E.t.

the Extra-Terrestrial is a 1982 science fiction film co-produced and directed by Steven Spielberg, written by Melissa Mathison and starring Henry Thomas, Robert MacNaughton, Drew Barrymore, Dee Wallace and Peter Coyote. It tells the story of Elliott (played by Thomas), a lonely boy who befriends a friendly alien, dubbed "E.T.", who is stranded on Earth.

Elliott and his siblings help the alien return home while attempting to keep it hidden from their mother and the government.
The concept for E.T. was based on an imaginary friend Spielberg created after his parents' divorce.

In 1980, Spielberg met Mathison and developed a new story from the stalled science fiction/horror film project Night Skies. Unlike most motion pictures, the film was shot in roughly chronological order, to facilitate convincing emotional performances from the young cast.
Released by Universal Studios, E.T.

was a blockbuster, surpassing Star Wars to become the most financially successful film released to that point. Critics acclaimed it as a timeless story of friendship, and it ranks as the best science fiction film ever made in a Rotten Tomatoes survey.

The film was rereleased in 1985, and in 2002 with altered special effects and additional scenes. The scene shifts to a suburban California home, where a boy named Elliott (Henry Thomas) plays servant to his older brother, Michael (Robert MacNaughton), and his friends (K.

Despite his family's disbelief, Elliott leaves Reese's Pieces candy in the forest to lure it into his bedroom. That afternoon, Michael and their younger sister, Gertie (Drew Barrymore), meet the alien.Michael, Gertie and the alien hide in the closet while Elliott assures his mother that everything is all right. Michael and Gertie promise to keep the alien a secret from their mother.

Deciding to keep the alien, the children begin to ask it about its origin. It answers by levitating balls to represent its solar system, and further demonstrates its powers by reviving a dead plant.
At school the next day, Elliott begins to experience a psychic connection with the alien.

Elliott becomes irrational due partly to the alien's intoxication from drinking Coors beer. Michael starts to notice that E.T.'s health is declining and that Elliott is referring to himself as "we." On Halloween, Michael and Elliott dress E.T.

dying in the forest, and takes him to Elliott, who is also dying. Mary becomes frightened when she discovers her son's illness and the dying alien, before government agents invade the house.
Scientists set up a medical facility in the house, quarantining Elliott and E.T.

stands near the spaceship, his heart glowing as he prepares to return home. says goodbye to Michael and Gertie, and before entering the spaceship, tells Elliott "I'll be right here," pointing its glowing finger to Elliott's forehead.
Cast


From left: Henry Thomas as Elliott, Drew Barrymore as Gertie, and Robert MacNaughton as Michael

Henry Thomas as Elliott, a lonely ten-year-old boy who is picked on by his older brother.

Elliott longs for a good friend, whom he finds in E.T. Elliott adopts the stranded alien and they form a mental, physical, and emotional bond.
Robert MacNaughton as Michael, Elliott's football-playing sixteen-year-old brother who often picks on him.
Drew Barrymore as Gertie, Elliott's mischievous seven-year-old sister.She is sarcastic and initially terrified of E.T., but grows to love the alien.
Dee Wallace as Mary, the children's mother, recently separated from her husband. She is mostly oblivious to the alien's presence in her household.
Peter Coyote as "Keys", a government agent so dubbed because of the key rings that prominently hang from his belt.

evade the authorities during the film's climax.
Erika Eleniak as the young girl Elliott kisses in class.
Spielberg auditioned more than 300 children for the roles. Having worked with Cary Guffey on Close Encounters of the Third Kind, he felt confident in working with a cast composed mostly of child actors, rather than young adults. Robert Fisk suggested Henry Thomas for the role of Elliott. Thomas, who auditioned in an Indiana Jones costume, did not perform well in the formal testing, but got the filmmakers' attention in an improvised scene. Thoughts of his dead dog inspired his convincing tears. MacNaughton auditioned eight times to play Michael, sometimes with boys auditioning for Elliott. Spielberg felt Drew Barrymore had the right imagination for the film after she impressed him with a story that she led a punk rock band. Spielberg enjoyed working with the children, noting that the experience made him feel ready to become a father.
Debra Winger provided sounds for E.T., but the alien was actually voiced by Pat Welsh, an elderly woman who lived in Marin County, California.

Welsh smoked two packets of cigarettes a day, which gave her voice a quality that sound effects creator Ben Burtt liked. She spent nine-and-a-half hours recording her part, and was paid $380 by Burtt for her services. Burtt also recorded sixteen other people and various animals to create E.T.'s "voice".

These included his sleeping wife, who had a cold, a burp from his USC film professor, and racoons, sea otters and horses.
Doctors working at the USC Medical Center were recruited to play the doctors who try to save E.T. Spielberg felt that actors in the roles, performing lines of highly technical medical dialogue, would come across as unnatural. During post-production, Spielberg decided to cut a scene featuring Harrison Ford as Elliott's principal.

