E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial

Blank Jack with Griffin and David

Blank Jack with Griffin and David.

Don't know what to say or to expect.

All you need to know is that the name of the show is Blank Jack

B

Cast

Pod

B C Podcast BC podcast.

Blank check podcast.

Wow, that was stupid.

That was great.

That was so dope.

It was simple.

Yeah, it was simple.

My God, our microphones are all glowing at the tip.

Would you rather I call you podcast breath?

I was about to say that's what I would do.

That's the Griffin move, but this is too important of a movie to do.

You know something that's disrespectful to the film and to the medium of podcasting.

A serious medium of podcasting.

Here's the thing about penis breath.

We're starting out great.

Yeah.

Two things things about it.

One, my favorite thing about him saying penis breath, beyond the fact that it is such a specific insult.

Yeah, and I just like to say about it.

Calling him a jerk or calling him an asshole or whatever, is that the mom cannot help but laugh because it's such a specific, like she can't even shine him.

She's clearly being like, she goes,

it's a full laugh while she's attempting to scold him.

When I was a teenager, I met Chris Columbus.

Hey.

Because my mom, I think, interviewed him for Harry Potter.

So she sailed the ocean blue all the way.

It was in London.

It was in London.

And

that's kind of a good joke.

Yeah, it was a good joke.

And maybe it was in her interview.

I just look, this is all I remember.

The story was, it was right around when ET got revamped, right?

It was for its third anniversary.

2002.

Right.

Yep.

And someone asked him about it.

He'd worked with Spielberg, right?

And we're like, what do you think of the fact that Spielberg made a couple tweaks and he's changed this thing with the, you know, and he was like, as long as he hasn't changed the penis breath

and he did

he did in the 20th version they take out penis breath what i think it gets stuffed over with something else no the changes the big changes in the 20th are penis breath walkie talkie's removed or walkie talkies replaced guns digitally no adults hold guns oh that's such an important detail correct no spielberg highly regrets it and we're going to talk about this is what's fascinating versus all the other times we've talked about this kind of tinkering spielberg within one year of it was like, that was a mistake, pulled the 20th version from circulation.

And now it's hard to watch that, which is why it's hard for us to

recount.

Yes.

You have to get the out-of-print DVD.

And then he did the fucking CGI E-T.

There's one scene where there's a holistic CGI ET, and then he did a lot of face replacements and bits, and all of that sucks.

The penis breath thing, Griff.

I don't think that's true.

Are you sure about that?

Yes, I think you may have read that in this Ain't It Cool News article from 2001, but it's not true.

Okay, the only thing that was there that's changed.

She changes, she doesn't say terrorist, she says something else in a post-9-11 world.

Because it was post-9-11, the off-screen dialogue of her saying to Michael, Michael,

you know, you're not going out dressed like a terrorist.

It's changed to like pirate or something.

I don't know, like something like less offensive.

Here's my favorite.

Not offensive, Michael.

Here's my favorite thing about Penis Breath.

Sensitive.

Here's my favorite thing about Penis Breath.

And obviously, none of us were alive in 1982.

We can't speak to what it was like to be on the schoolyards in the immediate release of this movie.

I like that it feels like an insult exclusive to this film.

Right.

You do not.

It's an ETL insult.

Otherwise, I'm like, it's astounding that it isn't even quoted more.

Every time he says it, and I'm waiting for it, it still hits me right because it's surprising.

Penis breath.

It was nothing like that, penis breath.

Welcome to Blank Checks.

I almost said special features because I'm the one who introduces introduces that stuff.

EC podcast.

Podcast.

Welcome.

EC podcast.

Yeah, see, the whole thing is Griff's like, let's do this intro where Ben does E.T., but he's Griffin has a good E.T.

Yeah.

Do E.T.

You're a professional voice actor.

Okay, so you repeat the part, you do the Elliott.

Do EC

cast podcast.

No, we're not doing it again.

Griffin, do the

blank check podcast.

Do the ride, right?

What's the doesn't the ET ride, doesn't he say like your name at the end of it or whatever?

Goodbye, David, right?

And you're like, whoa, he said my name.

Ben.

What can he do, Griffin?

AKA, producer.

Ben, aka

the Ben Ducer.

What if we loaded every Ben nickname into E.T.?

I feel like his Griffin's a little funky.

I've obviously done the ride many times.

It's my favorite ride.

It's your favorite ride.

I think it is.

I think it's my favorite.

It's called ET Adventure.

It rules.

And we'll talk about it on Patreon.

Yeah, I think we'll

put it in.

I feel like it's always a little like, goodbye, groove.

Do they like have one person?

It's not like a computer program that figures out how to say name.

They just have one person read like a thousand names.

This is what's great about it.

Is the ride is, I want to say it's still sponsored by ATT.

Sure.

It's AT or T.

You have to choose now.

You do have to choose.

You still have to choose.

10 Comedy Points, a Decade of Dreams.

Way to throw back to an all-time moment on the show.

They, if I remember correctly, the system is still, and the last time I went on it was like two years ago,

you get handed a phone card

while you wait online.

And then right before you board the ride, you hand that phone card to an operator.

You tell them your name.

They type your name into a computer and they link it to knowing which number ride vehicle you're in so it will time out properly.

But it is still a pretty fucking main

system.

But that is, yeah, it's kind of an old-fashioned way of doing it.

I guess what else are you going to do?

Yeah.

This looks very fun, this ride of watching it.

We'll talk about it.

It looks like a very chill.

Yes.

Not too intense.

Right.

We've talked about the scuttled blank check goes to Orlando plans over the years.

Who knows if it ever happens?

I have always felt like if we could make it happen, this is the ride where you would walk off and be like.

Enchanting.

I get where you're coming from.

Not that you would be fully theme park filled, but I think you would have a forky-esque

wall comes down.

I get it.

It's one of the rides.

It's one of the few rides that has actually stuck with me.

Wow.

It is enchanting.

It is relaxing.

It is.

Well, I like relaxing.

I like hearing that.

And it's a fascinating combination of the first half of the ride is you basically going through E.T.

the movie as a ride.

And then you're like on his planet or something.

Then the second half of the ride is basically Spielberg being like, these are the things I developed when Universal begged me to make a sequel.

And I decided it was better to leave the movie as is.

But you know what?

I'll let them write a sequel novel and I'll put it in the ride.

And you go to E.T.'s plant with a bunch of guys, a bunch of weird plant guys who are like playing instruments on their belly and doing stuff.

And then he says your motherfucking name, which rules, because I'm going to say it.

E.T.

is the greatest friend of all time.

I hurt my voice a little doing the voice.

I have to take a sip.

Pow, I just shit my pants.

This is a blank trick with Griffin and David.

I'm Griffin.

I'm David.

It's a podcast about filmographies.

Directors who have massive success early on in their careers and are given a series of blank checks to make whatever crazy passion products they want.

And sometimes those checks clear and sometimes they bounce, baby.

Sometimes they fly in front of the moon and into film history.

E.T.

the Extraterrestrial is the film today.

I am going to put forward a few hot takes.

Oh, boy.

Here's my first one.

Okay.

I think this movie is good.

Okay, that's not a hot take at all.

That's widely held.

Okay.

Second, and this is a hot take.

I think this is one of the most successful movies of all time.

Financially, just in financial

data.

And third, I think this is one of the most important movies in history.

Just kind of in like cultural, kind of omnipresent.

These are hot takes.

I don't want anyone to cancel me for this.

I'm very excited to be talking about E.T.

I see what you're reading.

It's a mini-series on the films of Steven Spielberg.

Yes.

We've been calling it Podrastic Cast.

Okay.

Today we've gotten to what I think is his best film.

I think it's sort of inarguably his.

I have AI above it as a personal favorite.

I think ET is.

Do you have it at Tuesday?

It's Opus.

Yes.

I mean,

AI and ET are very paired, in my opinion.

Ben, can you grab me a seltzer?

This voice is going to keep catching up with me.

I think Empire of the Sun and E.T.

are very linked.

I think Catch Me If You Can and ET are very linked.

I think because it deals with so many of the core themes, he has other movies that are like adjacent to E.T.

that I could understand people ranking above or below.

But I'm like, this is the cleanest example of everything that makes Steven Spielberg Steven Spielberg.

And I feel like it is this like incredible apex point of everything coming to a head.

Yeah, this is, yeah, look.

Yeah.

I mean, it's E.T., this is always going to be a tough episode.

It's a, it's, uh,

you know, there's, it's, it's, it's easy to go into superlatives because there's really no way to over superlative E.T.

Yeah.

Um, and its success is undeniable, and it's the best.

Um, talking about his blank check status, watch the trailer for this movie that very wisely hides E.T.

in all of the trailers for the movie, all you saw was his hand

and the glowing finger at the very end.

Yeah.

Silhouette of the hand.

I feel like you don't even see silhouette of the rest of his body.

Um, so like seeing E.T.

was a surprise, was kept off the poster.

The main poster image at the time was the two fingers touching, right?

Um, this is how the trailer opens.

In 1975, he brought you Joss.

Yeah.

In 1977, he brought you close encounters of the third kind.

Let's not pay attention to what happened in 1979.

In 1981, he brought you Raiders of the Lost Ark.

In 1982, he brings you E.T.

the Extraterrestrial.

Why not?

If you're sitting in the theater and you see that trailer, you're like, great, you're promising me one of the greatest movies ever made.

You're promising me the fucking pinnacle of Hollywood filmmaking.

And this movie, like, delivered.

Right?

There's like a confidence to that pitch that it is incredible it met and also met in a way where the weird contradiction of E.T.

is like, this is his small personal movie.

Yes, it is.

And it is undeniably smaller in scale than the films he'd been making.

Intimate film.

And if you actually recount it, like five things happen in this movie.

Sure.

And nonetheless, it's an epic.

It's sort of a little epic, as I think you put it.

Like a epic.

Yes.

And

it has

real sweep, sweep.

Look, obviously, a lot of that is John Williams, who we will talk about.

A lot of that is just the emotion this film is able to tap into makes it feel operatic.

When it is actually very contained and focused.

And watching it today, it is just like astounding.

As much as I still feel like E.T.

is one of the movies that probably gets repeated in like the offices of studio execs all the time of wouldn't it be great to make something like E.T.,

this thing would not pass one notes round.

This thing would not survive.

You just cannot imagine them not feeling the need to explain everything,

add bigger set pieces, blow it up, heighten the stakes, you know?

Sure, I think there could be

what I think the movie is missing, and I don't know if you guys agree with me, is Barb.

I'm going to bring her in.

You want Barb from Stranger Things?

Stranger Things is one of those totemic shows that invented everything that happens in it, right?

It's like the tone, the vibes, the aesthetic, right?

And then the Duffer brothers went back in time after they created Stranger Things, whispered Spielberg's ear.

Right.

Yeah.

Farted E.T.

into Spielberg's ear.

So you watch E.T.

now and you're like, okay, well, obviously Stranger Things did it better, but then you're just watching E.T.

like, if only Barb was here.

You know?

look, I have famous things.

You're being facetious.

I am being facetious.

I just wanted to

crystallize it.

I love to occasionally bring

Barb because I've never made it past like episode three of Stranger Things.

I tried three times because that show was so popular.

Second of it.

You know, trying to be like, this show is so popular.

I'm sure I would.

And I always, so I've tried three times.

So I've watched

the poor forgotten Barb, this like very early character who dies.

Yeah.

I've watched her die three times.

Barb looms very large for you.

And then just been like, I can't be bothered and it's not tried with episode four.

When you said Barb, I barbed.

Do you want E.T.

to go to Vista Del Mar?

What are you implying?

Well,

there's a new Barb and hook up with Barb and Star.

Barb and Star.

That would be so cute.

You know what, Rob?

Go to Vista Del Mar.

Barb and Starr?

Go to Vista Del Mar.

That movie rules.

Such a movie.

Here's another movie that rules.

E.T., the extraterrestrial from 1982.

Yes.

I have so fucking much to say.

I hope people are hooting, hollering at a guestless episode because we're going to fucking expound on this thing.

We had two great guests who were possibly hovering around it, but the whole time, every time we talked about it, we kept circling back to, and by the way, if we do E.T.

Guestless,

that's all right.

That feels kind of ideal.

Oh, yeah.

You know, there were two people kind of sniffing around, and we were like, if it works, it works.

But you know what?

I'm down to just fucking just lay out and talk E.T., the boys.

Here we we are.

When did you first see E.T.

the Extraterrestrial Griffith?

I cannot carbon date it.

It was young.

It was early.

I feel like it was presented to me as if it were like the Grand Canyon.

Same.

Like, you are finally ready to understand a thing that is like key to our culture.

But also, I think what is still so specific about E.T.

is it is presented to children as this rite of passage of like, are you finally ready to go through a profound emotional change?

Can you handle the sort of more intense emotions of this this big feelings movie my guess is i saw it around five if not younger but like i couldn't tell you i couldn't either i i remember very viscerally the experience of watching it for the first time and the emotional journey of it and yet i can't pin what age it was because it's hard for me to think about a time before i had seen it i don't remember the first time i saw it but i do just every time i watch it yes

realize how written into my brain it is of just like elliott's little shark toy things like this, you know, where I'm on his tongue, yeah, like all right, the like the image of the blood on his finger, things where I'm just like, I'm these, all these things made such an impact on me at a young age, and they are so

like when I see them, it's almost like freaky deja vu.

Like that I'm like remembering something that happened to me just because the movie was so kind of like whatever, yeah, pounded into me.

Yeah.

What up, Ben?

I mean, same.

Yeah.

I saw it very young.

I don't remember exactly when, but it's just just been so

It's ingrained in me, you know, it really is and uh and we were all born after it came out.

It's not like we even saw it, you know, uh in theaters or whatever.

Yeah, I remember the VHS tape having a little green corner at the bottom of the version I had that just like always stuck out to me as seeing it on the shelf.

Okay

And this also for sure implanted in my mind that I want to be abducted by an alien.

So E.T.

is kind of a real pivot point movie for you.

Definitely.

Yeah.

So, David, similar experience for you?

Wanting to be abducted by an alien.

No, no, no.

Watching E.T.

for the first time.

That's what I just said.

No, no, no.

I don't remember.

I don't remember the first time.

I'll say this, though.

Like, all implanted in my brain burned into me.

It was not a movie I watched obsessively as a child.

It was not a VHS we had.

I remember this one very profound experience.

And then my sister Romley, longtime sister, she was nine years younger.

When she was a couple years old, and it was like, is Romley ready for E.T.?

We rented it for her.

And I feel like I had possibly not seen it since the one time at that point.

Romley had a phase where she was obsessed with it.

And I feel like I watched it five times with her

when she was like, you know, four and I was like 13.

And then we took Romley on the Universal Ride.

She got terrified because she didn't like actually meeting E.T.

There is no way that he knew how to say her name.

It was bad.

Yeah.

It like activated some satanic chant in E.T.

and he started talking backwards.

No, and we were like, Romley, Romley, stop crying.

He's going to say your name.

And then he goes, like, goodbye.

I will post it on social media, but afterwards at Universal, next to the gift shop, they have like a photo op where you can get on the bike and ride in front of the moon with E.T.

And we were like, don't you want a photo with E.T.?

And Romley stopped crying for five five seconds in order to do a perfect child like model smiling face pose.

We got the picture and then she got off and started bawling again.

The photo is incredible.

But so I watched it a lot in that period.

Sure.

And then I've seen it, I want to say two or three times since then.

They re-released it in IMAX a couple of years ago.

I remember going to like a free public park screening.

E.T.

Probably 10 years ago.

That was weirdly the 20th version.

Projected off a DVD where everyone like five minutes in was like oh fuck CGI right um but it is a movie Java the Hutt was there Jappa was there E.T.

stepped on his tail

and then Japa stepped on E.T.'s neck

but yeah is it's just it is a very important film to me despite it not really being like one of my movies Yeah, I hear what you're saying, but this E.T.

is, yeah, right.

To me, not a movie I'd want to watch all the time.

Do you think you outgrow it a little bit?

I don't think so.

Because I definitely remember having it in my collection

at some point.

And I watched it a lot because I didn't have a lot of VHS tapes.

Okay, you owned it.

I owned it.

Yeah.

And at some point, I was like, that's baby stuff.

Of course, when you're a teenager, you right,

you swing away, but then you swing back.

That's old.

Well, no, I hadn't swung back until today.

Oh, wow.

Because I swung back.

I mean, well, I was

pretty wrecked.

Destroyed.

I can only imagine.

I think.

Look, I've talked about this a lot.

Romale being almost a decade younger than me basically insulated me from needing to swing away from any childish stuff.

That's why.

Because I was just like, oh, I'll take her to every animated movie.

That's why you're the man in front of us today.

Right, exactly.

And obviously, my love of the craft of like fucking puppets and animation, whatever.

I still wanted to watch these things clinically as my adult brain was developing, but that made it okay for me to see everything.

E.T.

I do think, I just want to call this out.

I think also, culturally, we were of a generation where there was this kind of like, you go through a phase where you think Spielberg is a corny, manipulative bullshit offer.

100%.

And that was like a cultural thing of like, people love Spielberg as kids, then they get cynical about him if you get serious about movies, and then you maybe swing back.

Now, Spielberg is sort of like such an old master.

Yeah, he's like a guardian of cinema now.

It's not also mostly making adult dramas.

But he makes original movies too.

So people are just like, oh, you know, it used to be be like, ah, Spielberg, he's, you know, playing to the middle of the past.

Right.

Now he feels like someone that like film Twitter protects more than the general public does and reviews, you know?

Yeah.

But I do think that was like a thing of like, you're in the 90s and people are like, is E.T.

like corny bullshit?

No.

No, it's not.

It's, it is, it is.

I just think it's like one of the most emotionally astute movies ever made.

I'm going to say a lot of hyperbolic things in this episode.

You need to relax.

I'm going to need, I need you to relax because we're going to go too crazy.

It's so fucking good.

Yeah, it's very, very good.

Stevens Fielberg's ET.

I'm going to just open the dossier just to sort of, just to kind of like put a saucer under the cup.

Kathleen Kennedy, a person who everyone has normal feelings about.

Yeah.

Look, it's my favorite thing to say when people like to complain about the things she has done in charge of Lucasfilm and go like, who is this woman anyway?

Why'd she get this position?

I'm like, I don't know what she said.

Yeah, what success has she had?

She produced E.T.?

He met her are you talking about while working on 1941 yes she was john millius's secretary uh and right she was working for john millius and so she starts working for sema spielberg she's an associate uh

assistant producer sorry on raiders and associate producer on poltergeist and uh while he's working on raiders spielberg is like uh while i was doing all this close encounters research

I found out about this UFO case in Kentucky.

Go find out about it.

Yeah.

She goes and digs into it.

There's a case where a family said they've been visited from creatures from outer space.

It's called the Kelly Hopkinsville encounter.

It's a very famous UFOology thing.

Family of 12 that all said sort of like these gray aliens, you know, hypnotized us.

It's a classic, classic.

The return of this Sekaka 7

has just come out and Spielberg hires John Sales off of that to basically like dramatize this.

And this is the kind of fabled lost project Night Sky.

Correct.

It's basically a horror thriller kind of movie about like families coming under attack by aliens.

And Spielberg is like thinking about making this, but he's like, what if like 20 years from now, someone makes this movie and it's about, you know, you throw cups of water on them in baseball.

It's just one of these fascinating things.

It's funny that Shyamalan, the heir to Spielberg at that moment, makes signs, which is Night Skies.

