Notebooks in movies

Tracing my habit back to movies like Indiana Jones and Se7en

Henry Jones sketches in his diary in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989)

Hey y’all,

As I mentioned last week, I just don’t feel like this year has begun yet. Maybe the new moon this weekend will get things moving, but for now, I’ve decided to lean into the inertia and enjoy my own retrograde.

This week I was thinking about the origins of my notebook habit. It may sound funny, but I think you could trace it back to watching Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989). The whole plot of that movie is built around a notebook MacGuffin — Henry Jones, Sr.’s diary containing his lifetime of research on the Holy Grail. The book is so valuable that the Nazis will do anything to get ahold of it. Hijinks ensue.

A spread from the grail diary prop in Last Crusade (via)

The Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade video game actually contained a replica of the grail diary that served as a form of copy protection — you had to look things up in the booklet to prove you owned the game before you could play it. I loved this little booklet and still have it somewhere in a drawer at my mom’s house. (You can download a PDF of it here. There’s a whole section of the internet dedicated to making grail diary replicas.)