E.T. brought its director an unprecedented and somewhat troublesome new level of worldwide fame and adulation. His life story was celebrated and mythologized in countless newspaper and magazine profiles, notably in Time, whose lengthy encomium began: “Once upon a time there was a little boy named Steven, who lived in a mythical land called Suburbia …”** Many of Spielberg’s childhood acquaintances did not know what had become of him until the summer of E.T. Spielberg found he had become so recognizable, at least in New York and Los Angeles, that “I often run into mommies who immediately throw their six-year-olds at me.” Another unnerving price of success was having to deal with allegations that E.T. was plagiarized from an unproduced screenplay, The Alien, by the celebrated Indian director Satyajit Ray, or from the 1978 one-act play Lokey from Maldemar by Lisa Litchfield, who filed an unsuccessful $750 million lawsuit. “It’s the people you’ve never heard of who crawl out of the woodwork like cockroaches to sue you,” Spielberg commented.
On June 27, 1982, Spielberg was invited to show E.T. at the White House to Ronald and Nancy Reagan and a handful of guests, including Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor. “Nancy Reagan was crying toward the end,” Spielberg reported, “and the President looked like a ten-year-old kid.” On September 17, the director showed his film to the staff of the United Nations, where he was introduced by Secretary General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar and received the UN Peace Medal. And on December 9, Spielberg was presented to Queen Elizabeth II at a royal benefit premiere in London, leading The Hollywood Reporter to quip, “Steven Spielberg may yet be knighted.”
The reflected glory of E.T. even made Spielberg’s mother a celebrity, when the effervescent Leah appeared on The Tonight Show to reminisce with Johnny Carson about her son’s precocious childhood. E.T. himself appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone, reading a copy of Variety bearing the headline THE SPACEMAN THAT SAVED H’WOOD. In 1985, Spielberg filed an indignant protest in E.T.’s name after the Los Angeles Times ran a caricature of the alien as a decadent Hollywood hipster wearing a glittering pinkie ring, with a coke spoon and razor blade dangling from his neck.
The first biographies of Spielberg appeared in the year following E.T.’s release: British author Tony Crawley’s The Steven Spielberg Story: The Man Behind the Movies and Tom Collins’s children’s biography Steven Spielberg: Creator of E.T.†† The E.T. marketing blitz also spawned a book of Letters to E.T., introduced by Spielberg; a novelization by the noted science-fiction writer William Kotzwinkle, E.T. The Extraterrestrial in His Adventure on Earth; and, for younger readers, Kotzwinkle’s illustrated E.T. The Extra Terrestrial Storybook. Each of Kotzwinkle’s books sold more than a million copies.
Although Kotzwinkle wrote a 1985 sequel, E.T.: The Book of the Green Planet, based on a story by Spielberg, the director has staunchly resisted public and industry pressure to make a filmed sequel, feeling it “would do nothing but rob the original of its virginity.” But Spielberg was tempted enough in July 1982 to write a treatment with Mathison, “E.T. II: Nocturnal Fears,” in which Elliott and friends are kidnapped by evil extraterrestrials (perhaps refugees from Night Skies) and must contact E.T. to rescue them. Spielberg also was involved in the planning of Universal Studios’ exhilarating E.T. ride, a $40 million attraction that opened in 1991. A live-action sequel to the movie, preceded by a filmed introduction by Spielberg and E.T., the ride whisks the audience to E.T.’s planet on flying bicycles.
Spielberg initially said he didn’t want to “flood the market” with E.T. product tie-ins and that he wanted any products to be designed in the spirit of the film, but MCA/Universal eventually licensed more than two hundred products in a belated attempt to capitalize on the film’s unexpected box-office performance. MCA spent more than $2 million pursuing rip-off items, filing more than two hundred lawsuits. Perhaps the most egregious unauthorized product was a recording entitled “I Had Sex with E.T.” Some of the authorized products were in little better taste, ranging from E.T. dolls and costumes to ice cream, chocolate-flavored cereal, and women’s undergarments with E.T.’s face stitched on the leg. Reese’s Pieces, the candy Elliott uses to lure E.T. out of hiding, saw its business climb by 65 percent after Hershey agreed to spend $1 million for advertising tie-ins.‡‡ But most companies selling E.T.-related products failed to reap the marketing bonanza of the Star Wars films, whose products had grossed an astonishing $1.5 billion by 1982. An “E.T. Earth Center” toy store at Universal Studios closed after only five weeks.