Like, you know, with his Shyamalan's themes after that.

Great point.

It's just fascinating to me that this movie kind of comes from three different streams of like thought incubation, but all three start with Spielberg.

Like he's not intercepting anything from the outside, right?

Like there's this one impulse while still making close encounters that is like, what if I made a really scary alien movie rather than the spiritual one?

Then the second thread is while he's shooting close encounters and they are filming the stuff from the end of the movie where the aliens come out of the ship and there's the one main Carlo Rimbaldi, animatronic alien, who is the one who does the hand signals and really interacts with Richard Dreyfus.

He has this like thought of, what if this was like a student exchange program?

What if Richard Dreyfus gets on the ship and the alien stays behind?

What happens if there's one alien on Earth?

And he's thinking about that in like a Disney movie.

And is it a coincidence maybe that that movie was almost kind of anti-family a little bit?

We'll talk about that.

Okay, look.

John Sales delivers this script.

Okay.

Spielberg is just kind of like, eh, this is like violent.

I don't want this.

Too scary.

And also, is this different enough from Close Encounters?

Do I need to do this?

And he's reading the script.

One of the last images in the script is a little alien left alone looking at the sky.

And Spielberg's like, well, that's interesting.

And so throughout Making Raiders, he's...

He's pondering this and he's trying to get back to the tranquility, he says, the spirituality of close encounters.

He's kind of lonely.

His girlfriend at the time, Kathleen Carey, is in California.

So is George Lucas.

Harrison Ford is pooping his guts out all the time.

And Spielberg's like, I wish I had a friend to talk to.

Cause, you know, it's been the days before he could just fire up Twitter and, you know, fire off some sexy posts.

Twitter's a great place for friends.

Exactly.

Connect to the world in a really healthy way.

He's bored.

Yeah.

And he's like.

You know, what if I were 10 years old again and I had like an imaginary friend?

I feel like it's been turned into

he like there's this kind of apocryphal like Spielberg had an imaginary alien friend as a child.

And I think that that is not true.

No, I think it's about

him going back to the idea of someone in that feeling.

Exactly.

Right.

And what is like, why do children do that?

What is this like need to create a thing to fill a void?

You know, a sense of like loneliness that needs to be replaced with like an imaginary loyalty.

You know, because it's like kids with friends have imaginary friends.

It's not just like a thing of latchkey children who don't know how to socialize, but I think it's the notion of that like connectivity.

Right.

I have an imaginary friend who is always going to be there for me that I can call on at any moment.

That's what he's riffing on, not a specific imaginary friend of his childhood with a glowy finger.

Right.

Yeah.

So,

you know, he's pondering all of this.

And

he's thinking, of course, about his

father being gone and, you know, when he was a young man.

And

that's how he comes up with Elliot and this this kid whose dad is flown off to Mexico with another woman well but here's the other part of this that the third stream is during close encounters which he wrote of course he's like writing another script or at least noodling with the early stages of it being like maybe I write all of my movies And it is his first attempt to try to make the thing that he kicks the cane on for 40 years that eventually becomes the Fablemans, right?

Yeah.

It's the first attempt at being like, do I want to make a movie about divorce?

Maybe not a literal autobiographical film about my family but i want to like excise the emotions of divorce and being a child of divorce and like at many points over the next couple decades every time he sort of toys with it he goes uh

too hot to handle sure what he gets into is the idea of can i fold these three things together um yeah uh

so

he

is he's got the sales draft he's like forget it but he hands he brings in melissa matheson yes who had written The Black Stallion, 1975, 1979, Black Stallion.

Is on set during Raiders.

Because she is dating Mr.

Harrison for it.

Correct.

She's a short.

And she's one of the only people he's around there to talk to.

Yes.

She's written The Black Stallion, which he loves.

She's written The Escape Artist, which was a notoriously kind of tragic and difficult production.

And,

well, Francis Ford Coppola's son dies during the making of

that film.

Whatever.

It's a a complicated movie, right?

The point is, he starts talking to her about, like, I'm noodling with these ideas.

There's the sales draft I have.

There's this other thing I'm interested in, whatever it is.

Melissa Matheson's like, I'm retired.

I don't want to write anymore.

Like, she's sort of talking through it to him.

She's.

Until she finally sort of locks in.

What, David?

Let me read the dossier.

I watched so much special feature stuff last night.

Don't give me that look.

I just feel like, why do we even have the dossier then?

Because it's great.

Okay.

Well, she said, JJ Phonehouse.

she's not into science fiction she doesn't feel like a good writer she didn't like black stallion spielberg says he is he admired black stallion which feels a little more uh okay

you know couched in but um

she was feeling very unhappy and miserable about herself she'd optioned a book for some like for some screenplay that she couldn't finish uh whatever they all lean on her kennedy harrison ford spielberg all lean on her she writes a draft

and uh she writes a book a screenplay called e.t and me

then it's called a boy's Life.

She consults with Harrison Ford's young sons,

Willard and Benjamin.

Good names.

Sure.

Willard Ford.

And she says that multiple kids that she talks to, basically with this proposal of like, what would you do if you had an imaginary sort of alien friend?

Bring up the healing, taking the Awes away.

Right.

Interesting.

And so she locks into that is like, okay, that can be what's sort of magical about him.

The other thing is that Harrison Ford's boys are obsessed with Dungeons and Dragons.

Okay.

And she's like, okay, so I think I'm going to have them playing Dungeons and Dragons, have to sort of like seed the rich

imaginative

stuff there.

I like that.

Yeah, I do too.

Phone home, Melissa's line.

Okay.

Spielberg's joke was, Melissa, are you working for me or ATT?

And she said, to quote Ben Hosley, it's AT or T, and you have to choose now.

Yeah, funny.

But also, wait a second.

Ben plagiarized that joke.

A decade of watching.

She's quick.

Spielberg then has lunch with Kathleen Kennedy.

Walks in with the screenplay.

Kathleen Kennedy's meeting with someone at MGM, I think.

And he's just like, we could shoot this draft.

It's the first draft.

And he's like, we could shoot this tomorrow.

He says

it's still to this day, the best first draft he's ever read.

Kathleen Kennedy said, at that point in time, I'd maybe read five scripts.

Right.

But Spielberg said, like, people would read it and cry.

Like, it's like, it's, you know, which is not usual for a screenplay.

And Kathleen Kennedy was like, look, I didn't have enough perspective to understand how good the script was, but I knew it was great.

And she's like, now in the last 40 years, I've read thousands of scripts and nothing's as good as that first draft of E.T.

The other part of it is that Spielberg had been stewing on all the pieces of this for so long that he's basically during Raiders, like going to her and being like, can I share some more thoughts with you?

So like the writing process is like, and I think it extends past when Raiders raps, them meeting and spending days where he is just spilling notions and ideas to her.

And then she's doing things like talking to Ford's sons and going, what about this?

What about this?

And they're like meeting on it.

They're talking through it a lot before she goes off, writes, comes back, hands him a perfect thing.

And they're like, they probably adjusted less than 10%

of what's in that draft.

This lady is hanging with Steven Spielberg, writing E.T., and sleeping with Harrison Ford.

I mean, what kind of the drink?

That's pretty, pretty good stuff.

Yeah, it doesn't.

So I think being in love with Harrison Ford, especially back then, is kind of a tricky thing.

He's kind of a grump.

They put the right focus on it, which is she is getting to sleep with him.

That's pretty cool.

Sure.

I mean.

Yes.

Yes.

But so it makes sense that this thing sort of like comes together so quickly.

Because it had been in him so long.

She knew how to process it well.

She was pulling from other places.

When she finally sits down to write, it had all sort of been been figured out.

But I also think it is a key part of this movie for how much Spielberg didn't really want to talk about his childhood at length until later in life.

But everyone knew that the divorce was seismic.

I think people used to read this movie as being a lot more like one-to-one autobiographical.

Where when you watch this film now, you're like, the circumstances of his childhood do not line up very well to this movie.

It is speaking to a feeling.

It is speaking to an emotional truth, but there is like not a ton of overlap here.

And I think if Spielberg had tried to write this himself, it would never have even gotten close to being as good as her being able to process it and with a little distance, form an actual story around it.

This isn't, it isn't.

It's not a, yeah, this is the, just because he's inspired by his, you know, his childhood, you know, search for a father figure and all that, and that's in the movie.

It's right.

It's not like some one-to-one movie about Spielberg's childhood at all.

No, which is what I find fascinating.

And it's a thing I'm going to just pin on the board right here in our conversation that I was thinking a lot about on this most recent watch.

What is E.T.

about?

I have plenty of answers to you.

I have plenty of answers to you too, but I think part of the movie's power is that it actually is a little hard to pin down.

That it is a little bit of like a mirror.

And I think why this movie is so effective is I think it is about certain very specific things, but i think it is about them in a way that leaves enough room for everyone to like fill in the pieces of it this is my take i we'll get into it you disagree i agree with that yes i think et is about a very universal and powerful feeling that children have which is why i agree that's everyone speaks next to it that's what it's speaking to yes

well

rick baker had been brought in to I guess design a bunch of monster aliens for night skies and was basically told like this is now a children's film film, and you have to design one alien.

Yeah, was really he got really mad, yeah, and exits the project.

You wasted my time.

Spielberg turns to Stan Winston, another icon.

Yeah, um,

and uh, Stan Winston likes the script, but then he also checks in with Carlo Rambaldi, who, of course, did the animatronic for the biggest encounters, uh, for King Kong.

And

he did do the little alien in Close Encounter, which is too obvious.

He's a little hero alien, is only on screen for 10 seconds or whatever.

Um, But Carl Ormbaldi comes from fucking Dario Orgento movies.

He

is it rude to say he looks like E.T.?

It is not.

I had the exact same thoughts.

He's a very funny-looking guy.

People always talk about that, like Spielberg, like, you know, throughout, like, I want to look a little like Einstein.

Yeah, then it's like, he has Einstein's eyes.

I want the intelligence and I want the kindness.

And then I was just, well, yeah, he's got Bo Derrick's rocking by.

He's a perfect tent.

Oh my gosh.

Carl Irmbaldi looks a lot like E.T.

Even his Wikipedia photo in the background blurred out his E.T.

And it's like, you're like, brother, look at this side by side.

The shape of his head kind of triangulates.

He's got these very rich, big, but wide-set eyes.

And then the kind of like small pointiness of his mouth and his nose.

Oh, my God.

That's so funny.

Right?

Yeah.

And you look at him and there's the same kind of like odd, elusive, hard to pin down quality where you're like, this guy looks a little scary, a little intense, kind, emotionally like deep.

You know, it's all there.

So, uh, Rambaldi, Spielberg decides he wants both.

Uh, Stan Winson doesn't want to collaborate, so Spiberg just goes with Rambaldi.

Uh, Stan Winson apparently intensely regretted that decision.

No shit, obviously.

Uh, and he's, you know, gives him this really great

sort of suggestion of like, basically, like, I want him to be off-putting, but not monstrous, which is kind of a tough needle to thread.

And if the E.T.

design is bad, this movie stinks.

I agree.

It's really, would be really hard to overcome if you you have like Mac and Me,

like, you know, instead of E.T., right?

The Mac and Me absolutely.

Like if you just have a stupid looking thing.

And what's wild is like, you know,

Rambaldi comes from like someone who did Giallo movies, right?

The year before this,

he does possession.

Great movie.

The creature stuff that he actually designed Isabella Johnny.

People don't know that she is a Carlo Rambaldi animal astronomer.

And that's the root of her recent like legal tax issues is like puppets shouldn't be filing taxes.

She doesn't have tax issues.

Yeah, I think she went to jail for that, possibly.

If you're French,

and you're a famous actor, and then you get older,

something weird happens.

It is, I don't know what it is.

It is wild.

It's like a radioactive Half-Life thing where it's like, oh, time's up.

You're about to get weird in some way or another.

Right.

Does like, is the biggest talent agency in France Monkey Paw Incorporated?

No, isn't the biggest talent agency the great guys from De Porsant, my favorite Netflix show?

Yes.

I know it's not an, it's probably, you know, what's that show called?

Call My Agent is the right.

Yes.

I love that show.

Yeah, what about my Monkey Paw joke?

That was good.

It does feel like the fame catches up with all of them in a weird way.

Have you ever watched Call My Agent?

Yeah.

So my mom was like, watch this show.

I think I was like,

you might be surprised to hear that my mom was like, watch this show.

And I fire it up with her.

Yeah.

It was like I was on vacation with her or something, and we were trying to decide on something to watch.

It was a nightmare.

And she was like, watch this, let's watch this.

And like, immediately they're hitting you with like Cecile DeFrance jokes, right?

Of like, and I'm like, this is so great.

This is like inside baseball about French acting.

It's so funny.

Anyway, what I was going to say is that possession designs are not that different from E.T.

Interesting.

There is that sort of like fleshy, gooey, lumpy, brown, sort of like bio-organic body horror thing to

see.

And it's just give it nice eyes.

Yes.

And more of a kind of personality.

The possession ones ones are fully terrifying, but it is what you're talking about.

That line of like, there should be something a little off-putting for him in him.

What will make him feel real is the idea that the audience has to kind of like learn to love him and warm up to him and start to see a personality in him rather than all other movies like this design something that at first blush is cute.

Right.

Like they don't trust that they can get you there through performance and story.

They're like, well, if he looks cute, it's easy to get people in.

To invoke a movie we've covered in the past decade of dreams

when David Fincher was doing his casting process for Girl with the Dragon tattoo, and all of Hollywood's hottest actress were coming in and desperately vying.

E.T.

did audition for that.

He did.

He had a good take.

He had a good take, sure.

He had a good take.

He always said,

the problem was he would see people like Scarlett Johansson.

who he was like, had a great performance, nailed the accent, had the characterization, and was like, it is kind of impossible to not make Scarlett Johansson sexy.

And we could like put the piercings or the wigs on her.

And it always still was like fighting that.

And he said to Sony, I need Lisbeth to be like E.T.

And they said, What do you mean?

And he said, I want it to be so if you see her on a poster, it feels a little bracing.

And I trust that in the movie, you will warm up to it.

And he said, Like, E.T., if you see him as like a plush doll on a shelf, you're like, That thing is hideous looking.

But if you've seen the movie, you connect to the design.

So

they, you know, he comes up with the E.T.

design.

It's a really good one.

Yeah, you nailed it.

It's fucking incredible.

Beyond the design, it is just, I texted this in BC group text Max Plus,

our major all-hands on deck group text.

Sure.

As JJ was like completing the dossier.

And I said, like, does E.T.

give the greatest performance in the history of film?

He's a cool guy.

It is astonishing what they get out of like obviously a real mishmash of mediums.

Right.

Animatronics puppets, guy in suit.

Yes, but I think the thing in the E.T.

puppet that I struggle to think of another example of it being done this effectively isn't just like, oh, there's an expressiveness to him.

This puppet feels like it breathes.

There are motors in it that are like micro expressions that are going on and moments in the film that are not trying to sell an emotion.

They are selling the idea that he just exists.

There's always this kind of just sort of like flexing of his face.

Right.

I agree.

I think ET's cool.

I do think

he's right on the edge of looking completely fucked up and terrifying, which is why he's cool.

Uh-huh.

I like when he gets drunk.

I like when he puts on flannel.

I like when he crushes some beers.

We'll talk about it.

Can I do a quick ranking of of my five favorite comedians of all time?

Number one, Steve Martin.

Number two, drunk E.T.

Number two, number three, E.T.

as it goes for Halloween.

Yeah.

Number four, E.T.

wearing lady clothes.

Number five, Bernie Mac.

These are three of the funniest things

in history.

Yeah, I love it when E.T.

says that.

Ben.

What's up, Griff?

This is an ad break.

Yeah.

And I'm just, this isn't a humble brag, it's just a fact of the matter.

Despite you being on mic, oftentimes, when sponsors buy ad space on this podcast, the big thing they want is personal host endorsement.

Right.

They love that they get a little bonus ben on the ad read, but technically, that's not what they're looking for.

But something very different is happening right now.

That's true.

We had a sponsor come in and say, we are looking for the coveted Ben Hosley endorsement.

What?

This is laser-targeted.

The product.

We have a copy that asks, is the product a porch movie?

It certainly is.

And what is today's episode sponsored by?

The Toxic Avenger.

The new Toxic Avenger movie is coming to theaters August 29th.

Macon Blair's remake of...

Reimagining.

Reimagining, whatever.

Reboot of The Toxic Avenger.

Now, David and I have not gotten to see it yet, but they sent you a screener link.

Yeah, I'm going to see it.

We're

excited to see it.

But Ben, you texted us last night.

This fucking rules.

It fucks.

It honks.

Yeah.

It's so great.

Let me read you the cast list here in billing order, as they asked, which I really appreciate.

Peter Dinkledge, Jacob Tremblay, Tremblay, Taylor Page, with Elijah Wood, and Kevin Bacon.

Tremblay is Toxie's son.

His stepson.

His stepson.

Okay.

Wade Goose.

Yes.

Great name.

Give us the takes.

We haven't heard of them yet.

Okay.

You got fucking Dinklage is fantastic.

He's talking.

He plays it with so much heart.

It's such a lovely performance.

Bacon is in the pocket too, man.

He's the bad guy.

He's the bad guy.

There's a lot of him shirtless.

Okay.

Looking like David.

David sizzling.

Yep.

And then Elijah Wood plays like a dang-ass freak.

He certainly does.

He's having a lot of fun.

Tell us some things you liked about the movie.

Okay, well, I'm a Jersey guy.

I just got to say, the original movie was shot in the town where I went to high school.

Yes, yes, that's right.

The original film.

Yep.

I grew up watching toxic and trauma movies on porches.

Yes.

With my sleazy and sticky friends.

It informed so much of my sensibility.

Your friends like Junkyard Dog and Headbanger.

Yeah, exactly.

Making Toxic Crusader drills.

And so when I heard that they were doing this new installment, I was really emotionally invested.

It was in limbo for a while before our friends at Ciniverse rescued it and are now releasing it uncut.

But I feel like there have been years of you being very excited at the prospect, but also a little weary.

They're playing with fire here.

Yeah, it's just, it's something that means a lot to me.

And they knocked it out of the fucking park.

Okay.

It somehow really captured that sensibility, that sense of humor, even just that like lo-fi, scrappy kind of nature that's inherent in all of the trauma movies and the original Toxie movies.

And they have like updated it in this way that it was just, I was so pleased with it.

It's gooey.

It's gooey.

It's sufficiently gooey.

Tons of blood tons of goo

uh great action it's really funny it just it it hits all of the sensibilities that you would want in an updated version cinniverse last year released terrifier 3 unrated yeah big risk for them there i feel like it's a very very intense movie and one of the huge hit more interesting yeah theatrical box office phenomenons the last five years want to make that happen again here

tickets are on sale right now advanced sales really really matter for movies like this.

So if y'all were planning on seeing Toxic Avenger, go ahead and buy those tickets.

Please go to toxicavenger.com slash blank check to get your tickets.

Blank check one word.

In theaters August 29th.

Yup.

And Ben, it just says here in the copy, wants to call out that Elijah Wood plays a weird little guy who says summon the nuts.

Can you tell us anything about that moment without spoiling it?

Summon the nuts is in reference to a

psychotic new metal band

who are also mercenaries

and drive a van

with a skeleton giving two fingies up on the grill.

And that's all I'll say.

Okay.

