E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial (Steven Spielberg), 1982
Accounts of the early development of, and inspiration for, Spielberg’s wonderful E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial talk of two early ideas that merged into one. The first was the idea of a thriller about aliens called Night Skies, involving aliens menacing a farmhouse, which included a subplot about an alien being left behind on Earth. The second was a nebulous idea about a film based on the life of children. The latter idea seems to have gone through many incarnations, being referred to variously as Clearwater, After School, Growing Up, and A Boy’s Life. Some of these may nominally have been considered separate projects (Clearwater seems to have been based on a treatment by Hal Barwood and Matthew Robbins, while Growing Up was a Robert Zemeckis / Bob Gale script), but the common thread was that Spielberg wanted to do a small scale, intimate film about children. The greatness of E.T. can be linked to its origins in this premise: it works so well because it would be an interesting movie even without the alien.
Written in 1975, right after the film was made, it has been revised for the new edition through addition of a new introduction (by Peter Benchley), a foreword by Gottlieb, some great set photos, and copious endnotes that predominantly recount events since the book was first written. The result, unfortunately, has neither the strengths of a fresh eyewitness account nor a considered opinion made with the benefit of hindsight. The 1975 material (the body of the text) seems overly keen not to offend anyone, resulting in strange and inconsistent self-censorship: on page 46 Gottlieb grants anonymity to the second screenwriter on the project (Howard Sackler), apparently at Sackler’s request, but on Page 137 he goes ahead and names him regardless. He is also unrelentingly eager to promote the movie, which at the time was still in cinemas, and which the 1975 incarnation of Gottlieb tends to assume we haven’t seen. (Speaking of the mix of real and mechanical shark footage he earnestly informs us that we’ll “never be able to guess what footage was shot where.” Hmmm.)