Indianas in Pyjamas
After seeing the first Indiana Jones film in 1982, three mad boys recreated it. This is their incredible story...
By Angus Fontaine
Indy Kids (from left) Eric Zala, Jayson Lamb and Chris Strompolos
It began as a few kids on an unholy quest: to re-make their favourite film scene for scene. But 26 years on, Eric Zala and Chris Strompolos's Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation - a pre-pubescent paean to director Steven Spielberg's first Indiana Jones adventure is a miracle of modern cinema and, like the Ark itself, a "beacon of light for a jaded world".
This totally bizarre 100-minute film has many heart-warming virtues. But it's the cracked ballad behind the scenes - the gloriously misspent childhood on the Mississippi Gulf Coast and the friendship that survived an epic shoot of seven summers - that makes it a film fable for the ages. This story, says Eric, "renews people's courage to chase impossible dreams."
Eric, then 11 and Chris, 10, hatched their plan over a play-date/ pitch-meeting in the summer of 1982. Official production on Raiders: The Adaptation began when Eric strapped a tape-player to his chest to pirate Spielberg's original from the local theatre, thus allowing the boys to commit every line to memory and list all its 649 shots into a spiral-bound notebook.
Chris cast himself as Indy. Eric would direct and play baddie, Dr Rene Belloq. An older girl they had a crush on became the heroine, Marion. Local kids were recruited to play poison pygmies, Arab assassins and baby-faced Nazis. Chris's dog, Snickers, starred as the monkey side-kick with a Sieg Heil salute (fishing line tied to a front paw and gently tugged).
Downtown Biloxi became bustling Cairo, the Zala backyard was the Peruvian jungle and a neighbouring dirt-farm stood-in for the dunes of the Sahara. At various stages of shooting, Mrs Zala's garage was transformed into a moss-lined cave, a billowing desert tent or a booze-oozing Nepalese bar (ideally when she was out shopping). "While most teenagers were having keg parties, we were painting hieroglyphics on Eric's mum's wall," chuckles Chris.
Joined by a third rabid Raiders fan, Jayson Lamb on SPFX, the boys stepped up for props. Eric wangled a 100lb of fibreglass out of a kindly boat-builder to build the boulder and convinced loggers to lend two telegraph poles for a ramp. Chris harangued a US Navy Captain for three whole years for use of a submarine and warship. "My mum would drive me over to the base in my little suit and tie to bombard this guy with story-boards and shooting schedules. Finally his resistance sank and he was, ‘Take what you want, just leave me be!'"
For the 76-shot sequence where Indy is dragged behind an army truck, an old '64 Plymouth pick-up was rescued from a swamp, re-painted green and reanimated to nefarious Nazified life by Eric's boy genius younger brother Kurt so Chris could eat dirt at 50kmh. "We went full-tilt to get it as real as was humanly possible," he says.
Eric, too, put his life on the line, setting himself - and his mum's much-abused basement - ablaze in the bar-room shoot-out scene. If the smell of singed hair didn't drive the boys' parents crazy, the sight of a large crowd of locals and police watching an ambulanceman chisel industrial plaster off Eric's soon-to-be eyebrow-less face soon did.
Four years in they were less than halfway done. Old boyhood bonds now began to fracture under the weight of adolescence. Yet, summer after summer the friends returned, determined to finish as men what they had started as boys. Finally, in July 1988, they wrapped, sound effects were added and John Williams' rousing score slapped on top. There was even a red-carpet premiere in their hometown for 200 friends and relatives.
In the next decade, Eric and Chris got as far away from their film - and each other - as possible. Chris became an actor and frontman of a punk-band. Eric signed on at NYU film school and worked bad jobs while toiling on a screenplay.
Then someone opened the Ark.
In December 2002, madcap film-maker Eli Roth (director of the Hostel horror films) played The Adaptation in a free hour before a premiere of Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. The crowd whooped - loudest when, due to re-shoots years apart, Indy's boyish squeak broke into a late-teen foghorn seconds apart in some scenes. Overnight, the film became the toast of film geeks all over the globe.
Things got weirder. In February 2003, the boys received letters from Spielberg himself thanking them for their "loving and detailed tribute". They turned up to Skywalker Ranch expecting the wrath of Paramount's copyright wolves. Instead, Chris recalls: "Spielberg said, ‘Boys I watched your movie...then I watched it again. I want you to know it inspired me.'"
Dumbstruck doesn't cover it, reckons Chris. "I mean, it's one thing to follow in the footsteps of your heroes by re-making a film, another to not be sued silly by the studio who made it...but to inspire them? That's just surreal!" The freak-fest didn't end there. In March 2004, Chris and Eric inked a six-figure deal signing over film rights for a hatchling Hollywood blockbuster of their story to be written by Daniel Klaus (Ghostworld) and produced by Scott Rudin (School of Rock, Wonder Boys). "Now I sometimes find myself talking about the major motion picture being made about my childhood with a mundanity I reserve for dropping off my dry cleaning," laughs Eric. "It's only because if I stop in my tracks and think ‘My God, they're casting an actor to play me! People around the world will see us!' I can't process it. It's all too much..."
In addition to touring Raiders: The Adaptation on the festival circuit, Eric and Chris have quit their corporate desk jobs and joined forces anew as Rolling Boulder Films for a new Mississippi-based action-adventure Zala admits is "very ambitious and very risky."
"The way we figure, if anyone knows what it's like to get a gargantuan project underway against all odds it's Chris and I," Eric says. "We've still got the same weird alchemy we had as kids so even though we're embarking on a whole new adventure, it's the same old energy driving it."
Watch the opening of the movie below!