And they are the most dang-ass freaks of dang-ass freaks.

I'm excited to see it.

And your endorsement, I think, carries more weight than anyone else's in in the world on this one.

Seriously, get your tickets now.

Go to toxicadvengure.com/slash blank check.

Do it, do it.

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Aw,

they're dreaming.

Spielberg has a script.

Yeah.

Spielberg has a little clay prototype of what E.T.

looks like.

He goes to Columbia, where Night Skies was set up and they'd made close encounters.

And they're like, this is going to cost $10 million.

That seems like a lot.

Your last movie was 1941 because Raiders hasn't come out yet.

That didn't do well.

And let's remember that Columbia really wanted to do it.

We have a movie called Starman that we really like.

Right.

This is, I love when our podcast has gone on long enough that stories start to overlap and things we've covered in the past, like this web of shit.

But Columbia really wanted a close encounter sequel, which is why he makes the director's cut to sort of satiate that need.

But when he comes to them with Night Skies, I think they're like, Look, this feels close enough to Close Encounters, even if it's not literally a sequel.

We'll take what we can get.

By the moment he comes in with a fucking clay maquette and is like, it's now about like a nice alien who befriends a sad boy.

I think they're like, what the fuck are you talking about?

And a thing I saw him talk about a lot in these special features I watched that span over decades is that he kept on being like, this is me trying to make a Disney movie.

And in 1982 and 1981, Disney was at their nadir.

They are bad.

It's not quite a brand that you can sell to people in the same way.

It's a bit of an embarrassing brand.

It's embarrassing.

He was like, it's uncool.

Disney animation is in a bad place.

Disney live action is in a worse place.

Like in 1982 or 1981 or whatever, like you're talking, that's Fox and the Hound.

Black Cauldron is 85.

It's an, yes, it's an

Renaissance comic.

I mean, Tron comes out the same summer.

They're trying to make Star Wars.

Yes.

Or shitty family comics.

We both love Tron.

The animation movies are like struggles behind the.

Columbia puts this project in turnarounds.

Yeah.

Spielberg goes over to Sid Sheinberg, his old mentor at Universal, and Scheinberg says, I love it, but I'm not sure it's going to be like a big commercial movie.

I'll give you distribution, but I want you to raise some money with a bonding company.

Spielberg does that and signs a contract that has strict penalties where he would give give up percentage points if he went over budget or anything like that.

He's trying to keep himself on Rails.

Well, they're trying to keep him on Rails as well.

And, you know, so he does it really sort of quickly and sort of conservatively, if that makes sense.

This movie was set up.

in the manner of a blank check project where everyone's like, look, the script is good.

It's probably not commercial.

He talks about how everyone working on it was like,

this feels like a fun project, but I don't know if it's going to make any money.

And his greatest wish was that it wouldn't lose Universal money.

And Scheinberg just kind of took a flyer and, like, look, we got a history.

You've made some other hits for us.

There's also this Harold Kazagian, who produced Raiders, claims that Spielberg was trying to make a musical Universal called Real to Real, which he could not get them to agree to.

And he still kind of owed Universal a movie and does E.T.

as also, like, finally, he's like, well, let me just do E.T.

Yeah.

Now, I'm not sure how grain of salt on that.

You know, like, I don't know how much we should take it as like great because people are just getting something out of the way.

Universal buys ET from Columbia for $1 million.

A million dollars.

And instead just puts all their chips onto Starman.

Columbia does.

Yes.

Yes.

So

number one casting decision, Drew Barrymore.

Bring her in.

Legendary child of the Barrymore acting family.

She tells, famously tells Steven Spielberg a story about how she's like the lead singer of a punk band.

Correct.

I'm not sure if that was like her like making something up or if it was like quote unquote real.

This is what he said, that she talked for minutes about how she had a punk band and they were going to go play CBGBs and friends at school.

You know, confident.

She's five years old.

Right.

And like six or seven minutes in, he was like, this isn't real.

Like, the more details she added, the more he went from like, maybe she wasn't.

They were called the purple people eaters.

Right.

When she started out, he was like, I guess maybe she plays with friends at school.

And she started heightening to a degree.

But then his realization was, if she can sell me on this being a reality, this kid could sell me on anything.

I I mean, she's, it's the most delightful kid performance.

It's incredible.

It is astounding.

Drew Barrymore is great.

She was first

interviewed for Poltergeist, obviously, to be little, you know, little, what's her name?

Carol?

Yeah.

In Altered States is her first movie.

Is that right?

She had been in, she is, I think she's very young.

She's very young.

Heather Orr.

Caroline Freeze.

Yeah.

Anyway, Elliot obviously is a much tougher decision.

Yes.

David.

Jack Fisk.

What were were you going to say?

David Hollander.

I don't know who that is.

Had been cast, some kid from Little House in the Prairie.

Okay.

Is made to play DD at Harrison Ford's house and was seen as too showy and assertive by Spielberg.

So is uncast.

Well, let's get ahead of one thing here, right?

And it speaks to like why the audition process included things like Drew Barrymore talking about being in a punk band.

That Spielberg was like, for this to work, I need to like create an experience for this children where they are like feeling things honestly and also are like taking some part in the authorship of this movie.

So part of his thought, even though the script in his view is pretty perfect, is like, the thing that will make this work is if the kids are really in this in an honest way and we have to sort of adjust around them and find the right personalities and kids who have that level of imagination and emotional connection and all of that sort of stuff.

So all the auditions are these weird tests to sort of like

see the personalities of the children as much as anything else.

That makes sense to me.

Yeah, because Henry Thomas reads, he's recommended, yes, by Jack Fisk,

because he had played Sissy SpaceX's son in Raggedy Man.

He reads, and the reading is not very good, but then Spielberg's like, well, why don't you do this improv?

That's part of what he said.

He said he didn't seem comfortable with the language.

You know, he wasn't good at learning lines.

He does this improv that you can see that is.

It's a famous, you can watch it on you.

Have you ever seen this, Ben?

I have no.

It is this callback where he just describes to him the situation where he's like okay so government men have shown up and they want to do experiments on et and they're going to take him away from you and e.t's getting sick and you have this emotional connection to him and he's your best friend and he's like got it and he's like okay and then they just start the improv and henry thomas like breaks into tears and does basically at the level of what you see in the final film the emotional connection of like you can't take e.t away from me and then it ends with him going, Kid, you got the part.

Wow.

Yeah.

Say it.

You can hear him say it.

It's like perfect.

But he, in that moment, realizes like he's adjusting to all these kids of like, what's the way to direct this kid, right?

What's the best way to get this performance out of them?

I'm casting personalities, energies, emotions.

Corey Feldman is cast as a character called Lance, who is going to be Elliot's like nemesis and bully, whatever.

Sure.

Gets taken out of the screenplay.

Yeah, totally.

Feldman is very depressed, but obviously that's what gets him the parts in Gremlins and the Goonies,

which Spielberg produced.

Peter Coyote walks in.

Spielberg hates him, and then he puts some keys on his belt.

And Spielberg's like, I love it.

Jingle, jingle.

Where'd you get those keys?

They talk a lot about how he shot this movie basically in continuity because he wanted the kids to have the emotional experience of this building in real time.

And part of the big calculation, which I would argue, paid off really well, is like when we get to the end of the movie, there will be an outpouring of emotion because these kids will genuinely be saying goodbye to the whole experience.

And there's this great clip of Drew Barrymore where, like, an EPK, they ask her during filming, like, how, how has this experience been?

And she just goes, like, it's great because there are a lot of kids in this movie.

And sometimes you work on other movies and there aren't other kids.

So when you're not working, you don't have anyone to play with and it's lonely, but here are their kids all the time.

Right.

But that was like the attitude he wanted to create.

One of Melissa Matheson's side jobs on top of being like an associate producer on the movie and being there to help rewrite stuff was like she also had to spend time with the kids all the time and like do activities with the kids when they weren't being schooled so that she could learn them and adjust to them and pull from what they were feeling and whatever.

And Peter Coyote makes this comment on one of these things I watched.

I think it was like a Q ⁇ A for the 20th anniversary re-release where he was like, yeah, the vibe on the set was great.

I mean, I had just come off of 10 years of living on different communes and I rolled onto the set and I was like, yeah, this feels like a commune.

And I'm like, wait, we're not not going to unpack that at all.

That's cool.

But

it does speak to his weird kind of earthy vibe.

Yeah, he's a real hippie guy because his name, his birth name is like Robert Cohen.

Yeah.

And when he was in college, he like ate peyote and was like

Peter Coyote.

One of the coolest names.

It's a pretty cool name.

Yeah.

And he's, he's like a, you can read all about him.

He, he discovered Zen, hung out with the Beats, like was hanging out in Haight Ashbury in the 60s and all that.

He has a Hall of Fame voice.

Sounds cool.

And then, and he sort of emerges from all of that.

that and it's like i'll start acting again right and he's a great actor i love peter coyote he's amazing in this movie i think that we can talk about that later yeah um spielberg doesn't really storyboard this or plan it in the ways he'd been doing with like raiders and all that stuff says he kind of winged it uh i think it really helps the movie uh obviously a lot of those feels as control he needs to work around the kids he can't impose structure around them He said a thing I liked where he was like, Melissa Matheson did this thing that no other writer I worked with ever did, which is when we started filming, she handed me, she had broken all the scenes onto cards.

She had retyped scenes onto individual cards.

So I had a stack of cards and that freed me from needing to carry the script around.

And every day I would take the couple of scenes we were shooting and just put the cards in my pocket and then just be able to focus on those scenes.

You know, like take a card out, show the kids, be like, this is what we're filming today.

And this takes place after what we filmed yesterday.

And just really like zone into that reality.

Alan Davio shoots it.

Obviously, he'd worked on Emblin with Spielberg.

They hadn't worked together again.

Spielberg moves on to like much more established cinematographers.

And then Davio says he heard the announcement of E.T.

and sent Spielberg, I think, a TV movie he had shot recently.

You need me to read from the dossier.

Fucking read from the dosiberger.

Because that is not what it says in the dossier.

And we have to listen.

Spielberg watched a TV movie called The Boy Who Drank Too Much, starring Scott Bayo.

But Spielberg watched it.

Okay.

And noticed Davio's names in the credits

and called him immediately and was like, you need to shoot my next feature.

And Alan's like, why?

And he's like, I just saw this thing on television.

It knocked me out.

Like, so very nice of him, but basically also kind of like, hey, it's my old buddy Alan.

It's one of his movies.

And then he goes on to, of course, shoot Color Purple Empire.

He does this next run for the Trunk of the Eighties.

It's one of his only movies not edited by Michael Kahn.

Yeah, which is crazy.

Why isn't it?

I watched Carol Littleton.

Long Khan interview where I forget what it is, but he

I thought it sucked.

No, there was some scheduling conflict.

It was the one time he was on something else because he thought Spielberg wasn't going to have a movie lined up.

And I can't remember what he would have been doing at this time instead, but it doesn't seem like there was any

animosity or weirdness behind it.

Carol Littleton, who edited it, is a pretty famous editor in her own right and also married to John Bailey, the very famous cinematographer.

Fascinating.

Hollywood

down-the-line tech power couple.

Yes.

Anyway,

you know,

Spielberg starts shooting the movie.

E.T.

is sort of the big

question.

We have the look, but how do we, you know, make it move around?

I'm sorry.

It's Poltergeist.

It's the Poltergeist and E.T.

were going at the same time, obviously, that those two shoots basically went back to back.

And he asked Khan to oversee Poltergeist because he basically was like, I trust you, and I'll be hands-on with E.T.

That's what it is.

So with E.T.,

they're like, he can't be a puppet like Yoda

because he doesn't, that won't make sense in a realistic environment.

It makes sense in a fantasy environment, like sort of hopping around.

So animatronics, Carlo Rambaldi wants to do animatronics, but Spielberg is like, he's not going to feel alive.

So whatever.

They split the difference by just doing a lot of different things.

I think is the answer, right?

They do have some animatronics.

They do have some puppetry.

They also have people in the suits.

You have a walk around E.T., you have like mimes who are doing just hand motions.

You have an animatronic.

You have puppets.

You have all these different things.

I think part of what is so astounding about like the success of ET as a performance for me is that they're very smart about like the design of ET

is

thoughtfully made in conjunction with what you're gonna need to get out of him in a performance, right?

Like the extending of the neck.

is sort of like, well, to put like a little person in a suit and have them waddle around is going to look silly.

So better to give him like no feet and no legs.

So it does just kind of like look like a lumpy shifting of weight and you pre-establish that.

But also the neck can retract in so you don't have this unwieldy thing when he's moving.

Well, but also when it's a planted animatronic, then he can get more expressive.

The neck makes it look like it's not a puppet, a turtle person.

Because you're like, well, nothing could fit in that neck.

Exactly.

That's what's clever about the neck.

But that he has this form that can kind of contract when you're.

All right, and I'm scared.

Here's the truth.

E.T.'s real.

He's just a real alien.

They found him.

Thank God.

Okay, he's just real.

And that's the answer.

That's the truth.

That's the actual truth.

Carlo Rampaldi, you ever seen that guy?

That's just E.T.

in a human suit.

Yeah, he fucked E.T.'s mom.

And you may or may not know that fucking M ⁇ Ms were the original in the script, but then Reese's pieces came in.

This is, and I am not saying this to roast him.

I just know it about him because I've known JJ for years, JJ, our researcher.

It was literally the Reese's pieces deal and the sort of rise of merchandising in movies and all that.

It was literally his PhD dissertation topic.

Yes.

It's one of those famous stories.

He wrote 230 pages about this.

MMs being like, we don't fucking need you.

We're MMs.

And then, like, right, MMs lost so much business in recent pieces of money.

But it's not just that Hershey's, who owned recent pieces, you know, were like, oh, we'll do it.

They were like, we'll do it and we'll craft a marketing campaign around it.

It'll be like, this is a chance to define ourselves.

And now that's what fucking American culture is.

Okay.

Here are things I have to say.

One,

the entire ET's real.

This is what I'm building off of.

The entire visual scheme of this movie is built around, hey, it might be smart if we try to lean on backlighting.

It will make E.T.

look more real.

It will give him a tactility.

It will not expose the sort of like seams of this puppet.

Yeah.

I does feel like that accidentally turned Spielberg on to what becomes his number one like visual

preference?

It's also like as a kid, I remember it really affecting me how like their house is often really dark.

Yes, the shades are closed, and it just feels depressing in there.

Not like oppressively so, but just a little gloomy.

Like Elliot's room is kind of a gloomy mess.

That first whole part where they're playing DD underneath that kind of stained glass light in the big booth, which by the way, what is their house?

Their house is crazy.

Yeah.

And like, what is Dee Wallace's job?

And how do they, I know it's in the valley and they're not like, it's not like they're like, it's a rich neighborhood, but like, I'm fascinated by this house.

But they're also, they're on the hill.

Yeah.

Like, it's, they're in this weird liminal space where they're like on the cliff, right on the edge of the perfect suburban housing community, but between that and the forest.

That's the thing.

It feels like a new housing development

that's like out there.

Yeah.

It's it's very of the moment, but will be out of date in like a year.

Right.

There's going to be more and more.

You know, you're correct that this like technical visual sort of like practical scheme ends up landing this emotional weight.

And I also think he responds to that.

And then when he starts working with Yanis, it becomes the cliche of the Spielberg like pools of light from the window shape.

It's so crazy that I look, this film lost best picture to Gandhi, obviously an error.

But one of those things where, oh, Gandhi was this big historical epic, the Oscar voted pool was much more pleasing.

How did it lose best cinematography to Gandhi?

I've seen Gandhi.

Gandhi is very watchable.

It's on a movie where you're like, wow, the cinematography is incredible.

It wins four Oscars.

Does it win editing?

It won best original score, which we should mention.

John Williams wrote a pretty good score.

We'll get into that.

It won best sound and sound editing, back when they had two sound Oscars.

And it won best visual effects.

And I think it won maybe like a sort of special makeup Oscar or whatever.

But it is insane that it didn't win cinematography editing, and I would say original screenplay.

What wins original screenplay this year?

Best screenplay written directly for the screen goes to

Gandhi.

Well, I mean, Gandhi, like, is it like

a small, little, cute, nice guy?

Has Gandhi said he is back to life?

Well, kind of.

That is kind of his vibe.

Does Gandhi have like a visible rib cage at all times?

I'm

like, fuck, we keep backing into this.

I'm assuming neither of you have ever seen Richard Attenborough's Gandhi.

A little bald guy.

fuck.

It's just funny to think about.

It's also funny that like Spielberg clearly is an admirer of Richard Attenborough's puts him in Jurassic Park, likes, you know,

and like Richard Attenborough at the time was, you know, graciously as the winner.

It was like, I thought E.T.

was a better movie.

I thought E.T.

is like a miraculous movie.

Yeah.

Neither of us have seen Gandhi.

Yeah.

Gandhi is very, very watchable.

It's one of those things where you're, I mean, for one, Ben Kingsley is just fucking ridiculously good in it.

Well, I'm going to throw it a hot take.

I think he's a good actor.

He's a good actor, but it's, you know, it's just, it's a very straightforward, watchable, like, here is the life of Gandhi biopic that by the end kind of sweeps you up and, you know, the funeral scene is crazy.

You know, like, it's effective, but it wasn't even like a big hit.

You know, it was like a medium hit.

It was a big hit, I guess, for a sort of big historical epic.

That's kind of weird about it to me is I have Gandhi in one of those Columbia classic four characters.

So I'm saying I still just, I'm always like, oh, I'll watch Gandhi at some point.

But you could see there being theoretically a David versus Goliath narrative that I think, for example, really helped hurt Locker against Avatar, right?

Where similarly,

I don't know why I broke that into two words.

There is like, here's the highest-grossing film of all time.

Does it need best picture as well?

Yeah, no, it needs our pressure part of it.

But yet, Gandhi was this kind of like classical Hollywood epic with big scale and all these extras and all these things you said.

It's not like they gave it to ordinary people against ET.

Gandhi's kind of in a weird midpoint.

You know?

And it's, yeah, it's like pretty good.

Can I, can I finish this epic point I'm building about ET being real?

ET's real.

Backlighting, right?

Second thing is Spielberg concocts a whole scheme, which is like, I want to hide.

the people operating ET at all times.

They build these sets and everything around like, can we run cables into another room?

If Drew Barrymore is interacting to E.T., I want her to feel like E.T.

is real.

I think for the other actors, he's like, look, it will help their emotional reality.

But Drew Barrymore in particular, he's like, she's at a crux age where she might just straight up believe this is an alien.

And if we can get that out of her, that's kind of magical, right?

Like, just let's make it as little acting required as possible.

And he feels like it's working.

Like, oh my God, we fucking done it.

We hide the guys.

We run cables through a hole in the wall to to another room.

We keep that door locked.

She never sees them.

Like halfway through filming, she comes up to him one day and she's like, I have a secret.

Can I show you?

And he goes, sure.

And she leads him by hand and opens the door to all the operators.

And she's like, these are the guys who work E.T.

Right.

And she's presenting it to him like she's figured something out.

And he realizes she's known.

And that for her, that's like part of the magic.

And what she says now as an adult is, even if she couldn't put it in words, she understood that the emotion she was feeling from E.T.

was a reflection of these people

and that she didn't need to believe E.T.

was real.

That she was like, A, the craft of it, but B, like this is being performed by people who are pushing emotion through this.

And it helps me to see them as people.

Right.

So I know that that kindness is real.

