(9 of 10)
Like Lucas, Spielberg has earned the right to create and shape his own film projects, whether or not he is the nominal director. He had planned only to produce Poltergeist, but soon found himself rewriting the script (from his original story) and, word had it, taking over from Director Tobe Hooper, who had surged to midnight-movie prominence seven years earlier with The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, a relentless exercise in terror set, like Poltergeist, in a darkened house. He might have had a chance if he had banned Spielberg from the set. But Spielberg had chosen the cast and locations and "storyboarded" the film—devised sketches that approximated virtually every scene the director would shoot. "My taking over had less to do with Tobe's competence," Spielberg says, "and more with the fact that I'm bullish about my ideas."
With Elliott and his little friend E.T., though, all was smooth sailing—a dream of a set for a dream movie. The mechanical creature performed beautifully as a machine and as an actor. And Spielberg found the children easy to work with, explaining the story in terms of fairy tales and board games. For the main roles he had interviewed more than 300 children. "Many of them were remarkable," he says, "but they weren't real. They thought before they felt. Then, just a few weeks before we were to start shooting, Henry Thomas walked in. He gave a dreadful reading. I could see he was petrified. But when I asked him to improvise a scene with our casting director, he transformed immediately into Elliott. He can act and react. He's gifted and malleable. He gave an incredibly controlled performance." Mature and childlike by turns, utterly unaffected yet supremely resourceful as an actor, Thomas is largely responsible for making scenes between a boy and a pile of steel and foam rubber glisten with feeling.
Spielberg hopes that with E.T. and Poltergeist he will be taken seriously as a director of actors. He has every reason to be. In both pictures, the children are natural and winning. As the mother in Poltergeist, Jobeth Williams, who Spielberg predicts could some day be on a par with Jill Clayburgh, creates a surprisingly rounded character. She gives the movie audience an electrifying shiver the moment her character feels Carol Anne's spirit moving through her body. In E.T., Dee Wallace has some quietly affecting scenes as Elliott's mother, who cannot quite hide from her children the ache of loneliness at her husband's desertion. In Spielberg's previous features, only one actor (Melinda Dillon, in Close Encounters) was nominated for an Academy Award. That figure should change next year, and Spielberg should emerge from under his portable cloud of Mr. Special Effects.