Steven Spielberg’s 1984 adventure film Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom is jam-packed with hijinks, but the cast and crew helped Barbara Streisand whip Harrison Ford as part of a prank. In a grainy, low-quality video, several friends of the production appear to play a prank on leading man Ford, as he is restrained and set to receive a whipping ordered by the film’s antagonist Mola Ram (Amrish Puri). Instead, Barbra Streisand, clad in full dominatrix gear, enters to give Indy his punishment. And that’s not all—Ford’s Star Wars compatriots Irvin Kershner and Carrie Fisher appear in this blooper as well.
A prequel to the 1981 classic Raiders of the Lost Ark, Temple of Doom follows the fedora-wearing, whip-wielding archeologist into the wilderness of the Indian subcontinent. Accompanied by diminutive sidekick Short Round (Johnathan Ke Quan) and dame du jour Willie Scott (Kate Capshaw), the trio become engrossed in a local mystery which soon traps them in the subterranean devil worship and mining operation of Mola Ram. Once captured, Indy is restrained and whipped before being forced to drink the Blood of Kali, a potion that will make him subservient to his captors.
While shooting this scene, Spielberg and company decided to play a practical joke on Ford’s gun-toting character behind the scenes. Instead of the corrupt priest exacting his evil on Indy and Short Round, a leather-clad Barbra Streisand enters the frame and punishes Indy for his naughty behavior—specifically making films like Force 10 from Nazarene (1978) and Hanover Street (1979), which both famously bombed at the box office. Carrie Fisher suddenly changes the mood by entering into a reenactment of Leia’s reunion with a freshly-decarbonized Han in Return of the Jedi (1983), while Irvin Kirshner, director of The Empire Strikes Back (1980), critiques Spielberg’s direction of the whole situation as tepid. Ford plays along, asking Streisand to really hit him. Streisand finishes the clip with the unfortunate use of a gay slur, one which likely read more as a joke in 1984 given the BDSM scenario, but has nonetheless aged poorly.
Movie star Barbra Streisand, then-partners with film composer and producer Richard Baskin, probably arrived on set to help with the prank as a result of her connection to Baskin. Baskin was a frequent collaborator with Robert Altman, a fellow New Hollywood filmmaker to Spielberg. Streisand herself was no stranger to such cinematic circles, having acted since the sixties, even winning Best Director at the Golden Globes for her film Yentl (1983) around the same time as this day on the Temple of Doom set. Fisher and Kershner bear the obvious Star Wars connection to Ford, Return of the Jedi having then-recently released to cap off the original trilogy.
Who knows what else lies unearthed in Steven Spielberg’s supposed “private blooper reel,” from which this video was reportedly plucked and released to the public in 2011. Perhaps the veteran filmmaker will make a prank appearance of his own on the set of the fifth Indiana Jones film, bemoaning James Mangold’s direction as Kershner did his of Ford back nearly 40 years ago. With Indy 5 slated for a summer 2022 release, it will likely be some time before any bonus material of that nature is leaked.
Key Release Dates
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny
Release Date:2023-06-30
