Bonus: Lives Less Ordinary

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Hello, I'm India Rackerson.

Welcome to this bonus episode in the documentary from the BBC World Service.

I host the BBC's Lives Less Ordinary podcast, which seeks out extraordinary life experiences

from all over the world.

And we're going to bring you an episode of Lives Less Ordinary here whenever we can.

But to catch more of our shows, just search for Lives Less Ordinary wherever you find your BBC podcasts.

When I was little, getting lost in imaginary worlds of play was one of my favourite things to do.

There were the long summer holidays fighting with cousins over the main part in some spy film ripoff we'd written,

pinching dress pearls and bowler hats.

The costumes from my grandparents' room.

Rehearsing all day in the garage, ready for the big performance.

Evenings after school, where my sister and I would spend hours watching and recreating

lightsaber fights from the latest Star Wars film.

Wanting to feel that we were part of the action.

Time stretching out in front of us.

And sure, it's just make-believe.

But it's consuming.

It matters so much to you.

It takes you to places you can't get to.

In your own small world.

Well, my guest today took all of that to the extreme.

Because back in 1982, in Mississippi, in America's deep south,

two boys aged 10 and 11 embarked on a crazy mission.

And it all started after a trip to the Simla.

I think where it grabbed me was when Indy emerges from the shadows.

In the opening scene, and he grabs his bullwhip and snaps the gun out of the hand of the man

who was about to assassinate him.

And that wonderful sound of...

In 1982, Chris Strompolos is 10, and he's glued to the screen,

watching for the first time, Indiana Jones, Raiders of the Lost Ark.

And the flourish of the John Williams score.

I was like, oh.

And he emerges from the shadows under his fedora with sweat and dirt on his face

and gives us that classic Harrison look.

I was like, count me in here.

You know, I'm locked in.

For me, the moment that was indelible was the boulder scene.

The sense of spectacle, of excitement, exhilaration.

I don't know.

I didn't know movies could do that.

And this is Eric Zahler.

He's 11 when he first sees it.

And it was just a world that I wished I could be part of in some way.

Little did I know, the following summer,

I'd be getting a fateful call from Chris with an idea.

And that idea was nothing short of epic.

To remake Indiana Jones, Raiders of the Lost Ark,

shot for shot in their back garden.

Just let that sink in for a moment.

One of Hollywood's biggest franchises.

A $22 million blockbuster that had umpteen foreign locations,

more than 500 extras,

completely remade by kids on just their allowance.

Truck chase?

Sure, they'd do it.

Indy fights Nazis aboard a World War II submarine.

They'd hunt a real sub down.

What they did, what you're about to hear, is wonderful.

This behemoth of a project would take them seven years to complete.

In the final film, you can see them age.

You can hear their voices deepen.

There'd be fires, visits to the emergency ward,

production shut down by angry parents and many fallouts.

It would swallow them whole.

But decades later, a lost tape would be unearthed,

bringing them back together for their final scene

and face to face with one of their heroes.

But let's start.

In the right place.

The beginning.

When Eric and Chris met on the school bus.

It was a long bus ride, an hour long.

And so I would do my homework on the bus, draw comic books.

One day, I see this kid reading a Raiders of the Lost Ark comic book.

Even though I'm an introvert, I worked up the gumption to ask a stranger,

hey, can I borrow that comic book?

And Chris said, yeah, sure.

And one day, out of the blue,

in the summer, I get this call.

Hey, this is Chris, the kid that you borrowed the Raiders of the Lost Ark comic book on the bus.

Yeah, yeah.

Hey, I'm doing a remake of Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Do you want to help?

We got together for our first production meeting, really, play date.

We were 11 and 12, respectively.

Chris's mom dropped him off at my house,

and I showed him all around this big sprawling house.

And there in the basement, listening to bad horror movie sound effects,

we decided and committed, yes, we are going to band together.

Don't know how we're going to do it,

but we're going to remake a $22 million Hollywood blockbuster on our allowance.

Had we known that it would have taken seven years,

we would have been scared to death, I think.

