356: Indiana Jones with Neil Laird

Dan LeFebvre  03:46

We have a lot to cover today with five different Indiana Jones movies, but before we get started digging into some of the more historical details, something I like to do here is to take a step back and get an overall letter grade for the historical accuracy of a movie. Now we have multiple movies today, so I’d love to ask you, kind of a letter grade for each one. Let’s start with the first movie released in the franchise, what letter grade would you give Raiders of the Lost Ark based on its historical accuracy? Yeah,

Neil Laird  04:14

Let’s clarify that, because obviously not talking about the quality, the fun of the film, like a historical which is obviously two different things, just, you know, tricky, but sometimes I do go in concert. I would say, with Indiana Jones, I would give it a solid B, the first one.

Dan LeFebvre  04:28

And then how about the next film, Temple of Doom.

Neil Laird  04:30

Tempo of doom would have to be a D, D,

Dan LeFebvre  04:33

okay, so a bit of a drop there. And then the Last Crusade is the next that would be a, b, b, okay, so tune back.

Neil Laird  04:40

We’ll talk about C plus or B. It’s on the on the fridge. Okay,

Dan LeFebvre  04:43

okay. And then almost 20 years later, we got another Indiana Jones with 2000 eights Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. What grade does that one get?

Neil Laird  04:51

20 years to to work on that, and they come back with an F.

Dan LeFebvre  04:56

I had a feeling that would be another drop. Yeah. And then last, but certainly not least, the final film in the franchise. At least as of this recording, we’ll see if they change that to is 2023, style of destiny. What historical letter grade does that one get?

Neil Laird  05:10

I would say that’s a, probably c plus as well. Maybe, if I’m generous, I’ll give it a B. It’s up there with sort of Last Crusade and that one both have some interesting concepts. They sort of fudge a bit. So we get a details. We’ll talk about that dividing run. Okay,

Dan LeFebvre  05:24

okay, yeah. So we have a little bit of a roller coaster there. The whole franchise. Nice. All right, let’s start digging into each of the movies now, starting with 1980 ones, Raiders of the Lost Ark. It’s the first one that’s not the Indiana Jones and and then the rest are but according to the movie, The Lost Ark, and the title is the Ark of the Ark of the Covenant, and Indiana Jones explains the basic concept in a scene at the beginning of the film. In a nutshell, the Ark is where the Israelites held the 10 Commandments that were given to Moses on Mount Sinai from the book of Exodus. In the Christian Bible, it’s not just a historical artifact, though, according to the movie, because the story that they tell suggests that the Israelites used the power of God associated with the Ark to defeat their enemies. And since the movie is set in 1936 when the Nazis are rising to power, Hitler wants to find the Ark to basically make his armies invincible. And that’s how the movie kind of sets up the whole concept for why Indiana Jones is trying to find the ark for the United States government before the Nazis do, do we know if the Ark of the Covenant was a real historical artifact, and was it really something that Hitler looked for as the Nazis were rising to power?

Neil Laird  06:26

Well, it’s interesting that the reason I gave this one a B, is why there was no arc today. And of course, no one in contemporary times has seen it. It’s one of the most well documented of all the artifacts we talk about in this series, because it was in the Bible. It actually goes back to biblical days, unlike the rest of them, and they’re quite descriptive in what they talk about, how big it is, the cubits and where it was housed. And you know, the book of Exodus gets very, very particular on all the sordid engineering details. Doesn’t mean that it was a real thing, but it certainly means they believed in it. And if you follow the story through the other chapters of the Bible, they do talk about, once they get to the Holy Land, how it becomes this scourge and it’s stolen by the Philistines, and they’ll they all get attacked by plague and rats, so much that they give it back. And then the Israeli Israelites, when they take it home, someone dares to look at it, and they die. They get struck down by lightning, very close to melting. So clearly, I think the writers of raiders read their Bible and know the lore, and I think that’s why it’s so strong in terms of, if not historical, at least the history of the telling of the ark, you know, take away the fact that it existed or not, they did their research, and they really are writing to what the writers of the Bible, in the New Testament, and some of the other apocryphal authors wrote at the time. Now, what the other question whether Nazis looked for it. They were looking for everything at that point. You know, the Nazi who just chasing everything down, and a lot of it was because they do believe in the spirit, the supernatural, but they also wanted to get anything that gave them the up on on religion and obviously telling people they have something a lot of us propaganda. It wasn’t as they believe that they were going to carnage the force of Yahweh. It was to get the local population to say, look what we have. You know, it was, it was, it was as much telling you we’re giving you something as valuable as it was, trying to use it for nefarious purposes. But like, like, like, the other ones we talk about later, there’s no specific information saying they were looking for the ark. Particularly, they were looking for anything that they could exploit in the occult or in the biblical or in the spiritual in the Christian world to prop themselves up.

Dan LeFebvre  08:38

So make sure I’m understanding, it’s not as much that they were looking for it to lead their armies, necessarily, but almost like, as long as their armies, or whoever their followers were, believed that that had the power, it didn’t even matter if they actually had the power itself, like you see the lightning in the movie, right? The idea of that concept, as long as people believe then it sounds like that’s what the Nazis were going for. Yeah, they

Neil Laird  09:02

get part of it. Maybe not. Unlike the people wrote the Bible, whether those people wrote that believe that the Ark had these supernatural things. But if the you know, if, if to people who think that we are the ones who are housing it have those power, then where you’re going to listen to us as well. So it’s both ways. It may have been people already believed in, in the supernatural, in the occult aspect of it. But just as many were cynical people trying to manipulate the populace.

Dan LeFebvre  09:25

Another huge parks in Indiana Jones search for the arc in Raiders revolves around the lost city of Tanis. In the movie’s version of history, Tannis was buried by a huge Sandstorm back in like 980 BC, until Renee Belloc discovers Tannis, presumably just before the movie’s timeline, because the Nazis financed Bell excavation to find the Ark there at Tanis. Is there really a historical connection between the city of Tannis and the ark in a word, no,

Neil Laird  09:58

I admire the big Tannis now. Again, we talked about this up top. I’m an archeologist, or I am. I’m not an archeologist, but I do all these shows about them. So I’ve done tons of shows in Egypt. That’s my happy place. I probably shot maybe 2030, films there. I’ve been there a lot. I’ve been to Tannis a couple of times as well, but mostly not about, never about the arc. The Tannis is a real place. It’s up in the delta, which is north east of Alexandria, and it from the late period of Egypt. So it’s 19/20 dynasty on which mean anything to the layman, but it was, it was post King David in the holy period. But it wasn’t a place that was wiped off the face of the earth by a sandstorm. It basically just crumbled. When the Egyptian empire crumbled the late period. Late period was got ransacked by 600 BC by the Persians, and it kind of disappeared from history, mostly like lots of these ancient cities, not because it got lost, because it got dismantled, it got abused. People took the temples and reused them to make a donkey shed. You know, it just basically, it basically got repurposed. And it’s a fascinating city, because they did find one more quick aside, besides the King Tut tomb, which is the only known unleaded tomb in ancient Egypt. The other one was found in Tanis, but much later, a pharaoh co shoshank The second, and you find out the gold and all the all the mummies and all the trappings there, just like King Tut, but it’s a much poorer time in history. So it’s very interesting. People don’t know about it. You can see all this stuff when you go to the Cairo Museum. But it lost its luster because, because King Tut looms bigger, and also, ironically, it was found just before the rise of World War Two. So as soon as it was found, the Nazis swept in, and it never really got the press, and people couldn’t excavate it again, all that kind of stuff. So it just sort of slunk off into into oblivion. So it’s a long answer to say no, there’s, there’s no connection at all to the ark. There. It is a real town, and interesting enough too. Even before I went to Egypt, when I was watching this film as a kid, it never quite felt right. It feels like, you know, if you go to Egypt as a tourist or as a filmmaker, an archeologist, one thing you’ll quickly learn is it’s not the sand dunes. It’s not the soft sand that we think of in the Sahara. It’s a harder, darker, more well trodden land. So you don’t have you look at the Tannis in Raiders, it feels like it’s the rolling hills and up there, and there’s very few artifacts. You go to the modern tennis it’s big and flat and brown, and there’s no sands. There’s no dunes at all, because it doesn’t get that. It’s too close to the delta, little too marshy, so it doesn’t even feel like they’re real. They’re real. Tannis, again, does it matter to people who are watching on a Saturday afternoon with popcorn? No. And conversely, that’s a terrible representation of Cairo in that film. Cairo looks nothing like that. Cairo that had like a small town in Algeria or something. Really, that’s that question. I have to throw that in there. That is a poor representation of 1930s Cairo. No, I think that’s, I

Dan LeFebvre  13:04

mean, that’s a great point. That was something you already kind of mentioned with Tanis. But, you know, we see a lot of, a lot of archeology in the movie, and you just kind of get the sense that this is what Egyptian archeology looked like there. I know, granted, you know, in the 1930s but still, I think a lot of people are influenced by what you see in Raiders as This must be what it looks like there.

