♪♪♪
Downloaded from YTS.MX
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AUTOMATED VOICE: E-F-P.
That is incorrect.
The correct spelling of "nuisance" is N-U--
...soon to compete are some very dazzling science fiction films.
If you, like millions of Trekkies, across the galaxy,
then you're waiting for "Star Trek II," the movie.
MAN: "Blade Runner" is a detective thriller
set in a very crowded Los Angeles in the year 2019.
[MTV theme playing]
In a bold move to get the kids out of video arcades
and back into the theaters,
Disney Studios is offering "Tron."
The Columbia is back after spending seven days in space.
The movie has plenty of ice, blood.
and things that go bump in the night.
We'll also be reviewing two eagerly awaited films
from producer Steven Spielberg.
MAN #2: Americans popped in
between $5 and $9 billion worth of quarters.
MAN: "E.T." is heavy in visual effects.
It's set for release on June 4th.
♪♪♪
I can't think of a year during my life
that the lineup was equivalent as far as depth of storytelling,
epicness, significant storytelling.
I've...seen things you people wouldn't believe.
They liked to think back in the '80s.
All those...moments will be lost...in time.
There's still a little hangover from the '70s,
And the '70s was, I think, a golden age.
That was a time that just blew everything up,
and so we were kind of reaping the rewards.
Coming out of the '70s, there was more of a sense
of character, the antihero and the everyman.
Then all of a sudden we're going to take that language
and put it into genre.
-[growls] -In the '70s, you had "Jaws."
♪♪♪
Biggest summer blockbuster ever.
Why, you son of a...
[gunshot]
Followed up two years later by "Star Wars,"
which changed the world.
That was, I think, where so many of us got hooked on movies,
when Spielberg and Lucas changed everything.
After 1977, it was game over.
REPORTER: "Star Wars"-- it is more
than just a successful movie.
It is a box office phenomenon.
The film is breaking attendance records all over the country.
Not since "Jaws" have so many people
stood in line to see a movie.
"Star Wars" was a gateway. We were hooked on sci-fi.
That's what we talked about when we went to school.
Box office was very much dominated
by high concept ideas.
Then in the wake of "Star Wars," you had "Superman," the movie.
You had "Alien." You had other indie films
like "Dawn of the Dead" and "Phantasm, "Halloween,"
and all of the studios are trying to figure out
how can we duplicate both the indie success
and the studio success of these one-off movies?
We were doing very well in the '60s and '70s.
but when "Star Wars" came out,
I thought, the major studios
have figured out what we've been doing
on a low budget, and they're taking these ideas,
and we are going to be in trouble.
'Cause they saw that stories of the fantastic
had a really wide appeal
and not just for a teenage audience.
So they started making studio-level genre films.
PENN: People were starting to feel
they could do something interesting
in a blockbuster template.
The idea that you could make movies as varied
as "Poltergeist," "E.T.," and Blade Runner,
it's kind of a maturing of the summer blockbuster...
It's too bad she won't live.
But then again, who does?
...a lot of which is science fiction.
People want to see science fiction,
and so we gotta give that to them, and I think '82 is
the year mass market science fiction blockbusters--
that's the year their voice broke, if you will.
You could certainly argue there were better years
for cinema than 1982,
but there's no greater geek year than 1982.
There are a lot of great years for movies.
You could look at 1939 with "Wizard of Oz"
and "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington."
So many people look at 1977 as the greatest geek year ever.
but really, when it comes down to it,
1982 is the greatest year ever for movies, period.
Week after week, you have one classic movie after another
that holds up 40 years later.
MILLER: The reason 1982 was such a unique year,
it was a turning point in a lot of ways.
It was this great moment where, for whatever reason,
nerds accidentally won.
FILONI: It was just a great time to be a kid growing up.
I think our imaginations were running wild.
We loved these adventures.
They were all pretty hopeful, too.
You know, the feeling of the films was something optimistic.
As your teacher, Mr. Spock, is fond of saying,
I like to think that there always are possibilities.
They weren't cynical. Somehow that really affect us.
There's a feeling to those movies...
-Aloha, Spicoli. -[laughs]
...a sense of wonder that is just in all of them,
and that's something that to this day I chase
and try to capture,
'cause you really wanna pass it on to people.