Just in case you haven't seen the film,

Indiana Jones, played by Harrison Ford,

is the fedora-wearing, bullwhip-carrying 1930s archaeologist

created by George Lucas and Steven Spielberg.

He's a great actor.

Indiana Jones, or Indy, as he's commonly known,

is in a worldwide race to find the lost Ark of the Covenant,

thought to have supernatural powers,

before it falls into the hands of the Nazis.

And just to set the scene for you,

in Eric and Chris's venture,

Eric would play the rival archaeologist and Nazi sympathiser,

René Belloc,

and Chris, well, he was always going to be Indy.

Obviously, you had no idea of where it would end up.

Did you have an idea, a feeling,

of what you wanted it for?

What was this whole thing about?

I think it was just about inhabiting Indy's world,

wearing the jacket and putting on the hat,

and seeing if I could really pull off

dragging under a truck,

running from a boulder,

darting out of a room that's on fire,

save the girl, fight the bad guys,

all of these sort of physical experiences

that I didn't really naturally see myself doing.

I'm Indiana Jones,

and I just went through a bunch of cobwebs,

and the boulder almost killed me.

Simply finishing the damn thing

was the highest aspiration we thought of at the time.

Someone said,

yeah, someday Spielberg's going to love this

and tell you that it's great.

Like, yeah, right.

Get back to spraying hieroglyphics on my mum's basement wall.

Even if you're, you know,

a ten-year-old kid with quite a lot of gumption,

it's still quite a thing to call up someone you barely know

and then to meet up,

and commit to recreating a two-hour Hollywood blockbuster.

I mean, what was it about you two

and what you had as kids

that meant this was like a perfect pairing?

Well, we're very different.

I mean, looking at us, people wouldn't know,

OK, why are these guys friends at all,

let alone best friends?

I mean, you've got a gregarious, charismatic class clown in Chris,

and with me, you've got a brainy, quiet, nerdy guy.

But despite that,

despite those differences,

we shared a passion for the original Raiders.

For me, visual-oriented, perfectionist,

you know, I wanted to see

what would a shot-for-shot remake

of Raiders of the Lost Ark with kids

done right look like?

Done right.

I love this.

The ambition of these 11-year-olds

to recreate this film held no bounds,

as you're going to hear.

But all of this started before the movie was out on video,

before the internet,

and long before on Demogorgon.

So how on earth were they going to recreate it?

We kind of groped around in the dark, to be honest, at first.

I mean, how do you do this?

Where do you start?

So, yeah, I spent an entire summer storyboarding from memory

all the shots because, yeah, Raiders wasn't out yet.

Sorry, I cannot compete what you mean by that.

How do you storyboard Raiders of the Lost Ark from memory?

Well, Chris and I were going to sneak in a tape recorder

to capture music.

We naively thought we would use this in the end product.

You know, that's where I'll get the sound effects.

I got thrown out of the movie theater.

I had strapped a Radio Shack tape recorder to my stomach

wearing a large winter jacket in the middle of summer.

And the ticket taker at the door was like,

um, this is a little fishy.

Open your jacket, kid.

So then it fell to Eric,

the boy who'd never so much as stolen an apple

to bootleg the audio from the cinema.

He managed it.

And along with that,

he was able to record the sound effects.

Along with the 600 little pictures he'd drawn from memory,

they could just about piece the movie together in their heads.

But bringing it to the big screen was, of course,

another thing entirely.

They started assembling their set

and gathered an army of neighborhood kids

and, of course, Eric's little brother, Kurt,

to play Peruvians, Nazi soldiers, Egyptian diggers.

And they got to work.

But after the first year or so of filming,

they realized the Betamax camera they were using

had imprinted a large,

large letter A

all over their footage.

It was useless.

So, back to the drawing board.

All right, we're going to reshoot it.

So those first scenes we shot over and over again.

Are you playing with the zoom at all?

No, uh, but...

Until, by osmosis, by film school on the fly,

by trial and error...

Three, mom, get out of the shot.

We start to get our chops.

You know, jungle, college, bar, jungle, college, bar.

