CHAPTER 17: THE THEATRICAL EXPERIENCE
John Scoleri: I’m fortunate to have a dedicated home theater, but there’s nothing quite like seeing Raiders on a massive screen like the Century domes in San Jose I was fortunate to grow up with. I recall Raiders playing San Jose for over a year!
Mike Matessino: I saw Raiders at the first show on opening day at mother church: Movieland in Yonkers, New York. Curiously there were very few people there, but it was a Friday matinee and in those days you didn’t necessarily have the huge opening weekends for movies people knew little about. Reviews and word-of-mouth were still a factor. I had read the novelization before seeing the movie, so I already knew the story. But still it took me a few viewings to process what it had accomplished, how it was an homage to movies of the past while also being its own completely new thing.
Jim Bowers (co-host, Caped Wonder Superman Podcast): When I think back on memorable summer releases, 1981 is without a doubt one of my favorite years! How many times did I watch Superman II and Raiders of the Lost Ark on the same day in 1981? I lost count a long time ago!
Scott Mantz: I saw it five times during the summer of ’81.
Dan Madsen: That first year I saw the movie fifteen times!
David C. Fein (producer, Star Trek: The Motion Picture—The Director’s Edition restoration): I stopped counting after twenty-five!
F. Hudson Miller: It was worth it to seek out a cinema with Dolby Stereo. It would have been even more important to search out the 70mm Six-Track screenings. That’s what I did.
Saul Pincus: As a 70mm experience—which I saw at the Imperial in Montreal—Raiders was fantastic and immersive in all the ways you’d expect.
William Kallay: My aunt took me to see Raiders at the AMC Puente Hills Mall [City of Industry, California]. This was a typical AMC theater of the era with a small screen and a single aisle going down the middle of auditorium. AMC in that era was not known for superior theatrical presentations, and the sound that day was unremarkable. Later that summer, my buddy and I rode our bikes from Anaheim Hills to Orange to see Raiders at Cinedome. This theater complex was known for superior 70mm presentations. He had not seen it yet. We got there, bought our tickets and popcorn and got our seat in the huge domed auditorium. This time, I got to see the movie in all of its glory. Seeing and hearing it 70mm Six-Track Dolby Stereo was a huge difference from the Puente Hills showing. The picture quality was clearly superior, and the sound was a remarkable improvement over how I saw it the first time. When Indy took the idol and ran past the poisoned darts flying at him, it felt like we were in that temple with him. And when the boulder rolled down and chased Indy, the theater rumbled, and I felt the subwoofer blasting through my chest. The film came even more alive with every action scene, gut wrenching laugh, and horrified gasp. I leaned over to my buddy and said, “I think I like this better than Star Wars.”
John Wilson (projectionist): I would have run it probably a shade south of 100 times all up. Only film I've ever screened in all formats: a horrendous 20-minute digest on Super 8mm, my 16mm scope print, 35mm of course, and delightfully in 70mm also. I'd add 4K DCP, but that doesn't count!
Don Beelik (Famous Players): I was an usher in 1981 at a 900-seat single-screen Art Deco cinema in Toronto with no doors between the auditorium and lobby. Raiders played six months, five times a day—we all knew every word from the film. It wasn’t healthy! The break room was the only place we could get away from the sound, except the bass (it was a 70mm Six-Track Dolby “baby boom” presentation). Opening week we sold out almost every screening, and we only had ten minutes turnaround between afternoon screenings and fifteen minutes at night (i.e. ten to fifteen minutes to empty, clean, and bring in the next 900 people). In those days we had two to four ushers posted in the auditorium, except for our fifteen-minute break. It was madness!
Nick Coston (Plitt Theatres): I was the manager of the River Oaks in Calumet City, Illinois, during the release of Raiders. Nobody told us we were getting a 70mm print. It just showed up and we had to rush it to the booth. We had an 83-year-old projectionist and ran changeovers. The first show started late because we had to change all the gears on the projector. We used our D-150 lenses and our largest masking setting. What a great picture!
