November 20, 2024 • 50 mins
In 1981, 11-year-old Matt DeMeritt got a call that would change his life. He wasn’t a child actor, or a performer of any kind. He was just a suburban kid enjoying his summer break. But Matt had something no other kid had — something Steven Spielberg needed to make his most ambitious movie yet.
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Note: This episode contains discussions of suicide. Please take care while listening.
Hosted by Dana Schwartz, Zaron Burnett, and Jason English
Written by Jake Rossen
Produced by Josh Fisher
Story Editor is Marisa Brown
Editing and Sound Design by Mary Dooe, Jonathan Washington and Josh Fisher
Mixing and Mastering by Baheed Frazier
Voice Actors are Jess Krainchich and Juliet English
Original Music by Elise McCoy
Research and Fact Checking by Jake Rossen and Austin Thompson
Show Logo by Lucy Quintanilla
Executive Producer is Jason English
Special thanks to Simon Brew. Check out the Film Stories podcast!
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:09):
Originals.
Speaker 2 (00:10):
This is an iHeart original. It's late summer nineteen eighty one.
Eleven year old Matt de Merit is at his house
in Torrance, California. When the phone rings, his mother picks
it up. Matt can hear just one side of the conversation.
Speaker 1 (00:33):
Yes, Yes, that's my son. Who jaws Steven Spielberg.
Speaker 2 (00:40):
Jaws Steven Spielberg, the same director who has spent the
past six years on top of Hollywood and who currently
has the highest grossing movie of the summer in Raiders
of the Lost Arc.
Speaker 1 (00:55):
In the distance, I could hear my mom and I
keep having this very interesting conversation with someone who is
interested in hiring me. That's Matt, and basically told my
mom that they're doing a movie and it involves someone
being in a costume. Didn't want to give away too
much for someone being in a costume to walk around.
Speaker 2 (01:14):
To put this call in perspective, Matt wasn't a child
actor or a performer of any kind at eleven. He
also wasn't a cinematographer or effects artist. He was just
a suburban kid enjoying his summer before he had to
go back to school, and school wasn't going so well
(01:35):
for Matt, which we'll get too shortly. But Matt had
something no other kid had, something that made him shy
at times, but something Steven Spielberg needed in order to
embark on his most ambitious movie yet, a movie that
for many years held the title highest grossing film of
(01:58):
all time, and from a certain point of view, a
movie that would feature Matt as the star.
Speaker 3 (02:06):
The movie.
Speaker 2 (02:06):
Movie went by many different names during its development, Watch
the Skies, Night Skies, a Boy's Life, Et and Me,
and finally Et the Extra Terrestrial, And for Matt Demerit,
it would prove a bitter sweet experience, one that would
(02:27):
help him through one of the most formative events in
his life. For now, all he knew was that he
needed to have a conversation with his parents and go
meet Steven Spielberg, And well there was one other thing.
Speaker 3 (02:42):
Mom, Who's Stephen Spielberg?
Speaker 2 (02:46):
For iHeartRadio? This is very Special episodes an iHeart original podcast,
I'm your host Danish Schwortz and this is Et and Me.
Et is one of those movies that I have such
a distinct memory of my dad taking us to see
(03:06):
the re release in theaters when we were kids. So
it was very, very exciting for me just to listen
to this episode because, to be honest, I knew absolutely
nothing about how it was made.
Speaker 3 (03:17):
I love it.
Speaker 4 (03:17):
One of our best episodes last season was the Titanic
episode about how the cast and crew got poisoned on set,
and it's similar. This is a good lane for us
where we have some beloved film and we're getting a
lot of the behind the scenes from the people who
actually made it.
Speaker 3 (03:32):
Yeah.
Speaker 5 (03:32):
Also this speak surprises like the creature for the Black
Lagoon shows up. I love this one for I was
all the Hollywood history.
Speaker 3 (03:37):
Should we dive back in hell y.
Speaker 2 (03:42):
In a lot of ways, Matt de Merritt's childhood looked
a lot like everyone else's, maybe like yours. He grew
up in the suburbs of Torrance, a coastal city in
southern California with beautiful views and a laid back atmosphere.
The local newspaper is named the Daily Breeze, if that
tells you anything. Matt had some artistic inclinations, which he
(04:07):
might have inherited from his father, an illustrator for the
Post Office.
Speaker 1 (04:12):
I would draw a lot as a kid. I love
to look at my dad's drawings and ask him to
draw me monsters and stuff. I was so fascinated when
he could draw creatures for me, so I tried to
emulate him. That was kind of kid I was. I
drew a lot, and I skateboarded a lot, and I
like to hang out with my friends and go to
(04:33):
the park and do stuff like that. That's Matt.
Speaker 2 (04:37):
And while there was plenty of normal kid stuff to do,
Matt did it a little differently. That's because Matt was
born without legs.
Speaker 1 (04:47):
Well, apparently, my mother took an anti nausea medication which
she was pregnant with me called ben Deckton, and that
was a popular drug at the time for that condition,
and it turned out that there were a lot of
birth defects that seemed to be correlated with the drug,
and so all the parents filed a class action lawsuit
(05:08):
against the maker the drug, Meryl Dow. Meryl Dao had
a lot of lawyers and basically were able to counter
all the evidence that they had that it might have
caused birth effects. So nothing really ever came for it
could either have been that or could have been a
natural birth effect. You know, sometimes it happens where you
can't really attreat to anything specific.
Speaker 2 (05:29):
For a variety of reasons, prosthetic legs were a poor
solution for Matt, who learned to locomot around in a wheelchair.
In addition to walking on his hands. He even learned
to use a skateboard.
Speaker 1 (05:42):
I loved skateboard parks when I was a kid. I
couldn't do tricks, you know, quite at the Tony Hawk level,
but I could go on those bowls, and I could
do like hand plants and stuff like that.
Speaker 2 (05:53):
Matt says that because he didn't lose his legs exactly,
he never really missed them.
Speaker 1 (05:59):
I just always perceived my condition as normal. That's all
I was used to. It wasn't struggling with the loss
of limbs. I just always got around own naturally, you know.
I learned to walk on my hands, just like anyone
learns to walk on their legs. Reaching for stuff or
asking for help wasn't of a problem. I could either
climb up and get the thing that I needed, or
I always aid the support system for people who could
(06:22):
get stuff that was out of my reach.
Speaker 2 (06:25):
But there were other challenging things about Matt's life. His
father had been diagnosed with a serious issue bipolar disorder.
The condition used to be referred to as manic depression.
According to the National Institute of Mental Health, the diagnosis
is characterized by clear changes in mood, energy, and activity levels.
(06:48):
Depending on the particular diagnosis, people can experience moods that
range from euphoric or energized to extremely despondent.
Speaker 1 (06:59):
My dad was in denial that he had bipolar, and
so he wouldn't take this medication, and he'd be very withdrawn,
which is one of the symptoms of being depressed. So
the times he wouldn't communicate at all.
Speaker 2 (07:12):
But there was something that did help strengthen the bond
between Matt and his dad. Creature features monster movies, men
in rubber suits. It was a fantasy escape from a
reality that could often prove challenging, and a way to
get closer to his father, who sometimes seemed far away.
Speaker 1 (07:34):
My dad and I used to watch monster movies on Saturdays.
There was a kind of a marathon that happened every
Saturday on Channel five called Monster Rally, and so the
first horror film I saw was a Creature from the
Black Lagoon.
Speaker 2 (07:51):
While all this was happening, Steven Spielberg was grappling with
something of a creature feature of his own, one that
would require Math's unique abilities, though no one quite knew
that yet. By this point in the nineteen eight eighties,
the director was enjoying that rare blend of critical, commercial
(08:11):
and financial success that proved elusive for a lot of filmmakers.
His adaptation of Peter Benchley's beach read Jaws in nineteen
seventy five was a phenomenon. In nineteen seventy seven, he
led Jaws co star Richard Dreyfuss to a fateful meeting
with aliens in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Raiders
(08:35):
of the Lost Arc meanwhile, was waiting in the wings.
It would spawn four sequels and make Indiana Jones one
of the great movie heroes. Spielberg's only misfire had been
nineteen forty one, a big World War II comedy that
audiences didn't find very funny in Hollywood terms. Spielberg had
(08:56):
a blank check, the ability to make practically anything he wanted,
and what Spielberg was looking to do was tell a
story about a skiddish, harmless alien who comes to Earth
and befriends a boy still coming to terms with his parents' separation.
It would be a family movie, something with themes that
(09:18):
resonated deeply with Spielberg, who was himself a product of divorce.
His parents, Arthur and Leah, had gone their separate ways
when Spielberg was nineteen after several years of acrimony. His
mother had grown close with his father's best friend. Though
Arthur told his children he was responsible for the separation,
(09:41):
it strained Spielberg's relationship with his dad for years, and
there's no question it informed his filmmaking. But e T
would be his most personal work to date, a close
look at a child dealing with the anger of a
fractured household, not yet able to process the convoluted adult world,
(10:03):
something plenty of kids, including Matt, could understand.
Speaker 6 (10:08):
It was the story of his youth, It was his childhood,
It was his parents' divorce.
Speaker 2 (10:14):
That's Simon brew Simon is the founder of the Den
of Geek website and a pop culture historian. Jason and
I actually used to work with him at Mental Floss,
and he hosts a podcast, Film Stories, that goes deep
into the making of great films. You should listen after
you finished this episode, of course.
Speaker 6 (10:34):
And the idea wasn't that this would be his biggest film.
Although you can't ever design how an audience will react,
the whole idea was, this is something smaller, This is
me going right back to my roots. I'm just gonna
almost do one for me.
Speaker 2 (10:49):
A couple of years prior, Spielberg had envisioned a movie
with a spaceship full of sinister aliens descending on a farmhouse.
