Toner_Low

RAIDERS: THE ADAPTATION

Another thing I hadn't heard of until just now: In the mid-80s, a group of kids in Mississippi filmed a shot-for-shot recreation of Raiders of the Lost Ark on video, and the result won the approval of Spielberg himself. The account of how these enterprising youngsters did it yields several alarming stories like the following:

[Director Eric] Zala nearly incinerated himself in a "very ill-advised stunt" as a Nepalese barroom brawler who catches on fire. "We naïvely doused my back with gasoline that day," he says. "I was wearing a fire-retardant raincoat under the costume, so I thought, 'Hey, we're playing it safe.' And so we roll the shot, I stand, they light me on fire, I scream, hit my mark, and then I yell, 'Cut! OK, blanket!' Two kids rush by with the smothering blankets prepared, put them on, pull them off—I'm still on fire, and now they're fanning the flames higher and my hair starts to get singed. The smell of burnt hair fills the room." Eventually, a fire extinguisher stopped any serious damage, but "our moms caught wind of what happened and for some reason had a problem with this. So they shut us down for the summer."

Trailer here. The BBC also did a piece on the movie when it played at a Brooklyn film festival in 2005.