Three, two, action!

Until finally we were satisfied

and then moved on to the rest of the film.

That's it.

Faster!

Good!

So, one of the first, most dramatic things

to happen in Raiders of the Lost Ark,

both versions,

is the boulder scene.

And that's where Indiana Jones is being chased down

a sort of, like, cave tunnel

by a rolling boulder that's been set off

through a series of booby traps

that have been laid.

Classic.

It's an amazing scene

and you really, really pulled it off.

There's an enormous boulder

and Chris running from it

looking genuinely terrified.

So, talk...

Talk me through that.

How did you...

How do you go about doing that

in a basement, in Mississippi,

in your summer holidays as teenagers?

We stayed up way past our bedtime

building this fantastic cardboard boulder

out of crisscross bamboo stalks

and duct tape and cardboard.

And by the time the sun come up,

we realised it was too big

to get out of Chris's room.

Oh, no.

Yeah.

Boulder number two,

a cable spool, didn't work.

Boulder number three,

a weather balloon, it popped.

Boulder number four,

chicken wire.

I cut up my hands

bending this chicken wire frame

into this giant six foot high sphere.

Well, hurricane hit Mississippi that summer

and I still have memories of watching

through my living room window

that hurricane force winds

buffeting our chicken wire boulder

down to the water.

To this day, I still have no idea where it is.

Boulder number five, fiberglass.

My mom contributed an idea.

She knew a guy who did fiberglass for boats.

Five years in at this point,

we finally had our six foot high spherical boulder

to roll down two 40 foot long untreated telephone poles

in my mom's garage made up to look like a cave.

All for about eight seconds.

Totally worth it.

The props in the film,

there's everything from enormous Egyptian statues,

the Ark of the Covenant itself,

swords, guns, lots of costumes,

snakes.

I mean, I could go on forever.

How did you get hold of all of this stuff?

Birthdays and Christmases became prop

and costume acquiring opportunities.

All right, Chris, can you ask for the fedora

for your birthday?

I'll ask for the jacket.

We trolled Toys R Us to buy as many rubber snakes

and fake rifles as our allowance would support.

Parents' closets were raided.

We bicycled to the local Goodwill stores

and Boy Scout uniforms make fine Nazi uniforms

for Christmas.

Pre-pubescent kids, as it turns out.

It is such a joy to watch.

And you were so ambitious.

There's burning trucks, there's pits of snakes,

rolling boulders.

But to give a sense of the scale,

at one point when I was watching it,

I had to check myself and go,

wait, they're climbing on a warship

with mounted artillery.

What?

These are teenagers.

How did they, how did you beg or borrow,

steal a massive boat like that?

And where were the guns from?

And you have all these questions suddenly,

you just have to remember,

no, this is just a couple of kids in their backyard.

Where did you get that boat?

The submarine was an authentic World War II submarine,

a retired naval park in Mobile, Alabama.

Eric and I just had agreed,

well, we have to get this

because where else are you going to find a submarine?

Sure, where else?

They approached the naval captain

in charge of this battleship museum park again,

and again, refusing to take no for an answer.

It was a eye-rolling situation for him

where he would, he was like,

these kids again, jeez, why are they bugging me?

You know, what do you boys want?

After three years of asking,

he eventually was worn down,

said, all right, fine, fine.

How does a 13-year-old kid

get an authentic World War II submarine?

Well, you just ask.

I mean, it's, the whole process

was clearly really consuming.

It must have just eaten up all of,

your time, basically.

To what degree do you think

what you were doing together

was a form of escape?

My mother had been remarried

to my stepfather, Jimmy.

Jimmy was an alcoholic

and it was an abusive situation.

And it was years of being sort of passed around

between my parents.

And so Raiders was very much an escape

because it was an arena where I was powerful.

I was the hero.

I had control.

And so there was this backdrop

of struggling with myself.

A chubby Greek kid, you know,

growing up in the South playing Indiana Jones,

it doesn't seem like quite the match, you know,

but it was a form of finding myself

and escaping from that image of myself

that I probably didn't appreciate.

