In summer 1982, three Mississippi boys decided to film a shot-for-shot remake of their favourite movie, Raiders of the Lost Ark. After years of toil - which saw one of them being set alight, another having his head blown up, and the whole lot of them blagging the use of two US submarines - their backyard odyssey is being hailed as a crackpot masterpiece, not least by Steven Spielberg himself. By Jim Windolf
Friday May 14, 2004
The Guardian
Chris Strompolos was a rowdy, pudgy kid who craved attention. He once bit a classmate, and he had a habit of barking at his teachers. To get him to behave, teachers made Chris sit on his hands, copy pages from the Bible, and stay in a dark room for hours by himself. More and more, he drifted into a fantasy world - the world of his favourite movie, Raiders of the Lost Ark. Ever since seeing it in the summer of 1981, he had idolised the hero, swashbuckling archaeologist Indiana Jones. Chris loved Indiana Jones. Cracking the bullwhip. Rescuing the girl. Making wisecracks all the while. Whenever he could, Chris slipped into the swampy woods near his hometown of Gulfport, and he swung from vines and pretended to be Indy.
When he wasn't playing Indiana Jones, Chris often pored over his Raiders of the Lost Ark comic book. It was a good way to pass the time during the hour-long school bus rides. One day on the bus, the 10-year- old Chris showed his prized comic book to an older boy, named Eric Zala. Eric, 11, was impressed. He was a Raiders fan, too.
After the school year was over, in June of 1982, Chris called Eric. He had an idea. Eric was surprised to be hearing from a kid he barely knew, but invited Chris over to his house anyway. What ensued was like a Hollywood pitch meeting. The two boys sat in Eric's basement, brainstorming about doing their own shot-for-shot remake of the movie they loved. Chris planned to play Indiana Jones. Eric said he would take Toht, the Nazi.
For most kids, an afternoon spent daydreaming out loud about taking on some grand project would have been enough. But for Chris and Eric, their little undertaking became something that occupied them for the rest of the 1980s. While countless American kids spent the Reagan years numbing their brains with cable TV, Eric and Chris would be routinely running through lines of dialogue, building sets, and making stuff explode. Other boys asked for toys; they asked for supplies - a bullwhip, a leather jacket, six cans of spray paint, a VHS camcorder (which Chris got for his birthday one year). Their project grew with them in their teenage years, but their goal still seemed out of reach, even when they had deep voices and girlfriends, were burned out and practically hated each other's guts. Then, 21 years past the start date, when Chris and Eric were finally and absolutely through with each other, their insane project would bring them together once again.
The two boys got started in summer 1982. With Paramount's nationwide re-release of Raiders of the Lost Ark on July 16, 1982, Chris and Eric found themselves suddenly able to trade in their play-acting for the seriousness of pre-production. This began when Chris undertook a secret mission to a cinema with a tape recorder strapped to his chest - only to be tossed out. The less mischievous-looking Eric tried the same thing later on and got away with it.
The tape recording was crucial. The two boys committed every line to memory, and matched the actors' inflections. Chris scribbled down descriptions of roughly 20 shots from the movie; Eric continued this tedious process in his precise handwriting until they had a list of 649 shots. Now their plan had the elegance of simplicity: film each of the 649 shots as written, and the movie would be done. How hard could it be? Eric made detailed sketches of costumes, which, along with the shot list, went into a spiral-bound notebook labelled: "Raiders of the Lost Ark Book of Ideas and Memos. Indy and Toht's Notes: Don't Touch!!!!"
They were not quite ready to start shooting (still no camera), but at least they could get to work on making an important prop: the giant boulder that chases Indy out of a cave. The two of them stayed up late, constructing it out of crisscrossed bamboo stalks from a nearby swamp and cardboard. It seemed almost as large as the boulder in the original. Too bad they couldn't get it out of the door. And after they took it apart, they couldn't put it together again.
After the boulder failure, the Raiders of the Lost Ark project went on hiatus for the school year. It was picked up again in summer 1983. (This was a pattern that would be repeated throughout the production.) That year Chris and Eric added a third member to their film-making partnership: Jayson Lamb, a fellow Mississippi misfit who talked about death, wore an Indian medicine bag around his neck, and didn't eat meat. He had won Chris's attention by transforming a classroom into a gory haunted house the previous Halloween. Chris figured Jayson would be good at making all the corpses the movie required.
The first day of actual filming took place in the Zalas' lush backyard, which was serving as the Peruvian jungle where Raiders of the Lost Ark begins. Jayson, aged 13, was operating a clunky Sony Betamax camera rented for the boys by Chris's mother. Eric, who had given up the Toht role, was now playing the meatier part of Dr Rene Belloq, the French archaeologist and Indiana Jones's nemesis. "Dr Jones," said Eric, now almost 13, matching Belloq's accent, "again we see there is nothing you can possess which I cannot take away." Dressed as Indiana, Chris (12) handed over the relic coveted by Belloq. He was surrounded by a bunch of spear-carrying, half-naked kids, most of them blond, who had been recruited by Eric to play hostile Hovitos Indians. As Eric inspected the idol, Chris made a run for it. The natives chased him. Cut. For the next scene the cast and crew headed to the Tchoutacabouffa river, about 10 miles away. Parents drove them.
The chase continued through sunlit trees and ended when Chris leapt off the riverbank. With his smooth cheeks, he looked like an infant version of his stubbled hero, but he certainly felt like Indy as he splashed into the water. Then came playback at the WLOX-13 television studio where Chris's mother, Elaine Stevens, worked as an anchor woman. Chris, Eric and Jayson were horrified by what they saw on the screen. It looked so stupid and amateurish, and not just because of a mysterious glitch that had left a giant "A" in the upper-left corner of every frame. They'd have to redo it completely - but first, the boulder scene.
This time, Chris and Eric made a much smaller boulder out of a cable drum and cardboard, then got ready to shoot Indy's escape. The Zalas' garage would make for a decent cave, they thought. Jayson pointed the camera, Eric called "Action" and Chris ran with an expression of terror on his face as the prop bumped along behind him.
