If you go
› What: Double feature presentation of “Raiders!: The Story of the Greatest Fan Film Ever Made” and “Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation” with special guest director Eric Zala.› When: 7-11:30 p.m. Wednesday, July 27.› Where: Cine-Rama, 100 W. Main St.› Admission: $12 per film; $18 double-feature, if purchased in advance, $20 day of screening.› Phone: 423-521-1716.› Website: www.thecinerama.org/schedule.
Q&A
Read a Q&A with “Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation” director and actor Eric Zala.
Free from obligations and with seemingly endless hours to fill, summer is a season of infinite possibility for most kids. Some fill it with trips to camp or video game marathons, but in the summer of 1982, Mississippi preteens Chris Strompolos and Eric Zala spent their break making a movie.
Well, remaking one.
"By the time the boulder scene happened, it just split my brain open," Zala, now 46, says of seeing "Raiders of the Lost Ark" for the first time in the summer of 1981. "I didn't know movies could do that, in terms of being so thrilling and captivating,"
During an hour-long bus ride to school that fall, Zala met and befriended fellow Indiana Jones fan Strompolos, who later approached him with an idea to re-create the film, shot for shot.
"I imagined all the sets were built and the roles were cast and that I'd wander on and help. Little did I know that all Chris had done was to buy the script from Waldenbooks and cast himself as Indiana Jones, as any good producer will do," he laughs. "He wanted to be Indiana Jones, and as the director, I thought, 'What would a shot-for-shot remake of 'Raiders of the Lost Ark' starring kids look like?' There was only one way to find out."
That year Zala hand-drew more than 600 storyboards, using as "memory jogs" photos of the set and an audio recording of the film made via a cassette recorder smuggled into a 1982 theatrical re-release. Production commenced the following summer and finally ended seven years later in 1989.
"We began it, having no idea what we were getting into," Zala says. "Thank God, because if we'd known we would have been scared to death."
Working on a budget of just $5,000 during that period, Strompolos and Zala had to be creative in their approach to the project. Their cast consisted of neighborhood kids - about 60 in all - who were constantly rotating in and out as actors lost interest. The movie features many clever substitutes, such as using the family dog as a monkey stand-in or Zala's basement as the set for a Nepalese bar, which they set fire to using "lots and lots of isopropyl alcohol."
Despite its epic creation, "Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation" was mostly forgotten for years until it was discovered by actor and "Hostel" director Eli Roth. In 2003, Roth managed to have the adaptation shown at film critic Harry Knowles' Butt-Numb-A-Thon film festival, where its popularity led to national attention, including a personal letter from Steven Spielberg who described it as "very loving and detailed."
But there was a gaping hole in the adaptation, a missing scene from late in the film featuring a fistfight near and aboard a Nazi airplane, which eventually explodes. The scene was cut due to being mostly extraneous to the plot and out of reach for a crew of teenagers. Still, Zala says its absence haunted him and was a frequent talking point during Q&A sessions after screenings of the adaptation.
In June 2014, Zala and Strompolos finally finished their work by filming the missing sequence. The shoot was partially funded by $58,000 - more than 11 times their entire budget to that point - which they raised via a Kickstarter campaign.
"When I settled into my airplane seat [on the way home] still dressed as [Dr. René] Belloq, I called Chris and said, 'We finally did it. We finally finished,'" Zala says.
In a case of Hollywood hall-of-mirrors, Zala and Strompolos' project has been chronicled in the documentary "Raiders!: The Story of the Greatest Fan Film Ever Made," which premiered at the South By Southwest Film Festival in 2015. Both the adaptation and the companion documentary will be shown at Cine-Rama on Wednesday, July 27.
The documentary was previously screened at this year's Chattanooga Film Festival, but due to an emergency, Strompolos couldn't attend. Wednesday's reprisal, which Zala will introduce, will demonstrate to audiences the power of film to inspire intense adoration, says Chris Dortch, who founded both the film festival and the newly opened art-house theater.
"[The remake] is almost like a metaphor for all of film and filmmaking," Dortch says. "It's exactly the kind of story I want to share with the audiences we have here."
Contact Casey Phillips at cphillips@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6205. Follow him on Twitter at @PhillipsCTFP.