So Raiders was always the thing

into which we threw ourselves for kid power, right?

Where it was our landscape and our playground

and our choices and our creativity.

Eric, how was,

how were things for you?

What was going on with your childhood?

About a year after we had started,

my parents calls into the living room,

Kurt and I,

and announced that they're getting divorced.

I would later find out that my dad was leaving my mom

for his younger secretary.

Not a good thing, very upsetting,

but I'm grateful that I had Raiders as a project.

It was such a immersive, obsessive mission.

I was able to,

to lose myself in my work

or maybe more accurately find myself.

There was a lot to think about for these teenagers,

including finding the right girl to play Marion,

Indy's strong-willed love interest.

And by their own admission,

they weren't exactly drowning in offers.

But Eric knew a girl called Angela from church

who he thought might fit the bill.

My God, she even knew how to smoke cigarettes.

So when the time comes to blow smoke

in the bad guy's face in the bar,

you're like, wow.

We have found our woman.

Come back tomorrow.

Why?

Because I said so, that's why.

One of the primary concerns for me,

and I asked Eric and he delivered beautifully,

which was just please make sure that Marion,

whoever plays Marion, is shorter than I am.

Because also you obviously had to kiss her.

Yeah.

And it was the first time I had ever kissed a girl.

So I was clumsy and nervous.

And I asked Eric to have a closed set,

you know,

which was very important to make sure everybody leaves.

And it was very private.

Did everybody leave?

We just kicked Kurt out.

And then it was a closed set.

Yeah.

You had a lot of special effects in the film as well.

And an alarming number of pyrotechnics.

Every time there is an explosion,

there is an explosion.

And there is so much fire.

Talk to me a little bit about the fire,

because that did put the production,

in a bit of trouble at one point, didn't it?

It did.

You know, you tend to think you're invincible when you're a kid.

And maybe that's why when it came time for us to,

in the bar scene, one of the bad guys gets lit on fire.

I take over and stand in,

do the stunt doubling for the neighborhood kid playing it.

And for whatever reason,

I asked the guys to douse my back with gasoline that day.

More dangerous than the isopropyl alcohol that we've been using.

.

Thank God we got it out,

but the footage was spotted by the moms,

our proverbial head of the studios.

And yeah, we were shut down.

A crisis point.

Eric and Chris pleaded with their moms to let them restart shooting.

Eventually, the moms said they could continue on one condition.

The boys had to have adult supervision.

They brought in an occasional actor, Peter Kiefer, who lived nearby.

.

How little do they know, we found an adult chaperone,

even less responsible than we are.

Three, two, one.

Peter Kiefer, God bless him, would tell us where to put more fire,

and pyrotechnics increased, if anything.

That's it, that's perfect.

Let's do it again real quick.

And when you're watching,

there really is this extra layer of jeopardy within their film.

These kids did it without fire marshals, without pyrotechnicians.

There was no CGI.

It was all them.

You're thinking, okay,

.

But how are they going to make the faces melt at the end?

Oh my gosh, they've made the faces melt.

It's mind-blowing.

And head of special effects and the third kid in the Raiders trio

was a boy called Jason Lamb.

He was eccentric and incredibly inventive.

His home was his laboratory, rigging squibs to shoot blood,

contraptions to set off gunshots exploding in walls,

swirling cotton in a fish tank to replicate ghosts bursting out of the Ark.

And it worked really well, most of the time.

You know, the closest anyone ever came to dying, ironically,

was not Chris doing his own stunts.

No, no, it was the director, also Belloc,

in an ill-advised plaster mask attempt.

So we plan to do that fantastic effect where Belloc blows up

. . .

. . . on opening the Ark at the end of Raiders,

the same way that Spielberg and Lucas did it.

Make a plaster mold of the actress' face, fill it with gelatin,

paint it flesh-colored, turn on a heat gun like a super hair dryer

and melt it, or blow it up in my case, and it'd be great.

So we assemble on the back porch of my house in Mississippi

and I put on a shower cap, cut two straws,

stuff them up my nose so I can breathe,

and the guys lap the plaster.