Just one of the aliens in that script, called Watch
the Skies and later Night Skies was friendly. But after
developing the film and even having its alien creatures designed,
(11:12):
Spielberg realized that wasn't the movie he wanted to make. Instead,
he commissioned a script for his alien buddy story from
Melissa Matheson, whom he had met filming Raiders of the
Lost Arc. Matheson was the future wife of that movie's star,
Harrison Ford, but more importantly, she was a screenwriter who
(11:33):
was extremely adept at getting to the beating heart of
Spielberg's story, the bond between an alien stranded on Earth
and Elliott, a boy mourning the absence of his father
after his parents separate. That left just one major piece
of the puzzle, how to create E T. While the
(11:57):
technology was rapidly finding itself in summer blockbusters, artists couldn't
just turn to computer animation. The alien would have to
be the scene with the actors. Early on, someone broached
the idea of sticking a monkey in a costume. That
was quickly discarded. Then someone suggested putting a person in
(12:20):
a suit, but Spielberg vetoed that as well. The entire
point of ET's physique was that it was something other
than human. He didn't want anyone to think it was
merely someone encased in rubber. Instead, Spielberg approached his close
encounter's colleague, a special effects artist named Carlo Rambaldi. A
(12:43):
prop expert, Carlo had helped reimagine King Kong for the
nineteen seventy six remake, but despite that movie's giant ape,
Et would prove to be the bigger problem. Carlow was
given just a few months to conjure up Et as
an animatronic puppet. He'd be animated by servos and wires
(13:08):
by a team of puppeteers. They would control everything from
his eyes to his mouth to his elongated neck, which
went up and down like a carjack.
Speaker 6 (13:19):
It was in the end production illustrator Ed Verrow, who
got kind of the eureka moment of what he was
the one who twigged what Spielberg was actually afterwards that
he wanted. It was described as a combination of the
innocence of youth and the wisdom of age, and that
was in the design and the sketches that were being
done for the creature. There was also the idea that
(13:42):
they wanted ET to be quote a creature that only
a mother could love, which I really really love as well.
Speaker 2 (13:49):
Rambaldi was a master and ET quickly evolved into a
highly convincing presence with big, bulbous eyes that took inspiration
from Albert Einstein. The various ets Rambaldi built could express themselves, blink,
move their mouth, health furrow a brow.
Speaker 6 (14:09):
And what Rambaldi told Spielberg is you're gonna need nine
months to do this. Spielberg gave him six, and they
just worked around the clock to put this creature together.
And I mean they really made it. I think they
made in the end three different ets with different electronics
and different capabilities within them. And what Spielberg was wanting
(14:30):
really that he wanted a creature that was slow and
sure footed, and as Spielberg said, he's much more conditioned
to a heavier atmosphere, a heavier gravity. And they got really,
really forensic on what this creature and what this character was.
It's supposed to be an alien walking on a planet
which it wasn't familiar with.
Speaker 2 (14:50):
But even Rembaldi didn't have a perfect solution for Et
walking or performing big physical movements like falling down. To
try and control his feet via remote robotics would make
him look like a jerky ma net or a clumsy
battery operated toy. It would also cost another million dollars
(15:13):
for what was supposed to be Spielberg's tiny movie, So
Spielberg listened as his producer, Kathleen Kennedy suggested having a
human performer inside of a costume, provided it was someone
close to ET's stature that eliminated most adults. Rambaldi quickly
(15:33):
created a simple mock up suit that the four year
old daughter of Spielberg's lawyer climbed into for a screen test.
She hated every minute of it, throwing a tantrum, but
the idea itself was sound. The kid in a suit
looked convincing. Now all they had to do was find
(15:54):
the right kid. Someone had the idea to call UCLA
Medical Center. UCLA had a program devoted to the treatment
of individuals with uniek physical attributes. One of the physicians
at UCLA recommended Matt, who had undergone physical therapy there.
(16:16):
What made Matt unique was how he got around. Walking
on his hands gave Matt a very specific skill, giving
him a profile similar to Et. By using his hands
as ET's feet, he could step in when Et needed
more agility than the puppeteers could provide. Matt could tackle
(16:38):
stunt that might prove too daunting for a little person
inside the suit.
Speaker 1 (16:44):
So Universal Studios reached out to UCLA Medical Center to
see if there was anyone with dwarfism or was in
a small stature that could fit in the costume. And
the only one they had on hand who was short
was me, and I think they kind of pitched it
to them. They said that I could walk on my
hands just like my hands were legs, and they said,
(17:05):
that's intriguing be able to come down for an audition,
so that the doctor gave him my number.
Speaker 2 (17:12):
Matt's doctor acted as his talent agent very la That's
how a producer wound up phoning Matt's mom and how
Matt wound up going to audition for Steven Spielberg, a
guy he barely knew. In fact, Matt's father needed to
take him to see Raiders that summer to give Matt
(17:33):
a better idea of just what he was getting himself into.
Oddly enough, Matt was already a fan of Carlo Rambaldi.
Carlo had done the mechanical effects for the alien head
in the movie Alien the R Rated Gorefest, which Matt
had seen in nineteen seventy nine as a nine year old.
(17:53):
He was a monster kid, remember, So for Matt, going
to Rambaldi's effects house was like going to Willywanka's chocolate factory.
He was in creature Heaven.
Speaker 1 (18:05):
Got in a studio in Oh. It smelled so interesting too.
It was like a workshop, you know. It was like
Geppetto's workshop. Smelled like wood and sawdust and plaster. And
that was very intriguing that I was going into this
very creative environment, you know, where there are all these
creatures that Carlo had designed for other movies.
Speaker 2 (18:27):
At the shop, Matt met Spielberg, who did something that
immediately endeared him to his would be Et. Spielberg didn't
loom over him like a gargoyle, hands on knees. He
bent down so he could look Matt eye to eye,
the same way ET's telescoping neck allowed him to come
face to face with new friends. Spielberg understood how looking
(18:51):
up at the world can be intimidating. He wanted Matt
to feel comfortable.
Speaker 1 (18:57):
That was something interesting about him. Not everybody did that.
I remember Carlo doing that, and it's not that it's
rude that other people don't do that. They just it's
something that some people think about immediately and some people
don't really take into consideration until maybe later. He did
it immediately, and I thought that that was pretty cool.
Speaker 2 (19:15):
Spielberg asked Matt about getting around on a skateboard. Matt
offered that it wasn't his only way of travel. In
the shop, Matt was stuffed into another makeshift et suit
and then showed them a couple different ways he got around.
Speaker 1 (19:31):
Then I demonstrated to him the walk that I did
eventually use in the movie, where my hands are the
feet and I lift my torso up so it's not
touched any ground at all, and my hands ambled back
and forth, just like legs, wood or feet, And he
said that's the one that he thinks is going to work.
And they captured me doing that walk on camera, played
(19:54):
a back and looked really good to them.
Speaker 2 (19:58):
The hands for feet method proved surprisingly effective. It gave
et the kind of distinctive not of this earth Gate
Spielberg wanted one people weren't used to seeing, and practically
no one but Matt could do it. But it would
be a little while before Matt heard anything definitive. Then
(20:21):
came another phone call. Matt was offered the job. Matt
and his parents had a talk. Sure it was cool,
but it would also interrupt the start of Matt's school year.
The movie would shoot from September to December nineteen eighty one.
They wanted to be sure it was something he really
(20:42):
wanted to do. But for Matt, delaying school was no
big deal. On top of everything else, he had the
bane of any shy kid's existence. Bullies, and Matt's bullies
were especially cruel.
Speaker 1 (20:59):
Boy, was it great to get away from school because
around that time I was bullied a lot. That was
like the peak time of my bullying. Some of the
bullies would come up from behind my wheelchair. I'd take
my wheelchair to school and they'd tip the wheelchair over.
Speaker 2 (21:15):
That would be enough for any kid to have to
deal with, but the situation at home was also coming
to a head. Matt's mother was frustrated his father wasn't
willing to get the help he needed.
Speaker 1 (21:29):
They would get a lot of fights about that kind
of stuff. He wasn't abusive, or he wasn't emotionally abusive.
He didn't yell, he wasn't that kind of person, but
just the general atmosphere at home when he was deep
in depression was something that was great to escape from
during that time.
Speaker 2 (21:49):
So in September nineteen eighty one, Matt went off to
do something he never dreamed of, play a crucial role
in making the Ultimate Creature feature come to life. Like Elliott,
he'd be taking on new responsibilities that would distract him
from his own problems, but in order to do that,
(22:10):
he'd have to overcome his inherent shyness while taking a
direction from the most successful director in the world. You'd
think a kid going off to shoot a Stephen Spielberg
(22:32):
movie would be the talk of the playground, but Matt
left to film the movie with relatively few people knowing
what he was up to.
Speaker 1 (22:40):
I didn't have a lot of friends at the time.
I think I told my best friend that I was
doing it, And he also didn't know that much about
movies and about Spielberg. He came from a really religious background,
so his parents would he let him see any kind
of movies. So I think I only told him.
Speaker 2 (22:56):
This was probably something Spielberg preferred. The details surrounding the
character of Et were highly classified in the pre Internet,
as it was easier to plug leaks to the media.
Spielberg wanted his young actors left in the dark, making
their first impression of the creature a genuine one. Matt,
(23:19):
of course, had already gotten a preview, and by the
time he showed up on location in Tahunga, California, a
custom rubber Latex suit had been crafted just for him.
It weighed thirty pounds, and yes, it made him sweat
a lot.
Speaker 1 (23:37):
One interesting thing is though, that the recipe for Latex
was much worse back then, because latex shrank and latex
doesn't have a lot of pores in it. But if
he shrinks, the porson and it smaller. So long story short,
the costume would get smaller and hotter every time I
got into it because the latex shranks. So thankfully that
(24:00):
didn't show on camera, I definitely felt it.
Speaker 2 (24:04):
Originally, Matt was hired for just one scene where Et
needed to take a tumble, but it turned out Et
would be doing that a lot, so Matt's responsibilities kept
growing on set. He quickly became known as stunt et.
Speaker 1 (24:22):
Pratfalls. Yeah, Pratfall's agility, falling down, all that stuff.
Speaker 2 (24:27):
Matt, of course was no practiced stunt person, but this
was the eighties and film producers sometimes pushed the edges
of what was appropriate.
Speaker 1 (24:37):
That's one of the kind of dangerous aspects of filmmaking,
especially back then, is this like a lot of fly
by the seat of your pants kind of attitude. You know,
it's like they're going to make budgets, they can't go
over budget. Just fussing with something and make sure that
someone's not going to get hurt. They put a lot
of padding in the costume, so even when I fell
(24:57):
flat on my face, there was like lots of styrofoam
protecting my faith.
