Raiders: Adaptation

Coming, as it did, after a 19-year gap, the movie sequel Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull was much anticipated and hugely publicised. It got a reasonably enthusiastic critical and audience response. But it's unlikely to have triggered anything like the fervour the 1981 original Indy film, Raiders of the Lost Ark, did in a pair of Mississippi boys.

Chris Strompolos and Eric Zala were 10 and 11 when they were struck by the idea of remaking Raiders, shot for shot. It was a project that would have daunted adults - back then there were no VHS tapes, let alone DVDs, from which to copy the dialogue and action. Instead, they smuggled a tape-recorder into a cinema and used the cassettes to create a hand-written list of the hundreds and hundreds of shots. Zala (above at left, with Strompolos and editor/cinematographer Jayson Lamb) drew up 602 storyboards and they followed these religiously … for the next seven years, through puberty, major falling-outs, on-set accidents and the endless, grinding work it took to get the job done.

Theirs is a quite remarkable, and oddly sweet, story. No wonder it has been optioned for a film itself - Oscar-nominated screenwriter Daniel Clowes (Ghost World) has been working on it for several years now. Read about in detail in this Vanity Fair piece by Jim Windolf, from 2004. Then take a look at the trailer for Raiders: Adaptation here.

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