Raider of the Lost Blond (Points Club Book 6)

Says Chris, "I thought she was cool because she smoked cigarettes.

When they needed an Egyptian tomb, they stenciled hieroglyphics in Eric's basement. When the script called for a bar fire, they poured 36 bottles of rubbing alcohol on themselves and the cellar walls and lit a match. That move got production grounded for a year. Eric, who doubled as the opportunistic French archaeologist Belloq, singed his hair.

Before shooting wrapped, he'd also broken an arm and been rushed to the hospital after Jayson used industrial plaster to make a mold of his face. The ER doctors had to break him out with sledgehammers and chain saws. Astonishingly, Chris completed the film unscathed — a wonder, given that he did every one of Indiana Jones' stunts without Harrison Ford's innate athleticism or four stunt doubles. But in front of the cameras he was a natural, his puppy fat balanced out by his strong jawline, loose grace and total commitment.

They filmed scenes in alleys and dirt quarries and alligator-infested rivers, enlisted every neighborhood kid they knew as an extra, dragged Chris behind a truck, and rigged their own explosives from gunpowder Jayson bought at Mom and Pop's General Store and Gun Shop, even though he was so short he could barely reach over the counter. After a three-year letter-writing campaign, they even convinced a naval captain to loan them a battleship and submarine. When they edited the footage during the graveyard shift at the local news station, where Chris' mother was a news anchor, they made peace with the way that the actors had visibly skipped in age with each scene change: It was as though Indy were leaping in and out of a wormhole.

It would have to do.

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Still, the most amazing thing about Raiders: The Adaptation isn't that the friends conceived of it. It's that they completed it. Without one, Eric and Chris were forced to leave out Raiders of the Lost Ark 's six-minute, most complicated action scene. It goes like this: Indiana Jones and Marion break out of an archaeological site called the Well of Souls, where they've been left to rot by the Nazis.

He conks a mechanic and wearily boxes a second, shirtless, macho man. Meanwhile, Marion gets trapped inside the cockpit while the plane starts spinning in circles. Marion machine-guns them down, punctures a fuel truck and accidentally ignites a barrel of dynamite. As fire crawls toward the plane, Indiana Jones is knocked to the ground just before a propeller grinds up the German's head.

Jones frees Marion and the two heroes sprint to safety as the Flying Wing explodes. Jayson suggested they use miniatures. Eric, a literalist, refused. If Spielberg had used a real plane, so would they. Then they realized a weakness in the script.

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Narratively, the Flying Wing scene was pointless. The Ark was never on the plane. Indiana Jones and Marion had murdered a dozen people for no reason at all. The Adaptation could cut from the Well of Souls escape to Jones chasing down the Ark on horseback without missing a beat. The young filmmakers wrapped without it.

By then, the high school seniors were barely speaking, thanks to a fight over a girl and the sense that the whole thing was kind of embarrassing. They left Mississippi for college and moved on with their lives. Eventually, Chris and Eric both wound up in L. Strompolos formed a rock band and lost much of his 20s to meth; Zala became a manager at a video game company.

Raiders was a goof, a childhood fixation stashed away on a VHS tape, given no more importance than the Ark itself, left languishing in a warehouse at the end of the real movie. Their film remained forgotten for 25 years. In , while year-old Zala was living in L. Without either Strompolos or Zala realizing it, their hobby had become Hollywood lore. In , Roth also contacted Steven Spielberg's office, and the director was so impressed that he penned individual letters to Strompolos, Zala and Lamb.

Spielberg, too, had started making movies when he was At 12, he convinced an airport in Scottsdale, Arizona, to let him borrow a plane for his World War II short no explosions required. He spent the next three years fixated on a longer, minute flick designed around a battle scene so epic that he mimicked the effect of dozens of soldiers by convincing the neighborhood kids to run past the camera, circle behind it, and then run past it again.