Speaker 2 (25:02):
One of Matt's bigger scenes as Et was when the
alien falls over drunk, which we remind you is not
something an eleven year old can portray with any conviction.
But Matt was up for it.
Speaker 1 (25:15):
And I remember being so excited because I was walking
very easily in the costume, and I felt like I
could do everything that they're directing me too. I could
hear all the directions very clearly. I saw the marks
that they wanted me to hit, and whenever they want
me to kind of play up the fall a little bit,
(25:35):
they wanted me to not fall immediately, which is what
I did. They want me to extend a little bit
and like you had some expression to it. I remember
when I did that, and I did that the kind
of final fall in my face. Everybody laughed and it
sounded like what it would sound like in the audience,
you know, when the movie was playing. So I thought, Okay,
(25:56):
I think this is going to go over well.
Speaker 2 (25:59):
In contrast to his problems at school, Matt found fast
friends in Henry Thomas, who played Elliott, and Robert McNaughton,
who played Elliott's older brother Michael. There were no cliques,
no social hierarchy, no grade school pettiness or cruelty, just
three kids on the set of a movie.
Speaker 1 (26:19):
We completely bonded as soon as we met because we
were like, well, I was going to say, we're in
the same age group, but actually Rob was the same
age as the older kids, but he had more like
youth mentality in He also knew that it would be
it would benefit all of us to kind of like
bond together. So we were our own group on that set,
and that was fantastic because it rescued me from that situation.
(26:43):
It was like a just escape from being bullied in school,
and also, you know who likes doing schoolwork right, And
it got me away from this situation at home to
where my mom and my dad were fighting a lot
and going through that drama.
Speaker 2 (26:56):
The drama Matt's referring to is a pretty seismic event
in the life of a kid. In between Matt being
fitted for his suit and the start of shooting, his
parents made a big decision.
Speaker 1 (27:10):
There was a few weeks before we started when he
was living at home, and so when I went out
to get fitted, and when I went to Carlo remble
Bally Studio to practice in the costume and meet with
the crew just and prepare before shooting. That's when my
dad lived at home, but then when we were actually shooting,
my dad was actually living apart from us.
Speaker 2 (27:33):
Matt's ET family was at least for a time, more
stable than his actual family. In addition to making friends
with Henry and Robert, Matt also met ET's other half.
This ET was a thirty four year old adult named
Pat Bailon, who was roughly two feet nine inches tall
(27:56):
and weighed forty five pounds. Pat was born with cartilage
hare hypoplasia, a bone growth disorder that can lead to dwarfes.
Pat was used for ET scenes that didn't require Et
tipping over, for example, the one in which Et is
being stashed away in a bicycle basket and wrapped in
(28:18):
a blanket, plus other walking scenes.
Speaker 1 (28:22):
I remember he was a really nice guy. He didn't
have any ego about him. We kind of filmed the
Eten sequencer. That's the way the story's been told anyway.
So I came on about two weeks into filming, two
or three weeks into filming, and Pat number made me
feel like I was in the outside looking in.
Speaker 2 (28:41):
Pat's background was fascinating. He had only recently broken into films,
working on a Chevy Chase movie titled Under the Rainbow,
a fictitious retelling of the filming of the Wizard of
Oz and the rumors surrounding its little people performers getting
wild after filming. Before acting, Pat had been a bouncer
(29:04):
at a bar in Ohio. It was a publicity stunt
for the business.
Speaker 3 (29:09):
But it worked.
Speaker 2 (29:10):
He later became a dispatcher for a sheriff's office. By
the time ET rolled around, Pat was having some back problems.
He might start a scene then realize he needed to
rest or. The action might be too dangerous for Pat,
whose condition didn't allow for him to fall down much.
(29:31):
That's where Matt came in.
Speaker 1 (29:33):
I did a lot of the same scenes that Pat did,
and Pat was tired. They'd bring me in and I
do like a just the same thing, but it'd be
a different actor in the costume.
Speaker 2 (29:43):
Despite Matt doing most of the stunts, it was Pat
who probably came closest to having an ET related emergency
room visit. Pat was in the costume and sporting a
battery pack when the power source caught fire, setting the
adorable alien ablaze for a brief moment before a crew
(30:04):
member stepped in.
Speaker 1 (30:06):
It on another way could have gone really bad, but
they were just lucky and they got him out of
the costume in time or whatever. However they've resolved that situation.
But it's like, yeah, you can't foresee all these things because,
like you said, it's nothing like this has ever been
done before.
Speaker 2 (30:22):
At one point there was a third Et, a woman
named Tamara de Troux, who stepped in for pat when needed.
Et also had a different set of hands for many scenes.
They belonged to Caprice Roth, a mime hired by the
production who wound up becoming the connective tissue of ET's performance.
(30:45):
She managed to make a cohesive team out of the
many puppeteers controlling his facial movements, synchronizing them with her gestures.
Of course, anyone controlling a puppet will give in to
the temptation of satisfying onset boredom, and with up to
fifteen puppeteers, there were plenty of opportunities. There are scenes
(31:10):
you'll never see of Et picking his nose, puffing on
a cigar, or pinching at the rear end of a
passing production crew member. Mostly though, people believed in Et
deeply and wholeheartedly, and they believed in Matt, who was
coming through in a big way, despite acting in a vacuum.
(31:35):
Owing to the secrecy surrounding et, Matt didn't get a
script or see dailies of the footage. He was just
living in the moment. But Matt's best memory on set
didn't come from a scene. It came when his father
paid him a visit. His parents didn't normally come to filming,
(31:56):
having their own jobs and trusting a Steven Spielberg set
would be a safe place for their child. The production
sent a car to pick Matt up every morning and
drive him back at night, so Matt's dad showing up
was a big deal.
Speaker 1 (32:13):
On one of the days that he was on a
manic high, he decided to come down to the set
and surprise me, which is great because my mom hadn't
been there, my dad hadn't been there. For him to
share a day on the set with me was awesome.
I remember him putting me on his shoulders and walking
me around the set, and he was introducing himself as
(32:36):
my dad. He's met Spielberg and Carlo and a lot
of the cast and crew. You know, he was with me.
He was happy, he experienced it, and I came away
with one great memory of him being there with me
on the set.
Speaker 2 (32:53):
As with most movies, there was a few month gap
between ET wrapping filming and its release. After returning to school,
but before the film had come out, Matt noticed something
a little strange. He wasn't being bullied as often. It
wasn't because the kids knew he had played ET. They
(33:15):
didn't know anything about ET. It was because Matt had
a secret, one that gave him a sense of confidence
and self worth.
Speaker 1 (33:24):
They didn't know why it was gone, but there was
like an intangible security and confidence that I got from it.
Because as soon as I got back to school, the
bullying did not resume. It stopped completely. And it wasn't
because the movie came out.
Speaker 2 (33:39):
It was just, you know, Matt had never intended for
his work to be some big secret, but in order
for audiences to believe in ET, Steven Spielberg was reluctant
to admit the alien was the work of Hollywood. ET's
success hinged in part on Matt and everyone else involved
(34:00):
with the creature being invisible. In the weeks leading up
to the premiere of ET, the movie gained more and
more momentum. Test screenings weren't just successful audiences were enraptured, laughing, crying,
(34:23):
and falling for an alien who didn't meet what you
would consider conventional standards of attractiveness. The reception ET received
even took Spielberg by surprise. The film made its entire
ten million dollar budget back in a single weekend. It
was the number one film in America for six weeks
(34:47):
and kept returning to that position throughout the rest of
the year. It just kept playing and playing. By the
next year, it had outgrossed Star Wars to become the
most successful film in history. It was a modern Wizard
of Oz, the rare family film that didn't pander to
(35:08):
kids or bore adults, the movie that became must see viewing.
Here's Simon Brew again.
Speaker 6 (35:17):
Everyone at my school saw ET at the cinema, pretty
much everyone. I mean it was Star Wars, ET and
Superman three. Those were the three things that were most
important in your life to what.
Speaker 2 (35:28):
Why did people respond to Et? For children, it was
that the movie understood them and took their problems seriously.
For adults, it was the ability to see through younger
eyes and recall the excitement and fears of an unknown world.
The next time you watch the film, try to notice
(35:49):
how Spielberg shot it. The camera is often just a
few feet off the ground, as though the audience is
experiencing it from the perspective of a kid or a
short alien. For Simon and millions of other kids, E
was a controlled Catharsis. With his team of crafts people, actors,
(36:12):
and Melissa Matheson, Spielberg had somehow made people believe in
Et and in ET's bond with Elliott, which made their
separation at the climax all the more wrenching.
Speaker 6 (36:27):
He just went in to see it, and I mean
all I remember as that seven year old was just
being traumatized, just being absolutely inconsolable on the way out.
And I still get that as well, and every time
I watch it, I still get it. But it was
a thing. I mean, all we were told going in
(36:48):
is you're gonna see it and you're gonna come out crying.
And we still all just went in. Our parents still
took us the sadists.
Speaker 2 (36:55):
Matt went to see the movie, of course with his parents,
and kept looking for scenes in which he appeared under
pounds of rubber as Et. There was the scene with
et inebriated, and the one where a polaroid flash causes
him to topple over.
Speaker 1 (37:13):
The other scene. So it was all the kitchen scenes.
Anytime Et is in a bathroom, that's me. So the
scene where she where de Wallace comes home the mother
and she's putting everything in the refrigerator. She's completely distracted
and she doesn't see me walking around her, and then
she opens the refrigerator door and it has been in
the face and I fall over.
Speaker 4 (37:33):
That was me.
Speaker 2 (37:35):
In the midst of all this, the media always kept
going back to a central question, how how had Et
been cobbled together to make for one of the few
truly convincing creatures in movie history. Time and time again,
Spielberg would dodge the question. Et was mysterious. Even the
(37:58):
first trailer for the movie avoided showing what he looked like.
He told the press at the can Film Festival where
premiered that Et was made out of love and that
it took twelve hearts to make ET's heartbeat. Asked what
materials were used, he said that you will not hear
(38:20):
the answer to that question from my lips. It seemed
like Spielberg and Universal wanted Et to remain an illusion.
