Steven Spielberg (64 page)

Daviau's photographic magic convinced the audience that Rambaldi's alien creature was
not
made of plastic and rubber. “E.T. could not only look sad, but he could look curiously sad,” Spielberg marveled. “Not by the way we controlled E.T. mechanically but by the way Allen shifted light.”

“If you got one iota too much light on him, particularly in the early scenes, it was a disaster,” Daviau explains. “One iota too little, and there was nothing there. So it was all like riding that knife edge; it was very tricky stuff. And the pressure on every department to move so fast! TV schedule–type pressure,
beyond
TV schedule, and yet trying for this incredible, special, magical quality. People go, ‘Oh,
E.T.
—it must have been wonderful.' No, it was hell! It was so nerve-wracking because you didn't have time to reshoot anything, and yet you were riding this knife edge.

“E.T.
was so tough because Steven had made a bet with Universal that he could do this thing for $10 million. [Completing
E.T.
within that budget enabled him to satisfy his obligation for the final remaining film in his 1975 contract with Universal.] In the initial stages, they never expected him to do it. I think they saw how serious he was once he started shooting. He would make speeches to us, ‘This isn't just about money. It's about my freedom. But they'll come after my money, they'll make me pay for any overages. Or I'll have to work for them and do terrible pictures for years.' If he went over on it, oh, he'd owe them! He'd still be doing
Jaws
5
or something.

“I oftentimes say to film students, ‘There are times you do things because you're too dumb to know they can't be done.' One of the great things about Steven is that he demands not just your best, but he demands you do things you don't think you can do. Just because of the way he inspires you to do them, you pull amazing rabbits out of hats. That's what this whole picture was like for every department.”

I
N
the first weeks after the film's release on June 11, 1982, Spielberg personally was earning as much as half a million dollars
per
day
as his share of the profits. He found several new places to plant his money that year. He spent several million dollars on real estate, including a four-acre spread in Long Island's fashionable East Hampton, with a transplanted 1790s Pennsylvania Dutch barn renovated by architect Charles Gwathmey and puckishly
dubbed “Quelle Barn”; a parcel of land in the posh Bel Air section of Los Angeles; and an apartment on the West Side of Manhattan. The week
E.
T.
opened, “Citizen Spielberg” (as he was dubbed in the press) treated himself to one of the original balsa wood “Rosebud” sleds from
Citizen
Kane
(cost at Sotheby's auction: $60,500).

The steady, unrelenting box-office performance of
E.T.
dethroned
Star
Wars
as the record-holder. Spielberg's film played in theaters for an entire year before the studio pulled it from the market for a two-year rest. It was not its revenues but the overwhelming outpouring of emotion
E.
T.
engendered in both young and old alike that made it instantly recognizable as a film classic of the magnitude of
The
Wizard
of Oz
and
It's
a
Wonderful
Life.
Sid Sheinberg and Lew Wasserman flew down to join Spielberg for the first preview in Houston. “That first screening of
E.T.
—I don't think there's ever been an experience like it,” Sheinberg remarked in a 1988 interview. “I surely will never have another one like it in film. I don't think anyone will ever have another one like it in film. It truly was like a religious experience. It must be a little bit like the way people feel if they feel they've seen God.

“The lights go on, and Steven Spielberg is sobbing.”

Describing the film's premiere in May 1982 at the closing-night gala of the Cannes Film Festival, critic Roger Ebert rhapsodized, “This is not simply a good movie. It is one of the rare movies that brush away our cautions and win our hearts…. When the film is over, the audience rises en masse and turns and shouts its approval and cheers Spielberg, who sits in the front row of the balcony and stands up with a silly grin on his face.” Spielberg found the experience “very humbling.”