Spielberg learned by experimentation. He tied cameras to his dog, spent hours splashing water in the bathroom sink to study sound effects, and figured out how to fake bullets with flour. He stuck to it and became a filmmaker. Strompolos and Zala hadn't. In fact, the letter was their first sign that Raiders: The Adaptation had been disinterred — a bolt of lightning out of the blue.

They didn't know that their adolescent project had become the buzz of Hollywood; that wasn't their scene. At his year high school reunion, Zala had fallen for a former classmate, a lovely brunette named Cassie, married her and moved home to Mississippi. Strompolos was a newlywed, too. At a rock show, he'd met a glamorous goth named Monica, who stabilized his life.

The letter changed everything. They met Spielberg and shook his hand.

Tim League premiered the film in Austin and flew in the cast and crew. Vanity Fair published a profile. Paramount optioned their life story for its own movie and hired Ghost World 's Daniel Clowes to write the script. Their shameful secret was suddenly hip. Because you know the movie so well, you can't wait for them to do the next scene.

Well, they can't do that! Overnight, Zala and Strompolos were dusting off their dreams of succeeding in Hollywood.

Legally, they couldn't make money from what was, in essence, Lucasfilm's property. They could only screen Raiders: The Adaptation for charity. But hey, Tarantino had seen their film. Maybe this could kickstart a second act: Zala quit his job. He and Strompolos took meetings. They pitched their own action-adventure script — an original one — about a man who rescues his father from a river cult. To them, it was a more personal story, a Southern Gothic drawn as much from their childhood in the swamps as from the Indiana Jones heroism they loved.

They had an agent and a manager and moderate interest. But the suits wouldn't let them direct. After all, what had Strompolos and Zala proven? That they had been dutiful, pubescent mimics? The zeitgeist was against them. Before Paramount green-lit its Raiders biopic, two other movies about outsiders remaking movies premiered: So they kept touring with Raiders: By , they'd screened it 85 times.

They even published a book, Raiders! Six years had passed and Spielberg still hadn't seen their names on the big screen. By now, they were both fathers.

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It was time to put Raiders behind them. Both returned to their old jobs. At the video game company where Zala worked, he'd fallen behind.

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An employee he'd hired years before had, in his absence, become his boss. He and Cassie and their two kids left Mississippi and moved to Las Vegas. Strompolos stayed in L. In a way, that was fitting.



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During the eight years that Chris and Eric shot Raiders: The Adaptation , the way we watch movies had changed. By the time they wrapped filming in , the percentage of households that owned VCRs skyrocketed from 3 to Four years later, that number was 90 percent. Before the '80s, there were only two ways to see a movie: Either way, a movie was an event. If you fucked around and you didn't see it, too bad," Tarantino says.

Loving movies, as Tarantino and Spielberg did, meant submitting to them. Every Saturday morning, Spielberg's dad would drop him off at the movie theater to watch whatever was playing, no questions asked: As for TV, both fledgling directors had no choice but to stay up late to watch movies they wanted to see or, conversely, to watch whatever movie was airing right then, even if they'd never heard of it.

The Tonight Show with Jay Leno: Danville 2nd Ward Young Men: Fuzzy Wuzzy, or Fuzzy Wuzzn't He? Half in the Bag: The title means "Warsaw Hangover". Chow as an old lady. When you drop him off at his house, the groom and playable character hop into an Enus Super Diamond Rolls Royce and the groom hints that his father-in-law likes this car more than he likes the groom.

All of these exchanges are in reference to the antics of Doug and his wife's dad Sid in the movie The Hangover,. Beauty and the Geek Australia: Late Night with Seth Meyers: De slimste mens ter wereld: The awards derbies of recent years have seen a predominance of indie films at the expense of big studio features — resulting in a slate of Oscar contenders devoid not only of genuine blockbusters but also of more modest mid-budget crowd-pleasers.

For most of its 91 years, Oscar has been surrounded by hoopla. It actually began the year before but picked up steam when, for the second year in a row, no people of [ You will be redirected back to your article in seconds. Feb 4, Official Site: Previous video Next video. Premier Logo Created with Sketch. Please fill out this field with valid email address. Advertise About Tips Contact Us.