“E.T.” Turns Thirty

The thirtieth-anniversary edition of “E.T., the Extra-Terrestrial ” is in theatres tonight and out on Blu-ray next Tuesday, and Steven Spielberg’s masterpiece about the audacity of empathy hasn’t lost a speck of its humor, emotion, or mystery. It’s even acquired a new sheen: when Spielberg supervised the film’s twentieth-anniversary edition, he foolishly erased shotguns from the hands of threatening federal agents in the climactic chase scene (he replaced the firearms with walkie-talkies); he also substituted the word “hippies” for the word “terrorists” in a comical Halloween sequence. These moves were high-minded—and misguided. What’s wonderful about “E.T.” in its original 1982 version—the one that’s lovingly restored here—is how it captures American childhood before the social-political catastrophes, technological revolutions, and pop-psychology manias of the last thirty years. This movie salutes the buried treasures and rough edges of suburbia at its peak (the setting combines the arid canyon suburbs of southern California with the lush redwood forests of northern California). And it expresses the all-American belief in the power of every individual to surprise you—even if he’s an inscrutable alien.

Spielberg and his screenwriter, Melissa Mathison, don’t over-explain anyone, including the squat, splayfooted title character with the elevator neck and the stoned-on-life big eyes. E.T. is simply stranded when he’s separated from the rest of his Earth-exploration team by some menacing adult alien-hunters, led by a fellow with an ominous, jangling set of keys (who much later is revealed to have the ruggedly humane face of Peter Coyote). When ten-year-old Elliott (Henry Thomas) lures the little guy into his suburban California house and swears to secrecy his five-year-old sister Gertie (Drew Barrymore) and his fourteen-year-old brother Michael (Robert MacNaughton), there’s no danger that they’ll take and transmit photos of the creature on their cell phones or post them on Facebook.

And, blessedly, there isn’t a hint of psychobabble to the film’s treatment of Elliott’s plight as a middle child in a family whose father has gone to live with someone named Sally. “E.T.” is rooted in the kind of secret garden of the imagination that sensitive children like Elliott of every generation can create—even in a cluttered, toy-laden boy’s room in an unremarkable middle-class development. There’s now a fairy-tale glow to the most mundane details, from the big square push-button telephone that helps put the thought of phoning home into E.T.’s head, to the old-fashioned atlas and desk globe that Elliott uses to show E.T. where he is on Earth. It’s a movingly analogue, even handmade film. E.T. himself is a miracle of Carlo Rambaldi’s puppetry, not C.G.I., and the central component of the device that E.T. creates to send homing signals to his fellow aliens looks like nothing more complex than a turntable.

In his earlier “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” Spielberg fed off the scientific fervor that was the flip, positive side of the nuclear age for millions of sci-fi-crazy baby boomers. The movie, alternately earnest and mischievous, built to a mystical crescendo; one ganja-saturated friend I saw it with in 1977 stood up as Spielberg’s Everyman hero entered the Mother Ship and bawled, “Take me, too!” In “E.T.,” science without feeling and technology without humanistic purpose are the enemies. Spielberg has always described the movie as partly a “Close Encounters” spinoff, partly an expression of his reaction as a teen-ager to his parents’ divorce.

But the movie is adult as well as childlike in its fearlessness; it’s an excitingly daring and outward-looking movie, and not simply a glorified boy-and-his dog film. E.T. isn’t Elliott’s pet. The boy moves from being E.T.’s protector to being his psychic double. Spielberg and Mathison subtly build the way E.T. and Elliott become joined at the heart, until he senses and experiences what the alien does. It’s a device often used for queasy scares in pulp stories about twins. Here it becomes a way of deriving comedy, suspense, and an unpretentious sort of uplift from Elliott’s invigorating faith in his friend.

