Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation

Because Raiders was yet not available for rental or sale in video stores when the boys started in the summer of '82, they had no reference copy of the movie they were seeking to remake shot-for-shot. So, they got everything Raiders that they could get their hands on - photos from magazines, the published screenplay, storybooks, making-of publications, action figures, an illicit recording of the soundtrack from smuggling in a cassette recorder into a movie theater showing Raiders when re-released in 1982. With the amassed material, and by memory of seeing Raiders in the theater, they cobbled together a composite reconstruction of the original Raiders, shot-by-shot, laying it out in storyboard form. Before Raiders, Eric Zala wanted to be comic book artist growing up. This prepared him to hand draw over 600 individual detailed storyboards that became the blueprint they used for seven years, only rarely deviated from.

Featured in The People vs. George Lucas (2010)