The commercial exploitation of E. T. was so blatant and crass that it began to tarnish many people’s images of the movie. “Spielberg—who had personal control over merchandising—turned his film into a toy factory, trivializing the movie almost beyond recognition,” Michael Ventura observed in L.A. Weekly. “… Gorged with greed, he sells and sells and sells, until the name E.T. no longer conjures a marvelous surprise that uplifted us in a huge dark room, but a lot of dolls and bumper stickers and Michael Jackson records and games and candy bars, all sticky with sentimentality…. It’s as though Spielberg needs not to believe in these images he creates.”
Nevertheless, all the huckstering failed to discourage the most remarkable aspect of the E.T. phenomenon, its widespread embrace as a quasi-religious parable. The spiritual dimension that was only implied in Close Encounters was foregrounded unmistakably in E.T. Stanley Kauffmann’s New Republic review dubbed it “The Gospel According to St. Steven.” English professor Al Millar, who published a pamphlet entitled E.T.—You’re More Than a Movie Star, was among those pointing out parallels between Spielberg’s creature and Jesus Christ, including the mysterious stranger’s arrival in a shed, his glowing heart, power to work miracles, healing touch, spiritual teachings, persecution by civil authorities, death and resurrection, and climactic ascent into the heavens after bidding farewell to his disciples.§§
At Christmas 1982, Universal made the religious overtones even more explicit, with ads showing E.T.’s glowing finger touching the hand of a child, evoking Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel image of God’s finger touching the hand of Adam. The ad logo read simply, “Peace.” Spielberg seemed somewhat embarrassed by such religiosity, insisting he had not intended E.T. as a spiritual parable. But he admitted that “the only time Melissa and I sort of looked at each other and said, ‘Gee, are we getting into a possibly sticky area here?’ was when E.T. is revealed to the boys on the bicycles and he’s wearing a white hospital robe and his ‘immaculate heart’ is glowing. We looked at each other at that point and said, ‘This might trigger a lot of speculation.’ We already knew that his coming back to life was a form of resurrection. But I’m a nice Jewish boy from Phoenix, Arizona. 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.”
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ALTHOUGH he had banished the evil extraterrestrials of Night Skies from his more benign conception of E.T., Spielberg’s fascination with ghoulish morbidity and wanton destructiveness was given free rein in his production of Poltergeist, a horror movie about ghosts invading a suburban California tract home built over an Indian burial site. The making of Poltergeist overlapped with that of E.T., and the two films were released virtually simultaneously in the summer of 1982.
“Poltergeist is what I fear and E.T. is what I love,” explained Spielberg, relishing the opportunity to display both sides of his creative personality on adjoining screens in shopping malls. “One is about suburban evil, and the other is about suburban good…. Poltergeist is the darker side of my nature—it’s me when I was scaring my younger sisters half to death when we were growing up.”
His involvement on Poltergeist was unusually intense for a producer and writer. He was on the set for all but three days of the film’s twelve-week shooting schedule, and he, not director Tobe Hooper, often appeared to be calling the shots. The issue of the film’s authorship leaked into the press and gave rise to an acrimoni
ous controversy over whether Spielberg was the de facto director of Poltergeist. It was generally believed in Hollywood that Spielberg simply moved in and took over the film creatively, just as producer Howard Hawks had done with Christian Nyby, the credited director of the 1951 science-fiction/horror film The Thing from Another World.
A mild-mannered, bearded Texan with a quirky sense of humor and a gift for cinematic Grand Guignol, Hooper came to Spielberg’s attention with The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, a low-budget 1974 horror film that became a cult classic. Spielberg found it “one of the most truly visceral movies ever made. Essentially it starts inside the stomach and ends in the heart…. I loved it.” When he suggested to Hooper that they make a movie together, Hooper said he had always wanted to make a ghost story.
