Raiders! The Story of the Greatest Fan Film Ever Made is not a substitute for seeing the real deal, but it will definitely generate renewed appreciation for what those kids accomplished in and around their suburban homes in southern Mississippi from 1982 to 1989. The documentary, which was written and directed by Jeremy Coon (a producer on Napoleon Dynamite) and Tim Skousen (The Sasquatch Gang), is evenly divided between an oral history of the production itself and following the story, which unfolded just a few years ago, of how Strompolos (who played Indy and co-directed), Zala (who played Belloq and co-directed), and Lamb (who was responsible for most of the effects) reunited to film the one part of Raiders they weren’t able to pull off as kids: the fabled Flying Wing sequence in which Indy fights a shirtless, muscle-bound Nazi in and around whirring propellers while buildings and trucks (and eventually the plane itself) explodes around them.

Raiders! never offers any direct explanation for why the kids didn’t recreate this scene back in the ’80s; one would guess that it had to do with the technical difficulties involved, but then again, these kids managed to recreate Indy outrunning a massive boulder in a cave, being dragged behind a moving truck in the desert, and shooting his way out of a bar engulfed in flames. Nevertheless, the now fortysomething-year-old men, most of whom are now married fathers, are just as committed as ever to finishing the film, and even though they are now working with a professional crew and a $20,000 budget (mostly raised on Kickstarter), there is still a childlike wonder to their endeavor since it serves no purpose other than finishing what they started as kids (the fact that they are recreating a copyrighted film means that they could never profit from it financially, and in the very first scene we see them wrangling $5,000 from an investor based entirely on their enthusiasm and good will). Of course, things don’t go as planned—rain delays are particularly vexing—and a significant part of the drama hinges on whether Zala will be fired from his job with a video game company for taking off too much time.

Strompolos, Zala, and Lamb all make for intriguing interview subjects, and their memories of working on the film are tinged with a nostalgia for childhood abandon that they still clearly relish, even as they went their separate ways after falling out at the end of high school, each taking a different path in life, some darker than others. Their accounts are bolstered by interviews with their parents, siblings, and various friends who were roped into working on the film, especially Zala’s younger brother, who played some 40 different parts and allowed his brother to shoot Roman candles directly at him to recreate the climactic opening of the Ark. The film abounds with production stories that veer from the astounding (especially their willingness to light things on fire, including themselves), to the amusing (their use of a pet dog to stand in for a spider monkey, which was apparently hard to come by in Mississippi in the mid-’80s).

Real life constantly intruded on the project, particularly the various familial breakdowns they all suffered (all three boys’ parents were either already divorced or divorced during that the time the film was being made, and Strompolos’s mother remarried an abusive alcoholic), which makes their complete immersion in the project feels like an escape from their pain as much as it was a passion project. It seems only appropriate, given that Spielberg himself, whose parents divorced when he was a teenager, started his own career in much the same way, staging massive combat films with his schoolmates in the Arizona desert behind his house and talking his mom into letting him splatter the kitchen with red goo for his teenage science fiction epic that would eventually become Close Encounters of the Third Kind. It is no wonder that, once he saw The Adaptation in the early 2000s, he invited Strompolos, Zala, and Lamb to his office to meet them and tell them how inspiring he found their childhood project.

Other interviewees include director Eli Roth (Hostel), who obtained a multi-generation VHS copy of The Adaptation in the early 2000s and passed it on to Harry “Ain’t It Cool News” Knowles, who put it into the projector during his 2002 Butt-Numb-a-Thon Film Festival in Austin when a print of The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, which was making its premiere at the festival, was delayed by an hour. The audience was so enraptured by the film that they actually started booing when Knowles turned it off in favor of Jackson’s film. From that point, The Adaptation was destined for cult status, re-energized by the ardent appreciation of viewers who recognized the love and enthusiasm that went into it. At the time, its makers, all of whom had fallen out of contact, had largely forgotten it, but The Adaption was beginning a second life, one that this highly entertaining documentary is sure to keep going for some time.

Copyright ©2016 James Kendrick

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