You've got to see this. Maybe you've already heard about it. Two kids in Mississippi in the '80s made a shot-by-shot remake of Spielberg's RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARC. There will be a book out about it next year by a wonderful writer, Alan Eisenstock. Anyway, here are the first ten minutes. Pretty remarkable. If any of you kids out there would like to do a remake of VOLUNTEERS I promise to post it.
I saw this in a cinema in London. The two kids behind it did a Q&A afterwards, too. LucasFilm agreed to let them exhibit it as long as they gave the proceeds to charity. There was even a blown up copy of a letter Spielberg had sent them, congratulating them.
ReplyDeleteIt was a great evening!
I wish I could join you all into this thing but:
ReplyDelete"This video is not available in your country - Sorry about that".
Country=Germany.
They were just lucky. When I was twelve I made a shot-by-shot remake of 'Romancing the Stone'...
ReplyDeleteIt's "Ark"! Geez!
ReplyDeleteThat's pretty damn impressive. I just hope they didn't follow it up with "Temple of Doom"
ReplyDelete'Raiders of the Lost Arc' was a great film, although I also liked 'Triangle of Doom' and 'The Last Circle'.
ReplyDeleteAdam Paull: That's nothing. We made a shot for shot remake of Romancing the Bone except we all wore animal masks.
ReplyDeleteSo this is actually "Super 8" BEFORE there was "Super 8"
ReplyDeleteI've been lucky enough to see this in a museum showing. Quite an enthusiastic effort. There was supposed to be a film about the making of this film at one point, but that seems to have fallen by the wayside.
ReplyDeleteNot as good as the original.
ReplyDeleteAs a lng time Carl Sagan fan, I'd like to honor his memory by lamenting the fact that they never made a RAIDERS OF THE LOST DODECAHEDRON.
ReplyDeleteMike, you are right.
ReplyDeleteThe shot-by-shot remake I made of My dinner With Andre when I was 13 never got exhibited, because that BASTARD Louis Malle wouldn't allow it! I thought my shooting it at a McDonald's in Torrance made it far more "relatable," but then, the fact that I had to shoot it in 8mm without any sound made it even duller than the original. Man, those were some loooooong title cards to read, especially as they were all written in my nearly illegable handwriting.
I was amused by the the way the kid playing Alfred Molina's role doesn't even attempt an accent. In Spielberg's version, I don't recall Harrison Ford blocking our view of his brushing the spiders off of Molina's back, but then, Spielberg didn't use ridiculously oversized spiders stapled to his shirt so they could not be brushed off. Also, Spielberg didn't use cutting and angles to hide Ford being unable to use the whip well enough, since Harrison spent months learning how to use it.
It is certianly better than Gus Van Sant's pointless Psycho shot-by-shot remake.
How soon I wonder will we get to see these kids' shot-by-shot remake of The Lord of the Rings extended edition?
You have to remember, these kids started making this before home video had really taken off. They didn't have a reference copy of Raiders, they had to rely on their memory of the film from seeing it at the cinema and promotional materials.
ReplyDeleteOf course it took them 8 years to finish, too. At the end of the film those boys have turned into men.
If you get a chance to see it, I highly recommend it.
(Also, there's some hilarious comments here!)
Actually Lassie in "Woofing" was calling Tommy (as in Tommy Rettig) to save gramps not that little doppelgänger Timmy.
ReplyDeleteAlso, there was no Adobe Premiere or After Effects in those days. There weren't affordable editing decks. You had to do it VCR-to-VCR or camera-to-VCR. (Yes, grumpy old man alert.)
ReplyDeleteThank you for posting this. I vaguely remember hearing about it but have never seen any footage until now.
ReplyDeleteIt's such an ambitious undertaking, you have to tip your hat at these guys just for trying. You can tell in places where they're constrained mostly by scale, but they went all-out where it counted. They nailed the key moments, like the idol lowering and the giant rolling boulder.
Very impressive.