Damon Lindelof Writes A Love Letter To 'Raiders Of The Lost Ark'

"True love is hard to find. Sometimes you think you have true love and then you catch the early flight home from San Diego and a couple of nude people jump out of your bathroom, blindfolded, like a goddamn magic show." And while that second sentence has nothing to do with the rest of this article (it's just one of my favorites, two points if you get the reference) the first one does. True love IS hard to find. We look for it in another person. We look for it in our daily lives and, as film fans, we look for it in movies. And though we see a lot of movies we really like, only a precious will hear the "L" word.

For most of us, Steven Spielberg's 1981 masterpiece Raiders of the Lost Ark fits the bill. It's become the quintessential adventure movie of our time and not only spawned two (okay, three) sequels, but innumerable copycats both in and out of the adventure genre. Most of us would call it perfect and, time and time again, Raiders solidifies that claim.

Lost co-creator and Prometheus/Star Trek screenwriter Damon Lindelof would agree and, in celebration of an upcoming 30th anniversary screening of Raiders, he's penned a high-school-type love letter to the movie as if it was a person. He makes some great points and even pees his pants. Read an excerpt after the jump.

Lindelof completed this assignment for the Los Angeles Times Hero Complex, who is hosting an already sold out screening of Raiders September 12 with Steven Spielberg in attendance. Here's just a sample of Lindelof's love letter, we urge you to head over there and read it in full.

I love you because Indiana Jones is a nerd. Granted, a highly capable nerd who knows how to ride horses and fight real good, but still, at his core, Indy is an academic who's motivated purely by his desire to find and retrieve really cool stuff so he can put it in a museum where other nerds can appreciate it. Also, he wears glasses and gets nervous when hot female students write the words "Love You" on their eyelids. Do you have any idea how much commitment is involved in writing "Love You" on your eyelids? It's really hard! Not that I've ever done it.

Because I haven't.

And while we're on the subject of Dr. Jones, here's another thing I love about him. He's actually scared of stuff. This doesn't seem like something that should be celebrated, but it's actually quite rare for the hero of a movie to be scared of anything. Do you know what Green Lantern is afraid of? Fear. He is afraid of being afraid. Does that even make sense? Here's what makes sense to be afraid of — Hissing Cobras and Gigantic Bald Nazis with mustaches trying to kill you. And it was perfectly OK for me to be scared of them because Indy was too.

That's just a taste. Lindelof also admits he peed in his pants the first time he saw the film, talks about some of its memorable minutia, the originality of the ending and the power of the final shot. Head over to the Hero Complex to read it all.