They had never expressly told Matt not to discuss his
work in the movie, but Spielberg's reluctance to explain the
techniques used was something of a hint. Plus, think about it,
(38:42):
what if a kid in your school said he was
in the biggest movie of all time. You couldn't see him,
but he was there. It's kind of like the kid
who kept insisting his uncle worked for Nintendo. It just
smelt like baloney.
Speaker 1 (38:57):
I mean, I might have started telling them, and then
I think maybe I initially did, and then they'd say
they'd seen a TV segment or read and starlog magazine
or somethinghow it was a robot, or how maybe it
was just this one actor or whatever, and they disbelieved me.
(39:18):
And I think after that I didn't like try and
convince them. I just figured eventually they'd figured out.
Speaker 2 (39:25):
Almost everyone involved with ET experienced the shadow of it.
Henry Thomas remembers getting mobbed after the movie came out.
Even Pat Bylon got plenty of press attention, but Matt
was different. He was famous in plain sight, an anonymous celebrity,
(39:46):
but notoriety wasn't really the point. It was about an
experience that had come along at a good time. The
highs of ET were in sharp contrast to Matt's home life.
His parents had separated, his father's bipolar disorder going untreated
and slowly getting worse. Then later, in nineteen eighty two,
(40:10):
Matt heard the news no child should ever have to
endure tragically, his father died by suicide.
Speaker 1 (40:19):
So, yeah, I've just lucky happenstance as something came along
at that time that would bring all this residual stuff
that would help me absorb the impact of my father diing.
Speaker 2 (40:30):
There's a curious thread that weaves through ET. From the beginning,
Spielberg had envisioned it as a way into his feelings
about his own family. The divorce of his mother and
father in the film Elliot mirrors that same struggle, and
in Matt's world, the film had come at a time
his family suffered an incredible loss.
Speaker 1 (40:54):
I was crazy, I made who knows, you know. If
I didn't have the cushion of ET to counterbalance up
the bitterness of that experience, I don't know what would
happen to What kind of person did I be today?
Speaker 3 (41:08):
You know?
Speaker 1 (41:08):
Like making all those new friends and having them as
my support system after my dad died was huge like
Robert found out. Robert McNaughton, the guy who played the Michael,
the older brother in ET. He was really supportive after that,
like he'd heard about my father. Like we gotten together
(41:30):
a couple of times after ET came out and really
had a good time. But after you heard my father
killed himself, he'd make an effort to come by my
house and we go and do stuff on the weekends,
like go watch movies, or go play tag and water
balloons and all that stuff, and just do the stuff
(41:52):
would distract me the horror of that time. That was
really great. So ET came along a great time.
Speaker 2 (42:00):
ET never really lost that power for Matt or for anyone.
It was really, at least in theaters periodically through the
nineteen eighties. Spielberg refused to allow it to be available
on VHS until six years later in nineteen eighty eight.
There was a magic to it that he largely kept preserved.
(42:22):
There would never be a sequel, or even much talk
of one. Henry Thomas, who portrayed Elliott, appeared with ET
in a twenty nineteen commercial for Comcast that Spielberg approved of,
but not much else. And while it might seem easy
to conjure up Et as a CGI creation or even
(42:43):
another Latex costume. It's not Comcast used a hybrid option.
Speaker 1 (42:50):
There's a reason for that because Latex you just can't
do a one to one copy of the original puppet.
There's something's going to be off the paint, the wrinkles,
the eyes. I don't know. Well, in the movie itself,
you can kind of see what ET almost has like
a lazy eye because they just couldn't get the one
of the eye to quite be symmetrical with the other one.
(43:10):
You know, they did a photo session with Michael Jackson.
You see there was something my ET's I that was degenerating.
So yeah, so I mean, going back to what we
were saying about the sequel, even if you got everything right,
but you just can't nail ET. You couldn't get that
ET look good match it from the first movie.
Speaker 2 (43:31):
Matt wasn't completely done with the film business, though Et
would be a tough act to follow. A few years later,
in nineteen eighty five, he appeared in The Fourth Wise Man,
a biblical tale, playing a leoper. He also appeared in
Cyborg two, a sequel to a nineteen eighty nine Jean
(43:51):
Claude van Damn film that couldn't even manage to re
enlist Jean Claude van dam.
Speaker 1 (43:57):
I had a speaking part in that. I'm not in
costume while I'm not in like a latex costume, so
that was like a futuristic dystopian picture. Angelina Jolie's in it,
Jack Plants, Elias cotaeis of a lot of great stars,
and that Billy Drago from The Untouchables and so yeah.
So I had a speaking part in that one. That
was probably my most memorable experience after ET was actually
(44:20):
doing a legit speaking scene, dialogue scene with those actors.
I played a character named manhole Man. He was like
a doorman to the overworld.
Speaker 2 (44:35):
But for all of his immediate success, Matt didn't fall
in love with.
Speaker 1 (44:39):
Acting and never felt natural to me. And then the
number of roles that come to handicapped people, especially someone
who's doesn't have any legs, few and far between.
Speaker 2 (44:52):
Matt went on to teach English and then got into
writing and podcasting. He makes convention appearances away for fans
of ET to put a human face to the character.
Matt de Merit the creature Kid. I didn't know it
at the time. But he became part of a legacy
people who breathed life into fantastic creations. Once not long ago,
(45:17):
Matt found himself at a convention and sitting alongside Rico Browning,
the man who played the Creature from the Black Lagoon,
a nineteen fifty four classic Matt grew up watching with
his dad.
Speaker 1 (45:30):
It was very flattered because he gave me his autograph
and told me how much he loved ET. And we
struck up a conversation, and I realized as I was
talking to him that Hey, you know, this is the
company I'm in. You know, I'm part of this company.
I was a man in a very famous creature suit.
Speaker 2 (45:48):
This is ET for Matt a time in his life
that was a mixture of happiness and loss. The movie
is something audiences have treasured, but it was the making
of ET that allowed Matt to believe in himself.
Speaker 1 (46:05):
There's a great word sweet, you know, and I think
life is just bittersweet. It's not always bitter, it's not
always sweet, you know, it's sometimes it just it converges
into an experience like that, you know, where these two
concurrent things happen, both positive, one positive, one incredibly negative.
(46:27):
It gave me the confidence to discourse with people and
interact with people, you know, because I did at this hook.
It wasn't just my disability, wasn't just the subject of
the conversation, but this glorious movie that people cried during
and laughed at, you know. So it's really hard for
me to get my mind around that. So there's always
(46:47):
going to be a bit of a detachment from that,
like pinching myself. Is it's still real, you know, like
when I do convention with with Robert and Henry today.
So I can't believe forty years later was still talking,
you know, and we're still having the same laughs that
we had back then, and we're still celebrating this movie
(47:10):
forty years later.
Speaker 4 (47:14):
Okay, we usually cast these stories at the end. It's
kind of hard to make this one a movie. And
there's also been very against making any ET sequels in
all these years. But does anyone want to pitch an
ET sequel? On the fly?
Speaker 1 (47:27):
Here?
Speaker 3 (47:28):
Oh?
Speaker 2 (47:28):
God, an ET sequel? Okay, Elliott goes to his planet, right,
that's the classic sequel reversal.
Speaker 5 (47:34):
Oh, that's good, like that, that's brilliant.
Speaker 3 (47:37):
Write that. You have to write that.
Speaker 2 (47:39):
Yes, I'm sure, I'll write that everyone will be clamoring
for it.
Speaker 4 (47:43):
I was thinking about Avengeful Et later in life coming
back less of a heartwarming story than what we're done.
Speaker 5 (47:50):
Oh oh, Evengefully he comes back to destroy the earth.
Speaker 2 (47:55):
Or Et comes back as Elliott is getting a divorce
as an adult and he has to work through that.
Speaker 3 (48:01):
Ah. Yes, mid life crisis Elliott. Brilliant. These are all
good for a very special character.
Speaker 4 (48:09):
So in the cold open, that was my youngest daughter Juliette,
who we roped into doing a little voice acting. She
gave us multiple takes. Total pro if nepotism is not
allowed for these official rankings, but we're cool with looking
the other way. For to some medical ethics, I would
pick the doctor who got his former patient his start
in Hollywood.
Speaker 3 (48:28):
Oh yeah, good points.
Speaker 2 (48:30):
I'm going to actually say the casting director who's like,
we should call a hospital, that's the move.
Speaker 3 (48:38):
I'm going with the crew who went and put the
fire out.
Speaker 5 (48:40):
I thought that was brilliant because you got to have
those people with fast acting, clear headed, no panic.
Speaker 4 (48:45):
Also loved Simon brew Another shout out to Simon to
coming on and giving us some Hollywood history. I love
Simon old friend, great voice, good podcast. Go check out
film stories after this.
Speaker 5 (48:56):
As Dana said, totally, this was a hard one to cast,
by the way, because you have the main actor like Matt,
He's got to play himself, right. I mean this is automatically,
this is the Jackie Robinson story to play yourself.
Speaker 3 (49:07):
Brother.
Speaker 5 (49:08):
But other than that, I could cast Steven Spielberg as
Jesse Eisenberg.
Speaker 3 (49:11):
I thought that one worked.
Speaker 5 (49:12):
I can see that Melissa Matheson screenwriter Emma Stone, but
as a brunette. And then Carlo Rimbaldi Adrian Brody. He
feels like the outsider's outsider in Hollywood. I think he
can bring that right creature feature energy. And then finally
as Pat the little person. I thought the actor Danny Woodburn,
who played Seinfeld's comic friend on Seinfeld, is like kind
of like a brilliant little person actor. I thought he
(49:34):
could give you that Hollywood veteran vibe that sounds great.
Speaker 3 (49:37):
Love it.
Speaker 4 (49:37):
I would see that version of this. I don't know
if it's officially an et squel, but let's talk, but
I do want to see Dana's.
Speaker 3 (49:43):
One hundred percent both of them.
Speaker 2 (49:45):
Actually I am my alien. It's sort of like an
alien three situation.
Speaker 4 (49:51):
Very Special Episodes is made by some very special people.
The show's hosted by Danish Schwartz, Sarah Burnette and Jason English.
