Now that I am one of the few people who have seen the Raiders: Adaptation movie, I feel it is a privilege to write about my own experience of this film coming into my worldview. How it intersects, how it tangents, and what I can personally learn from its existence. I write in this weblog more like Dominick Dunne, where every incoming item is filtered through personal experience, than like Jim Windolf, who I can tell is a real journalist, reporting the facts of the case and letting the rest of us fit our baggage into our own overhead bins. Watch out when opening them, though, that baggage might fall on your head! Another reason why I am a blogger and not a journalist, other than having no qualifications to the latter, is I am egotistical enough to think that the real story IS my own personal baggage surrounding the topic at hand, colliding with my head and perhaps risking my personal safety. The facts are just facts, but the real story is in the interpretation and application.
As mentioned many times in this blog, I am well past miniskirt age, and perhaps grappling with that more than I would like. Like Chris Strombolis once reportedly (in Jim's article) said to Eric Zala, I have definitely sold out, chosen the corporate universe, with its unruly orbit of two stars: mortgage and paycheck. The mortgage being a red hot supernova spewing hot lava and toxic gas. The paycheck being a white dwarf, practically invisible, with somehow just enough gravitational pull to keep the mortgage-star from careening into a black hole. But barely. And this is my universe, where skirts are low, age is recognized, and my head turning this way and that as I watch this cosmic game of tennis between the two major stars that embody my corporate sell out, as Chris might have characterized it, 10 or so years ago.
Given these factors I was nonetheless granted access to a private showing of Raiders: Adaptation by virtue of my Microsoft e-mail address. I signed up for two tickets. I told my dh, that if he wanted to see it with me, on what unfortunately turned out to be a glorious and sunny Saturday afternoon in Seattle, he would need to find a sitter. I gave him a list of names. Then on the Wednesday before, I told him that it was officially the last minute for him to find the sitter. He made one call and waited for that person to get back. On Thursday I sent out a mail to a group of FOAFs (friend of a friends), asking if anyone wanted to go with me instead. I immediately got a reply back from Nancy, who is a former FoxPro MVP and currently makes a nice living rescuing FoxPro projects for midsize businesses.
My internal preparation for this event involved racking my brains for an episode of This American Life on the subject of Adaptation, which it turns out I hallucinated. The episode, as I remember it, was an in-depth coverage of the Adaptation crew and their antics. Lamenting the absence of audio tagging, I trolled through the archives on the TAL and the NPR websites, never getting any search results for my entries. TAL tends to name the shows obliquely, so a show dedicated to Adaptation might very well be titled How to light yourself on fire and live to tell the tale, where three disparate stories of fire-based troublemaking would be placed back to back. All fine and dandy if you're looking for a tale as your keyword. For search results where you don't know the answer, it's completely useless. Even worse that we, as geeks, have not solved this problem for a show this good. I am always sad to reach my destination in my car if TAL is on. Come on, geeks, we can solve this one! But I digress...
Over coffee, before the screening, Nancy and I had each listened to the wrong parts of a different TAL from last Friday, where a performance art group posed as hardcore fans for an unknown band, giving them the show of their lives. Neither of us could piece together the whole story in a satisfying way.
What I remembered from the in-depth Adaptation episode, which turns out to have actually been an article in Vanity Fair, was the following:
* Two boys' entire adolescence captured on film in this staged way (true, but more like 4 boys)
* Love interest / triangle between two of the boys and the actress for Marian (true, without which likely the Making Of would not hold nearly so much promise)
And that sketchy memory was enough to make a fan out of me.
After finishing coffee, Nancy and I return to the new digs of the Northwest Film Forum to take our seats. For me, the building will always be the Art Satellite. For while Chris and Eric and Jayson were starting to get on each other's nerves, in that building me and my friends were undergoing similar changes. For example:
* My childhood chum Joel, who should have gone into film makeup and will always hold such promise in this direction no matter how old we both get, used this space to make the most exotic plaster casts of himself and others. I suspect he used dental plaster and not superheating industrial plaster like Eric had to suffer through.