By 1981, Spielberg had come up with a story he thought could serve as the basis for a mutually stimulating creative collaboration. Taking story credit as well as joint screenplay credit with Michael Grais and Mark Victor, Spielberg combined horror genre elements with his own suburban milieu of hilly, winding streets and cookie-cutter homes. In a malevolent twist on Close Encounters, the spectral title characters (poltergeist is German for “noisy ghost”) kidnap the small daughter of a white-bread WASP family called the Freelings.¶¶ “I really based the neighborhood on suburban Scottsdale, Arizona, where I grew up,” Spielberg said, though his home was actually in neighboring Phoenix. “… The Freeling family in Poltergeist is not atypical of the people I knew and grew up with.”
A soulless technical exercise in scaring the wits out of the audience, Poltergeist is a feature-film equivalent of the gross-out pranks little Stevie pulled on his sisters and neighbors. Its pièce de résistance is a grisly sequence of revengeful corpses rising out of the Freelings’ muddy backyard swimming hole. Poltergeist may have been payback time for Spielberg, who seemed to take a sadistic relish in putting his complacent WASP neighbors through Hell. Most of the thinly plotted movie is taken up with elaborately horrific (if occasionally cheesy) visual effects by George Lucas’s northern California company Industrial Light & Magic, as Steve and Diane Freeling (Craig T. Nelson and JoBeth Williams) battle ghosts to rescue their angelic little daughter, Carol Anne (Heather O’Rourke). Because the Freelings are such plastic Middle-American clichés, Poltergeist fails to arouse much empathy for the beleaguered family. Spielberg’s familiar thematic obsession with a child’s separation from his/her parents serves as little more than a plot device.||||
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SPIELBERG and Hooper at first appeared to be a good match. “We sit around and talk about movies almost like Huey and Duey [Donald Duck’s nephews],” Hooper said. “Half of a piece of construction would be suggested by one of us, and the other half would be completed by the other.” But it was not long before Spielberg came to the disenchanted conclusion that “Tobe isn’t what you’d call a take-charge sort of guy.”
Making the film for MGM, where David Begelman, the fallen champion of Close Encounters, was now in charge, Spielberg was concerned about making good on his promise to deliver the film at no more than 10 percent over its $9.5 million budget. The final cost of $10.8 million was 12 percent over the budget, although the movie (which Spielberg produced with Frank Marshall) finished shooting two days ahead of schedule. JoBeth Williams commented that Spielberg “drove us all like racehorses … I think that since making 1941 he’s acutely conscious of time and money.”
A number of practical problems prevented Spielberg from personally replacing Hooper as director. Poltergeist started shooting in May 1981, while E.T. was in active preproduction, requiring Spielberg’s daily attention to a myriad of technical and conceptual details. Although E.T. wound up being pushed back a month, it originally was scheduled to begin shooting that August, the same month Poltergeist finished shooting. Even if Spielberg could have found a way to juggle his schedule and give his full attention to both movies, his contract with Universal prevented him from directing another movie while making E.T., and Directors Guild of America rules prohibited the producer from taking over the job of the director.
“My enthusiasm for wanting to make Poltergeist would have been difficult for any director I would have hired,” Spielberg later admitted. “It derived from my imagination and my experiences, and it came [partly] out of my typewriter. I felt a proprietary interest in this project that was stronger than if I was just an executive producer. I thought I’d be able to turn Poltergeist over to a director and walk away. I was wrong.”
Being hired to direct Poltergeist was a quantum jump in Hollywood prestige for Hooper, since it was his first theatrical feature for a major studio and made him the latest protégé of Hollywood’s most successful filmmaker. That may have been why he paid the price of acceding to Spielberg’s constant presence on the set and turning over the last few months of postproduction to his writer-producer. “Tobe seemed to resolve Steven’s participation in his mind,” felt production manager Dennis E. Jones. “But I’m sure inside he was hurting.”*** Less than a month into shooting, Jeff Silverman of the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner reported Hollywood gossip that Hooper was “not really directing the pic anymore.” That prompted a response from Hooper that Spielberg’s “involvement spans all aspects of this film and does not differ from those functions normally performed by the executive producer. He is on the set when I specifically request it and this is becoming increasingly less as he prepares for an upcoming picture which he will direct beginning in August.”
