Then a couple weeks ago, I followed that up with a viewing of Raiders! The Story of the Greatest Fan Film Ever Made, which is a documentary about the film and the creation of the one scene they were unable to do when they were children: the WWII plane blowing up.
Watching this movie brought up ALL SORTS of childhood memories for me, most of which star my dear, dear friend Norm. In fact, Norm is the first friend I ever had being that we met when he was born, 4 months after me. Truth be told, we got married by maybe a clown (?) at a carnival when we were about five. I'm not sure we ever had it officially annulled.
(this is one of my favorite pics of Norm and me. It captures us perfectly - Norm is clearly explaining physics to my family and I'm thinking "kitty!". Also, I just noticed that my plastic (not stuffed) cat apparently was ready to attack Norm's cowboys!)
Norm and I were some original role-playing gamers. One of the first things I remember us doing was re-enacting Daktari, a show that probably no one remembers (Daktari is Swahili for Doctor). It ran for four seasons (who knew!?) and was the story of a (white white white!) veterinarian and his daughter who live in Africa and tend to the animals there. They also defend the animals from poachers, etc. They had two pets - Judy the chimp and Clarence the Lion (I think we can make a well educated guess as to why I loved this show). 
We constantly dragged ALL of Norm's stuffed animals out and "played" this show. We were still a product of our times, however, so Norm always was the vet and I was the daughter. Still, I remember her as being pretty cool so I was okay with this casting.
Fast forward ten years to the summer of '78. I know I've written about this before, but Star Wars blew our minds. I mean BLEW. OUR. MINDS. Norm and I had a bet going as to who would see the film 10 times first (Norm won, dang it!) and it seemed like our every waking moment was discussing, analyzing, being one with this film. Total immersion. In between throwing Norm's dog Timmy his stick (he was OBSESSED with that stick - Timmy, not Norm) we started quoting the film. And I don't mean random quotes. I mean we started at the beginning and quoted to the end. Norm was always infinitely better at remembering than me, but we had a blast doing it.
Remember, this was before videotapes (although there may have been an LP with some of the dialog?) so we were just recreating from memory what we had seen in the movie theatre.
Watching the documentary Raiders! took me right back to that time. Basically, these two 11 year olds saw Raiders of the Lost Ark in 1981 and it BLEW. THIER. MINDS. They loved it so much, like we felt about Star Wars; they had to somehow become one with it, they needed to ingest it. And clearly just quoting the hell out of it wasn't enough for these guys - they decided to dedicate their summers to recreating it shot for shot. I'm sure they didn't think it would really take the whole of their next seven summers (and I'm sure they wouldn't have thought in their wildest dreams that 30 years later they would STILL be working on it), but they were fully committed.
They nearly set their house on fire, spent their entire allowances and in the end nearly killed someone, so to call it an amateur production is a gross understatement.
But they just fucking did it.
And I admire them for that. If Norm and I only had a way to access a video camera back then...Timmy could have TOTALLY played Chewbacca.
Both of them, Chris Strompolos (Greek!) and Eric Zala, had troubled childhoods and clearly needed something to distract them. And fortunately they have very different skill sets - Chris is a natural born actor (Greek!) and Eric is a total organized, anal-retentive producer-type - so their partnership was perfect.
They discovered that nothing was easy, so they became super innovative in scheming up ways to create each scene. Their other partner in crime was a guy named Jayson Lamb. He was at the time (and continues to be) an incredibly eccentric kid who became their special effects wizard.
My favorite thing is that they would view their "dailies" at the TV station Chris' mom worked at. At some point an adult who worked there saw that they basically set Eric's basement on fire for the Mongolian bar scene and called foul. So they got some vagrant-y type dude who lived on Chris' family's property to "supervise". I think he might have been drunk and/or stoned the whole time.
Like all creative collaborations there was plenty of internal strife. The boys ended up hating each other for years (to be fair, Chris the Greek was pretty much a massive douche and Eric the producer was very wimpy, And Jayson was and remains just flat out weird) after they were finally finished with the project (minus the explosion scene).
Many years later a VHS (Clearly someone was doing their own archeological dig to find a fucking VHS!) surfaced at an underground film festival in Austin. This led to a bit of actual fame for Chris, Eric and Jayson. Their film became a cult phenomenon that eventually led to a Kickstarter campaign to get that last coveted shot in the can.
Well, you can imagine that nothing went smoothly (including that they practically killed their explosion "expert"...I'd hazard to say he was no "expert" since he nearly blew himself up), yet in the end they get their shot and it makes for an incredibly entertaining documentary. It's lovingly done, you get the feeling that the filmmakers wished they had done something as cool when they are 11 years old. As do I.
(My drink pairing with this is Bartles and Jaymes Wine Coolers (do they still make them??). Seems like that's what these guys would have stolen from their mom's fridge for their wrap party.)
My takeaways:
#1 - Honestly, this puts me in the mind of the documentary, American Movie (https://www.youtube.com/
#2 - I'm pretty sure neither Norm's parents nor mine would have been okay with any of these kind of shenanigans so our project would have been shut down before it was started.
#3 - Norm, even though our marriage was a sham, you know I still love you!
xoxox....hashtagSueslife
I'm so glad you got to see "Raiders!" I meant to go when it was at the Alamo and I missed it. I remember going to go see Raiders of the Lost Ark when I was 14 and spending a summer week with my grandmother in northwest Florida.. A friend of the family named Rusty, an oh so cool high schooler offered to take my brother and me in his new, shiny Mustang 5.0. I was very impressed that he was taking time out to take younger kids along with him to a movie he'd already seen once before. I vividly remember riding in the back seat of that mustang, staring out into a night black as tar, pierced only by the headlights, revealing the dark asphalt road and neat rows of pine trees and nothing else on our way to what he assured me was a great movie. "You're gonna love it. Just don't take it too seriously", he said. We did. And we didn't.
ReplyDeleteRusty always seemed kind and a bit distant. I later learned that he was secretly gay and one of the early AIDS casualties of the 80's. So Raiders will always be a bit bittersweet for me.
Completely remember Daktari. Di and I watched it. All. The. Time. I loved that in Daktari they had a jeep painted like a zebra. We also loved the Thunderbirds(which we have since seen in English AND Spanish and it pretty much blows). I must track down these films though- they sound genius. Thanks for educating the public about these important documentaries so we can be fascinating at cocktail parties and state dinners.
ReplyDeleteThat's the goal.
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