Today's episode was written by Jake Rossen. Our producer is
Josh Fisher. Our story editor is Marisa Brown. Ed and
sound design by Jonathan Washington and Josh Fisher. Mixing and
(50:11):
mastering by Beheid Fraser. Special thanks to our voice actors
Jessica Krinchitch and Juliette English. Original music by Alice McCoy.
Research in fact checking by Jake Rosson and Austin Thompson.
Show logo by Lucy Quintinia. Our executive producer is Jason English.
(50:32):
If you want to email the show, you can reach
us at Very Special Episodes at gmail dot com. Very
Special Episodes is a production of iHeart Podcasts.
Originals.
Speaker 2 (00:10):
This is an iHeart original. It's late summer nineteen eighty one.
Eleven year old Matt de Merit is at his house
in Torrance, California. When the phone rings, his mother picks
it up. Matt can hear just one side of the conversation.
Speaker 1 (00:33):
Yes, Yes, that's my son. Who jaws Steven Spielberg.
Speaker 2 (00:40):
Jaws Steven Spielberg, the same director who has spent the
past six years on top of Hollywood and who currently
has the highest grossing movie of the summer in Raiders
of the Lost Arc.
Speaker 1 (00:55):
In the distance, I could hear my mom and I
keep having this very interesting conversation with someone who is
interested in hiring me. That's Matt, and basically told my
mom that they're doing a movie and it involves someone
being in a costume. Didn't want to give away too
much for someone being in a costume to walk around.
Speaker 2 (01:14):
To put this call in perspective, Matt wasn't a child
actor or a performer of any kind at eleven. He
also wasn't a cinematographer or effects artist. He was just
a suburban kid enjoying his summer before he had to
go back to school, and school wasn't going so well
(01:35):
for Matt, which we'll get too shortly. But Matt had
something no other kid had, something that made him shy
at times, but something Steven Spielberg needed in order to
embark on his most ambitious movie yet, a movie that
for many years held the title highest grossing film of
(01:58):
all time, and from a certain point of view, a
movie that would feature Matt as the star.
Speaker 3 (02:06):
The movie.
Speaker 2 (02:06):
Movie went by many different names during its development, Watch
the Skies, Night Skies, a Boy's Life, Et and Me,
and finally Et the Extra Terrestrial, And for Matt Demerit,
it would prove a bitter sweet experience, one that would
(02:27):
help him through one of the most formative events in
his life. For now, all he knew was that he
needed to have a conversation with his parents and go
meet Steven Spielberg, And well there was one other thing.
Speaker 3 (02:42):
Mom, Who's Stephen Spielberg?
Speaker 2 (02:46):
For iHeartRadio? This is very Special episodes an iHeart original podcast,
I'm your host Danish Schwortz and this is Et and Me.
Et is one of those movies that I have such
a distinct memory of my dad taking us to see
(03:06):
the re release in theaters when we were kids. So
it was very, very exciting for me just to listen
to this episode because, to be honest, I knew absolutely
nothing about how it was made.
Speaker 3 (03:17):
I love it.
Speaker 4 (03:17):
One of our best episodes last season was the Titanic
episode about how the cast and crew got poisoned on set,
and it's similar. This is a good lane for us
where we have some beloved film and we're getting a
lot of the behind the scenes from the people who
actually made it.
Speaker 3 (03:32):
Yeah.
Speaker 5 (03:32):
Also this speak surprises like the creature for the Black
Lagoon shows up. I love this one for I was
all the Hollywood history.
Speaker 3 (03:37):
Should we dive back in hell y.
Speaker 2 (03:42):
In a lot of ways, Matt de Merritt's childhood looked
a lot like everyone else's, maybe like yours. He grew
up in the suburbs of Torrance, a coastal city in
southern California with beautiful views and a laid back atmosphere.
The local newspaper is named the Daily Breeze, if that
tells you anything. Matt had some artistic inclinations, which he
(04:07):
might have inherited from his father, an illustrator for the
Post Office.
Speaker 1 (04:12):
I would draw a lot as a kid. I love
to look at my dad's drawings and ask him to
draw me monsters and stuff. I was so fascinated when
he could draw creatures for me, so I tried to
emulate him. That was kind of kid I was. I
drew a lot, and I skateboarded a lot, and I
like to hang out with my friends and go to
(04:33):
the park and do stuff like that. That's Matt.
Speaker 2 (04:37):
And while there was plenty of normal kid stuff to do,
Matt did it a little differently. That's because Matt was
born without legs.
Speaker 1 (04:47):
Well, apparently, my mother took an anti nausea medication which
she was pregnant with me called ben Deckton, and that
was a popular drug at the time for that condition,
and it turned out that there were a lot of
birth defects that seemed to be correlated with the drug,
and so all the parents filed a class action lawsuit
(05:08):
against the maker the drug, Meryl Dow. Meryl Dao had
a lot of lawyers and basically were able to counter
all the evidence that they had that it might have
caused birth effects. So nothing really ever came for it
could either have been that or could have been a
natural birth effect. You know, sometimes it happens where you
can't really attreat to anything specific.
Speaker 2 (05:29):
For a variety of reasons, prosthetic legs were a poor
solution for Matt, who learned to locomot around in a wheelchair.
In addition to walking on his hands. He even learned
to use a skateboard.
Speaker 1 (05:42):
I loved skateboard parks when I was a kid. I
couldn't do tricks, you know, quite at the Tony Hawk level,
but I could go on those bowls, and I could
do like hand plants and stuff like that.
Speaker 2 (05:53):
Matt says that because he didn't lose his legs exactly,
he never really missed them.
Speaker 1 (05:59):
I just always perceived my condition as normal. That's all
I was used to. It wasn't struggling with the loss
of limbs. I just always got around own naturally, you know.
I learned to walk on my hands, just like anyone
learns to walk on their legs. Reaching for stuff or
asking for help wasn't of a problem. I could either
climb up and get the thing that I needed, or
I always aid the support system for people who could
(06:22):
get stuff that was out of my reach.
Speaker 2 (06:25):
But there were other challenging things about Matt's life. His
father had been diagnosed with a serious issue bipolar disorder.
The condition used to be referred to as manic depression.
According to the National Institute of Mental Health, the diagnosis
is characterized by clear changes in mood, energy, and activity levels.
(06:48):
Depending on the particular diagnosis, people can experience moods that
range from euphoric or energized to extremely despondent.
Speaker 1 (06:59):
My dad was in denial that he had bipolar, and
so he wouldn't take this medication, and he'd be very withdrawn,
which is one of the symptoms of being depressed. So
the times he wouldn't communicate at all.
Speaker 2 (07:12):
But there was something that did help strengthen the bond
between Matt and his dad. Creature features monster movies, men
in rubber suits. It was a fantasy escape from a
reality that could often prove challenging, and a way to
get closer to his father, who sometimes seemed far away.
Speaker 1 (07:34):
My dad and I used to watch monster movies on Saturdays.
There was a kind of a marathon that happened every
Saturday on Channel five called Monster Rally, and so the
first horror film I saw was a Creature from the
Black Lagoon.
Speaker 2 (07:51):
While all this was happening, Steven Spielberg was grappling with
something of a creature feature of his own, one that
would require Math's unique abilities, though no one quite knew
that yet. By this point in the nineteen eight eighties,
the director was enjoying that rare blend of critical, commercial
(08:11):
and financial success that proved elusive for a lot of filmmakers.
His adaptation of Peter Benchley's beach read Jaws in nineteen
seventy five was a phenomenon. In nineteen seventy seven, he
led Jaws co star Richard Dreyfuss to a fateful meeting
with aliens in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Raiders
(08:35):
of the Lost Arc meanwhile, was waiting in the wings.
It would spawn four sequels and make Indiana Jones one
of the great movie heroes. Spielberg's only misfire had been
nineteen forty one, a big World War II comedy that
audiences didn't find very funny in Hollywood terms. Spielberg had
(08:56):
a blank check, the ability to make practically anything he wanted,
and what Spielberg was looking to do was tell a
story about a skiddish, harmless alien who comes to Earth
and befriends a boy still coming to terms with his parents' separation.
It would be a family movie, something with themes that
(09:18):
resonated deeply with Spielberg, who was himself a product of divorce.
His parents, Arthur and Leah, had gone their separate ways
when Spielberg was nineteen after several years of acrimony. His
mother had grown close with his father's best friend. Though
Arthur told his children he was responsible for the separation,
(09:41):
it strained Spielberg's relationship with his dad for years, and
there's no question it informed his filmmaking. But e T
would be his most personal work to date, a close
look at a child dealing with the anger of a
fractured household, not yet able to process the convoluted adult world,
(10:03):
something plenty of kids, including Matt, could understand.
Speaker 6 (10:08):
It was the story of his youth, It was his childhood,
It was his parents' divorce.
Speaker 2 (10:14):
That's Simon brew Simon is the founder of the Den
of Geek website and a pop culture historian. Jason and
I actually used to work with him at Mental Floss,
and he hosts a podcast, Film Stories, that goes deep
into the making of great films. You should listen after
you finished this episode, of course.
Speaker 6 (10:34):
And the idea wasn't that this would be his biggest film.
Although you can't ever design how an audience will react,
the whole idea was, this is something smaller, This is
me going right back to my roots. I'm just gonna
almost do one for me.
Speaker 2 (10:49):
A couple of years prior, Spielberg had envisioned a movie
with a spaceship full of sinister aliens descending on a farmhouse.
Just one of the aliens in that script, called Watch
the Skies and later Night Skies was friendly. But after
developing the film and even having its alien creatures designed,
(11:12):
Spielberg realized that wasn't the movie he wanted to make. Instead,
he commissioned a script for his alien buddy story from
Melissa Matheson, whom he had met filming Raiders of the
Lost Arc. Matheson was the future wife of that movie's star,
Harrison Ford, but more importantly, she was a screenwriter who
(11:33):
was extremely adept at getting to the beating heart of
Spielberg's story, the bond between an alien stranded on Earth
and Elliott, a boy mourning the absence of his father
after his parents separate. That left just one major piece
of the puzzle, how to create E T. While the
(11:57):
technology was rapidly finding itself in summer blockbusters, artists couldn't
just turn to computer animation. The alien would have to
be the scene with the actors. Early on, someone broached
the idea of sticking a monkey in a costume. That
was quickly discarded. Then someone suggested putting a person in
(12:20):
a suit, but Spielberg vetoed that as well. The entire
point of ET's physique was that it was something other
than human. He didn't want anyone to think it was
merely someone encased in rubber. Instead, Spielberg approached his close
encounter's colleague, a special effects artist named Carlo Rambaldi. A
(12:43):
prop expert, Carlo had helped reimagine King Kong for the
nineteen seventy six remake, but despite that movie's giant ape,
Et would prove to be the bigger problem. Carlow was
given just a few months to conjure up Et as
an animatronic puppet. He'd be animated by servos and wires
(13:08):
by a team of puppeteers. They would control everything from
his eyes to his mouth to his elongated neck, which
went up and down like a carjack.
