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NYT Syndicate
Bamboo stalks and duct tape did not work. Neither did cable spool and chicken wire. Finally, the two teenagers trying to re-create the famous boulder scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark hit on the solution: a giant fibreglass ball.
Eric Zala and Chris Strompolos learned this lesson through trial and error, when they spent eight summers of their childhood, beginning in 1982, filming a shot-for-shot remake of Steven Spielberg's 1981 adventure tale.
Now a documentary, Raiders! The Story of the Greatest Fan Film Ever Made, based on a book with the same title (and following a 2004 Vanity Fair feature), shows how two adolescents became independent filmmakers acquiring the skills, techniques and problem-solving abilities that rivalled those found on studio sets.
These days, fan films have become a popular way to pay tribute to a movie by creating a new original installment in a franchise, with a few, like Superman: Requiem or Spider-Man: Lost Cause, garnering millions of YouTube views. The world of Star Trek fan films has become so robust that a legal battle has ensued over whether one group has the right to make an independent feature. But the idea of taking an existing film and re-creating it in its entirety seemed like a one-of-a-kind ambitious effort in the pre-internet era and still stands as an impressive rarity.
"I just wanted to be Indiana Jones," Strompolos said in a phone interview."I wanted to see what it would be like to be so self-sufficient and get in and out of trouble."
Strompolos bonded with Zala over a Raiders comic book during bus rides to school in Bay St Louis, Mississippi. Eventually, they came up with the movie project, with Strompolos, 11 at the time, serving as producer and star, and Zala, 12, directing. Their friend Jayson Lamb pitched in as effects expert and cinematographer. And their cast was made up of any child around their neighbourhoods who said yes. In the documentary, Zala's brother Kurt recalls playing 40 parts.
In the summer of 1982, when Raiders of the Lost Ark was released in theatres, Zala sneaked in a tape recorder to capture the dialogue and the soundtrack as a memory jog. He used the tape and what he remembered from the visuals to create storyboards for the entire film. He also sketched out the costumes.
They turned parts of their homes into detailed sets and shot around town, sometimes with permission, sometimes without it. Backyards substituted for Peruvian jungles, Mississippi flatlands for Egyptian deserts, and a hound dog for a monkey.
Scenes, shot on Betamax and VHS, were filmed significantly out of sequence, and sometimes years passed between one cut and another. Indy goes through puberty and back to adolescence in some segments.
"Whatever was ready was a primary determiner of what was next," Zala said, explaining their shooting schedule and the sets they built."It took Chris three years of persistent pestering of one captain to allow us to shoot on a World War II submarine."
It took quite a few years more than that to shoot an elaborate fight sequence in which Indy battles a brutish German mechanic. That scene was the only one the filmmakers didn't complete during their initial shoot as teenagers."And of course the airplane blows up at the end," Strompolos said."Logistically, it was just too much for us to wrap our heads around."
Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation, without that scene, had its first screening in 1989 at a beverage distribution company in Gulfport, Mississippi. Then the two filmmakers went their separate ways, with Strompolos eventually moving to Los Angeles to pursue opportunities in entertainment and Zala starting a career in video games. Years later, a VHS copy of the movie began exchanging hands, and Harry Knowles of the website Ain't It Cool News received a copy from the director Eli Roth. Knowles screened part of it at his annual Austin, Texas, film festival, where it was an instant hit with the audience, and the full film was screened in 2003 at the Alamo Drafthouse in Austin. A copy of the film even made it to Spielberg, and he met with the filmmakers.
Ten years later, one of the documentary's directors, Jeremy Coon, a producer of Napoleon Dynamite, saw the adaptation at the Tumbleweeds film festival in Salt Lake City."There was something so endearing about the film, I just fell in love with it," Coon said by phone from Salt Lake City."And I felt embarrassed I didn't know more about it."
Zala and Strompolos had been approached about documentaries before, but the timing wasn't right or the director wasn't a good fit, they explained. Strompolos hit it off with Coon and felt that he, along with his co-director, Tim Skousen, had the right attitude, background and passion for the job.
The documentary Raiders! looks at the history of the project, which was finally completed in 2014. That is when Zala and Strompolos raised over $50,000 on Kickstarter and put in some of their own money to shoot the plane explosion scene, using a real plane and a professional crew (though there were some mishaps along the way and the potential for danger did exist). The scene is now tucked into a new cut of their adaptation.
"That contrast of static-ridden, 11th-generation Betamax put alongside 4K HD with a 42-year-old Indiana Jones is funny," Strompolos said."But strangely, it fits in really beautifully."
The documentary directors were particularly drawn to this part of the story."The drama is inherent when you try to take on a production like this and to do it basically for no money," Skousen said.
The documentary, along with the finished version of the adaptation, had its premiere in 2015 at the South by Southwest film festival to an enthusiastic audience. And now the backyard video project is touring the country with the documentary as a double feature.
The once-fledgling filmmakers have their own production company, Rolling Boulder Films. And in a fitting twist, Strompolos and Zala are teaming up with Skousen to produce a narrative feature he plans to direct, a post-apocalyptic film set in and around Detroit.
"We're going to do a film together because I know that I can trust these guys to just go for it," Skousen said."Doing this documentary was a reminder of the joy that comes from following your dreams."
