E.T. and Me

In 1981, 11-year-old Matt DeMeritt got a call that would change his life. He wasn’t a child actor, or a performer of any kind. He was just a suburban kid enjoying his summer break. But Matt had something no other kid had — something Steven Spielberg needed to make his most ambitious movie yet. * Note: This episode contains discussions of suicide. Please take care while listening. Hosted by Dana Schwartz, Zaron Burnett, and Jason English Written by Jake Rossen Produced by Josh Fisher Story Editor is Marisa Brown Editing and Sound Design by Mary Dooe, Jonathan Washington and Josh Fisher Mixing and Mastering by Baheed Frazier Voice Actors are Jess Krainchich and Juliet English Original Music by Elise McCoy http://www.elisemccoy.com Research and Fact Checking by Jake Rossen and Austin Thompson Show Logo by Lucy Quintanilla Executive Producer is Jason English Special thanks to Simon Brew. Check out the Film Stories podcast! https://filmstories.co.uk/podcast-page/episodes/ Thanks for listening! If you're enjoying Very Special Episodes, please leave us a rating and review on your favorite podcast platform. You can reach us at [email protected]. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.

• 0:04Speaker 01

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• 0:38Speaker 00

  This is an iHeart original.

• 0:44Dana Schwartz?

  It's late summer 1981. 11-year-old Matt Demerit is at his house in Torrance, California, when the phone rings. His mother picks it up. Matt can hear just one side of the conversation.

• 1:01Speaker 04

  Yes, yes, that's my son. Who? Jaws Steven Spielberg?

• 1:07Dana Schwartz?

  Jaws Steven Spielberg, the same director who has spent the past six years on top of Hollywood and who currently has the highest grossing movie of the summer in Raiders of the Lost Ark.

• 1:23Speaker 05

  In the distance, I could hear my mom and I kept having this very interesting conversation with someone who was interested in hiring me.

• 1:29Dana Schwartz?

  That's Matt.

• 1:31Speaker 05

  And basically told my mom that they're doing a movie and it involves someone being in a costume. They didn't want to give away too much, but someone being in a costume to walk around.

• 1:42Dana Schwartz?

  To put this call in perspective, Matt wasn't a child actor or a performer of any kind. At 11, he also wasn't a cinematographer or effects artist. He was just a suburban kid enjoying his summer before he had to go back to school. And school wasn't going so well for Matt, which we'll get to shortly. But Matt had something no other kid had, something that made him shy at times, but something Steven Spielberg needed in order to embark on his most ambitious movie yet. A movie that, for many years, held the title "highest grossing film of all time."

• 2:27Dana Schwartz?

  And, from a certain point of view, a movie that would feature Matt as the star. The movie went by many different names during its development. "Watch the Skies," "Night Skies," "A Boy's Life," "E.T. and Me," and finally, "E.T. the Extraterrestrial." And for Matt Demerit, it would prove a bittersweet experience, one that would help him through one of the most formative events in his life. For now, all he knew was that he needed to have a conversation with his parents and go meet Steven Spielberg. And, well, there was one other thing.

• 3:10Speaker 06

  Mom, who's Steven Spielberg?

• 3:14Dana Schwartz?

  For iHeartRadio, this is Very Special Episodes, an iHeart original podcast. I'm your host, Dana Schwartz, and this is E.T. and Me.

• 3:29Dana Schwartz?

  E.T. is one of those movies that I have such a distinct memory of my dad taking us to see the re-release in theaters when we were kids. So it was very, very exciting for me just to listen to this episode. Because, to be honest, I knew absolutely nothing about how it was made.

• 3:44Speaker 01

  I love it. One of our best episodes last season was the Titanic episode about how the cast and crew got poisoned on set. And it was similar. This is a good lane for us, where we have some beloved film and we're getting a lot of the behind the scenes.

• 3:58Dana Schwartz?

  From the people who actually made it.

• 4:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, also those big surprises like the creature for the Black Lagoon shows up. I love this one from all the Hollywood history.

• 4:05Dana Schwartz?

  Shall we dive back in?

• 4:06Speaker 01

  Hell, yeah.

• 4:10Dana Schwartz?

  In a lot of ways, Matt Demerit's childhood looked a lot like everyone else's, maybe like yours. He grew up in the suburbs of Torrance, a coastal city in Southern California with beautiful views and a laid back atmosphere. The local newspaper is named The Daily Breeze, if that tells you anything. Matt had some artistic inclinations, which he might have inherited from his father, an illustrator for the post office.