Neil Laird  13:27

And again, it’s more towards the more trained eye, having been to the site so often, I can feel when it’s, you know, it’s more romantic and more dramatic in the film than it does. Again, it’s flatter and more well trodden and not quite as pretty, not quite as exotic. Doesn’t look as well on film. There’s a lot of modern concrete tower blocks just out of view, you know, gas stations and stuff.

Dan LeFebvre  13:51

Now almost every movie is going to have some plot holes. I think one of the most popular ones that I know of from Raiders of Lost Ark has to do with just the idea that Indiana Jones himself really had no impact on the outcome of the film. The Nazis would have found the Ark and all died at the end from God’s power, from the Ark anyway. But since this is more kind of focusing on the history side of things, I have to ask, does Raiders have a major plot hole that really stood out to you from a historical perspective?

Neil Laird  14:18

I mean, that’s historical, I wouldn’t say not beyond them playing so fast and loose with the facts. I think to me, even as a kid, I remember this again, I’m in my today’s my 58th birthday, so I saw all these movies in the theater. So I remember seeing raiders and Temple of Doom, which we’ll talk to in a few minutes in the theater. And I remember thinking as a kid, a huge plot point then was, well, if Temple Of Doom is a prequel, and he discovers all this magic and all the supernatural stuff a year before Raider, why did he believe any of it when he’s in Raiders? Why isn’t such a bloody skeptic just last year, you watched a guy have his art ripped out and a bunch of gods and zombies attacking you and. You know, you forgot about all that. It’s a very plot point

Dan LeFebvre  15:03

that is a very good point that I didn’t even think about that, you know, because it is a prequel. And, yeah, no, that’s he forgot. You know, we just all had that happening to us all the time with

Neil Laird  15:17

the Ark and a couple birthdays and the taxes you forget about Yeah, he slept since

Dan LeFebvre  15:21

then, since you mentioned Temple of Doom. That is the next one. It came out in 1984 but it is a prequel. It happens the year prior to what we saw in Raiders. And so we’re not seeing Nazis anymore. This one is Indiana Jones looking for the Sankara stones, which, according to the movie, are powerful and sacred artifacts tied to the Hindu legend. Now, when they’re stolen from a village that triggers Indiana Jones to go searching for them, is there any truth to the legend of the Sakara stones that we see in movie? No,

Neil Laird  15:49

it’s totally fictional. I mean, in all of them, I think this is the the one that is the most sexualized. It’s not really based on anything. And even when we get to the crystal skulls and we talk about how dubious some of the facts are, there a lack thereof. At least it was based on something we could hold there were lingam stone Shiva. Lingam stones were very common. You see them any if you go to any Hindu temple, and they’re just sort of like, and I’m not a Hindu scholar, but I think they represent the sort of shapelessness of Earth and God and creation, the co creation stones, so that that was all totally fictionalized in terms of the diamond and all that totally fictionalized for the film, which I think is one of his biggest flaws, because it also doesn’t really have that gravitas. It doesn’t really make much sense. You don’t know what it does. It somehow it helps people control kids and enslave them, and then when you get them bad, they’re no longer slaves. It’s pretty murky in terms of what his power is as well. But no, it is totally fictional, and there’s nothing in terms of five stoves that have to be put together.

Dan LeFebvre  16:47

Okay, okay, yeah, that’s, I guess maybe it doesn’t have all that, like you were saying, building off the biblical lore and things that people already know as they’re watching this. And they might not know the details of it, but they know enough of it to know that, oh, Tannis, that’s a real place. I know that that’s a real place. I know the arc covenant is a was a thing. I don’t know what it does, but you know that that kind of thing, you can get that with this in cornerstones. Okay,

Neil Laird  17:11

yeah, it’s like, you know, again, I do archeology programs, like over 1000 hours of TV under shows. And I’ve done all the other stories multiple times. I’ve never done a lingam show. So it also shows you there’s really nothing there. There’s no rule there there, other than if you want to do a story about religion and about spirituality, but the idea of that having some sort of magical property, even people looking for it, he doesn’t, doesn’t really even have that, that holy grail quest where people are trying to find some classic stone. It’s just a total McMuffin. Okay,

Dan LeFebvre  17:44

okay. Well, speaking of searching, I have to ask Indiana Jones discovers the thuggee cult is behind all of this, and according to the movie, they’re a secret society who worship the Goddess Kali, which is where the Temple of Doom comes in, because that’s a temple for sacrificing humans to Kali. But the movie suggests that the thuggee cult was eradicated by the British in the 19th century when they colonized India. Is there a true story behind the thuggee cult that we see in the

Neil Laird  18:12

movie? There was a Thuggy called it’s really fascinating. It’s then I had not done a film on that, but I have read about it. And the thuggies were a real group of people that. But they were bandits. They were not so much a cult. That kind of came later, but basically between, I think, the 1800s and up until the British sort of came in and rough shot everyone. They were highway bandits, and they were known for strangling their victims, and they became quite notorious. And I do think there’s some there’s some truth to the fact that they were actually two serial killers, there’s one, I forget his name, who claimed to have killed 900 people before he was caught, which would make him the most notorious serial killer ever. And traditionally, they always did it through strangulation. And one of the theories is that there was some Hindu what’s the word prophecy? And a prophecy some sort of, some sort of law they wanted to follow where we never shed blood. You can kill, but never shed blood. You strangle somebody. There’s no blood. It’s one theory. But the British, when they did come in, the Raj they came in, they did eradicate them. And that’s when things get murky, because when it’s being written by the winners. You don’t know exactly how much they added. The British might have exaggerated. They may have made a religious cult and leaned into the Kali thing because they wanted to dismiss and denigrate the local religions. So while there might have been people who did follow those cults, some of them are also Muslim as well. So you can say they were all devotees of some cult at the end of the day, they were just really nasty highway bandits who would kill, would kill for anything. Okay,

Dan LeFebvre  19:49

okay, yeah, sounds like a lot of fictionalization in there, but maybe that’s where the filmmakers were hoping that that was the the nugget of truth that people would latch on to and recognize and. And

Neil Laird  20:00

then I’m glad they brought them up, because they’re pretty obscure. I don’t know if people listening to this in India would know more, but it’s not something you hear too much about here in the west. So I do admire that film, at least for going to India, which isn’t something we normally do in the West, and for talking about things like the sad years, because we don’t usually, you know, we usually do in the West. We usually stick in the West. So it’s great actually, they went a bit far afield. You know, biggest problem with that film is it’s of all of all the films. It’s the great white savior film. You know, it’s like poor town that has to bring the white guy over from Yale or ever to solve a problem they couldn’t possibly solve on their own. And if you look at it today, the racism and the way they dismiss the Indians, and wait, this one white guy and his shrill sidekicks, you know, save an entire nation, is really kind of hard to stomach. It makes it, it makes it a tough watch for me.