Other observers did not see it that way. Screenwriter Bob Gale, who made two visits to the MGM soundstage where Poltergeist was filming, found it an “uncomfortable set,” because whenever Hooper gave an instruction to cinematographer Matthew F. Leonetti, Leonetti would look over his shoulder at Spielberg, who would nod or shake his head. Screenwriter David Giler and Spielberg’s agent, Guy McElwaine, spent a day acting in the film as part of a group of men watching football on television, an inside joke about the male-bonding parties Spielberg attended at McElwaine’s house. Giler recalls, “My partner, Walter Hill, and I were working on Southern Comfort in a cutting room right across the way. When I came back from the set, I said, ‘Well, now I know what the executive producer does. I’ve always wondered. He sets up the camera, tells the actors what to do, stands back, and lets the director say, ‘Action!’”
Hooper made no public objection when the ads for the film treated him as a virtual nonperson, relegating his name to small type while proclaiming, “Steven Spielberg has fascinated, mystified and scared audiences with Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Raiders of the Lost Ark. Now, he takes you into a world of terrifying forces that defy reason …” But Hooper finally had enough when he saw the trailer, in which the line “A Steven Spielberg Production” was twice as large as “A Tobe Hooper Film.” That was a violation of Directors Guild rules. Arbitrator Edward Mosk awarded Hooper $15,000 in damages, finding the trailer “denigrated the role of the director.” Mosk noted that “broader issues of dispute exist between the producer-writer and the director which seem to have exacerbated the current dispute over the trailer credit.” Ordering MGM to redo trailers running in New York and Los Angeles, Mosk also directed the studio to take full-page advertisements in three trade publications apologizing to Hooper and the DGA. The ads called the credit error “inadvertent” and said it “was not intended to diminish Mr. Hooper’s creative achievement as the director of the film.”
Spielberg took out his own double-edged ad in the trades, in the form of a letter addressed to Hooper: “Regrettably, some of the press has misunderstood the rather unique, creative relationship which you and I shared throughout the making of Poltergeist. I enjoyed your openness in allowing me, as a producer and a writer, a wide berth for creative involvement, just as I know you were happy with the freedom you had to direct Poltergeist so wonderfully. Through the screenplay you accepted a vision of this very intense movie from the start, and as the director, you delivered the goods.”
While the advertisements by MGM and
Spielberg may have helped salve Hooper’s wounded pride, the brouhaha was a setback to his career, negating any positive effect the film’s box-office success otherwise would have had on his future in Hollywood. Generally treating Poltergeist as an efficient but uninspired genre piece, reviewers knew where the true credit lay. Pauline Kael wrote in The New Yorker, “Whatever the credits say, [Spielberg] was certainly the guiding intelligence of Poltergeist—which isn’t a high compliment.” David Ehrenstein commented in the L.A. Reader that if only Hooper had been given free rein, he would have been “the ideal person to tear this vision of domestic bliss limb from limb.” But Spielberg wanted a family audience for the PG-rated film, and Ehrenstein accused him of wanting “to play with horror, but not for keeps…. You don’t have to be a dedicated follower of the politique des auteurs to recognize that Poltergeist owes a lot more to the creator of Close Encounters of the Third Kind than it does to the perpetrator of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.”
Despite his insistence on claiming credit in the press (“I designed the film…. I was the David O. Selznick of this movie”), Spielberg seemed somewhat uncomfortable with the public scrutiny of his role as shadow director of Poltergeist. Coming at the same time E.T. was making him (in the words of Rolling Stone’s Michael Sragow) “the most successful movie director in Hollywood, America, the Occident, the planet Earth, the solar system and the galaxy,” Spielberg’s treatment of Hooper looked like a symptom of incipient megalomania. Spielberg told the Los Angeles Times he had learned a lesson from the experience: “If I write it myself, I’ll direct it myself. I won’t put someone else through what I put Tobe through, and I’ll be more honest in my contributions to a film.”
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