Right.

And like.

The other actors talk about it where like he said he cast D.

Wallace because he felt like she had a childlike spirit.

This movie doesn't show an adult in full until Peter Coyote's, like, full reveal, right?

Is the whole visual scheme of like the keys on the.

Apart from D.

Wallace.

Yes.

That's the one.

And he said, the reason is because she's like a kid.

She's the only kid, the adult that they trust

or have a connection with.

It's the magic of the fact that the first time you see Peter Coyote's face is not that you're seeing his face, although it's a lovely face.

It's a lovely face.

And to be clear, I could do 10 more minutes of the keys.

The keys get me going.

The keys look good.

Jangling around.

Sound Sound great.

You're seeing his face because he's making an emotional connection with Elliot.

He's saying, I care about this too.

I've always wanted to meet an alien since I was a kid.

He's saying things that are finally getting through to Elliot.

It moves me to tears.

I'm getting goosebumps thinking about the first time you see that sweet hippie's face.

Do you give him a supporting acronym for this?

I don't.

It's an interesting, you know, maybe I should.

Yeah, is that bullshit?

She went

to an episode that will come out in two months for our next mini-series.

I mean, I think I put her in lead because I wanted the people I have in supporting and supporting.

I don't know.

Do you have Drew in supporting?

I do have Drew in supporting.

So that's the only argument I would kind of make for putting Dee Wallace in lead.

Exactly.

You have Henry Thomas in lead?

Of course.

Right.

Do you have him win?

No, I do not.

Who do you give it to in 82?

Paul Newman in the verdict.

I'm sorry.

Leave me alone.

No, it's one of my favorite screens of David Thomas.

As much as Henry Thomas is so fucking wonderful in this movie, my supporting actors of 1982

are,

this is a pretty good list.

Okay, give it to me.

Rutger Hauer and Blade Runner.

Great performance.

Sean Penn in Fast Times at Ridgemont High.

Great performance.

Eddie Murphy in 48 Hours, which is a supporting performance.

Nick Nulty is the lead of that movie.

By another 48 hours, they are co-leads.

I mean, Eddie's the lead.

It's more of a supporting performance than Kieran Colkin is in A Real Paint.

Sure.

Who's probably won an Oscar by this point?

Or no, maybe no.

This episode's coming out pretty soon.

But he's probably going going to win an Oscar.

Bill Murray and Tootsie.

Wow.

That one's kind of interesting.

And Kevin Bacon and Diner, which is a, I love Kevin Bacon anyway, but is a dynamite supporting story.

So that's a hawthorn type performer.

A real David pick.

I mean, do I need to put Coyote in there?

Yeah.

Maybe.

How about the keys?

The keys.

Supporting keys.

You did give it.

Yeah.

Right.

Well, I gave it the honorary Golden Key Award, which I only give out in a year of great key film acting series 2003.

We're all rushing towards the same time.

But he says this thing when he auditioned Dee Wallace, he was like, She's got this sort of like childlike thing to her, right?

It is reflected in what you said, her laughing at penis breath.

She can't even contain it.

She's kind of on their level.

There is.

But it's funny because I mostly think of her as like a screen queen, right?

Like, that's largely

right.

Yeah.

But he recognized this thing in her and that she's on their level from the beginning.

This is a movie where the cameras are usually pretty fucking low to the ground.

She's not too tall.

He shoots this movie from the perspective of children and of E.T., who is also, let's say it, a short king.

And Israel.

And Israel.

He's real.

Yes.

But he was like, she feels like one of them.

And it is what

talking about this, the setup of this family not being one-to-one, but a thing that Spielberg, I think, is really connecting to is

his mother, you know, was not always the most adult person.

And when his parents split up, he is the oldest.

He's taking care of three younger siblings.

There is a degree to which he is forced into a bit of a parent role.

Well, there's a degree to which he's the Michael.

It's funny.

It's like he's split across all the kids.

Like Michael is the one who's kind of responsible for his siblings.

Yes.

But also is making fun of them.

And Spielberg talks about how he make fun of his sisters.

Yes.

Elliot is this just emotional, like throbbing kind of emotional creature.

Right.

Like his feelings are so on his sleeve, but who's so in need of a parent.

The middle child, which is so different than Spielberg's identity.

And he is so much younger than Spielberg was at the time of the divorce.

Yeah, he is.

Spielberg was more of a teenager.

Dee Wallace, to me, does not strike me as a Spielberg's mom analog, really, because she doesn't seem like this kind of floaty

arty person.

She mostly just seems busy.

It's the most Methodist and magic of she's reinterpreting stuff in her own way, and then they're casting based on what she wrote rather than him trying to analog it to his own life.

I'm watching this with Forky, and like when...

She leaves Elliot home alone with a fever.

Yeah.

Elliot's 10.

We were kind of like,

you know, I mean, again, you know, it's the single mom thing, right?

Where it's like, these are latchkey kids.

What can you do?

Yeah.

And we were like, you know, 10, you could leave a kid home alone.

It's a little borderline.

But I was like, but with a fever, I would probably totally kind of feel weird about it.

When she leaves Gertie alone, it's kind of the age of five.

Yeah.

Just to go around the corner to like get something.

Like, it's not, you do have that.

Again, you're like, you're like, damn, like, that is, that's a wild thing to do.

But, but again, this is the latchkey kid thing.

It's very different from what life they live.

No, what else he's supposed to do?

His mom, but there is a similar.

He said that one of the big things he insists on in the script is that they call her by her first name because that's something he and his siblings did to his mom.

It's so fucking annoying.

That they all call her.

My daughter does that sometimes.

It's so annoying.

They know so early that it's annoying.

That's pretty funny.

I give her five.

It's very fun, though.

It's a good one.

Will you relay some comedy points to her when you get home tonight?

To give her five.

It's very interesting.

It's maybe a little bit of a young child five.

This is the first time I've watched this movie since I had a daughter.

And it is my daughter's pretty close to Gurdy.

I was thinking personality.

And age.

And

got a little bit of looks.

She's got some gurdy.

Yeah.

And it was not, it was, yeah, it was interesting.

Yeah.

The D.

Wallace thing is just like, right, her not being able to contain the laugh, them sort of treating her like one of the gang, right?

She's not the same as Spielberg's mom, but there is this feeling of like

her energy creates a need for Elliot to kind of step up and be the leader, which is more interesting because he's not the oldest child and that Michael in some way is like a reflection of, I think, the bullies that Spielberg felt like he was sort of tormented with.

And he talks about

no, no.

Just I, I, the analysis of like

E.T.

forces Michael to have to respect Elliot in an interesting way.

Yeah.

Right.

But I still think of Michael as the protector.

Elliot is E.T.

That's like the whole weird phenomenon that happens.

Yes.

They become one being, and Michael is the only one who's really attuned to that.

Michael is kind of the secret hero.

Michael is great.

The scene where he goes and sits down with the toys,

very quiet little scene, really gets me every time.

But the first 10 minutes of this movie are Michael and his friends.

Yeah, they're being a little bit more than a few of them, the headphones kid and fucking see Thomas Howell.

Yeah.

For about 10 years, there seemed like the biggest movie star out of the E.T.

cast.

It is funny to think.

Because he was in Soulman.

Yeah.

He got to star in movies.

But that first chunk is like Elliot being ignored, them kind of gently ripping on him.

Yeah, but he's annoying.

Elliot is a bit of a whiner.

He's younger than them, but he wants.

It's a classic, you know, younger sibling thing of like, they just want to play DD.

It's also what's been worse.

It's my turn,

his unhappy childhood, right?

This feeling, not even based on circumstances of what happened with his parents, but just like he was a worried, sensitive, lonely child.

He just felt this way all the time.

Yeah, very very feely, very feely boy, uh, clearly.

Uh, and you know, I think it's easy to get a little annoyed by Elliot at first, just in that way of like, ah, stop being such a little pain in the ass.

Stepped on the pizza.

He,

he did, it's not just that, it's that he then blows up the spot that they had gotten secret pizza.

That's like you really feel for the kids being like, fuck.

It's an anti-save the cat moment.

It's a moment that threatens to turn you against the character forever.

It's such a bold move to be like, everyone's going to be angry at you.

You can't play DD without pizza, too.

It's like, it's like, it's pizza, DD, pizza.

And also, from their perspective, he comes back.

They're like, where's the pizza?

He's like, I stepped on a, by the way, I found a goblin.

You're like, excuse me, first of all, unforgivable crime.

Second of all,

that's your excuse.

Second of all, clearly you're not ready to play DD because we just like said the word goblin near you and you're like, all right, there's a goblin inside.

There's a fucking goblin in our house.

Oh, Elliot.

He's such a cutie pie, though.

Dee Wallace in one of these 20th anniversary Q ⁇ A things.

They're talking about Spielberg's whole strategy of making the kids not see the puppeteers and engage with E.T.

is real.

And then she interjects and she's like, I have to say I'm being thrown off every time one of you guys talk about him as a puppet because to me, E.T.

is real.

And even 20 years later, I feel that way.

And it's like, that's why he fucking cast her.

Yeah.

Because there is a part of her that still cannot engage with E.T.

as the adult at the time of the making of the movie, being anything other than like another actor she worked with, or not even an actor, a real thing she reacted to.

E.T.

is real.

E.T.

is real.

David, what?

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The film begins.

Oh, we'll get to the release later.

The film begins

in the forest.

Well, it first just begins with the letters ET coming up.

True.

No, like preamble, no Universal Pictures presents.

Studio logo, and then just ET fading in, the extraterrestrial fading in, and then the movie starting.

It's a little like ominous, especially because the logo is the hand-drawn version, which otherwise we basically only see over his shoulder as he's like doodling E.T.

in school and writing his name.

But there's something kind of just like no preamble, no ramp up, title, cast, and then we're in the forest and we're seeing this very shadowy, backlit thing of this admittedly very cool spaceship design.

Uh, it's a cool spaceship, roundy, round boy, looks like a Christmas ornament.

I thought that's interesting, sure, because they like fly, these are botanists.

That's how I always took it, right?

These aliens are botanists.

E.T.

has said when people asked for like direction on the development visually of E.T.

has said this.

I'm sorry, Steven Spielberg.

I was more excited to hear what E.T.

is saying.

E.T.

says,

Spielberg said that when they asked him about the sort of biology of E.T., that he would say to people, I almost think E.T.

is a plant.

He has like plant veins.

I've heard this too.

Like, he's a plant inside.

Maybe think of him less as an animal on his planet and more like a plant.

Love it.

Yes.

But that makes sense with the flower pot version.

They're studying, you know, whatever.

You're seeing a lot of E.T.s in this opening, but all in silhouette, all obstructed, all through trees.

R-E.T.

Yeah.

Is kind of enchanted, I think, by the lights.

That's why he

misses his flight.

He's like looking at the valley.

He's looking at the houses.

It is.

And he's thinking, like, one day the Ultimate Valley movie will be made, Magnolia.

It is the Wally.

But until then, this is the Ultimate Valley.

That I love.

And I feel like Wally is one of the only movies to kind of come close to touching E.T.

Magic at times.

I love Wally, but I said,

come close to touching it at times.

I put so many fucking qualifiers on that.

And yeah.

And you're waving your hand.

I do not.

I'm pushing back to your pushback, but what I like.

I'm pushing back to your pushback, to my pushback, to your pushback.

He's making the most disrespectful faces.

And I really like Wally.

I really liked Wally when it came out, and I've only grown to love him.

David's making stinky poo-poo faces, and I want to jump over the desk and strangle it.

Come on now.

Nothing touches E.T.

except for Mac and Mia.

He comes close to touching it at times.

What do you think, Ben?

You won't even let me finish my fucking statement.

Every time you say it, I wrinkle my nose.

That's what I'm saying.

He's making a stinky poo-poo face.

Sorry, Sorry, Griff.

He's reaching.

Come closer.

I'll reach.

He's reaching.

I'm fucking to Tambay Matumbo.

I got the wingspan.

Let me reach.

The thing I like is this very subtle implication that, like, this guy is just a little different.

Yeah, he's a little different.

He's just made a little different.

It's not overstated, and we don't get to see the personalities of the other ETs.

But like you said, it's like

something in a light.

Ed Burns.

Yeah, there's like one more classes.

Let me phone home.

I gotta call my mom.

There's a demolitions guy.

He's got like soot all over his face.

Just trying to think of like what the guys would be.

What the ETs would be like.

There's a gay one.

But I like that we don't.

It's the 80s, so it's a little broad.

Yeah, I'll let you do a take on what that one sounds like.

Fabulous.

Wow.

Oh,

boy.

Go, girl.

Right, there's one girl one, obviously.

Again, it's the 80s.

So they're like, we can have one girl one and one kind of, you can pick like other minars one racially ambiguous one slay queen she ate

i put my whole e-tussie into that damn thing this is what people miss about this show they miss this i don't know have we not been giving them this sort of phantom podcast energy right sure um yes uh e.t uh is gay no sorry he's um he's hanging out He's hanging out.

He's looking at the valley.

He misses his flight.

Yeah, there's just, he just sort of gets caught up in a moment.

The MMT seem very like, okay, let's get in and get out.

Let's get some samples.

Let's get this data collection.

E.T.

is a...

a bit of a messy bitch, misses his flight home.

Yes.

Then crashes on a 10-year-old's couch.

Yeah.

Eats everything in his fridge.

Drinks beer.

He's trashed in the day.

And then rips open all his toys and shit and makes like some weird DIY project.

And is like, let's go in the woods

and fucking turn it on.

But beyond him being magical relax buddy beyond him being magical there's this quiet implication that like et is a genius but he can't get past the language barrier right and in the stuff like the ride in the books they make it more canonically like get out of here with the ride is a botanist and fucking whatever i know i'm just saying right there is an admittedly problematic robot chicken sketch that is sort of like if e.t goes up to his planet is he the fucking forest gump of his planet is he the fuck up enough enough let's stop invoking all these terrible things but i i i do sometimes wonder if

E.T.'s a child.

It's a question.

Right.

Or like a young person on the crew or something.

I don't know.

Adorable.

Like the sort of Elphangor.

Yes.

To the, you know, of the Andalites in

Elphangor is the captain who dies and gives them their morphing power, an animorph.

Sure.

And then there's Axe, right?

And they meet, he's the only survivor and they meet him and they have an Andalite, but he's like a teenager.

He's like the baby, you know.

Sure.

And that's kind kind of what E.T Mike is.

Maybe he's like a lab and

anamorphs.

If I can just say some more words that are nonsense to 90% of our listeners.

No, I just adore this movie's lack of definitive answers in all the things we're talking about, right?

I love that you're just like, maybe he's a child, or maybe he's an elder, maybe he's a genius, or maybe he's a fuck-up, you know?

Yeah.

Like, so much of it is about like the struggle to form a line of communication, but just barely.

E.T.

phone home.

ET is a guy.

Anyway, he misses off his head.

And he goes to the shed of young Elliot and pretends to be a goblin.

Right.

And you have this, like, you don't really see E.T.

even sort of clearly until 15 minutes in.

The first 10 minutes are largely this kind of like E.T.

being left and Elliot like fighting to get

just a fucking crumb of attention from his older brother and the friends and them all just kind of like overlapping dialogue cutting him out yeah uh and then he slowly discovers this thing

yeah uh discovers him with the rhesus pieces um the flashlight have you guys ever eaten rhesus pieces yes yeah i've eaten rhesus pieces yeah they roll

i guess i don't think my mom ever had a mercury thermometer so i guess i never did the specific holding it to the bulb i did run it under the tap once and it kind of backfired and maybe this has happened to you guys too to pretend to be sick because then i had like a temperature of like 103.

Like it was like, you know, it's too hot too fast.

And then my mom was like, whoa, what is going on with you?

I feel like we had a like plastic thermometer with a metal tip that was the sensor.

And I would put it under my armpit.

Yeah, armpit thermometer was a thing when we were kids, for sure.

For annoying kids who couldn't keep it in their mouth.

Right.

Well, that was part of it for me.

But I guess that wasn't me trying to trick.

But did you guys ever pull the thermometer trick?

Oh, so it was trying to trick.

Yes.

Yes.

You also might be unsurprised to hear that i got sick so often i didn't need to pull tricks i was basically out one out of every five days yeah you just had to say i feel sick and your mom was like sure you do right wednesday was like gray griffin day where i was like lying there on the floor

uh so

Elliot stays home from school and meets E.T.

fakes it because he wants to really lock in with E.T.

He shows E.T.

his Star Wars action figures.

It's maybe the best.

No, I have to stop saying maybe the best moment in the movie, but it is, it's so accurate.

Yep.

This 10-year-old meets E.T.

and he's like, all right, so this is Lando Calcium.

And here, by the way, here's how Spielberg constructed this, right?

He's like, let's put a bunch of cool shit in this room and let Henry Thomas do whatever he wants.

He arguably has too many toys.

You're kind of like, this is a middle child.

How does he have this cooler room with this many toys?

But that's more potly inheritance for Michael and whatever.

But it is.

He was just like, show him whatever you'd be most proud to show him.

Look around this room.

Describe in your own terms.

There is divorce kid energy too, I guess, of like, if your parents are divorced, often both parents then kind of will buy toys to try and filter affection.

And it's part of him being the middle kid of like, Michael's like sort of old enough to be like angry about this, right?

Gurdy is a little too young to fully process what's going on.

Elliot would just be pure emotions about this thing.

I also love that it's like, this is a snapshot of a moment before Lucas goes in and is like, ugh, we have to come up with like Wikipedia names for all these characters.

Right.

So he's just hammerhead.

They're all hammerhead, Walrus Man.

Like, there's no fucking Panda Baba, Momon, Nidon shit here.

He's just listing the toy names.

Real shit.

Real shit.

And then Lando, he loves Lando.

They save the best for last.

This is Lando Carizian.

This

is the best.

It just feels so authentic.

He's like,

how can a kid explain like humanity?

Right.

And it's just like

using the toys and the things things and the objects that represent our culture.

Now he would be like, here's my favorite Twitch streamer.

Yeah.

Here's my favorite Fortnite skin.

Oh, good.

Yeah.

Jesus.

He's asking E.T.

to gift him some V-books.

Shows E.T.

I also think

there's an element.

Yes.

No, and you have the Yoda moment later, right?

Which is then accompanied by John Williams quoting his own score, which is a little too cute, but I think works.

But I also think there's an aspect of spielberg almost being like proud and in awe of his friend where he's like look realistically this kid would be obsessed with star wars and also it's cool that my friend made something that undeniably culturally pervasive that it's not even me just putting in an easter egg sure no it totally yeah of course these kids are right at the age right where that hammerhead means something to an eight-year-old i think it's something spielberg is like that's cool that george did it let's just be honest griffin just loves that the kid loves toys i do like that He's got a pretty good fig collection.

I mean, this kid brings home six figures a month, if you know what I'm saying.

I don't like that's me recirculating a fucking meme structure that's really big on like fucking action figure photography Instagram.

This could have been a big episode.

It is a big episode.

Remember when I said he put his whole e-tussie into it?

That was good.

Yeah.

Put it on the fucking Mount Rushman.

Damn it.

See, I already had cut that out.

No, it's back in.

It's back.

We're going to keep calling it back.

Keep it in Noua.

I put my whole e-tussie into that damn thing.

No bits.

Yeah.

So

another thing, moment that really,

you know, in a sort of heart-rending way, feels accurate to me is they're like, all right, he shows Michael E.T.

Okay.

