Well known in the galaxy far, far away for his work on Attack of the Clones, the Lucasfilm adventures of Jonathan Hales started a number of years before when he was invited to become a writer on what was then known as The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles. Speaking with Lucasfilm, Hales looks back to a time when the big screen adventures of Henry Jones Jr. were (for the 20th century at least) concluded, but the small screen action was only just beginning.
In your initial discussions about the series, how was it explained to you?
Quite simply, I was living in London and my agent telephoned me explaining that George Lucas was coming to town with an idea for a new television series. Of course, I was interested in meeting him. I went to the Pall Mall area of London, and met with George and [producer] Rick McCallum. George explained that he wanted to do a television series about young Indiana Jones, which would cover a large part of the 20th century, because that was Indy’s lifetime. He wanted it to have an education aspect. That was important to him. I liked the sound of that very much. It wasn’t much more than that. We met for about 20 minutes. I was their first meeting that day, and they had a list of other writers they were meeting with, and I remember trying to read the list upside down across the table to read the names of the other people! After about five or six days, my agent phoned up and said, “They want you to do it.”
Did you start work on the series before you came to California?
No. I can’t remember how long it was, maybe five or six weeks, before we all went out to San Francisco and Skywalker Ranch. Five British writers went out. [Lucasfilm research librarian] Debbie Fine had sent us all a big folder with information about Northern California, which was very nice, but that was it.
Could you tell us more about this group of writers? How did these men and women work together, and did you know any of them previously?
I didn’t know any of them previously. We were a disparate group coming from Britain. Matthew Jacobs was a director/writer who had done some interesting work for the BBC. Rosemary Anne Sisson had started off writing plays. She was very bright and lively, and had written a number of television shows, including a very popular one over here called Upstairs, Downstairs, which was similar to what Downton Abbey is today. Reg Gadney was a novelist who’d also written a series about John F. Kennedy for British television. Gavin Scott had been a local television reporter. When we arrived in San Francisco, we were met at the airport by Jonathan Hensleigh, who was the one American in the initial group of writers. There were six of us to begin with, and then soon after, Frank Darabont arrived from Hollywood. Later, another American named Jule Selbo joined us. We all had different ranges of experience.
Read on for the full and fascinating interview.
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