E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial: You’ve Got a Friend in Outer Space - Reactor

E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982). Directed by Steven Spielberg. Written by Melissa Mathison. Starring Henry Thomas, Dee Wallace, Robert MacNaughton, and Drew Barrymore.

When I mentioned that I was watching E.T. this week, my older sister sent me laughing emojis and said, “Just don’t freak out and burst into tears like you did when we saw it in the theater!”

Thanks for the warning, Sarah, but I did not burst into tears this time. I made it through the whole movie without ever getting so frightened I had to be taken out to the lobby to calm down. What a difference forty-some years can make.

E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial is one of the most mythologized films in American cinema, from one of the most mythologized directors, and the story of how it came about has been told so often it’s not entirely clear where fact ends and biographical embellishment begins. Most articles point back to the same sources, such as Martin McBridge’s 1997 book Steven Spielberg: A Biography. It’s not that I think people are going around lying about E.T. to hide some dark Hollywood secrets, as the information relayed later pretty much matches what was reported at the time. It just means that the story of the movie is pretty well-known.

It happened like this: In 1980, Steven Spielberg was still rather new in his role as Hollywood’s wildly successful wunderkind, and he was filming Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) in Tunisia. As Spielberg would later explain in a 1982 interview with People, “I was kind of lonely at the time… I remember saying to myself, ‘What I really need is a friend I can talk to—somebody who can give me all the answers.’” This reminded Spielberg of his youthful obsession with aliens—one he had already put to film in Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) and was at the time still trying to make work in the unproduced project Night Skies.

That led to Spielberg and Raiders of the Lost Ark star Harrison Ford talking Ford’s girlfriend (and later wife), screenwriter Melissa Mathison, into writing a screenplay about a friendly alien visitor. Mathison had a single screenplay on her resume but it was an impressive one: The Black Stallion (1979). (That is another movie that caused me to have a theater meltdown as a child, but in my defense opening a family movie with a deadly fire and panicking horse on a boat during a storm is certainly a choice.) The Black Stallion had been a box office success and a critical darling, so it wasn’t much of a risk for Mathison to take on writing Spielberg’s friendly alien film.

The premise for the movie was lifted from the unproduced film Night Skies, which was intended to be a horror film written by John Sayles, with Tobe Hooper named as a possible director. That movie would have been awesome but, alas, it was not meant to be. The story behind Night Skies was ripped from the headlines about alien encounter now known as the 1955 Kelly–Hopkinsville event in Kentucky, in which several people claimed to have been terrorized in a farmhouse by a group of hostile aliens. I don’t know what was going on in Kentucky in 1955, but the resulting news reports played a big role in the developing American lore about big-eyed visitors from outer space.

While Spielberg was filming Raiders of the Lost Ark, Sayles was developing the screenplay for Night Skies, which focused largely on young human characters, including a ten-year-old autistic boy who befriended the one friendly alien. At the same time, special effects designer Rick Baker was creating concept art and models for the Night Skies aliens. (You have seen Baker’s work, because it is everywhere. Literally everywhere.)

But over in Tunisia, Spielberg was starting to have doubts. He wasn’t sure he wanted to make a horror movie after all. He wanted to make something more optimistic, more wholesome. That’s how he came around to convincing Mathison to pluck the one wholesome part out of Night Skies—the child’s friendship with the friendly alien left behind when the others leave Earth—and create a whole different movie out of it.

Columbia Pictures, the studio that had produced Close Encounters of the Third Kind and was developing Night Skies as a quasi-sequel to it, was not happy about Spielberg’s change of heart. Columbia’s reasoning was that a wholesome kid-centric family movie simply had no chance of making very much money. Which, of course, sounds completely insane to us now, but this was in 1981. There were wholesome family movies with kid main characters, but they weren’t the big moneymakers they tend to be today. This was before the Disney revival era when animated children’s films became a major cinematic juggernaut. There have always been films purposefully aimed at being a big, splashy success, but during the Hollywood studio era they tended to be historical epics (like Ben-Hur [1959] or Cleopatra [1963]), and in the so-called New American Cinema of the ’70s those big movies came to be defined by films like Spielberg’s own Jaws (1975) and George Lucas’ Star Wars films. That level of success was not what people expected of kid-friendly movies.

Not until E.T. After E.T., everything changed, to the point where it’s not an exaggeration to divide the whole genre of “family films” into a pre-E.T. era and a post-E.T. era.

Spielberg and Columbia came to an agreement to end development of Night Skies; it involved Spielberg or his investors paying the studio back for the $1 million they had spent developing Night Skies and Columbia getting a cut of the E.T. profits even when the project moved to Universal. That turned out to be good deal, because E.T. made a stupendous fuckton of money when it was released.

Before it could get to that point, however, they had to make the movie, and before they could make the movie they had to make the little dude at its center. The alien is designed by Italian artist Carlo Rambaldi, whose work we see all over sci fi cinema, including in Mario Bava’s Planet of the Vampires (1965), Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and of course Alien (1979), where Rambaldi was the one who built the moveable head and pharyngeal jaw based on H.R. Giger’s xenomorph design. This was a guy who knew a thing or two about crafting aliens, in other words, and the design of E.T. was cobbled together from several different ideas and influences. Those included, but are not limited to: Albert Einstein’s face, Rambaldi’s Himalayan pet cat, Donald Duck’s posture and walk, and a painting Rambaldi had done years before. That painting is Donne del Delta (Women of the Delta) (1952), and if you’re thinking it’s kind of weird that he would base his idea of an extraterrestrial on his own painting of human women, well, it’s because you haven’t seen the painting yet, but that’s not your fault, because as far as I can tell only one poor-quality image exists of it online.

