20 Things You Somehow Missed In Raiders Of The Lost Ark
1. The Warehouse Is A Painting
A successful movie ideally needs to have an ending that truly lingers with you long after the film is over. Citizen Kane showed the sled, Rosebud being burnt in an incinerator; Psycho had the blink-and-you'll-miss-it skull shot superimposed over Anthony Perkins's face, and Planet of the Apes showed Taylor despairing in front of a shattered, half-sunken Statue of Liberty.
In a nod to Citizen Kane's poignant ending, Spielberg showed the Ark of the Covenant being locked in a crate, given a military designation, and stored away in a sprawling warehouse, demonstrating that all of Indy's efforts were purely to get one over on the Nazis, and nothing more.
It is a truly classic ending and one that was expanded upon in the 2008 sequel, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, showing us that the warehouse is, in fact, "Hangar 51" in the middle of the Nevada Desert, where the U.S. government conceals all of the highly prized artefacts that it has recovered. The Ark of the Covenant also makes a fleeting appearance in that film, too.
However, in Raiders of the Lost Ark, the warehouse itself was almost entirely non-existent, as it was a highly-detailed matte painting designed to create the illusion that the warehouseman was wheeling the Ark through a seemingly endless stack of crates.
Art director, Michael Pangrazio spent three months painting the wider warehouse interior onto glass, leaving an empty space so that a live action actor could push a cart holding the Ark to create the illusion that this was another real-life location.