And then they're like, all right, let's show it to Gertie.

But they have to like threaten her toy with mutilation to kind of get her in line.

It, it just breaks my heart watching that happen.

Like, not in like this tragic way, it's honest, but just in like, it's honest, it's how a kid like that operates.

Like, obviously, my kid cares most about her toys, right?

These like, you know, like Matrix Bear.

She does love Matrix Bear.

He's usually daddy bear, I will say.

Well, because Matrix is daddy.

I guess so.

Um,

and uh, and then, but then Gertie gets it just like them.

Like, the way Gertie gets it, the way they all get it with E.T.

Of, like, this is our friend.

It's not going to hurt us.

And the adults can't know about it.

But the concept's a little too big for Gurdy.

So they have to introduce some stakes to get her to lock in and pay attention to what they're trying to impart upon her.

It's also just such a perfect, like, I feel like historic Spielberg piece of direction is.

the whip pan from the sort of serene, emotionally like locked in, sensitive moment between Michael and Elliot and E.T.

all connecting.

Right.

Whip pan to Gurdy, like kicking the door open.

Yeah.

Gurdy rocks.

Then like whip pan to E.T.'s reaction.

Gurdy's scream and E.T.'s neck extending and screaming back in response and them just needing to like muzzle her.

But the Michael thing, I think it is like the, what you're saying about like Michael doesn't engage with Elliot because Elliot's annoying, right?

At the beginning when he's being dismissive.

He's all awhenian.

Like, you know.

And he's also, he's a, he's a teenager.

He's like in that phase.

He's like with his fucking teen friends.

He doesn't want his dumb younger brother to be like playing D ⁇ D too.

He's playing D ⁇ D.

It goes a little into my read of what this movie is ultimately about, which I'll get to.

But that like Michael seeing that Elliot has connected to E.T.

and there's a sort of like emotional intelligence now to what he's presenting to him, sort of with a new sense of like maturity.

just totally recalibrates Michael immediately, right?

Like for the rest of the movie, Michael respects Elliot.

Right.

Right.

There's a part of him that has grown up the second he's connected to E.T.

I just also think that there's this bond of their three of them are all like, we are in on this project together of like protecting E.T.

and the

way that they get Gertie on board to by saying that

only kids can see E.T.

is so they have to turn it into a game for her.

And I do wait, but she does respond to that with, give me a break.

Yeah.

Like, so I do feel like she's kind of like, I'm older than you.

Oh, really?

She says, give me a break.

I don't know.

But she's playing this line all the time.

I mean, there's sort of the stuff of her like saying too much to grown-ups when she shouldn't and other times taking the responsibility very seriously.

There's this aspect to Gertie of just like,

it's amazing that this performance does not become overly precocious, wise beyond her years, kid.

Because she says things that are very much from a childslike perspective, but she says them with a level of confidence and authority, right?

Yeah.

Like, isn't that the magic of the Drew Barrymore line deliveries in this?

I mean, I guess there's something that's a little bit like, hey, I wasn't born yesterday.

I

look, Drew Barrymore turned out to be a really good actor.

Yeah.

So it's one of those things in retrospect I can be like, this is a great performance.

You never know with these kid performances.

Is it just kind of a magical, you know, feature directing?

The right environment's being created for them.

These are cute kids.

They're being cute.

You know, obviously with Elliot, with Henry Thomas, it's this, the emotions that come out of him are so raw that there is something kind of magic they're tapping into with that actor.

And he's, and he turned out to be a good actor, too.

Yeah, yes.

Um,

but

yeah, should I be nominating Drew Barrymore for best supporting actress?

I don't know.

I do.

I love her so much in this movie.

I mean, here's the argument in favor of it.

As you said, she turned out to be a good actress, but there's this is a distinctly different performance than any other performance she gives in the rest of her entire career.

Like, even the rest of

Drew Barrymore, like Firestarter and fucking Cat's Eye are like not this.

Well, that's she starts doing this,

right?

This kind of genre horror-you know, and then her 90s, like Poison Ivy, Batman Forever shore shit is not this.

And when she has her like late 90s

or whatever, when she has her late 90s, locks into what becomes the Drew Barrymore movie star persona, which is the kind of like goofy flower child thing, that is not this.

Is that kind of, does that kind of start with wedding singer?

Wedding singer is very more of a comic.

Wedding singer is the moment.

Because like before then, things like Scream or Boys on the Side, I feel like it's more like the kind of rebellious wild child young 20s Drew.

No, and her and Sandler talk about this, that she's like, I'm at an inflection point.

I want to push back.

Like, I want to put the wild child shit behind me.

And she saw Sandler on SNL and saw Billy Madison and was like, me and that guy.

That would help both of us.

Fascinating to consider.

Right, that sort of turns me me into something sort of like more girl next door.

And I think there's an emotional basis to him that I can pull out of her.

Her career is just so interesting in that, yeah, like things like in the early 90s, she's doing Poison Ivy.

Yeah.

And like six years later or seven years later, she's doing Never Been Kissed, where the premise is like, this like lovable girl next door who never like had a fun experience in her life and is a big dork.

And you're like, it's Drew Barrymore.

Like, what do you mean?

She's already been like crazy.

Singer like shifts that immediately.

Yeah, no, and completely.

like successfully and even the other stuff she does as a kid like irreconcilable irreconcilable differences or whatever it's a little like her arms crossed being like i'm gonna stick it to my divorcing parents is not the same energy as gurdy gurdy is a very specific thing spielberg talks a lot about how he needed to like really form a relationship with these children and make this set feel like a family to make these kids feel safe.

And before this movie, he thought he never wanted to have children.

I think largely because he was still working through the ways in which he felt like his parents fucked him up.

And he's

becoming wildly successful and all this.

And the other thing with Spielberg, the interesting dichotomy to him is like he is simultaneously someone who had to grow up way too fast and also didn't grow up, right?

He's sort of like stuck at odds with himself and is just sort of like, I'm fucking living it up.

I'm making movies.

I'm playing with toys.

I have money.

Why do I need to like burden myself with a family?

But he knows that he needs to create this kind of environment to make this movie.

Drew Barrymore is the one he gets closest to.

And the largest reason for that is that Drew Barrymore has like a chaotic, dysfunctional family.

And the more she works on the movie, he's like, she has parents who don't pay attention to her, who are putting her in bad situations.

Unlike.

Henry Thomas, who like talks all the time about how good his parents were, especially after the success of this movie of being like, we have to make sure you're a normal kid.

We are taking you out of Hollywood.

We are not letting you work a ton.

You're going to real schools.

Right.

And it's just sort of like, I don't know how they pulled it off, but they did.

I think he recognizes in Barry Moore, like, this is at the brink of going really bad, which it did for a while and it rebounded.

But he always stayed close with her.

Right.

And she talks about like, my relationship with Steven Spielberg was the first time that I recognized what a parent should be like.

And he talks about in that, he saw like, fuck, I think I do want to be a dad.

I know.

He's like, that's the thing where I get a little bit like, Steve, I actually need to know less about you sometimes.

Like, but yes, he says this is what convinces me to be a parent.

I guess more people should just go out there and make E.T.

if they're feeling a little on the fence about bringing kids into the world.

Just go make E.T.

Just make one E.T.

E.T.

is real.

E.T.

is real.

Gay E.T.

is not real yet.

Gay T?

Gay T?

Gay T?

We're going to come up with a better name for this.

Gay E.T.

is real if you believe hard enough.

Right.

There is a bit of...

If all of our listeners clap their hands.

You know, obviously, Peter Penn, you see Dee Wallace reading Peter Pan to Drew Barrymore at one point.

And then when D.

E.

T.

dies, spoiler alert.

Sure.

She's basically doing the Tinkerbell wish he could come back kind of thing from Peter Pan.

Yes.

Peter Pan's obviously just so influential and important for Spielberg.

And like she feels like the most, you know, like.

like Ben was saying about like only, you know, like I believe in E.T., you know, vibe from her, right?

Like, you know, like she, like he is like a kind of magical fairy in her life.

There is this,

you know, Spielberg framing this as a Disney movie to people in a way that made them worried, right?

He is like iterating on a canon of like formative trauma childhood movies, right?

These things that his generation, people who grew up before E.T.

existed, talk about of like, old Yeller having to be put down at the end of the movie.

Spoiler alert.

I fucking hate that dumb fucking movie.

My parents made me watch it.

Bambi's mom being shot at the beginning.

These things that are like rites of passage for children that are like part of watching this is this is going to be tough and it's going to make you have to work through some shit.

It's so silly.

Spielberg is doing that, but he's also infusing it with this sort of like new Hollywood character study, performance-based, non-plotty.

You know, he's like not going for melodrama.

It is, it, it is just this like perfect moment of like 10 different traditions of Hollywood all coming together at the same time, which I've talked about.

That's part of Spielberg's development, is that he is this guy who is like forming a bridge between new and old Hollywood, but he's also doing that with the movie itself.

Old Yeller feels like this punishment that was inflicted on baby boomers that they then inflicted on millennials,

that we are not inflicting.

Old Yeller died.

Done.

Millennials were forced to watch Old Yeller by their poor scarred parent.

Did you ever see Old Yeller?

No, actually.

But you know what it's about.

That's why Ben turned out the most normal out of us.

You know, and like my parents made me watch it.

And then, of course, at the end, yeah, there's young yeller, not to spoil old yeller, but they're like, yeah, sure, we shot a dog, but don't worry, there's another dog, young yeller.

Yeah.

And so you're sort of walking out half happy.

But I remember as a kid, I was like, that sucked.

It's not like as a kid, I was like, can't wait to watch old Yeller.

Can we, can we buy that on fucking VHS?

And it's just great that we are just like done.

Done.

Out of here.

We'll show our kids E.T., which is emotional and sad and then triumphant or whatever.

But like, that's great.

It's a great arc and experience.

Old yellow is just like, yeah,

you know, don't let your dog get rabies or else your dad's going to shoot with a shotgun.

I'm going to swing in with my take.

Yeah, fine.

What is this fabled take?

It better not be Wally is better than E.T.

I didn't say that.

Don't make your stinky poo-poo face.

I'm not throwing this out as some revolutionary take, but as I keep hovering around it, I keep going back to like this core basic thing, right?

Which I think above all else, E.T.

is just about, in the abstract, having an experience that changes you forever.

Uh-huh.

Sure.

Right.

And the way we're talking about the experience of like showing this movie to a child and forcing you to like think through your sense of the world and life and process emotions that you maybe haven't touched before and whatever.

Right.

Like that is what this movie is about to me more than anything.

E.T.

is filling a void in the family structure.

E.T.

is like means of like emotional language for a kid who feels sensitive and overwhelmed by the world, but doesn't know how to actually make sense of it.

Like, it's all these other things that are more specific.

But I also think this movie is just about like

experiences that change you irrevocably.

And especially in your adolescence growing up, these things that are these like stepping stones of maturation.

It's experiences that change you, but it's you have,

but it's like...

because you have autonomy.

Correct.

You experience something.

Autonomy.

Yes.

In a way that is like adults trusting you or you commanding some level of trust to like.

But they have a whole experience that they don't need adults for.

Exactly.

Like, you know, it's like they are learning how to have experiences without, you know, having their hands held.

And

that's, you know, making more adults realize.

Right.

When the adults come in and bring all this bullshit with them, the, you know, all the crazy tech.

Yeah.

They, it takes them forever to realize that the kids already know more about E.T.

and can and have figured out E.T.

way better than they can.

What's so touching about the Peter Coyote part is that he does get it, and yet he kind of can't help it.

He can't quite.

Right.

He's empathetic.

He recognizes

what has happened, and yet he cannot stop the wheels from spinning in his head of like, but this is an opportunity.

There is a sort of like responsibility for us as a species to learn as much as we can from this.

But what I like about E.T.

is none of that's being said.

You just know it's true.

You don't know who these guys are, really, or what they work for, what their ultimate goal is.

This whole framing of like, this is a gift, this is a very special gift, and I'm so happy he found you and you unlocked him in this way.

He's actually really jealous.

But it's not like he's like, and we want to chop E.T.

up to make like Elliot says that fucking, you know, growth hormones or whatever, right?

They do.

And it's not like we want to dissect him or any of this stuff.

He's just sort of like, we need to learn more.

And Elliot's like, this isn't about that.

Yeah, for sure.

Yes.

I like that he's not a capitalist.

I like that it's not like E.T.

is a threat, that he's only five degrees off from coming from completely the right place.

Um, but there is that adult

part of it that he can't turn off.

I did have a thought where I was like, fuck, wait, is E.T.

the like the cure for everything and we just let him go?

That's the question.

You know what?

What if we just chopped up E.T.

and we're like, if you eat like one little

bit of ET, you live forever.

I've got a blue chip, or it's just like

a cure for like, you know, all of these horrible diseases.

Yeah.

But he's too cute.

You got to let him go.

You got to let it go.

You got to let him go.

No, what, or like, right?

What can these people teach us?

Like these healers, these scientists who are visiting us, but they're not visiting us and going like, you should not bomb.

Like, you know, they're just kind of like, we're just checking out some grass.

Leave us alone.

Here's my other thing.

I think that

E.T.

B.

Wally.

Yes.

I'm so fucking angry at you.

David, is there what?

Is there a stink in this?

This is like dumb animation bullshit and your Will Vinton disrespect all over again.

I shouldn't even be re-invoking this stuff.

Now he's going to get more dismissive at.

No, I won't do the Will Vinton.

JD has to be here for that because JD is so good at like the ire of like, David, you haven't heard of, you know.

Yeah, right.

I think this movie being a divorce movie is overstated.

I think that is a prism that is helpful for it tackling what it needs to tackle, which is this sense of core loneliness as a child, right?

That is like

getting to a level of awareness that you're starting to identify

sadness, fear, anger, these emotions that are starting to make sense to you, but you can't quite put your hands around.

And when I'm talking about these experiences that change you, they are the things that happen in your maturation as a human being that do help crystallize those things for you, whether they're positive experiences or negative experiences.

The divorce creates the structure for the void that E.T.

can fill.

But E.T.

is not a father figure.

No, I think E.T.

is something of a father figure.

But I also think, in a certain way, Elliot's like a father to E.T.

is what makes it interesting, it is not a one-to-one thing.

It is not, it is a very complicated, emotional thing.

That is true, but he is

like an emotional

being that elliot relates to and that is what he needs and someone who hears him and like sees him and literally the the conceit of this movie that is so great that you almost think on paper is that one step too far they are emotionally bonded they feel the same things they feel the same pain they feel the same joy it is just that he knows someone else totally gets what he's going through right like that is what is going on metaphorically the sense of like complete understanding from another person at an age where you're just like, Am I totally alone and feeling this way?

And that is the greatest fear.

E.T., to continue the plot,

Elliot stays home.

They meet E.T.

yada yada yada.

He can levitate balls like Plasticine, or what do you call it in this country?

Sure.

Plato.

He's got magic.

He's making a solar system.

He's from over there.

He's trying to communicate that he needs to, in fact, go home.

He can heal.

Yes.

He can make flowers grow pretty again.

He can write.

He can grow a flower.

He can heal Elliot's cut.

The flower device.

It's

really seeded there.

Yep.

Emotional payoff later.

Yep.

I mean, yeah.

The whole movie is that.

Yeah.

And

there's just a lack of

explaining.

Yes, exactly.

The bond between them is communicated very simply.

Elliot's getting some shit out of the fridge.

A lot of shit.

to be clear.

He's really loading up.

E.T.

opens an umbrella.

It startles him.

Elliot, startled, drops everything.

Yeah.

That's all you need to know.

Yep.

They're kind of becoming the same thing.

Then we have this wonderful scene that I remember as a kid, I would always forget about because it's the weirdest scene in E.T.

where E.T.

starts ripping some course lights.

That scene's great.

Nothing wrong with that.

Throws on the quiet man, right?

He's having a great time.

Did you forget this?

I'm like, this is the scene for me where I'm like, I think this is the weirdness that transcends this movie for me, that it's not playing it safe, that it's like taking weird turns.

He's wearing a teddy bear's little pajamas, right?

Well, they've tried to hide E.T.

in the plush pile, which I love.

Yeah.

But I love that he's found a little piece of clothing that fits him.

But it's also such a weird, like, old man, sort of.

I know.

It's like a grandpa bathrobe.

I'll just like let grandpa sit in the comfy chair and watch his old movies.

Yeah.

Right.

Watch his stories or whatever.

Getting ripped.

But it's like Elliot knows that if he takes more than one day off from school, he's going to be pushing his luck.

He has to go back to school.

he trusts that et now is comfortable enough in the home he's not going to do anything wrong but in fact et gets too comfortable did you guys ever dissect a frog yes it's so weird to me like that never i never did that i think it's not really done quite as much anymore you know what's even now

super weird i want to say third or fourth grade we not only dissected a frog i remember with even greater specificity we dissected a sheep's eyeball I've heard of that.

I dissected it.

A teacher cook out like fucking

eyeball.

What do you call it?

Like vacuum sealed of course plastic bags that he had to cut open with scissors and just plop on the table and be like here's an eyeball we did a heart i don't remember what animal but i remember that was really especially disgusting you have to imagine this is done right that any listener of this show who is like 20 is like what the are you guys talking about i i don't know i think so and but obviously it's such a brilliant choice for this because Elliot feels for the frogs, much like he feels for his little home frog friend.

And obviously also Elliot is three sheets to the wind.

So he frees all the frogs.

And then

he's also drunk in the magic of movies.

He's drunk on the magic of John Wayne and Maureen O'Hara.

He's a hero.

I love him, obviously, having her stand on the kid who's lying down so that he can kiss her.

It's great.

Henry Thomas talks about when he read the script.

He's like, this rules.

I get it.

Alien E.T., I love this guy.

And he gets the kissing scene.

And he's like, I don't know if I want to do this movie.

Of course.

If I was 10, I'll say.

I don't want to do this movie.

And it's like, I don't like girls this sucks not just like this is embarrassing to do he's like this seems revolting i think they shot this first it almost sounded like spielberg said this was one of the only things that wasn't shot in continuity maybe to get him over the hump of the kissing thing which he was so worried about sure and henry thomas is like as a little a little kid was just like i need to nail this in one so we can move on And the beautiful thing of like the door, the wind sweeping open, the kid on the floor, him stepping on him so that he can kiss Erica Lanik from Baywatch.

Oh, sure.

Is that who it is?

Yes.

Yeah.

And that Henry Thomas like attacked it the first time and their like teeth clinked.

Classic.

Like she was not ready.

They're like teeth hit.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And then Spellbrook is like cut.

And he's like, great.

So Print moving on.

He's like, Henry, that looked...

insane

and Henry Thomas had to be like hoaxed into doing three more takes until it looked right well it's great

and drunky is the funniest shit in the world.

Drunk E.T.

is funny.

This is what I'm saying of him owning, like, okay, what of the E.T.

performance works the least?

The walking looks goofy.

So let's try to limit the walk to scenes where E.T.

should look a little funny.

It's funny when he's in a Halloween costume.

It's funny when he's drunk.

You don't really do the walk around E.T.

that much other than those moments because you can tell outside of the spaceship getting off and getting on, he knows, like, let's limit how much we do this.

Because this is when you stop taking E.T.

seriously as an emotional character.

Now, there's not much plot.

This is what I'm saying.

Like five things happen in this movie.

There is a long section that is just like everyone getting to know E.T.

Then he communicates this one idea.

I need to phone home, right?

