The Rewatchables - ‘E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial’ With Bill Simmons, Chris Ryan, Sean Fennessey, and Mallory Rubin

Episode Date: May 17, 2022

The Ringer’s Bill Simmons, Chris Ryan, Sean Fennessey, and Mallory Rubin hop on their bikes and head to the forest to rewatch Steven Spielberg’s iconic ‘E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial’ starring Henry Thomas, Robert MacNaughton, and Drew Barrymore. Producer: Craig Horlbeck Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey, rewatchables fans. We've had this podcast for five years. Getting a little bored with the categories, ready for some new blood. I think we want to add one or two new categories. You can have input on this process. Email us at the rewatchables 33 at gmail.com. And we will add one or two of your suggestions to future episodes of the rewatchables. The rewatchables 33 at gmail.com.

The rewatchables is brought to you by the ringer podcast network where you can find the ringerverse with Bally Rubin. Find the big picture with Sean Fennacy. You're still cranking up the watch, right, Chris? Twice a week. The watch with Chris Ryan. Got to make the donuts. Keep grinding out that rent money, CR.

Coming up. I'll be right here. E.T. is next. On March 22nd, Universal Pictures presents the 20th anniversary of E.T. The extraterrestrial. What's happening? With enhanced visual effects. Never before seen footage.

And a digitally remastered soundtrack. Stephen Spielberg's E.T. The Extraterrestrial rated PG. All right, is E.T. The Extraterrestrial. That's the full title. Proper title. Sean Fantasy, Mallory, Rubin, Chris Ryan. My name is Bill Simmons. It's the 40th anniversary. of this movie,

which I saw in the theater, unlike you guys, when it came out. I'm old. Don't speak for yourself. I think I was taken to this movie when I was five. You think so? Yeah.

Okay, maybe. Sawed in Brooklyn, Massachusetts. I think I double saw it. I might have seen it twice. Oh. Mount Rushmore of Need to Show This to My Kids movies. Sean has a tiny one. My mom and Chris don't have kids yet.

Some point. Ten months old. But I will be showing my child dead of thieves. Chris's list for this is Den of Thieves, those are movies Segario. Yeah, Polter Guys, Tulsa from 1982,

that'll come before E.T. When you have little kids, there hits this moment where you're like, oh, I think they're old enough. Can show them this movie. For me, it was E.T. and Home Alone and Toy Story

were the three. Like, I can't wait to see what their reactions are to these three movies. So I think that's probably the Mount Rushmore with the fourth spot open depending on

kind of what family you have yeah you could have Lion King in that forest by you can have an elf you can have Finding Nemo you could have Toy Story 3 Mystic River does in there just the importance of family who really gets hammered home

is that my ET in there but I think ET Home Alone and Toy Star are the three months Wizard of Oz's for me is very high that when I was a kid interesting my mom popped that VHS in and I watched it many many many many times so in our house that will be a big one Mallory, is this the most important

all things considered movie of your lifetime? You know, I was reflecting on that while rewatching it for this very podcast and I'm not sure I would have said yes or even thought about it consciously that way until rewatching it,

but watching it a couple times this weekend I realized how connected it is to literally every single thing I care about. And how ripped off it's been? I mean, stranger things. My wife is like, boy, this movie's a lot like stranger things. And I'm like, bite your tongue!

Stranger Things stole this movie's lunch! I'm re-watching Stranger Things actually right now. So sharing both of those viewing journeys this weekend and you see the Dungeons and Dragons, putting a sheet over you to dress as a ghost, right? The 11, oh, I want to go. I think I can hide on Halloween. That's just E.T.

Right? Everything is, of course, connected to Star Wars. It's not like E.T. was the very first thing. But that's one of the things that stood out that I love so much is this, like, absolutely indispensable link in the chain. It is the bridge that looks, back and calls upon all of the Yoda references and everything from Star Wars that came before and beyond that too. But so much of what comes after in the next 40 years owes a pretty

seismic debt to E.T. You saw it in the theater? I think so. I mean, like, I just remember it being part of my life. Like, the weird thing watching this movie over and over again is it starts to be indistinguishable about like what's E.T. and what was your childhood? You know, like the things that it codifies that you're like, yeah, that's what it was like. You know, we raised ourselves pretty much. Like our parents were not very hands-on. Road bikes everywhere. We talked a lot of shit. We played a lot of games.

We had a lot of secrets. Like, it was like the way... There's a pizza order. The pizza would show up. Yeah. I mean, it was exactly. You didn't have to... You just had to count on local pizzerias to deliver in a timely fashion.

Yeah. Not like today. No. You know? Today, our society is crumbling. No, there's some of surveillance state going into pizza. You know, you're following the guy. But yeah, like, I think that when I watch...

this movie. It's like, it fills in memories for yourself where like that time in your life when you're in those single digit years and you remember certain events maybe or you have like funny detailed memories, but you don't remember like swaths of time from when you're six or seven or eight or whatever. But when you watch this movie, you're kind of like, I know that's how it felt. And I can't tell if I'm just completely, I've just seen ET so many times that I think that's what childhood was like. Or it is the perfect kind of capturing of. of what it felt like to be growing up in the 80s. I don't know.

What do you got, Sean? Should I just riff? Don't do Spielberg yet. Let's save Spielberg. Just this movie has a perfectly constructed kids, big budget, everything in the context of the early 80s and the Spielberg, Lucas, and all of that. And this is the most successful movie I had involved in them. I like what Chris said. This movie was released one month before I was born.

And so it very much feels like in the fabric of, my life I saw it very early on as well. My parents loved this movie. It feels like a summation of the good side of the 1980s. I think in American popular culture, American, you know, the movie culture in particular was very commercial, very violent, very kind of like seeking out the basest impulses of our society and producers and studios took control back from filmmakers. And they said, we're going to give audiences what they want, which is this degraded, sexy, violent thing. And this movie is very sweet and very sincere and very emotional, deeply emotional

in a way that very few movies that have ever been made are emotional. And it still works. And even though it's a special effects movie and it's a movie about an alien, it's like one of the great family films ever made. It's one of the great friendship movies ever made. So, I don't know.

I love it. It's great. Sean said, Sean mentioned Wizard of Oz as his other family movie. And I think that the genius of this movie, and Spielberg's talked about this, is it's essentially just a reverse Wizard of Oz. It's instead of taking an ordinary person

and putting them in an extraordinary place, take an extraordinary being and put him in a really ordinary place. You put him in the suburbs. And I didn't really think about that until this most recent watch of just how, what is simple but perfect idea

that is for a story and for a movie and how it kind of then functions as the bookend to Wizard of Oz as far as like, you can have this wonderland, you can have Oz, you know, this, this, like, fantasy world. But what if you took all the magic of that world and just dropped it in this sort of anonymous California neighborhood that it sometimes is Northern California and sometimes

is the valley? Yeah, you think like, it's like every generation has a movie like this, right? Wizard of Oz is a good one. I think for E.T. I was talking like a, I don't know if a generation's 12 years, 15 years, whatever it is, eventually gets replaced by Titanic. That becomes the next movie like this and things involved that way. I was 12 years old when I saw this movie.

My parents were divorced. I was living with my dad. I was almost the exact eight. How old do we think Elliot was in this movie? He's 12 or 13. I think he's like 10. Yeah, he's 10. Mike's like 15, right?

Yeah, I'm at 14. So I was in, I easily could have been in the family and the whole, I still believed in stuff. Like, this alien could come out of nowhere and be my best friend. It's been interesting watching it over the years from the parents' perspective as you get older. Yeah. And you think, you know, especially like when Dee Wallace's character comes home at the end. And there's this alien and they're all like, no, no, it's fine. And she's just so horrified.

And her instinct is just, I need to get my kids away and protect. And this movie has a really complicated, interesting relationship with kids versus adults and kids working with adults. And ultimately, the kids are right and the adults are wrong. And that's been ripped off, I think, more than just about anything. I think that the, you know, and the Spielberg and everybody involved with the film has talked about this a lot over the years. but the choice to film so much of it from the eye line of a child, right? Yeah. Obviously, the character we think is going to be the primary antagonist and villain for the bulk of the film.

Keys is named strictly by the thing that we see on his waistband. Like, there's no real sense of who this person is until this clarifying moment at the end where you realize, actually, you have more uncommon with this person than you thought. And if you just took the moment to have, like, one exchange and one conversation, and that, of course, is one of the great messages and points of the story, right? What is the power of empathy? What is the power of just taking a moment to, like, try to understand. another person. But, you know, they call their mom mom, mom, but they also call their mom Mary,

right? And the other side of what you just mentioned about coming in into the bathroom and seeing, like, my guy, ET just dehydrated, needs a gatorade, needs some fluids, is all of those other moments where ET is right there weaving, bobbing in and out of the kitchen, right, by the fridge and the counter, no awareness, right? And again, it's like, when do you just take the moment to look around? It reminds me a little bit of, you know, the fact that, you know, the fact that, you know, the fact that in Harry Potter, muggles, they can't see things that are right there simply because they do not bother to look.

Because they're busy adults. You're going about the rhythm of your day. You have to unpack groceries. You have to bring home the dry cleaning. You have to raise three kids. You have to wonder why your ex suddenly likes Mexico, all of these preoccupations that rob you from just having the capacity to pay attention to the magic all around you.

And I think that's one of the reasons that the movie is so rewarding to return to because as you said, you bring that new perspective. And that's true of so many classic films, they age with you. The story ages with you. And you can hold on to that feeling you had when you first saw it, but also bring that new perspective and the new relationships in your life to how you process the story now. It's a great one. I'm glad you brought up the eyeline thing because I think, I mean, Spielberg's probably the greatest director of my lifetime, but he'll make these single decisions that completely make a movie. We're not going to show a Jaws.

We're not going to show it. We're going to wait. Now, that one, it was a little lucky because... Yeah, it didn't work. Right. The shark was a disaster. They're like, man, we can't... Necessity's the mother of invention.

But it worked and it was great. And in this movie, the way they film it is so fucking smart. Where everything you're just looking up like a little kid would. It's almost like you're at Gertie's eye level the entire time. And it's just, I don't know when he thought of that or how that occurred to him. The other thing in the research about how he should... out of sequentially because he wanted the kids to get attached to this weird, you know, little monster they created basically. It's also just like, when you think about when you're a kid,

how magical, no matter what size they are, houses are, because there are rooms you're not allowed to go into. There are rooms that are like harder to get to, like maybe it's an attic and it's up a ladder or the basement's dark and the steps aren't that good. There's all these little like nooks and crannies, even if it's just a two-bedroom apartment, it doesn't matter. And the way that he's able to like turn that house into this magical kingdom where like the closet is can't be that big. There's no way Elliot has a walk in closet like that. But in his mind and from the perspective of the camera, it's a good point. It feels like a huge, huge closet where you could hide a fucking alien in there. And I had closets like that where it was just like all my stuff. I just would like,

when it was a clean your room, you would just shove everything in a closet and be like, done. And I remember when you would unpack it, you would be like, oh yeah, I have this and I have that and I forgot I have this and I'll hide back here and stuff like that. And the way he figures out how to like create huge amounts of space out of limited reality is incredible. A.O. Scott wrote, the suburban milieu with its unsupervised children and unhappy parents, its broken toys and brand name junk food could have come out of a Raymond Carver story. I think when I rewatch this movie, I think that's the part I like the most is you're taken into this world. I don't know where it is in California,

but I've seen lots of different pieces of where it is, right? And it's just early 80s. Kind of fucked up family, but not really because it's a tight family. They're all kind of looking out for each other. And just kids on bikes, being able to do whatever they want. This is why Stranger Things, like you almost have to go backwards

when you make shows like this because kids are so supervised now. You never have this thing. where they're like, hey, after ET dies, we're still the alien. Well, and also... Meet us at that point that we were at before. You spend all of your time now looking at your computer or looking at your phones, why would you ever look at the world around you?

