This is fantastic. Someone somewhere came across a 125 page transcript of the story meeting between George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, and Laurence Kasdan when they first sat down to brainstorm and create “Raiders of the Lost Ark” and the character of Indiana Jones. That same someone then scanned it all to a pdf and posted a link to it here, so that the rest of us could enjoy it.
I’m still working my way through it, but it is wonderful to be a virtual fly on the wall as Lucas & Spielberg dream and plot their way through the characters and story ideas that would become “Raiders” (as well as a bunch of ideas that got cut from “Raiders” and then used in the later Indiana Jones films).
For a few highlights from the transcript and a great analysis of it from a screenwriters perspective, check out this post from the Mystery Man on Film blog.