SF Indie Fest Report: Raiders of the Lost Ark (The Adaptation)

One of the films playing the SF Indie Fest is a movie we've all seen before, and yet it's guaranteed we've never seen it like this. It's the least original film imaginable -- and at the same time, it pulses with true inspiration and invention. It's a fuzzy, faded piece of ephemera whose verve and vision and vitality made it a legend among the lucky few who've seen it. It should not, by any right, exist, and yet it does. And the crowd who witnessed a rare big-screen showing of it at this year's Indiefest couldn't have been happier.

Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation began as a labor of love, and then became a work of obsession. Eric Zala, Chris Strompolos and Jayson Lamb saw Raiders when it was released in 1981, and, like so many of us, fell in love with it. Unlike many of us (or, in fact, the rest of us) they spent the next several years -- 1982 to 1988, beginning when they were 12 -- recreating the film pretty much shot for shot over the summer and whenever they could, recruiting friends and grownups and anyone who would listen to their cause, shooting when they could and how they could. Lamb was the cameraman, handled special effects and played his share of parts; Zala directed, and played bad guy Belloq; Strompolos plays Indiana Jones. And they made their movie (which was, of course, someone else's movie). And as amazing as it is to think of that achievement, it's even more impressive that they didn't quit; as Zala noted in the post-screening Q&A he conducted alongside Strompolos and Lamb, " ... it would be a shame if this were just a bunch of videotapes in someone's basement. ..."


(Jayson Lamb, Chris Strompolos and Eric Zala, SF Indie Fest 2008)

But Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation is not just a bunch of videotapes in someone's basement; on the bigscreen at the Victoria theater, it played before a rapt crowd in all of its fuzzy, faded Betamax glory -- the stunts, the fights, the props, the patter. And while there's a certain cuteness factor inherent to watching The Adaptation -- it's hard not to let a giddy laugh escape early on as Strompolos runs from the 'deathtraps' the group cobbled together, or as shirtless Mississippi teens stand in for South American tribesmen -- that soon fades in the face of an impressive demonstration of both the inventiveness the trio brought to their tribute and the intrinsic strength of the original film.

Yes, there are substitutions; a boat stands in for a plane, a dog stands in for a monkey, a pre-teen with a ridiculous fake beard stands in for John Rhys-Davies. But things catch on fire; teens leap from moving vehicles; the high seas sequences take place on real military vessels. And even in this curious form -- re-shot and scraped together -- Lawrence Kasdan's screenplay still works, not just the sweep and the scope and the stunts of it but the beats and breaks, too. "Asps. Very poisonous. You go first." "It's a radio for talking to God!" "I'm your goddamn partner!" -- these are all great lines, and seeing them in such a rough setting just makes them shine all the more brightly.

Zala, Strompolos and Lamb's saga has already been optioned by Hollywood (which means that we may one day get to see a film about kids making a film which will have a far greater budget than the one available to the kids who actually made the original movie, but that's part of the fun). And Steven Spielberg and George Lucas have responded to the existence of the trio's tribute not with an army of lawyers but real admiration; in the Q&A, they explained the letter they got from Spielberg after Eli Roth slipped a copy of their film up the chain of command at Dreamworks, and noted they had shown the film the day before in a command performance at ILM. Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation is more a happening than a film; the sound in some scenes is near-unintelligible, but this is not the sort of thing you can send back for post-production looping. But it's not the film equivalent of a performance by one-hit wonder cover band, either; Zala and Strompolos explained how they're working on a new film, something original, with their own recently-minted company, Rolling Boulder Productions. Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation is decidedly not original, but it's still amazingly unique.