And within hours, all of Frank Darabont’s Star Wars toys went up for sale on eBay.

CHUD.com has a terrific snippet of an interview with Frank Darabont about the Indiana Jones IV screenplay that he drafted and submitted to Spielberg and Lucas. According to Darabont, Spielberg was very happy with the script and was ready to start shooting the film, but Lucas - who, of course, is well known for his finely tuned sense of story, dialogue, believable drama, character development, intelligent narrative, sympathetic characters, subtext, tension, subtlety and the concept that filmmaking is a creative, collaborative effort in which others are allowed to have opinions - stamped the script “rejected” faster than a parole application at Shawshank Prison. Says Darabont:

I worked for over a year on that; I worked very close with Steven Spielberg. He was ecstatic with the result and was ready to shoot it two years ago. He was very, very happy with the script and said it was the best draft of anything since Raiders of the Lost Ark…And then you have George Lucas read it and say, “Yeah, I don’t think so, I don’t like it.” And then he resets it to zero when Spielberg is ready to shoot it that coming year, [which] is a real kick to the nuts…It’s just bizarre to me. I can’t get into George’s head.

Think about this for a moment: do we normally see a filmmaker speaking about one of their colleagues with that kind of frustration? Usually it’s very civil, along the lines of “well, he went a different way with the material” or “I just love his work” or of course the carefully-worded “gee, I haven’t seen that movie, but I hear it’s very good”. It’s pretty rare to hear a well-regarded writer/director classify an experience with another Hollywood bigshot as “a real kick to the nuts”.

Good for Darabont. His filmography isn’t packed with blockbusters, but I’m willing to give a lot more leeway to the guy who put Shawshank together than the one who made the greatest villain in sci-fi history complete his origin story by crying like a toddler.