And, like, that's actually one of the things that feels a little bit tragic about revisiting ET. Like, Chris, I love a couple of the things you've said already. One, the point about the closet, hiding this source of wonder. Way to bring it to it to it. But because it connects to what you were saying earlier about inverting Oz. Like, that's another inversion. When you're a kid, so often you think of what's hiding in the closet as the source of terror, right? Trepidation. What is just out of view? And to flip that and say, well, maybe the thing

that other people can't see or that you just need to pull something back, whether it's a toy or a hanging shirt, whatever it might be, to explore, can fill you with awe and joy. And to your point about the suburbs and the neighborhoods riding your bike through what this becomes this like castle, everything in the movie fits that description. A regular house plant, this chrysanthemum, becomes our health meter for knowing how E.T. and Elliott are doing, are they going to be okay,

the sign of resurrection? The communicator, what's it built from? It's built from a speak and spell, a fork, a hanger, all of the regular things around you that are just an arm's distance away can connect you to another universe, another planet.

That's incredible to take the things that could be mundane and make them your pathway to the magical. I have some issues picking nits with the speak and stuff. spell becoming gateway to the tech. You want a terrible science of the communicator? It's a little shaky.

Sean, as our resident psycho movie expert, the child actors in this movie are fucking awesome? The Henry Thomas performance is the greatest child acting performance in the history of movies. Because I was going to say, like, because we talked about Justin Henry, Kramer versus Kramer, Henry Thomas, not nominated, we'll get to that later.

But I think all the, Henry Thomas, and Drew Barrymore, you could argue a one two for great. I think it's like a picks mountain for child ensembles. It might be. It's up there to stand by me. And I don't, you know, Thomas just has a huge, huge burden

because he is the person and someone wrote about this and I'm stealing this thought and I don't remember who wrote it, but he is the person through which we have to believe that E.T. is real. Everything that he does, every move that he makes is showing us that this is actually happening. Well, what about when he starts using

we? Yeah. Yes. He becomes psychically bonded with this. Yeah. And it's pretty early in the movie, which I always forget. We're, you know, it's almost like he sounds like they're on a team. And it's like, wait, we? The alien. Like he's talking about the Celtics. Yeah.

He's like, yeah, we're feeling pretty good. We need Rob Williams back. We did really well in game six. He's like, beat David Roberts back there. You guys just beat an alien. Yeah, we did. We literally beat the freak. Yeah, but the child actors of one of those misses.

Yeah. Now, Robert Norton, was he the guy who plays the older brother? Magnotton, yeah. Magnotten. Not like he went on to like a million things, but I think he's good in this movie. Then Henry Thomas, it's tough because as he became an adult,

you just couldn't unsee Elliot. This movie was too big and too famous. It was almost unfair for his career. Drew Barrymore was little enough that I don't think she was able to grow out of that and then had this whole second thing. But Henry Thomas, who's had, what's the show he's on now?

He does all the Mike Flanagan shows. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So he's on like mid-Honting of Hillhouse. He was on the Nightmast. Yeah, and he's turned into, I think, a really accomplished actor. It's not like an

Oscar winner, but I think he's a really good actor. But you would have bought all the stock for him in 1982. One of the amazing things about this movie, this was true, very early on when it was released on Home Video, is that they included the making ofs for this film. And Spielberg was being followed very closely

throughout the making of this movie. And there's a lot of footage of him coaching the actors, of him talking to Henry Thomas, of him talking to Drew Barrymore, in the way that he motivated them and inspired them and showed them what he wanted them to do. And it's the masterclass of how to work with children. It's incredible because he is so childlike.

And he so clearly understands his story. It's so personal to him. He conceived of the whole thing. But he gets inside of that character when he's trying to tell Henry Thomas, like when he's going through the cornfield at the beginning. And he's like, you're going to want to go forward like this. And he teaches him how to hold the flashlight at your side.

He's like, you don't want to hold the flashlight at your side. He's like you want to hold that in front of you. Like it's a lance. Like you're protecting yourself. Like he has these very specific details that he's sharing because he feels it very deeply. And he relates to the characters. and he wants these kids to understand exactly where he's coming from,

and that's how he's going to get the best performances. And he does. I mean, the Henry Thomas performance in particular, I'm blown away by to this day. I was going to talk about this later, but it really does matter for the way Spielberg understood childhood is there really aren't any villains in this movie. And there's a couple of opportunities along the way.

They zag with Peter Coyote. Yeah, but, like, Mike could be a bully. Mike could be like, we should go to the press, and get money for like this and help mom or like anything it could Or even like he could punch a little brother in one of the opening scenes. Yeah, he could be so much more of a dick. But when you're a kid, I don't know, when I was a kid, I wanted to be like, I wanted everybody, I wanted to be friends with people.

Like I wanted to team up and have like a collaboration. I didn't want, like I didn't dream of like, oh, wouldn't it be cool if then this kid was an asshole, but I transcended that. It's like, no, you want your older brother to help you. Yeah. And that kind of like pulls the viewer in even more because, you're cheering for all of them because they're all trying to help Elliot. Like, there's never any skepticism.

As soon as Gertie gets over it, you're just like, yeah, these three siblings actually have this thing that's bringing them together as a family after their divorce. So, like, they were shattered and then they get brought back together by this person. Another divorce movie for us. I know. Oh, yeah. The COD super team is here. I know.

What a genre. I mean, it's one of the critical divorce films of the 20th century. Dad's in Mexico, Sally. Sally. Yeah. What? He hates Mexico. I'll be right back.

Then the kid's like, why don't you do that? Did you ever think about the movie? Because I didn't think of it this way. When I saw the movie as a kid, I was like, this is a movie about a kid who makes a friend and they have an inextricable bond.

And then as you get older, and the more you read about the movie, the more you hear about how Spielberg thinks about it, E.T. is really, he is the person who... He's the missing father figure. He's filling the void of his father's departure. And I'll be right here

and the kind of way that E.T. has the ability to calm Henry Thomas' character is kind of amazing and I didn't see it that way when I was a kid growing up I was like I want to make a friend like this. I remember in the theater

in the first couple times after feeling like the adults were the bad guys in the movie especially like the scene when they tried to keep BT alive and Elliot's like you're killing him but now when I watch it there's kind of no evil

at all with those guys they're just like there's an alien in their house they want to figure it out that's part of what's good about the movie is I think that the adults react the way adults would react to an alien, which is like, we got to put this thing in a science experiment.

We got to figure out what it is and contain it. And children are like, we need to befriend it and understand it. Yeah, right. I believe in it. But even when Keyes says, like, I've been waiting for this since I was 10, like, you're like, that's like a incredibly, like, humanizing thing for a quote-unquote villain to say.

It's true. I think also then you have to reflect on, like, what Elliot's life is like if he doesn't have this moment in this experience, then he's just, like, searching for something his entire life, which is what Keys is doing, quite literally, with a ring of keys that opened doors that he

can't get through. Yeah, maybe he is. What do all those keys go to? No, for like a sex dungeon, you mean? Okay. Not like 8mm. I think that... Elliot grows up to be a machine. Sean's point about ET is like the father figure. It's interesting because I've never really thought of it that way.

I think of... I'm always struck by the sequence where they're cutting between keys in the surveillance van, listening and watching and Michael and Elliot talking and how every time I'm like, wait a minute, is he their dad? And I always have to remind myself that that's not what the case is. That's not how it's going to play out. But I think of E.T. and Elliott as just pairs, as twins, right, as two versions of the same being or two halves of a whole and how it's a story really about, like, self-discovery

and reflection and learning to understand, like, who you are and what you're interested in and what you want to believe in, right? And so that moment at the end when Elliot says, like, that he will never stop believing for the rest of his life. He's believing in himself as much as E.T. He's believing in just the power of invention and imagination and possibility. Like, there's a story about, you know, empathy and possibility, I think, as much as anything else. And that's something that you were open to when you were young in a way that you just become closed off to at a certain point in your life. And so those government officials standing there blocking the path with their guns or all of the doctors with their machines.

Like, I think the villain point is interesting. Like, is there anything to what degree is that in a fair? They're doing their jobs, and that's the full lens through which they see what they're doing, right? Scientific pursuit, not like this ability to forge some magical life-altering connection when we have here, Chris. Mallory, can you name the last four lines of this movie? The last four lines of the movie. The last four things that were said in this movie. Is come stay part of it? Or is that right before the final four?

Come? Yeah, come stay. stay. And then I'll be right here pointing at his forehead. Ouch. Ouch. Right. I'll be right here.

And the movie ends. That's the actual script. And then the rainbow. Come, stay. Ouch. I'll be right here. Yep. But there's so much, like, longing.

Very effective pauses between those words. I love that he points at his head instead of his heart. You think he should point at his heart, but he points at his head. Again, imagination. Beautiful thing. So Spielberg had an imaginary alien companion after his parents got divorced in 1960, Hard to believe. He was filming Raiders of the Lost Rock.

Did you or was it like you had an imaginary Lenny Dykstra in your life who was like? All jokes aside, I mean, I relate tremendously to Elliot. You know, Elliot, the life that Elliot is leading with his action figures and feeling lonely. Yeah. And trying to hang out with the cool kids and riding my bike. I mean, it's so relatable. Me too. I had just lots of fake sporting events.

Yeah. Just one-man basketball, Nerf, you know, the tall Nerf hoop, just. Game after game, all that stuff. I used to do the same thing. I used to have the affluent college basketball all neck and just take Syracuse and North Carolina lineups and play out entire games. And have video games, where we had like primitive video games.

Filming Raiders of Lost Ark in Tunisia. And he had a great sense of loneliness, Spielberg. He missed his family and friends, started thinking about his childhood creation again. Met Melissa Matheson. Married at the time, too? Harrison Ford. Let me tell you something. If I may for a minute. If you said... The woman you're most jealous of?

You could do five things that another person has done in their life. Two of the five would be, would be, Melissa's. You're just switching places with there. And then going back home to Harrison Ford. It's like Haralabob drafted Luca. I'm iconic.

So anyway, they developed a thing called Knights Guys, and then Matheson wrote the first draft of the script. It was called E.T. and me. A couple rewrites. legendary story of Columbia Pictures messing this up

Frank Price who was being advised by people they rejected it, doubted its commercial potential You know, that's not the whole story He had people underneath him who Well, but they picked Starman over this movie They pursued the John Carpenter movie Which became Starman Really good movie

Which is a good movie which Spielberg says is a good movie But they just felt like they couldn't have They were too similar Don't shed tears for them because Universal purchased it for a million. Like I said, Scheinberg. But they,

Columbia retained 5% of the film's net profits. So it was almost like the ABA owners. They got the one-seventh movie. They made more money from the minor stake they had to see that year than any movie that they put out. They put up $0 and made like $100 million. Pretty sweet. So not terrible.

Nine Oscar nominations. This is one of the craziest, like, looking back on it, Oscars ever when you think about what ET means for It's an absolute outrage. So it wins for best original score, visual effects, sound, and sound like.

It was the dune of its time, which is crazy to think about. We're dominated below the line. But this was the Oscars 40 years ago. Gandhi wins for Best Picture and Best Director and Best Actor. Henry Thomas not nominated. Spielberg does not win.

Spielberg not winning is a top of five. But didn't Samperews say like Yeah, even had Furrow's like, this is terrible? Yeah. It was like when Nick Fowdo won the master's over Norman's like, this is terrible, I feel bad.