Speaker 6 (13:19):
It was in the end production illustrator Ed Verrow, who
got kind of the eureka moment of what he was
the one who twigged what Spielberg was actually afterwards that
he wanted. It was described as a combination of the
innocence of youth and the wisdom of age, and that
was in the design and the sketches that were being
done for the creature. There was also the idea that
(13:42):
they wanted ET to be quote a creature that only
a mother could love, which I really really love as well.
Speaker 2 (13:49):
Rambaldi was a master and ET quickly evolved into a
highly convincing presence with big, bulbous eyes that took inspiration
from Albert Einstein. The various ets Rambaldi built could express themselves, blink,
move their mouth, health furrow a brow.
Speaker 6 (14:09):
And what Rambaldi told Spielberg is you're gonna need nine
months to do this. Spielberg gave him six, and they
just worked around the clock to put this creature together.
And I mean they really made it. I think they
made in the end three different ets with different electronics
and different capabilities within them. And what Spielberg was wanting
(14:30):
really that he wanted a creature that was slow and
sure footed, and as Spielberg said, he's much more conditioned
to a heavier atmosphere, a heavier gravity. And they got really,
really forensic on what this creature and what this character was.
It's supposed to be an alien walking on a planet
which it wasn't familiar with.
Speaker 2 (14:50):
But even Rembaldi didn't have a perfect solution for Et
walking or performing big physical movements like falling down. To
try and control his feet via remote robotics would make
him look like a jerky ma net or a clumsy
battery operated toy. It would also cost another million dollars
(15:13):
for what was supposed to be Spielberg's tiny movie, So
Spielberg listened as his producer, Kathleen Kennedy suggested having a
human performer inside of a costume, provided it was someone
close to ET's stature that eliminated most adults. Rambaldi quickly
(15:33):
created a simple mock up suit that the four year
old daughter of Spielberg's lawyer climbed into for a screen test.
She hated every minute of it, throwing a tantrum, but
the idea itself was sound. The kid in a suit
looked convincing. Now all they had to do was find
(15:54):
the right kid. Someone had the idea to call UCLA
Medical Center. UCLA had a program devoted to the treatment
of individuals with uniek physical attributes. One of the physicians
at UCLA recommended Matt, who had undergone physical therapy there.
(16:16):
What made Matt unique was how he got around. Walking
on his hands gave Matt a very specific skill, giving
him a profile similar to Et. By using his hands
as ET's feet, he could step in when Et needed
more agility than the puppeteers could provide. Matt could tackle
(16:38):
stunt that might prove too daunting for a little person
inside the suit.
Speaker 1 (16:44):
So Universal Studios reached out to UCLA Medical Center to
see if there was anyone with dwarfism or was in
a small stature that could fit in the costume. And
the only one they had on hand who was short
was me, and I think they kind of pitched it
to them. They said that I could walk on my
hands just like my hands were legs, and they said,
(17:05):
that's intriguing be able to come down for an audition,
so that the doctor gave him my number.
Speaker 2 (17:12):
Matt's doctor acted as his talent agent very la That's
how a producer wound up phoning Matt's mom and how
Matt wound up going to audition for Steven Spielberg, a
guy he barely knew. In fact, Matt's father needed to
take him to see Raiders that summer to give Matt
(17:33):
a better idea of just what he was getting himself into.
Oddly enough, Matt was already a fan of Carlo Rambaldi.
Carlo had done the mechanical effects for the alien head
in the movie Alien the R Rated Gorefest, which Matt
had seen in nineteen seventy nine as a nine year old.
(17:53):
He was a monster kid, remember, So for Matt, going
to Rambaldi's effects house was like going to Willywanka's chocolate factory.
He was in creature Heaven.
Speaker 1 (18:05):
Got in a studio in Oh. It smelled so interesting too.
It was like a workshop, you know. It was like
Geppetto's workshop. Smelled like wood and sawdust and plaster. And
that was very intriguing that I was going into this
very creative environment, you know, where there are all these
creatures that Carlo had designed for other movies.
Speaker 2 (18:27):
At the shop, Matt met Spielberg, who did something that
immediately endeared him to his would be Et. Spielberg didn't
loom over him like a gargoyle, hands on knees. He
bent down so he could look Matt eye to eye,
the same way ET's telescoping neck allowed him to come
face to face with new friends. Spielberg understood how looking
(18:51):
up at the world can be intimidating. He wanted Matt
to feel comfortable.
Speaker 1 (18:57):
That was something interesting about him. Not everybody did that.
I remember Carlo doing that, and it's not that it's
rude that other people don't do that. They just it's
something that some people think about immediately and some people
don't really take into consideration until maybe later. He did
it immediately, and I thought that that was pretty cool.
Speaker 2 (19:15):
Spielberg asked Matt about getting around on a skateboard. Matt
offered that it wasn't his only way of travel. In
the shop, Matt was stuffed into another makeshift et suit
and then showed them a couple different ways he got around.
Speaker 1 (19:31):
Then I demonstrated to him the walk that I did
eventually use in the movie, where my hands are the
feet and I lift my torso up so it's not
touched any ground at all, and my hands ambled back
and forth, just like legs, wood or feet, And he
said that's the one that he thinks is going to work.
And they captured me doing that walk on camera, played
(19:54):
a back and looked really good to them.
Speaker 2 (19:58):
The hands for feet method proved surprisingly effective. It gave
et the kind of distinctive not of this earth Gate
Spielberg wanted one people weren't used to seeing, and practically
no one but Matt could do it. But it would
be a little while before Matt heard anything definitive. Then
(20:21):
came another phone call. Matt was offered the job. Matt
and his parents had a talk. Sure it was cool,
but it would also interrupt the start of Matt's school year.
The movie would shoot from September to December nineteen eighty one.
They wanted to be sure it was something he really
(20:42):
wanted to do. But for Matt, delaying school was no
big deal. On top of everything else, he had the
bane of any shy kid's existence. Bullies, and Matt's bullies
were especially cruel.
Speaker 1 (20:59):
Boy, was it great to get away from school because
around that time I was bullied a lot. That was
like the peak time of my bullying. Some of the
bullies would come up from behind my wheelchair. I'd take
my wheelchair to school and they'd tip the wheelchair over.
Speaker 2 (21:15):
That would be enough for any kid to have to
deal with, but the situation at home was also coming
to a head. Matt's mother was frustrated his father wasn't
willing to get the help he needed.
Speaker 1 (21:29):
They would get a lot of fights about that kind
of stuff. He wasn't abusive, or he wasn't emotionally abusive.
He didn't yell, he wasn't that kind of person, but
just the general atmosphere at home when he was deep
in depression was something that was great to escape from
during that time.
Speaker 2 (21:49):
So in September nineteen eighty one, Matt went off to
do something he never dreamed of, play a crucial role
in making the Ultimate Creature feature come to life. Like Elliott,
he'd be taking on new responsibilities that would distract him
from his own problems, but in order to do that,
(22:10):
he'd have to overcome his inherent shyness while taking a
direction from the most successful director in the world. You'd
think a kid going off to shoot a Stephen Spielberg
(22:32):
movie would be the talk of the playground, but Matt
left to film the movie with relatively few people knowing
what he was up to.
Speaker 1 (22:40):
I didn't have a lot of friends at the time.
I think I told my best friend that I was
doing it, And he also didn't know that much about
movies and about Spielberg. He came from a really religious background,
so his parents would he let him see any kind
of movies. So I think I only told him.
Speaker 2 (22:56):
This was probably something Spielberg preferred. The details surrounding the
character of Et were highly classified in the pre Internet,
as it was easier to plug leaks to the media.
Spielberg wanted his young actors left in the dark, making
their first impression of the creature a genuine one. Matt,
(23:19):
of course, had already gotten a preview, and by the
time he showed up on location in Tahunga, California, a
custom rubber Latex suit had been crafted just for him.
It weighed thirty pounds, and yes, it made him sweat
a lot.
Speaker 1 (23:37):
One interesting thing is though, that the recipe for Latex
was much worse back then, because latex shrank and latex
doesn't have a lot of pores in it. But if
he shrinks, the porson and it smaller. So long story short,
the costume would get smaller and hotter every time I
got into it because the latex shranks. So thankfully that
(24:00):
didn't show on camera, I definitely felt it.
Speaker 2 (24:04):
Originally, Matt was hired for just one scene where Et
needed to take a tumble, but it turned out Et
would be doing that a lot, so Matt's responsibilities kept
growing on set. He quickly became known as stunt et.
Speaker 1 (24:22):
Pratfalls. Yeah, Pratfall's agility, falling down, all that stuff.
Speaker 2 (24:27):
Matt, of course was no practiced stunt person, but this
was the eighties and film producers sometimes pushed the edges
of what was appropriate.
Speaker 1 (24:37):
That's one of the kind of dangerous aspects of filmmaking,
especially back then, is this like a lot of fly
by the seat of your pants kind of attitude. You know,
it's like they're going to make budgets, they can't go
over budget. Just fussing with something and make sure that
someone's not going to get hurt. They put a lot
of padding in the costume, so even when I fell
(24:57):
flat on my face, there was like lots of styrofoam
protecting my faith.
Speaker 2 (25:02):
One of Matt's bigger scenes as Et was when the
alien falls over drunk, which we remind you is not
something an eleven year old can portray with any conviction.
But Matt was up for it.
