Creating a Creature

All extraterrestrial beings are "bug-eyed monsters," or BEMs, to science-fiction buffs. And, sure enough, the eyes of the alien creature in Steven Spielberg's E. T. are very large and prominent. At first startled glance--and he takes some getting used to--you could call him a BEM.

The fact is that E.T. gazes benignly at his young friend Elliott with eyes constructed in Hollywood by a craftsman who makes glass eyes for the blind. Innocence was the quality that Spielberg had in mind, but it is hard to blame Little Sister Gertie when she takes her first look at E.T. and squawks in revulsion. "I wanted a creature that only a mother could love," says Spielberg. "I didn't want him to be sublime or beatific, or there would be no place to go in the relationship."

The E.T. who appears on the screen is a highly evolved creature. One special-effects crew tried to make the spaceman and failed, spending a reported $700,000 in the process. Then Spielberg turned to Carlo Rambaldi, an Italian painter and sculptor. Rambaldi first came to the U.S. in 1975 as a consultant on King Kong, then in 1978 set up a small shop in Los Angeles. He explained the construction of E.T. to TIME'S Joseph Pilcher, beginning with sketches and a series of clay models for screen testing for Spielberg before building the creature. Finally, Rambaldi made an aluminum and steel skeleton and then laboriously built up a musculature of fiberglass, polyurethane and foam rubber, layer upon layer. Each layer represents a muscle responsible for a body movement or facial expression, and each is connected to a mechanical control or electronic servomechanism. At his most complicated, with Rambaldi and up to ten assistants pulling his levers, E.T. can execute 150 separate motions, including wrinkling his nose, furrowing his brow and delicately crooking his long fingers. It was not feasible to cram all the necessary machinery into one model, so Rambaldi built three: one with mechanical controls, Rambaldi holds an early model of E.T.'s skull mostly for large body movements operated with cables from a distance of about 20 feet, another with electronic controls, for subtler articulation, and a third with a combination of control methods. Although Spielberg's organization does not like to speak of such a crudity, there was a fourth E.T., a midget in a costume, for the few scenes in which the creature had to lurch across the floor.

Rambaldi's monsterpiece is about the height of a four-year-old child, with a large, lumpy, pulsating skull, a neck that extends or retracts according to mood, skin that is a very alien gray-green when E.T. is healthy, and long, marvelously graceful arms with four-digit hands. He is very strange and complex in his repertory of emotions, although he is allowed only a ten-word speaking vocabulary (his voice is that of an 82-year-old woman with some electronic distortion). He is onscreen most of the time, and he takes a firm, sure hold of the viewer's emotions when he is there. This is the clue about how he must be regarded: foam rubber or not, it is wrong to call him a good trick. He is a good actor, quite capable of handling a drunk scene or of splashing about in a bathtub (though Spielberg, to his eventual regret, cut the bath scene). His co-star Henry Thomas, 10, now lonesome for E.T, says, "He was a person."

What is more, at a cost of about $1.5 million, he was cheap. As Spielberg points out, Marlon Brando gets about three times as much. And E.T. will earn his keep with the usual spinoffs: candy, dolls, T shirts, an alarm clock, a toy game to be made by Texas Instruments, whose Speak & Spell game is part of the device E.T. makes to re-establish contact with his spaceship. "Phone home," the little lost spaceman learns to say plaintively, and this dictates the single TV commercial that Spielberg will allow him to make. Naturally, it will be for the Bell System: Reach out and touch someone.

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