Norman should have won. It's bonkers. Yeah. He's at the height, the height of his powers. What were the best pictures at year? And close encounters. So we had Gandhi, E.T. missing Tutsi and the verdict.

There's, we did this, I forget when we did another movie that was in this world where it's like, E.T. should have won for Best Picture and Best Director. And then Paul Newman should have won for Best Actor. Oh, and we did Call Her Money. Yeah.

And there's this whole alternate Oscars. That's the greatest Oscars of all time. But hey, hot take. Turn the camera on, Craig. Best thing that ever happened is Spielberg. Not winning the best director. Not winning the best picture. Little of fire on him.

Steve, still not good enough. No, you made twice as much money as any movie in 1982. Maybe you should have done better. But it's not like he was on the rise at this point. I literally, Jaws, close encounters, Raiders to the Lost Art. And then this movie. And then we're like, okay, we have it. Like, we have our generational Sessel Bina Mill.

This is the crowd-pleasing genius. No ask her to show for it. He's like, what do we have to do now? It's important that we give this to Gandhi, which is like, fine. It's a perfectly adequate biopic, but by no means is it, it's not the best of the five best picture. Yeah, but it wasn't like, we should really dab up Robert Eggers here. No, it was like. It was Spielberg.

Yeah. He was already Spielberg. It gets worse. Best Supporting actor. Henry Thomas doesn't even get nominated. He would get nominated for supporting. He would be best actor. Henry Thomas would have been best actor

He would have been the most screen time We know how that works normally With the kid actors They'll never put the kid in best actor Trying to think if there's ever Was Anna Pacquin Best actress and Best Supporting Actors?

They never put the kids in the best But yeah Charles Durning's in here For the best little whorehouse in Texas And it's just so old school Old White And then Then our girl D Wallace

She's gonna nominate either Yeah Tough one. Great mom performance. You must have liked her. Dee Wallace? Yeah. Great stuff.

You like that Halloween costume? Great. Great D. At Burroughs quote was... You like that. I can't believe you don't have that. Cassidy? As I don't.

Yeah. At Burroughs quote was, I was certain that not only would E.T. win, but that it should win. It was inventive, powerful, wonderful. I make more mundane movies. Dead on, Sir Richard. Full back, Phil.

That guy was in the great escape. So Spielberg, Jaws, close-accounters, 1941, comeback Raiders, E.T. I mean, he's batten 80% there. But that is, like, the best run of movies anyone's ever had. It's hard to imagine. And it's two years later. Right. I know that that's a little bit apocryphal.

He had John Sayles working on this script. It was supposed to be a close-encounter sequel. They were messing around with all that stuff. But just like kind of imagine you're the director of Raiders of the Lost Ark and you think of E.T. Oh, my God. That's crazy. And then you're like, I'm going to put a little joke in here for my buddy George Lucas, who's just made the most successful film franchise in the history of movies.

And we're going to have a little back and forth. Those guys love each other. That continued all the way into Phantom Menace. We got E.T. in the Senate. A couple of really good lessons from this movie, I think, from Spielberg's perspective. One, it's okay to read your own press. In the case of this movie, he doesn't make it. he doesn't read the press for close encounters.

In all of the reviews of close encounters, people are like, what a personal story. This is so clearly based on Stephen's own experiences with family and what he dreamed of. And he was like, it isn't. This is just an idea I came up with. You want me to make a personal story about an alien?

I'll do it. And so he makes this movie. Secondarily, always lift up your friends. Steven Spielberg and George Lucas have been in this unspoken partnership together for 45 years. And in their own stuff, this is just like Mal, given to see our shout out on the,

ringerverse. In their own stuff, they're referencing each other. God. There's so much Star Wars. Which of us is Lucas. Yeah. All right, we're going to clear out. I'm going to ISO Sean on the left side.

Okay. And we just want to space the floor from you go in the corner. I'm going to be in the top, ready to shoot, Mowers, and the other corner. Just do 90 seconds on Spielberg in this moment. It's the best to enjoy this when he does this? It's a lot of pressure. It's like say something smart about the most important filmmaker of your lifetime. Chris just threw it out of bounce.

No, no. Time out. Come back. All right. Run, play. It's the person who is like the great spectacle maker of his generation getting personal. And it takes, you have to get a little older to realize how to tap into that, how to be, how to not worry so much about the audience and worry more about yourself. And when you hear him talk about this movie, you hear him talk about being happy with it, regardless of its success.

He did not expect it to be a massive hit. He said if it had a solid audience, he would. would have been more than happy with that because it was the most important movie he had made to that point. Do you think he still feels that way? Well, the funny thing about this is when we talk about this run-up to 1982 and the successes that he had, most filmmakers or musicians or painters or whatever type of artist you are, you would have been happy to be like, I did it, I'm good. I'm going to ride, you know, rest of my laurels for the next 40 years. In 1993, he makes Jurassic Park and Schindler's list.

I mean, he is, and then in the 2000s, after people are like Spielberg kind of passed his prime after saving private run. and basically goes on his most successful run from a box office perspective ever. And he is the most indefatigable filmic producer, creator, director in the history of movies. Still got his fastball, in my opinion. West Side Story is still him at the height of his powers.

And it's crazy to think that he did this 40 years ago. 40 years ago and he's still making movies. It's like how CR just continues to surprise us. 12 pods a week. Yeah, 12 pods a week. And he's prestige goes from Winnington and we own this city right away. Today's watch is going to be kind of like my Munich. Is he your favorite filmmaker, Mel?

I don't know the answer to this question. Is it Peter Jackson? David Yates. Peter Jackson's high on the list. I think that if you look at the totality of Spielberg's most important movies and the most important movies in my life, that Venn diagram is he's got to be at the top of the list, I think. I don't know who else really can compete. Well, it's the old Desert Island thing, right?

Let's say you're stuck Tom Hanks castaway style on an island, whose movie library would you want? If you could have anybody's DVDs, who would you take? Chris would take Tony Scott, obviously, but for the rest of us, who would we take? I'm getting a hook in there in my first graphic. See, R, we take one VHS copy of Michael Mann's the Keep. That's right.

I'm just going to be on this island watching Domino. No, no, no, you guys don't understand. Mickey works great in this. Would you take Michael Mann or Tony Scott? I think I'd probably take Tony Scott if I had to watch the same movies over and over and over again. You alone watching Man on Fire into eternity? That's the saddest thing I've ever heard.

Just drawing help in the sand every night. But can you imagine me just watching Black Hat? I'd be like, I still don't get it. That would be my diary viewing number 70 What are for you though? Is that? I don't know

Desert Island filmography. I think you want volume if you're on a desert island, right? You want as many really good movies as possible. It's hard to compete. You talked about his early 2000s run where he does saving private Ryan in 1998 and you would have think,

all right, now he's going to scale back, he'll probably produce. No, he does AI, weird movies. The Minority Report, Catch Me, If You Can, The Terminal War of the World's Munich, and then an Indiana Jones thing. That's another great year. And he just kind of keeps going and, you know, it gets, I think it fades a little bit.

I agree with you on the West Side Story is just a cool, really well-made movie. But this is 40 years, 45 years. The fading is just, it's contextual. Like, we're measuring him against the own possible standard that he said. Again, we can't say enough times on this podcast that he made Raiders of the Laws. Stark and ET in consecutive years. Those are two of the 15 most important movies ever made.

He made them in back-to-back years. And Jaws. And then close encounters taps into this whole, hey, you know what people love? Science fiction. Yep. You know, it's going to make a lot of money with a movie?

Aliens. Friendly aliens. Go that way, and the audience will come. So he basically, yeah, I think he's the most important director of the last 50 years. I don't even think it's an argument. It's not really.

At least in America, it's not. I think the fun thing about this, too, is all of his movies talk to each other, right? Like, War of the Worlds is talking to this movie. He's like, you want me to make a mean alien movie? I'll make a mean alien. Yeah. Because he'd been thinking about doing it because that was going to be his close encounters was going to be like, well, what if the aliens were bad? And it was going to be something equally small and family base, but a little bit more terrifying.

And that he doesn't really do that for 20 years. This was the closest he got to rendering kind of his family life after his parents split up. His three younger sisters, but he talks about how this was the idyllic version of the suburb that he grew up in. And he really grew up in like a less nice suburb in Arizona. But now this year, at the end of this year, I think the second biggest or biggest Oscar movie of the year is going to be the Fableman's, which is the new movie he's making that he co-wrote with Tony Kushner about his adolescence, starring Seth Rogen and Paul Dana and Michelle Williams. And so we're now 40 years later, and he's finally putting for real this story that he's trying to tell an ET on the big screen. So he's still, all these movies talk to each other. When was Poltergeist?

Well, he's making Poltergeist at the same time. That's crazy. He's going back and forth. Yeah, that's almost like... It was released one week later. Yeah, he's producing that and doing a bunch of stuff on that movie as well.

He's amazing. We got to take a break. This movie had a $10.5 million dollar budget. It made $793 million. I think that's the biggest disparity of any movie we've done in the rewatchables. Man. Yeah, it was a great question.

It made 80 times the amount of money they spent, probably more. It became... It surpassed Star Wars, became the highest grossing film of all time. Held that record for 11 years until Jurassic Park. It had eight different weekends with a gross of over 10 million. Home Alone was the only movie that's matched that until Titanic. It set a record for being number one for 16 weeks in total.

That's insane. It sold over 15 million VHS units, which I remember he wouldn't put out the tape for years. VHS is like, where is he? T. And Spielberg's like, no, it'll ruin it. They don't do that with like the famous Christmas shows and all that. You have to watch them on TV. That's what I want with this.

And then they're like, hey, Steve, there's some coin at stake here, buddy. So everybody was taping it off TV. When it was air on TV, you just had the... So he got pissed when you found out, oh, there's these pile of them once. Didn't it a... Interesting. The tape had, like, was it green? Wasn't the case different?

Yeah. The plastic was different? Made $250 million in video sales revenue. Re-released it on DVD, 2012, and it made, you know, whatever it makes on that. Also, the merchandising, they sold 50 million dolls in September, 1982, became the best-selling toy at Christmas. I remember this. It generated over $1 billion in merchandise sales. It opened a theme park ride, E.T. Adventure.

Pretty good. Universal Studios, Florida. Solid. Yeah. 1990. You're on the bike. Still exists. And we'll take it.

talk about it later, I guess, but probably the worst video game of all time. I never played this. Yeah, I knew about it. We can go it to later. Our guy, Raj, lost his mind for it. Loved it. Four stars. Yeah.

It's not simply a good movie. It's one of those movies that brush away our cautions and win our hearts. He's right. George F. Will did not like this movie. He wrote tells you a lot about George F. Will.

He wrote a second piece, to his grandkids about how he watched E.T. with them. That's among the best things, I think he's ever written. That's a great one. That's a great one. Watching that and watch the movie. Yeah, oh, it's lovely.

The playing of the emotion on their faces, the way he talks about how he has one eye on the movie, one eye on them on the couch. It's just incredible. And that's the thing, this movie is so special to watch with your kids. It really is because it's really hard to get a kid to pay attention, right?

You'll see it probably three years from now. You'll pop it on. And as soon as E.T. shows up, the kid doesn't move for the next 90 minutes. It's just like, is ET in danger? They're just seeing everything through, please protect this creature I love. Let's do

the, we got a lot of categories to cover. Wait, John Williams. It's coming. It's coming. It's coming. All right. It's coming. We got a lot of it. We got time. Did you think it was like the pod's not over? Oh my God. I mean, we're talking about Spielberg and the greatest she's ever done it. So it's just, whoo. Do you want to do it now?