Speaker 1 (25:15):
And I remember being so excited because I was walking
very easily in the costume, and I felt like I
could do everything that they're directing me too. I could
hear all the directions very clearly. I saw the marks
that they wanted me to hit, and whenever they want
me to kind of play up the fall a little bit,
(25:35):
they wanted me to not fall immediately, which is what
I did. They want me to extend a little bit
and like you had some expression to it. I remember
when I did that, and I did that the kind
of final fall in my face. Everybody laughed and it
sounded like what it would sound like in the audience,
you know, when the movie was playing. So I thought, Okay,
(25:56):
I think this is going to go over well.
Speaker 2 (25:59):
In contrast to his problems at school, Matt found fast
friends in Henry Thomas, who played Elliott, and Robert McNaughton,
who played Elliott's older brother Michael. There were no cliques,
no social hierarchy, no grade school pettiness or cruelty, just
three kids on the set of a movie.
Speaker 1 (26:19):
We completely bonded as soon as we met because we
were like, well, I was going to say, we're in
the same age group, but actually Rob was the same
age as the older kids, but he had more like
youth mentality in He also knew that it would be
it would benefit all of us to kind of like
bond together. So we were our own group on that set,
and that was fantastic because it rescued me from that situation.
(26:43):
It was like a just escape from being bullied in school,
and also, you know who likes doing schoolwork right, And
it got me away from this situation at home to
where my mom and my dad were fighting a lot
and going through that drama.
Speaker 2 (26:56):
The drama Matt's referring to is a pretty seismic event
in the life of a kid. In between Matt being
fitted for his suit and the start of shooting, his
parents made a big decision.
Speaker 1 (27:10):
There was a few weeks before we started when he
was living at home, and so when I went out
to get fitted, and when I went to Carlo remble
Bally Studio to practice in the costume and meet with
the crew just and prepare before shooting. That's when my
dad lived at home, but then when we were actually shooting,
my dad was actually living apart from us.
Speaker 2 (27:33):
Matt's ET family was at least for a time, more
stable than his actual family. In addition to making friends
with Henry and Robert, Matt also met ET's other half.
This ET was a thirty four year old adult named
Pat Bailon, who was roughly two feet nine inches tall
(27:56):
and weighed forty five pounds. Pat was born with cartilage
hare hypoplasia, a bone growth disorder that can lead to dwarfes.
Pat was used for ET scenes that didn't require Et
tipping over, for example, the one in which Et is
being stashed away in a bicycle basket and wrapped in
(28:18):
a blanket, plus other walking scenes.
Speaker 1 (28:22):
I remember he was a really nice guy. He didn't
have any ego about him. We kind of filmed the
Eten sequencer. That's the way the story's been told anyway.
So I came on about two weeks into filming, two
or three weeks into filming, and Pat number made me
feel like I was in the outside looking in.
Speaker 2 (28:41):
Pat's background was fascinating. He had only recently broken into films,
working on a Chevy Chase movie titled Under the Rainbow,
a fictitious retelling of the filming of the Wizard of
Oz and the rumors surrounding its little people performers getting
wild after filming. Before acting, Pat had been a bouncer
(29:04):
at a bar in Ohio. It was a publicity stunt
for the business.
Speaker 3 (29:09):
But it worked.
Speaker 2 (29:10):
He later became a dispatcher for a sheriff's office. By
the time ET rolled around, Pat was having some back problems.
He might start a scene then realize he needed to
rest or. The action might be too dangerous for Pat,
whose condition didn't allow for him to fall down much.
(29:31):
That's where Matt came in.
Speaker 1 (29:33):
I did a lot of the same scenes that Pat did,
and Pat was tired. They'd bring me in and I
do like a just the same thing, but it'd be
a different actor in the costume.
Speaker 2 (29:43):
Despite Matt doing most of the stunts, it was Pat
who probably came closest to having an ET related emergency
room visit. Pat was in the costume and sporting a
battery pack when the power source caught fire, setting the
adorable alien ablaze for a brief moment before a crew
(30:04):
member stepped in.
Speaker 1 (30:06):
It on another way could have gone really bad, but
they were just lucky and they got him out of
the costume in time or whatever. However they've resolved that situation.
But it's like, yeah, you can't foresee all these things because,
like you said, it's nothing like this has ever been
done before.
Speaker 2 (30:22):
At one point there was a third Et, a woman
named Tamara de Troux, who stepped in for pat when needed.
Et also had a different set of hands for many scenes.
They belonged to Caprice Roth, a mime hired by the
production who wound up becoming the connective tissue of ET's performance.
(30:45):
She managed to make a cohesive team out of the
many puppeteers controlling his facial movements, synchronizing them with her gestures.
Of course, anyone controlling a puppet will give in to
the temptation of satisfying onset boredom, and with up to
fifteen puppeteers, there were plenty of opportunities. There are scenes
(31:10):
you'll never see of Et picking his nose, puffing on
a cigar, or pinching at the rear end of a
passing production crew member. Mostly though, people believed in Et
deeply and wholeheartedly, and they believed in Matt, who was
coming through in a big way, despite acting in a vacuum.
(31:35):
Owing to the secrecy surrounding et, Matt didn't get a
script or see dailies of the footage. He was just
living in the moment. But Matt's best memory on set
didn't come from a scene. It came when his father
paid him a visit. His parents didn't normally come to filming,
(31:56):
having their own jobs and trusting a Steven Spielberg set
would be a safe place for their child. The production
sent a car to pick Matt up every morning and
drive him back at night, so Matt's dad showing up
was a big deal.
Speaker 1 (32:13):
On one of the days that he was on a
manic high, he decided to come down to the set
and surprise me, which is great because my mom hadn't
been there, my dad hadn't been there. For him to
share a day on the set with me was awesome.
I remember him putting me on his shoulders and walking
me around the set, and he was introducing himself as
(32:36):
my dad. He's met Spielberg and Carlo and a lot
of the cast and crew. You know, he was with me.
He was happy, he experienced it, and I came away
with one great memory of him being there with me
on the set.
Speaker 2 (32:53):
As with most movies, there was a few month gap
between ET wrapping filming and its release. After returning to school,
but before the film had come out, Matt noticed something
a little strange. He wasn't being bullied as often. It
wasn't because the kids knew he had played ET. They
(33:15):
didn't know anything about ET. It was because Matt had
a secret, one that gave him a sense of confidence
and self worth.
Speaker 1 (33:24):
They didn't know why it was gone, but there was
like an intangible security and confidence that I got from it.
Because as soon as I got back to school, the
bullying did not resume. It stopped completely. And it wasn't
because the movie came out.
Speaker 2 (33:39):
It was just, you know, Matt had never intended for
his work to be some big secret, but in order
for audiences to believe in ET, Steven Spielberg was reluctant
to admit the alien was the work of Hollywood. ET's
success hinged in part on Matt and everyone else involved
(34:00):
with the creature being invisible. In the weeks leading up
to the premiere of ET, the movie gained more and
more momentum. Test screenings weren't just successful audiences were enraptured, laughing, crying,
(34:23):
and falling for an alien who didn't meet what you
would consider conventional standards of attractiveness. The reception ET received
even took Spielberg by surprise. The film made its entire
ten million dollar budget back in a single weekend. It
was the number one film in America for six weeks
(34:47):
and kept returning to that position throughout the rest of
the year. It just kept playing and playing. By the
next year, it had outgrossed Star Wars to become the
most successful film in history. It was a modern Wizard
of Oz, the rare family film that didn't pander to
(35:08):
kids or bore adults, the movie that became must see viewing.
Here's Simon Brew again.
Speaker 6 (35:17):
Everyone at my school saw ET at the cinema, pretty
much everyone. I mean it was Star Wars, ET and
Superman three. Those were the three things that were most
important in your life to what.
Speaker 2 (35:28):
Why did people respond to Et? For children, it was
that the movie understood them and took their problems seriously.
For adults, it was the ability to see through younger
eyes and recall the excitement and fears of an unknown world.
The next time you watch the film, try to notice
(35:49):
how Spielberg shot it. The camera is often just a
few feet off the ground, as though the audience is
experiencing it from the perspective of a kid or a
short alien. For Simon and millions of other kids, E
was a controlled Catharsis. With his team of crafts people, actors,
(36:12):
and Melissa Matheson, Spielberg had somehow made people believe in
Et and in ET's bond with Elliott, which made their
separation at the climax all the more wrenching.
Speaker 6 (36:27):
He just went in to see it, and I mean
all I remember as that seven year old was just
being traumatized, just being absolutely inconsolable on the way out.
And I still get that as well, and every time
I watch it, I still get it. But it was
a thing. I mean, all we were told going in
(36:48):
is you're gonna see it and you're gonna come out crying.
And we still all just went in. Our parents still
took us the sadists.
Speaker 2 (36:55):
Matt went to see the movie, of course with his parents,
and kept looking for scenes in which he appeared under
pounds of rubber as Et. There was the scene with
et inebriated, and the one where a polaroid flash causes
him to topple over.
Speaker 1 (37:13):
The other scene. So it was all the kitchen scenes.
Anytime Et is in a bathroom, that's me. So the
scene where she where de Wallace comes home the mother
and she's putting everything in the refrigerator. She's completely distracted
and she doesn't see me walking around her, and then
she opens the refrigerator door and it has been in
the face and I fall over.
Speaker 4 (37:33):
That was me.
Speaker 2 (37:35):
In the midst of all this, the media always kept
going back to a central question, how how had Et
been cobbled together to make for one of the few
truly convincing creatures in movie history. Time and time again,
Spielberg would dodge the question. Et was mysterious. Even the
(37:58):
first trailer for the movie avoided showing what he looked like.
He told the press at the can Film Festival where
premiered that Et was made out of love and that
it took twelve hearts to make ET's heartbeat. Asked what
materials were used, he said that you will not hear
(38:20):
the answer to that question from my lips. It seemed
like Spielberg and Universal wanted Et to remain an illusion.
They had never expressly told Matt not to discuss his
work in the movie, but Spielberg's reluctance to explain the
techniques used was something of a hint. Plus, think about it,
(38:42):
what if a kid in your school said he was
in the biggest movie of all time. You couldn't see him,
but he was there. It's kind of like the kid
who kept insisting his uncle worked for Nintendo. It just
smelt like baloney.
Speaker 1 (38:57):
I mean, I might have started telling them, and then
I think maybe I initially did, and then they'd say
they'd seen a TV segment or read and starlog magazine
or somethinghow it was a robot, or how maybe it
was just this one actor or whatever, and they disbelieved me.