The project was set aside because of delays on 1941, but the concept of making a small autobiographical film about childhood would stay with Spielberg. He also thought about a follow-up to Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and began to develop a darker project he had planned with John Sayles called Night Skies in which malevolent aliens terrorize a family.
Filming Raiders of the Lost Ark in Tunisia left Spielberg bored, and memories of his childhood creation resurfaced. He told screenwriter Melissa Mathison about Night Skies, and developed a subplot from the failed project, in which Buddy, the only friendly alien, befriends an autistic child. Buddy's abandonment on Earth in the script's final scene inspired the E.T.

got drunk. Columbia Pictures, which had been producing Night Skies, met Spielberg to discuss the script. She hired Institute staffers to create E.T.'s eyes, which she felt were particularly important in engaging the audience. Four E.T.heads were created for filming, one as the main animatronic and the others for facial expressions, as well as a costume. Two dwarfs, Tamara De Treaux and Pat Bilon, as well as twelve-year-old Matthew De Meritt, who was born without legs, took turns wearing the costume, depending on what scene was being filmed. Caprice Roth, a professional mime, filled prosthetics to play E.T.'s hands. The finished creature was created in three months at the cost of $1.5 million. Spielberg declared it was "something that only a mother could love." Mars, Incorporated found E.T. so ugly that the company refused to allow M&M's to be used in the film, believing the creature would frighten children.

The next forty-two days were spent at Laird International Studios in Culver City, for the interiors of Elliott's home. The crew shot at a redwood forest near Crescent City for the last six days of production. Spielberg shot the film in roughly chronological order to achieve convincingly emotional performances from his cast.

In the scene in which Michael first encounters the alien, the creature's appearance caused MacNaughton to jump back and knock down the shelves behind him. For the first time in his career, he did not storyboard most of the film, in order to facilitate spontaneity in the performances. The film was shot so adults, except for Dee Wallace, are never seen from the waist up in the first half of the film, as a tribute to the cartoons of Tex Avery. The shoot was completed in sixty-one days, four days ahead of schedule.
Longtime Spielberg collaborator John Williams composed the musical score for E.T.

from the divorce of his own parents; Gary Arnold of the Washington Post called the film "essentially a spiritual autobiography, a portrait of the filmmaker as a typical suburban kid set apart by an uncommonly fervent, mystical imagination". References to Spielberg's childhood occur throughout: Elliott feigns illness by holding his thermometer to a light bulb while covering his face with a heating pad, a trick frequently employed by the young Spielberg. Michael's picking on Elliott echoes Spielberg's teasing of his younger sisters, and Michael's evolution from tormentor to protector reflects how Spielberg had to take care of his sisters after their father left.
Critics have focused on the parallels between the life of E.T. Critic Henry Sheehan described the film as a retelling of Peter Pan from the perspective of a Lost Boy (Elliott): E.T.

as "crucifixion by military science" and "resurrection by love and faith". According to Spielberg biographer Joseph McBride, Universal Studios appealed directly to the Christian market, with a poster reminiscent of Michelangelo's Creation of Adam and a logo reading "Peace". Spielberg answered that he did not intend the film to be a religious parable, joking, "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."
As a substantial body of film criticism has built up around E.T., numerous writers have analyzed the film in other ways as well. is tolerance, which would be central to future Spielberg films such as Schindler's List. Having been a loner as a teenager, Spielberg described the film as "a minority story". Spielberg's characteristic theme of communication is partnered with the ideal of mutual understanding: he has suggested that the story's central alien-human friendship is an analogy for how real-world adversaries can learn to overcome their differences.
Reception
E.T.

By the end of its theatrical run, it had grossed $359.2 million domestically. Spielberg earned $500,000 a day from his share of the profits. The Hershey Company's profits rose 65% due to the film's prominent use of Reese's Pieces. The film was rereleased on July 19, 1985, and grossed $40 million domestically. E.T. was released on VHS and laserdisc on October 27, 1988; to combat piracy, the videocassettes were colored green. In North America alone, VHS sales came to $75 million.


Spielberg with President Ronald Reagan and Nancy Reagan, fans of the film, in 1986

Critics acclaimed E.T.It is one of those movies that brush away our cautions and win our hearts." Michael Sragow of Rolling Stone called Spielberg "a space age Jean Renoir... or the first time, has put his breathtaking technical skills at the service of his deepest feelings." Leonard Maltin called it the best film of the year. George Will was one of the few to pan the film, feeling it spread subversive notions about childhood and science, while Vincent Canby of the New York Times criticized it for "freely recycl elements from Peter Pan and The Wizard of Oz".
There were allegations that the film was plagiarized from a 1967 script, The Alien, by celebrated Bengali director Satyajit Ray.

The Los Angeles Film Critics Association awarded the film Best Picture, Best Director and a "New Generation Award" for Melissa Mathison. The film won Saturn Awards for Best Science Fiction Film, Best Writing, Best Special Effects, Best Music and Best Poster Art, while Henry Thomas, Robert McNaughton, and Drew Barrymore won Young Artist Awards. has been selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry. In 2005, the film topped a Channel 4 poll of the 100 greatest family films, and was also listed by Time as one of the 100 best films ever made. In 2003, Entertainment Weekly called the film the eighth most "tear-jerking"; in 2007, in a survey of both films and television series, the magazine declared E.T.

taking a bath, and Gertie telling Mary that Elliott went to the forest. Spielberg did not add the scene featuring Harrison Ford, feeling that would reshape the film too drastically. Peter Travers of Rolling Stone wondered, "Remember those guns the feds carried? Thanks to the miracle of digital, they're now brandishing walkie-talkies....

is used sparingly as a complement to Carlo Rambaldi's extraordinary puppet." South Park parodied many of the changes in the 2002 episode "Free Hat".
Other portrayals


A traffic sign depicting E.T.

In July 1982, during the film's first theatrical run, Spielberg and Mathison wrote a treatment for a sequel to be titled E.T. It would have seen Elliott and his friends kidnapped by evil aliens and follow their attempts to contact E.T.

The announcements featured E.T.'s voice reminding drivers to "buckle up" their safety belts.