They're on my head, encasing my head completely.

And a couple minutes in, I start to feel this tremendous building heat

as though someone had stuck my head in an oven.

Turns out, Jason had gotten not dental plaster,

but industrial plaster, which contains a heating agent.

Chris and Jay pry it off my face,

and all of a sudden, I feel excruciating pain around my eyes.

Turns out, Jason also neglected to coat Vaseline

on my eyelashes and eyebrows, which were embedded in the plaster

and not coming out for anything.

I motion for a pad and paper and write,

hospital.

So Jason calls 911.

My mom sees a squad car pull into the driveway,

and I'm helped into the backseat of a car,

driven a distance to the hospital,

where Chris and Jay, who could see,

would tell me there was about 20 people in the emergency room,

all talking and whatnot.

All of a sudden, they whip,

legit doors whiz open,

and they wheel in this kid with this immense plaster husk on his head.

You know, I can only imagine what they had thought.

Anyway, they take me into a room and buzz

with a saw that they use to take casts off with,

all except for the area around my eyes.

And for that, surgeon comes in with a scalpel and saws away,

sawing off half one eyebrow, all of the other,

and my eyelashes are gone.

I had to borrow my mom's eyebrow pencil

to fill in my eyebrows before returning to high school.

Endless logistical obstacles

for only a few measly seconds of handycam gold.

But my goodness, they were determined.

Though, of course, being in each other's pockets

and under all this pressure started to take its toll.

And soon, as teenagers, other interests crept in.

Eric and Chris had a huge falling out over a girl.

Eric's girlfriend, in fact.

My high school sweetheart.

And when I called Chris,

discovering that he had seen her behind my back,

you know, I swore a blue streak.

And we didn't talk for a long time after that.

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From the BBC World Service, I'm India Ackerson

with the story of Chris Strompolos and Eric Zahler,

two movie-obsessed kids from Mississippi

who set out to remake a $22 million blockbuster,

Indiana Jones, shot for shot on their pocket money.

As teenagers, they have fallen out

and production has ground to a halt.

That is the first time I've ever seen Eric put someone off.

But the magnetic adventures of Indiana Jones

drew them back together.

After all, they had the famous truck chase scene to do.

Christopher, have you ever done anything like this before?

Dragging behind a car?

No.

I'm going to die right now.

I'm going to drag under that thing.

And you actually had a truck,

children driving it, crawling all over it,

smashing up the windows,

hanging off the back of the truck.

I mean, how did you start?

How do you even begin?

Eric lived on this sprawling property

right adjacent to a swamp.

Somehow, over the years,

there was this early 1960s Chevy

and it had decomposed.

And we spent quite a bit of time

excavating this truck, reassembling it,

and Eric re-outfitted it

to make it look like a 1930s Nazi military vehicle.

The truck didn't actually work.

It couldn't actually drive.

You heard correctly.

This truck has no engine.

Suicidal shot, take one.

All right, Chris, when you're ready,

you just let us know.

Not snowing you, Chris.

Once the truck had gained momentum,

when it was being pushed,

or pulled by another vehicle,

we would let it sort of roll and speed forth.

But to make it stop,

we had in the cabin of the truck,

a rope attached to an old rusty hammer,

activated a pulley system under the truck

so that when we pulled up on the hammer,

it would activate the old brake pads for the truck

and slowly bring the truck to a stop.

So we had to be,

very careful,

engage accordingly,

distances so it wouldn't crash into trees

or veer off the road

or run over other cast members.

I can't keep that in.

So in 1989, after seven years of filming,

you're done.

You shoot your last take.

Did you know it was your last take

when you were shooting it?

Like, do you remember that moment?

Yes, it was a special effects scene

for the melting scene.

Indy and Marion tied to the post,

and the ghost going by them,

so we had this fake blue screen

that Jason was going to swap out.

I really want to get this scene done.

What?

Just drive me goddamn nuts.

I'm freaking out.

And set up fans blowing on them

and poured baby powder to simulate ghosts.