But playback again revealed the cold truth. The cave looked like the garage at Eric's house, and the little boulder sucked.
Still the show went on. Eric began transforming his basement into a Nepalese bar. His father may have drunk too much, but all those empty green wine jugs made nice props for this sequence, which required two scary elements: (1) fire, which engulfs the bar after a gunfight; and (2) a girl to play Marion Ravenwood, Indy's love interest. A classmate named Stephanie Ewing got the part, because she had the right hair colour and said yes. Jayson checked a magic book to find the ratio of isopropyl alcohol to water necessary for creating flames that would burn out quickly. Eric figured it might be a good idea to film the bar sequence when his mum was out, since he'd be setting the basement on fire, not to mention himself.
To play the bit-part, known in the Raiders of the Lost Ark credits as Ratty Nepalese, (probably the most dangerous role in the film, since the character seemingly burns to death) Eric wore a turban, a fake moustache, and a long purple robe with clothes underneath as protection. Action. Enter the Himalayan henchmen, led by Toht the Nazi torturer, played with evil glee by a baby-faced kid named Ted Ross. Ted held a flaming poker close to Stephanie, who delivered her lines in a Mississippi drawl. Chris, as Indy, cracked the bullwhip, and the poker fell from Ted's hand.
The flames rose and died quickly, as planned. Then came Eric's big moment as the Ratty Nepalese. For a reason no one recalls, he asked that the back of his robe be doused not with isopropyl but with gaso line. The gas was lit. Eric screamed. Jayson got the shot. Two kids were supposed to put Eric out by smothering him in a blanket, but in a panic they fanned him. The flames rose. The smell of singed hair filled the room. Chris grabbed a fire extinguisher they had on hand and blasted his friend with the powdery spray. "NO!" screamed Eric - not because he was on fire, but because he wanted the extinguisher emptied only in an emergency, and this, in his opinion, didn't qualify. It costs real money to refill a fire extinguisher. One month into filming, Eric was already thinking of the budget.
Back at WLOX, the boys liked what they saw. It was cool. But a worker at the station was not so thrilled by footage of a screaming 13-year-old with a burning back in a room full of flames. He told Chris's mother. She watched it, horrified, and called Eric's mother to tell her what had been going on in her house while she was out. By order of the mums, production was shut down, at least for the rest of the summer of 1983.
But the mums proved kind studio bosses. By summer 1984, with Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom in cinemas, the project had been greenlit again, provided an adult was on hand to supervise fire scenes. Peter Kiefler, a sometime actor who lived in one of Eric's family's backyard cottages, got that assignment. He was a demigod to the boys, since he had played a zombie in George Romero's Dawn of the Dead. They'd be needing him soon, to watch over the re-shoot of the bar scene, necessitated by the fact that their Marion had moved to Alaska. Every shot with her had to be scrapped. In fact, all but a few seconds (Eric on fire) of what they had filmed so far was deemed not worth keeping.
Eric approached a girl at church, Angela Rodriguez. She was pretty and a couple of years older, but she said yes. Almost immediately Eric got to work turning a small upstairs bedroom into a ship's cabin for the big love scene. On her arrival at the Zala house, Angela found a costume waiting for her - a shimmering, silvery nightgown from Chris's mum's wardrobe. To put his new lead actress at ease, Eric closed the set, meaning he told his little brother to get out. Chris and Angela took their places on the narrow bed. The open window let in the sound of evening frogs croaking in the nearby swamp. Chris, now 13, was jittery. This was going to be not only his first screen kiss but the first real kiss of his life. Since they were trying to replicate the original, he had to play it just as Harrison Ford had - without a shirt - and he was in a tubby phase. It wasn't pretty, but he and Angela survived.
Back at WLOX, the boys watched their first romantic footage. But it was more ridiculous than romantic because the two leads were kissing to the absurd soundtrack of loudly croaking frogs. They would have to reshoot it when the swamp was quiet.
Little brother Kurt was shooed away from the bedroom again. And ... action. But something strange happened: far from seeming uncomfortable with each other or the task at hand, Chris and Angela kept kissing long after Eric had called: "Cut!" They might not have looked much like two romantic adventurers of 1936, but it worked, and an on-set romance was born.
One June day in 1986, David Elliott, a correspondent for WLOX, got an awful assignment. With Chris's parents now divorced, his mother had married the owner of the TV station. Elliot was called to do a segment on the station-owner's teenage stepson and his friends who were remaking Raiders of the Lost Ark, shot for shot. But once he saw what they were up to, he believed he would have a nice little piece for the evening news. There was Chris running out of the Zalas' garage, now strewn with Spanish moss to make it look like a cave - as an impressive-looking boulder chased him.
Eric had eventually made the boulder out of fibre glass - at no charge - after inspiration led him to a boatbuilder named Mic Sajway. This thing was perfect, at 6ft high and 100lb, except for its tendency to roll off course. To keep it on a straight path, Eric needed large rails. Now 16 and in possession of a driving licence, he went deep into the country one July day and talked some loggers into making a delivery. His mum was surprised to see an 18-wheeler pulling into the driveway, and even more surprised when large men unloaded two logs the size of telephone poles from its trailer.
Chris and Eric, heading into their junior and senior years of high school respectively, knew they had come a long way since that day in the basement five years earlier. Chris no longer needed to rub burnt cork on his face to suggest Indy's whiskers. And Eric, who had once looked a little ridiculous playing a jaded Frenchman, could now pull off the part of Belloq pretty convincingly.