They make this sort of plan quietly.

You don't see them rotating things.

It's the Buck Rogers comic story.

Right.

He sees the satellite dish.

He kind of gets it from that.

But he's got a record player.

He's got like a saw blade.

He's got no look.

He's got an umbrella.

Yes.

But basically, it is like it just happens in between scenes that he has constructed this thing that they're all going to use Halloween as the cover because that's the night where parents let you go out and aren't too worried about

E.T.

up as a ghost.

It's a great bit, like you say.

Gertie is like, you know, trusted with this secret, which she can't hold.

So she keeps on wanting to tell the grown-ups, but they keep on being like, Gertie, in her imagination.

What is this weird thing?

Her new bit.

Why gets her talking about being

invoke another Pixar movie, but looks like Jesse when she's dressed as a cowgirl?

She's got the little red hat.

She does.

She's so cute.

She does.

She's not a cutie pie.

Doesn't she make a joke about, like, this isn't my real costume?

There's a whole thing where she's like, they're going to let her change the costume.

I'm a cowboy pretending to be a ghost or whatever.

She's so funny.

She wants to be a ghost.

Right, but it's right.

It's so they can give E.T.

the sheet function.

She should have won the Mark Twain Prize that year he's so funny in this movie i know we're pushing alligators in the sewer just a couple of things uh after he gets in trouble for letting the frogs go free there's apparently a deleted scene where harrison ford played the principal you can see it uh it's uh on you know youtube or whatever um it is not you don't see harrison ford like it's a cameo where he's kind of in shadow much like all adults but even still he was like distracting to the audience right they could just tell it would just be just feel weird enough yes it kind of feels like, again, the less adults, the better.

That's the thing.

It's kind of breaking the adult rule.

It's more than you even want.

The amount of like the teacher you hear in that dissection scene is like as much as you can deal with.

And then I just love too, when

the mom gets the call about, you know, Elliot getting in trouble at school that E.T.

is just kind of like pink panthering like behind her and she just never sees him.

I just love that little moment.

It is crazy.

Man, first of all, I love you using pink panthering as a verb, but also it is one of those sequences where you're like, this is a difficult balancing act, Stephen.

I don't know if I'm going to buy this.

That she somehow keeps just not noticing him.

And it is to the credit of both her as an actor and the like puppeteering of E.T.

that without it being too cute.

They keep on just sort of selling that it's just like she would just barely miss him.

Yeah.

You know, she's a little too caught up in like running down the things in her head, you know.

But she like puts the coffee can down, but she's like, you know, so chaotic and stressed out as a single mom that she doesn't really like clock that she's gone missing.

That the what they use is not her being oblivious.

It's that she's just sort of in like, oh, fuck, what else do I have to do mom mode?

Yeah.

But it is perfectly timed and staged where you never feel like it's breaking reality.

Where I'm like, come on, she would have seen him now.

Yeah.

They have a Halloween thing.

It is kind of a funny Mandela effect thing to a degree.

And I'd say a lot of it is because of the Ambolin logo.

That the classic image of Elliot and E.T.

riding in front of the moon is often transmuted with the end of the day.

The later bike sequence, yes.

During the daylight with the red hoodie.

Whereas when he flies with E.T.

in front of the moon, he's dressed up as a fucking ghoul.

He is.

He's a ghoul.

He's in the gray sweatshirt.

That's the first time

the flight theme hits, right?

Let's talk about John Williams first.

Flying

called Flying.

Because he talks about the secondary motif of the film, which is

what sounds, I would argue, very similar to the AI score.

The very gentle, kind of sad, lonely piano music that doesn't hit sweeping until the bike for the first time.

Why has been marking delete on that?

I don't understand.

What's he doing with his computer?

I don't feel like to hear that for the first time.

Someone layer me doing that over the beautiful Alan Davio phone.

I always thought there was no way to improve upon E.T., and perhaps we have stumbled upon it.

You know, I saw, this is jumping ahead to the end of E.T., but it's relating to John Williams.

I saw Wicked in theaters.

One of the first films loved it.

Yeah, Wicked Rocks.

One of the first films I saw in theaters after

you're doing a stinky poop poof, but that's fine because Wicked isn't that good.

One reason I liked Wicked is that Wicked makes the correct choice that very few movies make,

which is that the final seconds of Wicked are someone going, bump, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, and it goes to black, and then you fucking explode with happiness, which ET also sure.

I'd say wicked, though, is ending at a cliffhanger, which this is not.

And we'll get to the fucking ending, but the ending is.

There's a cliffhanger in ET.

Where's he going?

Where's that bitch going?

Yeah, but it's kind of the same ending, actually.

They're both flying.

It's a cliffhanger that Spielberg is pot committed to never resolving versus

come back in a year.

AET 2027.

Oh,

can I pitch the tagline?

Yeah.

For GAT?

The extra, extraterrestrial.

Okay, come on.

What?

Your phone is ringing.

Universal pictures on the line?

We're canceling Wicked 2.

We don't need it with this solid gold.

We're reinstating DII.

DEI.

But just for KET, even Trump agrees.

KET is stealing the nation.

God.

Oh,

boy.

He flies in front of the moon.

It's very brief.

Beautiful.

In both cases, though, it lasts much...

It's a much shorter stretch of time than you think of, where I'm like, I almost expand it in my head into being this like triumphant two minutes of flying.

But in both cases, it's very small.

They just do like one arc into their landing spot in the woods.

E.T.

sets up his device.

Yeah.

I'm a

cool device.

By the way, I just want to say,

I am at this point really, it's the movie has just destroyed me.

I'm really like, this movie just hits something magical.

There is a story Spielberg Spielberg told in one of these fucking things I watched about the first assembly cut they put together, right?

And the movie was.

Where it was the David Sim score before Johnny come in.

There was no score.

Right.

Williams didn't even have a theme to hum him.

Yeah.

And it was four hours long.

And

Spielberg.

And Spielberg watched it.

And his response was, I never in my life thought I would make a movie this good.

And the way he recounts it is not a like, holy shit, Steve, you nailed it.

Right.

He is like, things came together on this that even when I am watching a version of this that is twice as long as it should be, without music, without finished, without final effects, and all of that sort of shit, he's just like, this is a miracle.

This just fucking worked.

The core emotion of this worked.

And people talk about, like, filmmakers are always like, that first assembly ad is the worst feeling you will ever have in your life.

Because it's nowhere near where it's going to be.

This is a disaster.

My career is ruined.

And he just could kind of see, like,

this just something, we hit on something here.

And it's only going to get better from here.

And he even said, like, I, I don't know if it's going to make any money.

This feels very personal to me, but this exceeds all my expectations of what I ever aspired to do as a filmmaker.

And then every step of the way, you fucking tighten that cut, you add the Williams.

He does one test screening

to Universal, where he was just like, I so badly just want this to be my weird little film.

I just want them to not touch it.

Right.

And they screened it.

I can have one test screening, but I don't want to.

Audience response was so ecstatic that they were like, we don't know if this is going to make money, but this thing undeniably works with anyone who sees it.

We're good.

We get it.

We're excited that we have a good movie to sell.

We're behind it.

And they just like, no notes, didn't touch it.

But everyone goes through this whole fucking process being like, this might be a movie for 10 people.

We hope we make back our budget.

I think to them they were like, he looks weird.

It's an odd pitch for a film.

It's cheesy.

It stars a bunch of kids.

They got this sort of like open emotionality, a little bit dead after

a weirdly specific thing to say.

Yeah.

Lose a lot of people right there.

Yeah.

It's weird that the score is a guy going

anyway.

I just love this balance of everyone being like, I think we're onto something here.

And also, I don't know if anyone else is going to like it.

Well,

they did like it, but we'll get to that.

So E.T.

flies in front of the moon.

Just to Ben's crying point, I always cry at one point in E.T.

And then I will also cry at other points that sort of move around, right?

Like there'll be things that get me every time.

I always cry when the bikes take off

the second time, you know, wouldn't they?

That is the most triumphant emotional moment in American Hollywood, you know, mainstream.

Stephen, here's a thought I had very, very similar to what you just said last night while watching it.

I'm like, the last 15 minutes of this movie are the pinnacle of Hollywood as an idea.

It is.

I'm like, this is the entire notion of America being like, movies are an industry.

We're going to make a dream factory.

We're going to put too much money and hire a lot of craftspeople to try to make these like transcendent emotional experiences that travel across the world and across decades.

And I just watch this and I'm like, it's this inflection point where he's getting like the best of old Hollywood, like artificial emotional magic with a sort of like more focused emotional realism, and just like

the best people, all at the top of their game, delivering perfectly, speaking things that you could not put into words.

At least until Jack Black showed up in the Minecraft trailer.

Yes.

That was

it.

Yeah, Steve.

I think Nick, our old researcher, Nick Loriano, had a letterbox review.

Let me find it.

That was essentially.

I'll tell you what my review was.

It was very good, and I invite you to read it out to us now.

G, period, M Poland.

Let me try that again.

Go for it.

You can do it.

You can do it.

G, period, M period, colon, the good movie.

That's what he said.

Yeah.

What do you guys think?

Ben?

Five stars.

What do you think of that?

I give it a perfect Uber ride.

Yeah,

I give it five stars.

Yeah.

Good job.

Yeah.

I think this thing's unimpeachable.

I do too.

What was Nick's review?

I'm trying to find it.

God.

How many friends of mine on Letterbox have fucking watched E.T.?

I guess it's a popular movie.

It's weird.

It's almost like everyone has seen it.

From 1975 to 1982, Steven Spielberg had a more powerful connection with the audience than anyone before or since.

And of all the films in that Miracle Run, this is the most wondrous.

He is correct about

being in sync with what people are feeling and thinking.

Here's what I find really fascinating.

Boring old, you know, sort of like Jimmy Carter America or whatever, you know, like the late 70s, early 80s, America.

Here's what I find fascinating about that.

Much like our previous miniseries subject, David Lynch, weirdly, I think Spielberg and Lynch are both artists who primarily try to work through their subconscious, right?

Spielberg talks about the fact that he's like never really done therapy in his life, that he will watch his movies 20 years later and be like, I guess this was that trying to get expressed out of my system, but that he doesn't didactically work through it before he tries to figure out how to transmute it into a film, right?

And like people have that same sort of like, I can't speak to why Mulholland Drive made such an emotional impact on me.

But those are elusive movies, right?

That are not trying to hand you clean sort of like emotional arcs and story beats that can carry you through.

Spielberg has like.

that aspect of being able to like just pull some emotion out of his system that he can't even put into words and create the right delivery system for it and also like entertain That is just insane.

And it's as you said, in that run of years, it's just like he fucking knew how to say stuff to audiences.

He did.

And it's not like he lost that, but he's got more, he became more complicated in what he wanted to try to say.

And this is sort of like the pinnacle for me of all of it.

Right.

Right.

I'm a kid.

So am I going to surprise you with a poster board I need for the science fair tomorrow?

Probably.

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After Halloween, it's sort of interesting.

So Elliot basically needs to go home because E.T.'s device is taking too long and his mom's going to be worried.

Yeah.

Elliot goes home.

Yeah.

The device is cool because it does feel like it could work

a little bit.

You just buy it on that.

I think the best component is a fork.

Yes, that he makes a.

Of course, you would say that you're married to a goddamn fork

that he makes a bespoke like record player, yeah, yeah, yeah, uh, scratchy, scratchy, but yes, uh, what happens?

Uh, I love that it's like messy and like discombobulated, you know, where I'm like, oh, it's like the umbrella's over here and the wires are running here.

It's not like a clean, tight little like flick a switch and it goes on, but it's wind-powered, it's just so cool.

Um,

so

Michael goes back to the next day to try to find yeah, but this is where it all cracks open.

Now the mom is worried.

Where was Henry?

Right.

I mean, sorry, where was Elliot?

Elliot.

You know, and then, of course, E.T.

doesn't come back.

Michael finds him by the culvert.

You know, he's becoming great.

E.T.

He's all fucked up.

This begins.

I guess the idea is he's just sort of exposed to the elements.

They don't even, it's also just Elliot's in turmoil.

I don't know.

Yeah, and also that again really explained like why E.T.

starts to, it's, they sort of seed it with like he's starting to look sick.

They say that earlier.

It's like maybe he just can't be here for too long.

It's too much time away from his ecosystem.

He's right.

Because, like,

he's eating fucking Reese's pieces only.

He isn't on the best diet.

And it's like,

yeah, does E.T.

come back to life after, yeah, you know, because of the love of the children around him.

Yeah.

So maybe some Worby Parkers and

he comes back to life because his people come back, right?

Like, that's sort of how I take it.

Like, it's like they are part of whatever sustains him.

To once again join in the end.

But it is part of what is so devastating about E.T.

being like, come and Elliot saying, stay,

that they're both like,

why don't you come to my world?

Right.

And they're like, we can't.

This could only ever last a week.

Yeah.

We

got to split up.

They got to split up.

Right.

Which I don't, I would go.

Yeah, of course you would.

You'd, you'd fucking Roy Neary so fast.

Yeah.

But that's like, this is the part of it that even though he hasn't had kids yet, he's doing this direct rebuke to close encounters, right?

And this is what makes it such an interesting counterpoint movie to me is like, in speaking of these sort of like unresolved things, right?

And like filling these like emotional holes from your childhood and Spielberg like making movies that speak to his loneliness without really successfully working through them.

The shift in, what is it, five years between Close Encounters and E.T.

is like close encounters is him still making a movie as a kid who ran away, joined the circus and won.

Right.

And part of that is the pursuit pursuit of like, I made it out of my childhood home.

I'm away from all the sadness and the anger.

I've made it to Hollywood.

I'm making movies.

And great.

I got on the ship and now that's what I was searching for.

There was some siren call pulling me out of my home, away to something greater that will answer everything for me.

And I think he has grown up enough in the five years between these two movies that he's now speaking to a thing that I think a lot of people who experience massive success early on in their careers have to face, which is you get everything you think you wanted.

And then one day you sit down, you go, fuck, I'm still not happy.

That wasn't the thing.

Yeah, you push against the door, you open it.

Right.

And that causes some people to spiral out of control and other people have to start then doing the hard work.

And ET is the inverse of close encounters, which is you are home and the things come to you and you have to work through them.

You can't run away, right?

You can't just go on the ship,

enter this magical city of light.

No, you're not going to be able to do it.

And have it all be perfect.

Right.

You know, the Andalite ship that Elfangor and Axiomy hang out on is all grass.

Animorphs book series just to remind everybody.

Yeah.

It's all grass because, you know,

andalites eat through their feet.

Okay.

I always like that.

Yeah.

I bet you do.

They don't have mouths.

Look what I'm doing.

The animorphs are way too powerful and cool for you to be doing stinky.

Are you fucking kidding me?

Animorph's pretty cool.

I hate that he doesn't get upset when I do it to him.

And when he does it to me, it is,

it fucking hits right in the middle.

I don't know what to tell you.

I learned as a teenager to stop getting upset about people like not agreeing with me because I would get so upset.

Like, right, you know what I mean?

Like that thing where you're like showing your friend a movie and then they don't like it.

And I would take it.

And I just built this armor of like.

I just can't, I cannot let it get to me because then I'll just be upset all the time.

Right.

And I think it is kind of why I became a critic because I was just kind of like, I can just sort of feel what I feel about a movie and it'll be okay if not everyone agrees with me.

Right.

You know, like you won't have that kind of chip on your own.

I want to pin this thought.

I'm going to come back to that.

Correct me if I'm wrong.

The Brits are kind of known for their emotional detachment.

And also for being sarcastic about everything anyone ever said.

So there's really that

feeling that anyone has.

They're a bit like,

what's all this then?

Except for then, obviously, if you watch like whatever, you know, an episode of Porridge and they're like,

and you're like, you got a lot going on in there.

What's porridge about?

It's a prison sitcom.

I always think of porridge.

That was not going to be my guess.

The whole thing with porridge, you know, you move to Britain.

I was guessing it was a fucking sitcom about making dinner every night.

Exactly.

It's a prison sitcom.

That's the thing.

You move to Britain.

You have to feed them porridge.

Is that the idea?

But you move to Britain and, you know, you learn like, oh, right, they have their whole.

own pop culture history, right, that I don't know anything about.

You moved to Britain, as one does, as we have.

As I had to.

Right.

And to me, the fundamentally

the british the most british ass thing i ever learned was they were like oh we have all our great sitcoms like it ain't half hot mom and lolo and you're like jesus christ this is cartoon and they're like and porridge and you're like stop right there i'm sorry what is porridge like and they're like what do you mean it's a really funny sitcom what's it about this guy who's in prison

How do you have the weirdest sense of humor on these people?

How often would they make, please, sir, can I have some more jokes on porridge?

That just feels like a fucking layup.

If the show's called Porridge and it's prisoners and they're asking for more gruel, right?

They probably made it once.

Or they only made it once.

Well, the probably four.

I believe there are 20 episodes.

I think it's a three season.

So that ran for 38.

100%.

It's stealing the fucking season,

but it's funny every time.

Yes.

I believe Porridge, I think, is a major, major influence on the office.

Like, that is one of the classic, like, Jervison merchant touchstones of, like, you can make a sitcom about like a sort of mundane sad thing.

Anyway, porridge.

They bring Gray E.T.

home.

Poor Gray E.T.

And he's all gray.

Both feels bad because he's connected to E.T.

Yes.

In terms of physical health and also the worry of like, what is this?

Why can't I fix this?

Right.

And then Dee Wallace comes home.

And for the first time, she has to engage with D, with E.T.

and it's such a beautifully played moment.

of them being like, mom, they're so worried that they're going to let her in on this.

And they're like, mom, we need to show you something.

And she sees E.T.

and her first response is like, oh, that's great.

How did you do this?

Right.

She immediately responds to it like it's a fun art project they did.

And they don't say anything to correct her.

And Dee Wallace just plays the realization very quickly of like, wait a second, fuck.

This is a living organism on the floor of my kitchen that is dying.

Very fun stuff.

Very normal.

It is so terrifying.

I mean, as a kid, the most terrifying image of E.T.

is the spacemen arriving, right?

The spacemen breaking through the window.

The window, like the way they come through, you know, the great Spielberg, you know, visual construction of like they're at every door.

And then even the window, they're coming through the windows.

It's like zombie movies.

As a kid, it is so terrifying.

Yes.

And he said it was one of the ways in which the shooting consequentially

really helped because it's like when one day they show up to set and the house has now been like ruined with all this fucking plastic, it was upsetting.

It was an invasion.

They had spent like whatever 30 straight days with this home feeling safe.

And it's amazing, like the way it's just in the snap of a finger, suddenly, right?

It's turned into like this lab, this quarantined lab.

Like, how does that happen so fast?

But you're like, of course it does.

She's like, this is my home, right?

It doesn't matter.

She can't protect her.

In their defense,

she's got a fucking alien in her house.

A gray ass alien.

And she's probably like, what about my, you know, fucking plumbing insurance?

That's a fucking alien, man.

I love that as like a result of this movie having like, you know, a budget cap on it, trying to keep itself on rails, right?

And this ET animatronic puppet being so complicated that you're like, they couldn't build two of them.

So for this sequence, they clearly just like

cake E.T.

with gray makeup.

Yeah.

You know, like there's something about the effect where you're like, oh, they didn't make a second sick E.T.

puppet.

You can tell that they've just layered something on top of the hero puppet and then washed it off later.

There's something kind of like weirdly

more upsetting about him just kind of being like dusted with powdered sugar.