MEYER: So, when you're a kid, kid experiences,
it's about people, scenery, books, movies--
that's what imprints on you.
The works of art, for example, that you fall in love with,
that are most lasting.
You see "Star Trek" at age 12.
You know, if it's any good, it's going to be major.
Or maybe even if it's not any good,
it's gonna be major.
That's when you're really consuming
art, movies, and music
that shape and mold you to who you become later on as an adult.
You can't separate people my age from the movies
of the early '80s because they're so part
of who we were growing up.
BURNETT: We were free-range kids.
We got to go out. Our parents were like, "Hey, man,
come home when the sun goes down. Be home for dinner."
My parents didn't know what I did.
They just knew you had gone off for the day,
and you'd be home for dinner, maybe.
BURNETT: Ride our bike somewhere.
Nobody cared. We had our secret lives.
Even if "E.T." wasn't about an alien,
kids today would think it was a science fiction movie
because the kids leave in the morning on bicycles.
Their parents don't know where they are.
They show back up at dinner.
Parents don't ask where they were.
They're not calling 'em on cellphones.
That was the life we had.
I'm a proud geek, was one before it became fashionable.
Yeah, which I'm a little bitter about....
[laughs] because I feel like I had to choose
between cultivating being attractive
or reading comic books.
Look, an authentic voodoo doll.
And now you can technically do both,
and that's a little frustrating.
Everything felt awesome,
and the movies really reflected that.
♪♪♪
When you get to '82, we're coming out of Watergate,
we're coming out of Vietnam era. Everyone's having a good time.
Yeah. Britain went to war with Argentina
over the Falkland Islands,
but it wasn't any kind of huge wars.
It coincided with a time in America
where everything seemed possible.
Reagan was in power. People were more optimistic,
The economy was better, and the movies sort of reflect
a sunnier, more fairy tale time.
Who would have ever thought that Ronald Reagan,
the former movie star,
that he would be the President of the United States?
-Bonzo! -Mr. Boyd!
Bonzo, that wasn't a nice thing to do.
The oldest President of the United States at the time.
REAGAN: You don't really become president.
The presidency is an institution,
and you have temporary custody of it.
That was all part of it.
It was all part of the fantasy landscape that we lived in.
It was morning in America. I wasn't politically aware.
I didn't know about
Ronald Reagan's sort of politics.
I mean, I didn't know that I didn't agree with the politics.
You just felt good to be American.
The groundwork has been laid,
and now we will move forward to capitalize
on the tremendous potential
offered by the ultimate frontier of space.
The '80s became about Reaganomics and making money.
People were feeling good, so they wanted to play.
But I feel like it was more of a social-physical interaction
with the entertainment that we had back then.
When I think of 1982, I think of the arcade
as being the clubhouse of the teenage people.
The joke is that teenagers have to find
their own place because they're not civil yet. [laughs]
That's why I loved being a young teenager in 1982,
because part of going to the movies is you had
to go to the movies to see the movie.
BIASELLI: We didn't have the internet at our fingertips.
We didn't have the opportunity to have everything on demand.
You couldn't press a button and suddenly
have these things appear. You had to work for it.
You had to take a chance. Sometimes you'd ask the guy
who sold you the ticket, "What's good?"
Our idea of social media was standing on line
waiting three hours to get into a film
where we would talk about our enthusiasm, our excitement.
It's the fun, the excitement.
We get out here with all our friends, and it's a good time.
Waiting in line is even a good time.
You're like, "Oh, I'm not going to see this movie today,"
'cause there'd be a long line around the block.
Why are movies called blockbusters?
Because the anticipated movies
have people lined up around the block.
I did like when there were less choices
and people watched movies together.
The experience that you have
when you are part of an audience
is an experience that is intensely intimate and personal
and collective at the same time.
We've gone on this journey together.
We have shared something.
People we didn't even know next to us laughing, crying,
doing whatever it was,
sharing that unifying human bond.
Stepping back from what makes going to the movies magical,
we have to look at entertainment as medicinal.
It takes us out of our pain.
It takes us out of our trauma and allows us
to go someplace where we can feel safe for those two hours
and not worry about our troubles.
These days, with the way the world is,
there's a lot to escape from,
so it's a good bet that many Americans this spring
will be going to that galaxy long ago and far, far away.