* It was in that building that I had the first class where we sat around in a circle on the floor and talked about our feelings. Unfortunately, it would not be my last class of this type.
* I practiced and auditioned in that building for the part of Adelaide from Guys and Dolls. I forgot the words during the audition. The part went to a deserving petite redhead named Rachel. That song remains trapped in my memory, and now lives on as Product Managers Lament for Microsoft: The Musical, which I would like to say that I am in the middle of writing but that would be putting it optimistically.
* During a performance in that building of Godspell, a classmate of mine lost his mind, we all thought, playing the lead part a little too convincingly.
* For the first time, in that building, I placed my head on the chest of a young man I was smitten with, and listened to his heart beat. Due to a security screw-up recently, I now have his current e-mail address, which I will not use because I don't have anything to say. But perhaps someday. Until then it sits in my outlook garbage can. Perhaps my address is sitting in his.
* At a high school reunion, I was shocked to see that a picture of me in the part I actually got for Guys and Dolls - a chorus girl, in fishnets, and hair piled on top of my head - was blown up larger than life size and placed at a prominent position since approximately the time I had graduated. Think of all the circle-time classes subsequent students had to put up with, talking about their feelings, and then having to stare up at me in my fishnets. The example of school spirit Oh, the humanity.
Based on all that baggage, I couldn't tell whether seeing Raiders: Adaptation in that space was a fitting coincidence or not.
So. You will remember that Planet Mortgage burns like a red hot burning thing. You will therefore understand how I squirmed through the lovely and enlightened folks at NW Film Forum a) not asking for any money at the door for the tickets, and b) asking us all for fundraiser-grade money later at the beginning of the show. I felt like I had stolen the ticket, because even if I gave three or more zeros, I do not have the power as a v- to tap into the Microsoft matching funds. Nor could I offer anything other than the most laughable number of zeros. Perhaps what I can do is to post my story here, hope someone from MS will read it, and offer to be my match-buddy for the 10 bucks I have free to donate. Hey, it could work.
Finally, with Chris's admonitions that the film was the worst video quality imaginable and also the worst audio quality imaginable, the film started. He was right. We forgave him, much more readily than we would forgive ourselves. And this is the key to the entire experience, for Chris, and for us: bringing this film into prominence is a way of processing each of our own childhoods in the same way it was useful for Chris to process his. For example, an essential part of childhood is boredom. You're ancy, you want something to fill the void. The counterpart to boredom is obsessive activity: the train of dominos that is set up over the entire house, the chemistry experiments comparing the sound cake mix makes compared to water when stuffed into a water balloon, finding a primo set of blackberries and the secret stump which gives you the leverage to reach them. Yeah, life gives you classes titled Social Studies, which sound much better than they actually are, but with these powers to overcome boredom, anything is bearable. The pee-chee gets more and more obsessively detailed as you slump in your chair like your dad was the unabomber. Adaptation is a celebration of kids overcoming the primary dynamic of childhood: boredom. And, as I told Chris later after the film, it's very impressive. We could hardly get it together to build a rope swing. And even then, we got busted.
The film is framed by text at the beginning and the end. The beginning text scrolls by as a tribute to the real Raiders and its effect on the Adaptation filmmakers. Then, immediately, the audience starts laughing. The jungle scene video quality is almost indistinguishable from a greenish magic eye painting. We get our first look at this new Indy from the back, and his shrug-shouldered followers have a sense for slapstick. They all look about 8 and 1/2, the age where the 1/2 still means something. This in and of itself is funny. We see Indy pack a sack full of sand, and this time we know why he is doing it. The sack is the kind usually used to carry around collections of marbles. They enter the cave, which resembles a homespun haunted house that some lenient parents would let kids build in their basements for Halloween. We see Indy, this new Indy that we haven't quite bought into yet, dance across the checkerboard of loose bathroom tiles and make it to the statue. The statue is probably a pumpkin. It also has a more convincing incarnation, but our first look of it is as convincing as the Tick's Little Wooden Boy. Which is to say, not very convincing at all. When the sack of sand sinks into the ground, the escape scene plays out and the audience is at the edge of their seat waiting for the boulder. Finally it arrives, round and white, as ceremonial as the new year's ball on times square. Chris runs to the left and is backlit by this white round thing on his right. We applaud.
