E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial

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E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial

Released in 1981, Steven Spielberg's E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial touched the emotions and the collective imagination of moviegoers of all ages, breaking all previous box-office records to become the most profitable film of its time until it was ousted by Spielberg's own Jurassic Park 12 years later. Exciting, moving, thought-provoking and funny, as well as inventive and skillful, the film's importance, however, transcends that of box-office success or entertainment value.

Made and released early in the Reagan years, E.T. exemplified a shift in America's cultural values after the 1960s and 1970s, during which the Vietnam War, the Watergate scandals, and the Iran hostage crisis had convulsed the nation. The emergence, too, of the new youth culture that had accompanied these turbulent decades, had manifested itself in a new cinema that began with Easy Rider in 1969. With the onset of the 1980s, Americans were seeking reconciliation and a reassertion of family values. The perceived message of the times, albeit clothed in political conservatism, was one of hope, love, and nostalgia for a gentler past, which was faithfully reflected in the majority of Hollywood movies.

Thus it was that Spielberg's film proved timely to its age, reflecting the spirit and values that were being so eagerly sought by a troubled nation, and thereby appealing to adults and children alike. The expertise and imagination with which it was made, however, gave it lasting properties well beyond the 1980s and has made it a favorite film of audiences throughout the world. Indeed, it might be seen as serving the same purpose and exerting the same degree of magic as the perennially beloved Wizard of Oz (1939), although it is a product of the technological age in both its vision and its realization.

Considered at the time to be Steven Spielberg's masterpiece, and undoubtedly his most personal film, this story set in middle-class suburbia grew out of the director's own lonely childhood in Scottsdale, Arizona, the son of a father who left the family home. He has said, "I use my childhood in all my pictures, and all the time. I go back there to find ideas and stories. My childhood was the most fruitful part of my entire life. All those horrible, traumatic years I spent as a kid became what I do for a living today, or what I draw from creatively today." E.T. was the culmination of several ideas that had germinated, been explored, and even filmed, over a number of years. One of Spielberg's major contributions to late-twentieth-century culture is the concept of the benign alien. Virtually all previous science fiction films grew out of fears of invasion, war, and the threat of nuclear annihilation that loomed large during the Cold War years. It was posited that aliens with the technology to reach Earth would also have the technology to unleash incredible destruction; and these fears were reflected in stories of invasion, aggression, colonization, and extermination. In Spielberg's mind, however, "Comics and TV always portrayed aliens as malevolent [but] I never believed that. If they had the technology to get here, they could only be benign."

His first creative expression of this concept resulted in one of the most profoundly searching and brilliantly executed films of the century, Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), at the end of which an alien creature steps off the ship—allowing Spielberg the opportunity to create and show an alien, even though the scene lasted only a half minute or so. Then, in 1979, after dreaming up an idea he called "Night Skies," a tale about 11 aliens terrorizing a farm family, he put the project into development at Columbia and turned it over to writer/director John Sayles to flesh out the script. Sayles made a number of changes that included the introduction of a friendly alien who befriends an autistic child, and ended his script with the kindly alien being stranded on Earth. This last scene became the first scene of E.T., though Sayles never pursued screen credit, considering his script "more of a jumping-off point than something that was raided for material."

In 1980, while filming Raiders of the Lost Ark on location in Tunisia, Spielberg was turning over the idea of following Raiders with a simpler, more personal project. Looking for someone as a sounding board for his idea of an interplanetary love story, he turned to Harrison Ford's girlfriend, screenwriter Melissa Mathison, who had accompanied Ford to Tunisia. Mathison subsequently said the story was already half-created in Spielberg's mind, but she spent weeks pitching ideas back and forth with him for both the story and for the creature's visual image. Among other things, they decided that the creature's neck should elongate like a turtle's, so that the audience would instantly know that they were not watching an actor in costume, while Spielberg knew that he wanted the creature's communication to rest in emotion rather than intellect.