I think that's one of the things that whenever anybody
dismisses fandom of any kind,
my first thought is that you don't really understand
what it is to hurt in a way as an adolescent
and to find solace and safety.
At that time, certainly for me,
growing up in a very abusive home,
movies were my safe space.
Why wouldn't I want to stand in line
to have that ticket to peace and escape?
Recently, it's hard not to look back on 1982
and see it as a pioneering time for original stories.
Some of the formulas that we would now say,
"Oh, this is a formulaic movie,"
sometimes you were seeing that formula for the first time
you know, in '82.
Telling you, man, I've been in places like this before,
and white cops came and [bleep] with me and my friends.
The only thing that stopped us from kicking their [bleep]
is they had guns and badges.
Takes years of experience to handle a joy like this.
Wanna bet?
As you move into this new decade,
and you've got the benefit of technology behind them,
they were like, how do we make a story
that people care about that also looks unbelievable,
like nothing that's ever come before?
There is nothing like that spirit of innovation
when everything was new and iconic.
The movies that got made are jaw-dropping.
Was an unbelievable year for culture in America.
MALTIN: It didn't feel that way at the time.
I didn't think I'm in the midst of a golden,
you know, rainbow here.
-What about "Swords of Glory"? -Crap.
-"Amarillo." -Crap.
-"Sands of the Sudan." -Crap.
Benjy, you want to see movies? Get a job as an usher.
The rest of us are here to write
professional show business comedy.
Now, looking back, I say we'd be lucky
to get half as many good films right now. [laughs]
It was kind of a magical time
when the commerce was supporting art
in a way that created lasting legacy films,
so we get the best of all worlds,
because somehow culture and money meet around that time.
You sort of see the auteurist filmmaking
converging with the blockbuster mentality,
so you have people like Paul Schrader
doing "Cat People" for Universal.
You have somebody like Nick Meyer doing "Star Trek II."
You have these really original visions
merging with more commercial sensibilities.
So many of these movies feel so personal
even when they're in the mainstream space.
These film brats were telling you everything
about what was important to them
and what they had loved growing up,
and that's what all these genre movies were.
Could you even imagine what the conversations
were like at that time?
"We're going to make an entire movie
with puppets, no people,
and it's gonna cost just as much as a movie with people.
It's gonna be risky and crazy, and we're gonna take chances."
That's the spirit of
"We're going to do something that no one has done before."
A lot of those movies in '82
would never be made these days
because they are risky.
Studios don't want to take risks the way that they used to.
No one actually can make a creative decision
without someone sitting down and doing a spreadsheet on it.
I mean, when you look at 1982, the number of successes seem
to really outweigh the number of failures.
I would say to the people making the decisions,
you know, maybe take a few more chances.
We are living in the age of IP and--and sort of IP hackery
in a sense that, like, movies do not exist
or have any sort of support unless they are
an existing property of some kind.
With the new way in which they decide
what big movies are made,
you'd never have a "Star Wars" today,
you'd never have an "Indiana Jones."
Back then, these decisions on what to make
were made with instinct, not algorithms.
I went out with a movie a few years ago,
and all the studios said it was a great script,
but they were passing on it, and finally,
the very last studio that passed on it,
I went to the head of the studio, and I said,
"I don't understand this. Everyone's saying how much
they love the script and no one's making it.
Why won't you make it?"
And he said, "Well, it's not based on something else."
And I said, "Well, you made 'Independence Day' with me.
That wasn't based on something else."
And he goes, "I wouldn't make it today
unless you called it 'War of the Worlds.'"
It's sad, and I think it ultimately
hurt the movie business.
There were over nine studios at the time.
I think there's four now.
This consolidation really stifles competition,
and the good thing about competition was
everyone wants to try and do something different.
That year is when I was hired by "Entertainment Tonight"
to be a film critic on their show.
I think audiences are responding to sequels
when the sequels are good.
I don't think there's any other criteria that they have.
If the word of mouth gets out that a sequel
is just a ripoff and is, uh, taking them for a ride,
so to speak, they're not going to show up.
It was the first show of its kind,
but the other phenomena was Siskel and Ebert,
longtime newspaper critics in Chicago,
but their television show made them household names.
Imagine, film critics becoming household names.
1982 was the best year at the box office
in the last 30 years.