We got the shot done,

and Chris was like,

Never ever again.

We never have to film anything.

Big deal.

Who cares?

See you later, guys.

Who cares?

And I had reached my sort of threshold

of wanting to work on Raiders at that point,

I ended up in my mom's minivan

zipping off and driving away.

Not the dream wrap party

after seven years of filming.

Their relationship was strained.

Harsh words were spoken,

and another ice age descended on the friendship

and the unedited film.

So, yeah, you know,

you change a lot from age 12 to 19,

and film is a collaborative medium.

You know, there are so many challenges

to remake Raiders.

The biggest challenge,

ultimately, are people challenges.

You have to reach inside yourself

and set aside emotions

and stay focused and consistent on the goal,

and thank goodness we did.

Things finally thawed thanks to,

of course, Indiana Jones.

In 1989, the final film in the then-trilogy,

The Last Crusade,

opened at the cinema.

Eric proactively called me and said,

Hey, man, I know that we're not speaking

to each other right now,

but let's go.

We'll see the third one.

And we did, and it inspired us again.

And we went and dove back into our Raiders journey

and finished it.

The Shine had rubbed off their early enthusiasm,

but they put the edit together,

and their long-suffering mums even organised

a premiere of Raiders of the Lost Ark,

the adaptation, at a local theatre.

It marked the end of a huge seven-year adventure.

It was a quiet closure of everything,

and we just all kind of went,

in our separate ways.

The hat and the whip were placed inside

the gold, spray-painted styrofoam ark,

and the lid was sealed.

They went off to university

and began their lives out on their own.

For a while, at least.

And a bit further down the line,

you are living together in L.A., aren't you?

When I first came to Los Angeles,

Eric was the first person I reached out to

to say, Hey, man, I need a place to live.

And Eric, being the friend that he was,

he stepped in and provided.

And then we moved in together.

And how was your relationship then?

Well, it started out great, you know,

watching marathons of the X-Files,

you know, on the TV and whatnot.

And then I think our lives were just,

Eric was looking at fortifying and growing

and getting a good job and supporting himself

and getting into a stable, mature relationship.

And I was not.

I was looking at pursuing music

and trying to keep the sort of film dream alive.

But I was looking at pursuing music.

But unbeknownst to me at that time,

or not really self-acknowledged, you know,

I'm a drug addict.

I'm an alcoholic.

I'm suffering from mental illness, you know.

And all of those things were years and years

and years and years in the making.

And so, yes, I came back from my high school reunion

with a Florida stripper and drinking a lot.

And my life imploded and I ended up going to jail.

That's when our lives pulled away from each other.

My mind collapsed.

Eric was moving forward.

Things that had been present in our relationship

boiled over to the point where we became estranged

and didn't speak for years.

I had to get my feet back on the ground and find a job.

And so, yeah, there was a lot of recovery.

And also, I think my friendship with Eric

was always a pillar of safety.

It was always that thing that I sort of

had always thought that was going to be there.

And that was a pillar of safety.

And that was no longer there.

And I was in L.A. by myself, strung out.

And it was not an easy time.

Eric left L.A. and got married.

And Chris wasn't invited to the wedding.

But Chris had got his life back on track

and had also got engaged,

though he kept the indie chapter of his life

firmly in the past.

It was just too painful.

I don't know.

It was shame and it represented a lot of different things

in my background and elements of my life

that I just don't know about.

I don't know if I was prepared to share.

And so I kept it all very secret and hidden.

But as life ticked on,

completely unbeknownst to Chris and Eric,

a cassette of their film,

just idly copied by one of their dorm friends at university,

had been dusted off and had started to multiply.

Copies were being passed about by film geeks and indie fans.

In 2002, during a projector malfunction

at an Austin film festival called Butt Numathon,

their tape was hurriedly played just to fill time.

And it brought the house down.

When the time came to shut it off

and play the world premiere of the Lord of the Rings sequel

they'd all actually come to see,

the audience booed.

Raiders had stolen the show.

Here's Eric.

