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To tell more of the plot would be to spoil one of the film's pleasures, its gratification of the child's delight in wondering "What comes next, Daddy?" It is enough to say that E.T. stands securely in the company of some classic children's stories, from Peter Pan to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. With the crucial help of Screenwriter Melissa Mathison, who was present every day on the set, Spielberg has infused comic and dramatic tension into a story in which, one comes to realize, there are no villains. Everyone is nice, and the conflict comes from a taffy pull between good and greater good. That conflict is achingly strong, its resolution euphoric.
The working title for E.T. was A Boy's Life. And as surely as any work of science fiction can be its author's autobiography, the boy here is Steven Spielberg. His parents seeded the mix of science and art that would surface in Spielberg's films: his father Arnold was a computer engineer, his mother Leah a former classical pianist. (They were divorced when Steven was 17.) In many ways, he was a typical boy. He loved animals, especially cocker spaniels—and parakeets, which he kept in his bedroom, flying free. "There would be birds flying around and birdseed all over the floor," recalls Leah, now 62 and the owner-operator of a kosher delicatessen in West Los Angeles. "I'd just reach in to get the dirty clothes."
In a house he had to share with three mischievous younger sisters, Steven would take the standard boy's revenge: lock them in the closet and then throw in the thing they feared most. "He used to scare the hell out of them," Leah says. "When they were going to sleep, he would creep under their window and whisper, 'I'm the moon!' " But the fraternal bogeyman was also a small festival of phobias. "My biggest fear was a clown doll," he says. "Also the tree I could see outside my room. Also anything that might be under the bed or in the closet. Also Dragnet on TV. Also a crack in the bedroom wall—I thought ghosts might come from it." For Spielberg, film making has been a profitable form of psychotherapy: those boyhood fears form the spine of the Poltergeist plot.
He might have hatched that plot in the nursery, for by then Steven had discovered his life's passion. Leah recalls, "One day Arnold bought a movie camera and started taking pictures of Steven. He was still a baby, but he got up and walked straight for the camera." At twelve, he got his own movie camera, an inexpensive Kodak, and would spend hours alone writing scripts, drawing shots on sheets of paper that piled up in his room, making movies. He would film head-on crashes of his Lionel trains. He would go on camping trips with his family and turn his home movies into melodramas. ("I never felt life was good enough," he says now, "so I had to embellish it.") At his request, Leah boiled cherries jubilee in a pressure cooker until it exploded, and Steven filmed the messy crimson walls and floor. Once Leah asked him to photograph the family in their convertible; Steven took a shot of the hubcap. Leah shakes her head: "I should have known that meant something!"