Don Beelik: We found dozens of continuity and visual errors in Raiders [from seeing it so many times]. It was a terrific sound mix and a really great blow-up. The film was run reel-to-reel and it left our cinema without a scratch and hardly any noticeable dust at reel changes. We had great projectionists. The sound was beginning to wear a little thin [by the end of the run]. The sound technicians did some adjustments to our Dolby system to improve the sound a bit as it wore out. Great memories!
Gabriel August Neeb (San Diego historian; contributor, Cinema Treasures): My first memory of Raiders of the Lost Ark is my friend John Carroll in front of his fellow kindergartners talking about a movie where a bunch of soldiers have their faces melted off because they looked into a treasure chest. It sounded scary. Then, what may have been a few weeks later—time moves strangely when you're five—my dad took me to a movie which happened to be Raiders of the Lost Ark. I still have the memories of that long trip from the San Diego coast out to the only place it was playing in the county: the Cinema Grossmont in La Mesa. Two hours later I walked out convinced I'd seen the best movie ever made and I remained resolute in that conviction until I saw Star Trek II and that became the best movie ever made. Quoting lines from it on the playground made me a weird kid (you know which line). Of course, even that fell to the wayside when the best, bestest movie Return of the Jedi opened a year later. Raiders was different. It had just one location—in La Mesa—and it played there for over a year (58 weeks). It was the movie to see in San Diego…until overtaken by another Steven Spielberg movie: E.T. the Extra Terrestrial. Producer Frank Marshall even showed up at the Cinema Grossmont to preside over a cake cutting ceremony celebrating the one year run of Raiders. Now, forty years later, it still has a hold on those thousands of us that remember it. I've seen Raiders many times in the theater. During the 1990s it played at midnight a few times a year at the Mann Plaza [in Los Angeles’ Westwood Village] and I caught a few of those. Yet none quite match that first time when I was five. Now, I'm going to have a drink. You know, a drink?
Charles de Lauzirika: I was a lousy student in junior high and had to go to summer school in a different city in 1981. After school each day, I'd have a few hours to kill before my mom could pick me up after her workday, so I'd go see Raiders at the Alex Theater in Glendale. I can't claim to have seen it every day after school. But I saw it most days. And, honestly, watching Raiders over and over again like that, studying it, absorbing every frame...that, to me, was the best summer school I could imagine.
Bill Hunt (Editor-in-Chief, The Digital Bits): What I remember most about seeing Raiders in a theater, was that it reinforced the idea that a movie-going experience could be something like a roller coaster ride... an experience you’d want to repeat many times. My first brush with that phenomena was Star Wars, obviously, but I guess it didn’t occur to my fourteen-year-old self that a movie not set in space and in the future—or a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away—could be every bit as gripping and engrossing the tenth time as the first. And living as I did in rural North Dakota at the time, I’m certain I saw Raiders in the worst theater possible, yet it still had that effect on me. That’s a testament to the power of cinema.
Eric Lichtenfeld: If you were a kid back then, you could see Indiana Jones, go to sleepaway camp for a month or more, and when you came back, the movie would still be playing. Now, movies are distributed and marketed differently than they used to be. Tentpoles are packaged as huge events that then burn through screens so damn fast. And the market becomes so crowded with these things that a few weeks after one of them opens, it’s like it never even happened.
CHAPTER 18: THE HOME MEDIA EXPERIENCE
Cliff Stephenson: What’s interesting that some people might not know or remember was that (1) Raiders was one of the earliest VHS releases actually priced low enough for people to buy and even then it was $40 (which translates to roughly $110 in 2021) and (2) it actually took Raiders over two years to debut on VHS (December 1983). It played theatrically for over a year (insane to think about now) and then took another year plus before in debuted on videotape. It debuted on video so many years after its theatrical release that the VHS contained the teaser for 1984’s Temple of Doom! A decade later (in 1992) when it finally got released in widescreen on LaserDisc (alongside Temple of Doom) it was one of the greatest home video releases ever to that point. While Last Crusade had been available in widescreen since its home video release in February 1990, Raiders and Temple hadn’t been seen that way for several years outside of an occasional theatrical screening, so their widescreen composition was simply unavailable. Another decade later when the DVD set got released it wasn’t the presentation that was as revolutionary; it was its first release to get special features that elevated that release. But that DVD release is also where we start to get into some of the minor tweaks and revisions with the digital removal of the snake reflection in the Well of Souls. With the subsequent Blu-ray and then this year’s 4K UHD release, it just feels like we’ve been perfecting these presentations and I can’t imagine ever needing another release again.