The scene at the school begins, which is where we see Chris's real work in imitating Harrison’s every gesture. NEOLITHIC. The girls do a great job of looking smitten. The text on the eyelids is illegible. The council of nitwits from the government is fun to see, the boys not any older than in the jungle scene, and they seemed grateful enough to have memorized their lines. All but Indy rush through the verbal text, and one boy seems smallest of all, in round Harry Potter glasses and a shrunken too-small frame. We see him later on, in the final council of nitwits at the end of the film, where Indy is told the ark is "safe." This little guy looks all of a sudden like he drank from the "drink me" bottle. But I digress. In both scenes, a heavy dictionary is useful, perhaps stolen, I know they wouldn't let me actually touch mine in my middle school, they were too expensive. Pasted in is a fair approximation drawing of the original "ark" reference picture that Harrison shows. The drawing is so good, it carries the scene.
It's about this time that it occurs to me, one way of making a film would be to do the script, and the storyboard, and then get a bunch of film students to do it on the cheap as a class project. If the film still holds up at zero budget and zero experience, you have a winner. This student film would have passed that test.
Now, the amazing things start happening that awe the audience. We are thinking: How did they pull this off? First, a rolls royce shows up. Then, the actors get on an actual airplane. A map of the world is ruined by a green pen, then a red, scribbled with general intention toward the destination and occasionally correcting itself, ending with a blotch in Tibet. The bar scene starts, and just like in the real Raiders, the whole film lights up when you meet the girl. Of course, she has my exact hair that I used to have in the 80s. Both the long and the short versions. She reminds me of Missing Persons, of Belinda Carlisle, of Berlin, of comparing how long your tail was with your friend before the bell rings. Mostly she reminds me of that old Behind the Music footage of No Doubt, where Gwen is singing awkwardly onstage similarly groomed. Note to self, time to cancel the cable before your life slips down the drain. But this young actress is remarkable in the way she can convey to us how familiar all these things were, so long ago. Watching Adaptation, it doesn't matter how much we are bringing to the experience from our personal life. The film is so humble, it welcomes this type of derivative experience. So even though it might completely be projection on our parts, let's give this young actress some credit for reminding us of who we were. Another note to self, too much talking about your feelings leads to writing like this.
As a mother, the bar scene in Adaptation is incredibly frightening to watch. You want to give your kids creative freedom. You want them to grow and make mistakes and have perseverance. You want them to aspire to ideals before they wise up and learn better, and hope in a way that they never learn better. But honestly. The scariest thing about the fire scene is the feeling - nay, the knowledge - that it happens in realtime. You know that this is not a special effect, that 2 seconds with an arm on fire is really 2 seconds, and therefore incredibly scary. At the end of the scene, the whole room is on fire, our jaws are on the floor. When Marian says she's Indy’s new goddamn partner we feel slightly vindicated. Someone had to yell at him after all that destruction.
Cairo is where we actually start to buy into this new Indy. Sure, he's short, squishy, has the wrong coloring, is way too young, he looks almost completely wrong. But there is the rapport with Miriam, and the dog, the kidnapping with the baskets (who knew so many laundry baskets could be rounded up?) was all done very well in Indy's favor. They light a truck on fire, which is one thing, but also this Indy is in agony before it, and believably so. So we're sold. Also at this locale we start to see the first of Belloc, played by Eric, who delivers great lines. My favorite line he says is "blow it back to God" later in the canyon scene of the movie. Indy has his most confident and believable performance just pausing, looking out the window, before his dates get poisoned. Now that Eric is on the scene, we wonder just for one second what if the actors switched roles? But then Chris lets loose with those eyes, the classic Indy "pools of mystery," and mountains are moved with just a few facial expressions. We are behind Chris 100%, carrying around that dog on his shoulder, and we applaud with relief at the "bad dates" line.