Yeah,

it's so unsettling the way he looks, even though, right, E.T.

always looks fucked up.

But also, they've seen it.

So, he kind of needs a KET to kind of zoo him up, if you're asking me.

Get him to the salon, get a facial.

They've kind of so successfully built up.

You can teach him how to cook.

The whole state inter-life of E.T.

that just like limiting the motion a little bit becomes like, oh my God, what the fuck is wrong with E.T.?

It's just funny that on Queer Eye, one guy is like, I'm going to change your house and make it look amazing.

And another guy is like, so this is how you make an omelette.

You put eggs in it.

You know, it's like, you know, it's a little imbalanced.

David, beyond that, that one guy's like a culture expert and that his thing is just sort of like, here's an album you might like.

I'm going to send you a Spotify playlist.

My joke about the culture guy, and I know on the new one, the culture guy's a little.

His name's Karama.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

He's my favorite.

My wife watches it, and I don't.

I haven't watched it.

I watched yours, but I think Karama's a real one.

She really likes the culture guy.

Yeah.

I just remember Jay in the original one, which I watched.

Right.

He was the silly one.

And like literally would just kind of be like, you know, make sure to shake someone's hand when you meet them.

And it's kind of like, get the fuck out of here.

Yeah.

The other one's, this guy's tearing down walls in this guy's home.

And you're like, you know, you should really like sign emails with best.

And like, Ted Allen has like a good brain

best yeah that guy rules but that jay was sort of like i recommend talking to people and you're like what good thanks jay you're not really queer of you you're not even like recommending activities you're not telling me plays to go see i just love the i know the original one would have the heart stringy moments a little bit but it was kind of more just like put some pants on you're a mess and the new one is always like the most up

you know it's so emotional by the end it's always some hugely trendy i was into it for the first two seasons because I was like, this is surprising that like queer eye can actually get to me.

By season three, I was like, guys, we're pushing it.

I'm out.

This is too much.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's still well made.

I sympathize with it.

I mean, the ultimate lesson of the newer queer eye is like, you know how you can fix someone's problem?

Just throw a bunch of money.

Money.

Money.

Get you a new house.

And here's how you make an omelet, as I was saying.

Oh, of course.

And there's that, learning how to make an omelette.

It's just funny that in one week, you can change someone's house, but you cannot teach someone to cook in one week.

So fundamentally, you can probably just teach them to make risottos.

These spacemen seemingly changed the house in like two hours.

Yeah.

They've wrapped the whole fucking house in plastic.

They transform everything.

They set up their fucking labs.

And it is, it is part of what makes this.

section so upsetting.

And I feel like this is when children start to cry and like convulse, right?

And I feel like I've told this story before, but I went to see this park on the lawn screening of E.T.

with my then-girlfriend and Derek Simon, my oldest and best friend, often invoked, and his now wife, I want to say.

And we were sitting on a fucking towel next to young parents who had maybe a three-year-old.

And this section starts.

E.T.

is gray.

Elliot's on a bed next to him.

They're both sick.

They're reaching out to each other.

The girl just starts losing it.

And the father just very calmly says to her, don't worry.

worry, this is what happens to everyone when they watch this movie.

Right.

And he said it with the right tone that actually consoled her of being like, You don't have to be scared.

What you're feeling right now is normal.

Yeah.

Yeah.

This is shared.

And it was just like,

it has stuck with me, the profundity of watching that happen to strangers next to me and knowing that this movie just exists on that fucking like spectrum.

But it is that thing of like, the spacemen are scary.

It is scary that not only E.T.

is dying, but so is Elliot.

It is so much more intense than you expect this movie to get.

Right.

Right.

In terms of the threat, which is still kind of abstract.

As you said, we don't really know what their designs are for E.T.

I don't think they're ill-intentioned, but you just see like this movie is within spitting distance of becoming like horribly traumatic.

It's very traumatic.

It's very traumatic to watch Elliot suffer.

And I do feel like that is the thing they're most worried about in a way.

Yeah.

There is a compassion to even the medical stuff where it's that's scary.

I think E.T.

dying would make children upset, but Elliot also at risk of dying.

And it, it being the sort of like they're feeling each other's pain

is what pushes it over the edge to being a profound, like formative experience for children.

But, you know,

Elliot, E.T.

like disconnects from Elliot consciously, clearly, to kind of try to heal him.

Yeah.

Which works.

That's when Peter Coyote comes in.

It's where we see his face, all that that we were talking about.

And E.T.

dies and is dead for a good 15 minutes.

Like, it's like, it's not just a sort of like, he's dead, he's back kind of thing.

Like, it's a long thing.

15, it feels longer than it is.

I'm going to look it up.

Yeah.

Let's find out.

Let's find out.

Because it's like.

E.T., you know, it's the, it's the whole E.T.

on the table.

Let's try this.

Let's try this.

Let's shock him, right?

Which is so visceral, especially when you're a kid.

I got the moment that is just a true reaction where Drew Barrimore says she didn't know what a defibrillator was.

So when they're taking it out, and this was a big thing.

Spielberg was like, hire real doctors.

The main doctor was his GP or his internal list, I think he said.

And he was just like, when you give actors medical dialogue, you can tell that they're trying to remember the jargon on the page.

Of course.

I mean, it's unavoidable.

And especially with this, where it's like, you want to believe in the reality of actual doctors.

operating on a fucking alien.

He was like, don't get actors.

Get real doctors.

Have them go through the routine of what they would really do.

And so he just kind of let them run with that.

Right.

And they take out the defibrillators.

Drew Bramer doesn't know what that is.

She doesn't know what it's like.

It's scary.

And when you have that reaction shot where the shot goes through and she like shudders, she like jumps, that is just like a real captured moment.

It's about, it looks like, it's about 10 minutes.

Thank you.

You're welcome.

Much appreciate it.

Although it's even E.T.'s revival, of course, is slightly drawn out.

They put him in the fridge thingy.

Elliot talks to him.

It's so genuine and lovely.

And then he walks by.

You know, he doesn't see the light.

Then he sees the flower.

He's like, double take on the flower.

I'm just like, Spielberg really takes his time with it.

He's really playing you, you know?

Somehow, so quickly backs into an incredibly funny sequence of Elliot now needing to cover the fact that he's pretending to cry.

Right.

To now play Sad.

He's so good, though.

Which I do do think

helps children get through the rest of the movie.

Like, the movie needs a 10-minute rev respite from emotional damage.

Right.

And then it revs up into the fun of the car chase, the tube, disconnecting the tube.

Empowered.

They're getting away with this on their own.

But it's like...

Barb isn't there, though.

That would really make it feel powerful.

There are some stranger things happening in this movie.

Let's admit it.

But

they plan the Great Escape.

Yeah.

yeah,

and I love that

their ability to get away because they can maneuver on bicycles, right?

And the adults know the neighborhood, they know the neighborhood, but the adults, even with all of their power and resources, are

like completely proven

in the defense of the adults.

They didn't know the bikes could fly.

Yeah, that's true.

Because the whole magic of it is like they're doing it, they're getting away, and then they're cutting through these developments that aren't even built yet, right?

Which is really cool.

like the sort of you know and they're sneaking all around and you're so long and you're with it and then you're like they're fucked you know they're going down the hill and you're like no like they've got the blockade and they've got the guns well that's the thing which is so scary we talked about earlier in the episode when she literally says like their kids no guns yeah i really think that that is

a powerful part of the story.

And I think it is part of the core cowardice of replacing it with walkie-talkies where Spielberg in 2002 was like, is this a little too intense?

And by 2003 was like, what the fuck am I talking about?

Because the positioning is so specific where it's like, you see them with guns.

And then once the kids come into range, they are not aiming at the kids.

When the kids fly overhead, the guns are basically being held out of the way.

No, they're not aiming at the kids, but it's terrifying that they have them.

It's terrifying that they have them, but the adults have the wherewithal to be like, I can't fucking shoot a kid, right?

There is a sense of intensity that also doesn't feel like a threat of real harm, but it's the

way of raising of stakes.

And I'm biased because I had a run-in where I was quite young, trespassing, and got in trouble with the cops, but had a very scary moment that I don't want to get into.

And I just feel like their instinct is to have guns, is to protect themselves.

That's what's scary is that that's the immediate instinct.

Right.

Like the guy is a shotgun.

But this is the other thing about this movie.

The bubble of E.T.

is so contained that you're like, these aren't the spacemen.

These are the local authorities, right?

They don't really understand what's going on.

That there's so little ripple effect of anyone who has any interaction with E.T.

up until this point, that I think part of them having the guns cocked and loaded, but not even aiming them anywhere at the kids is just like, what is this that's been called in?

Five kids on a bicycle with a weird like bundle of blankets in the basket.

And then so quickly, when the adults turn, it's like the bikes start flying.

And it's such a great heightening up of just like the first bike ride moment, despite it giving us the iconic image, is so brief, is a small distance, basically just insulates what would be a crash off the cliff, right?

You don't have the confidence that E.T.

will be able to lift five bikes.

True.

No, I mean, it's, yeah, it gets me every time.

I just start sobbing.

And he does the fucking eyes, like basically editing uh um truck in right

he cuts three times to closer and closer yeah yeah yeah shots of elliot elliott's worried that he's not gonna fucking do it there's the question of is et too weak to pull off the fucking shit again and then just the et close-up in the basket He's wearing the little blanket over his head.

He looks like a little baboosh.

Can I say it?

Is this the greatest Blankie movie of all time?

Well, people already, I think, are floating on the street.

People are seeing it on the Reddit.

I'm stealing it from the Reddit.

Very good stuff.

And then they fly and you cry.

Oh, yeah.

I cry.

Oh, yeah.

For sure, too.

It is.

You can tell, A,

watching it academically, right?

Studying it intensely, you can see in the lead up to the sequence the shots where it is clearly an adult stunt double doing the bike riding in Elliot's sweatshirt.

Yeah.

And you can see in the kids flying the the shots where it is clearly little stop motion puppets.

There is not like an invisibility of the effect.

And yet the emotion.

I'm going to tell you, the invective is.

This is what I'm saying.

I don't know what you're talking about.

No, that's what I'm saying.

I'm like, I'm watching it trying to break it down, and I recognize the techniques, but that's me like putting my fucking no-fun goggles on.

No fun.

Because it is so perfectly constructed that you don't question any of it.

When they did the re-release in IMAX a couple years ago, I think it was 2022.

I went to see it with our friends Jordan Fish and Ray Tintori.

And I believe I texted you right afterwards and I said, Here's a take.

Is E.T.

the

greatest example of an already great film that is somehow improved most exponentially by the score?

I mean, maybe you can think of movies that are like mediocre and the score makes it like a seven.

So the first

use of the flying theme is the first time he flies.

The second time is when he comes back to life under observation.

Sure.

Right.

They do a quieter version of it.

And then this is when it really repels up.

This is one 15-minute track.

On the soundtrack, I think it has three slashes in its title because this is basically 15 minutes of unbroken music that cover the entire final section, right?

It is titled, excuse me, escape slash chase slash saying goodbye.

It is everything from them leaving the home to the end credits to black.

And then end credits is its own theme.

William said it was a very complicated piece because it responds so directly to so many moments, has to sync up to specific images and beats, right?

It has to go through all these different moments of like expression.

And it's 15 sustained minutes, which is just an endurance test for all the musicians.

And this is peak full orchestra, you know, like a fucking thousand violins and the drums and everything.

And they tried scoring it a couple of times and it kept on being off.

And they're doing it to picture.

They have the movie locked in a cut that Spielberg likes.

And Williams kept being like, it's a little off.

We're not hitting all the beats.

I don't want to have to stitch it together and post.

Let's try it again.

And Spielberg says, Let's turn the screen off.

Just play it for 15 minutes.

You folks just feel it.

Don't worry about the image.

Play the piece as John has written in the most emotionally connected way you can, and I will re-edit the movie around it.

Because Spielberg in that moment was like, this shit is fucking gold.

And I don't want a worse version of the Williams track just because it fits my edit.

It's easier for me to futz the fucking edit based on their timing.

Good for him.

And he was like, it was the only sort of editing pass he did at that point was just to adjust that a little bit.

And he was was like, and he did.

He had to do like five little shiftings of things.

It gave him a couple new ideas, but basically he was like, just give this to me as if it's a fixed piece of classical music.

And I will now edit to it as if it is a pre-existing track.

And it is just astonishing.

There is, you know, you have everyone getting to the ship in the woods, right?

Everyone coming together at this moment, realizing they're going to have to say goodbye to E.T., this dialogue that is incredible that I will get to in a moment.

Okay.

Okay.

But like the score is swelling and building and building up to him walking up the ramp, right?

The door irising in on him, and then it gets quiet.

And you're like, oh, right.

Well, the score hit the absolute peak of what it could do.

And now it's going down to a settled mode.

And yet, when the ship starts taking off, Williams ramps it up again and within 60 seconds gets it bigger than it was 60 seconds earlier when you thought it had hit its peak.

And it just feels like it keeps on transcending and hitting a new plateau as he's just like getting so much mileage out of these fucking close-ups that are every actor having a different but incredibly specific personal response to it.

Ron points out a problem in the Wikipedia.

Okay, do it.

It says that E.T.

places his glowing finger on Elliott's heart and tells him he'll always be there.

No, he doesn't.

Puts it on his head.

Elliot puts it on his head.

Come on, nowie, Wikipedia.

Not heart.

It would be lame if it was heart because E.T.

doesn't know about human concepts of like, oh, your heart is kind of like, you know, a metaphor for our emoji.

He's like, no, I'm going to hear it.

You'll remember heart.

Sure.

Right.

Yeah, he does.

Right here.

Baby.

Good ass baby.

Here are the two things in the score that get me the most.

Okay.

Very hyper-specific things.

Okay.

One is at the start of the bike chase when the strings just start going fucking crazy.

Yeah.

Right.

like oh my god they're getting away with it and the second is just the bum bum bum bum well the finale wicked that's what i was just saying i said that yes the timpani yes that's why wicked rocks should be so

the office yes we should have every episode

every time

so good yes i mean i love it i love the ending i love the triumph of it i think

you know, it's not quite the titanic level of you send everyone out happy in a sad movie because ET isn't a sad movie.

Yeah.

ET is a melancholy movie, whereas sort of, you know, you cry at the end, but I do think you just exit with a pep in your stick because of the music.

Well, Jesus, Timpanis are expensive.

Oh, yeah.

Those things.

Yeah, they're expensive.

How much do they cost?

You look like you got like $40 Timpani at Walmart or whatever.

Just one is five grand.

Yeah, but they're big.

Shit.

We would only need one to be clear.

We don't need two.

No, I, I, yes, we don't, what do you need a whole set?

Give me a second.

What do you, what?

I'm giving you a second, yeah.

Okay.

What?

What are you doing?

I'm just looking at as it is written in the script, okay?

And this must feel like goofy shit to write and takes a lot of confidence to be like, no, this is exactly what it should be.

E.T.

come,

Elliot, stay, E.T.

ouch, Elliot, ouch.

Sure.

I'll be right here.

Yeah.

Bye.

Bye.

I mean, that's like masterful shit that defies.

The way they talk throughout the movie is so beautiful.

Yes.

Where they're just kind of echoing each other and you're just feeling their connection.

It is, it's beautiful.

But the dialogue in this movie never like explains the themes.

Yes, that doesn't matter.

It never underlies them.

It is.

Yeah.

Yeah.

One, there's one time when Michael kind of just says it explicitly.

Uh-huh.

Like, Elliot feels like, you know, does to the adults or whatever.

And it's fine because you need him to know.

You need someone to tell them.

But it's almost, you almost wish he didn't have to.

Also, the divorce movie part of this, I think the father is directly invoked two times, right?

There is the like, well, you should call your father about this.

And he says, like, what?

She's in Mexico with Cindy or whatever.

Yeah.

And she, the mom is really upset because, and then comes back to the table and says he has he hates Mexico.

And Gertie says, what's Mexico?

Gertie says, what's Mexico?

But Michael, again, Robert McNaughton, the most underrated performance,

is really affected because he's the most mature.

And he says to Elliot, like, can't you think about anyone else for a second?

You know, like,

don't say that in front of her.

And then there's just going to upset her.

There's one later moment where they sort of bemoan

the end of the experiences that they used to have specifically with their father, going to the ball games, you know, or popcorn.

Yeah, that moment I don't like because, again, it's just a little, like, he was like, hey, remember when dad would go buy us popcorn?

Where I'm like, do we need to say that?

We know you miss your dad.

But it's fine.

It's literally only twice in the entire movie.

It's only twice.

So

it's a good movie that ends well.

Well, hold on.

I want to say this.

What do you want to say?

These final shots, the faces, right?

Like Dee Wallace is kind of like overcome with emotion, but is sort of laughing.

The boys, you know, like Michael and his gang are all kind of like looking up in awe.

There is this like, whoa, this is cool.

Gertie is kind of just like completely emotionally overwhelmed in a way that feels like, what if you told a four-year-old their pet died?

You know, you're like emotionally beside yourself, but also can't really intellectually process it.

Elliot is like borderline stoic.

His eyes are full of tears.

He's making these adjustments in his face, but he is like, not clenched jaw.

But this final shot, what just kind of knocks me out and is the thing that every single time makes me cry as the drums are going is that this final shot is Henry Thomas in real time over 20 seconds starting to process, right?

Like that's what's on there.

Everyone else has like a clearer emotional response to what's going on.

And Elliot is looking up and just being like,

okay.

Right.

So this is my life now.

This is who I am.

This is what has happened to me and what happens next.

And it is what Spielberg said always stopped him when he was trying to come up with fucking sequel ideas is like,

what could I possibly say that is more impactful than ending on the note of Elliot not knowing how he moves past this?

Not as like a core trauma that he'll never get over, but you do go like, if you've had this experience for a week of your life, then what the fuck is your life like as an adult after this?

Well, I don't think he's cursed.

Of course, we don't see it, but it's safe to assume that the government shows up, arrests the entire family, locks them up for the rest of their lives.

It's possible.

There's a terrible fucking commercial that Lance Accord directed with Henry Thomas that I hate and I think is sacrilegious.

Yes.

Where it's like he comes back and Elliot's like, Thank God, I've been waiting for you.

And it's so fucking maudlin and bullshit.

But I think part of what, like, the difference between Wicked, which is like, well, we know this is half a story and we know where the story is going and whatever.

The like lack of answers at the end of E.T., I agree with you that the ending is so emotionally triumphant.

You do walk out feeling something, but it's not a clean ending.

I'm not comparing the ending of E.T.

and Wicked in any way except they had Timpany.

You earlier said, I said, but Wicked ends with a sense of a cliffhanger and E.T.

doesn't.

And you said, E.T.

is unresolved, but I'm like, staying in the unresolved portion is the point.

I'm just saying more movies should end with fucking trying to

orchestral music because movies are good.

Yes, I agree.

People should just end with like, what's a really dumb movie?

What's like a really dumb movie?

Dumb and dumber.

Yeah.

Exactly.

Should end with bump, bump, bump, bump.

Okay, but what about dumb and dumber too?

Bump, bump, bump.

Gaiji?

Bump, bump, bump.

Which, by the way, obviously should be the.

Here's what I think more movies should do.

What?

Have five ETs, each who represent a different area of self-improvement, culture, food.

Yes, that's interior design.

Style.

Queer grooming.

Yeah.

Anyway,

E.T.

