How A Raiders Of The Lost Ark Pilot Wound Up Saving Jurassic Park's Cast And Crew
At the beginning of Steven Spielberg's 1981 adventure film "Raiders of the Lost Ark," Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford) escapes from a jungle-bound ancient temple having just escaped spiders, darts, moving stone doors, a near-plummet into a pit, and a massive rolling boulder. To make matters worse, Indy didn't even get to keep the golden Chachapoyan fertility idol that he had plundered from inside, reluctantly handing it over to a greedy rival (Paul Freeman) backed by an army of armed locals. Indy manages to slip away and, once again, just barely escapes peril as the locals fire arrows and poison darts at him. He barely manages to make it back to a seaplane in a nearby river, where his pilot Jock (Fred Sorenson) flies him to safety.
Ah, but the peril isn't quite over. Indy notices that there's a snake in his passenger seat. Jock assures Indy that it's just his pet snake, Reggie. Indy screams that he hates snakes. "C'mon," Jock shoots back, "show a little backbone, will ya?" The film's introductory sequence ends with a winking joke about Indy's bravery. It's one golden moment in a film full of them.
It turns out that Sorenson was hired for "Raiders" because he is a professional pilot who could actually fly a plane. Jock is Sorenson's only acting credit, and after his scenes wrapped, he moved back to a career as a commercial airline pilot. It seems, however, that his piloting career caused his path to once again cross with Spielberg's. According to a 2013 oral history of "Jurassic Park" conducted by Entertainment Weekly, Sorenson and "Jurassic" producer Kathleen Kennedy literally crossed paths when Spielberg and the crew of his film were stranded on the island of Kauai. Like he did with Indy, Sorenson flew Spielberg to safety.
Hurricane Iniki made flying out of Kauai difficult
While filming "Jurassic Park," Steven Spielberg recalled being awakened at 4 a.m. at his hotel to news that Hurricane Iniki — then the largest in Hawai'ian history, was bearing down on his location. Actor Sam Neill recalled he and the rest of the cast having to hide in the ballroom of the Hawai'ian hotel, waiting for the storm to strike. Everyone was a little nervous. Spielberg recalled his producer taking action, going by foot to the local airport to see if a flight away from the storm could be hastily arranged.
And who should be in Kauai at that moment, but Fred Sorenson. The pilot recognized the producer. As Spielberg told EW:
"Kathy Kennedy jogged to the airport. She found some guy about to leave on a small private single-engine aircraft. She hitchhiked her way to Honolulu and she was trying to find a plane that could get our crew and cast back to Los Angeles. She bumped into this guy she kind of recognized and she walked over to the guy and said, 'Don't I know you?' and he said, 'Hi Kathy.' It was the young man that flew the biplane in 'Raiders of the Lost Ark.'"
Quite a coincidence. Sorenson's presence on Kauai had nothing to do with the production of "Jurassic Park," and his cargo plane wasn't delivering film supplies. It was just one of those wild-chance meetings. So, yes, Spielberg and his crew were, it seems, going to be rescued by one of his former actors, arguably the deliverer of the first laugh line in "Raiders of the Lost Ark."
A cinematic coincidence for Kathy Kennedy
It was poetry beyond belief, Steven Spielberg thought, that a rescue pilot from one of his movies should be ... a rescue pilot. It seems that Fred Sorenson was able to, within 24 hours, cart the director and the rest of the "Jurassic" crew to safety. As Spielberg said:
"He was the pilot that was in our movie and he just happened to be a pilot of a four-engine 707, a cargo plane and he was between flights. So Kathy arranged with him to send a large plane to the island the next day to take the cast and crew out. It's once again something else that seems to only happen in the movies. And when things like that happen in the movies, the audience rejects that!"
It remains unclear if Spielberg or any of the crew displayed any moments of fear or trepidation, but if I were Sorenson, I would easily have taken the opportunity to yell "Show a little backbone, will ya?!" to anyone who might be panicking.
Sorenson didn't do any more film acting after "Raiders of the Lost Ark," but Jock has popped up in a few pieces of expanded universe lore. At Disney Springs in Florida, one can grab a drink at Jock Lindsay's Hangar Bar which serves bar food and some rather heavy-looking cocktails. They also serve a flight of beers touted as Jock's brews. It seems Jock was a well-fed man with a taste for beer. The bar also claims that Jock was a member of a secret society called the Society of Explorers and Adventurers. Sadly, this mysterious Society is not mentioned in any of the extant Indy films.