Some logistics come into play at the rogue dig site. First, a Nazi flag. How in the world do you come by such a thing as a kid. You would have to make it in secret yourself, no getting someone's mom to sew it for you. Sitting in your closet, that's a school suspension just waiting to happen. Worse, it's probably a newspaper story. Grounded for life. Devastating. Nevertheless, it shows up. The hole to the map room is a pile of freshly dug dirt on top of a painted cardboard box with a round hole in the top. You're supposed to only see the hole. Chris lowers himself into the box, attempting to not scrunch up, because presumably of the long way down. At the dig site, they pull off a great scene at sunset, with people working, the sun going down, and Indy taking his hat off in silhouette form.
Some observations during the Mariam drunken seduction scene with Belloc in the tent. One is: perhaps, if this film was any better, the outcome from Spielberg would have been more along the lines of cease and desist rather than good job. The rawness of the film is a major asset. Another is my own personal memory of watching this woman get crushingly drunk (supposedly), for the second time. She uses liquor for her own needs as an expression of her own personal power. Note that this never happens in real life. I believe that watching her in this scene is the exact moment where I formed my belief that alcohol can be a fun thing to consume. I still have had no life experiences to back up this belief. More grandly, this film formed in my mind the definition of what it meant for a man to be attractive. Harrison, in all his ganglyness, was simply IT. 12 years after seeing Raiders I went off and married the guy who looked the most like Harrison Ford who I could catch. So in a way, perhaps my own life has been crafted more by this movie than even Chris or Eric's. In the meantime, our audience gets a laugh out of the coathanger gag.
The white dress, by the way, is stunning. Completely accurate. And works well with the shoes, one of which is of course claimed for cinematic effect by the snakes before the other one. Indy and Miriam spend some time in a basement falling from the ceiling, scattering water on snakes using a canister of herbicide, and building up realistic feisty-romantic banter. They manufacture a totem pole thing in said basement, which of course is completely ridiculous, and use it to smash down a wall of breakaway bricks to escape.
At this point, we are completely behind the movie. It starts feeling like a ritual, similar to Rocky Horror Picture Show, where the acting and storyline can be incredibly derivative and still have ceremonial value. It reminds me of the holiday Festivus, which is actually a real holiday made popular in a Seinfeld episode. First there are the feats of strength, then there are the airing of grievances. A pole is erected. Someone places a clock in a paper sack. These are irrelevant activities with no context or fanfare, but meaningful because of repetition. I imagine a new kind of Raiders festival that takes place on a holiday that we could invent, where we have the breaking down of the wall, and the kissing of the elbow, and the catching of dates in the air. The family meal for Raiders night is brought out after everyone takes a turn riding in the laundry basket. It's just a thought.
Belloc gets a lot of scenes in the desert. He is very handsome as a teenager. His hair is unfortunately blow dried, but given that it was 1985, this is easy to overlook. He has a very good accent. I wish he had remembered the word com-fort-a-ble in the same way I did, though. The actors are all older now, visibly. Which explains how the truck scene was even possible. The filmmakers now know how to drive. Lots of dangerous things happen in the truck scene. I should note that I completely fell for the special effect they had of pushing or pulling the truck to simulate it driving. If this spoils the scene for you I am sorry. If the filmmakers had access to a truck with an engine in it, they would probably been driving it without hesitation, so perhaps you can feel the same fear I felt just thinking about that possibility. When watching, I could have sworn they were driving at least 10mph. So my heart was in my throat as one kid jumped into the truck from a tree, and Indy slid ironically underneath the truck and was dragged behind. Kids jump off the truck into water, I think. The whole thing looks very good, very dangerous. Possibly the best executed scene in the film. Lots of audience applause.