Like all the main bad guys in the original movie, Belloq dies horribly in the last sequence when the ark is opened and demons rush out. On July 17 1987, Eric, Chris and Jayson started getting ready for this big finale. The first thing they had to do was make a plastercast of Eric's head, so that they could film it exploding later on. They read from Eric's worn copy of Derek Taylor's 1981 book, The Making of Raiders of the Lost Ark, to see how it was done. Then Eric sat on the back porch of his house with two straws up his nose. Jayson wet his face with soapy water and slathered on three inches of industrial plaster, making sure to cover his eyes and mouth. Almost immediately Eric started squirming. Chris fetched a pen and paper. "Hot," Eric wrote.
The air going in and out of the straws suggested panic. The plaster was already hard. Chris poked at it with a screwdriver to no avail. He got a hammer and banged. Nothing. Even a hacksaw couldn't break through. Their big mistake, they later realised, was using industrial plaster, which heats on contact with moisture. Eric again gestured for the pen. "Hospital," he wrote. At the hospital, as the doctor removed the plaster before a small audience of amazed residents, Eric learned just how far eyelids can be stretched. For weeks afterward, he went around with no eyelashes and one and a half eyebrows.
Later that summer, Eric, now 17, started his first romance. As soon as it began, he worried that the girl might be more attracted to Chris, who was so charismatic and flirtatious. Eric could be that smooth only as Belloq, not in real life. Chris was worldly too, Eric thought, since for the last few years, his rich stepfather had been sending him to the Knox school, a boarding academy on Long Island, while Eric was stuck on the same old Mississippi roads he'd been travelling since age two.
One evening in summer 1987, Chris took Eric's girlfriend to a restaurant in Biloxi called the Bombay Bicycle Club. She had a salad. After Chris had returned to boarding school that fall, Eric was in his girlfriend's room - half-idly and half-jealously going through her stuff - when he came upon Chris's calling card, with his Long Island address. The girl admitted she had been writing to Chris. She also confessed to having had a salad with him at the Bombay Bicycle Club. Eric made her tear up the card, and he flushed the scraps down the toilet. Then he called Chris and screamed his guts out.
There were some key scenes on the call sheet for the summer of 1988, scenes necessary to the completion of the movie. Now all that was in serious jeopardy. The whole project depended on the alchemy between Eric and Chris that occurred when Eric's intensity and meticulousness sparked against Chris's charisma and need to be centrestage. And now that chemistry was gone.
By July 1988, Chris, now 17, and Eric, 18, had made peace enough to film aboard the USS Alabama and a submarine, the USS Drum, in Mobile Bay, Alabama, about 75 miles east of Gulfport. Chris had secured use of the vessels in a two-year correspondence with one Captain Deffley. Then came the last day of filming - the opening of the ark. It was not a joyous occasion. Jayson tried to get Chris to express some kind of happiness, but he just muttered something like: "Now we have to edit this fucking thing." They had started filming with a childlike enthusiasm and were ending it with something like the joylessness of Hollywood journeymen. There was no wrap party.
Back at WLOX, between 11 pm and 6am, Chris, Eric and Jayson started grappling with five years of footage. They found that they would have to use takes filmed years apart within certain sequences. In the school scene, for instance, Indiana Jones would have to say one line in a boyish soprano and the next in a manly baritone. And in the love scene, Marion would appear with a short mid-80s hairdo during the kiss and then with longer, late-80s hair while waking up just seconds of screen-time later. Jayson - who had never worshipped Spielberg, Lucas or Indiana Jones - began to question how creative it was, really, to be making a shot-for-shot remake. And editing was tedious, nothing like the wild outdoor fun of previous summers.
At last, they had a cut everyone could agree on. All that remained was to perfect the audio track. Chris and Jayson stopped by WLOX one night, with Eric not present, slapped on some of the John Williams score and a few sound effects, and proclaimed the film finished. Why not? At best their movie was a curiosity, a freakish piece of juvenilia, and they were glad to be finished with it. They made a couple of video copies - souvenirs of their misspent youth.
Finished? In just one night? Eric was stunned. He asked Chris and Jayson to meet him at the studio. They never showed. So he watched the cut by himself, then called Chris. Time to talk in person.
The showdown took place in the driveway at Chris's house. Chris was in the driver's seat of his light-blue Chrysler minivan, the window open. Jayson was beside him. Eric pulled into the driveway, walked up, and said he thought the sound needed a lot more attention. Why work so hard for six years and rush it at the very end? Chris told him to stop whining. Eric argued his case some more. "Go fuck yourself," said Chris. He started the engine and peeled off.
Chris soon left for his senior year of boarding school. Eric started at New York University, where he planned to major in film. The movie was finally out of their lives.
Chris and Eric returned to Mississippi for summer 1989, but they weren't speaking. Then Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade came out. Eric called Chris, playing it cool - just asking if he felt like going. Chris said yes. They had a good time at the movie, and soon he and Eric were back in the WLOX editing suite, spending night after night working on the audio track. The fights looked much more convincing with psh! sound effects, which they lifted from the original film. And at last it was done.
A few weeks later, WLOX's Dave Elliott, wearing a tuxedo, stood outside the PepsiCo Auditorium in Gulfport, saying into his microphone: "Well, this is about as close as the Coast gets to an old-fashioned Hollywood premiere." The camera shot a white stretch limo rented by Chris's mum. Out stepped Eric and Chris in tuxes, accompanied by dates done up prom-style, and Jayson, solo, in tails, sideburns, and blue-lensed granny glasses. An audience of about 200 friends, family and cast members cheered and laughed throughout Raiders of the Lost Ark - the Adaptation. It was a big night for the three young men. They felt as they had really accomplished something even if they had rendered Spielberg's name as Spielburg in their credits. And yet ... could they really trust the happy reaction of a hometown crowd so inclined to root for their success?
At NYU over the next couple of years, Eric played his movie from time to time in the dorm basement. Sometimes his fellow film students would drop in and stay to the end. It seemed he had something of interest, even to a less partisan audience.
Chris, now majoring in theatre arts at the College of Wooster in Ohio, spent the summer of 1991 with Eric driving from car dealership to car dealership all across Mississippi to make cheap TV commercials for his stepdad's media company. Along the way Chris admitted he had tried to steal Eric's girlfriend that time and Eric admitted he had hated Chris for years. That conversation cleared the air somehow. They grew as close as they had been before that infamous Bombay Bicycle Club salad.