Rambaldi built E.T. in several parts: four heads that were controlled mechanically by a huge team of puppeteers, three torso costumes that were worn by different actors (little people Tamara De Treaux and Pat Bilon, and twelve-year-old Matthew DeMeritt, who was born without legs and walked on his hands), and hands that were controlled by mime Caprice Roth. E.T. was famously voiced by Pat Welsh, a homemaker living in Marin County; sound designer Ben Burtt overheard her raspy, two-pack-a-day voice at a store and immediately wanted her to audition.

Here’s the thing about E.T.: he was made and operated by a small village of cast and crew, and it shows. All of that shows. We can tell he’s made up of several costumes and puppets. There are a few moments where it’s especially noticeable because the camera angles of face and body shots don’t quite line up. His clumsiness looks like the clumsiness of a puppet or somebody in an awkward costume.

We can tell, but it doesn’t really matter, because watching this movie means going along with this game of make-believe. It’s so relentlessly earnest that pointing out that E.T. is just a puppet feels a bit like telling a child that her mud pie is certainly not a delicious chocolate cake. Yes, yes, we know it’s pretend, but we’re playing along for a couple of hours, okay?

I think there are two reasons it works. The first is that the facial puppets are good facial puppets. Rambaldi and the crew put a lot of work into giving E.T. a face that’s a little bit alien, a little bit cute, very expressive, and just familiar enough to not make turn us away. (The fact that he was modeled on Einstein and a squashy-faced cat explains a lot.) Producer Kathleen Kennedy insisted that E.T.’s eyes look as lifelike as possible, because she knew that all of the animatronics and sculpting and puppeteering would mean nothing if the alien’s face wasn’t convincing. (E.T. was the first movie that Kennedy produced. It would not be the last.)

The other reason it works is that the child actors are great. Sure, there are some adults in the movie, with Dee Wallace as the mom and Peter Coyote as the shadowy government agent who turns out to be not so bad after all, but they’re not very important. This story is about the kids: Elliott (Henry Thomas) and his older brother Michael (Robert MacNaughton) and younger sister Gertie (Drew Barrymore). All three are very good in their roles and believable as siblings, and Thomas is especially fantastic as he shows the different facets of Elliot’s loneliness, fear, curiosity, and wonder. E.T. is, at its (red, glowing) heart, a story about a little boy who makes a friend, and the strength of that story relies on the audience’s fondness for both the boy and the friend.

As I was watching, I kept thinking about how the movie never quite sheds the feeling of obvious make-believe. It’s not because E.T. is so obviously a puppet, and it’s not because there are no coastal redwood forests bordering the San Fernando Valley. It’s not even because of the too-sappy John Williams score. (I am usually neutral-to-positive on John Williams, but this one just doesn’t work for me.) In fact, I’m not sure my feeling of detachment from the movie has anything to do with the movie itself.

I think it might be due to my inability to separate E.T. from its legacy. It’s very difficult to watch it now, in 2025, without seeing echoes of everything that has borrowed, adopted, parodied, or outright stole (we’re looking at you, Stranger Things) elements of the movie in the past few decades. I enjoyed rewatching it after all this time. Maybe it’s never going to be a favorite of mine, but it’s an enjoyable movie to watch on a quiet autumn afternoon.

But I keep coming back to the fact that what I find truly interesting about E.T. is not the movie itself, but the cinematic perspective it provides on how America viewed itself in the early ’80s.

Science fiction films have always been a way for people to comment on the culture that surrounds them, and in American sci fi cinema of the late ’70s and early ’80s there was an abundance of movies scattered along a spectrum with earnest optimism at one end and weary cynicism at the other. We’ve already watched a number of films that represent that cynical, more critical viewpoint of American life in the 1980s: Escape from New York (1981), Blade Runner (1982), Repo Man (1984), The Brother from Another Planet (1984).

E.T. is the far opposite end of that spectrum, the prime example of earnest, optimistic self-representation in American cinema. That doesn’t mean it’s completely artificial. For all that people roll their eyes at the wholesomeness of Spielberg’s ’80s films, audiences loved them for a reason. Like Close Encounters of the Third Kind before it, E.T. offers a look at ’80s suburban American family life that seems quaint now, but it did resonate with people for genuine reasons.

Articles about E.T. consistently report that Ronald and Nancy Reagan loved the movie and Princess Diana cried when she watched it. What any particular individuals thought about E.T. isn’t necessarily significant, but what’s fascinating is the way the opinions of people in positions of power and prominence are reported as heartfelt approval for what E.T. is showing us about ourselves. Strained marriages or single parents, working moms, messy but secure homes, noisy and sassy children running around without supervision, all of this offered a comforting view of imperfect but fundamentally good family life during that time, and E.T., for better or worse, came to stand as the most prominent example of it.

What do you think about E.T.? Have your thoughts on it changed over the years? Did anybody who did a science class frog dissection in the ’80s actually have to euthanize the frogs themselves, right there in the classroom? Our science class frogs always came to us fully dead, in buckets of preservative.

Next week: We’re leaving the verdant coastal redwood forests of the greater Los Angeles area and escaping to the mountain. Which mountain, you ask? Yes, that one. Watch Escape to Witch Mountain on Disney, Amazon, or Apple.