1982
DIRECTOR: STEVEN SPIELBERG PRODUCERS: STEVEN SPIELBERG AND KATHLEEN KENNEDY SCREENPLAY: MELISSA MATHISON STARRING: DEE WALLACE (MARY), HENRY THOMAS (ELLIOTT), PETER COYOTE (KEYS), ROBERT MACNAUGHTON (MICHAEL), DREW BARRYMORE (GERTIE), K. C. MARTEL (GREG), SEAN FRYE (STEVE), C. THOMAS HOWELL (TYLER)
E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial
UNIVERSAL • COLOR, 115 MINUTES
A boy from a broken suburban home befriends a stranded extraterrestrial and helps the creature return to his planet.
While Steven Spielberg was shooting the spaceship-landing scene in Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), he got the idea for a sequel. “I had this image that there should be one surviving alien,” the director said, “walking away alone and afraid. What I really wanted to do was a movie about that little guy who was left behind.” Spielberg also longed to make a small, personal film about children of divorce growing up in the suburbs. When he merged the two concepts into one, the result was perhaps the most endearing science-fiction movie of all time—E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial.
The film’s story couldn’t be simpler. It’s essentially a boy-and-his-dog tale in the mold of Disney’s Old Yeller (1957), but instead of a dog, the boy adopts a stray alien. “We worked out a plot line in five minutes,” recalled Melissa Mathison, who wrote the script for Spielberg. “The spaceman gets stranded, he’s found by kids who keep him in a closet. Then he gets sick. Then he gets well.” But the deceptively simple story accomplished an incredible feat: it injected heart into the often cold universe of science fiction, giving audiences a much-needed dose of warmth.
Through the eyes of ten-year-old Henry Thomas as Elliott, Spielberg conjures a suburban fantasy seen from a child’s perspective. Every adult except Elliott’s mom (Dee Wallace)—and, later, Peter Coyote’s kind government agent Keys—is obscured by shadows or viewed from the waist down. Only Elliott’s brother and his little sister, Gertie, played by Drew Barrymore, are in on the secret of the “man from the moon” in the closet. At six, Barrymore knew her extraterrestrial costar was not really alive, but saw him as a kind of “guardian angel,” she said. At the film’s twentieth-anniversary reunion in 2002, the actress remembered E.T. as “one of the first, most important friends of my life.” Even grown-up Dee Wallace was consumed by the magic. “I truly never thought of E.T. as a puppet,” Wallace said. “He was very real to all of us.”
E.T. and Drew Barrymore
E.T. boards the spaceship for home.
Peter Coyote and Dee Wallace
Carlo Rambaldi crafted an engineering miracle with his highly expressive E.T. creation. Spielberg asked Rambaldi to use photos of Albert Einstein, Ernest Hemingway, and Carl Sandburg to design the creature’s large, soulful eyes, though Rambaldi claims he modeled the eyes after those of his Himalayan cat. Like a cat, E.T. emits a comforting purr—along with an entire vocabulary of burbles, grunts, and hums—until he picks up a smattering of English. When formulating a plan to contact his home planet, the alien utters one of the most famous lines in movie history: “E.T. phone home.”
Cinematographer Allen Daviau enhanced E.T’s authenticity by using tiny key-lights and foil reflectors, part of an overall mellow, naturalistic lighting scheme. With golden lamps and sunlit windows, Daviau transformed the kids’ bedrooms and walk-in closets into luminous worlds of their own, with enough deep shadows to suggest danger. The story is not all sweetness and light; when the alien’s health fades and the government invades Elliott’s sanctuary, the fantasy becomes a nightmare. The visible span of darkness and light within each scene mirrors the story’s broad range of joy, laughter, thrills, and tears.
Steven Spielberg with E.T.
In Spielberg’s eyes, he had made a small, intimate film. But the fifteen-minute standing ovation it received at its first public screening (at the 1982 Cannes Film Festival) hinted at something much bigger. In fact, his fairy tale about a friendly alien became the phenomenon of the decade, warming the hearts of millions and touching even the most jaded critics. New Yorker reviewer Pauline Kael gushed that the tears viewers shed were “tokens of gratitude for the spell the picture has put on the audience.” Rolling Stone hailed it as “the most moving science-fiction movie ever made,” and Gene Siskel theorized, “I think the secret of the film’s success is that it supplies a quality that has been missing from most American movies of late: the emotion of love.”
The box-office triumph was followed by a merchandising frenzy and a wave of copycat movies about adorable aliens or robots, including Gremlins (1985), Short Circuit (1986), and Mac and Me (1988). But beneath all the hype and imitations, a classic film remains. For a motion picture that stars a special effect, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial connects with viewers on a deeply authentic level. It portrays a bond of understanding that transcends barriers of culture, language, and even species. Most of all, it’s about the power of believing. Elliott expresses this simply and perfectly when he says good-bye to E.T., assuring him, “I’ll believe in you all my life.”
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