‘Raiders!’ Is a Love Letter to Filmmaking and the Ultimate Cult Film

The culture of movie geeks has its plusses and minuses. Like any subculture, they can be insular, dogmatic, and obnoxious. But what binds together film geek culture — and what redeems it from all its shortcomings — is the genuine love these people have for the movies. In particular, the movies they grew up with, that shaped them, that they escaped into when school was shitty or their parents were breaking up. That’s one of the many things I got to thinking about while watching Raiders!: The Story of the Greatest Fan Film Ever Made.

The story sounds like a legend in and of itself: way way back in the go-go VHS ’80s, three 11-year-old pals in Mississippi decided to make a shot-for-shot remake of their favorite movie, Steven Spielberg’s Raiders of the Lost Ark. It’s the kind of idea that kids come up with but never follow through on. Because making movies is hard and long and full of a billion little moving parts that you never think about when you’re watching even the simplest of movies, much less one of the preeminent blockbuster creations of the 1980s. But this particular trip pulled it off, over the course of seven years, through the breakup of their friendships, they did it. These kids were dedicated and industrious and remarkably reckless, and the first half of Raiders is essentially a compendium of “I can’t believe we weren’t killed” stories about filming car chases and fire scenes. The boys — Eric, who directed, Chris, who played Indy, and Jayson, who did effects — reflect on those days, but maybe the best parts of this first half of the documentary are the interviews with their mothers, who smile and reminisce about their sons turning their houses into movie sets for months and years at a time, setting fire to basements and placing themselves in many different flavors of danger.

What makes Raiders! the fascinating documentary that it is, though, is that this story of the kids re-making Raiders is only a part of the story. What ends up elevating this into such a gripping testament to dreams, ambition, and moviemaking as a kind of communal ecclesiastical madness, is what happens to the film after. Talking to such nerd-film icons as Eli Roth, Harry Knowles, and Alamo Drafthouse founder Tim League, we get the story of how the Raiders remake got passed around from movie enthusiast to movie enthusiast, until Roth presented it to Knowles at the 2002 Butt-Numb-a-Thon movie marathon in Austin, where it screened for 45 minutes and so captivated and delighted a room full of the most dedicated movie geeks around that they nearly made the decision to ditch the world premiere of The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers to finish watching it. It should be noted, of course, that as a Drafthouse Films production, the fact that the film is also a love letter to Butt-Numb-a-Thon is neither surprising nor inconsiderable.

And it doesn’t end there, as the filmmakers reunite some twenty-odd years later to film one last scene to complete their work. It’s an elaborate chase scene at an airfield involving serious pyrotechnics, and the filmmakers have these years of built up resentments, and meanwhile Eric’s on the phone with his actual job trying to beg for two more days away from his soul-crushing, pencil-pushing existence so he can follow through on this childhood dream … it’s honestly the stuff of real movies. And yet the directors of the documentary, Jeremy Coon and Tim Skousen, never fall fully into saccharine hagiography. The now-adult filmmakers are some characters. The fractures of their childhood friendships remain as scars on their adult personalities. Jason still seems decidedly bitter; Chris might be a bit of a jerk. It’s reminiscent of another story of passions pursued: the arcade-gaming doc The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters. The undercurrents of quiet desperation are never far from the filmmakers — especially Eric, in his succession of LucasFilm and Overlook Hotel t-shirts, who is either going to be an unlikely hero or a tragic martyr on the altar of moviemaking.

Raiders! is a film that never stops surprising you, as the story of this unlikely remake keeps turning down these fascinating detours and alleys. Best of all, though, is that the movie at its center isn’t junk to be appreciated ironically. It’s not trash that became treasure. Surely in this year of Stranger Things, we can appreciate the enthusiasm of young kids and Steven Spielberg fandom all swirled into one heady venture. As no less luminous a Hollywood personality than Harry Knowles sums up in his typically understated way, the Raiders of the Lost Ark remake that these kids produced is “a frigging Norman Rockwell painting at 24 frames per second.” Indeed.

[You can stream Raiders!: The Story of the Greatest Fan Film Ever Made.]