Okay, the cabin scene on the boat. This will be more interesting in the making-of movie. Indy does a little too good a job of sounding tired in Adaptation, something Harrison seems to convey at the same time as he conveys romantic interest. Completely forgivable, I know I try often to convey both at the same time too, and tired always wins out. Chris's bare chest is something that we are used to at this point, and we cut him a lot of slack. We are so rooting for him at this point that we just let the whole thing go, as an A for effort, and prepare to be impressed by Chris climbing up the side of the bad guy's boat in a very young and spry way after the famous quick swim in the ocean. Mariam continues to look stunning this entire time, and her confidence grows too. I remember feeling sorry knowing the movie was almost over, I wanted to see more of her growth as an actress particularly. Or, perhaps, as a projection of my own young self. Either way.
Just as the bad guy's boat lands, we get our first overhead shot. It's like an aerial shot except of course no airplane. We see the lackeys bring out the ark and start to carry it down the canyon. Indy holds up the operation with a section of plumbing, and of course he brings out the classic "pools of mystery" for effect. Once opened, the ark shows everyone what looks like blue sheets flapping and flipping around various characters squirming and falling to the ground. It turns out, that is part of how they did the effect. Go Eric. Toht meets his end first by having something the texture of green kefir drool off the brim of his hat. There is a cutaway, then back to Toht but this time it's a rib roast with a hat on it. There is the second meeting of government nitwits where the extras are now twice as tall as they were at the beginning of the movie. And the ark is wheeled along, and put to rest in a refrigerator warehouse. We have been told to sit through the film’s credits, and they are a wonderful expression of the project. Everyone's name appears several times. There is an injury list. We deduce a little from the Making Of by noting whose dad is listed under Transportation etc. And then it's over.
Chris was there to answer our questions, and there were many. He walked onto the small stage to big applause. His appearance now is crisp, urban, not arty at all. Seems like a man who visits his barber on schedule, and knows the value of a shave with a straight edge razor. Perhaps the Indy mystique is still with him a little in our minds. He is capable of pulling off a tucked-in shirt with a belt, which is to say you could not really call him pudgy at all anymore. Not really. He has perhaps not the cheekbones I imagine Eric might still have, but a good face for TV or video. His expressive eyes are no longer the "pools of mystery" that characterized both Harrison and Chris's versions of Indy, but they still are vivid enough to hold up from behind a set of glasses. He tells the story of Eric getting his head plastered. He tells the story of the film coming out of obscurity. Two new tidbits which you might not have heard about though. One is, that they decided not to do the shot with the bald guy getting chopped up in the airplane propeller, because they did not have an airplane. There was talk about using a miniature, but in their teenage logic, they thought it would "look really bad." Can you imagine, lots of your project looks like a magic eye painting and you think the use of a miniature would look cheesy. Word to all project managers who have lost perspective. This got a great laugh out of the all-MS audience. Another tidbit was how deep in obscurity the film really was, before it was discovered. In fact, Chris says, when he got married, his wife didn't even know about it. That produced the largest gasp in the audience for the afternoon. Can you imagine. Actually, we sorta can.
Milling about the lobby I asked Chris: Is this it for you, are you always going to be the guy who did Adaptation? What could be next? He said it wasn't so bad, he doesn't mind if this is the thing people think of him for. He has a career going in LA in video, and no complaints. The thing I realized is, for some of us we would have a childhood-self and all those adventures, and then the grownup-self who hangs up the superhero cape, and goes about our day job getting fat. (Gosh, who do I know who is doing this. Hmmm. Could it be ME?) Chris isn't doing this, there is no distinction between the person who made this movie and the person presenting it a decade or two later. I'd be interested to see if the other major characters had such a continuous identity. Then we talk about raising kids, which he doesn't have yet, and fear of giving them a chance to explore the world while at the same time keeping them safe. (See my link above underlined word boredom) Chris agreed that this was a major asset to making this movie: a small town where everyone knew everyone else, and loose-at-best parental supervision. That combined with free exploratory time in the Mississippi wilds. I know I can never recreate the freedom of his or even my own childhood for my own boys. However, I know I would rather have them setting a basement on fire than clocking in 10 years of video games. This is coming from somebody in the industry, even. But it has to be someone else’s basement. Easy to say now, when they're little, but truth be told I am seriously conflicted about the issue. I suppose I have another 10 years to think about it. For now I have Chris to thank for setting such a vivid example of a childhood well spent.