• 4:39Speaker 05

  I would draw a lot as a kid. I loved to look at my dad's drawings and ask him to draw me monsters and stuff. I was so fascinated when he could draw creatures for me. So I tried to emulate him. That was the kind of kid I was. I drew a lot and I skateboarded a lot and I liked to hang out with my friends and go to the park and do stuff like that.

• 5:04Dana Schwartz?

  That's Matt. And while there was plenty of normal kid stuff to do, Matt did it a little differently. That's because Matt was born without legs.

• 5:15Speaker 05

  Well, apparently my mother took an anti-nausea medication when she was pregnant with me called Bendectin. And that was a popular drug at the time for that condition. And it turned out that there were a lot of birth defects that seemed to be correlated with the drug. And so all the parents filed a class action lawsuit against the maker of the drug, Meryl Dow. Meryl Dow had a lot of lawyers and basically were able to counter all the evidence that they had that it might have caused birth defects. So nothing really ever came of it. Could either have been that or it could have been a natural birth defect. You know, sometimes that happens where you can't really attribute to anything specific.

• 5:57Dana Schwartz?

  For a variety of reasons, prosthetic legs were a poor solution for Matt, who learned to locomote around in a wheelchair in addition to walking on his hands. He even learned to use a skateboard.

• 6:10Speaker 05

  I loved skateboard parks when I was a kid. I couldn't do tricks, you know, quite at the Tony Hawk level, but I could go on those balls and I could do like hand plants and stuff like that.

• 6:21Dana Schwartz?

  Matt says that because he didn't lose his legs exactly, he never really missed them.

• 6:27Speaker 05

  I just always perceived my condition as normal. That's all I was used to. I wasn't struggling with the loss of limbs. I just always got around naturally. You know, I learned to walk on my hands, just like anyone learns to walk on their legs. Reaching for stuff or asking for help wasn't ever a problem. I could either climb up and get the thing that I needed, or I always had the support system for people who could get stuff that was out of my reach.

• 6:53Dana Schwartz?

  But there were other challenging things about Matt's life. His father had been diagnosed with a serious issue: bipolar disorder. The condition used to be referred to as manic depression. According to the National Institute of Mental Health, the diagnosis is characterized by clear changes in mood, energy, and activity levels. Depending on the particular diagnosis, people can experience moods that range from euphoric or energized to extremely despondent.

• 7:26Speaker 05

  My dad was in denial that he had bipolar, and so he wouldn't take this medication. And he'd be very withdrawn, which is one of the symptoms of being depressed. So at times, we wouldn't communicate at all.

• 7:40Dana Schwartz?

  But there was something that did help strengthen the bond between Matt and his dad: creature features, monster movies, men in rubber suits. It was a fantasy escape from a reality that could often prove challenging and a way to get closer to his father, who sometimes seemed far away.

• 8:02Speaker 05

  My dad and I used to watch monster movies on Saturdays. There was a kind of a marathon that happened every Saturday on Channel 5 called Monster Rally. And so the first horror film I saw was A Creature from the Black Lagoon.

• 8:19Dana Schwartz?

  While all this was happening, Steven Spielberg was grappling with something of a creature feature of his own, one that would require Matt's unique abilities, though no one quite knew that yet. By this point in the 1980s, the director was enjoying that rare blend of critical, commercial, and financial success that proved elusive for a lot of filmmakers. His adaptation of Peter Benchley's Beach Read: Jaws in 1975 was a phenomenon. In 1977, he led Jaws co-star Richard Dreyfuss to a fateful meeting with aliens in Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

• 9:02Dana Schwartz?

  Raiders of the Lost Ark, meanwhile, was waiting in the wings. It would spawn four sequels and make Indiana Jones one of the great movie heroes. Spielberg's only misfire had been 1941, a big WWII comedy that audiences didn't find very funny. In Hollywood terms, Spielberg had a blank check: the ability to make practically anything he wanted. And what Spielberg was looking to do was tell a story about a skittish, harmless alien who comes to Earth and befriends a boy still coming to terms with his parents' separation.

• 9:42Dana Schwartz?

  It would be a family movie, something with themes that resonated deeply with Spielberg, who was himself a product of divorce. His parents, Arthur and Leah, had gone their separate ways when Spielberg was 19 after several years of acrimony. His mother had grown close with his father's best friend, though Arthur told his children he was responsible for the separation. It strained Spielberg's relationship with his dad for years, and there's no question it informed his filmmaking. But E.T. would be his most personal work to date: a close look at a child dealing with

• 10:24Dana Schwartz?

  the anger of a fractured household, not yet able to process the convoluted adult world, something plenty of kids, including Matt, could understand.

