The landmark film “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial” was released on this day in history, June 11, 1982.
With Steven Spielberg as its director, the film starred Henry Thomas, Drew Barrymore, Robert McNaughton and Dee Wallace.Â
“In Spielberg’s enduring masterpiece, one of the most wondrous and deeply touching of all science-fiction movies, young Elliott, a lonely child of divorce, befriends an outer-space creature who has been abandoned by his fellow aliens and yearns to return home to his distant home planet,” says the Museum of the Moving Image.Â
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“A symphony of feeling, featuring an audacious, overwhelming score by John Williams and cinematography by Allen Daviau that makes California suburbia look like a nocturnal dreamworld, E.T. is the rare blockbuster that is also a work of art.”
When the film was released, Spielberg was 34 years old and reportedly drew on his own experiences as an unusually imaginative, often-lonely child of divorce for his film, says History.com.
“For Spielberg, E.T. marked a return to territory he had first visited with the classic ‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind’ (1977), in which Richard Dreyfuss plays a man who comes face to face with a fearsome alien force that eventually proves to be human-friendly,” says the same source.
Spielberg collaborated with the movie’s screenwriter, Melissa Mathison (who would marry and eventually divorce Harrison Ford, the star of Spielberg’s “Indiana Jones” films) to capture the tale of the wise, cuddly and kind alien botanist who is stranded on Earth.
“Before long, a special link develops between E.T. and Elliott, who will eventually risk his own safety to return E.T. to his planet.”
He needs the help of a sensitive little boy, Elliott (Henry Thomas), to get back home, says History.com.
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Elliott…
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