E.T.

premieres

as a closing film of the Cam Film Festival.

Yes.

So I would say that suggests at this point, like you're saying, Universal knows they got something, but they're not just putting it out.

Their thing is, as I repeat, their thing is we show this movie to audiences and it fucking works.

The response is undeniable.

The question is if we can get people to go.

How do we convince them to leave their home and take a chance on it when the movie is being sold as a tiny bit of a mystery box?

Sure.

This is all a little bit.

These documentaries also are just like, oh, the deck was stacked against me, Steven Spielberg.

It wasn't stacked against it.

He was just saying like, you know, Jaws, close encounters.

Whatever.

Like Raiders, he was like, this shit's going to fucking work.

And he does say that the canned screening was the greatest emotional response he has ever had.

Standing O, everyone freaks out.

Francois Truffaut sends him a telegram that says, you belong here more than me.

Just a line from Close Encounters, which he says will never be equaled.

Yeah.

It opened in theaters in June.

June 11th, 1982, and it made $359 million, which is the most movie money a movie had made at that point, domestic.

Yes.

Obviously not adjusted for inflation or whatever.

But it basically holds that record until 1997.

No, until Jurassic Park.

Jurassic Park beats it.

Doesn't Jurassic Park beat it worldwide, but not domestic?

I know we cover this.

No.

We cover this in the Jurassic episode.

We'll get to it, but I think that's what happened.

And then I believe domestically, E.T.

is only dethroned by the Star Wars re-release adding on to...

The grand total of Star Wars in 1997.

That's what I believe to be the truth.

I don't know.

I guess maybe it's a worldwide thing.

I have no idea.

But Jurassic Park is easy.

You folks will hear it settled in the Jurassic Park episode.

And

it's a hit.

It does break through a sort of kid movie ceiling

that was seen to exist or whatever and all that.

It's nominated for nine Oscars.

It wins for Gandhi, wins best picture and best director.

Rude.

And best actor.

Rude.

Wow.

That was a, you know.

Each wasn't even nominated for acting.

Correct.

No.

And he gives a beautiful, sensitive performance.

He does.

He does.

And

they made a wonderful video game for the Atari, of course, that had no problems with it whatsoever.

You know the Atari video game thing, right, Ben?

You know, you must know that, Ben.

Oh, the really shitty game.

Where they made way too much of it because they were like, everyone's going to buy it.

And it was like the worst game of all time.

It sucks.

It's basically unplayable.

They dug a big hole and buried all the games there.

It's helped led to the destruction of the environment.

It kind of is the beginning of the end for Atari.

Yeah, it's beyond the beginning of the end for Atari.

It's right.

It's the coda of Atari.

But they stake everything on, like, people are going to want to play E.T.

no matter what.

We slap

E.T.

on a cartridge and people will buy it.

And instead, it like destabilizes the entire cartoon.

And I think they like made one guy

program it in such a short time.

And like

no time.

Exactly.

Yeah, it's a perfect, dare I say it, boondoggle.

You know,

right.

They improve on it in every way with the Xfinity commercial.

That's a better film than E.T.

touching work.

Right.

And they're going to improve again on it with Gay T, which is essentially ET3.

Right.

But if they call Facebook Trinity.

Trademark, registered copy of it.

Yeah, exactly.

Call me.

Yeah.

Obviously, right.

There is this book, The Green Planet, or whatever.

That's this kind of sequel novelization where Spielberg's like, let's see.

Botanicus, E.T.'s professor.

He's a good character.

Is he?

Yeah.

Is he now?

PTR has really reclaimed him as one of their own.

Oh, I'm glad.

And then made merch of Botanic Kush, who's the stoner version of Botanicus.

I would say with E.T., okay, the ride is great.

You guys like the ride.

But generally, with ET, it does seem like any attempts to do more ET were almost a folly.

The game, the sequel ideas, the remastering, you know, the 20th anniversary edition.

Just leave ETB.

Spielberg has been wise enough to do that.

Yes.

And he did an interview recently where he said he was scared in the wake of its success because he actually didn't have the contractual power to stop them from making it.

He had to implore them.

And he had such growing clout that he could, obviously.

And he said, you know, I went to the shop.

Whereas with Jaws, he didn't have that power.

They make a bunch of shitty sequels.

Although people got so mad at me for saying they were shitty, and I got so many texts from him.

Jaws too is good.

Everyone cares about the Jaws.

I mean, this is very recent.

Yes.

This is like

an event who was just talking about it with Strew Barry Moore at the 92nd Street Y, which was a surprise event.

It was supposed to be Meryl Streep doing Out of Africa.

Sounds like a snooze.

As part of a like

that, I think.

Well, I think also Out of Africa is it's the 40th anniversary, 30th 40th anniversary.

So

they

just subbed in Spielberg.

They couldn't travel because of, I think, the California fires.

And they like announced at the last second.

We're so sorry, Meryl Streep can't make it.

We're replacing your event with an E.T.

screening with Steven Spielberg and Drew Mariamore, which is maybe the greatest plus-up of all time.

Bit of an upgrade.

But he said, and I heard him told other versions of the story: the interesting thing about watching the fucking Blu-rays for this movie is like every five or 10 years, they do another anniversary edition of this film.

So there's like all this legacy special feature shit that's him commenting on it from like 10th anniversary, 15th, 20th, 25th, 30th, right?

Like, you see the same stories evolve with more and more distance.

But he said basically that they were like, Could we please get a sequel?

He earnestly tried.

He developed some of the green planet stuff, and then he goes back to them and he was like, Guys, nothing I'm going to give you is better than that.

There's no ending better than what we just had.

I really think we should have the confidence to step away and go, we made a perfect movie.

And he was like, I respected that they

accepted it.

They knew that.

Yes.

You know, he is about to enter a bit of a funny period

with Twilight Zone, Temple of Doom, Color, Purple Empire, the Sun, Last Crusade, always hook.

It's his softest, you know,

underbelly kind of.

It is an awkward transitional period that doesn't produce bad movies, but produces weird movies and certainly films that have weird responses after E.T.

is like such a fucking undeniable triumph and all

To the point that he's like U2, I think of Spielberg is like U2 in so many ways.

Of like when he's making Jurassic Park and Schindler's list, he's like, I'm auditioning for my comeback in a way.

And it's like, but you're still famous.

And it's like, yeah, but like, nonetheless, I kind of need to prove myself in this weird way.

Well, we said in 1941, I like to bring up you two for bed.

Okay, yeah, sure.

In the 1941 episode, we say that movie feels like Spielberg having the yips from how much success he's already experienced and trying to fuck up on purpose so he can break his own like streak that would become a burden for him were it to last longer, sustained, right?

Yeah, it doesn't feel like he's doing that in the post-ET realm, but it does feel like he's like, This is the best version of this movie I'm ever gonna make.

I can't keep doing versions of this.

I have to morph, I have to evolve, I have to try other stuff, I have to branch out.

Yeah, yeah.

Um,

it's weird.

I just got an album downloaded on my phone.

Uh

it is funny to think yeah

that we are a year away from another Spielberg alien movie,

which will now be his first in 20 years.

First in four of the worlds, yeah, are we saying?

Like he hasn't made anything alien-y since then, right?

Um,

and Coleman Domingo gave an interview, and they were like, what can you say about it?

And he said like six things that would apply to E.T.

It's true.

He's, I mean, he's overselling me.

I'm worried.

I'm so hyped now.

And Coleman Domingo, I feel like, is such a sort of

a showman?

Right, exactly.

I'm worried he's getting me too hyped, but I'm very hyped for whatever that is.

I'm excited in the way of like, I kind of trust that Spielberg would not make another alien movie unless he really had a reason, that there's something new he wants to do or say from a different perspective.

E.T.

opens number one at the box office, June 11th, 1982, Griffin.

Number two at the box office is another science fiction film.

A sequel.

It's a sequel.

It's a great film.

Star Trek to the Wreath of of Khan?

That's right.

How many weeks had it been out?

Two.

Okay.

It came out the week before.

So it had one week.

I feel like that movie is a big hit.

This summer is a little notorious for a lot of high-profile flops where other studios were just like E.T.

was a fucking buzzsaw.

It sucked up all the oxygen.

I mean, that is...

Wrath of Khan obviously is a big hit.

I'm trying to think of what's coming.

Like, Tron comes out this morning.

Summer fun.

It does okay.

Made Runner, the thing.

Yes.

Tron is probably a good example.

Yeah, I'm looking through.

I'm like, I'm looking.

I'm going ahead.

And a lot lot of those movies are darker, more mature, but they're also more clinical genre movies that are, it's just kind of people clearly are like, well, I could also just see E.T.

again.

People are just like chasing the dragon of E.T.

and being like, you know what?

If I buy a ticket to E.T., the end is going to make me feel like a trillion dollars again.

Beastmaster.

Sure.

Number three in the box office is a sequel.

We did a box office game for a future episode recently that was like sort of six weeks in advance of this one.

And this sequel was in that box office.

Oh, fuck.

Yeah.

And this is an episode we recorded yesterday.

And I'm already forgetting.

It's kind of crazy how quickly I do the complete brain dump the second we finish the record.

Yeah, I mean, it's not, it's not a big deal that you don't remember this.

It's a big sequel.

We do a lot of episodes.

It's a big sequel in 1982.

Yep.

And it's a three.

Not a trek.

It's a three.

And give me the genre again.

Mr.

T.

is in this film.

Oh, it's Rocky III.

Yeah.

The genre is movie with Mr.

T in it.

Yes.

Yeah.

He puts the fool.

He does.

He does, in fact.

He has.

Or is Mr.

T in Rocky 2?

No, he's in Rocky 3.

He's Marky 3, Clubberlang.

Rocky 2 is Apollo Creed again.

Yeah.

And Rocky 3 is Club Relangen, but Thunder

is also...

Is in Rocky 3.

They're both in Rocky 3.

Rocky 3 Rocks.

Great movie.

Yeah.

Not as good as...

Rockies.

Well, maybe it is as good as the other sequels.

I don't know.

They're all kind of good, except for five.

It's a little light on robot wives.

Sure.

Number four at the box office.

Talking about the most cowardly shit of all time.

When Stallone did his recut of Rocky 4, I was like, I took out the robot.

And I'm like, that's the best thing you ever did was having Polly basically fall in love with a robot.

It is true that that is a great thing that happens in Rocky 4, a film that is 42 minutes long and nonetheless has a room for that plot.

Yes.

And it's like mostly montages and then like, you know, two big fights and a robot.

The implication that Polly fucks the robot, that they give him a robot who's like, he'll help you around the house.

Then the robot starts acting like a 50s housewife.

And then Paulie starts implying that he puts his dick in the robot.

Well, you know what?

You got to put it somewhere, Paulie.

I guess.

I don't know.

Number four at the box office.

That's a classic David Sims The Atlantic.

Just move on.

Number four at the box office is a film that came out one week before that is produced by Steven Spielberg and is kind of under butt by being released against E.T.

But this is why we refer to it.

Michael Khan had to cut one or the other.

Sure.

Yeah.

I still think that's MGM fucking up releasing Poltergeist then.

But Poltergeist is obviously a size hit.

Yes.

But not an ET-sized hit.

No, but you know what is an ET-sized hit?

Less than 20 movies in history?

Sure.

Number.

Dude, just for inflation, it's like five.

Yeah, anyway, I don't know.

Go on.

Number five at the box office is

a sequel opening new this week, a legendary bomb.

And a classic, why on earth would you make a sequel to that movie?

And then, of course, when you learn what the sequel is, you're like, well, why would you do that?

Well, it's not the Sting 2.

No, but it's kind of like that.

It's not Butch Casting the Sun.

No, that was a TV movie.

That was a TV movie.

But it's kind of like that.

It's a sequel

with a bad take.

It's not a story.

No, it doesn't have a bad take.

It's just like none of the stars from the old movie are in it.

Yeah, so it's Sing Tui in that way.

Yeah, that's what I mean.

Yeah.

Huh.

None of the stars are in it.

When was the original from?

The original from 1978.

Okay.

Mm-hmm.

It's got a great, great actress in it making one of her first,

giving one of her first performances.

It's not a Jaws sequel.

No.

it's not is it is it king kong lives no that was a good guess though linda hamilton yeah yeah it's got a great actress giving one of her first performances she sings a great song in 1982 she sings a great song and the movie stinks grease too correct michelle pfeiffer and i want to coo woo woo woo rider job on that cool rider

loves songs too it's been reclaimed yeah but it's a piece of shit but cool writer rocks what super yaki's gonna fucking come for your head Oh, boy.

Uh, number six at the box office is a film that I'm guessing is not a dark drama, but I'm I have to look it up because I actually don't know what it is.

Oh, wait, I do know what it is.

Of course, it is Gene Wilder and Gilda Radner in Hanky Panky.

Hanky Panky.

Great title.

But it would be funny if that was like, I'm like, what's Hanky Pinky?

It's like, oh, it's about the Holocaust.

Oh, Jesus.

No, it's about a, it's sort of like a, I've never seen it.

It's like a sort of jokey mystery movie.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Okay.

Cool.

Is any good?

It's okay.

It sounds like it's bad.

It's fine.

Number seven at the box office is Porkies.

Sure.

The Canadian softcore comedy that swept the nation.

Talk about having to put your dicks somewhere.

Was it the one?

It's so weird that they put their dicks through the holes in the wall.

It is.

I guess they're stupid, horny teenagers.

But it's like simple.

You're looking on

the

going to happen.

And yeah, unfortunately, created a weird genre of pornography.

Yeah.

What happened?

Some mean lady yanks it, right?

Isn't that the bit that they're like, oh, the hot girls in the shower will do something nice.

And then like a fucking lunch lady comes in and is like,

Steve Marmora or whatever.

Made 109 domestic.

It was crazy.

Was it the number two or three or four?

It was right up there.

I'm not sure where it was.

This is what I love in these like 70s, 80s years where like the modern blockbuster and films hitting these kinds of crazy numbers are first forming.

Is you'll be like, the number one movie of the year is Star Wars and the number two movie of the year is Smokey and the Bandit.

You know, there's like a huge gulf between the two.

I try to make a joke where it's like, it's aged like uranium.

Like, it's, it's, like, so radioactive.

Yeah.

Do you know?

I don't, I don't really know how to do it.

They made a trilogy.

It's crazy.

It's so disgusting.

Yeah.

Um, number eight at the box office is a film.

Anyway, we'll do those on Patreon.

I've seen, I think I've seen all three.

I've seen none.

Porky's is bad, and then Porky's 2 is really bad.

And then Porky's Revenge is like, it's not even fun.

Porky's 2 is colon the next day.

Yes.

And Porky's Revenge is the titular Porky getting back to these kids.

Yeah, that's a mean sheriff-y guy.

Okay, I thought he was like a land bearer.

He's like a bar owner.

I don't know what the fuck he is.

He's like a boss.

I feel like Porky's Revenge doesn't even have nudity.

It's just mostly like plot.

What is this about?

It's a mean bar owner and some kids putting their dicks in place.

Kind of.

It's like a sex comedy.

It's like high school or whatever.

Sorry.

Number eight is Sword and the Sorcerer.

Oh, sure.

The sort of Albert Pyn.

That was a big flop.

Yes.

Huge flop.

Yeah.

Fantasy movie.

Number nine is Visiting Hours, not the Ed Sheeran song.

No, no.

The 1982 psychological slasher film starring William Shatner, Lee Grant, Michael Ironside.

Big lineup.

Sounds pretty cool.

It was a feminist journalist who's the target of a serial killer.

Sounds cool.

Who directed this picture?

Of course, Jean-Claude Lorde.

Jean-Claude Lorde.

And the Canadian Jean-Claude Lord.

Okay.

And number 10 at the box office is Conan the Barbarian.

John Millius.

Great movie.

Silberg's old buddy.

Yeah.

So that's E.T.

for you guys.

Yeah, I think he's rules.

He's one of my best friends.

I'm trying to think if there are any other points I want to make.

What were the other pins I placed in, Ben?

Did we keep track of the pins?

I think I got to all the pins.

I think I pulled the pins pins off the ball.

Yeah, no, I think you got to all the pins.

Yeah, but um, no, I just, I think this film is kind of unparalleled for what it is doing,

yeah, and it's and it's just like undeniable,

unwavering, eternal power of what it gets.

It feels like you could watch it 200 years from now, yeah, and it still would have resonance.

Yeah,

I hope so.

He's a great guy, yep.

Bye.

No, don't say bye.

See you later.

That's not how the show ends.

The theme songs play, the outro.

We have Timpani's ours.

Three minutes before the dolls hit.

Thank you all for listening.

Tune in next week for Indiana Jones and The Temple of Doom.

In this economy?

Or is it?

Am I wrong?

Tune in next week for our Blinkies episode with Joseph

Cinematrix Reed.

Wow, reading Range Joe himself.

And in two weeks, tune in for Templar Doom with our friend Olivia Kraket.

Yes.

Right.

But next week is the Blankies, where we will discuss the best films of the year, the Oscars and all that.

Maybe I decide to just nominate E.T.

in a bunch of categories for 2024.

The real challenge is, will Griffin watch Amelia Perez before the Blankies episode?

I will.

I've said this.

My concern is I'm worried I'm going to like it.

If you like it, you like it.

I know.

Some people like it.

I know.

I'm just a little scared that I'm kind of the big swing nature of it, the messiness of it is going to endear me to it to some degree.

But also I might hate it.

We'll see.

I will watch it.

I will absolutely get this.

My guess is you're going to be mixed to negative, but I'm not sure.

But I talked about Green Book, I only watched like two days before the ceremony when I was like, okay, time to just fucking get this over with.

And I guess I will probably do the same with Amelia Perez.

Green Book's watchable, though.

Greenbook, this is the thing that's insidious about Green Book.

It is very watchable.

Amelia Perez is not.

I find Amelia Perez a real slog.

Yeah.

Anyway.

You know what isn't a slog?

Green Book.

E.T.

E.T.

Phone Home, Ben.

Coming up on our Patreon blank check special features, we are kicking off our Star Trek commentary series where we will be covering the card eras

the Trek films.

That's right.

Star Trek Generation

is posting in a few days on our Patreon.

A weird movie.

Yeah.

In a lot of ways.

It's got its pluses and minuses.

It certainly has its pluses and minuses.

Thank you.

You're welcome.

And as always,

gay E.T.

is camped.

That's right.

Just to settle the debate.

I need to peace so badly.

Oh, okay.

I'll keep talking to Ben.

No, don't.

Why not?

Have fun.

We'll just pause.

No, E.T.'s real.

Come on.

Let's talk about it.

Let's just talk about how E.T.'s real.

I mean, I would

love to hug E.T.

Are you like

how Diego Luna is always like, I want to touch Java, like in interviews?

Do you know about this?

The actor Diego Luna, who plays Andor.

Yes.

So Andor, I don't think, ever.

you know, shares any space on screen with Java.

But on the press tours, Diego Luna is like, I would love to touch him.

Like, the texture seems so interesting.

It kind of seems gross, though.

I know, but not to Diego Luna.

He wants to touch Java.

Just let me touch him.

He said it many, many times.

And I hope someone has finally let him touch Java.

Peter Coyote, one of the founders of the Diggers, Ben.

You know, the Diggers, like these famous hate-ashbury

street theater guys,

left-wing anarchist types.

You know, so that's cool.

Don't you think?

He's still alive, Peter Coyote.

There he is.

He's a cool guy.

Just looking him up.

I don't know why I'm still talking.