The story of Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation is legendary, in large part because it’s rarely been seen. In 1982, 12-year-olds Eric Zala, Chris Strompolos and Jason Lamb began filming a shot for shot remake of their favorite movie, Raiders of the Lost Ark. It would take until 1989 to complete, with their ages changing from scene to scene. And because it is an unlicensed fan film, they can only screen it on limited special occasions.
SXSW was one such occasion, but Raiders: The Adaptation was preceded by the new documentary, Raiders! about the trio’s film. It turns out they actually had one scene left to go, the fight on the Nazi airfield with the airplane. So the filmmakers Jeremy Coon and Skousen followed Zala and Strompolos as they attempted to make the final scene the biggest and best yet. They faced current challenges like rain, explosive malfunctions, Zala’s job in game testing threatening to fire him if he didn’t come back to work.
All the while, the film reflects on the childhood adaptation itself, including the family hardships all three boys faced and their estrangement from Lamb, who wanted to complete the plane scene with a simple old school childhood effect. Zala and Strompolos were in Austin to discuss their legend and their latest scene. As background, Strompolos played Indy and Zala played Belloq.
CraveOnline: Of all things, was the red line on the map beyond the technology you had in the ‘80s?
Chris Strompolos: Yeah, that was a Jason Lamb invention. We didn’t have the immediate projection to lay over graphics. We didn’t have any titling ability or anything like that, so Jason Lamb literally sat in my mom’s lower basement room and did a stop motion version of the map which is lay out the map, mount the camera, draw a red line, film it, draw a red line, film it, draw a red line, film it. That was our map.
Did you actually borrow a classic car?
Eric Zala: Yes, we got a Rolls Royce.
Chris Strompolos: 1952 Rolls Royce.
Eric Zala: One of the kid prop masters’ dad had a vintage auto body shop.
That’s a big thing to trust you with.
Eric Zala: We didn’t blow it up or anything. We handled it with care.
Did you ever try to duplicate the fly in the mouth for Belloq?
Eric Zala: No. I don’t think we could have done that. That’s funny. I probably would’ve swallowed a fly for the part back then. It would’ve required CGI and of course CGI was not done even on a professional level back then, so no way we could have pulled that particular detail off, regrettably.
Chris Strompolos: We get asked about it a lot though. “Where’s the fly? You guys missed the fly.”
Did you build the submarine facade?
Eric Zala: No, that was an actual WWII submarine. Chris, you should tell this story.
Chris Strompolos: When I was 13 I approached the Naval Officer of the United States Navy in Mobile, AL. It was like a tourist park for retired vessels and submarines and a battleship. I just kept asking and asking and asking. It took me three years to get that but we finally got it.
You forgot to say, “Marion!” after the explosion in Cairo, didn’t you?
Chris Strompolos: Oh yeah, I did. There’s little nuances here and there that I’m sure I forgot.
Eric Zala: Little touches. From memory, we didn’t get everything, but it was pretty close.
At the risk of taking Jason’s side, why didn’t you want to do the plane scene inexpensively like you did when you were kids?
Eric Zala: Well, we tried actually. The book covered it in detail. At one point we figured we’d build one half scale. Through a troubled, problem kid at school, I got a recipe for a pipe bomb. The book chronicles how Jason and I went out to his grandfather’s farm to do a test with this pipe bomb, combination fertilizer and what not. It didn’t work and thank God. Again, we lacked basic appreciation for the fragility of the human body being that young. That probably turned out for the best.
But in the opening scene you changed the airplane to a boat, so you’d made some concessions and adaptations before.
Eric Zala: Sure, although our goal was to come as close as possible. A skiff versus an amphibious airplane, I couldn’t see us realistically getting an amphibious airplane. [We used] a dog instead of a spider monkey but in retrospect, we feel good about those changes. What could we have changed the plane to without radically changing the scene itself? I can’t even in hindsight really think of anything.
Chris Strompolos: A lot of those were also just pragmatics. We had a boat, we had the river. My house was there. It was all kind of there.
Eric Zala: We made them, yeah. Chris’s grandfather’s old red restaurant table cloths got appropriated. We made what we needed to on my mom’s old sewing machine, yeah.
Eric, can’t you work for the game company remotely from home? This is the year 2015.
Chris Strompolos: That’s a good question.
Eric Zala: I haven’t been offered that option really. I’d love nothing better but I’m certainly glad that I was able to pull this off. The real challenge of this was the opposite of the challenge that we had when we were kids. Sustaining over seven years, this time the time challenge was reversed, having to get it done in such a short period of time. We knew that everyone’s schedules, even my work schedule, was either now or never. We just made it. But yeah, that would’ve been helpful.
