Two childhood friends who made a shot-by-shot recreation of “Raiders of the Lost Ark” on video are getting a Hollywood movie of their own.
After meeting in elementary school, Mississippi kids Chris Strompolos and Eric Zala set out to remake Steven Spielberg’s “Raiders” in their backyard in 1981. It took them seven years to finally finish the film at age 18.
This week producer Jeremy Coon — whose credits include indie sensation “Napoleon Dynamite” — optioned a book by author Alan Eisenstock on the duo and their film. According to the author the two kids, now in their 40s, painstakingly recreated, “Every scene, every shot, every stunt – though they had no camera no money no clue.”
Coon plans to make two projects: a documentary as well as a feature film about the pair and their novice “Raiders” riff. He said he first saw Strompolos and Zala’s “Raiders Of The Lost Ark: The Adaptation” at a film festival. “I thought the movie was an urban myth but when I saw it, from a filmmaker perspective it was more inspiring than any movie I’d ever seen,” Coon told Deadline.com’s Mike Fleming. “These kids had done something ridiculous and impossible and the last time I had the experience of a movie being made because it was sheer fun was when I’d seen ‘Kill Bill.’ I went in feeling cynical but there was no cynicism in these kids. They did the movie because they loved it.”
The amateur adaptation has reportedly been seen by Spielberg himself, and Coon may still need cooperation from the director and George Lucas to make his two projects about Strompolos and Zala and their re-enactment.
According to Eisenstock, the pair nearly burned down Zala’s childhood home making the film, which they began shooting in Betamax before switching over to VHS when the technology became available.