Dan LeFebvre  20:51

Yeah, no, that’s fair, yeah. And that’s something that I wonder how much of that is them going into the, well, of course, movies released in the 80s, so you’re going to have some of that too. But then also, going back to, they’re talking about British colonialism, and that whole element of it too, which has its own element, I’m sure, again, history written by the winners. But I’m sure there is a lot of that whole, uh, Savior, white savior coming in,

Neil Laird  21:19

yeah, when you’re talking about India and you’re a white man, you hit a minefield already. I mean, Islam as well. And, yeah, you know him shooting a bunch of, you know, sword dashing, you know, Muslims too, is just as much of that. But yet you have to go with that. You recognize that it’s obviously, it’s, you know, had to put that aside both of the time, and also that it’s an exotic, foreign adventure. So you have to create bad guys wherever you go. That one just seems the most egregious. However, I would say is a real quick side note. It’s the only one of the four films, the five films where he leaves the artifacts with the locals. Point of Western Museum. He doesn’t steal it and take it to, you know, New York or London. So that’s of that going for it. He saves the day, and he goes home,

Dan LeFebvre  22:04

yeah, yeah. And then he leaves the stones with the villagers to Yeah,

Neil Laird  22:07

he didn’t get them, you know, like you didn’t get the Holy Grail, because he can’t leave the cave or whatever. But the intention was to take it out of the country, right, in places, somewhere where, you know, you can make money for it. You know,

Dan LeFebvre  22:19

the famous line, this belongs in a museum like everything, and that’s

Neil Laird  22:23

the whole authority. You know, my archeology friends, they both are probably archeologists because of Indiana Jones, because he’s so exotic and sexy and fun. And they also recognize the great conflict there, where it’s like, he’s about going around the world and stealing and bringing it back. Yeah. Yeah,

Dan LeFebvre  22:41

that’s fair. Before we leave a temple of doom. Was there anything about the movies historical depictions that might surprise someone who has only seen movie and hasn’t dug into the true

Neil Laird  22:50

story? I think it’s less a cultural than its historical. I think there’s so little history in there that it’s really just, I think that the how the culture is sort of dismissed and marginalized, is the thing that that resonates with me today. You know, it’s all creative. It’s all totally fantasy. So in a way, it’s kind of hard to badmouth for taking something and beyond making the Lingams, you know, something else. They didn’t, they didn’t recreate history, because it was really little history there to

Dan LeFebvre  23:19

recreate fair point. All creative license.

Neil Laird  23:23

Hey, no one flew me over this there’s another thing here, right?

Dan LeFebvre  23:27

Well, if we go back to the movies, were to what is my personal favorite in the franchise 1989 Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. And the artifact that India is searching for this time is the holy grail, the cup said to have been used by Jesus at the Last Supper and then caught his blood at the crucifixion. The Last Crusade is set in 1938 and so the Nazis are back as the main villains, and they’re also searching for the Holy Grail and the eternal life that it provides for anyone who drinks from the cup. Is it true that the Nazis searched for the Holy Grail. It’s

Neil Laird  24:01

the same with the ark. They didn’t specifically said, let’s go find the Grail, but it was all part and parcel of them trying to harness the occult and the and the minds and spirits of the people in Germany and elsewhere. So it wouldn’t surprise me, because the ark and the Grail probably one of the reasons why they’re the two strongest one in the franchise is there. They are real artifacts. I’ve done more arc and Grail shows than any other. I just did one. I’m working on a History Channel show right now about both of them. They’re both of them. You know, this is the same story over and over again. You never get tired of those stories. But the Holy Grail is interesting. Unlike, I think that’s why it’s a c plus is that so much was added. The Grail itself a little more mundane. It never had any spiritual it never had any other dimension. The Holy Grail. It doesn’t even come from the Bible. There’s no mention in the Bible. It comes from the 12th century, the Arthurian legend and parcel and all that kind of stuff. And. And it was clearly created after the fact, and it was all about trying to find this magical cup. And the idea of eternal youth, internal life was something that was added much later. If you look at stuff from the time period, it would usually regenerate you, would give you almost absolution, but it wouldn’t keep you young forever. I think probably Wagner. Wagner did a an opera on parcel, which was world famous back in the day. And even in that one, which is all about the all about the fantastical, it was all about parcel basically becoming free of all his guilt and all you know that you’re basically the best confession ever. All sins are eradicated. That’s what the Grail did when you had it then. So the even the idea of the eternal life and all that, it was added by the screenwriters just for this film,

Dan LeFebvre  25:46

interest. Oh, it was added for this film. Or was that something that was like, maybe

Neil Laird  25:50

came before that? Maybe there might have been other lore that came later, but that was not the typical if you talk about like, we know the arc, everyone agrees York will melt you or kill you, or you wake up in boils. We just play with the facts a bit. If you look at the tradition of the Holy Grail, where and when that came up, just not a big thing, and it’s you might want to, you know, double check your facts afterwards. But as far as I know, that was the first time I ever heard of it being giving you eternal youth. I was

Dan LeFebvre  26:21

wondering if maybe it was like a translation thing, because over time, there’s so many different ways that people could translate regeneration, you know, maybe some might think it’s more spiritual or physical, or, you know, all of these things, and just using all of it

Neil Laird  26:34

very well beyond that, exactly. Yeah. And it kind of took elements of the fountain of youth and all that in there too, all the classic tropes we have of looking for something magical. So I think it kind of becomes literally a repository for whatever you want it to be. Well, you already

Dan LeFebvre  26:48

mentioned them earlier, and I want to talk about a little bit from from this one Indian Jones is searching for clues left by the Knights Templar, to eventually find it leads into the canyon of the crescent moon, and that’s where it turns out this one of the surviving members of the Knights, Templar, used the grill himself to gain eternal life, and he’s there guarding it. And at the end of the movie, the grill gets lost again as the cave collapses, because, as the knight explains, Andy, you can’t take it past the Great Seal. Now correct me, if I’m wrong, I believe they use the real life location of Petra in the country of Jordan for that part of the movie. But can you fill in some historical context around the connection of the Knights Templar and the Holy Grail?

Neil Laird  27:27

I’ve got so many Templar shows. People love the Templar. They are the ultimate Rorschach test of, you know, weird, MIDI, medieval, you know, magic. First of all, Petra is one of my most I love Petra some of my favorite sites in the world. I’ve been to 70 some countries, and I would say Petra is my top five places everyone should have on their bucket list. Now it’s funny, when you come down you see patches, that’s called the Treasury, and you come down a wadi, which is an empty riverbed, a dry riverbed, the first thing you see me turn a corner is the Treasury, where they shot the exterior. Now if you go in the interior, you’re greatly disappointed, because it was just a tune for a first century AD king, but at the same time as like Augustus in that period, and it’s just an unfinished room, the Sarcophagus is even gone. So you go in, looks like a parking garage, just nothing like the set. There’s no booby traps and all this kind of stuff that, yeah, yeah. Once you walk it’s like, oh, you know the old night and you know, where’s all the soaring temples and stuff? Nope, the outside is where you take your photos. But, but Petra is an amazing, amazing site. Now, the nice tempers faci because I’ve done so many shows, and every one of them is about what they found, what they didn’t find. The Grail was one of them. And the reason that they kind of become this sort of like go to for any lost artifact from the Holy Land is because there was a pilgrims that let people get from Jaffa, from the boat, from the shores of Israel, to the Holy Land, to Jerusalem, which is about an hour or two today by car. It’s probably a couple days there. They were pilgrims to do back and forth. It became very, very rich because of that, because of all the taxes, and they were given the prime real estate in Jerusalem, which is the Temple Mount, where the temple Solomon was, where the great rock is today, the Dome of the Rock, all that stuff. And the theory was they were sitting on all the stuff that was hidden during the temple days, including including the ark, which was sacked several times the Babylonians and sacked by the Romans. I think was a Babylonian one where they hit it disappeared in history back then. So one of the theories is, they took it, they spired it out. But again, none of this has any basis. In fact, I did a show, probably one of the worst shows I ever did, on the Knights Templar about saying they didn’t find the the Holy Grail, but they found the head of Christ. And a guy actually wrote a book and published it and said the head of Christ was spirited out by the Knights Templar into a chapel in Scotland called Rosslyn Chapel. There’s a wonderful, little weird temple outside of Edinburgh. Da Vinci Code takes place there. If you go there, it’s super, super weird. And he couldn’t even have all. These facts about where exactly it was hidden, in a secret chamber underneath the altar in Rosslyn Chapel. And that’s where you would find the head of Christ. And he sold this book on it. And so I was there years later. I mean, it was just one of my first shows I did back in the 90s, and I was there shooting one time, and I was very expensive. I remember to to get permits, so I pretend like I was a tourist. Rather than pay like, 10,000 pounds, I went in there just I got some really, really good, slow pans, far better than a tourist would get, you know, and find a custodian, the guy raking the Lees came out to me and says, What the hell are you really here for? You’re not just some holiday and and no one was around. It was late. I went inside, but I couldn’t shoot inside. It was illegal to shoot inside if you have a permit. And I told him, I said, Well, actually, I hear the head of Christ this year. He goes, Oh, is that what it is this week? Is that what that’s

