Keeping Up With the Joneses

Growing up as a young film-dork in the suburbs many of my summer days were spent outside of a local movie theater, waiting on-line for hours at a time to buy tickets to whatever blockbuster film was being released that year. In those pre-Internet days that was the only way to guarantee you would be the first to see the big movie you just couldn’t wait for. It could be a humiliating experience (I was more than once interviewed by the town paper because of it; “Local A-hole Sees Movie” must have read the headlines) but luckily I always had a brother or two there to wait with me, which made the whole ordeal worth it. Now that I am old and cranky, and e-commerce allows me to purchase tickets from my air-conditioned work cubicle, I never wait on line anymore. But last week I had something of a flashback to those days, as my brother Bill and I waited patiently for two hours outside of the Anthology Film Archives in NYC to see Raiders of the Lost Ark.

This wasn’t for a screening of the original Indiana Jones film, but rather Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation -- a shot-by-shot remake of the film made by three 12-year-olds. A couple of years ago word of the existence of this movie began to spread on the Internet after it was screened at a film festival, and shortly after Vanity Fair published an article that recounted the story of the kids and how they made their film. It’s a totally charming story and a great article, which you can read here:

http://www.theraider.net/films/raiders_adaptation/downloads/vanityfair_article.pdf

The Adaptation itself is just as charming, and actually quite mind-blowing in its complexity. It took the boys 7 years to make -- they started when they were in grade-school and didn’t finish until their freshman year of college. As a result the kid who plays Indy, Chris Strompolos (also credited as the film’s “producer”), appears in the opening scene as a squeaky-voiced, chubby 12-year-old, and plays his last scene as a deep-voiced 19 year-old with whiskers. The prolonged shooting schedule allowed the boys to get every detail of the original Raiders right. The giant boulder, the bar burning to the ground, Indy dragging behind the truck, and the melting Nazis are all there. Though the movie was shot on a crappy home-video camera and the sound is atrocious, the spirit and sensibility matches exactly that of the Lucas/Spielberg template.

In some ways a little too well: the movie is impressive from the start, but the audience really perks up when the action moves to the burning bar-fight. If you recall in the original Raiders there were several mini-cliffhangers though out this scene, most of them involving the fighters getting or almost-getting consumed by fire. When the Nazi Toht lights a trail of booze that comes within inches of burning Indy’s head, your heart jumps as you realize THAT’S A REAL KID getting pulled away with only a second to spare. When the Nepalese guard has his back engulfed fully in flames, that’s no stuntman pulling it off. The danger is realer than it ever feels in any “real” movie. The filmmakers win over the viewers so completely that by the time of the truck chase, we not even phased that those are actual children getting thrown off of a moving vehicle at FULL-SPEED. When Indy gets dragged behind the truck by his bullwhip, you feel Strompolos’ pain far more that you ever did Ford’s.

The Archives arranged for one of the kids, Eric Zala, who directed the film (and plays Belloq) to be present for a Q&A after the screening. Now in his mid-30s Zala came across as a really nice guy, totally surprised that a dumb home-video he made as a teenager has come to garner so much interest (his college roommate copied the tape without Zala’s knowledge and passed it on -- which is how it got out in the world in the first place). Zala recounted stories of the making of the film, of getting to meet Steven Spielberg recently (who loved it), and how the success of the movie has given he and his friends a shot at a Hollywood career. It seemed the perfect punctuation mark to their efforts.

Watching the film with a packed house was an almost out-of-body experience, for a few reasons. First the sheer spectacle of watching these kids pull of what many would think impossible is worth the price of admission alone. It didn’t need to be Raiders; these kids could have made a shot-by-shot remake of Broadcast News and it would have been just as thrilling. Kids come up with grand schemes all the time, but they rarely pull them off, because kids loose focus and patience, and their attention wanders elsewhere. The audience cheered the follow-through, perhaps because most of them as kids had an outsized idea that had got away from them.

But if you are a fan of Raiders, The Adaptation works even better. If you remember every move Spielberg’s camera made, or relish every quirk of Paul Freeman’s bizarro-French accent (“Blow eet up-uh! Blow eet bach to GAHD!”), then the fun of it all is echoed back ten-fold once the kids have retransmitted it. I was nerdy enough to notice that several of the John Williams music cues came not from Raiders, but from the Temple of Doom and Last Crusade soundtracks. I figured that the reason for this was because many of the Raiders cues weren’t included on the original soundtrack pressing, so the kids had to fill in the gaps as best they could. Normally I would feel bad about myself for even knowing that. But in the context of watching the movie, it momentarily made me feel like I was in on a secret. I knew these guys, and I knew where they were coming from.

I mean that last statement quite literally. I would say that Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation is truly a unique experience, but it’s not -- for me at least. I reveal to you now my secret shame: I also made an Indiana Jones movie when I was a kid.

