Steven Spielberg (Text Only Version) by John Baxter

Author:John Baxter [Baxter, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Autobiography, Biography, Cinema, Entertainment & Performing Arts, Movies
ISBN: 9780007484966
Google: iB2hAgAAQBAJ
Publisher: Harper Collins
Published: 2013-12-19T16:00:00+00:00

At his Cannes press conference, Spielberg traded on the almost reverent atmosphere of the moment to reassure journalists that the film wouldn’t be mass-marketed. He almost sounded like a solicitous father when he told them, ‘It will go into six or seven hundred [cinemas] and then will roll out into more theatres as the summer progresses. It will be handled very carefully.’ (In fact this was almost the same release pattern as Jaws and Raiders.) He sounded less like the maker of E.T. than its custodian. ‘I made E.T. for us,’ he went on – meaning, most listeners believed, themselves, i.e. all right-thinking people. ‘I never thought of how it would be accepted, or how it would be in the theatres. I am the last person to predict any outcome for any movie that I’ve ever made.’

Others were not so diffident in their forecasts. Time described one ‘professional cynic’ emerging moist-eyed from an early screening to predict ‘$350 million’. He wasn’t far wrong. By the time it opened on 11 June 1982, following 450 special previews across America in the two preceding weeks, half the world wanted to see E.T. Puck, rueful, big-eyed, hammer-headed, wrinkled as an old boot, became an improbable icon. In a phenomenon other film-makers had experienced, notably Federico Fellini with his 1954 La Strada, where Giulietta Masina’s self-sacrificing and affectionate waif Gelsomina became the object of a national cult in Italy, the creature assumed near-mystical significance to millions. A book of Letters to E.T. would be published. The film had something for everyone. Environmentalists, to the anger of loggers in the area where Spielberg shot the film, took it as a plea for the preservation of the redwoods. Reading it as a parable of redemption and even resurrection by the power of love, one American preacher detected thirty-three parallels between Puck’s story and that of Christ, including one that compared his magic finger to that of God enlivening Adam in Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel frescoes.

Everyone wanted a seat on this bandwagon. Instead of the usual hack-for-hire, well-regarded novelist William Kotzwinkle agreed to write the tie-in novelisation and picture book. Neil Diamond recorded a ballad tribute to Puck, ‘Turn on Your Heart Light’. Michael Jackson narrated an album called The E.T. Storybook which included another E.T.-inspired song, ‘Someone in the Dark’, by Alan and Marilyn Bergman, Oscar-winning composers of ‘The Way We Were’. The singer, who had his own print of the film, which he claimed to have seen fifty times, weeping on each occasion, asked to meet Puck, so a photo session was arranged with one of Rambaldi’s dummies.

‘He grabbed me, he put his arms around me,’ Jackson said ecstatically. ‘He was so real that I was talking to him. I kissed him before I left. The next day, I missed him.’

The little visitor also waddled onstage at the Hollywood Bowl in June 1982 to shake hands with John Williams after a concert that included the E.T. theme; Spielberg said it was like watching your own kid at his first recital.

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