Little Raiders

Considered a classic in the canon of American films, Spielberg’s iconic 1981 film, Raiders of the Lost Ark, instantly captivated filmgoers of the 1980s, including a couple of Mississippi kids with dreams of becoming filmmakers someday. In one of movie history’s most memorable fight scenes, Dr. Henry “Indiana” Jones, played by Harrison Ford, plans to escape from the German Nazi forces by stealing a plane. Instead, he comes face to face with a towering behemoth of a bare-chested strongman, grinning and ready for a bare-knuckle fight that ends in a propeller-puréed Nazi and a spectacular airplane explosion.

 After seven grueling summers following the film’s release, teenagers Eric Zala and Chris Strompolos had nearly recreated the entire Spielberg film scene for scene—except for the famous airplane brawl. 

 “We had all the Raiders hallmarks, like the boulder, real snakes, even a real WWII submarine. But to pull off that single scene of the plane blowing up was out of our reach,” Zala, now fifty-three, said. 

 After all, how could teenagers engineer a plane explosion, and with camels in the background at that? 

 “Our justification for leaving it out originally was that the narrative worked fine without it,” Zala said. “It was too complicated and too dangerous. But our drive was to eventually do it, even if we were adults.”

The endeavor began in a backyard in Ocean Springs, Mississippi in the blazing summer of 1982. 

 Zala, then-twelve, and Strompolos, then-eleven, had bonded on a school bus over the now-collectable Marvel Super Special comic book adaptation of Spielberg’s Raiders of the Lost Ark. They started tossing around daydreams, brainstorming how they might create their backyard version of the movie.

 The two friends started routinely pulling all-nighters, but not to engulf themselves in the new adolescent crazes of premium channels on cable TV. Rather, they were occupied with memorizing dialogue, creating sets, and blowing stuff sky-high. While other boys asked for dirt bikes and Atari GameStations for birthdays and Christmas, Zala and Strompolos requested bullwhips, leather jackets, fedoras, cans of spray paint, and a VHS camcorder. 

 Strompolos was tapped to play the lead, while Zala took on the directing chores and played bad guy roles. Their friend Jayson Lamb was tasked with running the camera and creating homemade special effects—many of which included fireworks, gasoline, and vehicles. His contributions, and the use of a fish tank, can be credited with the convincing replication of the film’s famous face-melting, ghost-swirling, grand finale. 

 “Jayson wasn’t as into Raiders as we were, but he liked creating special effects and wanted to be involved,” Zala said. “Chris wanted to embody Harrison Ford and be the hero, and I had fantasies about being in Tunisia where Spielberg shot it, so everyone involved had a different motivation.”

Armed with a newfangled Betamax camcorder, a version of the film script from Waldenbooks, a grainy sound recording secretly made in a movie theater, and more than six hundred storyboards, the determined filmmakers recruited curious friends to help realize their production. Strompolos’s mom, Elaine Stevens (who also happens to be the first woman news anchor in the Magnolia State) assisted—granting the boys access to the WLOX-13 studio in Biloxi where she worked.

 “It was an amazing effort that gave their childhood meaning,” Stevens said in a recent interview. “And they completed it. A lot of kids start things they can't finish, and these children finished.”

 Throughout the exhaustive process, the various challenges of arguments, camera breakdowns, and elemental issues frequently, but always temporarily, shut down production. Much like the movie’s giant boulder (which they made with fiberglass), the boys rolled on summer by summer, moving ever forward to the final credits.  

The production’s biggest holdup came about after filming a certain fiery bar fight scene, which resulted in Zala being set on fire and the family basement nearly burned to ashes. When Stevens and the other moms saw the footage, production was immediately halted for the remainder of the summer of 1983.

 “As children, they took tremendous chances, and at times, I was afraid I would be childless,” Stevens said. “It all worked out, but they were fearless and determined, and even though we shut them down for a while, they eventually talked us into letting them restart production.”

After a little time and a few heavily promised concessions, the boys were back in business.

 “By the following summer things had cooled down literally and figuratively,” Zala recalled. “Chris and I concocted a plan. We put on a safety demonstration for the moms and promised to have an adult on site.”