You never saw people talk this passionately about art on TV.
Gene and Roger were not scripted,
and they disagreed, and it was fun to watch.
It seemed to me that "Sophie's Choice"
was about the fragility of love.
I don't get the treachery of the hearts bit.
I also don't agree with you that this film's that good.
-We disagree. -Okay.
In 1982, Tribune hires them to do a syndicated show
called "At the Movies." It's immediately success.
They became the nation's movie critics.
And they end up really influencing what people see.
With the success of Siskel and Ebert,
this idea of, well, you've got two guys together,
and are they doing two thumbs up or one thumb down?
And suddenly it became about aggregation of two critics,
which then led on to Rotten Tomatoes
and this whole idea of aggregating critics.
DEVLIN: The strongest memory I have of that year
was the second week of June.
And no other month before or since
has matched the quality of June of 1982.
That's the month and the year
that I officially fell in love with movies.
Sometimes two or three classic movies
opening on the same weekend,
and it's like, jeez, what do you choose?
On June 4, 1982,
you had "Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan,"
and "Poltergeist" opening on the same freaking day.
One week later, June 11th,
you have "E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial."
For, like, decades, it was like
the highest grossing movie of all time.
All of a sudden, there are two Steven Spielberg movies
coming out within a week of each other,
and the first one that came out was "Poltergeist."
"Poltergeist" was another film that was fanciful in nature,
with some scares built into it,
almost any age group could and did respond to.
I think it was using the child...
Hello?
...being sucked into the television.
She was so tuned in. She was truly an empath,
and she was 5.
Mike Fenton and I were casting "Poltergeist" and "E.T."
almost simultaneously.
So Heather O'Rourke initially came in for "E.T."
Steven saw her at the commissary, and he's like,
"Oh, you should really come in for--for 'Poltergeist.'"
[singsongy] They're here.
It went more for the heart than for the scare.
Reach back into our past when you used to have an open mind.
-Remember that? -Uh-huh.
Okay. Just try to use that.
I remember less the moments I jumped
than I do how much I was rooting for these people.
Whoo-hoo! Whoo! [laughs]
[yawns]
Stephen and Tobe both felt
very strongly that the family was the most important aspect.
-Good night, sweetie. -Good night.
Okay, lights out.
Closet light! Closet light!
-My fault. My fault. -[thunder rumbling]
Turn it on, Mommy!
[switch clicks]
Tobe really had a real sense of the horror,
how to create the darker moods,
but I think it was Steven's influence
to keep the family stuff really strong in the foreground.
That was the key in all of Spielberg's movies,
is that it really focused on the heart.
Are you with us now?
Can you--Can you say hello to Daddy?
[indistinct whispering]
CAROL ANNE: [distorted voice] Hello, Daddy.
[whimpering]
Hello, sweet pea.
A lot of this comes back to verisimilitude,
these art forms finding a reality
that's much closer to your own experience,
your own lived experience than you expect it to be.
Can you see Mommy?
[indistinct whispering]
distorted voice] Mommy, where are you? Where are you?
Why can't it be fantastic and very real at the same time?
Just sort of based the lifestyle on a lifestyle
I'm familiar with, growing up in suburban Phoenix, Arizona,
in tract homes with cul-de-sacs and 2-car garages.
And this suburban lifestyle breeds
a certain kind of individual.
Seeing the parents in their bedroom at night,
trying to hide a joint from the family,
you know, I'd never seen that in a movie before.
-Hi, honey. -[thunderclap]
Is everything okay?
And yet it still felt like a wholesome family.
Also has, like, super babelicious mom and dad.
Like, this... [laughs]
Like, that era, they're, like, very hot,
cool mom and dad characters, but it's also scary.
EDWARDS: "Poltergeist" scared me straight to 1983.
Static on a television still scares me,
and we all owned TVs like that in 1982.
I'm like, no, I'm not here for that.
I don't understand the title.
I still don't know what it means.
-What does "poltergeist" mean? -No one knew what it was.
We found a-- We found a German book, uh,
that had-- it was "poltergeist,"
And, uh, it was all in German, so, you know,
but we knew it was about ghosts, and we showed that to Steven.
He said, "That's the title."
He gave us a page.
There were some bullet points that he wanted to hit.