Dan LeFebvre  30:51

what it is this week? Oh, yes.

Neil Laird  30:53

Oh, last week it was the ground. Okay. He goes, Okay, you turn your camera off. I will show you the head of Christ, but you can’t, and you cannot videotape it. And your sound guy was like, hiding out behind that tree trying to get good audio of me, actually shut it off. So the custodians into the place was closing. He took me in. He goes, Okay, your camera’s off, right? And he walked in. And it’s a weird looking chapel. It’s always festooned with all these strange carvings. And it’s really odd. And it was, it was made by descendants of the Templars. Some did actually escape to Edinburgh the 1300s 1400s so there is some cause that they there was some connection, however tenuous. But he took me behind the altar, and lo and behold, there was a door that went down there. It was stairs that went down there. And it was very dark. And okay, keep saying, okay, no camera, right? No camera. This is when I first filmed that kid in a candy store. I can’t believe I’m going to score so big on my third film for television or whatever. So he gets down there, and he gets his keys out, and there’s a big oak door and with a big, you know, brass knob, and he opens it up, because, like, you ready to see the head of Christ? Yes, sir, I am. And he opens it up, and there is a sink and a bucket and a mop. And he takes his rake and he sets it in the genital closet, and he closes it, he goes, there’s your head of Christ. That’s what the Knights Templar are. That’s a long way to say the nice tapper, everything you want them to be, and they’re nothing.

Dan LeFebvre  32:22

Okay, yeah, so you just don’t, just don’t look behind the door, exactly.

Neil Laird  32:25

Don’t look behind the door. Man behind the curtain. Wow. Very, very early on to question everything you know, as a TV producer, it’s easy. People are selling a book and someone says one stuff has a great idea in avariably, we’re always chasing. You don’t want to do the boring story that’s all registered. In fact, you want to do something as a sense of mystery, like Indiana Jones or whatever. And that’s what History Channel, geographic, BBC, other people I work for, that’s what they chase. But it’s up to the we producers to, kind of like, not get caught up in that, because the end of the day, you’ll be sort of disappointed in most cases. I mean, there’s night, but they’re the I mean, they, they, there’s somewhere else in Roslyn chapel, there’s a bunch of strange carvings that someone claimed is a map of the New World, and that’s where, that’s where the Templars took the Holy Grail. So it’s somewhere in Mexico or something. So again, you know, people are always looking for that answer. The Knights Templar is the first is a perfect it’s a perfect people to do that because they were mysterious. They’re on the Temple Mount, and they were totally massacred. They were wiped out. So, so they so the thinking was they had some hidden story that the King of France was trying to get, which is why it massacred them on Friday the 13th, by the way, which is why we have Friday the 13th. And I

Dan LeFebvre  33:36

know I’ve heard some conspiracies of like, were they actually all taken out, or did this go underground? Right? Throws up even more questions Scotland,

Neil Laird  33:44

because there are some, there are some Templar graves up in Edinburgh. So they did all the radical I mean, they didn’t happen to all be in Paris on that night to whatever, but it’s a big story. I love the nice stuff. They’re going to keep giving and giving and giving. But their their connection to the Holy Grail is as tenuous as the head of Christ,

Dan LeFebvre  34:01

yeah, well, at least, I mean, I’m curious then, because used to be, you know, the Knights Templar being just a popular thing that people love to hear about. Even today, you have the Knights Templar in the holy grail tied in Indiana Jones. What is the current train of thought? Are there still people that are searching for the Holy Grail today?

Neil Laird  34:18

Yeah, I think, I think if the Holy Grail is kind of come to by word for it. You know, you talk to a physicist, or you talk to a paleontologist, or use a holy grail as a thing you’re trying to find. So of course, if people looking for the real deal, again, it doesn’t exist. And if it existed, it was melted down or disappeared. It was just a cup. Oh, idea it’s only mentioned in passing in the Old Testament, or the New Testament is, you know, they drank there and then none of you and Joseph and marathon and all these kind of things that come after the fact. But the fact that a regular cup could survive this long is even less likely than the ark, because it probably wasn’t even venerated until much, much later. Yeah, no, that makes sense. I’m sure that somebody wasted their money looking for. And then probably said they found a cup somewhere, and like, you know, some church in Krakow, and they claim that one, but they’ll sell a book, but chances are, could be another janitor closet.

Dan LeFebvre  35:12

But as we finish up the last Crusader, is there any other historical aspects from the film that we haven’t talked about that you think would be a surprise to viewers? Well, one

Neil Laird  35:20

thing I learned, because I’ve shot there so many times, and I think it’s so ridiculous when I watched that film today, is you’d be going to the catacombs under Venice, and that’s where they find it. Venice is a friggin Island, two feet down, and you flood everything. There are no catacombs in Venice. It is sinking. Last thing you want to do is build a basement in Venice. That’s

Dan LeFebvre  35:42

a very good point that they just don’t seem to address in the movies. Move

Neil Laird  35:46

1. There’s some water down there. Is a bit leaky, but you know what the last thing you’re gonna do is build a basement in Venice.

Dan LeFebvre  35:54

So good point. It’s a very good point. Well, let’s fast forward about 19 years between the Last Crusade and the next movie the franchise 2008 Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. And there’s a scene in the beginning of the movie where we’re introduced to shy le, both character mutt, and he tells Indy that one of his old colleagues who helped raise mud, Professor Oxley, is down in Peru, and that’s where he found the Crystal Skull, to quote, mutt in the movie, it’s like that one guy that Mitchell has had his head kiss. He has mispronunciation trying to find it. That skull, the one that he found. And then Indy corrects him on the name goes on. Gives us a little bit more background on the Mitchell hedges skull. It’s Mesoamerican. There are multiple skulls in the world, according to Indiana Jones. And it’s interesting craftsmanship, but that’s about it. And then we find out, you know, mutts off to says, oxley’s off to akator, which is, kind of reminds me of the the throwback to Tanis, you know, that kind of like, oh, this is the location that we have to go to start. You know, according to this one, it’s a guitar is where the skull was found. And that sparks Andy’s interest. Akator goes by another name in the movie El Dorado, the City of Gold. So that’s kind of how the movie sets up. The reason for the storyline is them heading down to Peru to find Oxley to Crystal Skull and akator. Can you help us separate fact from fiction in the movies? Narrative?