Eric started working on the script for his NYU student-thesis film, which was shaping up to be a drama about a man who grows old prematurely, and his repelled wife. He thought of Chris while writing the part of a cocksure dude who nearly steals the woman away from his frail anti-hero. In fall 1991, up in Amenia, New York, Eric and Chris were together again, making a movie again. It ran for 22 minutes and was called An Early Twilight. On the festival circuit in 1993, it won 21 awards.
Next stop, Los Angeles. Chris and Eric were rooming together. Eric worked lousy jobs and started a new screenplay. Chris was working for $8 an hour testing video games as he tried his luck as an actor. But in 1999, Chris quit acting, joined a rock band, and dived into a stormy relationship with a stripper. He got into drugs. He borrowed money from Eric and took way too long to pay it back. Eric, meanwhile, was going in the opposite direction. He had started working at the same company where Chris tested video games, but instead of seeing it as a mere day job to support his Hollywood ambitions, Eric applied himself and was promoted to management. The company even made him Chris's boss.
Eric polished the screenplay he had been working on and put it in a drawer. Chris accused him of being a corporate sellout. They didn't have much to say to each other after that. In 2000, Eric married an old high-school classmate, Cassie Grace. Chris did not attend the wedding. The bride and groom moved to Florida - and that seemed to be the end of the friendship that had begun in his basement 18 years earlier.
As Eric and Chris moved past 30, the movie they had made from 1982 to 1989 was nothing more than a memory. Or so they thought. Back in the mid-1990s, an NYU acquaintance of Eric's had seen Raiders of the Lost Ark - the Adaptation and had been impressed. Unbeknown to Eric, he had passed on a copy to a friend, who passed it on to someone else. Eventually, it made its way to a budding film-maker named Eli Roth, who became hellbent on bringing this crackpot masterpiece to a wider audience.
In December 2002, Roth went to Austin, Texas, on a film geek's pilgrimage to the fourth Butt-Numb-a-Thon festival, a 24-hour annual film marathon co-sponsored by Harry Knowles, founder of the film news website Aint-It-Cool News, and Tim League, owner of Austin's Alamo Drafthouse cinema. With an hour to be filled in the early hours before the unofficial world premiere of Lord of the Rings: the Two Towers, Roth persuaded Knowles and League to pop in the video he had brought along. The audience watched. Quietly at first. And then ... huge laughs. Cheers! And when they stopped the video of Raiders of the Lost Ark - the Adaptation to show the big movie everyone had been waiting for, the audience booed.
"It stole Butt-Numb-a-Thon," Knowles later wrote on his site. "After key moments, cheers began rocking the Drafthouse. People started trying to guess how these kids would pull off the next big moment. And they were always doing it bigger than we could imagine."
Eric read Ain't-It-Cool News almost every day, but somehow missed Knowles's paean to his film. In January 2003, Jayson was the first to be contacted by the outside film world. It was Roth, talking a mile a minute over the phone about the movie and his hope of getting a copy to Spielberg.
In February, Chris, Eric and Jayson each received a letter from the director of Raiders of the Lost Ark himself, saying he had appreciated their "loving and detailed tribute". Back in Austin, the Drafthouse movie theatre booked Raiders of the Lost Ark - the Adaptation for a three-night engagement to begin on May 30, with a special appearance by the film-makers who hadn't seen one another in years.
Chris, now 32, felt sick on the flight to Austin. He had got his life back together but he feared that Eric would shun him for how he had behaved at his low point, three years earlier. As Eric, also 32, flew toward Austin, he was worried that Chris would still see him as some kind of straitlaced sellout. But they hugged upon seeing each other, and things seemed almost normal. Jayson, 33, was there, too - in from Oakland, where he showed his horror-influenced artwork in his own backyard shows and supported himself with a job creating video presentations. He wondered aloud if anybody would actually show up for their movie.
With almost an hour to showtime, a long line formed outside the Drafthouse. Then when everyone was seated, the cinema went dark. On-screen, a teenage Chris stepped through the sunlit woods along the Tchoutacabouffa. Eric, Chris and Jayson, seated near the wall, kept an eye on the audience. They were nervous. Then came the laughter and the applause.
So what's the movie actually like? As Knowles suggested, you watch Raiders of the Lost Ark - the Adaptation with a double perspective, partly rooting for Indiana Jones to beat the Nazis, and partly rooting for the kids on-screen to pull off each film-making feat. It's probably no accident that an audience would respond strongly to this humble remake. An audience jaded by one mega-budget blockbuster after another is all too ready for an action movie made with love instead of money, and all toowilling to look past technical flaws for a film that shows real heart. But nobody would be able to sit through this movie if it weren't well-crafted.
From the first scene, the film has authority. The action is clear and it looks good - not Spielberg good, but better than a home video. The positioning of the actors in frame after frame, as well as their facial expressions, matches that of the original almost exactly. When Indiana Jones walks through the boobytrapped cave in the opening minutes, you would never guess that he's really in the basement of a house in Mississippi.
After the lights went up, Chris, Eric and Jayson - all three truly shocked that the film they had made over their adolescent summer vacations had found a large audience of strangers - took the stage and basked in a standing ovation, almost 20 years to the day since shooting their first scene in the Zalas' backyard.
Both Harry Knowles and Eli Roth believed there's a movie to be made out of all this. So it was no surprise when, back in February, big-time Hollywood producer Scott Rudin (The Hours, School of Rock, Stepford Wives) purchased the life rights from Chris, Eric and Jayson. Rudin, who works frequently with Paramount Pictures, the studio that made Raiders of the Lost Ark, has apparently won the blessing of Spielberg and Lucas for this project. Under the terms of the deal, Chris, Eric and Jayson could each earn a sum in the low six figures, if the movie actually ends up getting made. And so, like the other Indiana Jones movies, Raiders of the Lost Ark - the Adaptation may one day have a sequel of its own.
