacGuffin of the movie, which was also reflected on the Lucasfilm.com website.

Expanded Adventures

Within the Expanded Adventures, the wider lore of the Indiana Jones franchise beyond the movies themselves, authors of the 1980s often used artifacts of their of own creation. For example, the Ikons of Ikammanen from The Further Adventures of Indiana Jones, the ill-defined Mazatec Power Key of Indiana Jones in Revenge of the Ancients, and Indiana Jones and the Curse of Horror Island's Ebony Dove, stylistically similar in design to the titular MacGuffin of The Maltese Falcon, have to little to no basis in real-world archaeology or mysticism.

However, in the early 1990s, while writing his Indiana Jones prequel novels set in the 1920s, a directive that author Rob MacGregor received from George Lucas was that all the MacGuffins he used, such as the Omphalos in Indiana Jones and the Peril at Delphi, had to be established mystical objects as opposed to wholly new inventions. For all four of his Indy books, Max McCoy had a list of 30/40 possible MacGuffins to use, with Lucasfilm steering him to scrap some, like the Spear of Longinus, due to having them planned for future projects or allow him to use others like the Philosopher's Stone, overall having fun with the ones he was permitted to write. For Indiana Jones and the Secret of the Sphinx, McCoy included the Staff of Aaron as a means to find the Omega Book, a MacGuffin from the author's imagination but based on the common theme of preserved records of people's lives in real-world mysticism. Throughout McCoy's four novels, the Crystal Skull of Cozan was used as a subplot to avoid repeating the same story in each book, instead providing an overarching storyline across his titles. When conceiving ideas for Indiana Jones and the Army of the Dead, Steve Perry wished to have a magical MacGuffin in his novel, feeling that the Heart of Darkness, a mysterious African pearl that ended up on Haiti, looked like a keen idea.

For Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, Hal Barwood and Noah Falstein requested a visit to George Lucas' reference library in search of potential MacGuffins after being hired to adapt the Monkey King script and finding the MacGuffin substandard, with the latter also feeling that Western audiences weren't familiar enough with Chinese mythology for the MacGuffin to appeal to them. After choosing not to use the Excalibur legend for the setting limitations it posed, Barwood and Falstein saw gameplay potential in the concentric circle design of Atlantis from the book Mystic Places. Barwood later showed interest in using the Roswell UFO incident as the MacGuffin for Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine when a fourth Indy movie looked unlikely, but was told to drop it as George Lucas was still holding onto the idea for a sequel. Thus, Barwood listed ancient mysteries that Jones hadn't tackled yet and opted for the Tower of Babel and the Babylonian god Marduk, retroactively thanking Lucasfilm Ltd. for rejecting his initial MacGuffin.

To relaunch the Dark Horse Indiana Jones comic books in the late 2000s with an interesting MacGuffin, Rob Williams came up with the Tomb of the Gods as a means to start the series with high stakes over a "small, personal trinket" that could be disastrous to the world and to the protagonist's tempted soul, putting all humans in peril felt like "huge stakes" while providing the archaeologist with the possibility of all his studies being lies before uncovering a major revelation. For Indiana Jones and the Staff of Kings, David Collins asserted that the LucasArts crewmembers wished to use the Staff of Moses in a similar vein to the Ark of the Covenant as an artifact too powerful if the Old Testament stories are of any indication that Indy himself acknowledges why everyone wants it, with the danger it poses if used for evil in World War II being what affects the game's storyline due to the concerns on what may happen if the Nazis get hold of it.

External links

• MacGuffin on Wikipedia