Neil Laird  37:09

Well, there’s a lot more fiction. In fact here there was a Mitchell hedges, and he’s very interesting, and they say he might have been one of the prototypes for Indiana Jones, among others. He was a charlatan slash adventurer in the 30s, and he claimed to have found one of the crystal skulls in Belize. Actually, I forget the name of it. It’s an archeological site I’ve been to. It’s a Mayan site, a classic era Mayan site, which is down south, almost along the Guatemalan border, where it’s a small site, but it’s, but as you know, it’s, it’s got some really cool pyramids and things. But he claimed to have found it there and then with his daughter or something. And they just didn’t talk about it for a long time. But then later on, there was, there was some reveal. They actually bought it at Sotheby’s in like 1948 or something, somebody else. And there was no record whatsoever of crystal and there wouldn’t be, because the Mayans didn’t have crystal skulls. And all 13 of these skulls. I think there’s 13 of them in existence. They think they were all made by a French guy, and like the the just before the war, to sell, you know, crap, to Taurus, big artifacts and get them on Sotheby’s. And if you look at them now, and I’ve only seen one behind glass, I’ve never touched it, but you actually, actually see modern rotary modern machinery was it could for the Mayans and like the 1200s to build this out of corpse, it would have taken them, you know, 100 years or something, to polish it this way. There are actual traces of modern machinery, like diamond cutting devices. That’s

Dan LeFebvre  38:34

because the aliens gave it to them. Yeah, exactly, yeah. So, I

Neil Laird  38:38

mean, it’s, you know, exactly. I mean, this one above all of them. Not only I think it’s the worst film in terms of the story and the characters and all that stuff, but it’s the most ancient alias. Is the stuff that I’ve been trying to run away with all my career on television, the people I skewer in my books. I run writing books about a cheesy time traveling TV crew, there’s very much based on that kind of crew, whether everything’s a conspiracy and everything rubbish, you know, so there’s nothing there and and except for basing that on some snippets like El Dorado, you know, there were there wasn’t there. Obviously, people were looking for El Dorado. And a lot of Spanish conquistadors looking for El Dorado, of course, I never found it. Most of those were down south as well, in South South America, not in Mayan area. So they’re blending all that stuff together for some sort of like booga. Booga show, as we would call it, okay,

Dan LeFebvre  39:29

yeah, that was gonna be my next question, because we do the movie, does mention the Spanish conquistador Francisco, do Orlando, I think, who disappeared looking for El Dorado in 1546 so I’m assuming, was he a real person, or was it just kind of the concept of Spanish conquista. He

Neil Laird  39:45

was real. And actually, he’s known more famously for finding he sailed the beginning of the end of the Amazon. See, charted. Wow, okay, and this was a 15, mid 15, so forget the dates. And then he went back. Back, and then under a Portuguese flag, for some reason, he went back to start a colony. I think the Portuguese wanted to settle there on the mounts of the Amazon. And he was looking for El dorados. He went, anyone who went over to the New World was looking for El Dorado among other things as well. But mostly was about a benchmark, you know, a toehold for one of the governments who paid for the expedition. So they could what they ultimately did, so they could split the locals and get the land. Is exactly what happened. And he did not disappear. He died, and exactly what happened to him. Do you ever seen one of my favorite movies of all time? A year, Wrath of God. Do you know this film by Werner Herzog,

Dan LeFebvre  40:35

yes. I mean, I haven’t seen it in a long time, to get fantastic questions.

Neil Laird  40:39

It’s very much based on him among other people, but they took a lot of what happened to him, and he basically went. They got lost a second time. They lost ships. There was infighting. They got sick. He went off to find help and died along the way. His wife was left behind, kind of like in a geara. And some people did survive, but he just died. They say he went mad again agira, but there’s all well documented the time, and people did survive. And his idea then was not to look for the City of Gold, but to again, to create, you know, to put a Portuguese flag in the earth so they could exploit it.

Dan LeFebvre  41:23

Well, we’ve already talked about the Nazis search for artifacts in some of the other movies, but in Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, that’s set in 1957 so at this time, the villains are the Soviets, and they’re looking for powers provided by the secrets of the Crystal Skull, which again, very similar to what we saw with the Nazis looking for artifacts before. But is it true that the Soviets were searching for supernatural artifacts, too? Not

Neil Laird  41:44

that I’m aware of. No, I think, I think they just, they swapped out Nazis the end of the time, you know, yeah, the Cold War next. But in the Iraqis or the Vietnamese, you know, it depends on when they made the film. I mean, as far as I know, they were not looking for that. I think, you know, the Soviets are just more interested in just real world domination, as opposed to, you know, finding some sort of magical stone somewhere. And they certainly probably wanted to ride roughshod over the locals as well and get those things done for themselves. They certainly got a lot of missiles over there. But as far as that, that’s all, that’s all, Bs, okay, okay. Well,

Dan LeFebvre  42:19

we talked very briefly about it, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t ask about the elephant in the room with the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. And that is the way it ends, because that’s when we find out the crystal skulls are the skeletons of interdimensional beings that we see this huge UFO taking a portal to some other dimension after they return the skull. And the movie makes the point that say that they’re not aliens from space, but they look a lot like the stereotypical aliens that we would expect to see. And that leads me into something I’m sure a lot of people watching right now are thinking a lot of the stuff in the movie that we see, from the crystal skulls to the Nazca Lines in Peru, are also talked about on the History Channel show Ancient Aliens, of course, which started, actually about a year after Kingdom of the Crystal Skull came out in 2008 I don’t know if there’s any connection between those two things, necessarily, but I have a two part question about this. First, based on your experience, do you believe there’s any truth to the concepts proposed in the movie that tie these ancient artifacts to UFOs? And secondly, from a kind of a more overall perspective, what’s the general consensus for people that you’ve interacted with over the course of your career on whether or not there’s a connection between these ancient artifacts like the Crystal Skull and even the Nazca Lines, things like that, and UFOs, the

Neil Laird  43:35

message there certainly is, yeah, it’s a lot you can talk about and active decode. There’s certainly so much of what I’ve done is sort of disputing a lot of that stuff. And, you know, Asian aliens did not invent the idea of the aliens. That goes back to chariot of the gods in the seven even before, I think, you know, it was, was this guy’s name, I forget his name, but German guy who carries the god, Oh, danikin, I think, yeah. Well, yeah. I mean, and all that stuff goes back to the idea that it couldn’t possibly have been humans that had did this. We had to have some help. The very first show that I made is my thesis film in school. So I was young and naive, but I was able to pull it off. Was about the restoration of the Great Sphinx, and I was and through a friend’s father, who was on the antiquities board in Egypt, I was able to go over there and actually climb the Sphinx and watch them restore it is amazing for a 23 year old kid. And one of the amazing, the reasons I got the access is because at the same time that I made that film as again, as a eventually, sort of Discovery Channel, but it just could be my thesis film at the time was because there’s a big, popular show that had just aired 1994 with Charlton Heston claimed the Sphinx was 10,000 years old. Guy named Robert shock and some other geologists claim that by water erosion on the Sphinx, they proved that it was not made by it was 10,000 years old, so that the pyramids were four and a half 1000 years of things. So therefore, they quickly jumped to saying it wasn’t the it wasn’t built by the Pharaonic people. It was built by an ancient alien race. Who Came down 6000 years before, built this thing, totally disappeared, and then a culture arose 3000 years later and totally mimicked it all based on one study of water erosion. And by looking at saying the water erosion proves that, you know, it would take 10 and a half 1000 years to do this. Yeah, they got Charlton Heston Moses himself to do a two hour NBC documenting on this became a big thing. And here I am a kid going over there, and these archeologists, Zahi awas and some of the people that run it, they were so incensed by this that even had a young kid like me come over and talk about us, they could have a voice. Why not? And in 20 minutes, they disputed it there by looking at the way this Sphinx is built as multiple layers of stone. The head is much stronger than the body of this thing, so it arose at a different rate. So the water erosion could have happened, but it happened when there was, you know, channels and things and wind and all these things. So basically, took one stud, one simple study, and they and they allow them to totally dispute and throw out hundreds of years of scholarly research by basically creating a question that he simply could not answer directly. Is the old adage, the lack of evidence is evidence, and that’s what all these bogus alien shows are based on. It’s kind of like you find one thing that we don’t have bedrock proof of, and therefore you can create a completely new narrative that totally dismisses the ingenuity the people who built it. It’s insulting. A lot of colonialism there too early on. Well, you know, the Egyptians, they couldn’t possibly do it. They need to have help, you know. So there’s so many, so much stuff going on there that is frustrating. And if people actually just broke down and looked at the bedrock reality, they can answer that stuff or find out there’s more stuff to disprove this then this one little idea that you have that totally rewrites it. Now that said, I don’t know if there’s aliens. I would think there are. It’s hard to imagine. We’re alone in the universe. That’s a different thing. This is the best we got. You know, surely someone’s done it better than us, hopefully. But again, to bring it down to why all these things had or been created by a foreign or a fight by aliens. It’s just it’s reductive, and it’s too easy, and it’s just it’s frustratingly simple. And you know, if you look, if you look at the archeology, our village don’t all have it, all right, archeologists are always chasing themselves around. And I’ve gone and archeologists have, you know, they’re they need to get thesis and get their doctorate too, and use other people with strime. And I’m not saying they have all the answers, but it’s very, very easy, like it’s, you know, it’s very convenient to use them as the villains, you know, if you look at the people like Graham Hancock and those people who are doing all those ooga booga shows now the new Nazis and the Soviets are archeologists. They are hiding facts from us. They are coveting information, and they’re not telling us. What we really know is this old Kennedy conspiracy all the way down, the conspiracy thing, the government is holding stuff from us, and the archeologists are part of the government. They’re funded by the universities, the elite towers, and so a lot of this going after the elites. And there’s great appeal for that. We see that in politics, and we see that in history and education. And, you know, the sinks being 10,000 years old or being built by aliens fits right into that narrative.

