'You've got the wrong Jones, Mister Nelson. Why don't you try my father?' Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
It seems a safe bet that, should Steven Spielberg and George Lucas ever get around to making Indiana Jones 5, a movie extra named Tyler Nelson will not be asked to reprise his performance as a "dancing Russian soldier". Having spent a nanosecond or two on the set of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, Nelson proceeded to give a spectacularly indiscreet interview to his local paper in which he exclusively revealed top-secret plot details, suggested that Cate Blanchett plays the role of a cruel Russian interrogator and implied that Harrison Ford personally auditions all the extras by wrestling naked with them inside his trailer ...
All right, every revelation except that last one.
Nelson's spoilers look set to annoy viewers who want to keep themselves pure and ignorant ahead of the film's release next May. And obviously they are going to enrage the hired goons at Lucasfilm, who may (or may not) have been behind the mysterious disappearance of the story from aintitcoolnews.com yesterday. But the revelations are also pretty funny (and even pretty harmless), mainly because an extra witness rarely qualifies as an expert witness.
Tellingly, Nelson seems to confuse the "crystal skull" of the title with a "crucifix skull" (whatever that may be), while his secret spy-hole came courtesy of a brief stint dancing the balalaika in front of a campfire. "They were filming us outside of a tent dancing," he gushed to the Edmond Sun. "I saw Harrison Ford strapped to a chair being interrogated. I started to gather that they were holding this big crystal-looking thing in the tent and I heard someone mention something about a crucifix skull."
I can so picture him there; dancing wildly in front of that campfire, as if he hadn't a care in the world. And yet all the while he has his eyes peeled for "big crystal-looking things" and is straining his ears to hear the dialogue above the infernal racket of the balalaika. Small wonder he gets it slightly wrong. He's like the spectators at the Sermon on the Mount who thought Jesus was saying, "blessed are the cheese-makers".
If you want the authoritative, inside-word on a movie set, I'm not sure that an extra makes the best oracle. Admittedly, I'm not sure who would make the best oracle. The average film set is such a chaotic Tower of Babel in which nobody seems to have a sense the bigger picture: a director once told me that it would be absurdly easy to convince an actor that they were acting in one film while actually shooting quite another. But an extra knows the least of anyone, so his evidence is going to be sketchy at best. Ask the munchkins what The Wizard of Oz was about and they might have said it was a film about a house that fell on a witch.
