'Adventures of Young Indiana Jones: Hollywood Follies' TV Movie review

In 1994, a year after ABC canceled George Lucas's ambitious but expensive The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, Lucasfilm Limited produced a two-hour TV movie which continued the adventures of a college-age Henry Walton Jones, Jr. (Sean Patrick Flanery) before he became a professor of archaeology and a globetrotting adventurer.

Written by Jonathan Hales (Star Wars - Episode II: Attack of the Clones, The Scorpion King) and Matthew Jacobs (The Emperor's New Groove), Young Indiana Jones and the Hollywood Follies was the first of four follow-up stories that were shown on cable's The Family Channel after its original network pulled the plug on the critically-acclaimed but very pricy "edutainment" series.

Adventures of Young Indiana Jones: Hollywood Follies
Also known as Young Indiana Jones and the Hollywood Follies (VHS)
Chapter 22: The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones: Hollywood Follies (Disc 9, Volume Three: Years of Change)

Set in 1920 Hollywood, this story follows young Indy in what amounts to be a huge inside joke: in order to earn money to continue paying for his tuition at the University of Chicago, the central character of one of cinema's best-known franchises gets a summer job at a Hollywood studio.

In the wake of Indy's less-than-stellar career working behind the scenes on a Broadway production, his friend and mentor in show biz, George Gershwin (Tom Beckett) helps him get a job at Universal Pictures, the studio founded by the legendary Carl Laemmle (David Marguiles).

Indy, who has just celebrated his 21st birthday, expects to be assigned to a low-level entry position in the mail room, but as is often the case with the Man in the Hat, he is thrust into a situation that is a bit more daunting than he expects.

Laemmle, you see, has a huge problem out in California: Universal has hired the talented but extremely eccentric Erich von Stronheim (Dana Gladstone) to film what, to date, is the most expensive movie ever made: Foolish Wives, which the studio billed as the "first million dollar" film to be made.

Although Universal is publicly boasting of this "achievement," Laemmle and his fellow board members privately despair over Stronheim's overambitious (and expensive) vision for Foolish Wives.  The European-born "count" wants the film to have a running time of between six and 10 hours, keeps on adding new material to a loosely structured screenplay and doesn't seem too be concerned about cost overruns.

Laemmle's solution: since none of his sons or nephews has the chutzpah to confront the egomaniacal - if very gifted - actor-director, he is going to dispatch Indiana Jones to tell Stronheim to either finish his movie...or else production must stop.

Indy thinks this assignment won't be too hard, so he takes a train from the Big Apple to  California, not knowing that the search for the Peacock's Eye will seem like a lark compared to his dealings with Erich von Stronheim.

Assisted by an attractive screenwriter named Claire Lieberman (Allison Smith) and a young producer named Irving G. Thalberg (Bill Cusack), Indy strolls onto the set of Foolish Wives with youthful optimism and naivete, only to be confronted by one of his most challenging antagonists.....

My Take:  Interestingly, this 1994 TV-movie was the first of the quartet of Young Indy adventures Lucasfilm produced for cable's The Family Channel, but in the internal chronology of the series it's actually the 22nd and final chapter.

Directed by Michael Schultz (JAG, Everwood), Young Indiana Jones and the Hollywood Follies was written and filmed as a single project but has the same two-part feel that lots of the spliced-together "movies" in The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones tend to project.

Although Hales and Jacobs could have devoted the entire script to the Foolish Wives fiasco and milked it for all its comedic potential, they (and producer George Lucas) realized that their intended audience - kids, teens and young adults - would probably grow restless, so the other half of the movie shows Indy meeting the antithesis of Stronheim - a young director named John Ford (Stephen Caffrey).

Ford, of course, was one of Hollywood's most legendary filmmakers and a big creative influence on Lucas and Steven Spielberg.  Known for finding ways to make his movies -particularly Westerns and serious drama - quickly, inexpensively but still extremely well-made, Ford would eventually win four Academy Awards for Best Director, a feat yet unsurpassed in American cinema history.

Here, of course, John Ford is still a young man in his 30s and not quite a cinematic force of nature.  Nevertheless, as played by Caffrey (Tour of Duty), he is confident, commanding and always trying to innovate and improvise to make his movies better and more entertaining.

As in quite a few of the young adult Indy adventures, there is a romantic subplot that involves a (PG-rated) hookup between Claire and Indy.  This relationship is well-written and entertaining, while at the same time contrasting the different viewpoints on love espoused by both characters.

Because the movie's premise centers on the illusion of filmmaking, its basic conceit is a huge running gag - Indiana Jones (a creation of the movies) gets a summer job "making pictures" for a Hollywood studio.  

Indeed, one of the more in-your-face references to the inside joke is a scene in the John Ford half where Indy, who is working as a stunt double, is asked to do a risky maneuver in which he must dangle underneath a team of running horses and make his way under a stagecoach and then climb aboard it.  

This stunt was actually done in 1939's Stagecoach (which was also one of John Wayne's early movies) and inspired a similar and famous scene in 1981's Raiders of the Lost Ark - which, of course, stars Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones.  (One can, of course, assume that the 1936 Indy took his cue from remembering his days as a Hollywood stuntman 16 years earlier!)