E.T. THE EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL IN CONCERT: FILM WITH LIVE SCORE

Extra-terrestrials have been standard film fare since 1902, when French director Georges Méliès shot a bullet-shaped capsule containing a group of astronomers from an enormous cannon that landed in the eye of the Man in the Moon, where the earthmen encountered the underground dwelling Selenites, named for the Greek goddess of the moon. Le Voyage dans la Lune, silent, black-and-white, fourteen minutes long and brilliantly inventive, was enormously popular and established the science fiction genre that has lit countless movie screens around the world ever since.

Some of those films resonated deeply with the young Steven Spielberg, who started his directing career in 1974 (when he was 28) with The Sugarland Express and created an international sensation with Jaws in 1975 and Close Encounters of the Third Kind the following year. While he continued to become one of the most successful filmmakers of his generation—1941 (1979), Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)—he harbored an idea about a movie rooted in his own childhood. A 1978 project titled Growing Up went nowhere, but another one soon after that, developed with screenwriter Melissa Mathison and called Night Skies, contained a subplot about a friendly alien abandoned on Earth. Spielberg did not make that movie, but he did ask Mathison to work the subplot into a full script. During eight weeks of intense collaboration, they created E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. Spielberg called it “the best first draft I’ve ever read.” Academy Award voters would eventually agree and bestow an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay upon Mathison. 

The screen character of E.T. was created by Italian special effects artist Carlo Rambaldi, who had designed the aliens for Close Encounters, by drawing on an early surrealist painting of his own showing figures with short legs, long necks and large eyes and photos of elderly people taken during The Great Depression; his facial design was collated from photos of Albert Einstein, Ernest Hemingway and Carl Sandburg. The various animatronics and costumes (worn by three little people) cost $1.5 million, more than 10% of the film’s total budget; a heavily made-up mime did the close-ups for E.T.’s hand movements. So convincing was the effect that the seven-year-old Drew Barrymore’s sobbing reaction when her film character thought E.T. had died was completely natural. Rambaldi won an Oscar for Best Visual Effects. 

The audience at the Cannes Film Festival cheered for fifteen minutes when E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial was premiered there in May 1982, and the film was a smash hit on its North American release the following month, garnering glowing reviews and earning back its entire $10.5 million budget in its first weekend. Within a year, it had surpassed Star Wars as the top-grossing film of all time, a record it held until Spielberg’s Jurassic Park a decade later. According to the fascinating movie-business web site thenumbers.com, E.T. has grossed $435 million in domestic box office receipts and $793 million in all in first-run and wide re-releases in 1985 and 2002; it returns for a 35th anniversary limited theatrical engagement in September 2017. 

E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial was nominated for nine Academy Awards and won four, including one for John Williams’ score. In American Film Institute polls, it was voted the 24th Greatest Film of All Time, the 6th Most Inspiring, the 14th Greatest Movie Score, and one of “Fifty Films You Should See by Age Fourteen.” It was selected for preservation by the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress in 1994 and, in 2012, for the movie’s 30th anniversary, Madame Tussauds unveiled wax likenesses of E.T. at many of its international locations. 

When E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial was re-released in 2002, New York Post critic Lou Lumenock wrote, “We now have the distance to see just how close to a flawless and utterly timeless a film Steven Spielberg and his collaborators crafted — one that transcended genres (sci-fi and kids’ movies) to become one of the greatest and most durable of American movies.” To which Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times added, “Seeing E.T. again reminds us of how much we’ve remained the same, how gratified we still are by a film that connects so beautifully to our sense of wonder and joy.”


PRODUCTION CREDITS E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial in Concert is produced by Film Concerts Live!, a joint venture of IMG Artists, LLC and The Gorfaine/Schwartz Agency, Inc. Producers: Steven A. Linder and Jamie Richardson Production Manager: Rob Stogsdill Production Coordinator: Rebekah Wood Worldwide Representation: IMG Artists, LLC Supervising Technical Director: Mike Runice Technical Director: Chris Szuberla Music Composed by John Williams Music Preparation: Jo Ann Kane Music Service Film Preparation for Concert Performance: Ramiro Belgardt Technical Consultant: Laura Gibson Sound Remixing for Concert Performance: Chace Audio by Deluxe The score for E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial has been adapted for live concert performance. With special thanks to: Universal Studios, Steven Spielberg, Kathleen Kennedy, John Williams, David Newman, Chris Herzberger, Tamara Woolfork, Adrienne Crew, Darice Murphy, Mark Graham and the musicians and staff of the Philadelphia Orchestra and Bravo! Vail. www.filmconcertslive.com