He wanted it to be a ghost story set
in a middle class housing development,
that the ghost comes out of the TV.
It had originally been written by
Michael Grace and Mark Victor,
but Steven Spielberg wrote the shooting draft.
We only had six weeks to write the screenplay
because we were set to go on strike.
Film was in production, and we were striking our own movie.
Steven sent a PA out to get us from the line... [laughs]
'cause he said, "I think you guys want to see this."
It's a really cool scene.
So we went in, and we saw the room was on a gimbal,
and it turned around and all this.
Steven is a strong producer.
He was the guy who brought Tobe Hooper in to direct.
He was quite generous,
offering it to this guy who had only done
the genius "Texas Chain Saw" and then "Eaten Alive."
It's very intimidating to have
the world's most successful filmmaker producing your movie
and kind of talking about how to do what he saw in his mind
as a screenwriter.
I was on the set of "Poltergeist,"
and I watched it happen.
This thing is growing out of her,
and it's getting larger and larger,
and the shoulders are almost going up to the ceiling.
Just when you begin to see the fingers, it goes, whoosh!
Breaks up like blowing a smoke ring apart in the air
and then goes shooting up into the area by location.
He's an enthusiastic filmmaker.
You know, he says, "Hey, what about a two shot here?"
And we move in, and Tobe was hesitant to come in and say,
"Well, how about this?"
The collaboration between Tobe and Steven
was very interesting.
Steven was there. He was there every day,
and I think truly, Steven wanted to direct it himself,
but because he was going to do "E.T.,"
he couldn't really do both, and his price was too high.
He was getting ready to shoot "E.T.,"
and he was under a contractual obligation
to Universal to make "E.T.,"
which meant he couldn't work on another film as a director.
What we saw there was that
Tobe was in the director's chair,
and Steven was standing right behind him
with his hands on the chair. [laughs]
Tobe, I think, respected Steven and went along with it.
I'm sure it was very hard on Tobe in many ways
'cause Steven is a strong personality.
I think the result really had both influences.
GARRIS: Tobe directed the movie. He called "action" and "cut."
His creative influence was there,
but both of those men made that movie.
Yes, there were a lot of fights about who did it,
but it was not between the two of them.
It was a collaboration,
but doesn't feel like a Hooper movie.
It feels like a Spielberg movie.
"Poltergeist" does feel like a Spielberg film,
but it is absolutely the lensing
and framing of a Tobe Hooper film.
[both scream]
I'm embarrassed to say I cried in "Poltergeist."
I remembered being so connected to Heather,
but I had no idea that it would be that well received,
not only critically, but at the box office.
I think that movie is the perfect metaphor
for the summer of 1982 because Tangina says...
This house has many hearts.
And the summer of 1982 has many hearts.
ANNOUNCER: MGM has "Poltergeist" for release on June 4th.
This Steven Spielberg production is about a suburban family
terrorized in their spooky new house.
"Poltergeist" is anxiously awaited
by those who like to have the heck scared out of them.
[singsongy] They're here.
Also from the mind of Steven Spielberg is
"E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial."
Little is known about this film
except that it stars a friendly alien,
lost and alone, 100,000 light-years from home.
I had just joined the staff of a still-new television show
called "Entertainment Tonight," or "E.T,"
and along came a movie called "E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial."
What a glorious movie-- A film that reminded the child
inside you that there was still such a thing as wonder,
that that was a quality that you didn't have to discard
just because you're growing older chronologically.
[buzzing noises]
[screaming]
For me, the pinnacle of Steven Spielberg's career.
Since then, they've come up with this jargon
about four-quadrant movies.
Screw the quadrants. He just knew how to tell a great story
that would have broad appeal.
The craziest thing is that
"E.T." started off as a horror film.
It began as an unofficial sequel to "Close Encounters."
Columbia wanted Spielberg to do a sequel,
and he wasn't that interested in the sequel.
He came up with the idea for "Night Skies,"
which was aliens landing at a farm
and attacking a farm family. It was, uh, he described it as
"Guns Along the Mohawk," um, with aliens,
and it was a horror film.
The screenplay was written by John Sayles.
Ron Cobb was going to direct it.
Steven Spielberg was going to be the executive producer.
