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Indiana Jones And The Saucermen From Mars
Following the success of Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade, George Lucas would develop an idea or two that could have seen a fourth Indy adventure in cinemas in the 1990s. One that got quite far into the writing process was Indiana Jones And The Saucermen From Mars, an idea that Lucas started working on in 1993. He hired Jeb Stuart originally to write the script for him, before passing on the mantle to the late Jeffrey Boam (who had co-written The Last Crusade).
In this one, Indy very nearly gets married at the start to a linguist by the name of Dr Elaine McGregor. Amongst the guests at the wedding would have been Marion, Willie, Sallah and his father, but McGregor, instead of walking down the aisle, hops into a car on the big day and disappears. The search is thus on to find her.
Turns out she's working on the discovery of alien bodies and a strange stone cylinder. Indy and McGregor crack the code on said cylinder, which turns out to be coordinates leading them to a mountain. Russian spies want in though, and as Indy tries to rescue Elaine from one of their planes, a flying saucer appears. A further alien encounter sees a truck being lifted off the ground. Meanwhile, a mysterious countdown ticks down, with the assumption being it's a bomb.
And so the story progresses, until the eventual departure of the flying saucers and aliens - after teaching some nasty people lessons by, er, killing them - leaving Indy and Elaine free to go off and get married. Short Round was set to give them a lift in a car at the end of the film too.
A couple of things, then. Firstly, this shows that aliens were part of the thinking long before the script to Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull was completed. Secondly, in George Lucas' defence, that does tie in to the kind of serials he was watching that influenced him to come up with the Indiana Jones adventures in the first place.
So why did this one fall apart, while Crystal Skull didn't? Notwithstanding the fact that it migrated in part into what would be the fourth Indiana Jones film (the aliens, the fact that it opened in Nevada), it was more a case of timing. Both Spielberg and Ford weren't said to be keen on using aliens as a plot device, but by 1995, Jeffrey Boam had shaped it into a script that convinced them it might work. However, then Independence Day happened, and almost instantly killed the project. The similarities were too great.
Lucas would, as history shows, hold onto the idea of those aliens though. Jeffrey Boam would sadly pass away in 2000, at the age of just 53.
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more at: http://www.denofgeek.com/movies/indiana-...r-happened