At this time, I was running a quality assurance department

for a video game company down in Orlando, Florida.

Just another day at the office when, boom,

I get this email.

Hi, Eric, you don't know me.

My name's Eli Roth.

I'm a horror movie director.

And this might sound strange,

but Steven Spielberg loves your Raiders movie.

He wants to write you a letter.

What's your address?

And yeah, I'm like, all right, who's pulling my leg?

But I talked to Eli that night.

It slowly began to dawn on me, wow, this is for real.

Eli famously brought this battered VHS bootleg of our film

to his own pitch meeting,

and that's how Spielberg,

watched it and wanted to write us.

I thought it was a big joke.

Somebody was playing a trick on me or calling me

and just pulling my leg.

And yeah, a few weeks later, you know,

I get a letter in the mail,

which is actually hanging on my wall here.

And it was real.

It was from SS and I opened it up and it was all there.

And I was like, kind of flabbergasted.

And then the producer and director who tracked them down,

Eli Roth,

invited them to a proper screening of the film in Austin,

full of nerds.

And I was like, oh, my God,

this is going to be so much fun.

And I was like, oh, my God,

this is going to be so much fun.

And I was like, oh, my God,

this is going to be so much fun.

And I was like, oh, my God,

this is going to be so much fun.

about the film, about seeing each other after so long.

Eric and Chris made their way to Texas.

Tell me about that night, Eric.

What was it like?

How many people were there?

This is the premiere, right?

Yeah.

So Chris and I haven't spoken in years,

but we hugged and it was like all that bad stuff

had never happened.

Wow.

And so we're talking, laughing.

We show up at the theater

and we see this line wrapped around the block.

And it's like, what is this?

And it turns out they're in line for our movie.

And back then I was worried.

I mean, like, do they realize that there's...

Do they know what they're coming to see?

Yeah, we shot this in my mom's basement in the 80s.

I took note of the location of the exits

in case I had to make a quick break for it.

Oh, my gosh.

After I had gotten over this fear

of them being crushingly disappointed

and they loved it,

I was just so nervous

that people weren't going to watch it.

They weren't enjoying it because, I don't know,

but people were laughing and responding and engaging

and really kind of taken by it.

And that was really surprising.

And it was also very exhilarating.

When they gave us like, you know,

this roaring, roaring applause

when our boulder came on screen,

it's like, oh, my God, this is not only going to be okay,

this is going to be wonderful.

And it was.

A standing ovation.

A four-minute standing ovation.

A hit movie.

Raiders, the adaptation, blew up

and quickly became a cult favourite.

The Raiders guys, as they were now known,

were invited to film festivals all over the world.

It was dubbed the greatest fan film ever made.

But that wasn't all.

Here's Eric.

We're in Los Angeles, Chris, Jason and I,

driving around and all of a sudden we get this call.

It's our agent saying,

hey, Spielberg wants to meet you guys tomorrow.

I'm like, oh, my God.

I mean, this was always a fantasy,

but we never thought the fantasy would become true.

The next day we drive up to the Universal lot,

Jurassic Park gates to the Amblin compound open.

We walk in and say to the receptionist,

the most absurd words I've ever said to this day.

Hi, we're here to see Steven Spielberg.

And it's not a joke.

We were ushered upstairs through a courtyard,

we're in a car,

steps into a conference room where we wait.

There's all these honorary degrees around.

Chris and Jason and I are sitting around a table.

All of a sudden the door flies open and in walks the man himself,

Steven Spielberg.

Hey, boys.

We're in our mid-30s at this point, but we're boys.

We talk about Raiders, about life, about movies.

It was about 45 minutes.

It was extraordinary to meet your childhood hero

and find that you've chosen to be a hero.

You've chosen your hero as well.

What does it mean to him?

What does your film mean to him?

He said words that have stuck with us,

which is, you know,

I watched your movie and I watched it again.

And I just wanted to let you know

that it flattered even me.

What had started as a pact between friends

in a basement in the 80s

had brought them face to face

with the director who inspired them.

But their adventure wasn't quite over yet.

One scene in all those years had eluded them.