Back in the United States, while Spielberg edited Raiders, Mathison began writing the screenplay in earnest. An earlier version depicted E.T. as an interplanetary botanist stranded on Earth, at first more empathetic with plants than animals, and discussing with artichokes and tomatoes whether he should make contact with the humans. He finally does so by rolling an orange toward the boy Elliott's feet. In the hours spent by Spielberg and Mathison discussing changes, the orange became a baseball. Spielberg went to Columbia, which had already spent $1 million in development of "Night Skies" and offered them E.T. instead, but the studio, perceiving the idea as a children's picture with only limited commercial potential, said no. Universal was interested, but Columbia, because of their investment in "Night Skies," retained the rights to the property and refused to co-produce with Universal. They finally relinquished the rights in exchange for five percent of the net profits, and earned a fortune. (Spielberg, meanwhile, also convinced MGM to produce "Night Skies" which, after extensive rewrites to distance its subject matter from E.T., became director Tobe Hooper's Poltergeist, 1982).

The storyline of E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial is simple enough: One night, in the woods behind a hillside development of split-level homes, a spacecraft lands, disgorging a group of strange little creatures who shuffle off into the night until the appearance of humans—menacing from their point of view—forces them to re-enter their craft and take off, with one of their number left behind. The terrified creature hides out in a back yard, and is found by Elliott, the youngest boy of the family and a child at once sensitive, bold, and canny. They form a close friendship, communicating largely through instinctive understanding (E.T. has telepathic powers), which ends when Elliott becomes sadly aware that the creature wants to go home. Within this plot, Spielberg unfolds an empathetic tale of love and sympathy, pitted against fear and suspicion. The characterizations, including those of Elliott's mother (Dee Wallace), his siblings (Drew Barrymore, Robert MacNaughton), and an initially menacing authority figure played by Peter Coyote, are richly three-dimensional. But the high ground is shared between Henry Thomas' enchanting, fatherless Elliott, and the bizarre little alien, an Oscar-winning triumph of imagination, created and made by artist Carlo Rambaldi in accordance with Spielberg's humane vision.

More than one creature was built: there was a mechanically controlled version for scenes requiring large body movements, one with electronic controls for subtler articulation, and another to contain an actor (one of three used for the purpose) for the few scenes where E.T. has to lurch across the floor. Commentators have drawn parallels between E.T. and Christ, pointing to, among other aspects, the creature's arrival, his healing touch, his persecution by civil authorities, and his ascension into the heavens. Spielberg gave E.T. an appearance "only a mother could love," then wisely made him as afraid of Earthlings as they are of him, disarming Americans in particular, conditioned by years of Cold War sci-fi films to fear extraterrestrials. Interestingly, unlike the main character in Close Encounters, Elliott does not heed E.T.'s request, "Come," but chooses to stay behind with his family, perhaps reflecting Spielberg's own maturity and sense of responsibility. At the end, to lessen the pain of E.T.'s departure, Coyote's character, Keys, is subtly transformed from the antagonist to a possible new father, linked in two-shots with Elliott's mother as they watch the spaceship fly off.

The logistics, statistics, and tales both apocryphal and accurate surrounding the genesis and the making of E.T. have been frequently recounted in books and articles, but its importance lies in the finished product and the response it evoked, and continues to evoke, in all who see it. There is not a dry eye in the house at the film's climax, but the message is one of hope, within which is a serious subtext (shared by Close Encounters) that aims to defuse our nameless and parochial fears of "otherness." The film embodies its director's excursion into the wishes, dreams, and fantasies of his own past; but, significantly, that excursion brought audiences a return to innocence, love, and faith within a realistic contemporary social context.

With rare exceptions, the film, originally unveiled at the Cannes Film Festival, collected only superlatives from reviewers, and grossed millions for Spielberg personally, as well as for Universal studios. When the Academy Awards came around, E.T. lost out to Gandhi, but by the end of the twentieth century had become established as an acknowledged classic of the cinema.

—Bob Sullivan