Betcha can't wait for that Indiana Jones sequel this summer, when we find out if the years and mileage have been kind to Harrison Ford.

You can recall Indy as a younger man --?? actually, a middle-school kid -- at the third annual Sunscreen Film Festival, held March 19-22 in St. Petersburg.

In 1982, three Mississippi preteen boys were so enthralled by Raiders of the Lost Ark that they decided to remake it, shot-by-shot using a rented video camera, makeshift props and a lot of spunk. They were voting age when they finished.

Steven Spielberg spent a year and $26-million making Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Eric Zala, Jayson Lamb and Chris Strompolos did it for $5,000 during seven summer vacations.

Zala, now 37, directed the remake and played Belloq the bad guy. Heâ??ll explain how it all happened at two Sunscreen showings of Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation on March 21 and 22. Details and tickets for those events and others are available on the festival Web site.

"??It'??s very cool to have the best parts of your childhood set in order to John Williams'?? music,"?? said Zala by telephone from Washington, D.C. where his movie was being shown at the Smithsonian Institution.

That's a better gig than the Coca-Cola bottling plant where the remake played once in 1989 to 200 friends and family members before being stashed it away for 15 years. Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation resurfaced at an Austin, Tex. film festival in 2003 when director Eli Roth (Hostel) brought a VHS copy and suggested it as a time-filler.

Zala told me a karmically amusing story about the projector breaking down shortly before an advance screening of The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, making a sold-out audience antsy. Someone plugged in Rothâ??s copy for amusement.
The crowd warmed to it, even booed when the projector was fixed, stopping the video tape before they could see Strompolos mimic Indy'??s famous truck-chase fight.

"That'??s the highest compliment I can think of," Zala said.

Check Friday's Floridian for, as Paul Harvey says, the rest of the story.