Saul Pincus: Rare is the film where you don’t find a natural stopping point when watching it for the umpteenth time on home video. Raiders always pulls me in and keeps me pinned for the duration—that’s greatness.
John Scoleri: I have seen Raiders well over one-hundred times in the last forty years. I own the film on every format imaginable: a 400’ UK Super-8 short, 16mm scope feature, RCA VideoDisc, VHS (many iterations), Beta, LaserDisc (again, many iterations—this is the first way I saw it in OAR at home), Japanese VHD, Video CD, Video 8, DVD, Blu-ray, and I am very much looking forward to experiencing in in 4K UHD with Dolby Atmos.
Scott Mantz: Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan was my very first home video purchase. I got it for my 13th birthday! But Raiders was definitely the second, and I distinctly remember the ad in the beginning of the video that they were making a sequel.
Anonymous: Raiders was the first video I ever bought…and didn’t even have a VCR (yet)!
Neil S. Bulk: Raiders was not the first film I had on video. That distinction belongs to Star Wars on CED, which I used to watch every day after school. Raiders on CED was a Hanukkah present I was given later in the year. At the time, my father owned a pharmacy and his home was above it. I was watching my new Raiders CED on his TV, thrilled, when we got to my favorite part, Indy going under the truck. Now here’s something non-CED owners may not know, but the discs would sometimes skip. This was much more prevalent than a vinyl record, and on my favorite part of the movie this disc skipped for the entire shot. Seven-year-old me burst into tears and called my father who was working down in the store. I was devastated. He later exchanged the disc for me, and I watched that regularly.
William Kallay: I do remember my dad forking over $39.99 for the VHS of Raiders at Video Concepts inside the Orange Mall. Most exciting day of my teenage life! Even in pan-and-scan and mono sound on our TV, it was so cool to be able to watch my favorite movie at home.
Bruce Scivally: I saw all of the Indy films on first release in theaters, on a big screen with an audience, the way they should be experienced. The Indiana Jones films are built to entertain a mass audience and work best when seen among the masses. Watching them at home, on a smaller screen, they lose some of their grandeur, and certainly lose that quality of sharing communal laughs and screams and oohs and aahs of wonder. For this reason, I could never see Indy becoming a pedestrian TV series; these films are meant to be savored in a cinema.
Zaki Hasan: There’s no comparison with the theatrical experience, but as someone who watched the films for the first time on VHS, the home viewing experience is almost more baked into the franchise for me than seeing it in theaters (though I did get to watch Raiders on the big screen ten years ago, and it was exactly as transporting as one would hope).
Neil S. Bulk: While I had Raiders on a stereo CED, I only had Temple of Doom on VHS and didn’t have a Hi-Fi VCR, and so the [1992] LaserDisc remasters were a much-appreciated upgrade. Those letterboxed transfers were wonderful and kept me happy for many years.
Tim Bishop (Ken Crane’s LaserDisc): It seemed to me that most people started their LaserDisc collection with an Indiana Jones film. And of course, they started at the beginning. Raiders was a perennial beast of a seller.
David C. Fein: [Little known fact:] the Raiders and Temple of Doom letterbox remasters were one of the first THX LaserDiscs (but weren’t officially marketed as THX discs).
Cliff Stephenson: Laurent Bouzereau’s influence on not just me, but almost all special feature producers, cannot be overstated. His work on 90s LaserDisc releases like Jaws, E.T., Close Encounters, and the DVD work on Conan the Barbarian, and so many others, is really the template for what all of us do now. I remember getting the new Image Preview magazine in 1995 and learning there was going to be a documentary on the making of Jaws that was longer than the film itself. How would that be possible? The retrospective feature-length film documentary is really born in a lot of ways with Laurent’s early LaserDisc work. So, with the 2003 DVD release of the Indiana Jones collection, Laurent’s documentary work on that was, perhaps, the single greatest element of that release. There had been documentaries available prior (Great Movie Stunts and The Making of Raiders of the Lost Ark [were broadcast on TV and were even] released to VHS back in the early 80s), and while those documentaries were great, they were also somewhat promotional as they were usually produced in conjunction with the film’s release. The 2003 DVD set really gave us the first reflective making-of on the series that we had been craving. And remember…these docs were created with the idea that this was a trilogy of films that were done, so these features felt complete. It’s weird to think that forty years after the original film and almost twenty years after those initial DVD special features that people are back to documenting the making of a new Indiana Jones film.