No, no. Whenever, whenever, whenever you want. I didn't know how to do rewatchable scene. It's tried to limit it to this whole movie's rewatched. It's impossible. I really like the opening scene set up

when he gets left behind. I think it's really well done. It really tells you everything. You understand it, even if you're like a three-year-old. You can kind of understand. Oh, spaceship. That guy didn't get back in time.

Now he's stuck. And what are they doing? They're just grabbing plants. Yeah, they're bodies, man. You know, they got to do their research. It's great because E.T. is curious. You know, and one of the great ties between E.T. and Elliot in the movie

is that they are equally curious about each other, right? And so the fact that E.T. gets left behind, because he just wants to go look at the lights. He wants to gaze out from the cliff into the world beyond when, like, that's the way we would think. To your point earlier again, Chris, about inverting, right? Like, we would do that with E.T., but he's doing that with us, and that's

why he gets left behind. I just love it. It's great. There's a deleted scene where he goes to a Laker game, but they cut it out. Yeah. He wandered over to the floor. I think that's a winning time, season two, actually. Yeah. It might be. Why not? E.T.'s there.

It's E.T. and Spencer Haywood. As Maddie Johnson and Paul Weston are yelling at each other. E.T. is just like touching popcorn with his finger. Next rewatch, we'll see. Elliot lures E.T. to his room. Great one. You make it sound so lurid. Well, he's got the Reese's pieces.

He's lining them up. What a fucking win for Reese's pieces, man. Oh, my God. Eminem's really fucked this up. Yeah, let's just do this now. That's one of the biggest mistakes in the movie history. Astonishing. Not having M.N.

And single, trust me, I was there. Single-handly created a competitor. I didn't know what the fuck Reese's pieces were. When you see them, you're like, aren't those M&Ms? Like, I thought for a second that they were M&Ms. Where do you go? Risa's pieces are definitely better. 100 out of 100, yeah.

Now, I don't agree. I am personally, I buy M&Ms, but I think Reese's piece is a better product. Personally, you buy, are you worried about offending? Well, I like the peanut. I like peanut. I just, but I like peanut emmns. I just, but I like peanut. So you like the peanut rather than like the peanut butter flavor kind of?

I think the Reese's pieces is a better product. Okay. And I wish I like them more than the M&M peanuts, but I like the crunch of the peanuts. I love a Rhesus peanut butter cup. I love a mini Rhesus peanut butter cup. But Rhesus pieces, I'm not a fan. The candy-coated shell, the whole thing with the Rises is the perfect balance of chocolate and peanut butter.

You lose that with the Rhesus pieces. I like both. I'm sorry. If you had to do an M&M or Rie's Pieces, what would you do? either are 50 candies that I would pick before either. But if I had to pick, I would pick the peanut butter M&M, which has the better balance. Just throwing it out there. We didn't have that in 1982.

All time with. Who owns Eminem? Mars. Yeah, Hershey had pieces. Well, they created a competitor. Rees's pieces was like, they were like, it was like AEW with the WWE. It was just nowhere. And all of a sudden it was going head toad.

Oh, man. One of my favorites, E.T. meets the siblings. That's so great. Incredible. Just knocking down the shelves, Gertie's screaming. When the older brother pulls Gertie back

and E.T.'s coming at it. It's just so fucking funny. All the little details, like Mike's wearing the Space Invader's shirt. Again, Elliot's room when you're a kid is just like the coolest place in the world. It's this wonderland of toys and all these little nooks and grannies. Yeah.

See that Superstars poster? The background's a nice one. Yeah, he's got a helmet in there. It's just an incredible room. That whole sequence is great. I love that scene. Where were the Raiders then? You think Alia, it's a Raiders fan?

There might have been some Rams. Rams still around. Yeah. Could have been the Rams. Could have been either. Who knows? E.T. escapes. He tells him to stay in his room, and he goes to school, and E.T.'s like, nah, I'm going to

go downstairs. What's going out of that bridge? Put on the road. Of course. I wrote in my notes, this actually could have been the whole. movie. It could have been like how there's a second Anchorman, too. Just E.T. in the house for four hours,

I think I would have watched. Just hammered E.T. Interactive with the dog. Yeah, Harvey. Him learning TV and playing video games. E.T. watching Jimmy the Greek and betting games. That's C.R. every Saturday. Yeah. We have to see. Roles out of bed 11 a.m. cracks a banquet beer.

He gets an early Premier League soccer. Yeah. She becomes an Everton fan. Not interested in potato salad. We have the same diet. He's like, in the beers, rallying. No interest in potato salad. Me too. We went right on the ground.

I love the dog. Harvey, yeah. Great sidekick. Wonderful. Every time I watch it, I get worried the dog's not going to like E.T. And there's going to be. Well, there's that initial trepidation. But then again, they build that bond.

Well, E.T. When he's, he's an extraterrestrial. Has the ability to manipulate his surroundings. Yeah. Literally with telekinesis. Next one I have is Gertie to dress his zealied up and teaches them how to speak is just Drew Barrymore's just cooking.

E. He said be. E. He's a big. Good. Be. Be. Good.

Just cooking. Child actor. Just great stuff. Working with a puppet. All kids are cute, but some kids are like. Psychotic. Perfect name for a kid. One of the great child actor

performed ever. The Halloween bicycle flight, the first one, just him and Elliot, going by the moon, like one of the great shots. Probably ever. Yeah. It's the Amlin logo. Leading to the... I could be happy here. I could take care of you.

I wouldn't let anybody hurt you. We could grow up together, E.T. Wait, what? E.T. doesn't want to stay? why does he want to stay? This is great. He's got Reese's pieces, bicycles. I don't have any of the rewatchable stuff for when E.T.'s in trouble.

I don't like that part. Okay. I think it's very well done. You don't like him turning gray. I don't like, yeah, it's distressing. Yeah, it's not great. I do like when he wakes up, though. He's so excited.

Elliot's saying goodbye and the heart comes back on. Oh my God. E.T. phone home. Does this mean they're coming? I love that. The way that's filmed is genius because he's looking through. Yeah. Well, and like the, he's like looking through the porthole of a spaceship almost, right?

By looking through the glass. So many of the, the way that like when Elliot's playing hooky at first, the room is in shadow because there's so much to be discovered, right? The use of light and framing throughout the movie is just brilliant. It's so good. I also love any movie scene where somebody needs a couple minutes. Christine, you need a couple minutes. Oh, yeah. Let me have it by myself.

Yeah. Yeah. A couple minutes. Yeah, it's not like it's an important scientific. for discussion. I'm just going to want to let that kid have a few seconds. I feel like you're going to have to do this with James Hardin in the offseason. You know, now that he's in a space coffin, you're going to have to talk him back to life.

You think James Arden and I are psychically linked? And then, I don't know how you separate the group by ride Chase and the come stay out. I'll be right here. Yeah. See Thomas Howell shows up. It gets dark immediately. They're on the bikes. They go up in the air on the sunsets.

Yeah. Sunset is gorgeous. Sunset just flips. Special effects are bad, but in a fun. way. Great action filmmaking, though. Really good.

The camera's like following them all over the town. Yeah, it's great. Guys going down the hill with the E.T. on the front of the bike. Yeah.

It's a real chase scene. Yeah. It's really good. It's really good. I mean, look, I try to limit that. I'm sure you have. I'll give you two more.

I know you have two more. Well, I mean, we have to do E.T. Phone Home. E.T. Phone Home. E. E. Phone home.

That's right on the, the heels of Gertie, dressing up E.T. and teaching him how to speak, right? I mean, that's a, I think it's fair to say that's like historic significant sequence. One of the things I was interested in is I didn't remember, actually, that E.T. was dressed up that way in that sequence because I think the associations are just so purely the line, the message of the line and the finger, the shadow of his finger moving across Elliott's face as it's moving toward the window. And so to see like all like the rings and the bracelets, it's like, oh, yeah, this is dressed up like a doll. Yeah. This is like a

filling out in my mind in a way that I didn't remember because just the essence of it is the thing you take with you. So that has to be on. And I think like the, you already mentioned the Halloween, Elliot and E.T.'s forest ride across the moon. And then E.T. actually phoning home, which is really like three scenes that we're cheating and lumping into one. Yeah. But I think if you do extend that on either end a little bit more, everything in the actual trick-or-treating sequence is so fun to re-watch because you get to see E.T. literally looking out through these pinpricks in the sheet, right? Just this viewfinder into a whole other way of life, the way that he, like, is cooing and purring. Watching this movie with subtitles, I cannot recommend it highly enough.

It's the 1982 equivalent now of watching The Mandalorian with subtitles, and it's like Grogu Burbles, Grogu Coos, baby cooing, right? And it's just like E.T. Purrs. And he does just so special. Your head is going to explode when you have a kid. I can't even begin to tell you how, what it's really like. Let's go to Mallory's mom. She's on the line.

There's been an update. Every day is just a kid making noises like that. I love it. What do you have for most rewatchable scenes? One other one that I would just add is this part of one that you've already mentioned, which is when E.T. is kind of getting hammered, hanging out in his robe, having the psychic link with Henry Thomas. And Henry Thomas is doing the dissections.

And then we do the dissection. They free the frogs. And then he has this dance sequence imitating the quiet man, which E.T. is watching at home, which is this real, like... flourish in the movie. It's the real one time in the movie where it's outside of kind of the tone of the rest of the movie.

But I thought it was really sweet watching it this time. I thought it really worked. The only other one that I would add is I know you don't want to do E.T. gets sick, but when the scientists show up wearing full space suits. Oh my God, yes. That's on my list too. The zombie entrance.

And he's, like, Spielward is, among many things he's the best at. Mom's opening the door. Unbelievable moment. Close encounters. Saving Private Ryan. And there's just like he's very good at like open the door and oh my God.

And like that that's really incredible at ET. But I think that the last bike ride, you know, is the best. I think the last 15 minutes of this movie. Final scene is just the heart shatterer. Oh, man. It's tough. I think that and their, the E.T. Elliott bike ride when it's just the two of them going across the moon is really up there too. Is that the first time you hear the John Williams that it hits that crescendo?

That's kind of like the signature theme that we think of is on the Halloween ride, right? Such an amazing moment. My favorite short scene. Every time you do music now, I think of the winning time theme. So I almost want to be, Buh, Buh, Bap, Bha, as Elliot's riding in a play. My favorite short sequence is when he meets the siblings.

It's great. And just how the other tune, that older brother just has a great, what the F is going on face. Like just complete deer in the headlights. He has some really key moments. Like in the farewell sequence and the clearing at the end, Mike is the one who says he doesn't know goodbye.

Like the idea that ET doesn't know the word goodbye is just so heartbreaking but also so hopeful about that. I think in ET2, which was never made. Thank God. I think Mike is definitely selling, I had ET in my house, T shirts and pot on the side. what's age the best?

I mean, there's a lot. Let's do John Williams first. Okay. John Williams. About heard of them. What a score. I mean, so we talked about this on Raiders. We talked about how like Soderberg had recut Raiders and put a different score over it.

And it was cool because you could just watch the silent film version of Raiders and still understand the movie and the story. I don't think that's the case for E. I think that if you watch E.T. without this music, it's probably understandable, but the amount of work that the score does emotionally and for children and adults,

I think, to say it's okay to feel this way about this puppet, you know, and it's okay to believe in magic and it's okay to open up your heart to this movie. It still gets you every time.

You start this movie off, you're like, the special effects are aging. Okay, okay, I'm getting used to this. Like, you don't see a lot of puppets these days. And then once that music really starts crank cranking though, you're like, fuck this, I'm six again.