They had this basic idea
based on research
Spielberg had done when he was working on "Close Encounters"--
this, uh, incident that had happened in a rural farm
where the people claimed
that they had been surrounded by these little E.T.s.
and this is during the cattle and horse mutilation period.
They're inside. The things are trying to break in
and, uh, fought them off with shotguns and various things.
And Rick Baker took the time and designed these five aliens.
They are pretty spectacular.
The lead alien is pretty terrifying.
He's got this long, bony finger with a blade,
and that's what he's cutting and dissecting the cattle with.
There was a character in the story
who was a friendly alien,
and there was a young child in the story who was autistic,
and Buddy and the autistic boy created a connection.
When he's clicking with this alien,
it's, like, touching,
and John Sayles just nails these scenes of this alien
and this boy while all this horror is going on.
They had this plan, and it all kind of fell apart,
because eventually what Steven Spielberg realized
was that that wasn't the movie.
I think it was at Columbia then, and they said,
"Oh, we've got this other movie, 'Starman,' with Jeff Bridges.
We're not going to make some big space fantasy for kids
when we've already got a space movie,"
and I think that's when he moved to another studio,
and with that move, I think, kind of rethought it.
So he rethought it with Melissa Mathison.
She had co-written the script for "The Black Stallion."
She was also Harrison Ford's girlfriend.
She was with Harrison on location in Tunisia
when they were doing "Raiders of the Lost Ark."
They got together, and they, you know,
really didn't take much from-- from what I had done.
The ending of the script, I think,
is what probably got her,
because the last paragraph of the script,
Buddy, the nice alien, is, like, kind of lost,
walking around terrified, like a stranger in a strange world.
And because you see his relationship with the boy
throughout the whole movie,
and just to know that he's now stuck on Earth all by himself,
it's like a heartbreaking ending.
Like, you really feel bad for him.
And that ending of "Night Skies"
is the jumping off point of "E.T."
SAYLES: It was, really, what about this thing,
of this "E.T." who gets left behind? Wouldn't that be cool?
The intersection of the two scripts
is that I got to read it.
When the Writers Guild said, "Well, you were one
of the writers who was near this thing.
Do you think you should get any credit?" I just said,
"No, not at all, but this is really good."
If Spielberg can keep the budget down,
he's got a nice little Disney movie here.
It got put into turnaround, and then Universal was like,
"Hey, Columbia, could we just, like, buy that off you?"
This story goes that Universal gave Columbia 5% as the gift,
thank-you for selling them the script
and getting it out of turnaround.
And quietly, Columbia said they made more off that 5%
than any of their studio's films that year.
Okay, Mom, you can look now.
Aah! [laughs]
-Oh, that's great! -[squeaking]
[laughs] Stay there!
WALLACE: I auditioned for "Used Cars,"
and I didn't get it,
but Steven works very far ahead.
He was already playing around with "E.T.,"
and he knew whatever adult appeared in there,
he wanted them to be childlike.
And so when "E.T." came about, they called and offered me...
Bye!
...the role of Mary.
They had me come over to the studio,
and in a room behind a locked door,
I read what was entitled "A Boy's Life."
And I remember calling my agents on a rotary phone
and saying, "You know, I don't know how much
this is gonna do for me,
but I think it's gonna do a lot for the world,
and I really wanna be a part of this film."
E.T...
home phone.
E.T. phone home.
It's not a film about divorce,
but it is about the after effects of it,
and that comes from Spielberg's own life as well.
His depiction of families,
like this incredibly naturalistic depiction
that he had in "Close Encounters"
and in "Poltergeist," the fact that in "E.T.,"
that felt like the most real version of sitting around
a dinner table to someone who had a brother and sister.
What are you going as for Halloween?
-Not going to stupid Halloween. -Why don't you go as a goblin?
Shut up.
We're dropping in on these people's lives.
There was a clutter to the house.
There was a lived-in sense to the house.
Messy homes, messy lives.
I remember the moment I walked onto the soundstage,
and E.T. was standing over there,
and I walked in, and I just stopped,
and I looked at him and I went,
"Oh, my God. He's beautiful."
I mean, you just got him right away--
all the love that the movie brings forward through him.
Carlo Rambaldi did such an amazing job
capturing the heart of who E.T. was in his face and his eyes.
SPIELBERG: On three. One...two...three.