• 10:35Speaker 01

  It was the story of his youth. It was his childhood. It was his parents' divorce.

• 10:42Dana Schwartz?

  That's Simon Bru. Simon is the founder of the Den of Geek website and a pop culture historian. Jason and I actually used to work with him at Mental Floss. And he hosts a podcast, Film Stories, that goes deep into the making of great films. You should listen, after you finish this episode, of course.

• 11:02Speaker 01

  And the idea wasn't that this would be his biggest film, although you can't ever design how an audience will react. The whole idea was, this is something smaller. This is me going right back to my roots. I'm just gonna almost do one for me.

• 11:17Dana Schwartz?

  A couple of years prior, Spielberg had envisioned a movie with a spaceship full of sinister aliens descending on a farmhouse. Just one of the aliens in that script, called Watch the Skies, and later Night Skies, was friendly. But after developing the film and even having its alien creatures designed, Spielberg realized that wasn't the movie he wanted to make. Instead, he commissioned a script for his Alien Buddy story for Melissa Matheson, whom he had met filming Raiders of the Lost Ark. Matheson was the future wife of that movie's star, Harrison Ford.

• 11:58Dana Schwartz?

  But more importantly, she was a screenwriter who was extremely adept at getting to the beating heart of Spielberg's story. The bond between an alien stranded on Earth and Elliot, a boy mourning the absence of his father after his parents separate. That left just one major piece of the puzzle: how to create E.T. While the technology was rapidly finding itself in summer blockbusters, artists couldn't just turn to computer animation. The alien would have to be in the scene with the actors. Early on, someone broached the idea of sticking a monkey in a costume.

• 12:42Dana Schwartz?

  That was quickly discarded. Then someone suggested putting a person in a suit. But Spielberg vetoed that as well. The entire point of E.T.'s physique was that it was something other than human. He didn't want anyone to think it was merely someone encased in rubber. Instead, Spielberg approached his Close Encounters colleague, a special effects artist named Carlo Rambaldi. A prop expert, Carlo had helped reimagine King Kong for the 1976 remake. But despite that movie's giant ape, E.T. would prove to be the bigger problem.

• 13:27Dana Schwartz?

  Carlo was given just a few months to conjure up E.T. as an animatronic puppet. He'd be animated by servos and wires by a team of puppeteers. They would control everything from his eyes to his mouth to his elongated neck, which went up and down like a carjack.

• 13:47Speaker 01

  It was in the end, production illustrator Ed Verone, who got kind of the eureka moment of what... He was the one who twigged what Spielberg was actually afterwards, that he wanted. It was described as "a combination of the innocence of youth and the wisdom of age", and that was in the design and the sketches that were being done for the creature. There was also the idea that they wanted E.T. to be, quote, "a creature that only a mother could love", which I really, really love as well.

• 14:17Dana Schwartz?

  Rambaldi was a master, and E.T. quickly evolved into a highly convincing presence, with big, bulbous eyes that took inspiration from Albert Einstein. The various E.T.s Rambaldi built could express themselves, blink, move their mouth, furrow a brow.

• 14:36Speaker 01

  And what Rambaldi told Spielberg is, "You're gonna need nine months to do this." Spielberg gave him six, and they just worked around the clock to put this creature together. And, I mean, they really made it... I think they made in the end three different E.T.s, with different electronics and different capabilities within them. And what Spielberg was wanting, really, that he wanted a creature that was slow and sure-footed, and, as Spielberg said, "He's much more conditioned to a heavier atmosphere, a heavier gravity", and they got really, really forensic on what this creature and what this character was. It's supposed to be an alien walking on a planet, which it wasn't familiar with.

• 15:18Dana Schwartz?

  But even Rambaldi didn't have a perfect solution for E.T. walking or performing big, physical movements like falling down. To try and control his feet via "remote robotics" would make him look like a jerky marionette or a clumsy, battery-operated toy. It would also cost another million dollars for what was supposed to be Spielberg's tiny movie. So Spielberg listened as his producer, Kathleen Kennedy, suggested having a human performer inside of a costume, provided it was someone close to E.T.'s stature. That eliminated most adults.

• 16:00Dana Schwartz?