You know, like, this is crazy. Also, one of the best ever actual endings of the score with the movie where it's like, dun, dun, dun, as it like fades out for Belial. Yeah, the ending straight up does not work

without the score. Like, I'll be there, I'll be here moment. Doesn't really work. But the thing that I had read that I thought really interesting about this is Williams's power with Spielberg is really interesting because he basically writes music that forces Spielberg to cut around his compositions

which is very unusual in fact it's usually the exact opposite with filmmakers and composers where they're like here is the film make it fit to this and he has such, Spielberg has such respect for Williams and knows how much Williams honestly helped his career

I mean Jaws is not Jaws without John Williams and so the fact that John Williams was like, I have an idea for this. I think he calls him J. Dubb. Jaydubs. Sure. I think he's referred to him as Johnny. Johnny well.

I think he's referred to him as Johnny. They've like hung out together. Hung out? Yeah. They're working together for 50 years. I've gone to Vegas. I think they're boys. Yeah.

I think they're boys. Like, hey, March Madness. Oh, you think first we get a March Badness? Johnny and Steve. Johnny, you want to go down there? Some same game parlays. George are going. George is going.

George is going to shave his neck right before we go. I think they're more like Cape Cod, Martha's Vineyard brothers. But yeah. Yeah. Did that get it? Same premise. But yeah, I mean, he gets to cook in his way. Like, he gets to do what he wants to do.

Hasn't Spielberg actually said that with the chase sequence at the end, specifically that he edited the film to match the score? I mean, that's just, what more do you need to know? And I don't think, which is odd for a film about childhood, the only other time, like, non-John Williams music is even referenced is when Mike's singing Elvis Costello. Elvis is on the poster, too. Yeah, but is there any other non-score music in this movie?

There's never like a needle drop. No, unless it's anything on TV when E.T. is watching TV and that's it. Who do you have him versus Gordon Willis for much better at my job than anyone else who does this in movies? I think John Williams is like, I mean, John Williams is responsible for like 15 of the 20 most memorable musical moments in movie history. Yeah, who's like second? Who's the guy who's like, if only John Zimmer or like I don't even know? If only John Williams had never been born, I would have been king. It's the guy who has to like got drafted after the long.

I mean, you could argue that John Williams is better at the thing he does. By far. Anybody has ever been at the thing they do. Well, Chris, Chris will tell you about how Gordon Willis uses light. I mean, is anyone used light better than Gordon Lewis. It's the absolute light, Bill. And the part of the next thing I wanted to talk about was the cinematography in this movie. Go ahead.

I see, I wondered if we mind mel did. E.T. and Elliot style, and we both wrote down our favorite shots. A couple of our favorite shots. Who's E.T. and who's Elliot here? That's for the listener to decide. We can put a whole up. But a couple of my favorite shots. Alan Davio directed

this. This is his first cinematography gig on a feature, which is crazy. And he did a bunch of Spielberg. Yeah, and he wanted to do it a bunch with Spielberg. I love the flashlights in the forest in the beginning. All the flashlights kind of going through the redwoods. There's a shot, the steam coming out of the sink when Elliot's washing the dishes.

and is looking into the sky. Not abiding by California drought. Yeah. And then what about the wide shot of the, like the shed when the ball rolls out? The shed when the ball comes out. But one of my favorites is the Hitchcock Zoom of the development from the hill. Click, click, click. Yeah.

Yeah. And like, because you think everything's going pretty well. You know, like every, like, oh my God, E.T. They're all getting along. And then it does the, I guess we would call it like the Goodfell's Zoom like in the diner. But it's like the camera's going back. but zooming in so it just makes it

look like oh shit something's about to happen. They had that initially Scorsese ended up taking it

but it got cut out of it they kept looking up when they're on the bike ride like Ray Leota good fellas they're following us wait a second can you imagine

if we recut ET but it's like Elliot is having Henry Hill's last day of freedom because like I had a lot of stuff I had to do

I had to get ET over to the communicator then I had to get back to the fucking sauce. I had to see my Pittsburgh guys about a case of Reese's species that they had that they wanted to move.

So I was very busy and I couldn't deal with Lois and her shit. More would stage the best. Early 80s, ambiguous California. Nobody knows what part of California this was in. We know it was film, but when you watch it it, it could be northern California, it could be southern California. It doesn't really matter. A lot of redwoods.

I read near Tahoe is what they we're trying to create. Yeah, because he points on the mouth. He does point. Yeah. Now where they've filmed it. We talked about Henry Thomas. We talked about little Drew Barrymore as just as an actor in the movie, but also

like Drew Barrymore still kicking 40 years later. It's a very successful daytime shows. He's still kicking. 20 movies and is a very likable, Aitless celebrity. Which, you know, as a child actor, it's a little checkered. It's a really interesting sliding doors there, too, where she went up for the poltergeist part. land and Spielberg positioned

her. Thank God she was on that movie. That's the all-time bad luck. What are we doing? Paltarguise. Whenever you're ready. We could go research. Whenever you're ready. We mentioned Spielberg, the chronological order. And you really wanted the children to say goodbye to E.T. at the end because they

were actually saying goodbye, which is just really smart. I love when movies are filmed in chronological order. It's great. It's very rare. Ebert. Oh, we mentioned the every shot seen as the kid would see it. We mentioned some of the stuff already. See Thomas Howell?

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Made me wish the other kids who were kind of, there's two other kids. I don't know who the hell they were. Well, they were looking to get Corey Filman in there, but he had just been like one of the Corrie's and... And he did Friday the 13th instead. This is a good tune-up for you for the solo Soul Man rewatchable.

Yeah. I'm pretty excited about it. Solo Man? Solo man. Oh, man. Rough movie. What stage is the worst? E.T. When E.T. dies. Not rewatchable. but really rough.

They really do a good job. Like, your heart is just... That overhead shot of him in the river is brutal. Oh, yeah. With the raccoon by his head. Well, you know, you get that line in the earlier scene with Mike and his friends playing Dungeons and Dragons, and there's the line about, I have resurrection, right?

So, like, if you hear that line early, you're kind of holding on to that home the whole time that it's going to be okay. But it is devastating. E.T. the alien himself. Mm-hmm. created by Italian special effects artist Carlo Rambaldi. Carl Rambaldi.

He loved to be referred to that way. Producer Kathleen Kennedy visited the Jules Stein I Institute to study real and glass eyes. She felt the eyes were really important. Then she went back to Carlo Rambaldi. I really think that we should do a rewatchables tour of Italy. Just all the great cities so you can connect with the people, Bill.

Four heads were created for filming. A team of puppeteers controlled his face with animatronics. Two little people, as well as a 12-year-old born without legs, took turns wearing the costume. Depending on the scene, the puppet,

all in about $1.5 million. I will say this. 40 years ago, it was a long time. The special effects, all the shit in movies back then are mostly terrible when you watch. It still works.

It does. I was fucking crazy. When I saw those bikes tape off, I was like, this is literally my dreams to come to come to life. It's amazing. It's incredible. Can I throw one more little. It's so ahead of its time.

If it doesn't work even 10%, think about like he couldn't even create a shark seven years earlier. Now he's got this moving, living, blinking thing that works. It's not a one-to-one, but like kids have seen Yoda now by this point when this movie comes out. So like you have to nail this. You have to. temporary vocals like the sort of like

practice vocals on ET Deborah Winger Right along with some cigarette smoker Yes Two packs a day Ordered by Ben Burt I'm going to guess her name was

I can't find it I'm going to guess Pat Welsh I'm going to guess two packs a day is probably a low number for that If it's like so How many packs you're smoking

And the answer is Enough to be the voice of E.T. Yeah. I'm going to say that's like four packs a day. Oh, God. Up there with Mercedes-McCambridge's work in The Exorcist, channeling Pizzou. Yeah.

Pizzou. Any other, what's age the best? What do you got? So I say this as a, you know, a lover of franchises, a lover of IP machines. You? Yeah. What? The fact that this is a true original standalone sci-fi story and that they, they'd

did not do the sequel that they were planning to do. They didn't do it. They left the legacy of this film intact and let it in form and shape decades of everything that came after without needing to... They did do like the direct TV commercials somehow. I don't know how that happened.

I mean, Chris did four take hunters. That's right. Take Hunter 2 Nocturnal Fears. E.T.2 Nocturnal fears. Couldn't leave well enough alone. They didn't do it. You just had to keep going to the watering hole. What did we find in the research

for ultimately why he didn't want to make a sequel other than he had so much money or he didn't need the money. There can't be any other reason. He said he just didn't think it felt right. That he, the story he felt ultimately after they, I think they did a treatment for the second movie. But nobody thinks that way with movies. Nobody ever makes the right decision on sequels. I mean, one, obviously you're talking about thus literally not just the best, most important filmmaker of this generation, but also the savviest. I mean, the person who always played Yeah, he would also just be like, if he had another idea, he would be like, let's do another movie, a different movie.

Do you think the Second Raiders of Lost Ark affected that at all that? That's what I was going to say is he already had a franchise that he could return to. But it also, the second movie was, people were upset about it. Yeah, but he could think of those movies more as Lucas's movies anyway. I think that's a good call, Mal. Anything else for what's the best for you? I mean, though, aside from the bikes, which now, When you watch it, if you're a five-year-old now,

you'd be like, that doesn't look as good as whatever CGI thing I could watch. You'd be like, the shit is mid. Yeah. Okay, here's one thing that was really interesting. I don't know if this is age poorly or well, but you were talking about some of the box office data. Yeah.

The 8th Friday that this film was in release, it made more money than on the first Friday. You love when that happens. Like, that is crazy. Dr. Strange, too, over the weekend, dropped 67% at the box office from weekend to weekend. This movie stayed open

in American movie theaters for one calendar year. This is also like the time when, like, if somebody was like, what do you listen to you? He'd just be like, Thriller for five years. Yeah. I mean, this just got inside

of the American consciousness and stayed there for a long, long time. We had way less. Where do you think the image of Elliott and E.T. in the basket pedal flying across the face of the moon ranks on the most iconic images in visuals in movie history. And same question for E.T. Phone Home as one of the most iconic lines. I mean, those are two top ten. Hemsworth at the laptop in Black Hat.

Yeah. Jimmy Khan breaking into the safety thief. Oh, God. I would say the Chinese restaurant security camera scene in Black Hat. Yeah. Meals book about metals in heat. I actually think Spielberg has the top two choice. I think the woman in the water at the beginning of Jaws. I would say also the water shimmering in Jurassic Park. Yeah.

I mean, we're not going to do like John Wayne and the door free. Yeah, there's classic ones. There's definitely. Moon number one. I think it's the most iconic shot ever filmed. There's like break at the piano in Casablanca. You could do the historic ones, but he has a lot of those like Harvey Kytel naked and bad lieutenant.

Yeah. Yeah, well, you modeled your whole Well, Sharon Stone, basic instinct. We cover that when you're a basic instinct path. We're going to take a break and come back and do what's age the worst. All right, what's age the worst? I just, as a parent, when I see it from Dee Wallace's side, it's just sad when you get older and you can't,

you see the adult side a little bit where when you're a kid, you're just like, the alien, this is so great. And I hope the parents don't fuck this up. And then when you're the parent, you think. Hey, man, can we be, what do we know about the same? alien. You're just more skeptical. I would also say... So what stage is the worst for me personally?

I would say that there's a version of this movie, which is about a scientist who comes across the greatest discovery in the history of humanity and a kid fucks it up. Keys. You know what I mean? Like, who knows what we could... Like, what diseases we could have

cured? But that also explains the DeWallis character's perspective, which is like, there's a 99% chance this alien has a disease that it's going to give my child. It's from another planet. it. Yeah. So, you know.

