Fan fiction has become a staple of online life, as people create loving remakes of everything from Star Wars to the Power Rangers on their mobile phones.
But Chris Strompolos and Eric Zala come from different stock. Beginning in the pre-internet world of 1982, when they were just 11-year-olds, they painstakingly retold Raiders of the Lost Ark, shot-for-shot, from their home in Mississippi.
Their story captured the imagination of Jeremy Coon and Tim Skousen, who after seeing the film at a festival in Salt Lake City fell in love with it and its unlikely creators.
“I thought it didn’t really exist because it wasn’t online and I couldn’t really find anything,” explains Coon.
“I went on a Saturday afternoon to go see it, with no expectations – there were about 20 people there – and about 15 minutes in I was just engrossed. I turned to my friend and said: ‘Why do I not know about this? Someone needs to tell the story – like, where are the kids’ parents? What’s going on?’”
Chris Strompolos, who plays Indiana Jones in the movie, was at the screening. Coon spoke to him and then called Skousen, who came onboard. Strompolos and Zala had turned down previous offers to make documentaries based on their film, but this time they gave Coon and Skousen access to their lives and their attempt to shoot the only scene that evaded them in the 80s: the penultimate scene, when Indy fights a Nazi soldier and blows up a 75ft airplane.
“The awesome thing about Chris and Eric is once they’re onboard, they’re onboard,” says Coon. “There’s no ‘oh crap, we made a mistake’. As soon as we got the paperwork signed with them they shipped me a giant box with everything – the video tapes, everything you could think of – and they were like: ‘Ok, have at it.’”
“So much of this stuff is already there because they filmed it when they were kids,” says Skousen. “Then when the airplane scene came along, that really gave us trajectory because we weren’t just telling this incredible story of a relationship and then it falling apart, but you have them going on the adventure again and we get to go with them.”
The adventure isn’t just about on-set strife, although there is quite a lot if it. The film’s real focus is the relationship between Strompolos and Zala as they come to terms with past fallings out – they went years without speaking – and individual balancing acts as they try to finish the project while juggling family life and corporate jobs.
“It’s scary to trust someone to tell your life story,” says Zala. “We wanted it to be warts and all. Real life is messy.”
And at times, Raiders! is close to the bone. There’s Zala’s fraught phone conversation with his boss at a video game testing company, who is loathe to give him any time off. There are Strompolos’s past issues with drug addiction. Most explosively, there’s the climax of the film when things on set involving the 75ft airplane, their pyro guy and some C4 explosives go very wrong indeed.
“I was up on the hill and thought someone had been killed, and I thought, ‘We have no movie now,’” says Coon.
“I was tearing up and I felt like I was in a war zone. It was really, really crazy,” adds Skousen. “I went into shock.”
As things descended into chaos on set, off set and back in the real world, Coon and Skousen felt a responsiblity for Strompolos and Zala as the remake started to affect their real life.
“We didn’t intervene with hardly anything, we just observed but there were times when I was like: ‘If [Zala’s] really going to quit his job, I might have to intervene,’” he explains. “I was like: ‘Hey, let’s pause and think about this because I really don’t want to ruin your life.’”
Zala is still in his video game job, while Strompolos is attempting to work in movies full time. They certainly don’t seem like people whose lives have been ruined – more reignited.
“I can’t go back to schlumpy, cubicle land,” says Strompolos. “I’d kill myself.”
With Raiders! looking for distributors, it looks like he might not have to any time soon.