I was around 14 years old, and I made it the summer between the end of grade-school and the start of high-school. Mine was not a serious Indy movie, but rather a parody called Montana Mike and the Lost Cause (you can tell by the title that my comedy writing skills at the time barely hovered above Mad magazine standards). My brothers and I had been making movies with our home video camera for a while, and they were almost always comedies, but rarely lasted longer than 3-5 minutes each (The Dog Ate My Two Brothers and Mrs. Butterworth Kills were formative classics). After getting the swing of it I wanted to attempt something truly epic, and successive viewings of the recently released Indiana Jones trilogy on VHS spurred me to action. Montana Mike would clock in at 15 minutes. It was the first time I wrote out a detailed script for one of our movies (though there was no dialogue written, as my brothers and I were better actors when we just winged it). In addition to writing I would “produce” the film -- which mostly meant buying the video tape, building the sets, designing the costumes, and rigging the special effects (including an exploding airplane and miniature rope-bridge). I would also play the lead role -- Dr. Montana “Monty” Mike. I was adamant that I would not direct the film -- I came to this decision, quite seriously, after reading an interview with Leonard Nimoy in which he explained how difficult it was to serve as both director and an actor in the Star Trek films. Determined not to compromise the quality of the film, I approached my older brother Rick to be director, and he agreed.

Family-friend Paul Paris would play my side-kick Dr. Muckus Dummee (the Denholm Elliot analog). Tom would play Bell-hop, my archaeological rival. Rick would play Captain Volkswagen -- the head Nazi, Bill stepped-up to play “Nazi Goon,” and though Ken did not appear, I think he helped out as a crewman.

The story was pretty straight-forward: the action opened in South America (the town park doubling) with Monty in pursuit of a golden idol (a gold horse statue that decorated my Mom’s kitchen). After performing hopscotch across the temple floor to retrieve the prize (the ZAZ guys would have been proud), evil Bell-hop appears with gun in hand (a real prop owned by Rick that could have had us all sent to juvy if the cops found out) to steal the statue away from Monty. Damn him.

Back in the States Monty and his colleague Muckus meet with a government official (also played by Rick), who presses them to aide in recovering from the Nazis the ancient artifact know as The Holy Cross (as a Catholic family we always had extra crosses lying around, and it was a much easier prop to carry around than an Ark). Monty and Muckus are to fly to South America, to the site of the excavation, to steal back the treasure (this location was indicated by pointing to a world map, but it only occurred to me during editing that I was having everybody go back to same spot the movie started in). On the flight over Monty and Muckus are asleep on the airplane, but a Nazi Goon plants a bomb to kill them and escapes via parachute (the "airplane" Bill leaps from is the back door of our house). The heroes awake just in time to parachute out (not a forward thinking Nazi Goon, Bill) and the plane explodes in the biggest fiery crash lighter-fluid and firecrackers can provide.

Luckily Monty and Muckus land in the front yard of the local South American hotel (my house again) and reserve a room for the night. While heading for the ice machine Monty discovers the Nazi's have taken over the basement of the hotel as a headquarters for the excavation (we all pitched in to play Nazis, shooting from below the neck to obscure our faces). Even worse -- Bell-hop is leading the search! (Damn him). Monty and Muckus follow the Nazis to the dig (the field of one of the local public grade-schools) where they beat up some guards and abscond with the Holy Cross. As they prepare to make good their escape Monty literally runs into Bell-hop who steals back the cross by force of that illegal firearm prop (Damn him).

Bell-hop passes the cross onto General Volkswagen and tells him to drive it away from the dig (in a VW Beetle, natch). Volkswagen complies, but when Bell-hop is momentarily distracted, Monty knocks him out with a punch (or a dead-arm, as it looked in the footage). Monty pursues the VW Beetle on foot and manages to attach himself to the bumper by his bullwhip. Monty drags behind for a while (me at first, a dummy after an awkward jump-cut) until the whip comes off. Then Volkswagen turns the Volkswagen around and drives over Monty (the dummy again). Since it's a comedy Monty recovers quickly, hops in the car, and steals back the Holy Cross.

With the Nazis in pursuit Monty and Muckus flee across a rope bridge (wide-shots: the model I built, close-ups: our garage roof). With no signs of escape Bell-hop tells them to give it up. Muckus responds by cutting the bridge (a nice proactive moment for the side-kick) and all involved fall to the side of the mountain (a pile of rocks at the grade-school). Monty and Bell-hop fight for the cross -- and Monty ends up kicking his nemesis off the mountain (Damn him). Triumphant the boys return to the States and hand off the cross to the government official. The official gives the heroes assurance that after the government has studied the cross it will return in to the University -- but blurts out a quick "Not!" on the way out the door (Wayne's World was big at the time, and we didn't have access to a warehouse). Monty and Muckus go for coffee -- The End.

Reading over that synopsis it doesn’t make Montana Mike sound like a particularly funny movie. And, hey, maybe it wasn’t. The plot is quite conventional, and most of the humor is limited to funny names and asides to the camera (“We see again there is nothing you can possess that I can’t take away -- until the end of the movie.”) Even the MacGuffin -- “The Holy Cross” -- isn’t all that humorously preposterous. If you were to make a proper Indy parody you’d have him going after L. Ron Hubbard’s handwritten manuscript of Dianetics or something. Of course my motivation was much the same as the Raiders Adaptation guys -- to dress up and play Indian Jones for a while. Though there were lots of funny times making the movie.