We mentioned Mars not allowing M&Ms. There's an asteroids reference with the score that is just, I don't, anybody watching this now and be like, what? Not even get it. So this is a good one. Drew Barrymore. The surprise when she became an actual actress as like a late teenager and then an adult and the whole ET baggage she had from the movie is like, wait, that's a little kid

from ET. now she's in Madlove. It took a while to get over that. That's now aged the worst from the surprise. Because now you know it was Drew Barrymore. Sure. But Adam Sandler movies, it's done a whole bunch of things. And it's almost like, now it's flipped where it's the, wait, she was the little girl in E.T.

Which is crazy. So that's age to worst, not in a bad way. It's just aged. Yeah. Does that make sense? That's a good new category for us. What's aged? What's aged?

Fair. There are plagiers of allegations. that this film was plagiarized from the alien. In the 1967 script by Indie Director, I'm not going to say his name Ray. It's not legit Ray. And it turned in a whole thing. And then Scorsese,

not kind of on the team. He said, like, yeah, I think it was influenced by the script. And Spielberg's thing was like, I was in high school when that script was around. I was in Hollywood. Kind of impossible to know. It's one of those questions of, like, could two people have had this idea?

It's definitely plausible. Yeah, that an alien landed from wherever and became a little boys. best friend. Feels conceivable. Imitating E.T.'s voice has both aged the best and the worst, because there's been some bad ET voice impressions over the years.

Where does yours rank in the all-time history? Probably right in the middle. Dead middle. Okay. I would say. Pat Welsh, two packs a day. Nine and a half hours recording apart, paid $380. Tough. It's a lot of packs of Winston's. Though. Back then? Like $2 a pack? I'm going to guess she's not alive.

People who recorded... We recorded Let's just let it sit She's not alive Spellberg did some noises Debra Winger you mentioned There was a sleeping wife Sick with a cold

There was a burp from a USC film professor They used raccoons and otters and horses All right the video game So it was rush to be released During the 82 holiday season Really big bad mistake to rush video games back in 1982 I think it would be a mistake in 2020

Yeah 1989, definitely it's why they consider to be the worst video game ever played. It was blamed for the video game industry crash of 1983, which was the thing where people were like, yeah, video games, that was a fad. Nope. How's the development of CR's quest going? When are you guys going to have that out?

We've actually put a lot of it into CR coin. We're just waiting for. He wants the entire thing to be a very convincing augmented reality experience, and he won't launch until that's possible. By the way, CR, this is your sequel. In 1983, they reported that they overproduced millions of games that nobody bought

and that they were secretly buried in New Mexico and landfill and covered with a layer of concrete. And then in 2014... Overdoing it, maybe? In 2014, diggers hired to investigate it,

found in the landfill. And there were millions of ET cartridges. And did they put them on eBay or something? or what happened? They did not. Okay. But that's how many

games they made. Are they in the museum of civilization? It's good, St. 11th. That's how I got for what stage is

anything from you guys? Tough beat from my guy, John Sales. I'm a big John Sales fan. Just having written Knights Guys?

Yeah, like he's like, oh, I wrote their sequel to Close Encounter maybe, and then it's like, there's elements of Knights Guys

in, in ET. Also, night's guy's script. It's really cool. It would have been cool to see it get made. I feel like he'll never do it now because of War of the Worlds.

He basically made his evil aliens movie. But yeah, John Sales wrote Piranha, which was a spoof of Jaws, which is how Steven Spielberg saw it, loved it. I thought it was really fun. That's why he hired John Sales. And then he also hired Joe Dante to do his

gremlins, right? Yes. Didn't work out. Casting what ifs. Ralph Machio almost got cast as one of the other kids. Tyler. Tough beat, Mal. Could have Daniel son in there. Long Island's own.

Henry Thomas almost blew his audition, and then he thought about the day his dog died when he had to get sad, and it made Spielberg cry, and he got the job right away. So I got hired at Greenland. When and listen, always think about the day your dog died. You wept in front of Bill?

You mentioned Corey Feldman. Script rewrite eliminated his part. Tough beat for The Corster. There's stuff on the internet. about Dee Wallace that part was offered to Shelly Long but she'd already signed to do night shift

I could not confirm. That's why this is half-ass sometimes. Isn't that just like everybody won? I think it's fine. She started cheers. She did great. Dee Wallace this became her movie all that. Incredible mom run for Dee Wallace here. She goes right into Coojo after this.

I just called it an incredible run, Sean. I don't even limit it to the mom rolls. Seems like a fine lady. I don't know if she was in the howling, was she a mom? She was in the howling? Was she a mom? I feel like she's the love interest. Secret of Myr, she was a mom. She was. That's a couple years later. One of the great moms of all time. Mom Hall of Famer.

How about just Hall of Famer, Bill? Drop the mom. Your guy Harrison Ford could have had this movie. This is a devastating one, right? It's supposed to be the principal at Elliott's school. It would take me out of it, though. Now at this point, if Harrison Ford just pops up. I don't think you were, you wouldn't have seen his face.

Just hear him. You wouldn't have seen his face. Can I tell you what the problem of this is? Principal of Elliott School for the listeners. You can't have a world in which Star Wars exists in E.T. And Han Solo is in the movie. You can and here's why. I was going to get to this in picking nits later. But this is one of the most shocking things in this movie.

There's no Han Solo action figure. Elliot has a Lando, a Boba Fett, and a fucking Grito. Yeah. Right? McClunky! But he does not have a Han Solo action figure. not a Han guy What's all right

You could have Harrison He's a hero guy Han shot first I mean he's a boba guy clearly And a Lando guy He's got the He's got all three of Hans

rivals there What does that say What year did Empire come out 80? Okay Moving on to best that guy I can't the Joey Pants Award Which is movie so old

You can't even do that guy But I think Peter Coyote Was a that guy Coming out of this movie And then eventually I don't know when he became Peter Coyote But he became Peter Coyote at some point.

But for a while, he was Keys from E.T. That was how we knew Peter Coyote. That's an interesting one. And then at some point he became. And I would say the older brother in this movie became of that guy because it was like, Oh, the older brother from E.T. Right. I said his name wrong earlier in the podcast.

That's just who he became. What is Peter Coyote best known for? Fucking voicing the Civil War? Is it just Ken Bernstocks? I mean, I think if you hear his voice, you're just like, oh, my God. All right, Sean. Now you have to challenge me. There was, he did a couple of things in the 80s.

I'm not questioning the point you're making. No, I know, maybe now we have to stop the podcast so we can look this up. Sam Shepard. Like those guys used to help. He's best known for mixing it up in bars with Sam Shepard. I mean, I think in certain parts of New Mexico that might be the case. Yeah. Is his real name Peter Coyote?

Oh. Okay. No. I have an answer, Sean. Okay. You're going to say Jagged Edge? Back to back, 1985. Jagged Edge and the legend of Billy Jean.

Fuck, two good ones. And he's basically playing the same guy as E.T. guy in Legend of Billy Jean. Can I tell you? Craig, have you seen Legend of Billy Jean? No, he's not. Let me tell you a quick story. I took a class in 11th grade called Student Court, where we learned about the law,

and the teacher in that class showed us jagged edge. Oh, I didn't know I was podcasting the Super Cops over here. Oh, my God. They shouldn't show kids' jagged edge. That's not cool. Also, Peter. I like that movie. Peter Coyote's real name is Robert Peter Cohan.

Oh. So, wow. Henceforth, Sean Coyote. Okay? That's my name. Sean Hyena. That hurt. No.

That hurt. Why? Hyena. You're a relentless. Scavenger. Yeah, hyenas are terrible. Villas. Can I do one more Joey Pants from you?

They think it's the coyote in the tool shit. Wait, can I say one more Peter Coyena? Yeah. Pump up the volume invented podcasting. Legend of the Billie Jean invented the internet. We talked about this. I know. I just wanted for the people

who haven't heard that before. That's going to be the last rewatchable. Why are you directly addressing Chris? Because he and I love legend of Billy Jean. Yeah. Fair's fair.

We're going to do it one day and you're going to be like, wait a second. You guys did that as a rewatchable's podcast? We're like, yeah. We did. I honestly don't think I've seen it. It's Helen Slater and Christian Slater

are teens. They go on the run. Chris, they, this evil guy who runs a merchandise shop, um, his son, they ruin his Honda Elite scooter.

Yeah, it's like on the Gulf, right? Yeah. And she wants money for the scooter, and it turns into somebody gets shot and they go on the run. Yeah. You guys should definitely do it. All these people. And then they kidnapped the rich guy, but the rich guy's like, I'm into this. Keith Gordon is the rich guy's son. Let's make a viral video. Let's make sure you can get that in before we do

boogie nights and we wrap this thing up. Another Joey Pants for this. I don't really know if it's Joey Pants, but Erica Elanak is the girl in the science class. Yeah, she is. Oh, wow. Baywatch his own. And then she winds up being in Baywatch and under siege.

Chris clocked that one, you know why. I don't have any Vincent Hannon and give me all you got. I love acting. I don't have any overacting in this movie, do you? Overacting? Yeah, I don't feel like anyone was Vincent Hale. Some of Henry's friends during the

Dungeons and Dragons are trying to dial it up a little. It's like, relax, we'll give it to con. Dionne Waiters is Drew Barry Merrill eligible? She's in like nine scenes. I mean... She's in a lot of it. She's in so much of the movie.

There's four people they're in all of the movie. So unless it's D. Wallace, it's got to be true. You know what I mean? I think this is empty. I don't think anybody has unless you want to give it to see Thomas Howell. Has anyone been tracking

the winners of these awards over the years? No, one person. I challenge a listener out there to track every single award. Like, unclear as to what they're actually awarding. Stop it, Chris. Recast the couch. I would not mess with this movie.

No. Absolutely not. But if you forced me to be in a mess with this movie. Okay. Okay. Couldn't De Niro have played Keys? What are we talking about, Chris?

Wow. Lady, why are you so interested in the alien? Is it a bad thing to have 1982 De Niro in this movie for five scenes? Probably not. Yeah, sure. Sharon Stone and Dee Wallace's spot, too. I like D. Wallace.

Protect D. Wallace. Why not get a... Could we have gotten Sir Anthony Hopkins for Henry Thomas's part? Half-ass internet research. The movie was called a boy's life when they were filming it because Spielberg didn't want anyone to discover and plagiarized the plot. They filmed in Culver City, Northridge, Chejunga, Crescent City in Northern California, and they filmed the fine bicycle stuff at Porter Ranch. You spent a lot of time in Cjunga? Not really.

You took me there once. You may or may not remember this. We were on some weird journey to find some sandwich joint. We never could find it. And you were like, this is Tejunga. It's like two blocks. It's cool. I like Tejonga.

Oh, God. At one point when Gertie says, I don't like his feet, that was ad lit by Drew Barrymore. She was talking about the wires coming out of his feet. So they just kept it in and went with it. Spielberg personally screened the film at the White House

for the president, Ronald Reagan, and the first lady, Nancy. And Reagan was like, we should do a Rand Contra. Chris, would you believe that the late Michael Jackson owned one of the E.T. Puppets, there's like four. Full on.

It's the most Michael Jackson research you can get. If Ronnie and Nancy invited you to screen the collected take hunters, would you take it to the White House? Wait, back in the 80s? No, Biden and Jill. They're going to invite him. They used a wet t-shirt cram with jello to simulate the noise of E.T.'s walk. And then, Spielberg stayed in an interview. E.T. was a plant-like creature, either male nor a female.

That's his take on it. So there you go. Beyond Burger Alien. We have that coming up later. Apex Mountain. Spielberg, yes. Has to be this, right? Did we do this on Jaws?

But this has to be E.T. I don't know what our answer was before, but it has to be this. Weren't we like Apex Mountain is when he did Schindler's in Jurassic in the same year? But Raiders and E.T. are back-to-back years. And he's producing Poultergeist. It has to be this. I'm not going to argue with it. He didn't win best director.