  Rambaldi quickly created a simple mock-up suit that the four-year-old daughter of Spielberg's lawyer climbed into for a screen test. She hated every minute of it, throwing a tantrum. But the idea itself was sound. The kid in a suit looked convincing. Now, all they had to do was find the right kid. Someone had the idea to call UCLA Medical Center. UCLA had a program devoted to the treatment of individuals with unique physical attributes. One of the physicians at UCLA recommended Matt, who had undergone physical therapy there.

• 16:44Dana Schwartz?

  What made Matt unique was how he got around. Walking on his hands gave Matt a very specific skill, giving him a profile similar to E.T. By using his hands as E.T.'s feet, he could step in when E.T. needed more agility than the puppeteers could provide. Matt could tackle stunts that might prove too daunting for a little person inside the suit.

• 17:12Speaker 05

  So Universal Studios reached out to UCLA Medical Center to see if there was anyone with dwarfism or was in a small stature that could fit in the costume. And the only one they had on hand who was short was me. And I think they kind of pitched it to them. They said that I could walk on my hands, just like my hands were legs. And they said, that's intriguing. Would he be able to come down for an audition? So the doctor gave him my number.

• 17:39Dana Schwartz?

  Matt's doctor acted as his talent agent. Very L.A. That's how a producer wound up phoning Matt's mom and how Matt wound up going to audition for Steven Spielberg, a guy he barely knew. In fact, Matt's father needed to take him to see Raiders that summer to give Matt a better idea of just what he was getting himself into. Oddly enough, Matt was already a fan of Carlo Rambaldi. Carlo had done the mechanical effects for the alien head in the movie Alien, the R-rated gore fest which Matt had seen in 1979 as a nine-year-old. He was a monster kid, remember?

• 18:24Dana Schwartz?

  So for Matt, going to Rambaldi's effects house was like going to Willy Wonka's chocolate factory. He was in creature heaven.

• 18:33Speaker 05

  Got in the studio and, oh, it smelled so interesting, too. It was like a workshop, you know? It was like Geppetto's workshop. It smelled like wood and sawdust and plaster. And that was very intriguing that I was going into this very creative environment, you know, where there are all these creatures that Carlo had designed for other movies.

• 18:55Dana Schwartz?

  At the shop, Matt met Spielberg, who did something that immediately endeared him to his would-be E.T. Spielberg didn't loom over him like a gargoyle, hands on knees. He bent down so he could look Matt eye to eye, the same way E.T.'s telescoping neck allowed him to come face to face with new friends. Spielberg understood how looking up at the world can be intimidating. He wanted Matt to feel comfortable.

• 19:25Speaker 05

  That was something interesting about him. Not everybody did that. I remember Carlo doing that. And it's not that it's rude that other people don't do that. They just, it's something that some people think about immediately. And some people don't really take into consideration until maybe later. He did it immediately, and I thought that that was pretty cool.

• 19:43Dana Schwartz?

  Spielberg asked Matt about getting around on a skateboard. Matt offered that it wasn't his only way of travel. In the shop, Matt was stuffed into another makeshift E.T. suit and then showed them a couple different ways he got around.

• 19:59Speaker 05

  Then I demonstrated to him the walk that I did eventually use in the movie, where my hands are the feet and I lift my torso up so it's not touching the ground at all. My hands amble back and forth, just like legs would, or feet. And he said, "That's the one that he thinks is gonna work." And then they captured me doing that walk on camera, played it back, and looked really good to them.

• 20:26Dana Schwartz?

  The "hands for feet" method proved surprisingly effective. It gave E.T. the kind of distinctive, not-of-this-earth gait Spielberg wanted, one people weren't used to seeing. And practically, no one but Matt could do it. But it would be a little while before Matt heard anything definitive. Then came another phone call. Matt was offered the job. Matt and his parents had a talk. Sure, it was cool, but it would also interrupt the start of Matt's school year. The movie would shoot from September to December 1981.

• 21:07Dana Schwartz?

  They wanted to be sure it was something he really wanted to do. But for Matt, delaying school was no big deal. On top of everything else, he had the bane of any shy kid's existence: bullies. And Matt's bullies were especially cruel.

• 21:27Speaker 05

  Boy, was it great to get away from school because around that time I was bullied a lot. That was like the peak time of my bullying. Some of the bullies would come up from behind my wheelchair. I'd take my wheelchair to school and they'd tip the wheelchair over.

• 21:43Dana Schwartz?