 At one point during the process, Zala remembers painting hieroglyphics on his mom's basement walls. “Someone said, ‘Wouldn't it be cool if someday we actually finished this and Spielberg sees it and doesn't sue us and tells us he likes it?’” he recalled. “There was a pause, and another pause, and then we all laughed and said, ‘That’s never going to happen. Let’s get back to work and finish this.’”

After seven years, the boys finally completed their film—a meticulously detailed recreation of the original, sans one scene.

They eagerly premiered Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation in 1989 before two hundred friends and family at the Gulfport Pepsi-Cola Bottling Plant. Zala recalled the deafening, but glorious, applause and also having to get up early the next morning to clean up the auditorium and collect the "ark". 

“There was just an immense sense of relief that we had done it,” Zala said. “And I thought we had closed the book on Raiders, but I was wrong.”

The young men got on with their lives while pirated VHS copies were passed around to Raiders fans. A fuzzy, watered-down version ended up in the hands of Eli Roth, the co-writer and director of Cabin Fever, when he was then a student at New York University. He gave it to film critic Harry Knowles just before his 2002 Butt-Numb-A-Thon, an annual 24-hour film festival in Austin, Texas. When there was a gap in between screenings, Knowles filled it by unleashing the bootleg copy on an unsuspecting audience. 

A hush fell, and the audience watched quietly at first and then erupted into huge laughs and bellowing cheers. When organizers stopped the adaptation halfway through to show the scheduled screening, the audience booed.

“It stole Butt-Numb-a-Thon,” Knowles later wrote on his site, Ain’t It Cool News. “After key moments, cheers began rocking the Drafthouse. People started trying to guess how these kids would pull off the next big moment. And they always were doing it bigger than we could imagine.”

Thirteen years after The Adaptation’s completion, that improvised screening propelled the homemade movie on the path to fan film cult status, and Roth was so impressed with the buoyant audience response that the following year he tracked down Zala, Strompolos, and Lamb and organized an official screening at the Alamo Drafthouse in Austin. A year later, the film gained internet traction with an in-depth and detailed story in Vanity Fair’s 2004 Hollywood Issue.

Despite the fact that the film skipped the famous Flying Wing Fight segment and couldn't hide Strompolos’s  scene-to-scene (summer-to-summer) aging throughout the course of the film’s story (which takes place over a couple of weeks), Roth offered a crisp copy to Spielberg. After watching it twice, Spielberg then sent Zala, Lamb, and Strompolos each a personalized letter, calling their childhood labors full of vast amounts of imagination, originality, and detail.

 “I still remember opening the letter,” Zala said. “It was like my spirit left my body. It felt like it was just too poetic.”

In 2014, with their wives and children in tow, the pioneer fan filmmakers and cast reunited in Vancleave, Mississippi, to finally complete the missing airplane scene. They had raised $58,000 through a Kickstarter campaign to make it happen (for reference, the rest of their film had been made on a budget of about $5,000; the original about $18 million). The scene took seventy people, 124 shots, and eleven days to complete, but by the end of it, that great steely bird had been blown to bits, their boyhood dream finally realized in full. They’d even found a camel for the backdrop, loaned from an animal show at the Mississippi Coast Coliseum in Biloxi. 

 The final completion of Zala, Strompolos, and Lamb’s film was the occasion for a 2015 documentary film by Jeremy Coon and Tim Skousen titled Raiders!: The Story of the Greatest Fan Film Ever Made, and an accompanying book by Alan Eisenstock. This revival of sorts has catapulted the project to the status of cult classic and launched its creators into public speaking roles across the country. And this time, the film gained the attention of not only the statewide paper the Clarion Ledger, but numerous national publications such as The New York Times, the Smithsonian Magazine, and others.

Zala said that he and the others have also been in discussions with various production companies about creating a television series around the story—though “there are no guarantees, of course.” Ideally serving as producers, Zala and Strompolos would then be making a show about their film, coming full circle. 

 “Life is forever unexpected but then it reveals itself and you find you're right where you need to be,” he said. 

 You can watch Raiders of the Lost The Lost Ark: The Adaptation, shop merch, and find links to the Netflix documentary and book Raiders!: The Story of the Greatest Fan Film Ever Made at raidersguys.com and theraiderskids.com.