John Scoleri: For my 30th birthday in 2000, my wife and I rented a theater in San Jose to host a private screening of Raiders for our friends and family, and I have hosted anniversary screenings for the 25th in 2006, 30th in 2011, and 35th in 2016. I’m really looking forward to our 4K 40th anniversary screening!
Bill Hunt: With the new 4K UHD release, Raiders simply looks its best now, and better than it’s ever looked before at home by a wide margin. Better still, the new English Dolby Atmos remix, which was supervised by Ben Burtt at Skywalker Sound, is spectacular. Honestly, it’s a joy to finally see the film in this level of quality at home. I think it might actually surprise people who only remember it from previous Blu-ray and DVD viewings. The 4K experience is something of a revelation.
Neil S. Bulk: Sometime in the late 2000s, Raiders aired on the Sci-Fi Channel and someone noticed that a shot was changed and the Internet blew up. The changed shot occurred during the desert chase, when the jeep is falling after being knocked over the cliff. (Before I go on, I should point out that in the novelization Toht is in a vehicle that goes over a cliff, so he dies here instead of having his face melt.) There was nothing wrong with the original shot. It was a terrific matte painting filmed in a realistic manner. The way it was filmed is key to why the replaced CG shot does not work. In the original shot you get the sense the camera is tilting to capture the action of the jeep and Nazis plummeting to their deaths. In the revised CG shot the camera is falling with the action, something that’s at odds with the visual style of Raiders. In 2011, at the 30th anniversary showing of the film at the Samuel Goldwyn Theater, an all-new DCP was screened. Prior to it I asked a friend from Paramount about this shot and he told me it was never supposed to be released and its airing was a mistake.
William Kallay: Despite the great ways we can see Raiders at home on 4K Ultra HD or Blu-ray on huge widescreen televisions or projectors, there is nothing more exciting than seeing Raiders of the Lost Ark with a crowd on a Saturday night in 70mm.
Saul Pincus: Perhaps an interesting footnote to Raiders on home video was that video wasn’t the first appearance of the film on a home format. That honor went to the 400-foot, 16-minute Super-8 digest version that was released though Marketing Film in 1982. I was lucky to own this for a cool $35—but I had to wait nearly a year after I’d placed my order; as I later found out, Lucasfilm was unhappy with the original cut and had it reworked until they were satisfied. The Super-8 version contained the opening idol sequence, the CIA visit, the Cairo street fight, most of the truck sequence, and the climactic opening of the Ark—in color and sound, and amazingly… letterboxed! The ratio was 2:1 (closely mirroring the aspect ratio of the 70mm prints). Your standard VHS or Beta version of (admittedly) the entire film was panned-and-scanned using the pre-motion control reframing gear of the time, which resulted in me avoiding Raiders on VHS or Beta, holding out till 1992 when the letterboxed “Widescreen Edition” LaserDisc made its appearance. Compared to the original Star Wars films, Raiders has been well-treated on Laser, DVD, and Blu-ray; it’s always looked very much like it should—though it’s a much grainier film in spots than the Blu-ray or current DCP would have you believe.
Neil S. Bulk: One more thing about [the jeep going over the cliff]. There was a CAV release of Raiders on LaserDisc. It was 4x3 and, as I’m sure your readers know, CAV discs offered crystal clear frame-by-frame access and slow motion, but they could only hold a maximum of 30 minutes a side and Raiders is 115 minutes. This shot was the end of Side 3, which means there was an interruption during the truck chase. People can argue all day about streaming vs. physical media; I’m happy we don’t have to deal with side breaks anymore.
