Michael Eisner: How Spielberg and Lucas convinced me to buy Indiana Jones

I never really was in business with Rupert. I had one bad thing with him. He was a competitor. He was at Fox. He bought Sky Television and he wanted all our movies. I wouldn't sell him our movies for what he was asking, but I said I would sell them if he sold us half of Sky. So he agreed. We owned half of Sky, but he had the management control and we could never find out what was going on except for losing money in that era. So eventually I asked Barry if he could set up a meeting with Rupert. We had a meeting at Paramount and we had lunch with them. He turned his chair facing away from the round table, never said a word in the entire meeting. Not a word. Then he sued us. So, we sued him and I met him at the Mayfair Hotel in New York six months later and I settled the lawsuit with him in five minutes.

I wanted out. He wanted 100%. I said, 'You have to buy the movies.' He said, 'Yes.' And that was that.

Well, everybody had passed on Raiders because the opening scene with the ball looked like it would cost as much as any movie ever made, just that scene. And I thought the script was fantastic. We made the deal and I went to meet Steven and George and tell them we have a $17 million budget and you got to bring it in at that. Today it would cost, you know, $200 million. Steven said, 'I can do a budget at any price.' He said, 'We'll take the scene when the plane goes to Malaysia, wherever it was going, over the Pacific. If you want, I can build a plane. I can get a plane. I can do it on the plane. I can go there. Or I think what I'll do is I'll just have a little piece of the end of the wing and a door and Harrison Ford will walk through the door. The engines will start, you'll hear a plane take off and the next thing they'll do is there'll be a map showing going across the Pacific.' And I said, 'Well, fine.' And that scene is in the movie. He did the movie on budget. And history was made. I've talked to Steven about there was some movie that he wanted to do where the whole thing was going to be from one camera and it was all going to be about somebody like a six-million-dollar man who was stuck in a bed and everything in the movie was from his point of view. It was a very good script. I could not understand how you could have one camera and he explained how he would do it and he made it seem so simple. You know, there's nobody like him.

Horrible.