-----
How cool is that :D
Friday May 14, 2004
The Guardian
Chris Strompolos was a rowdy, pudgy kid who craved attention. He once bit a classmate, and he had a habit of barking at his teachers. To get him to behave, teachers made Chris sit on his hands, copy pages from the Bible, and stay in a dark room for hours by himself. More and more, he drifted into a fantasy world - the world of his favourite movie, Raiders of the Lost Ark. Ever since seeing it in the summer of 1981, he had idolised the hero, swashbuckling archaeologist Indiana Jones. Chris loved Indiana Jones. Cracking the bullwhip. Rescuing the girl. Making wisecracks all the while. Whenever he could, Chris slipped into the swampy woods near his hometown of Gulfport, and he swung from vines and pretended to be Indy.
When he wasn't playing Indiana Jones, Chris often pored over his Raiders of the Lost Ark comic book. It was a good way to pass the time during the hour-long school bus rides. One day on the bus, the 10-year- old Chris showed his prized comic book to an older boy, named Eric Zala. Eric, 11, was impressed. He was a Raiders fan, too.
After the school year was over, in June of 1982, Chris called Eric. He had an idea. Eric was surprised to be hearing from a kid he barely knew, but invited Chris over to his house anyway. What ensued was like a Hollywood pitch meeting. The two boys sat in Eric's basement, brainstorming about doing their own shot-for-shot remake of the movie they loved. Chris planned to play Indiana Jones. Eric said he would take Toht, the Nazi.
For most kids, an afternoon spent daydreaming out loud about taking on some grand project would have been enough. But for Chris and Eric, their little undertaking became something that occupied them for the rest of the 1980s. While countless American kids spent the Reagan years numbing their brains with cable TV, Eric and Chris would be routinely running through lines of dialogue, building sets, and making stuff explode. Other boys asked for toys; they asked for supplies - a bullwhip, a leather jacket, six cans of spray paint, a VHS camcorder (which Chris got for his birthday one year). Their project grew with them in their teenage years, but their goal still seemed out of reach, even when they had deep voices and girlfriends, were burned out and practically hated each other's guts. Then, 21 years past the start date, when Chris and Eric were finally and absolutely through with each other, their insane project would bring them together once again.
The two boys got started in summer 1982. With Paramount's nationwide re-release of Raiders of the Lost Ark on July 16, 1982, Chris and Eric found themselves suddenly able to trade in their play-acting for the seriousness of pre-production. This began when Chris undertook a secret mission to a cinema with a tape recorder strapped to his chest - only to be tossed out. The less mischievous-looking Eric tried the same thing later on and got away with it.
The tape recording was crucial. The two boys committed every line to memory, and matched the actors' inflections. Chris scribbled down descriptions of roughly 20 shots from the movie; Eric continued this tedious process in his precise handwriting until they had a list of 649 shots. Now their plan had the elegance of simplicity: film each of the 649 shots as written, and the movie would be done. How hard could it be? Eric made detailed sketches of costumes, which, along with the shot list, went into a spiral-bound notebook labelled: "Raiders of the Lost Ark Book of Ideas and Memos. Indy and Toht's Notes: Don't Touch!!!!"
They were not quite ready to start shooting (still no camera), but at least they could get to work on making an important prop: the giant boulder that chases Indy out of a cave. The two of them stayed up late, constructing it out of crisscrossed bamboo stalks from a nearby swamp and cardboard. It seemed almost as large as the boulder in the original. Too bad they couldn't get it out of the door. And after they took it apart, they couldn't put it together again.
After the boulder failure, the Raiders of the Lost Ark project went on hiatus for the school year. It was picked up again in summer 1983. (This was a pattern that would be repeated throughout the production.) That year Chris and Eric added a third member to their film-making partnership: Jayson Lamb, a fellow Mississippi misfit who talked about death, wore an Indian medicine bag around his neck, and didn't eat meat. He had won Chris's attention by transforming a classroom into a gory haunted house the previous Halloween. Chris figured Jayson would be good at making all the corpses the movie required.
The first day of actual filming took place in the Zalas' lush backyard, which was serving as the Peruvian jungle where Raiders of the Lost Ark begins. Jayson, aged 13, was operating a clunky Sony Betamax camera rented for the boys by Chris's mother. Eric, who had given up the Toht role, was now playing the meatier part of Dr Rene Belloq, the French archaeologist and Indiana Jones's nemesis. "Dr Jones," said Eric, now almost 13, matching Belloq's accent, "again we see there is nothing you can possess which I cannot take away." Dressed as Indiana, Chris (12) handed over the relic coveted by Belloq. He was surrounded by a bunch of spear-carrying, half-naked kids, most of them blond, who had been recruited by Eric to play hostile Hovitos Indians. As Eric inspected the idol, Chris made a run for it. The natives chased him. Cut. For the next scene the cast and crew headed to the Tchoutacabouffa river, about 10 miles away. Parents drove them.
The chase continued through sunlit trees and ended when Chris leapt off the riverbank. With his smooth cheeks, he looked like an infant version of his stubbled hero, but he certainly felt like Indy as he splashed into the water. Then came playback at the WLOX-13 television studio where Chris's mother, Elaine Stevens, worked as an anchor woman. Chris, Eric and Jayson were horrified by what they saw on the screen. It looked so stupid and amateurish, and not just because of a mysterious glitch that had left a giant "A" in the upper-left corner of every frame. They'd have to redo it completely - but first, the boulder scene.
This time, Chris and Eric made a much smaller boulder out of a cable drum and cardboard, then got ready to shoot Indy's escape. The Zalas' garage would make for a decent cave, they thought. Jayson pointed the camera, Eric called "Action" and Chris ran with an expression of terror on his face as the prop bumped along behind him.
