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" E C S T A S Y A M D G R I E F " I TOLD KATHY KENNEDY BEFORE I STARTED SHOOTING E.7". AND POLTERGEIST THAT THE SUMMER [OF 1 9 8 1 ] WOULD TELL ME ONCE AND FOR ALL IF I WAS SUITED TO BEING A FATHER. IT WAS GOING TO GO ONE OF TWO WAYS: I WAS GOING TO COME OUT OF IT EITHER PREGNANT OR LIKE W. C. FIELDS. — S T E V E N S P I E L B E R G , 1 9 8 2 U R R O U N D E D b y thousands of snakes on a British soundstage, Steven Spielberg was becoming depressed about the movie he was making. Raiders of the Lost Ark was a mechanical job of work offering few opportunities to express his personal feelings. "Action is wonderful," he said later, "but while I was doing Raiders I felt I was losing touch with the reason I became a moviemaker—to make stories about people and relationships." Feeling lonely far away from home and his girlfriend Kathleen Carey, Spielberg yearned to escape into a world of the imagination where he could express the sense of wonder that had sustained him since childhood: "I remember saying to myself, 'What I really need is a friend I can talk to —somebody who can give me all the answers.' It was like when you were a kid and had grown out of dolls or teddy bears or Winnie the Pooh, you just wanted a little voice in your mind to talk to. I began concocting this imaginary creature, partially from the guys who stepped out of the mother ship for ninety seconds in Close Encountersand then went back in, never to be seen again. Then I thought, What if I were ten years old again—where I've sort of been for thirty-four years anyway—and what if he needed me as much as I needed him? Wouldn't that be a great love story?" T H I B T E E M S 3 2 4 S T E V E N $ P I E L B E R G Luckily for Spielberg, he had somebody on hand who could help realize his fantasy.Melissa Mathisonwas a thirty-year-old screenwriter with only one credit, a rewrite on TheBlack Stallion. Mathison accompanied her boyfriend, Harrison Ford, during the shooting of Raiders, and Spielberg found himself "pouring my heart out to Melissa all the time." He told her his idea for a movie about a lonely little boy and his friend from outer space, an idea he later claimed he had been harboring as a fantasy since childhood. Mathison said her interest in the story was "not on any sort of sci-fi level. It was the idea of an alien creature who was benevolent, tender, emotional, and sweet that appealed to me. And the idea of the creature's striking up a relationship with a child who came from a broken home was very affecting." A beautifully simple and lyrical parable of interplanetary friendship, E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial was also the little movie about "keeds" Francois Truffaut had been urging Spielberg to make since 1976.* Produced for Universal by Spielberg and Kathleen Kennedy, E.T.was made for a comparatively low production cost (about $10 million) and with few of the elaborate visual effects that accompanied the aliens' visit to earth in Close Encounters. But, ironically, it was in finally delivering the "little movie" he had promised himself and the public that Spielberg made the film that accumulated the largest domestic box-office gross in movie history until Star Wars reclaimed the title with its 1997 reissue.! What touched the hearts of more than two hundred million moviegoers throughout the world in E.T.'s first year of release was a disguised emotional autobiography of Steven Spielberg. Perversely, the immediate origins of E.T.were not in Spielberg's Disneyish fantasies but in the darker side of his personality. The idea mutated from Night Skies, a screenplay John Sayles wrote for him about a band of extraterrestrials terrorizing a farm family. The leader of the band of eleven aliens was an evil creature called Scar, after the Comanche villain in John Ford's The Searchers. In the opening scene of Sayles's script, Scar killed farm animals simply by touching them with his long bony finger. Only one of Scar's followers was benevolent...

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