Over the weekend, I had the pleasure of seeing Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation. In many ways, the film is a textbook case of copyright infringement. Short of literal copying of Spielberg’s celluloid, this is as close as any copy of Raiders of the Lost Ark is likely to get. The Adaptation is a shot-for-shot, line-for-line remake of the 1981 classic – camera angles, stunt work, and special effects all faithfully recreated. Indeed, the original John Williams score is heard throughout the film. Only one fact saves The Adaptation from being a pale, if meticulous, clone of the original Raiders of the Lost Ark – it was made by 12 year olds.
Beginning in the summer of 1981, three friends set out to recreate the iconic adventure film in their basements and back yards, using a betamax recorder and costumes collected from the local Salvation Army. The project was an exercise in infringement from the outset, as Wired reported a few months back:
Zala, Strompolos and Lamb began their Raiders: The Adaptation odyssey 25 years ago by sneaking a tape recorder into a Raiders screening. Listening to the dialog and sound effects, Zala, Strompolos and Lamb spent a year creating a notebook (Book of Ideas and Memos. Indy and Toht’s Notes: Don’t Touch!!) filled with detailed storyboards.
Nowadays, these kids could be in jail for pulling such a stunt. Armed with their illicit audio recording and a script purchased at a local bookstore – the original Raiders wouldn’t be available on VHS for years – the filmmakers undertook the immense task of recreating a $26 million Hollywood film on their allowances.
As the Village Voice reported, it was no easy task:
Achieving such a faithful copy required a great deal of ingenuity. Replicating the film’s signature boulder sequence, for example, became a years-long epic in itself. A first version, a hulking lump of bamboo poles and duct tape, proved too large to leave the bedroom in which it was constructed. Boulder no. 2, made from chicken wire, blew away in a hurricane. The third model, cast in fiberglass in a hand-dug dirt mold with help from a local artisan, finally did the trick (even surviving Katrina many years later; the fiberglass boulder still sits in the backyard of Zala’s mother’s house). Trained monkeys being hard to come by in Mississippi, the boys substituted a dog named Snickers for the comic-relief animal bit.
But after six years of summer-break shooting, when the principals were headed off to college, The Adaptation was in the can.
And in the can it stayed, until 2003 when a high generation copy found its way into the hands of director Eli Roth, who passed a copy on to Spielberg. No stranger to childhood filmmaking, Spielberg loved it and sent letters to the now-adult creators of The Adaptation praising them and their film. Since then, The Adaptation has become something of a film festival favorite, playing on a handful of screens in a handful of cities every year. You can see a clip here.
With Spielberg’s tacit, if not explicit, approval, these guys seem unlikely to have to contend with copyright lawyers knocking on their doors anytime soon. Although I can’t help but think that the limited screenings and lack of DVD or online distribution are due to fears of offending the vengeful gods at Paramount.
Assuming those gods came down from on high for a bit of good old fashioned smiting, what aside from a sacrificial goat could be offered up as appeasement? Do these 12 year olds or their adult selves have a defense for creating and publicly performing their pre-pubescent masterwork?
Given the courts’ transformation fetish, this is something of a tough question. These young filmmakers were in no way interested in commenting on, much less subverting, the cultural meaning offered by Spielberg’s Raiders. Quite the opposite. They were interested in recreating, in as painstakingly-replicated a form as possible, the imagery and meaning they perceived sitting in a darkened theater in the summer of 1981. There was no attempt to reflect the juvenile notions of adventure or the not-so-subtle gender dynamics of the film by replacing the grizzled Harrison Ford with a 12 year old boy. Maybe that would have worked, but that isn’t what these kids were up to.
And all for the better, I say. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about The Adaptation, aside from the talent and persistence of these young filmmakers, is the total absence of irony. There is no mocking, no knowing winks; the fourth wall remains intact throughout. The purity of their unapologetic love of this movie is apparent.
Earlier in the week, Rebecca Tushnet blogged about the recent fair use conference at Columbia. An argument made there by Laura Heymann seems relevant to this discussion. Here is Professor Tushnet paraphrasing Professor Heymann:
Courts approach transformativeness from the wrong direction. They focus on the user as author, asking how much the defendant contributed and what sort of artistic process she used. Instead, they should ask how the reader engaged with the defendant’s use. The current focus leads to judicial skepticism when the defendant hasn’t added much, but readers recognize change more readily.
I’m not sure that this has to be an either/or. But at least in cases like this one, I think this argument has some appeal. While the makers of The Adaptation were engaged in a literal remaking of Raiders, watching it 27 years later in a room of adults, the transformativeness of The Adaptation can’t really be questioned. Every line, every action sequence, hell – every frame of this film offers an entirely different experience than the original film. Lines that were not written for laughs are impossibly funny coming from a 12 year old whose Nazi uniform is an altered Boy Scout outfit. Hackneyed actions sequences become impossibly dangerous – for example, the scene in which a Nepalese bar is engulfed in flames was filmed in the family basement, with no shortage of real flames. Regardless of the creators’ intent, and despite their attention to every detail, The Adaptation offers its audience a new meaning.
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