The movie never becomes entranced with its own sensitivity. In the extras, Spielberg says that if he were depicting his own childhood home it would have been more raucous. But the movie is just rowdy enough—as a director he’s still keen to the way each sibling carves out his or her own space. Barrymore’s Gertie has a hilarious blitheness and precocity; she calls her mom “Mary” as if they’re buddies. MacNaughton’s Michael boasts a touching-funny combination of budding maturity and goofiness. And Thomas, with the filmmakers’ help, makes Elliott’s earnest, melancholy character vibrant and unpredictable. He’s got the most uproarious retort in the movie—“It was nothing like that, penis-breath!” This is a tender film that bristles with slapstick and keen observation. What Disney movie of that era would have shown one of Michael’s adolescent friends reaching out to touch Mary’s rear end?

Spielberg bonded with his actors on “Jaws” while the shoot stretched out and the mechanical shark wouldn’t work. During “E.T.” he bonded with them as a father during a prolonged playtime. He shot the movie quietly, under the title “A Boy’s Life”; even Spielberg thought it would attract merely the family-movie audience. Under those circumstances, he did his most engaged and relaxed work. A key creative partner was Mathison, who not only wrote the script but also came on board as an associate producer with a special knack for monitoring and rehearsing the kids.

When I swapped e-mails with Mathison last week, I cited the example of her on “E.T.” and Carl Gottlieb on “Jaws,” and wondered why Spielberg thrived with having his writer around during shooting. “The writer’s specialty on set is holding the entire script in her head,” she wrote. For the director she was a “willing sounding-board to bounce future changes off of” without “cannibalizing other scenes.” But when it came to improvisations, “Steven did it with his actors. Best for the writer to stay out of the way at that point—on set, improvisation is personal, between actor and director.” One example: “Gertie improvising ‘Give me a break!’ after Elliot tells her only little kids can see E.T. I’m not sure if Steven urged her, steered her, or just lapped up the joy of Drew’s wackiness. It was sweet.”

Spielberg has always said he sought Mathison out because he loved Carroll Ballard’s “The Black Stallion,” which she also wrote, and found her easy to talk to on the set of “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” (Mathison was involved with Harrison Ford.) Actually, Mathison says, “I think [producer] Kathy Kennedy loved ‘The Black Stallion’ more; she suggested me to Steven. I was around—my boyfriend/husband was Indiana Jones—and Steven and I always enjoyed our talks.” When it came to fleshing out the story, “No one ‘channels’ Steven…. Steven is very precise with story, plot, and action—there’s no need at guessing his point of view. ‘E.T.’ was entirely imaginative. Steven and I shared our imagination on this story; we both brought our own memories and strengths. In 1982 I was not yet a parent, but was a stepmother, and had been a consummate babysitter and an older sister. The kids in ‘E.T.’ can be directly linked to kids I knew. I even stole some of my little friends’ best lines: i.e. ‘penis breath.’ What adult woman could have thought of that?”

Mathison’s spare but impressive résumé also includes the script to Martin Scorsese’s bio-pic of the fourteenth Dalai Lama, “Kundun.” Of the three directors she considers Ballard the most purely visual: “There would have been absolutely no words in ‘The Black Stallion’ if he could have managed it. The meaning and feeling had to be in the picture—more photograph than moving picture. He taught me how to frame an idea and an emotional intent in a description. He is a uniquely eloquent visual artist.

“Both Spielberg and Scorsese are more verbal; Marty talks about span and Steven talks about moment…. In story meetings Scorsese would ask me, ‘So, what’s the shot?’ Terrifying! He didn’t need my advice; he was trying to construct his movie in his head and needed to know if moving the camera a certain way around the Dalai Lama’s house would not only incorporate all those nagging exposition points, but be culturally accurate and true for character.

“Steven would be more about the moment—what is the impression? What’s going on in the theatre seats? If E.T. is coming through the corn stalks, is it funny or scary or thrilling? Choose! These are simply great filmmakers—their minds are in the film. The writer’s job is to help them see it.” And also, maybe, challenge them. After “Jaws,” “Close Encounter of the Third Kind,” and “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” no one expected a film as intimate as “E.T.” from Spielberg. When I asked Mathison if she tries to play to each director’s strengths, she replied, “Honestly, I think you try to give anyone something that goes against his strengths. Much more fun for all of us.”