Few pictures have been discussed more than the Indiana Jones series, starting with Raiders of the Lost Ark. Like Star Wars, it was a rollicking fun adventure that seemed bigger than life, which was exactly the goal of the filmmakers. But we’re still earning more of the details behind the 1981 movie.
Producer George Lucas first told director Steven Spielberg about his idea for Raiders of the Lost Ark when they were both on vacation in Hawaii in May 1977. Spielberg got away for the weekend from finishing up post-production on his now-classic film Close Encounters of the Third Kind while Lucas wanted to get to anywhere far, far away—Star Wars was coming out that weekend, and he was afraid that the movie would bomb at the box office.
When making films as a kid, Spielberg thought up a phony movie studio he dubbed “Play-Mount Pictures” (a play on Paramount and his name—“Spielberg” roughly translates to “Playmount” in German), and he would try to mimic the famous Paramount logo with natural scenery the best he could. So when he came to direct an actual Paramount motion picture, he thought a similar approach would work with the start of the film; he wanted to have the actual logo dissolve into a real mountain peak. To find a summit that matched the Paramount logo, Spielberg dispatched producer Frank Marshall all over Hawaii where they were shooting the opening scene in order to get the right one. Needless to say they found a picture perfect peak, and the shot lives on as the opening of the film.
There are plenty more stories like these in the mental_floss article 21 Things You Might Not Have Known About Raiders of the Lost Ark. Enjoy some clips, too.