Haunted them even.

The aeroplane scene.

It's set in Egypt where Indy fights the muscle-bound Nazi

as the plane's propellers spin dangerously close overhead.

It was the only thing back in the day

that we just could not figure out

because, of course, the aeroplane scene

ends with a plane exploding.

We're going to be blowing up a model plane

with an M60 firecracker.

This might sound weird, but we didn't want it to look cheesy.

Jump forward years later, our film is discovered.

Chris and I are...

They are doing Q&As all around.

And people would ask us,

hey, why didn't you do the aeroplane scene?

And we tell them and we joke and say,

huh, we should do this right.

Get the gang back together again

and shoot that scene and drop it in.

Think anybody would notice the age difference?

In my very, again, kind of excited, naive way,

I was like, yeah, man, come on, let's do the aeroplane scene.

And he's like, man, I don't know.

It's going to be just a huge ton of work.

And yes, Eric was right.

I remembered back when we were doing this,

our motivation for doing it.

We didn't think of what the world would think.

We did it for ourselves because, damn, that sounds cool.

A lot of work, but fun.

It was like, all right, I accepted the mission

and we'd begun.

This time, it was a more professional setup.

As adults, their arms could reach a lot further.

Their pockets were deeper.

And fans were keen to fund them too.

They had a real plane, an assistant director.

But it wouldn't be an Eric and Chris production

without the Jeopardy.

There were misfiring explosives, a concussed fire marshal,

and many days lost to rain.

But in the nick of time, they got all the shots they needed.

And finally, a call cut, watch playback, it works.

And there's just enough time for me to like run around,

hug people, and then be whisked away

to the closest local airport for the last flight out that day

so I could make it back to London.

Back to Las Vegas and not be fired.

And yeah, I threw my Panama hat up into the air.

But it was sinking into my seat on the airplane

when I finally got, my heart stopped beating

and it slowly dawned on me that we did it.

I can't believe we did it.

And sublime peace washed over my body.

And though I was filthy and still had my fake gray bellock hair,

I was still alive.

And everything.

It was, that was, that was something I'll never forget.

At the beginning of your film,

there's some sort of George Lucas style rolling text.

And I just thought part of it was really telling.

In it, you write,

this film is a tribute to Steven Spielberg and George Lucas

for their giving birth to what we consider

to be the ultimate adventure film.

For eight long years,

we've been driven by an almost obsessive inspiration

fueled by the two men.

It is to them, we give our thanks for the work they have wrought,

which has left,

a permanent impression upon the direction of our lives.

What permanent impression did it leave on you both?

How did it direct your lives?

Where did it send you?

It's impossible for me to imagine my life without Raiders.

It has been this sort of template.

It's been an incredible adventure.

It's led to so many amazing things.

And people, I think, have the misconception

that you go through an adventure and you come out,

man, I'm really the happiest person.

I'm the happiest person in the whole world.

And I am so, you know, it makes you wiser.

It beats you up, you know, and it makes you stronger

and more robust and it seasons you.

And I think that's what the journey of Raiders has done

since the very beginning.

I cannot imagine my growing up without that singular mission

of overcoming all those obstacles,

being rained out of frustration, you know,

the sour and the sweet.

And obviously, we're still in touch.

You know, this kid and I that I borrowed

his Raiders Lost Art comic book

on the bus to elementary school,

all because George and Stephen made a damn good film.

We love them for making that movie.

Eric Zahler and Chris Strompolos,

or the Raiders guys.

My huge thanks to them.

The clips you heard came courtesy of Drafthouse Pictures.

I'm India Rackerson,

the producer of this episode,

of Lives Less Ordinary was Edgar Maddicott,

and our editor is Manasa Khan.

Remember, normally Lives Less Ordinary

won't be in the documentary podcast.

So if you want to hear more episodes,

and there are loads,

like the one about the fisherman

and his mission to save the spy whale,

which was rumoured to have escaped the Russian Navy,

you can just search for Lives Less Ordinary

wherever you get your BBC podcasts.

We'll see you next time.

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