Not every review of
E.T.
was favorable. Curmudgeonly conservative George F. Will wrote a
Newsweek
column entitled, “Well, I Don't Love You, E.T.,” claiming with a straight face that the movie spread “subversive” notions about childhood and science. But most critics agreed with
Rolling
Stone
's Michael Sragow that Spielberg “shows himself to be a personal artist with all the uncanny intuitive force of a space-age Jean Renoir. Watching this vibrantly comic, boundlessly touching fantasy, you feel that Spielberg has, for the first time, put his breathtaking technical skills at the service of his deepest feelings.”

E.T.
brought its director an unprecedented and somewhat troublesome new level of worldwide fame and adulation. His life story was celebrated and mythologized in countless newspaper and magazine profiles, notably in
Time,
whose lengthy encomium began: “Once upon a time there was a little boy named Steven, who lived in a mythical land called Suburbia …”
**
Many of Spielberg's childhood acquaintances did not know what had become of him until the summer of
E.
T.
Spielberg found he had become so recognizable, at least in New York and Los Angeles, that “I often run into mommies
who immediately throw their six-year-olds at me.” Another unnerving price of success was having to deal with allegations that
E.T.
was plagiarized from an unproduced screenplay,
The
Alien,
by the celebrated Indian director Satyajit Ray, or from the 1978 one-act play
Lokey
from
Maldemar
by Lisa Litchfield, who filed an unsuccessful $750 million lawsuit. “It's the people you've never heard of who crawl out of the woodwork like cockroaches to sue you,” Spielberg commented.

On June 27, 1982, Spielberg was invited to show
E.T.
at the White House to Ronald and Nancy Reagan and a handful of guests, including Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor. “Nancy Reagan was crying toward the end,” Spielberg reported, “and the President looked like a ten-year-old kid.” On September 17, the director showed his film to the staff of the United Nations, where he was introduced by Secretary General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar and received the UN Peace Medal. And on December 9, Spielberg was presented to Queen Elizabeth II at a royal benefit premiere in London, leading
The
Hollywood
Reporter
to quip, “Steven Spielberg may yet be knighted.”

The reflected glory of
E.T.
even made Spielberg's mother a celebrity, when the effervescent Leah appeared on
The
Tonight
Show
to reminisce with Johnny Carson about her son's precocious childhood. E.T. himself appeared on the cover of
Rolling
Stone,
reading a copy of
Variety
bearing the headline
THE SPACEMAN THAT SAVED H'WOOD
. In 1985, Spielberg filed an indignant protest in E.T.'s name after the
Los
Angeles
Times
ran a caricature of the alien as a decadent Hollywood hipster wearing a glittering pinkie ring, with a coke spoon and razor blade dangling from his neck.

The first biographies of Spielberg appeared in the year following
E.T.
's release: British author Tony Crawley's
The
Steven
Spielberg
Story:
The
Man
 Behind
the
Movies
and Tom Collins's children's biography
Steven
Spielberg:
Creator
of
E.T.
††
The
E.T.
marketing blitz also spawned a book of
Letters
to
E.T.,
introduced by Spielberg; a novelization by the noted science-fiction writer William Kotzwinkle,
E.T.
The
Extraterrestrial
in
His
Adventure
on
Earth;
and, for younger readers, Kotzwinkle's illustrated
E.T.
The
Extra
Terrestrial
Storybook.
Each of Kotzwinkle's books sold more than a million copies.

Although Kotzwinkle wrote a 1985 sequel,
E.T.:
The
Book
of
the
Green
Planet,
based on a story by Spielberg, the director has staunchly resisted public and industry pressure to make a filmed sequel, feeling it “would do nothing but rob the original of its virginity.” But Spielberg was tempted enough in July 1982 to write a treatment with Mathison, “E.T. II: Nocturnal
Fears,” in which Elliott and friends are kidnapped by evil extraterrestrials (perhaps refugees from
Night
Skies
)
and must contact E.T. to rescue them. Spielberg also was involved in the planning of Universal Studios' exhilarating
E.T.
ride, a $40 million attraction that opened in 1991. A live-action sequel to the movie, preceded by a filmed introduction by Spielberg and E.T., the ride whisks the audience to E.T.'s planet on flying bicycles.