My favorite had to do simply with my age. At 14 I was still growing, and I was not yet the hulking mass of Andrew Morton you all know today. Right after the scene where I steal back the Holy Cross from the Volkswagen we had a shot where I was supposed to come running down a hill at full-speed and scream to Paul (who was framed in the foreground) “Muckus -- head for the rope bridge, the Nazi’s are after us!” What's funny to me now about this is that I would have no problem screaming a line like that in the middle of nice, quiet Connecticut suburbia (I could only imagine some reserved housewife sitting out on her patio, enjoying her morning coffee, gazing out on the hill her house overlooks, and spotting what must have looked to her like a young kid in a fit of paranoia screaming about Nazis -- while wearing a hat that had gone out of style years ago). But the real humor was in the delivery. I was determined to give my Harrison Ford-best and unleash the line with guttural intensity. Rick called action and I started barreling down the hill. The first part came out fine: "MUCKUS -- HEAD FOR THE ROPE BRIDGE..." But my mid-pubescent physiology could handle no more. My voice broke -- and in a high-pitched shriek reminiscent of an underwater dolphin scream came "...ThE NaZi'S aRe AfTeR uS!!! Birds cleared from the trees, babies got nose-bleeds, CDs played music without the assistance of a laser. Everybody cracked up, myself included. Harrison Ford surely never had this problem. We tried the shot a few more times, and I couldn't get though it without laughing. Eventually I composed myself, the voice held, and the shot was in the can. Later that day we watched the tape back, and when my sister Claire heard it she went into a laughing fit that lasted all through dinner. Years later I would have much sympathy for Howard Dean (and as I think about it, did the housewife on the patio hear it? And did she think it was a paranoid GIRL screaming about Nazi's?).

But mostly what I remember was the drudge work of getting the movie done. We mostly shot outside in the horrible summer heat, and when most of the costumes involved leather jackets or wool coats, it was slow going. In fact we almost lost Paul on the project, as much if his time was spent sitting around in the blazing sun with not a lot of action to participate in (the curse of the side-kick role). It took a lot of negotiations to keep him coming back over the months. There were a plenty of technical challenges that took hours to get right. In the scene where Monty had to drag behind the Volkswagen by bullwhip, I was supposed to perform the stunt for the majority of the shot. We were more squeamish than the Raiders Adaptation guys, so I wouldn’t really be dragged behind the car. Our rig was to have me lay stomach-down on a skateboard and get pulled along by the VW. I didn’t account for the fact that my arms and legs would still be exposed in this situation, and the first take I scraped up my elbows and knees. In the second take I lifted my arms and legs, but the gliding action of the skateboard made it look like I was hovering above the ground, and the position I held myself in caused the skateboard to pull quickly to the left -- and I would veer right out of the shot. By the time this was dealt with, we found that we couldn’t get the bug up to a convincing speed, because once we did we would quickly run out of road and Rick (driving the car) would have to break suddenly after “cut” was called. And if this happened I would shoot right into the back of the car, probably smashing my face into the bumper or firing through under the car and getting crushed under the screeching tires.

As grueling as all of this was, I enjoyed every minute of it. The motivation of making a movie like Monty wasn’t just to be Indiana Jones for a while, but also to be Steven Spielberg for the summer. Writing the script, drawing the storyboards, making the budget (yes, there was one), and getting the thing made was all very satisfying. I even loved editing the thing, even though it was done with the clumsy VCR-to-VCR method. In the end it actually cut together, and worked pretty well (if I do say so myself). At that age it was the biggest creative endeavor I had accomplished, and was quite a confidence booster.

A sequel was planned -- Montana Mike and the Basement of Doom -- but it never happened. I think it would have been too hard to convince all of my brothers to donate another summer to it. Of course when I saw what the Raiders Adaptation guys did, it made me think that I should have stuck it out.

Ultimately that is why Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation is so great. Being a kid movie-nerd is a fairly isolating experience. It doesn’t have the social currency that other pastimes have; if you’re a 12-year-old and you like sports, it’s likely that your town funded leagues and teams. I don’t imagine there are any towns that promote movie-recreation clubs. No one looks twice at kid walking down the street with a bat and glove, but if a kid is carrying a video camera, tripod, and has a bullwhip tied to his belt, it’s likely they’ll call the cops on him. But when you are bit by the dork-bug it becomes an obsession, and when you devote your energies to something that futile, all you can hope for is that someday, in some way, it will come to mean something. And that is the mini-miracle of the Raiders Adaptation for me. It was nice to discover that I wasn’t as alone in my pastime as I had thought, and reassuring to know that I was part of a community, even if I found out about it 17 years too late.

The cast and crew of Montana Mike and the Lost Cause (from left to right): Paul Paris (Muckus Dummee), Me (Montana Mike), Rick Morton (Director; Captain Volkswagen), and Tom Morton (Bell-hop).