When Fans Becomes Filmmakers

The Teen Remake of Raiders of the Lost Ark Is A Perfect Example Of An Obsession's Payoff

originally published October 3, 2007

The concept of the "fan" is a relatively new one; according to Wikipedia (grain of salt alert) the term dates back to late 19th-century boxing followers called "fancies," but the modern pop-culture fan is a byproduct of the same 20th-century technology that created modern pop culture in the first place.

I mean, I'm sure there was at least one guy in 1600 who saw Titus Andronicus 300 times and wrote his own plays where Ophelia totally made out with a thinly veiled stand-in for the author, but it wasn't until the second half of the last century that such behavior became codified and eventually stultified into the instantly recognizable stereotype of "The Simpsons"' Comic Book Guy: overweight, unwashed, unconcerned with social graces, obsessed with the pointless minutiae of fictional worlds.

But something funny happened between Worst Episodes Ever: the fans took over. We are now living in the Age of the Fan. The technology of mass communication, which birthed the modern fanatic, has become so widespread, so ingrained into everyday life, that the mass audience for pop culture is starting to splinter into thousands of smaller audiences. But what these new audiences lack in size, they make up for in dedication. It seems unlikely that there will ever be another movie that's as massive a cultural event as Star Wars was 30 years ago; sure, Spider-Man 3 broke opening-weekend records, but did anybody really care? And do those numbers even matter when ticket prices keep heading up? To find the passion, you have to look smaller: the feverishly loyal fanbase for, say, "Battlestar Galactica."

It's these people (and by "these people" I mean me and maybe, probably you, because we're all fans of something, and, man, do I love "Battlestar Galactica") who are shaping the future of entertainment. This is partly because the obsessive fans of yesterday are the writers, directors, producers and execs of today. It's also partly because, as the mainstream gets smaller and the niche becomes mainstream (just open any magazine to a story about the new TV season and notice how it points out that just about every new fall show is either for geeks or about geeks), the stereotypical fanboy image is disappearing. But it's mainly because the accelerating pace of communications technology allows nearly unfettered instantaneous access to the things we love and the mechanisms behind the things we love. Character blogs. Online Q&As with the stars. Writer podcasts. Webisodes and mobisodes. Comics and novels and interactive online games and all sorts of other ancillary products meant to immerse you in the world of your favorite show or movie.

You can go to iTunes right now and download about four hours of unedited "Battlestar Galactica" writers-room conversation. And that's awesome, but it also seems kind of nuts. All of this is done in the name of giving the fans something extra, making them part of the story, but the danger is that such familiarity breeds obsession, which can curdle into contempt when events don't unfold as the fan imagined.

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But there's another side to the Age of the Fan, one that can be seen in upcoming movies like Garth Jenning's Son of Rambow (in which a sheltered kid becomes obsessed with First Blood) and Michel Gondry's Be Kind Rewind (in which video-store clerks Jack Black and Mos Def remake movies after their stock is erased), or on the new album Rise Above from Brooklyn band the Dirty Projectors, which "re-imagines from memory" Black Flag's Damaged. These projects are about the love of art, and about taking something you love and making it your own. They harken back to a time when a blockbuster movie could still have an air of mystique - when it could still engender a fervent longing in its audience, a longing not only to see the movie again and again, but to live the movie, to take possession of it.

This was the feeling Chris Strompolos felt when he first saw Steven Spielberg's Raiders of the Lost Ark in 1981.

"Indiana Jones split my brain in half," he says. "I had a burning desire to inhabit the world and skin of Indiana Jones." This desire birthed a seven-year odyssey to shoot a faithful remake of Raiders, which gets its Georgia premiere this weekend at Ciné, accompanied by a filmmaking workshop on Saturday, Oct. 6 led by Strompolos and director Eric Zala. Strompolos and Zala will also introduce the film and host a Q&A afterwards at the 4:30 p.m. and 7 p.m. screenings on Friday and Saturday.

From 1982 to 1988, Strompolos, Zala and their friend Jayson Lamb spent their summer vacations in Mississippi working on a shot-for-shot remake of the first Indiana Jones adventure. They asked for spray paint and fedoras and bullwhips for Christmas and birthdays. They nearly burnt down Zala's mom's garage. They went through puberty and high school and nearly gave up dozens of times, but they finally finished the movie in 1989 and held a premiere for about 200 family and friends. Then they went their separate ways. They continued to follow their filmmaking dreams - Strompolos moved to Los Angeles to pursue an acting career, Zala went to film school at NYU - but their epic project became just another childhood memory.