-[screaming] -No! Stop it!
-[continues screaming] -No!
SPIELBERG: And cut. Cut.
We all saw E.T. as another character that we worked with,
and for the kids,
Steven went to incredible feats of keeping E.T. alive.
-And... -He's really real.
-Crazy story. -Then why all those wires?
These aren't wires. Those are his feet.
Do you know that?
They would stick the hydraulic E.T. over in a corner.
Well, one day we found Drew talking to him.
So after that, Steven had two guys on that E.T.
the whole time,
so he could make movements and blink and do his head
so that Drew kept that illusion of life about E.T.
What E.T. represents, it's just imagination.
And when the adults come,
they're coming to destroy this kid's imagination.
How other people are allowed to see E.T.--
it's from Elliott being like,
"I want you to see my imagination."
Grown-ups can't see him. Only little kids can see him.
I remember Mike Fulmer and his team
were building the miniature bikes,
and I think it was Tom St. Amand sculpted the kids,
and he had to sculpt a little E.T.
to put in the basket.
Well, on his desk were these photos of E.T.,
and I remember looking at it, going,
"Oh, my God, this is the ugliest thing I have ever seen.
No one is gonna see this movie," and I was so wrong.
BURNETT: "E.T." was done in secret.
The teaser was just clouds with lights.
You knew that it was gonna be something to do with aliens,
but you had no idea what "E.T." was.
Even I, who'd read Starlog,
I'd read everything about "E.T." I didn't know what it was about.
Late May, they had theatrical sneak previews
around the country,
and it just so happened that in Fargo,
they had--they had one of these, so I went to the theater
and had this experience with this movie
that just blew me away.
And the movie obviously hadn't opened widely yet,
so nobody else had seen it,
and I'm sitting here trying to tell people,
like, what it was that I had seen and experienced.
You just couldn't do it. People looked at you
like you were-- like you were crazy.
We went over and stood in line at the Cinerama Dome
with everybody else for three hours to see "E.T."
People were screaming,
they were crying, they were applauding.
It was the discovery of that summer.
I'm getting chills even thinking about it.
It was one of the most
magically transporting movies I'd ever seen.
GRAIS: No matter who you were or what ethnicity you were,
you could see yourself in that story.
That's what made "E.T." so special.
Like, when Elliot takes off on the bike,
that's not Elliott on the bike. That was me on the bike.
That was me trying to get E.T. home.
That's the gift that Steven Spielberg possesses.
My acting teacher, who is this Cuban émigré...
[Cuban accent] ...who spoke very strangely, um... [laughs]
[normal voice] uh, had seen a movie that changed his life.
He said... [Cuban accent]
"I've seen the best performance by an actor ever.
It is the E.T." [laughs]
E.T., E.T., E.T. be good.
And I remember being so excited because, uh,
'cause E.T. totally transported me, and I bought it.
I 100% bought that this was an alien creature.
You know, I know Carlo Rambaldi designed it,
and an army of technicians brought him to life.
For my acting teacher, who was my God at the time,
they had brought to the screen the greatest performance ever.
Steven asked me during the filming--
he said, "Dee, they're already asking me about doing a sequel."
He said, "What do you think?"
And I said...
"I think you should leave it the classic it's gonna be."
I'll...
be...
right...
here.
♪♪♪
[voice breaking] Bye.
"E.T." did a great job with marketing
because I still have "E.T." toys and "E.T." everything.
Like, you had to have some sort of "E.T." toy
so your friends knew you were cool.
E.T., E.T.
My kids are wild about "E.T."
Now there's a whole collection of "E.T." toys.
-This one talks. -Home.
The movie comes out. Initially, there's no toys.
Spielberg realizes his mistake,
immediately greenlights everything.
They were literally chartering the 747s
with no passengers,
filling the plane with the "E.T." things.
Luckily for Spielberg
and everybody who had points on the movie,
the movie was in the theaters for almost a year.
So by the time it came, the merch still did very well.
There was an "E.T." game. We actually had the "E.T." game.
I remember it. It was really hard.
[laughs] No one could win it.
"E.T." video game? Wow.
ANNOUNCER: It's the video game
that lets you pretend you're E.T.
Basically, this game comes out based on "E.T.,"
and it's--it's not a good game. It's a really frustrating game.
