Remember the pilot who whisks Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford) away from the Hovitos at the beginning of Raiders of the Lost Ark?
Well, it turns out the only fictional thing about Jock was his pet snake Reggie.
The guy who played him, Fred Sorenson, is a legitimate airman and while he never acted in another movie after Raiders, he did end up crossing paths with Steven Spielberg a decade later during the production of Jurassic Park in September 1992.
The dino-centric blockbuster had just one day left before wrapping the Hawaiian leg of filming on Kauai when life eerily imitated art. Category 4 Hurricane Iniki swept over the island, leaving death and destruction in its wake.
Similar to John Hammond, the well-oiled and seemingly invulnerable Hollywood machine found itself humbled by nature's entropic impulses. Hundreds of millions of dollars mean zilch in 227 mile per hour winds.
The military immediately imposed martial law, meaning any non-essential individuals, which included Spielberg and the rest of the cast and crew, were forbidden to leave the island. And that's where they would have indefinitely stayed, unable to continue shooting, if resourceful producer Kathleen Kennedy didn't finagle her way onto an Honolulu-bound plane that had just dropped off a Salvation Army group on Kauai.
How Raiders of the Lost Ark pilot rescued Jurassic Park cast and crew
Once back on the Big Island, Kennedy attempted to mobilize a studio jet she'd set up prior to the storm just in case. But it seemed an impossible task, given that other post-hurricane business understandably took priority over the inconveniences of a big-budget film crew. As she feverishly made calls at Honolulu International Airport, the producer realized she was being watched by a pilot from Hawaiian Airlines.
"He walked over to me and goes, 'Do you recognize me?'" Kennedy recalled in James Mottram's Jurassic Park: The Ultimate Visual History. "I said, 'No.' And he said, 'Well, I couldn't help but overhear your phone call.' And I'm thinking, 'Oh god, he's a fan!' And I'm exhausted because I've been up all day. And he says, 'Does the line "That's my pet snake, Reggie," mean anything to you?'"
It was none other than Fred Sorenson, who had been tasked with flying medical personnel and supplies in and out of Kauai.
Thanks to his familiarity with the airport, the two located the Universal jet and worked out a deal with the National Guard. The studio aircraft could land in the disaster zone to pick up the cast and crew before taking them back to Los Angeles if the production agreed to transport emergency medical responders on the way there. Moreover, Sorenson convinced Hawaiian Airlines to lend one of its DC-8 jetliners to the Jurassic Park evacuation plan, which took just 48 hours to complete.
On the way back to L.A., Kennedy remembered, Sorenson appropriately began "singing the theme to Raiders of the Lost Ark!"
Recalled set costumer Mitchell Kenney, "When the plane took off, we all cheered."
A smaller crew returned to the island of Oahu several weeks later to film the sequence where Alan Grant (Sam Neill), Lex (Ariana Richards) and Tim (Joseph Mazzello) evade the stampeding herd of Gallimimus. Ironically, the pivot forced by the hurricane turned out to be a stroke of luck.
"The location in Oahu was spectacular—much better than the one in Kauai," said Dennis Muren, a member of ILM's visual effects team. "There were dramatic lifts, with a narrow valley between them, whereas the other location had been an empty plain."
