percentage. She’s sort of a mercenary. She hates the Germans, but at the same time, this is her chance to get out of here, out of this hole. She sort of double crosses the Army. “Look, I’m not going to give you anything unless you cut me in on this. There’s a lot of money in this one. I can smell it.” He cuts her in on it. They’re sort of working together, but they don’t really. He can’t trust her very much. They’re the love story aspect of it. She’s sort of a back streets girl. She’s having an affair or something with one of the officers, that’s how she gets her information. She tells him that there’s a digging. That they’re out there in the desert and they have found the opening to a temple, and they think this ark is in there. This middle part, part of it is to develop this relationship. This is where a lot of the sabotage…

People are trying to kill him as soon as he arrives, or maybe even before he arrives, on the airplane. As soon as he gets there, there are knives coming out of walls, all these slimy characters are following him, all that stuff that happens in those places in the thirties. He’s poisoned and all kinds of things. He is trying to make contact with some other Arab guys who are going to help him. He tried to look up an old friend in the area and get some information, and he’s trying to get information from this girl. Finally she gives it to him, about where the Germans are. We had thought of giving him another piece of information, a MacGuffin, that he could take with him to try to analyze. This whole section is him sneaking around exotic stuff where he’s constantly being… He beats up German agents once in a while, and we sort of establish the German agent. That’s just for a couple scenes where we set the relationship with the girl, the tension, some fights in rooms with lots of boxes. They’re trapped in store rooms and stuff where he’s trying to make contact with his friend. He goes out in the desert and… I’m not really telling this part right. He gets this piece of information that he needs. He goes out and sees the Germans, disguised as Arabs. He realizes… He’s piecing this puzzle together, trying to find the temple. They have not found the temple, they’re just excavating around here. He realizes the temple is like a quarter of a mile east of where they are. He goes and he finds it. It’s in the desert, and he digs down and finds a little tiny bit of ruin. So he searches around until he finds something like a post or column. He digs into the sand, a couple of Arabs are with him. There’s a stone thing that he opens up, there’s a hole into the ground. He goes down in there and it’s the temple. He finds it and he finds the lost Ark. He’s recovering it. There’s a lot of tension because we have established that everybody is trying to kill him. People are following him all over the place. He knows that about a quarter mile east are about fifty Germans, with disguised tanks and guns. They have all kinds of junk over there. So he’s working right under their noses. The idea in the middle sequence was to create sort of a race, tension, who’s going to find the Ark first situation. If he pieces the puzzle together first, he gets the Ark. He starts to get the Ark out of the thing, and he comes up out of the hole, and all the Germans are there. He’s caught. They take the Ark. Then they beat the shit out of him. He does some fancy stuff, but they throw him back down the hole. We actually have the girl going off with the Germans. We don’t know what her situation is, but we don’t taint her. But when the Germans show up, she immediately goes off with the side that’s winning. He gets throws back in the hole, and they close the tomb up and leave him there to die. Then they take the thing back to their camp. Then he sort of tries to get away when she comes back and lets him out. Them we realize that she was really… She just didn’t want to get thrown in the hole with him. Didn’t think that would do any good. It’s night and they sneak off to the camp. They go into a tent and start to steal the Ark, start to take it to a truck. He’s pretending that he’s one of the Germans, although he’s wearing his regular stuff. Most of the Germans don’t know who he is. They get caught. They’re also with another Arab side kick, who also got thrown back in the thing. A little comic relief. They pretend like they’re supposed to be carrying it, then they put it on a truck. One guy says a little German, like he’s one of them. There are German civilians and German soldiers. The guys who have driven up are new guys. Their truck comes up and they get out. They meet him coming toward them. “Oh, good. You have come to meet us.” Just as they’re putting the ark on the truck, the old guard comes up. They best up some guards as they’re discovered. It’s too late and they sort of sneak off. The trucks take off into the night. He has to do something fast. Our guy goes back into camp, jumps on a horse, and starts chasing after them. “Wait here. I’ll get that damn thing back.” The truck is racing