Spielberg initially said he didn't want to “flood the market” with
E.T.
product tie-ins and that he wanted any products to be designed in the spirit of the film, but MCA/Universal eventually licensed more than two hundred products in a belated attempt to capitalize on the film's unexpected box-office performance. MCA spent more than $2 million pursuing rip-off items, filing more than two hundred lawsuits. Perhaps the most egregious unauthorized product was a recording entitled “I Had Sex with E.T.” Some of the authorized products were in little better taste, ranging from E.T. dolls and costumes to ice cream, chocolate-flavored cereal, and women's undergarments with E.T.'s face stitched on the leg. Reese's Pieces, the candy Elliott uses to lure E.T. out of hiding, saw its business climb by 65 percent after Hershey agreed to spend $1 million for advertising tie-ins.
‡‡
But most companies selling
E.T.
-related products failed to reap the marketing bonanza of the
Star
Wars
films, whose products had grossed an astonishing $1.5 billion by 1982. An “E.T. Earth Center” toy store at Universal Studios closed after only five weeks.

The commercial exploitation of
E.
T.
was so blatant and crass that it began to tarnish many people's images of the movie. “Spielberg—who had personal control over merchandising—turned his film into a toy factory, trivializing the movie almost beyond recognition,” Michael Ventura observed in
L.A. 
Weekly.
“… Gorged with greed, he sells and sells and sells, until the name
E.
T.
no longer conjures a marvelous surprise that uplifted us in a huge dark room, but a lot of dolls and bumper stickers and Michael Jackson records and games and candy bars, all sticky with sentimentality…. It's as though Spielberg needs
not
to believe in these images he creates.”

Nevertheless, all the huckstering failed to discourage the most remarkable aspect of the
E.T.
phenomenon, its widespread embrace as a quasi-religious parable. The spiritual dimension that was only implied in
Close
Encounters
was foregrounded unmistakably in
E.
T.
Stanley Kauffmann's
New
Republic
review dubbed it “The Gospel According to St. Steven.” English professor Al Millar, who published a pamphlet entitled
E.
T
.
—
You
're
More
Than
a
Movie
 Star,
was among those pointing out parallels between Spielberg's creature and Jesus Christ, including the mysterious stranger's arrival in a shed, his glowing heart, power to work miracles, healing touch, spiritual teachings,
persecution by civil authorities, death and resurrection, and climactic ascent into the heavens after bidding farewell to his disciples.
§§

At Christmas 1982, Universal made the religious overtones even more explicit, with ads showing E.T.'s glowing finger touching the hand of a child, evoking Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel image of God's finger touching the hand of Adam. The ad logo read simply, “Peace.” Spielberg seemed somewhat embarrassed by such religiosity, insisting he had not intended
E.
T.
as a spiritual parable. But he admitted that “the only time Melissa and I sort of looked at each other and said, ‘Gee, are we getting into a possibly sticky area here?' was when E.T. is revealed to the boys on the bicycles and he's wearing a white hospital robe and his ‘immaculate heart' is glowing. We looked at each other at that point and said, ‘This might trigger a lot of speculation.' We already knew that his coming back to life was a form of resurrection. But I'm a nice Jewish boy from Phoenix, Arizona. If I ever went to my mother and said, ‘Mom, I've made this movie that's a Christian parable,' what do you think she'd say? She has a kosher restaurant on Pico and Doheny in Los Angeles.”

A
LTHOUGH
he had banished the evil extraterrestrials of
Night
Skies
from his more benign conception of
E.
T.,
Spielberg's fascination with ghoulish morbidity and wanton destructiveness was given free rein in his production of
Poltergeist,
a horror movie about ghosts invading a suburban California tract home built over an Indian burial site. The making of
Polter
geist
overlapped with that of
E.
T.,
and the two films were released virtually simultaneously in the summer of 1982.