I love when a Little Story turns out to be (largely) true. I won't spoil this, but HERE is 'the rest of the story.'
Here's a "Story Conference Transcript" supposedly dated to 1978:Philip Kaufman — "... kind of a Middle Eastern adventure based around a similar idea to something like that book "The Spear of
Destiny" where the Nazis were into mystical cults and so forth, and they were looking for, in this case, it was a thing that I, you know, have been thinking about for maybe twenty years since a doctor — my mononucleosis doctor — when I was in college, a famous blood specialist – and he had written – with another doctor — an article on the Ark of the Covenant and how he felt it provided a means of communication with some other extra-terrestrial or God-like or whatever – it was in a sense an elaborate radio setup — it contained silk curtains and veils and other things – I've forgotten — it's all in the Bible, Leviticus, Exodus, the second book of the Bible, or whatever – or the beginning of Leviticus or something. A good part of that chapter in the Bible is the detailing of the actual Ark of the Covenant itself and all of the, you know, wood and how much – and gold cherubim and there were other components in there and he was saying that when the gold was rubbed in a certain way, and silk, and so forth, you have the ability to remit radio waves or receive, and in that case, the Levites were the only ones who could go in there and they would have to take their shoes off — I've forgotten if you — if you walk across the rug with your shoes off — but there is a whole electrical charge — it was, in fact, the holy of holies, and it was, in fact, a means of communicating with some other being, that it was a primitive or maybe highly elaborate radio wave that was on the right sensitivity for this kind of communication, and in fact when they use to go into battle there was a cloud that hovered over — they carried the Ark with them in the early days and there was always this cloud that hovered over the Ark and they were always victorious. They never lost whenever they carried it into battle.
A commonly discussed bit of wisdom is that Philip Kaufman had the original idea for the Ark of the Covenant as the objective in the movie. The Nazi interest in the occult, and the mythical power of the device made for a great mcguffin (Hitchcock’s term for an objective that the protagonist and antagonist are after). This was confirmed by the story conference document, but when I learned where Kaufman got the idea, I stood up and YELLED, then, as any writer does, composed a carefully crafted message to my family. Our excitement comes out in words on the page, ok!?
To understand this, I have to take you back several decades, to around 1955.
1955, CHICAGO, IL
Dr. Raphael Isaacs, my great grandfather, was Director of Hematology at the Michael Reese hospital in Chicago. He was a nationally renowned blood specialist; earlier in his career, he pioneered a treatment for the deadly disease pernicious anemia, employing a desiccated hog’s stomach to successfully treat patients. While at Reese, he specialized in leukemia research and treatment, focusing on the role of radiation in causing the disease, and seeing patients with blood disorders. He was a brilliant man of science. ...
To understand this, I have to take you back several decades, to around 1955.
1955, CHICAGO, IL
Dr. Raphael Isaacs, my great grandfather, was Director of Hematology at the Michael Reese hospital in Chicago. He was a nationally renowned blood specialist; earlier in his career, he pioneered a treatment for the deadly disease pernicious anemia, employing a desiccated hog’s stomach to successfully treat patients. While at Reese, he specialized in leukemia research and treatment, focusing on the role of radiation in causing the disease, and seeing patients with blood disorders. He was a brilliant man of science. ...
The monograph was eventually printed later, Puzzling Biblical Laws by (Dr.) Raphael Isaacs, Roger D. Isaacs [1965]; I cannot confirm his ideas were printed in any article before then. Philip Kaufman must have been ~18 yo in 1955, a student at Univ. of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana (as he says: its not listed in his bio); in the mid-1960s, Kaufman was in Chicago as a fledgling filmmaker. Obviously, he credited the unnamed source in his later account.
Frederick Rogers, the Dean of the Department of Engineering at the Lewis Institute of Technology in Chicago, published his Ark-Capacitor Theory in The Chicago Tribune on March 5th, 1933. In Germany, E. Stadelmann-Nehein (Munich?) had published an capacitor thesis about the Ark in 1909, popularized, but Constantine Belveselsky Warrand (an eccentric Russo-English inventor who then resided in South Carolina) had published the same idea in 1894. One strongly suspects that was no 'first call' either ....
Statistics: Posted by billd89 — Thu Mar 21, 2024 3:28 pm