A New Smile, but the Same Charm, From ‘E.T.’

When E.T. finally comes home to movie theaters next week, moviegoers will encounter a more active, more expressive and far more limber little alien than they first saw 20 years ago.

Steven Spielberg’s “E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial” is perhaps the most notable of the modern classics to be made during the transitional period of the mid-1970s and ‘80s, when special effects were still pupating in a pre-digital cocoon. Now it joins the likes of “Star Wars” and “The Exorcist” in receiving a digital face-lift for contemporary audiences.

Considering that the film is the fourth-highest-grossing picture in history, having taken in $400 million domestically in its initial release, it would be reasonable to question why something so unbroken needed to be fixed. But producer Kathleen Kennedy says updating the effects was not the initial concern.

“It was really an evolutionary process,” she says. “Once the decision was made [to re-release the film], the thought came up that we could put some scenes back in, which is a fairly typical discussion when you’re talking about a reissue. There was a scene in the bathroom that we loved [but that was cut because it didn’t quite work], and this was an opportunity to actually do it the way Steven had originally intended it to be done, and that led to discussions of how other shots could be enhanced.”

Although they were state-of-the-art at the time, there is no question that some of the film’s original effects have simply aged less than gracefully over 20 years.

“What worked in 1982 doesn’t quite hold up,” says Industrial Light & Magic’s Bill George, who supervised the visual effects for more than 140 shots that were reworked for the re-release. “We remember it a certain way, but when I went back and looked at the film, I was a bit shocked at how some of the stuff looked.”

The challenge for George (whose first assignment for Industrial Light & Magic was working on the spaceship for “E.T.’s” initial release) was to live up to everyone’s memory of the film while satisfying today’s more effects-savvy moviegoers.

Even more daunting was that to produce the highest-quality image, the original negative had to be obtained from Universal and scanned into a computer. “There was a tremendous amount of trust coming from the studio, and also of us convincing them that we’d be very careful with it, in order to get that original negative to scan in,” George says.

Work on the project began in summer 2000. Because the re-release had not been announced by Universal, the project was kept quiet, even at the effects house, where the film was referred to by its original working title, “A Boy’s Life.”

Original director of photography Allen Daviau was consulted on the project, although Spielberg was the key force driving the new work. “[Spielberg] went through the film and pointed out shots that he wasn’t happy with or wanted to change,” George says. “As we worked on it, other shots [that needed work] became clear.”

Many of the new effects are simply enhancements of the background plates through the addition of smoke, cloud or elements such as moving grass. Smoke was also added to the effects shots, which in the original were so free of atmosphere, George says, that they stood out from the rest of the film.

Other shots, such as the one in which E.T. causes the bicycle belonging to Elliot (the lead youngster, played by Henry Thomas) to fly, had been filmed on miniature sets with a motion-control camera, which precluded any kind of movement in the trees. George’s team added gently wafting branches, swirling mist and a shower of rocks tumbling down the face of the cliff as the bicycle goes over the edge.

The most noticeable work was done on E.T. himself. Originally the character was brought to life through a combination of sophisticated hydraulically controlled puppets created by Italian effects master Carlo Rambaldi (who shared that year’s special-effects Oscar with Industrial Light & Magic’s Dennis Muren and Kenneth F. Smith), a crew of very small actors who donned body suits for long shots and the expressive hands of a mime named Caprice Rothe, who performed the character’s close-up hand action in an arm-length glove.

The hydraulic E.T., no matter how advanced it was for the time, still suffered from what Kennedy calls “bad days,” when the proper performance could not be pulled out of it. That was why the bathroom scene, in which E.T. playfully submerges himself into the filled tub at Elliot’s house, had to be cut out of the original release.

There were other days when the problems were smaller but telling. “When we looked at the movie again after so many years, Steven and I were laughing because we could remember, ‘Oh, yeah, that’s where his lips got caught and we had to accept a funky smile,’” Kennedy says. “Now we can go in and adjust the area where his lip got caught.”

For each new shot, the Industrial Light & Magic team would digitally replace only as much of E.T. as was necessary for the performance. Sometimes it was only the face, sometimes the head and neck, occasionally it was the entire creature.

George says that care was taken not to over-animate. “We spent a lot of time studying the character,” he says. “He is so charming and had such a quality about him that we wanted to match, but at the same time, because of the limitations of the puppet, we wanted to do things it couldn’t do. We wanted it to be different, but not too different, and that’s sometimes a hard line to follow.”

The most dramatic change in the new version, in George’s view, is the scene in which the spaceship leaves E.T. behind. The 1982 version contained a static shot of the character wistfully looking toward the heavens, which bothered George. “Why would he stop?” he asks. “He should be continuing to run after the ship.” The new sequence shows E.T. nimbly running after the rising ship, stopping only when he realizes it is hopeless, then sadly dropping his head.

What really made the effects supervisor stop and think was the decision to redo the film’s signature shot, the image that became the corporate logo for Spielberg’s pre-DreamWorks company, Amblin Entertainment: the boy on the bicycle flying across the full moon.

Never in any previous digital spruce-ups had a shot so closely identified with a movie been completely redone. (When “The Exorcist” was being readied for a 2000 re-release, director William Friedkin reportedly refused to let effects artists digitally remove the visible piano wires that floated Linda Blair to the bedroom ceiling--he did not want the shot touched.)

“It was the kind of shot that caused me to pause and go, ‘My gosh, what am I working on here?’” George admits.

The original shot was done with a mechanical puppet on a miniature bicycle. Although the model was engineered to move realistically, its molded clothing was immobile. For the redo, a real boy who looked like an 8-year-old Henry Thomas was filmed seated on a bike, which was attached to a pivoting platform on a blue-screen stage.

With a fan providing wind resistance, the boy duplicated the movements in the original. Those images were digitally assembled over the original background plates, and the scene was duplicated exactly, except that now, Elliot’s Halloween cape billows in silhouette as he rides in front of the moon.

The reissue also provided the opportunity to change something that had always bothered Spielberg: the depiction of policemen chasing the kids with their guns drawn. “That was something that Steven regretted the moment he looked at the movie,” Kennedy says, “so that seemed to be a really obvious change.” The guns were removed by digital artists and replaced with walkie-talkies.

Both Kennedy and George hope today’s audiences will not play “spot the fix,” and simply accept and enjoy the new effects as an intrinsic part of the film, as invisible as the digital remastering of the soundtrack (though for the film’s Los Angeles premiere today, a benefit at the Shrine Auditorium, the music track will be provided live by John Williams and a 100-piece orchestra, and mixed on the spot). The film opens in general release on Friday.

However, those who prefer the original--guns, stiff clothes, funky smiles and all--can take comfort in the fact that the original version of “E.T.” will still be available even after the new version comes out.

“We’re protecting the purists,” Kennedy says.