(39:18):
And I think after that I didn't like try and
convince them. I just figured eventually they'd figured out.
Speaker 2 (39:25):
Almost everyone involved with ET experienced the shadow of it.
Henry Thomas remembers getting mobbed after the movie came out.
Even Pat Bylon got plenty of press attention, but Matt
was different. He was famous in plain sight, an anonymous celebrity,
(39:46):
but notoriety wasn't really the point. It was about an
experience that had come along at a good time. The
highs of ET were in sharp contrast to Matt's home life.
His parents had separated, his father's bipolar disorder going untreated
and slowly getting worse. Then later, in nineteen eighty two,
(40:10):
Matt heard the news no child should ever have to
endure tragically, his father died by suicide.
Speaker 1 (40:19):
So, yeah, I've just lucky happenstance as something came along
at that time that would bring all this residual stuff
that would help me absorb the impact of my father diing.
Speaker 2 (40:30):
There's a curious thread that weaves through ET. From the beginning,
Spielberg had envisioned it as a way into his feelings
about his own family. The divorce of his mother and
father in the film Elliot mirrors that same struggle, and
in Matt's world, the film had come at a time
his family suffered an incredible loss.
Speaker 1 (40:54):
I was crazy, I made who knows, you know. If
I didn't have the cushion of ET to counterbalance up
the bitterness of that experience, I don't know what would
happen to What kind of person did I be today?
Speaker 3 (41:08):
You know?
Speaker 1 (41:08):
Like making all those new friends and having them as
my support system after my dad died was huge like
Robert found out. Robert McNaughton, the guy who played the Michael,
the older brother in ET. He was really supportive after that,
like he'd heard about my father. Like we gotten together
(41:30):
a couple of times after ET came out and really
had a good time. But after you heard my father
killed himself, he'd make an effort to come by my
house and we go and do stuff on the weekends,
like go watch movies, or go play tag and water
balloons and all that stuff, and just do the stuff
(41:52):
would distract me the horror of that time. That was
really great. So ET came along a great time.
Speaker 2 (42:00):
ET never really lost that power for Matt or for anyone.
It was really, at least in theaters periodically through the
nineteen eighties. Spielberg refused to allow it to be available
on VHS until six years later in nineteen eighty eight.
There was a magic to it that he largely kept preserved.
(42:22):
There would never be a sequel, or even much talk
of one. Henry Thomas, who portrayed Elliott, appeared with ET
in a twenty nineteen commercial for Comcast that Spielberg approved of,
but not much else. And while it might seem easy
to conjure up Et as a CGI creation or even
(42:43):
another Latex costume. It's not Comcast used a hybrid option.
Speaker 1 (42:50):
There's a reason for that because Latex you just can't
do a one to one copy of the original puppet.
There's something's going to be off the paint, the wrinkles,
the eyes. I don't know. Well, in the movie itself,
you can kind of see what ET almost has like
a lazy eye because they just couldn't get the one
of the eye to quite be symmetrical with the other one.
(43:10):
You know, they did a photo session with Michael Jackson.
You see there was something my ET's I that was degenerating.
So yeah, so I mean, going back to what we
were saying about the sequel, even if you got everything right,
but you just can't nail ET. You couldn't get that
ET look good match it from the first movie.
Speaker 2 (43:31):
Matt wasn't completely done with the film business, though Et
would be a tough act to follow. A few years later,
in nineteen eighty five, he appeared in The Fourth Wise Man,
a biblical tale, playing a leoper. He also appeared in
Cyborg two, a sequel to a nineteen eighty nine Jean
(43:51):
Claude van Damn film that couldn't even manage to re
enlist Jean Claude van dam.
Speaker 1 (43:57):
I had a speaking part in that. I'm not in
costume while I'm not in like a latex costume, so
that was like a futuristic dystopian picture. Angelina Jolie's in it,
Jack Plants, Elias cotaeis of a lot of great stars,
and that Billy Drago from The Untouchables and so yeah.
So I had a speaking part in that one. That
was probably my most memorable experience after ET was actually
(44:20):
doing a legit speaking scene, dialogue scene with those actors.
I played a character named manhole Man. He was like
a doorman to the overworld.
Speaker 2 (44:35):
But for all of his immediate success, Matt didn't fall
in love with.
Speaker 1 (44:39):
Acting and never felt natural to me. And then the
number of roles that come to handicapped people, especially someone
who's doesn't have any legs, few and far between.
Speaker 2 (44:52):
Matt went on to teach English and then got into
writing and podcasting. He makes convention appearances away for fans
of ET to put a human face to the character.
Matt de Merit the creature Kid. I didn't know it
at the time. But he became part of a legacy
people who breathed life into fantastic creations. Once not long ago,
(45:17):
Matt found himself at a convention and sitting alongside Rico Browning,
the man who played the Creature from the Black Lagoon,
a nineteen fifty four classic Matt grew up watching with
his dad.
Speaker 1 (45:30):
It was very flattered because he gave me his autograph
and told me how much he loved ET. And we
struck up a conversation, and I realized as I was
talking to him that Hey, you know, this is the
company I'm in. You know, I'm part of this company.
I was a man in a very famous creature suit.
Speaker 2 (45:48):
This is ET for Matt a time in his life
that was a mixture of happiness and loss. The movie
is something audiences have treasured, but it was the making
of ET that allowed Matt to believe in himself.
Speaker 1 (46:05):
There's a great word sweet, you know, and I think
life is just bittersweet. It's not always bitter, it's not
always sweet, you know, it's sometimes it just it converges
into an experience like that, you know, where these two
concurrent things happen, both positive, one positive, one incredibly negative.
(46:27):
It gave me the confidence to discourse with people and
interact with people, you know, because I did at this hook.
It wasn't just my disability, wasn't just the subject of
the conversation, but this glorious movie that people cried during
and laughed at, you know. So it's really hard for
me to get my mind around that. So there's always
(46:47):
going to be a bit of a detachment from that,
like pinching myself. Is it's still real, you know, like
when I do convention with with Robert and Henry today.
So I can't believe forty years later was still talking,
you know, and we're still having the same laughs that
we had back then, and we're still celebrating this movie
(47:10):
forty years later.
Speaker 4 (47:14):
Okay, we usually cast these stories at the end. It's
kind of hard to make this one a movie. And
there's also been very against making any ET sequels in
all these years. But does anyone want to pitch an
ET sequel? On the fly?
Speaker 1 (47:27):
Here?
Speaker 3 (47:28):
Oh?
Speaker 2 (47:28):
God, an ET sequel? Okay, Elliott goes to his planet, right,
that's the classic sequel reversal.
Speaker 5 (47:34):
Oh, that's good, like that, that's brilliant.
Speaker 3 (47:37):
Write that. You have to write that.
Speaker 2 (47:39):
Yes, I'm sure, I'll write that everyone will be clamoring
for it.
Speaker 4 (47:43):
I was thinking about Avengeful Et later in life coming
back less of a heartwarming story than what we're done.
Speaker 5 (47:50):
Oh oh, Evengefully he comes back to destroy the earth.
Speaker 2 (47:55):
Or Et comes back as Elliott is getting a divorce
as an adult and he has to work through that.
Speaker 3 (48:01):
Ah. Yes, mid life crisis Elliott. Brilliant. These are all
good for a very special character.
Speaker 4 (48:09):
So in the cold open, that was my youngest daughter Juliette,
who we roped into doing a little voice acting. She
gave us multiple takes. Total pro if nepotism is not
allowed for these official rankings, but we're cool with looking
the other way. For to some medical ethics, I would
pick the doctor who got his former patient his start
in Hollywood.
Speaker 3 (48:28):
Oh yeah, good points.
Speaker 2 (48:30):
I'm going to actually say the casting director who's like,
we should call a hospital, that's the move.
Speaker 3 (48:38):
I'm going with the crew who went and put the
fire out.
Speaker 5 (48:40):
I thought that was brilliant because you got to have
those people with fast acting, clear headed, no panic.
Speaker 4 (48:45):
Also loved Simon brew Another shout out to Simon to
coming on and giving us some Hollywood history. I love
Simon old friend, great voice, good podcast. Go check out
film stories after this.
Speaker 5 (48:56):
As Dana said, totally, this was a hard one to cast,
by the way, because you have the main actor like Matt,
He's got to play himself, right. I mean this is automatically,
this is the Jackie Robinson story to play yourself.
Speaker 3 (49:07):
Brother.
Speaker 5 (49:08):
But other than that, I could cast Steven Spielberg as
Jesse Eisenberg.
Speaker 3 (49:11):
I thought that one worked.
Speaker 5 (49:12):
I can see that Melissa Matheson screenwriter Emma Stone, but
as a brunette. And then Carlo Rimbaldi Adrian Brody. He
feels like the outsider's outsider in Hollywood. I think he
can bring that right creature feature energy. And then finally
as Pat the little person. I thought the actor Danny Woodburn,
who played Seinfeld's comic friend on Seinfeld, is like kind
of like a brilliant little person actor. I thought he
(49:34):
could give you that Hollywood veteran vibe that sounds great.
Speaker 3 (49:37):
Love it.
Speaker 4 (49:37):
I would see that version of this. I don't know
if it's officially an et squel, but let's talk, but
I do want to see Dana's.
Speaker 3 (49:43):
One hundred percent both of them.
Speaker 2 (49:45):
Actually I am my alien. It's sort of like an
alien three situation.
Speaker 4 (49:51):
Very Special Episodes is made by some very special people.
The show's hosted by Danish Schwartz, Sarah Burnette and Jason English.
Today's episode was written by Jake Rossen. Our producer is
Josh Fisher. Our story editor is Marisa Brown. Ed and
sound design by Jonathan Washington and Josh Fisher. Mixing and
(50:11):
mastering by Beheid Fraser. Special thanks to our voice actors
Jessica Krinchitch and Juliette English. Original music by Alice McCoy.
Research in fact checking by Jake Rosson and Austin Thompson.
Show logo by Lucy Quintinia. Our executive producer is Jason English.
(50:32):
If you want to email the show, you can reach
us at Very Special Episodes at gmail dot com. Very
Special Episodes is a production of iHeart Podcasts.
Host
Dana Schwartz
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