Even more than seeing The Adaptation itself, seeing the behind the scenes footage in the documentary was great. Had you saved all of that?
Eric Zala: Yeah, we had about 40 hours worth of outtakes that have never been shown before. The doc guys just loved and thought it was gold. Whether it’s witnessing the guys really having trouble putting me out when I’m on fire or various things…
Chris Strompolos: All those elements have been sitting under Jason’s bed are now archived at the George Eastman House in Rochester, NY.
Now will The Adaptation always screen with the airplane scene?
Eric Zala: Well now, yeah. It’s finally complete. We finally did it right.
Now I’m kind of bummed I never got to see the “scene missing” version.
Eric Zala: I’m sure that can probably still be arranged.
Chris Strompolos: We can make both versions available.
How did it work without the airplane scene? How did you get around it?
Eric Zala: What we did was, from Indy and Marion in the catacombs, he just pulled Marion away from the corpses and the snake coming out of the corpse’s mouth, “Marion, look, look.” You see the sunlight coming through the cracks. How it played before is our Well of Souls exterior on location back in the day in 1986, it had rained and the refrigerator boxes were pretty much destroyed by the rain. It was just a dilapidated sunken mess. We improvised with the only shut that is cut now. It’s a terrible, terrible shot is Indy and Marion pushing through and all you see are their knees because it’s so tight. If you see anything more, it’s revealed to be an utterly ruined effect. So we go from them pushing out to the shot that follows the airplane scene, Indy in the tent calling Sallah over and saying, “Truck? What truck?” We found it’s the only scene that is extraneous to the plot of Raiders. You could cut it and go straight, as we did, right to the truck scene.
Snickers the dog was great, but I’m wondering how he sadly died at only five years old?
Eric Zala: We didn’t kill Snickers.
Chris Strompolos: He was my dog and he wandered out into the road and he got hit by a car.
Eric Zala: The Vanity Fair piece touches on that. People around the world when we’ve screened it ask about Snickers. The cool thing is Snickers lives on.
Did you redo any scene as many times as the boulder?
Eric Zala: Well, the boulder was the most challenging prop. It went through five different versions but we didn’t shoot all of them. They never made it that far because either a hurricane blew away the chicken wire boulder or the weather balloon boulder popped. In terms of actually shooting scenes, I think three, perhaps four times we did certain scenes at the beginning. Jungle scene, cave, bar, jungle scene, cave, bar, jungle scene, cave, bar, in different order until finally through repetition, to comparing with the original like a yardstick. “Okay, not there yet, we’ve got to do this again,” we slowly by osmosis, by film school on the fly, you would pick up things like lighting, composition, acting refines. Only when we were happy did we finally move on to shooting the rest of the movie. That’s part of what took us so damn long.
You are essentially doing Spielberg’s shots still, so in a way was Spielberg directing you?
Chris Strompolos: I might be stretching this, but in many of the ways that I wanted to channel Harrison, I think Eric probably wanted to channel Spielberg in terms of exactness and creative precision and good image building. You walk in the footsteps of the people you admire so you can try to emulate and pay tribute to what they’re doing.
Eric Zala: In many ways it is a real challenge. If we weren’t doing a shot for shot remake, it would be all too easy to trim a shot that we just can’t figure out how to do on our limited resources and time. But uh uh uh, can’t do that. This is a beloved movie. Fans know what shot’s coming up next. If we’re going to do this we need to deliver.
Did you not use the second plane explosion in the sequence?
Eric Zala: It is actually in there, it’s just with CGI we removed Dan’s body falling away from the shockwave.
Chris Strompolos: We isolated all the explosions and basically composited everything.
Check Out: The First Trailer for the Legendary ‘Raiders!’
Wow, after all you went through, it actually looks smaller cut together.
Chris Strompolos: Yeah, because you’re not in it. The doc really makes you feel that you’re in that pit with us with all the mud and the rain and the grittiness.
When you got to meet with Spielberg and he showed you outtakes from the films, what did you get to see? The Streisand/Carrie Fisher bit has come out, but what else was there?
Eric Zala: What we saw were a blooper reel, some amusing outtakes, first of Raiders. There were some things with Harrison and Alfred Molina. Then after that, like Chris described the Temple of Doom outtakes and the Barbra Streisand bit which you’re right, did find its way onto YouTube briefly before, as I understand it, being pulled again. So it still remains a mysterious thing for the most part for the time being. It was only 10 minutes or so but it was cool obviously for Raiders geeks like us.
Chris Strompolos: And to be in the room with the man himself.
Fred Topel is a staff writer at CraveOnline and the man behind Best Episode Ever and The Shelf Space Awards. Follow him on Twitter at @FredTopel.
