You knew it had to show up online eventually, and tonight it did. Frank Darabont’s Indiana Jones 4 script, the one George Lucas threw in the trash after it had already been approved by Steven Spielberg and Harrison Ford, is all over the internet. No I can’t tell you where it is, because anywhere I point to will invariably be shut down within seconds. Lucasfilm or Fox or both and their cadre of attorneys are all over this one.

I can tell you this much, having read just the first few pages: Frank Darabont deserves a writing credit. The opening credits sequence of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is a direct ripoff of the one here, in some cases shot by shot. In other places, the final script by David Koepp simply rips off locations. For instance the Atomic Café from the final film is here, except it’s not some weird prop placed for bombing, it’s an actual café where Indy has lunch. The biggest difference I’m noticing so far, is that Darabont’s script isn’t silly and kid friendly. There are no gophers. Darabont’s is also a lot more thoughtful, and you can tell from Indy's first lines of dialogue. It’s like Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, if it were written solely for adults. I’m willing to bet that when I get further in, those hilarious monkeys will be noticeably absent.

We’ll see how it goes as I keep reading. Maybe Darabont’s script suddenly falls apart at the end, and the Koepp/Lucas effort will best it. But I doubt it. George Lucas’s propensity for torpedoing the story of anything he’s involved in is near legendary by now. We’ll always wonder about the Indiana Jones 4 that might have been… if Spielberg and Ford had somehow managed to push Lucas out of the filmmaking process.