Dan LeFebvre  48:14

Yeah, and like you what you’re saying before about, you know, it’s very difficult to prove that, when you were saying that. It reminded me of, even, like, what you were talking about with, with the Holy Grail, it would be a cup. So how would we prove, and I mean, in the movie, course, and go back to Last Crusade in that one with the Holy Grail, it is a very simple cup. But the only way that they’re able to know that that’s the Grail is because it’s in this Grand Place. And you know that old Knight Templar there and stuff. And how, if we were to find it today, or if we were to find proof of that today, how would we even know that that is actually proof? Nobody’s ever going to open up that that closet for you, right, right? The aliens are going to open up that closet

Neil Laird  48:57

for you, to give you that No, exactly. Yeah. Who opened up clause and says, here’s your answer. And yeah, if you find a cup, you find the ark. There’s no There’s no telling. You know, the cup could be from anywhere, unless you have DNA of Jesus, Christ, and we have DNA that we can compare it to where his lips touched it, which we do not, never will, and we can’t prove that it was ever there. You can’t date that kind of stuff. You can do carbon dating on some stuff, but you can’t do it on petroglyphs and rock and things that are no longer have any carbon in it. So it’s very, very difficult to say. So that’s why the crystal skulls, for example, why they fooled people for so long? Because it’s the physical quartz and you can’t dig. Course, it’s only when people start looking at and seeing modern trappings. So because it’s easier to dispute that stuff. You know, there are always people looking for an ark I did an arc show years ago. Or some guy claims it a it’s in a cave in the Judean desert, and he has a video of him, but he, but he wasn’t allowed to go in there because the Israeli government wouldn’t let him. Very conveniently, there’s videotape that he shot through a little old, was all over. You can Google it afterwards. You. It was BS. I mean, they probably just built this out of cotton candy or something and put it in the dark. But since we couldn’t get there to break it down and see that, he bought this at it last year, then it always remains mystical evening stuff. I mean, I would love to know if there’s aliens. I would love to know how the pyramids and the Sphinx and all the places were built and what existed, but it’s just too easy to basically say that. You know this, this is the one Jesus wore these glasses. But you know, I can’t give them to you to prove it right now, because they have to go back to the shop. But trust me on

Dan LeFebvre  50:32

this. But trust me, yes, don’t look behind the door, but trust me, yes, exactly. Yeah, yeah. Well, the final movie in the franchise is 2023 Indiana Jones and the dial destiny. And again, in this one, the villains are the Nazis. But the movie is set in 1969 so it ties in Operation Paperclip, when the US government recruited former Nazi scientists. And in the movie, this Nazi scientist is led by Mads Mikkelsen character, Dr voller. His plan is to use an ancient Greek device that they call the antithetical to turn back time, because just like all the ancient artifacts that we see in Indiana Jones movies, this one has special powers, and this time, those powers are time. It’s the power to alter time. So Dr voller has this plan to use the antithekara to turn back time, to change history and restore the Nazi regime. Which parts of the movie storyline there are based on real history? Well,

Neil Laird  51:30

there is an anti get their device, so beginning and end of what’s true there? Okay, Athens Museum, and it’s, it doesn’t look quite as spectator day, because it’s flattened and it’s all made out of it’s all carbonized. So it’s all very kind of greenest in the bottom of sea. And it is a strange device, because it came from third century BC, and it is a machine, you know, it’s got gears and wheels, it’s all flattened like a pancake. But that is a real thing. And people, there have been many shows on that too, because people always been trying to suss out what it is. But you But in that, in that regard, we do have a janitor, janitor who’s opened the door, and it’s pretty clear now that what it was was a geared and Rose device that tracked the stars, that was solar, and each one was kind of able to tell the days and time to start the constellation. And it was probably in a wooden box that was carried around, and it went down on a ship that they found off the coast of roads, I think. But don’t quote me on that. So they do know that it was they can kind of see that they were charting certain days and certain festivals, and it kind of makes sense. But the fact that they made it is really amazing, because we did not think they had this technology. You know, three centuries before Christ. So it really is a very, very strange thing. But what I love about that one is, like the pyramids or anything else, it proves the ingenuity the people, not that they needed help from extraterrestrials. Greeks were a lot friggin smarter than we thought they were, and they created this thing long before we ever did. You know? So to me, that’s what I love about history. It’s like, Who are these people? What I love about ancient histories, my God, they did all this long before we came. We’re standing on the shoulders of giants. So you look at the device, and you think, Oh, my God. You know, these people were more clever than we give them credit for. Now, in terms of it wasn’t a time travel device. I wish it was my books that I read travel. And I love time travel. I love to go back there and see what it was like. But it was more simply about simply. It was about charting the stars in a very defined aspect. Name is charting them, and I’m probably dismissing it. It’s really more about looking at again all the religious aspects, and say, the festivals and all those kind of things and a lot of complexities are lost through time because we understand the nuances of what they were using these charts for, probably very accurate and why we only found one was a special. Was a prototype that was coming from roads to the mainland or wherever in sank. We don’t know, but it’s really hard to find in the Athens even got to go way in the back. It’s not nearly as impressive as like the frescoes that are that are on the Parthenon. It’s tucked way in the back, and it’s about this big, and it’s mobilissa small. So you really miss it, unless you’re looking for it, but it’s really what it represents more than it’s sheer beauty.

Dan LeFebvre  54:14

I like what you mentioned about how people then weren’t had this ingenuity that we often just don’t associate with people of ancient times, you know, like we’re the smartest the human race has ever been, and there’s never been anybody smarter than us. So therefore, they had to have had help in some way, because there’s no way that they could have done this. And I think

Neil Laird  54:35

it’d be more clever than us, you know, right? Primitive people living in Africa, of all places, you know, wherever it is, it’s kind of, yeah. I mean, there’s a lot of a lot of, a lot of ignorance there, and a lot of think that we are the best, and we’ve come across stuff the history that that we got to think that history is always, you know, increasing. We’re smarter now, but it’s cyclical, you know, smarter than that guy who, who, you know, brought up, got a paintbrush and Atlas, calcium. Even put his hand on the wall. We just learned a lot more things along the way, but, you know, they had it all sussed out as well. Yeah, yeah,

Dan LeFebvre  55:07

yeah. One thing in the dial destiny, mention of Operation Paperclip. I know that that was a real thing and but then obviously the time travel aspect isn’t necessarily true. But did we know if Nazi scientists who were recruited by the US government with Operation Paperclip, actually tried to restore the Nazi regime like we see happening in that movie?