That is, until late 2002, when Hostel director Eli Roth passed along an umpteenth-generation copy of the movie to Spielberg and Ain't It Cool News' Harry Knowles. Knowles included a portion of the movie in his Butt-Numb-a-Thon film festival at the Alamo Drafthouse in Austin, and the audience reaction prompted Roth and Drafthouse owner Tim League to track down "the Raiders guys" for a proper premiere in 2003. After that, the three childhood friends became media darlings, met Spielberg, sold the rights to their life story to A-list producer Scott Rudin, and screened their teen-dream movie all over the country. Zala and Strompolos, both working on the fringes of the entertainment business, felt their dreams reinvigorated as new opportunities arose, and formed their own company, Rolling Boulder, to produce the kinds of movies they want to see. It's one of the great success stories of recent times, and an example to fans that fantasies can come true.

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But if that's all this were, it wouldn't mean much. This isn't just a story about three fans getting lucky. There's an element of luck here, as there is in all success stories, but it's overshadowed by the sheer amount of work that Strompolos, Zala and Lamb put in to make their film. Any 12-year-old kid can put on a fedora and leather jacket and run around whipping things; it takes real filmmakers to match cinematic wits with Spielberg in their backyard. It takes filmmakers to see a project through to the end after seven years of work. The Raiders adaptation is the work of people with goals, not just dreams.

"We kept each other motivated," says Strompolos. "One goal led to another goal, which led to a list, which led to a notebook. The first two years were utter crap. We knew nothing about filmmaking. We taught ourselves from scratch."

"We shot certain scenes over and over again," says Zala. "We picked things up by osmosis and trial and error."

It's that learning process that separates this project from the thousands of abandoned, halfway-finished movies shot in backyards by kids every year. It may have begun as a "complete role-playing fantasy," as Strompolos puts it, but it became something much more. In their fannish desire to emulate Raiders and become Indiana Jones, the three friends ended up learning as much about filmmaking as they would in any film school. That is the real joy and power of fandom - by making something your own, you can understand it. At this point, Strompolos, Zala and Lamb probably understand Raiders of the Lost Ark better than Spielberg himself. "I've seen our version probably 200 times for every one time I've seen the original," says Zala. "When I see it now, it's like seeing a big-budget remake of our own."

The result of all that work and trial and error is a movie that isn't just a curiosity or a goofy teenage lark - it works. The famous boulder scene, which the boys shot in Zala's mom's garage, with plywood covered in Spanish moss forming the cave walls, looks amazing. Recreating big-budget Hollywood effects on a Mississippi teenager's allowance meant the guys had to come up with their own ingenious methods, and that ingenuity is onscreen for every second of the movie. "People come to see it and they expect to see some hokey backyard thing," says Strompolos. "But when they see it they're like, 'Whoa, they pulled it off!'"

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Aspiring filmmakers wanting to learn how to pull off their own backyard epic should hit the Ciné Lab on Oct. 6 for the Indy-Pendent Filmmaking workshop, in which Zala and Strompolos will share what they've learned about all aspects of filmmaking, with plenty of stories from the making of their Raiders adaptation.

"The theme is basically 'How do I go in my backyard and make something really cool?'" says Strompolos. The seminar costs $35 and includes lunch. Reservations are required, contact teenscreen@athens.net.

Since the rediscovery of their adaptation brought them back together, Strompolos (based in L.A.) and Zala (who lives in Mississippi) have been working on new film projects of their own, including a Southern Gothic action-adventure script that draws on their experiences growing up in Mississippi.

"We're just working to make the movies we want to see," says Strompolos. "Our little movie has opened up a lot of doors for us."

"We have complementary styles," says Zala. "Chris is a natural starter, and I'm a finisher. We've worked on the script in probably every city in America, huddled over a laptop in a hotel room, because that's the only time we see each other."

Meanwhile, Eightball cartoonist and Ghost World screenwriter Dan Clowes has written a screenplay based on Strompolos, Zala and Lamb's Raiders journey. It's conceivable that one day not too long from now a 12-year-old kid will see one of these movies and grab some friends and a camera, and another fan will become a filmmaker.

Gardner Linn

Raiders Of The Lost Ark: The Adaptation screens at Ciné on Friday, Oct. 5 at 4:30 p.m, 7 p.m. and 10 p.m.; Saturday, Oct. 6 and Sunday, Oct. 7 at 2 p.m., 4:30 p.m., 7 p.m. and 10 p.m. Admission is $8, $6 for matinees. All proceeds benefit Project::Teenscreen. See www.athenscine.com for more info.