I remember just, you know, not really getting it
and not in a not getting "Blade Runner" kind of way.
It was more like it just wasn't fun to play.
You play for two screens, and all of a sudden,
ET's in a hole again. It's just--It's just a terrible game.
A video game's the opposite of a movie.
It's how fun it is to play that's important.
It's not a passive experience.
It's not something you're watching.
The "E.T." video game probably was the start
of what is a long lineage
of crappy adaptations of mainstream media.
If this worked in this genre,
those people, those geeks, are gonna like this, too.
I don't think Steven Spielberg felt that way.
I mean, he likes playing video games.
Best game--the game that I still think
is the best game... -"Centipede."
...they've ever made is "Asteroids."
I do think there was this hubris
on the part of the people running Atari at the time
that, "Well, it's gonna say. 'E.T.' on the box,"
and they loved 'E.T.' Right? Isn't that enough?"
You would go into like a Sears or a JCPenney.
The video game section
would just be nothing but stacks of "E.T."
If any game ever deserved to be headed for a landfill,
it was Atari's "E.T."
Literally, There was this urban legend that Atari
was so ashamed of the game
that they buried all the unsold cartridges in this landfill.
It was a far more interesting and nuanced story
than I thought.
"E.T." just seemed like a crappy game
that was made way too quickly,
and that's the story that was told
and became kind of the urban legend.
The day that Warner inked a deal with Spielberg,
they set in motion a disaster.
It was Atari trying to achieve sales through a license.
Now at Toys 'R' Us, the new "E.T." cartridge,
only $33.97.
Help E.T. phone home with the Atari Video Game System,
now just $124.87.
But it takes a lot of negotiating
and a lot of time and such,
And by the time they were done with a deal,
it was schedule driving a game development,
which is never a good idea.
The deal was inked in August,
and the cartridge had to be ready for release November 1st.
At that time, it took a full year
to fully create a cartridge, vet it, test it, tweak it.
So you had September, October-- two months.
The probability of creating a good game
in that amount of time is zero.
And the creator of "E.T." did a fantastic job
for the amount of time he was given.
He actually only had, like, five weeks,
and we typically took 10 months.
The heart of the creative process
is the programmer.
I try and create basically a sensory experience
that evokes a certain feeling in the user.
I mean, I tend to program from a concept.
Poor Howard signed up for it,
and he's been panned as creating the worst game ever.
No, he created the best game ever
that had ever been done in two months.
Only from Atari, made especially for systems from Atari.
The video game that lets you help E.T. get home
just in time for Christmas.
Happy holidays from Atari.
Video games were so important because it allows kids
to feel like they are independent,
and they're having an adventure in and of themselves
outside of their parents' control.
It empowered a lot of people
who are not necessarily good at sports
to all of a sudden get street cred.
1982 is the--the peak for the video game--
original early video game boom.
First of all, you think about all of the great video games.
One of my favorite games was "Pitfall!"
"Pitfall!"--designed by David Crane for Activision.
It was Indiana Jones.
They didn't call it "Raiders of the Lost Ark,"
but that's what it was.
I'll assume I was influenced to put it in a jungle
instead of somewhere else because of a popular movie.
No one ever seen anything like that before.
I only had eight bits to work with,
eight pixels to make a character that looks human.
You felt like you were drawn into this story.
Just last night, I was lost in the jungle with Pitfall Harry,
surrounded by giant scorpions and man-eating crocodiles.
There were three different consoles
that were all very popular.
There was the Mattel Intellivision.
Mr. Intellivision, how come all you ever talk about
are sports games? -Sorry?
Intellivision now has games like the arcade.
I know.
Magnavox Odyssey.
More than 40 games in all.
Odyssey-- the excitement of a game,
the mind of a computer.
It was also the Atari 2600 or the VCS,
they called it back then.
More color, more sound, and more action,
and naturally, it's from Atari.
[electronic music plays]
♪ Have you played Atari today? ♪
Atari was almost like the Apple of the time. It was huge.
The reason why you see a big "Atari" logo
in "Blade Runner" is nobody at the time
would have ever thought Atari would go downhill.
Well, I was watching "Blade Runner," loved the movie.
It was this vision of the future,
and there was the Atari logo. And I said, "Yo!" [laughs]
♪♪♪