But playback again revealed the cold truth. The cave looked like the garage at Eric's house, and the little boulder sucked.
Still the show went on. Eric began transforming his basement into a Nepalese bar. His father may have drunk too much, but all those empty green wine jugs made nice props for this sequence, which required two scary elements: (1) fire, which engulfs the bar after a gunfight; and (2) a girl to play Marion Ravenwood, Indy's love interest. A classmate named Stephanie Ewing got the part, because she had the right hair colour and said yes. Jayson checked a magic book to find the ratio of isopropyl alcohol to water necessary for creating flames that would burn out quickly. Eric figured it might be a good idea to film the bar sequence when his mum was out, since he'd be setting the basement on fire, not to mention himself.
To play the bit-part, known in the Raiders of the Lost Ark credits as Ratty Nepalese, (probably the most dangerous role in the film, since the character seemingly burns to death) Eric wore a turban, a fake moustache, and a long purple robe with clothes underneath as protection. Action. Enter the Himalayan henchmen, led by Toht the Nazi torturer, played with evil glee by a baby-faced kid named Ted Ross. Ted held a flaming poker close to Stephanie, who delivered her lines in a Mississippi drawl. Chris, as Indy, cracked the bullwhip, and the poker fell from Ted's hand.
The flames rose and died quickly, as planned. Then came Eric's big moment as the Ratty Nepalese. For a reason no one recalls, he asked that the back of his robe be doused not with isopropyl but with gaso line. The gas was lit. Eric screamed. Jayson got the shot. Two kids were supposed to put Eric out by smothering him in a blanket, but in a panic they fanned him. The flames rose. The smell of singed hair filled the room. Chris grabbed a fire extinguisher they had on hand and blasted his friend with the powdery spray. "NO!" screamed Eric - not because he was on fire, but because he wanted the extinguisher emptied only in an emergency, and this, in his opinion, didn't qualify. It costs real money to refill a fire extinguisher. One month into filming, Eric was already thinking of the budget.
Back at WLOX, the boys liked what they saw. It was cool. But a worker at the station was not so thrilled by footage of a screaming 13-year-old with a burning back in a room full of flames. He told Chris's mother. She watched it, horrified, and called Eric's mother to tell her what had been going on in her house while she was out. By order of the mums, production was shut down, at least for the rest of the summer of 1983.
But the mums proved kind studio bosses. By summer 1984, with Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom in cinemas, the project had been greenlit again, provided an adult was on hand to supervise fire scenes. Peter Kiefler, a sometime actor who lived in one of Eric's family's backyard cottages, got that assignment. He was a demigod to the boys, since he had played a zombie in George Romero's Dawn of the Dead. They'd be needing him soon, to watch over the re-shoot of the bar scene, necessitated by the fact that their Marion had moved to Alaska. Every shot with her had to be scrapped. In fact, all but a few seconds (Eric on fire) of what they had filmed so far was deemed not worth keeping.
Eric approached a girl at church, Angela Rodriguez. She was pretty and a couple of years older, but she said yes. Almost immediately Eric got to work turning a small upstairs bedroom into a ship's cabin for the big love scene. On her arrival at the Zala house, Angela found a costume waiting for her - a shimmering, silvery nightgown from Chris's mum's wardrobe. To put his new lead actress at ease, Eric closed the set, meaning he told his little brother to get out. Chris and Angela took their places on the narrow bed. The open window let in the sound of evening frogs croaking in the nearby swamp. Chris, now 13, was jittery. This was going to be not only his first screen kiss but the first real kiss of his life. Since they were trying to replicate the original, he had to play it just as Harrison Ford had - without a shirt - and he was in a tubby phase. It wasn't pretty, but he and Angela survived.
Back at WLOX, the boys watched their first romantic footage. But it was more ridiculous than romantic because the two leads were kissing to the absurd soundtrack of loudly croaking frogs. They would have to reshoot it when the swamp was quiet.
Little brother Kurt was shooed away from the bedroom again. And ... action. But something strange happened: far from seeming uncomfortable with each other or the task at hand, Chris and Angela kept kissing long after Eric had called: "Cut!" They might not have looked much like two romantic adventurers of 1936, but it worked, and an on-set romance was born.
One June day in 1986, David Elliott, a correspondent for WLOX, got an awful assignment. With Chris's parents now divorced, his mother had married the owner of the TV station. Elliot was called to do a segment on the station-owner's teenage stepson and his friends who were remaking Raiders of the Lost Ark, shot for shot. But once he saw what they were up to, he believed he would have a nice little piece for the evening news. There was Chris running out of the Zalas' garage, now strewn with Spanish moss to make it look like a cave - as an impressive-looking boulder chased him.
Eric had eventually made the boulder out of fibre glass - at no charge - after inspiration led him to a boatbuilder named Mic Sajway. This thing was perfect, at 6ft high and 100lb, except for its tendency to roll off course. To keep it on a straight path, Eric needed large rails. Now 16 and in possession of a driving licence, he went deep into the country one July day and talked some loggers into making a delivery. His mum was surprised to see an 18-wheeler pulling into the driveway, and even more surprised when large men unloaded two logs the size of telephone poles from its trailer.
Chris and Eric, heading into their junior and senior years of high school respectively, knew they had come a long way since that day in the basement five years earlier. Chris no longer needed to rub burnt cork on his face to suggest Indy's whiskers. And Eric, who had once looked a little ridiculous playing a jaded Frenchman, could now pull off the part of Belloq pretty convincingly.
Like all the main bad guys in the original movie, Belloq dies horribly in the last sequence when the ark is opened and demons rush out. On July 17 1987, Eric, Chris and Jayson started getting ready for this big finale. The first thing they had to do was make a plastercast of Eric's head, so that they could film it exploding later on. They read from Eric's worn copy of Derek Taylor's 1981 book, The Making of Raiders of the Lost Ark, to see how it was done. Then Eric sat on the back porch of his house with two straws up his nose. Jayson wet his face with soapy water and slathered on three inches of industrial plaster, making sure to cover his eyes and mouth. Almost immediately Eric started squirming. Chris fetched a pen and paper. "Hot," Eric wrote.