Neil Laird  55:30

No, why would they? I mean, the Nazi regime was dead and dusted by that point. Why you want to bring back the most evil empire ever? You were lucky to get the hell out of Germany. Thank God you were smart and understood physics, or you would be in prison over there, you know, in Nuremberg as well. So I can’t imagine anybody want to go back to those

Dan LeFebvre  55:46

days, no real Dr voller, then, I

Neil Laird  55:48

guess it’s a good thing if you don’t want that bad settle down in suburban Ohio and disappear and not talk about their past they don’t want to relive.

Dan LeFebvre  55:56

It makes sense. It makes sense at the very end of dial destiny, the Nazis take Indy and his team hostage, and they use the Antikythera to go back in time using a world war two era bomber along with the fighter. But instead of going back to World War Two where they think they’re going to go, they’re actually taken all the way back to the year 212, BCE during the siege of Syracuse during the Second Punic War, the bomber gets hit by this large ballistic ball. It’s kind of cool to see, you know, the World War Two airplane. And then this ancient battle going on. The ancient Romans are fighting there, the other ones attacking Syracuse in the movie, and they immediately try to attack these, what they call them flying dragons, because they don’t know what they are as planes, right? The bomber crashes. We get to meet Archimedes, who tells Indy that he built the in ticket, Thera as a way of getting help for the siege. No matter what, it would always take people back to that time and place. And then Indy wants to stay there, because it’s something he studied his whole life. But his partner throughout the movie, Helena, knocks him out, and then we see him waking up back in present day. Didn’t get to stay there. I’m sure we could have an entire episode, just like all of these. We could have entire thing just about each one, this one being about the siege of Syracuse. But do you think the movie did a good job with this storyline of the battle Archimedes siege of Syracuse and all of that?

Neil Laird  57:13

I mean, I love the fact that they did it. I love that period, the Greco Roman period in ancient history. I just applaud them for doing that. They know it’s a fun ending. I was totally sucked into it. And again, it’s not something that we know well today. So it was fun to go back to, you know, the Punic Wars and see it. So again, you know, a plus for doing that, you know, did it look like that? It’s really kind of hard to know. I mean, there was a battle Syracuse in 1212, 12. Archimedes was there. He died there because they missed. They thought he was somebody else. They said, don’t kill Archimedes. The Romans wanted to use them. I love paper clip for their own devices. But someone didn’t recognize him, I guess, because he’d never YouTube channel, whatever, and he stabbed in the head. So I think, you know for what it was, yeah, it transported me back there. You know, these things are always, always, you know, you always want to see more of it. When you see all we saw is just that we didn’t we just see, like, maybe one room in the shore. I want to go English and Syracuse. Give me a two hour tour. You can’t get that, but for the little 10 minutes at the end, or whatever. Yeah, I thought I did a brilliant job of doing that. And I, you know, I love time travel, knowing it doesn’t exist. I think it’s great fun to seeing when worlds collide. So I had a lot of fun with that, and I didn’t roll my eyes. Okay,

Dan LeFebvre  58:22

okay, yeah, you mentioned wanting to go back and time yourself. And as I was watching this movie for the first time in theaters, I almost thought that the entire franchise would end with Indiana Jones living out the rest of his days in ancient history. I do like how they ended it, though, because he does end up back home with Marion and Salah and Helena there as well. But as we wrap up our discussion today, if you had to live out the rest of your days at any time and place in history, when and where would you choose? Oh, I

Neil Laird  58:49

mean, first of all, I would, I would love to add that device and go back there and save, you know, save the Library of Alexandria. There’s so many things that we could go back Pompeii before was destroying all the, all the, all the manuscripts there, I would take that device and just, you know, on the next series should be, you time traveling back there and getting artifacts when they’re still new and fresh. Yes, they’re not artifacts as much as objects. Again, stealing, because you’re taking something you’re screwing with time, you know, the ripples of them. You know, again, I write time travel, fiction. And they always realize, well, if I save somebody in Pompeii, what happens to their bloodline? Does it get wiped out? Or if I save this manuscript, it should have disappeared the ripple effect you’d ever know. But in terms of my own, I mean, there’s, I’ve been so many countries, and I’ve fallen in love with so many, but Egypt always had a special place for me. Egypt was a place I would go back to. I would go back to the pyramid age, or go back to the New Kingdom and see Rameses and what that was like, and King tus funeral walk through Thebes at his height. That’s that’s how I like to spend my Autumn here. So if you can work on that for me, if you know anybody, see what I

Dan LeFebvre  59:59

can do. Or no guarantees, but I’ll see, see what I can do. You mentioned wanting, wanting the device. If you were to oversee an Indiana Jones movie, what ancient artifact would indie be searching for in your movie?

Neil Laird  1:00:13

It’s a good question. I thought about, I mean, all the big ones, it’s hard to know. I mean, I again, if it wasn’t time travel, I it’s harder I got yet for me, I like to go back. I mean, one of the shows I did a show years ago on the copper scroll, which is fascinating, which exists. We know what the copper scroll is, but it’s a great story. It’s the only scroll found among the Dead Sea Scrolls. Is made of copper. It’s a treasure map, and it was written by somebody in a hurry and built and buried in one of the kumrun caves, and it has all this kind of worlds. So we know oldest treasure map, and it goes to all this lost gold from the from the temple where they all took it, maybe including the ark. Now be fun to follow that we have the ark, but be kind of fun to actually see where those places are. I did a show where I went to them. And you know what used to be like a long tunnel into the ground is not like a car park in Tel Aviv. I got there a bit late.

Dan LeFebvre  1:01:09

That’s okay. Like, like the tunnels under Venice and in the Indiana Jones. Like, I mean,

Neil Laird  1:01:13

budgeted post. Love it your question, because it’s more again, more again, more time traveling, because we do have the artifact. But there’s something about that story I always love, because it’s a journey. And it’d be kind of fun to tell that story if you could somehow go to some places along the trail and introduce different places and different time periods.

Dan LeFebvre  1:01:35

Oh yeah, for sure. And also just the mere fact that it’s the only one made out of copper, it sets itself as being different, like, why is this one different? And then you start to get the easily, the supernatural or ancient alien aspect in there, or whatever,

Neil Laird  1:01:48

something somebody has to melt Exactly. Well,

Dan LeFebvre  1:01:54

we talked a lot about the real world influencing Indiana Jones movies, but throughout your career, have you seen it go the other way, where Indiana Jones movies have impacted people working in cities, in archeology. I

