RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK: FILM WITH LIVE SCORE

Before the multiplex, the 3-D, the gee-wiz computer graphics, the immersive sound system, the $10 popcorn, there were the serials, twelve or fifteen twenty-minute episodes of a continuing story produced with more bravado than sophistication that left Flash Gordon, Dick Tracy, Captain Marvel, Zorro or whatever buff hero was featured in the series in impossible-to-escape peril at the end of each segment. The heyday of the movie serials was from the mid-1930s to the 1950s, when 25¢ got you into a Saturday matinee showing two serial episodes, two B features (cowboys were always big), and a bunch of cartoons; another 25¢ was enough to keep your teeth stuck together with Ju-Ju-Bees for the entire afternoon.

George Lucas (born in 1944 in Modesto, California) and Steven Spielberg (1946, Cincinnati Ohio) were enthralled with the Saturday serials as kids. Following the success of his Best Picture-nominated American Graffiti (1973), set in Modesto in 1962, Lucas wanted to make the Flash Gordon Saturday serial into a feature film but could not obtain the rights to the character … so he wrote and directed Star Wars (1977) instead. For the score, Spielberg recommended that Lucas hire John Williams, who had won an Oscar for his soundtrack for Spielberg’s Jaws in 1975. Star Wars was a phenomenon, winning six Academy Awards (including another one for Williams) and became the highest-grossing film of all time until it was overtaken by Spielberg’s E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial in 1983.

Soon after Star Wars was released, Lucas escaped the furor over the film by heading to Hawaii, where Spielberg was also taking a break from filming Close Encounters of the Third Kind. While they were collaborating on building a sand castle on the beach in front of the Mauna Kea Hotel, Spielberg confessed a secret desire to direct a James Bond film. Lucas told him he had developed a character “better than James Bond” in 1973, when he had been stopped from making his Flash Gordon film, a story then titled “The Adventures of Indiana Smith,” about a tweedy college-archeologist-turned-bullwhip-toting action hero. The principal plot device was the recovery of the lost Ark of the Covenant, the Biblical gold-covered wooden chest containing the original tablets inscribed with the Ten Commandments. The film was set in 1936 and the Nazis, then consolidating their power in Germany and believing the Ark would make their armies invincible, would be his adversaries. Spielberg loved the idea, calling it “a James Bond film without the hardware,” but he told Lucas that the surname “Smith” was not right for the character. Lucas replied, “OK. What about ‘Jones’?”

By January 1978, Spielberg had agreed to direct Raiders of the Lost Ark, Lucas continued to develop the story with screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan (who was then also working on the Star Wars’ sequel The Empire Strikes Back), and Frank Marshall was hired to produce. With its roots in the beloved 1930s serials, the plot of the film took Indy (the perfectly cast Harrison Ford, who had been impressive as Han Solo in Star Wars) on a thrill-ride that included narrow escapes (from snake pits, hurtling boulders, poison darts, collapsing walls, yawning chasms, exploding airplanes, ghoulish spirits, and roaring fires), nasty villains (Nazis, of course, but also a traitorous Frenchman and a spying spider monkey) and a feisty but regularly kidnapped damsel (played by Karen Allen).

Filming began in La Rochelle, France in June 1980 (the scenes with the Nazi submarine) and continued at London’s Elstree Studios (including the infamous snake-pit sequence, in which many of the “snakes” were harmless legless lizards from the Balkans called Scheltopusiks — only the cobras were poisonous; Indy was separated from the one threatening him by a glass panel), the Hawaiian island of Kauai (the tropical scenes), and Tunisia (the desert portions), where the whole crew (except Spielberg, who survived that month of filming eating canned SpaghettiOs) was hit with dysentery from the heat and tainted food. (The filming of the unforgettable scene when Indy and his bullwhip are pitted against stuntman Terry Richards’ sword had to be cut short because Ford was suffering badly from the malady that day. “Let’s just shoot the sucker,” he pleaded with Spielberg.) All the visual effects were created by Industrial Light & Magic, the ground-breaking company Lucas had established to support the cinematic wizardry of Star Wars.

Raiders of the Lost Ark, released on June 12, 1981, was an immediate hit with both the public and with critics. Vincent Canby in The New York Times called it “one of the most deliriously funny, ingenious and stylish American adventure movies ever made.” Pulitzer Prize-winning Chicago Sun Times critic Roger Ebert praised its “sense of humor and the droll style of its characters.... We find ourselves laughing in surprise, in relief, in incredulity at the movie’s ability to pile one incident upon another in an inexhaustible series of inventions.” Raiders was the year’s top-grossing film and was nominated for nine Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Score; it won for Art Direction, Film Editing, and Sound and Visual Effects with a Special Achievement Award for Sound Effects Editing. The film’s success led to three sequels — Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984), Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989), and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008); another is scheduled for possible release in 2020. Raiders of the Lost Ark was entered into the Library of Congress‘ National Film Registry in 1999 as being “culturally, historically or aesthetically significant.”