Healing Hurts: Melissa Mathison and “E.T.”
Melissa Mathison left this world today with only eight screenwriting credits to her name. Three are adaptations of children’s books (her first credit, The Black Stallion; plus The Indian in the Cupboard and the forthcoming The BFG from director Steven Spielberg). One is Martin Scorsese’s Kundun, a telling of the life of the Dalai Lama. One is under a pseudonym, “Josh Rogan,” for her adaptation of Spielberg’s treacly “Kick the Can” segment in Twilight Zone: The Movie.
With respect to her work, those credits could be gone, and her writing career would still bear discussion thanks to her second screenplay, to Spielberg’s 1982 masterpiece E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. E.T., as I have discussed elsewhere, is a movie that fundamentally altered most aspects of my being, from my outlook on life to the entertainment I consume, who and what I’m passionate about and how I express that passion.
To many, this is the Spielberg movie: a character-driven, family friendly suburban adventure full of magical special effects, alien visistors and wondrous visuals. But perhaps, in light of her sudden passing, we should remember what Mathison herself did to make this film such a joy.
Only her co-writing credit on The Black Stallion existed on her résumé in 1980, when Mathison visited her then-boyfriend Harrison Ford in the deserts of Tunisia, where Ford was shooting Raiders of the Lost Ark with Spielberg. The blockbuster director, who would count Raiders as the first film he turned in on schedule and under budget in nearly a decade, was anxious to make his next picture much closer to home and heart. He’d toyed with a John Sayles collaboration, Night Skies, about a villainous horde of aliens who wreaked havoc on a Midwestern farm, but found himself most drawn to the one kind young alien who befriended the family and ended the script as a permanent visitor on Earth. He’d also wanted to make a film inspired by his suburban childhood, a wholesome Establishment-era upbringing rent asunder by the divorce of his parents.
Spielberg shared his ideas with Mathison on a break in shooting, and slyly suggested she commit it to paper. Frustrated with the Black Stallion experience to the point where she felt her writing career was over, she protested until Spielberg’s charm and insistence won her over. Eight weeks later, a draft was ready — one that Spielberg described in 2002 as “a script I was willing to shoot the next day. It was so honest, and Melissa’s voice made a direct connection with my heart.”
Ultimately, it was the third draft of E.T. that would lock the film into production. So often do we remember the film as the story of a wayward space creature who befriends a lonely young boy. We remember the lightest of Mathison’s words, like our hero’s plaintive “E.T. phone home,” named the 15th most memorable line by the American Film Institute.
Less clear in our minds are the details of what made that boy so lonely, laid bare in Mathison’s script. Elliott (Henry Thomas) is a middle child to a single mother in early Reagan-era California. The world “they” wanted for him — clean and promising and nuclear family-driven — is torn away by separation and infidelity, and Elliott knows enough of pain to use it as an unwieldy weapon. Consider the exchange when mother Mary (Dee Wallace) and her children are discussing over dinner an unexplained disturbance (later revealed to be E.T.) in the backyard the night before:
Elliott: Dad would believe me.
Mary: Maybe you oughta call your father and tell him about it.
Elliott: I can’t — he’s in Mexico with Sally.
One can only imagine the strains from which Mathison drew these words. At the time, her relationship with Ford was turning serious, and she found herself a part of the lives of Harrison’s two young sons, Ben and Willard. Innocently, as she was drafting E.T., she’d ask the boys what they would want a kind alien friend to be like. The usual answers came up: he should be able to move objects without touching them, like Yoda in The Empire Strikes Back, and he should be able to have telepathic powers that enable him to understand the minds of others.
Then a surprising request came from the boys: healing. Not restorative powers, the kind that’d bring a beloved pet back to life. “They weren’t talking about saving someone’s life by healing,” she’d later say. “They were talking about taking the ‘owies’ away.” This ability to heal “hurts” is a stunning revelation from a child, for whom even the smallest of cuts and bruises can become endeavors of survival. And it’s a brilliant catch for an astute writer.
Mathison never once allowed her craft to get in the way of her affection for the story and the storytellers. By her own admission, her favorite scene was one she didn’t exactly write: an improvised scene where Elliott introduces E.T. to his childhood accouterments, from goldfish to Star Wars action figures. Nor did she flinch at the cutting of two scenes that involved her and a loved one directly. An extended version of the “Elliott at school” sequence had the boy furiously drawing advanced space communicator circuitry across a classroom wall until stopped by Mathison as the school nurse; he would then go before the principal, a faceless blowhard administrator played by a never-seen Harrison Ford.
It may not be fair to prioritize E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial over Mathison’s other works. But it is worth noting that long before the animatronics were assembled or the bicycles flew or John Williams committed his Oscar-winning score to paper, E.T. was a living, lovable character on a page, first typed by Melissa Mathison. May her work live on.