The air going in and out of the straws suggested panic. The plaster was already hard. Chris poked at it with a screwdriver to no avail. He got a hammer and banged. Nothing. Even a hacksaw couldn't break through. Their big mistake, they later realised, was using industrial plaster, which heats on contact with moisture. Eric again gestured for the pen. "Hospital," he wrote. At the hospital, as the doctor removed the plaster before a small audience of amazed residents, Eric learned just how far eyelids can be stretched. For weeks afterward, he went around with no eyelashes and one and a half eyebrows.
Later that summer, Eric, now 17, started his first romance. As soon as it began, he worried that the girl might be more attracted to Chris, who was so charismatic and flirtatious. Eric could be that smooth only as Belloq, not in real life. Chris was worldly too, Eric thought, since for the last few years, his rich stepfather had been sending him to the Knox school, a boarding academy on Long Island, while Eric was stuck on the same old Mississippi roads he'd been travelling since age two.
One evening in summer 1987, Chris took Eric's girlfriend to a restaurant in Biloxi called the Bombay Bicycle Club. She had a salad. After Chris had returned to boarding school that fall, Eric was in his girlfriend's room - half-idly and half-jealously going through her stuff - when he came upon Chris's calling card, with his Long Island address. The girl admitted she had been writing to Chris. She also confessed to having had a salad with him at the Bombay Bicycle Club. Eric made her tear up the card, and he flushed the scraps down the toilet. Then he called Chris and screamed his guts out.
There were some key scenes on the call sheet for the summer of 1988, scenes necessary to the completion of the movie. Now all that was in serious jeopardy. The whole project depended on the alchemy between Eric and Chris that occurred when Eric's intensity and meticulousness sparked against Chris's charisma and need to be centrestage. And now that chemistry was gone.
By July 1988, Chris, now 17, and Eric, 18, had made peace enough to film aboard the USS Alabama and a submarine, the USS Drum, in Mobile Bay, Alabama, about 75 miles east of Gulfport. Chris had secured use of the vessels in a two-year correspondence with one Captain Deffley. Then came the last day of filming - the opening of the ark. It was not a joyous occasion. Jayson tried to get Chris to express some kind of happiness, but he just muttered something like: "Now we have to edit this fucking thing." They had started filming with a childlike enthusiasm and were ending it with something like the joylessness of Hollywood journeymen. There was no wrap party.
Back at WLOX, between 11 pm and 6am, Chris, Eric and Jayson started grappling with five years of footage. They found that they would have to use takes filmed years apart within certain sequences. In the school scene, for instance, Indiana Jones would have to say one line in a boyish soprano and the next in a manly baritone. And in the love scene, Marion would appear with a short mid-80s hairdo during the kiss and then with longer, late-80s hair while waking up just seconds of screen-time later. Jayson - who had never worshipped Spielberg, Lucas or Indiana Jones - began to question how creative it was, really, to be making a shot-for-shot remake. And editing was tedious, nothing like the wild outdoor fun of previous summers.
At last, they had a cut everyone could agree on. All that remained was to perfect the audio track. Chris and Jayson stopped by WLOX one night, with Eric not present, slapped on some of the John Williams score and a few sound effects, and proclaimed the film finished. Why not? At best their movie was a curiosity, a freakish piece of juvenilia, and they were glad to be finished with it. They made a couple of video copies - souvenirs of their misspent youth.
Finished? In just one night? Eric was stunned. He asked Chris and Jayson to meet him at the studio. They never showed. So he watched the cut by himself, then called Chris. Time to talk in person.
The showdown took place in the driveway at Chris's house. Chris was in the driver's seat of his light-blue Chrysler minivan, the window open. Jayson was beside him. Eric pulled into the driveway, walked up, and said he thought the sound needed a lot more attention. Why work so hard for six years and rush it at the very end? Chris told him to stop whining. Eric argued his case some more. "Go fuck yourself," said Chris. He started the engine and peeled off.
Chris soon left for his senior year of boarding school. Eric started at New York University, where he planned to major in film. The movie was finally out of their lives.
Chris and Eric returned to Mississippi for summer 1989, but they weren't speaking. Then Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade came out. Eric called Chris, playing it cool - just asking if he felt like going. Chris said yes. They had a good time at the movie, and soon he and Eric were back in the WLOX editing suite, spending night after night working on the audio track. The fights looked much more convincing with psh! sound effects, which they lifted from the original film. And at last it was done.
A few weeks later, WLOX's Dave Elliott, wearing a tuxedo, stood outside the PepsiCo Auditorium in Gulfport, saying into his microphone: "Well, this is about as close as the Coast gets to an old-fashioned Hollywood premiere." The camera shot a white stretch limo rented by Chris's mum. Out stepped Eric and Chris in tuxes, accompanied by dates done up prom-style, and Jayson, solo, in tails, sideburns, and blue-lensed granny glasses. An audience of about 200 friends, family and cast members cheered and laughed throughout Raiders of the Lost Ark - the Adaptation. It was a big night for the three young men. They felt as they had really accomplished something even if they had rendered Spielberg's name as Spielburg in their credits. And yet ... could they really trust the happy reaction of a hometown crowd so inclined to root for their success?
At NYU over the next couple of years, Eric played his movie from time to time in the dorm basement. Sometimes his fellow film students would drop in and stay to the end. It seemed he had something of interest, even to a less partisan audience.
Chris, now majoring in theatre arts at the College of Wooster in Ohio, spent the summer of 1991 with Eric driving from car dealership to car dealership all across Mississippi to make cheap TV commercials for his stepdad's media company. Along the way Chris admitted he had tried to steal Eric's girlfriend that time and Eric admitted he had hated Chris for years. That conversation cleared the air somehow. They grew as close as they had been before that infamous Bombay Bicycle Club salad.