And we just agreed that that was one of the greatest travesties in the history of civilization. We didn't even spend time on it. It was so stupid. You know what's an interesting fact about this is he talked about test screening the movie in Texas for the first time in one of the interviews. And it was the first time that the studio saw the movie. The studio, Universal, literally didn't see the movie until they tested it with an audience for the first time, which is a real testament to his power even then. So I guess with that in mind, you could say maybe it's... He also, like, wasn't the whole thing as like how hard he was like,

we're going to keep this under $11 million, like, the budget? And, like, they were like, we're shooting fast and we're like... So it's like he maintained a lot of control probably because of that. How much money do you think he made on Jurassic Park, though, versus how much money he made on E.T. How many, points-wise, what do you think he had? I mean, he must have had so much, such a bigger bite of Jurassic Park. You know what?

He probably had two apex mountains. Yeah. Yeah, he had a whole range. Exactly. Because he basically had two different careers. And he had jaw. Yeah. I mean, come on.

Every kid actor except Drew Barrymore, this was Apex Mountain. It just was. What's Drew Barrymore's Apex Mountain? The aforementioned Mad Love, boys on the side. Mad Love is pretty great. No, you're probably going to 2000s when she's cranking out good rom-coms. Fever pitch. Probably fever pitch range.

What's the first Adam Sandler one? Fifty first dates. Yeah, that one was pretty big. I like her. Oh, no, that was the second one. Wedding Singer is the first one. Her and Sandler are good together. They were good together.

You could say Weding Singer, possibly. D. Wallace, guess. Nice run for her though. Yeah. I like her. Adorable. Like, really pretty, but very mom-like too, which I think is a hard tightrope.

Was she like 29, though, when they made this? Like, this is one of those moms were a lot younger at this time. I feel like she had a short haircut, so they're like, you must be 40. I wouldn't be surprised. You're right. She's like probably 32. She is 34.

34. Okay. That's reasonable. You have to age shamer, Sean. No, I just mean that's what Hollywood did all the time. Yeah, if she's 34. I'm 35. Can you imagine if I had a 14-year-old and 10-year-old? I don't think you'd be sitting here with us right now. Apex Mountain for Aliens? No.

No. No, but I think if we go with the sub-genre of friendly aliens, then yes. Friendly aliens, okay. Right? No for aliens and alien movies. Apex Mountain for aliens is busting out of genre. unhurt stomach.

Yeah. An alien. People were like, this is, how about kids movies? People? Or you? I was like, kids movies? Wow. Oh, yeah, this is easily my favorite kids movie. That's a great question.

I think this is... I actually think the answer is no, even though I think it's the best kids movie. I think it just probably has to be Toy Story because of the Pixar era. Toy Story sets up a whole general. of kids' movies. This movie didn't really set up

like a bunch of successors' followers in that genre. So I think it has to be Toy Story. I mean, I don't know if this is defined as a kids movie,

but Star Wars, I feel like it's really the movie that captures that's in the action page. Too, though. Cute little girl actresses. It's Drew Barrymore.

It's tough to think of like... Shirley Temple. Yeah, you're going to be back. How about semi-degenerate California kids? Repo man You know About stealth divorce movies

Oh Stealth Do we know that they're divorced They're separated Well he's in Mexico With Sally Look at you splitting hairs Just saying

Would you if you had to pick One group of kids to hang out with Would you pick the E T kids The Goonies or the Stand By Me kids The kids in this movie Seemed like the best hang Oh stand by me kids man Oh yeah

You have to hang out that. Two of those four kids suck. Cory Feldman kid sucks. And then Fat Jerry O'Connell. He sucks in that movie too. He's annoying. Sincerely. What's his name, Vern?

He always at the comb, though. He actually went by fat Jerry O'Connell back in too. He was fat. Yeah. They had that change. Chages a sad card. How about insults with penis breath? Do you think this movie invented that, Mal?

That was definitely a popular insult when I was in elementary school. Definitely turned and looked right now. You're an expert on penis brush. It was an amazing penis breath run after this movie. I'm just telling you. Speak and spell? Definitely. Yeah.

Speaking and spell wasn't even the best one out of all those. What was the best one? There was one where it was just, you typed in where you heard the words, but it was almost like you held it like a calculator. It wasn't like as unwieldy. There was a better version of the same idea that I used to use. that's all I got for Apixmon unless you guys have anything else

What about merch? Now I don't think it has to be Star Wars But here's what I was going to ask Can we because I think like you mentioned Okay what about Grogu? We're talking about friendly aliens and I would say I don't think of Grogu as an alien Because we're not looking at Grogo

Through a purely human perspective Like we are E-T, right? Right? This is not the ring of course So I can't really hang with you on this But so. So there are so many connections between Star Wars and E.T. So if we allow that to just span time, that swath of time from 77, A New Hope, through Empire and then into E.T.

Is that the apex mountain? Well, that's the joke, too, about the movie is when we see the Yoda on Halloween night. I love that part. That Yoda and E.T. acknowledge each other, which is, according to Spielberg, an acknowledgement that they know each other and exist in similar galaxies. and it's all connected. I think it's Star Wars for the merch answer. It has to be. It has to be Star Wars.

Plus Lucas got points, so. They have to assume Spielberg had him too, right? Well, Spielberg had points on Star Wars and Lucas had points on E.T. Didn't they? Didn't they swap? It wasn't E.T. that he swapped with him for. It was something else, wasn't it? Was it 1941?

Because that's hilarious. Might have been close encounters. Okay. What about product placement with the Reese's pieces? Is this Apex Mountain for product placement? Well, it almost seems pure in this one. Exactly. Like a very organic thing before everyone was paying attention to it.

There's a lot of products in this movie, too, though. The fake Coke thing, the Coors. V8. Yeah, that's a good one. I caught V8 as a V8 lover. Of course. I love a spicy V8. Pickin' it's.

Why wasn't the dog more upset about ETB in the house? You just think E.T navigated that right away? He was at first. shit. He was at first. Harvey was upset and E.T. was upset. Let me tell you something. My dog Murph would not have been okay with E.T. at all. Would have been immediately

jumping on it. But E.T. can build a bridge of understanding with other beings. Keys guy. Yeah. Pushed it a little too hard with the hair. I used to do that. Keyes guy. Another shot of the keys. When I was working at Grantland for a while, I had my keys on a keychain.

Do we need five closeups of the keys or no? Well, I think for like, it's Mao's point. It's like for a kid, that's what you would remember is the jangling. It's a cool identifier. When E.T. is dying, maybe keep Gertie away from the room. I don't know. She's four-year-old girl. Maybe bring her upstairs. Surprising to see her in that room.

Hmm. Also, why are they operating on Elliott at the same time as E.T. in the same room? That's a real doctor-house shit. I think there's a lot of problem. We got to do fucking two spinal tass. Let's go. It's lupus. Well, leading to the biggest nitpick in this movie, Keyes guy going, guys clear out.

Yeah. This 10-year-old wants to say goodbye to the alien that we've been chasing for years and years. So can you guys go and maybe have a cigarette outside? It would be fine in here. But all of those doctors and scientists were just real doctors and scientists from USC, right? So they were like, sure. Yeah, cool. Got to go back to class.

I have a, this is a possibly unanswerable question, but it's also a nitpick. it's a little unclear when they basically put that house under space quarantine like NASA quarantine what do the neighbors think is happening I had that well they have that one shot of everybody

kind of outside the house yeah just like yeah cool you guys are going to the peanut gallery here and watch us discover life from another planet I felt like it would have been like a news crew is there within two days right somebody's very fair nitp

somebody's a ramp well here's my number one nipick other than what I had is how does Gertie show up at the end when E.T's leaving? With mom? Yeah. She drives.

She drives. And Peter and Keys. Yeah. Just the three of them. Yep. Nobody else. They outfoxed the cops. Yeah.

Hanging at the playground. Nobody followed the car. Stop for a breather. I don't know. You think that this should have been more accurate to police procedure? It would be amazing. Actually, like there's another cut scene where like all of Mike and Elliot's friends are catching

serious federal charges pervading the police and they're fucking a juvie for like 10 years Last name pick is this guy Bob Brickin wrote this piece on the internet about how ET is really a horror movie

and that this alien lands he immediately upends this person's life convinces the kid they have a psychic connection ruins his family life almost gets everyone killed and then abandons him

and then abandons them. It's pretty good essay. It's what we call in the business, Sean, a zag. Sure. Yeah. It's an impressive zag. It's a committed all-end zag on E.T. As a horror movie.

I respected it. Absolutely not. I respected it. This is like the, what we're seeing here with these two responding to this theory is like listening to Rissillo on the second part of the BS pot on Sunday night with Chris Faw. This is a, I do not want to engage.

in this. This is a bagley over Luca level take. You mentioned the quarantine. I have a couple nitpicks about the health and safety in this movie. Once again, you've turned towards me.

You are a fellow... A hygienic man. Yes, exactly. You think of germs often. Keys in pursuit of alien life. Chris and I don't think about germs at all. No. Just let it flow freely.

You two would have done what Keyes did, which is. You guys have been trading COVID back and forth for years now. Chris went to Texas. I would have let him. This is a guy who will put on a hazmat suit later, right? Yeah. Yeah.

And he finds this little nest of Reese's pieces and just eats them right off the ground. Okay. That's five second rule. Yeah. Five second rule among extraterrestrial life forms out in the redwood forest. And then worse than that. I would have turned those down. The entire house, as you noted, tented, right, full on quarantine procedure.

Everybody's in their hazmat suits. All the plastic tenting is zipped up. the second ET dies, everybody takes off their helmets, takes off their masks, opens up all the rooms. They just completely abandon all quarantine protocol because he died. But he's still there. And they're touching him. Yeah, there's fumes. I don't understand.

I don't understand. Why did that happen? It's so funny how everybody's different psychological crutches come out in these podcasts where Mel's like, he's a dirty little being. I don't know if I want to notice that for COVID. But I was like, put your back on. Why didn't they burn the body? Oh, my God.

The only other thing that, like, that threw me more than that was that four teenage boys would only have ordered one pizza, which I just can't wrap my mind around. He can make bikes fly. I think he can, like, keep his, like, his strep throat to himself. Why didn't they pick up the pizza? It always bothers me. I know. I know.

I know. Yeah. Step over it. They had a can of raid on the kitchen table along with their cans of frescas. Like, stop leaving food out in the yard. It was the 80s. People used to do. Kitchen tape.

Come on. Every time we get to this, like, picking nits in this whole section, I'm like, anytime we're doing a pod together, I think you're truly insane. Like, I've known you for a really long time, and I know you got a lot of quirks, but the things that you think of, which are not illogical, right? I feel like every time you're making a good point, but I'm also like you spend way too much time being concerned about this. I organized my picking nits by category this time. I won't read all the things below them, but they were just Hans Solo, health and safety. food, California living, and stealth. They all had some points.

I had a very minor nitpick about 10-year-old Henry Thomas, who I thought was 12 when I was watching this. I forgot how old he was. But him riding the bike like he's fucking Tony Hawk. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And he's going down hills and stuff. It just seems impressive.

You know what I noticed? And I don't know if I assume that those kids actually weren't riding those bikes during those sequences. But him in particular, you show him They sure influenced a lot of kids to do some dangerous as BMX riding. Definitely. But you can see those other kids riding a lot faster and a lot more sure-handed. And you see him, even when you re-watch the movie,

you can see him like stopping with his foot and stopping with his foot and kind of like turning and being more careful. And I don't know if that was because Henry Thomas couldn't ride that well or because he was trying to account for E.T. Or if the filmmakers were like, we have to make sure you don't ride too fast. But you do, like, you can see him being less shore-footed than the rest of the other kids. Yeah, the teens all land and do kind of a hip-cool motion with their feet. Seen locked in.

