Indiana Jones' Producer Had To Fill In For A Raiders Of The Lost Ark Stunt

Great directors are often like football quarterbacks facing a full-scale blitz. They get to set, find out their meticulous planning has been undermined by multiple overnight catastrophes, and have to call a myriad of audibles in order to make their budgeted day.

This is especially difficult when you're making a mega-budget movie with carefully choreographed action set pieces. There are trucks and trains and a bevy of explosions to coordinate. Your first assistant director has their hands full making sure the entire crew is on the same page as the stunt folks prepare to execute a practically staged set piece that will leave moviegoers wondering how they pulled it off without getting anyone killed. At a studio filmmaking level, you're dealing with the best of the best, but the human element is always a factor.

And when Steven Spielberg was filming "Raiders of the Lost Ark" in 1981, he found himself in a position where his plucky producing partner had to throw on a costume and power the shoot through an unexpectedly rough day.

"Raiders of the Lost Ark" is a marvel of nonstop action — at least, once it gets past the wordy, yet expertly shot lecture hall exposition dump that sets up the entire movie. Harrison Ford's knockabout archaeologist Indiana Jones hurtles himself all over the globe in an effort to foil Hitler's quest to obtain the Ark of the Covenant. The production had to keep pace, lest Spielberg, reeling from the critical failure and commercial disappointment of "1941," fall behind schedule and further tarnish his wunderkind reputation.

This was acutely true when it came time to shoot Indy's brilliantly orchestrated fistfight with a Nazi muscleman (Pat Roach) as a German warplane taxis out of control on a makeshift Cairo runway. According to producer Frank Marshall, who, as a director, would go on to creep out moviegoers with "Arachnophobia" and insert-your-reaction-here with "Congo," this day threatened to go sideways.

As Marhsall told documentarian Laurent Bouzreau, "On the morning we were starting the sequence, all of the stuntmen were sick. They were at the hotel, and we didn't have anybody to play the flying wing pilot." Absent workable options, Spielberg turned to Marshall:

"'Frank, put on the outfit, get in the cockpit.' I thought, 'Oh, this will be fun.' Little did I know this was three days in a jumpsuit in a cockpit that was about 140 degrees. Maybe the stuntmen were sick on purpose that day."

Or maybe they were resting up for the subsequent truck chase that is as close to a gold standard for Hollywood stunt work as you'll ever see. In any event, Marshall did pretty well in that cockpit, and is still very much "Alive." Sadly, we've yet to shake the Nazis.