Eric started working on the script for his NYU student-thesis film, which was shaping up to be a drama about a man who grows old prematurely, and his repelled wife. He thought of Chris while writing the part of a cocksure dude who nearly steals the woman away from his frail anti-hero. In fall 1991, up in Amenia, New York, Eric and Chris were together again, making a movie again. It ran for 22 minutes and was called An Early Twilight. On the festival circuit in 1993, it won 21 awards.
Next stop, Los Angeles. Chris and Eric were rooming together. Eric worked lousy jobs and started a new screenplay. Chris was working for $8 an hour testing video games as he tried his luck as an actor. But in 1999, Chris quit acting, joined a rock band, and dived into a stormy relationship with a stripper. He got into drugs. He borrowed money from Eric and took way too long to pay it back. Eric, meanwhile, was going in the opposite direction. He had started working at the same company where Chris tested video games, but instead of seeing it as a mere day job to support his Hollywood ambitions, Eric applied himself and was promoted to management. The company even made him Chris's boss.
Eric polished the screenplay he had been working on and put it in a drawer. Chris accused him of being a corporate sellout. They didn't have much to say to each other after that. In 2000, Eric married an old high-school classmate, Cassie Grace. Chris did not attend the wedding. The bride and groom moved to Florida - and that seemed to be the end of the friendship that had begun in his basement 18 years earlier.
As Eric and Chris moved past 30, the movie they had made from 1982 to 1989 was nothing more than a memory. Or so they thought. Back in the mid-1990s, an NYU acquaintance of Eric's had seen Raiders of the Lost Ark - the Adaptation and had been impressed. Unbeknown to Eric, he had passed on a copy to a friend, who passed it on to someone else. Eventually, it made its way to a budding film-maker named Eli Roth, who became hellbent on bringing this crackpot masterpiece to a wider audience.
In December 2002, Roth went to Austin, Texas, on a film geek's pilgrimage to the fourth Butt-Numb-a-Thon festival, a 24-hour annual film marathon co-sponsored by Harry Knowles, founder of the film news website Aint-It-Cool News, and Tim League, owner of Austin's Alamo Drafthouse cinema. With an hour to be filled in the early hours before the unofficial world premiere of Lord of the Rings: the Two Towers, Roth persuaded Knowles and League to pop in the video he had brought along. The audience watched. Quietly at first. And then ... huge laughs. Cheers! And when they stopped the video of Raiders of the Lost Ark - the Adaptation to show the big movie everyone had been waiting for, the audience booed.
"It stole Butt-Numb-a-Thon," Knowles later wrote on his site. "After key moments, cheers began rocking the Drafthouse. People started trying to guess how these kids would pull off the next big moment. And they were always doing it bigger than we could imagine."
Eric read Ain't-It-Cool News almost every day, but somehow missed Knowles's paean to his film. In January 2003, Jayson was the first to be contacted by the outside film world. It was Roth, talking a mile a minute over the phone about the movie and his hope of getting a copy to Spielberg.
In February, Chris, Eric and Jayson each received a letter from the director of Raiders of the Lost Ark himself, saying he had appreciated their "loving and detailed tribute". Back in Austin, the Drafthouse movie theatre booked Raiders of the Lost Ark - the Adaptation for a three-night engagement to begin on May 30, with a special appearance by the film-makers who hadn't seen one another in years.
Chris, now 32, felt sick on the flight to Austin. He had got his life back together but he feared that Eric would shun him for how he had behaved at his low point, three years earlier. As Eric, also 32, flew toward Austin, he was worried that Chris would still see him as some kind of straitlaced sellout. But they hugged upon seeing each other, and things seemed almost normal. Jayson, 33, was there, too - in from Oakland, where he showed his horror-influenced artwork in his own backyard shows and supported himself with a job creating video presentations. He wondered aloud if anybody would actually show up for their movie.
With almost an hour to showtime, a long line formed outside the Drafthouse. Then when everyone was seated, the cinema went dark. On-screen, a teenage Chris stepped through the sunlit woods along the Tchoutacabouffa. Eric, Chris and Jayson, seated near the wall, kept an eye on the audience. They were nervous. Then came the laughter and the applause.
So what's the movie actually like? As Knowles suggested, you watch Raiders of the Lost Ark - the Adaptation with a double perspective, partly rooting for Indiana Jones to beat the Nazis, and partly rooting for the kids on-screen to pull off each film-making feat. It's probably no accident that an audience would respond strongly to this humble remake. An audience jaded by one mega-budget blockbuster after another is all too ready for an action movie made with love instead of money, and all toowilling to look past technical flaws for a film that shows real heart. But nobody would be able to sit through this movie if it weren't well-crafted.
From the first scene, the film has authority. The action is clear and it looks good - not Spielberg good, but better than a home video. The positioning of the actors in frame after frame, as well as their facial expressions, matches that of the original almost exactly. When Indiana Jones walks through the boobytrapped cave in the opening minutes, you would never guess that he's really in the basement of a house in Mississippi.
After the lights went up, Chris, Eric and Jayson - all three truly shocked that the film they had made over their adolescent summer vacations had found a large audience of strangers - took the stage and basked in a standing ovation, almost 20 years to the day since shooting their first scene in the Zalas' backyard.
Both Harry Knowles and Eli Roth believed there's a movie to be made out of all this. So it was no surprise when, back in February, big-time Hollywood producer Scott Rudin (The Hours, School of Rock, Stepford Wives) purchased the life rights from Chris, Eric and Jayson. Rudin, who works frequently with Paramount Pictures, the studio that made Raiders of the Lost Ark, has apparently won the blessing of Spielberg and Lucas for this project. Under the terms of the deal, Chris, Eric and Jayson could each earn a sum in the low six figures, if the movie actually ends up getting made. And so, like the other Indiana Jones movies, Raiders of the Lost Ark - the Adaptation may one day have a sequel of its own.
-----
How cool is that :D