Yeah. And when Elliott and E.T. in the earlier sequence in the nighttime sequence land, they fall. Right? They fall over. I love that, again,

like, rewatching Stranger Things and all the bike and, you know, Will, like, falling off his bike, and that's how the whole thing starts.

It's just all traces back to this. Well, that leads us to our next category. Could this be her made as a 10-episode Netflix show? Yeah. It's called Stranger Things. 50 episodes.

Yeah. Probably in answerable questions. This is a great, this is a great movie for this. Where did they live? So it's never mentioned, we talked about, a little earlier. Based on the license plates, we know it's California. They think it's

Northeastern California near Lake Tahoe, but who knows? That's what, when Elliott is pointing on the Atlas and then the globe, he is pointing toward the Tahoe, Northern California area, for sure. So maybe he's not like the most pinpoint accurate GPS system? You say that. And yet, when Mike was like, how are you going to explain school, Elliot was ready with that zinger, how do you explain school to a higher to a higher intelligence? So I think he knows how to find his home on a map. But so, so It's basically, it looks like the valley when they're looking down on it, but then there's the redwoods. Yes, the redwoods.

But I like that. Again, it creates the sense of like, where are we really? You know, there's something slightly surreal about it, exactly. Can I tack on to that, though, another geographical and like topographical one? This is my number one unanswerable question for this movie. Why is there a cornfield in Elliott's backyard? You don't see the corn in any other. I know.

I love it, but it is unanswerable. I was wondering about that. too. These other camera angles? Stable crop here, yeah. It's just not there. It's amazing. It's a good one.

Later to be wholly adopted in the movie signs from M. Night Shyamalan. You can see a strong E.T. influence in that movie and in all, M. Night Shyamlon movies. Was E.T.

The Beyond Burger of aliens is our next question for unanswerable questions. He's plant-based. That's what CP3 has been eating for the last five years. Could you have eaten E. And much like CP3E

Crapes out in the fourth quarter. That's right. That's right. I'll be right here without a ring. The plant base is so funny. In the research, that just killed me. What could have been the worst thing to happen to E.T.

in this movie that's realistic? Because the nominees are, the raccoon could have taken, like, a side of his head out. Just, like, nod on a. Elliot could have flipped over. Elliot could have been flipped over on the handbars and just, like, squashed them. Yeah. Like contracted herpes? What are we talking about here?

I don't, well, I think bad stuff could happen with the. with the astronaut doctors. Like maybe they could have cut them open. He also could have called the wrong aliens. Like they could have gotten the wrong call. And then like basically an invading force shows up. Yeah. That's where night skies comes in.

Wow. Alcohol poison. Oh yeah. Alcohol poison. Yeah. Great call. He couldn't throw up because he was plant-based. Yeah.

Could have got a DUI? What do you have for it? You had some unanswerables? I had a few. What are all the keys on Keys is key ring for? What do we think those keys are all for? Where do they go? What do they open?

Jesus. A house, a storage locker? In the 80s, it was like, I think you had to have like your car key. Then they're, I think the trunk key was different. So it's just like a lot of stuff. They're opening something so important

that he doesn't take them off even when he pulls the hazmat suit on. They cannot leave his person at any point. How many keys do you have on your keyring? I don't know, like four maybe. You even keep a key? Do you have some sort of card that opens anything? I have three.

I still have the Gower key. We never go there anymore. It's just like symbolic for me. Retinal scan for you. I still have the Grandland icon on my iPad. What do you mean? I just have it on there. Like the app.

Take it off. It was like just goes to the website basically. Okay. When's the last time you read Grantlin? Look it. It's all by itself. It's hard to find something. I don't know if you notice this show.

It's a sweet photo that is. It's difficult to find content on Gratlin now. I didn't want to delete the icon. I felt like that was too final. So I've kept it alive. That's very sweet. Thanks. Wait, I had one more answerable.

I have a few more. Oh, you have a few more? Go, and I'll do my last one last. Do you think that they stopped making kids chloroform living beings at Elliott's school after they freed the frogs? Do you think the teachers kept walking around saying, just give them the chloroform? It won't hurt them. They won't feel it. And do you think they're not, what do you think?

Cotton ball soaked with chloroform in the classroom. They're not that far away from cocaine being in Coca-Cola. So, like, the idea that they're tossing around chloroform. form in a science class. And you have a lot of experience with chloroform. So in your experience But it's like as a self-pleasure thing. Oh, God.

Yeah. Speaking of pleasure and self-pleasure, who is Sally? Who do we think Sally is? Where did the dad meet Sally? What's the story there? I see her as like a... They run away to Mexico right away. That's a classic Dana Wheeler-Nickleson role. I would have said Burnett. Okay. Different flavor then. Yeah. He's making a shift here.

Yeah. Interesting. It's a move. Okay. What is... Also, can we defend Bob for a second or whatever his name was? Dee Wallace is like in her early 30s in this movie. Obviously, they met really young. I think she's supposed to be playing older, but she was, they met young, fell out of love. There's something- Bob met Sally and something magical happened with him.

You know, the whole story of Spielberg's parents, which I'm sure will be in that new movie that's coming out later this year, is really interesting, though, because he was led to believe that his father had committed this kind of grave sin against his mother, and then he finds out much later in life that it was. It was actually not exactly as that played. Actually, his father was, I don't know about more innocent, but wasn't the aggressor in the relationship and that he could have had a different relationship to him and seen him differently if he had had this information too. And you can see in this movie that, like, he misses his dad, but everyone knows that his dad is doing something

that is hurting his mom, you know? And so it kind of changes the lens through which you see this movie when you learn that information. It's all in that long Spielberg documentary that HBO did a couple of years ago. What's long? It's interesting. Speaking of Mary,

do you think that E.T. has the hots for the mom? Because there's that great moment on Halloween, right? When he looks up and he looks up, ooh. Wow. That's honestly the most disturbing thing I've ever heard. I mean, what's going on under that sheet? You sounded like butthead coming from the stagasm.

But head across the E. Did Keyes and Mary go on a date? Keyes was definitely like chatting her up after E.T. Everyone thought E.T. was dead. And then in the clearing at the end, he put the hand on the shoulder move. What do you think? I like it. I think Peter Coyote and D. Walls would be a great couple.

Yeah. Elliot Coyote. He's got a nice ring to it. There is one actual unanswerable question, though, which is what would Elliot's life have been like if he had said yes at the end? If he had gone. If he had gone into space to live with E.D. What would you have done? What would you have done?

What would you have done? Get on the ship? In the middle of nowhere, California, get in the ship. This is the difference between me and you is I don't abandon my family. I don't know. I think I probably would have...

Oh, God. You go, Chris. You go to space. I think I probably would have gone. Yeah. I like space. Sean and I stay. I definitely would stay.

Bill and Chris go. What would you tell Phoebe? I go. So I'm married in this case because at 10, me and Phoebe are married. And I'm just like... You come home. E.T's in your house.

Right. I wouldn't go now. I would have gone when I was 10. Phoebe was the girl in the biology class who you kept looking at. I would go. I mean, like, it's just like no one else in the history of humanity

ever had that. Are we sure about that? Oh, wait a second. Right. The Celtics had just gotten Larry Bird at this point. I'm not going. I don't know what was going to happen. Yeah.

It's like Miami Vice hasn't premiered yet. Yeah. I would list a lot of stuff. Same. I wasn't, I wasn't born, but, you know, Cal Ripkin on the O's got to stick around. Michael Manon only made one movie.

I can't believe. I'd want to see the buddy Ryan body bag game. My in answerable, which I think is a good last discussion for us for to wrap this up, is what of the next 10 years look like for Elliot? I think you're going to say for E.D. I mean, Elliot

is definitely a complete fucking drug burnout. Yeah, like I'm worried like he's chasing the high. Nobody believes him. He's doing whippets within a year. Yes. That gradually graduates to pot. Big LSD urban myth guy. It's like, yo, did you remember about Elliot? He thinks he has an alien friend because he licked a stamp once in his LSD.

How long before he's Dirk Diggler at the end of Boogie Nights getting in that truck? I don't agree. Elliot is making the Mandalorian. Like he's coming up with Grogo. He's tapping in to everything that he experienced. So he's bringing that magic to other people. The older brother though, definitely. In jail, out of jail.

Multiple kids. Oh, yeah. I had a lot of issues. What piece of memorabilia would you want from this movie about? This is one of the great movies for this question. I think you have to pick the bike, complete with the basket, Elliot's bike. Elliot's bike. Yeah.

With the basket? Yeah, it was tough to not pick the communicator, but I have to pick the bike. It's in the most, as we just discussed, the most iconic moment and visual in, like, movie history. The puppet is on, one of the four puppets is on the table. See, that would upset me because it's like you, if you see ET in your home and your room, you want him to talk, you want him to engage, you don't just want him to be still. So I wouldn't want that, actually With my look, I would have one of the puppets And then Murph would eat the puppet one night

When nobody was so... Murph goes full raccoon And gnauz off his cheek Yeah, it's just pieces of the puppet The thing is it's nice about this movie is you don't have to choose Because you can have an ice cold banquet beer right now You had six this morning

That's right The bike's a good one I was thinking the speaking spell would be a good Yeah, that's cool Yeah, that's great That NFL poster would be nice Just to know what he had on there Or that Elvis Costello poster

I guess the answer of this is the least amount of words you could describe what it is and people would be like, oh if you're like, what's that? Oh, that's Elliot's bike from ET people would be like, well. Yeah, Elliot's fake.

What's that football poster? Oh, remember Elliot and ET in his room? Now I'm saying multiple sentences. That's a good rule of thumb for that question. The bike's a good one. The puppet's pretty cool.

You'd have to put it in like a glass case though. The puppet must be somewhere. There's four. Is it in the Academy Museum or like, where is that? Spielberg definitely has one. Who won the movie? Spielberg. It's got to be.

Coyote. Coyote. This will make up for him not winning the Oscar. This right here. Steve wins it too. Who is runner up for who won the movie? I'd have Henry Thomas for that. I'm going to go just with the actual execution and conception of the alien.

Oh. Just E.T. isn't in? there's an even clearer answer, which is aliens won this movie. This is the first movie where we were like, maybe aliens are cool. Maybe they're nice. Maybe they'll come down and they'll be nice to us

and they'll have glowing chests and they'll be able to do teleconesis. They won't explode out of ours? Yeah. Yeah. Right? Nice aliens? Imagine that.

The answer, Spielberg. Our guy Steve did it again. Incredible. He had absolute power. This podcast was produced by our guy Craig Horace who was minus 13 years old

when it came out if he'd seen it I had seen it yeah ain't seen it he was that semi-happy with this choice

he's upset we've been laid an apatel lately we're back next week with another big one what is it

I'm not telling you you're not going to tell me or you're not going to tell the audience okay it's another massive movie solo soul man

how exciting we had to lay the smackdown after fucked up family February when people Why are you acting like fucked up Family February was something that was put upon you just own it. It was a great idea. I loved it. I would do it again. People can't get

enough of Rachel getting married. Yeah. The Ordinary People Pod was good. I feel like that was one of our better episodes honestly. And if the people don't agree Fuck them. That's it. You're on straight. One for us. You know what? Five for us. It's not burgers and fries every night here in the rewatch.

That's right. Sometimes we're going to make some whitefish. That's probably not what I'm. I went away with her. You're going to say flame and yawn? All right, that's it for the rewatching us. Thanks, Valerie. Thanks, John.

Thanks, Chris. We'll see you next week.