Neil Laird  1:02:05

don’t know how many people I see on my shoots that have, you know, fedoras on, and made them claim I had it before Indiana Jones. I was the original Indiana Jones, all right. And I talked to archeologists and Egyptologists and paleontologists the world over, and those films impacted and amazing. And if you see him as a kid, he can understand why, because they’re fun. They make it sexy and adventurous. Dude doesn’t want to be an adventurer going off, but they also, but it’s also one of those things you they also get killed at because the end of the day, he is a plunderer. The very opening scene of raiders, which is a brilliant I still think Raiders are the best film because it’s the freshest. It surprised me the most. And even going back and looking at it again, it still holds up. There’s not a bad frame in it, as long as you don’t look at the questionable archeology, because very far keen season where Peru and he’s stealing this golden idol, and he destroys all of his artifacts to do it. Here is this tomb no one has been to just because he wants to Nick this thing so he can take it back of the states that entire temple is destroyed. Same thing later on, when he and Marian are down there in the Well of Souls or whatever, and everything is destroyed because they had to go look around, you know, so archeologists recognize in all the films what was when I just watched last week, and it was probably Last Crusade. You know that the Petra place is all destroyed at the very end because it’d go poking around and being archeologists. So every time you destroy, that doesn’t come back, it doesn’t heal itself. Well, my archeologist friends recognize there’s an old adage in archeology anyway, that all archeology is destruction. You bring something up that’s been hidden for 3000 years in the sand, and it starts to rot. There was a one of the shows I was at, mainly the Sphinx shows, my earlier shows, and it was one of the most exciting moments, and also one of the most troubling moments, I reckon, what archeology does and doesn’t do. We were at the Sphinx. And there’s, there’s a series of tombs done. There was a sphinx. It was a pyramid show I did. And there’s a bunch of tombs they found that were the workers, the people that built the pyramids, and people in and they always assumed they were slaves, all out 10 commandments that they had no either, just dumped in the river, whatever. And here are these tombs, very modest tombs, beehive like tombs that were found. And they’re amazing. I don’t know if you can go to them today, because they’re so fragile, but I was there when archeologists was finding these tombs, and we were videotaping it for the show. And they opened up one of the tombs, again, just mud brick, and it’s a very modest tomb with a guy. He wasn’t mummified. He was in the fetal position. He was all skeleton, and to the very modest clay jars on either side of him that he went off into the next world with. Maybe it held his organs. They call him canopic jars. Or maybe was just taking his few modest possessions he had to the duo at the next world. But as we’re videotaping it, we get a cool shots, and then we pull back because we want to look. Some and talk about something. And we came back and got our camera in there again, both the jars had cracked the modern air, mixing with that bubble of air that hadn’t been touched in four and a half 1000 years. 10 minutes of modern air destroyed those two clay things just like that. Now these are, you know, we have so many of those. The Arc yacht, that upset because it wasn’t like King Tut’s gold or whatever. They were just pots and things like that. But it just shows you, archeology is destruction. So Indiana Jones is in there going through entire temples and watching them collapse. So we can get one little artifact at the end. That’s bad archeology. You would not get your PhD.

Dan LeFebvre  1:05:44

You just roll the stone away at the beginner Raiders. It’s fine. It’s perfectly fine, right?

Neil Laird  1:05:49

Yeah. Well,

Dan LeFebvre  1:05:50

you mentioned Raiders was your favorite film. Is it because of that opening sequence? Or is there a particular

Neil Laird  1:05:55

reason why unico openings? I just think that film every second is fresh, and it left to my mind and never quite captured. I do agree the Last Crusade came the closest, and it helped because of that great characters that had, particularly Henri, and it was fresh, and, you know, it was a great adventure, but they all sort of feel a bit samey. I enjoyed doubt Destiny more than I thought I would. I thought skull and Temple of Doom are terrible. I just can’t rewatch them again. They’re just, they just, you know, they’re just kind of ugly and stupid, and they didn’t the second one was kind of CO opted by 84 more enough to remember, that’s when the age of the franchise and the big budget for kids came out. And, you know, so that film was geared toward 12 year olds, and it just felt, you know, so just didn’t have this sense of wonder. Indiana Jones was just laugh out loud funny that even we did something outrageous, like the great chase scene underneath the car, he just laughed out loud by the time he was doing it, you know, jumping out of a plane on a raft in India. It’s just, I start to feel like you’re doing it just for the sake. So I like the films, not to say, I mean, then I think three of them I’d watch anytime, one three and the last one, I think they’re great fun. The other two, I just never warmed to. I keep trying to, but I could just never warm to them. And I think it’s because the sense of joy was somehow Doom is a dark film. It’s very grisly and ugly, and crystal. Skull is just trash, trash, it’s just in, like, an old episode of, I don’t know, I’m gonna remember a show from the 70s, probably four year time, I don’t know, called Cold chat. The nights. Remember this. You’re

Dan LeFebvre  1:07:29

not familiar with that one? No, it? They

Neil Laird  1:07:32

say that it, um, they only ran for a season, but it’s called classic. They say that it inspired The X Files, and it Darren McGavin, who was a middle the guy from father’s story, the father from A Christmas Story, and he’s in seersucking suit. He goes around Chicago, and every week he finds vampires and zombies and UFOs, and he dispatches them all in an hour, you know, because no one believes him, and he has to get on the wire. And he’s a reporter that never gets he was a lot of fun. It was a fun show because he was a lot of fun. And as a little kid, this is the mid 70s, you know, they were wonderfully fun to watch because they were scary and moss monsters in the sewer chasing around Chicago. He has to get a special thing to kill it, or whatever twig. But the special effects were so ropey. They had like, $6.50 you know. So they had a headless, headless motorcycle. Guy was 30. Was the the sleepy, hollow story, and all it was was a guy, you know, doing this, and it was just so you could tell they were desperate for ideas and desperate for cash, and they want to have fun, but they didn’t know what to do with it. That’s what Crystal Skull felt like. It felt like a cold check the nightstop episode, which is too much money thrown at it, but without the sense of humor, without the sense of at least cold check, knew what it was, you know, this just felt like something that was just sort of like, let’s just take the most outrageous thing we can, because we have to, and let’s, you know, throw some cash at it. And it didn’t work at the end of the day. I’m not sure exactly what he found at the end and why they left and what he learned. I mean, it was scratching my head at the end of that film, thinking, This isn’t archeology anymore. This is yeah, just Luca Bucha, yeah,

Dan LeFebvre  1:09:02

yeah. Well, yeah, it, it very It seemed different too, because it does well. For, for one, those are the only two that are really the Nazis. Are not villains. But also, in in Crystal Skull, it was almost like an X Files type ending like where you you’re left with more questions than answers, whereas, with the others, at least, you get a sense for Okay, they’re being stored in some museum or whatever. But the story is kind of wrapped up like you okay, he, he got it, or we found out that you can’t. You know the power of God through the Ark of the Covenant is you know something that you can’t control, right? But you still figured out what was happening, whereas, with

Neil Laird  1:09:45

all kind of a good wrap up, I mean, the ending, that last shot of raiders, is brilliant. There’s a cynical ending is so wonderful all of this, and it gets tucked away somewhere in DC and even, and then last kingdom is satisfying too, because, you know, you see the cup disappear and they. Can’t get it, but they know it exists. There’s something it feels conclusive about it, but you’re right, that one just feels like it’s just a it’s just a mess of just, you know, trying to dazzle us with, with, with, you know, oddities, and I don’t know, guys, what’s, you know, doing this?

Dan LeFebvre  1:10:19

Yes, for sure, for sure. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show to chat about the true story behind the Indiana Jones movies. It’s fitting that the franchise there kind of fits with a time traveling story, because, as we’ve talked about, kind of throughout, on top of all your experiences working on historical films yourself, you’ve also published your first novel recently called Prime Time Travelers, and I know you have a new one out that’s about Pompeii. So can you give listeners a peek into your book and where they can get a copy? Yeah,

Neil Laird  1:10:46

and they pretty much came out of exactly what we’re talking about. I’ve done 25 years of doing non fiction television where it’s all about buttoning it up and footnoting it. You work for National Geographic. Make sure you have six sources, you know, for everything. So after a while, I kind of got tired of looking at ancient, least ruins in the desert. I wanted to have some fun with the past, and their way to do that is section so I took a TV crew, very much like the ones I work with, and I have them time travel in the past. And the first one, they go back to the ancient Egyptian underworld, looking for a lost mummy and to win an Emmy. And that’s prime time travelers. And the second one, that’s in November is they go back with extra money, because it’s a big hit on TV at Pompeii, to go back to Pompeii and and it capture it in all its glory before it’s destroyed. And it gives me a chance to kind of play with my day job and my love of history, but also in a very playful kind of way, taking history and questioning what’s true it’s not going back in the past, even though it wasn’t like that at all. So it’s been a great fun to kind of dip into both wells and take the fiction and the non fiction and kind of blur them into escapist and they’re both on Amazon. Gillip and Neil Laird are prime time travelers or prime time Pompeii. You can find them on Amazon, Kindle, fantastic.

Dan LeFebvre  1:11:54

I’ll make sure to include links to those in the show notes. Thank you again. So much for your time. Neil,

Neil Laird  1:11:58

that was my pleasure. Thanks for having me, it was good fun.