  That would be enough for any kid to have to deal with, but the situation at home was also coming to a head. Matt's mother was frustrated. His father wasn't willing to get the help he needed.

• 21:56Speaker 05

  They were getting a lot of fights about that kind of stuff. He wasn't abusive or he wasn't emotionally abusive. He didn't yell. He wasn't that kind of person, but just the general atmosphere at home when he was deep in depression was something that was great to escape from during that time.

• 22:16Dana Schwartz?

  So in September 1981, Matt went off to do something he never dreamed of, play a crucial role in making the ultimate creature feature come to life. Like Elliot, he'd be taking on new responsibilities that would distract him from his own problems. But in order to do that, he'd have to overcome his inherent shyness while taking direction from the most successful director in the world.

• 22:52Speaker 01

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• 22:54Speaker 02

  My sister had amazing.

• 22:55Speaker 01

  The ideal treatment is.

• 22:57Speaker 00

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• 23:26Dana Schwartz?

  You'd think a kid going off to shoot a Steven Spielberg movie would be the talk of the playground, but Matt left to film the movie with relatively few people knowing what he was up to.

• 23:38Speaker 05

  I didn't have a lot of friends at the time. I think I told my best friend that I was doing it, and he also didn't know that much about movies and about Spielberg. He came from a really religious background, so his parents wouldn't even let him see any kind of movies. So I think I only told him.

• 23:54Dana Schwartz?

  This was probably something Spielberg preferred. The details surrounding the character of E.T. were highly classified. In the pre-internet age, it was easier to plug leaks to the media. Spielberg wanted his young actors left in the dark, making their first impression of the creature a genuine one. Matt, of course, had already gotten a preview, and by the time he showed up on location in Tahunga, California, a custom rubber latex suit had been crafted just for him. It weighed 30 pounds, and yes, it made him sweat. A lot.

• 24:35Speaker 05

  One interesting thing is, though, that the recipe for latex was much worse back then, because latex shrank. And latex doesn't have a lot of pores in it, but if it shrinks, the pores are going to get smaller. So, long story short, the costume would get smaller and hotter every time I got into it, because the latex shrank. So thankfully, that didn't show on camera. I definitely felt it.

• 25:01Dana Schwartz?

  Originally, Matt was hired for just one scene, where E.T. needed to take a tumble. But it turned out E.T. would be doing that a lot, so Matt's responsibilities kept growing. On set, he quickly became known as Stunt E.T.

• 25:20Speaker 05

  Pratt falls. Yeah, Pratt falls, agility, falling down, all that stuff.

• 25:25Dana Schwartz?

  Matt, of course, was no practiced stunt person. But this was the 80s and film producers sometimes pushed the edges of what was appropriate.

• 25:35Speaker 05

  That's one of the kind of dangerous aspects of filmmaking, especially back then. Is this like a lot of fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants kind of attitude? You know, it's like they gotta make budgets. They can't go over budget just fussing with something and make sure that someone's not gonna get hurt. They put a lot of padding in the costume, so even when I fell flat on my face, there was like lots of styrofoam protecting my face.

• 25:59Dana Schwartz?

  One of Matt's bigger scenes as E.T. was when the alien falls over drunk, which, we remind you, is not something an 11-year-old can portray with any conviction. But Matt was up for it.

• 26:12Speaker 05

  And I remember being so excited because I was walking very easily in the costume. And I felt like I could do everything that they were directing me to. I could hear all the directions very clearly. I saw all the marks they wanted me to hit. And whenever they wanted me to kind of play up the fall a little bit, they wanted me to not fall immediately, which is what I did. They wanted me to extend it a little bit and like add some expression to it. And I remember when I did that, and I did that, the kind of final fall on my face, everybody laughed. And it sounded like what it would sound like in the audience, you know, when the movie was playing. So I thought, okay, I think this is gonna go over well.

• 26:56Dana Schwartz?

  In contrast to his problems at school, Matt found fast friends in Henry Thomas, who played Elliot, and Robert McNaughton, who played Elliot's older brother, Michael. There were no cliques, no social hierarchy, no grade school pettiness or cruelty, just three kids on the set of a movie.

• 27:17Speaker 05

  We completely bonded as soon as we met because we were like, well, I was gonna say we're in the same age group, but actually Rob was the same age as the older kids. But he had more like a youth mentality and he also knew that it would be, it would benefit all of us to kind of like bond together. So we were our own group on that set. And that was fantastic because it rescued me from that situation. It was like a, just an escape from being bullied in school. And also, you know, who likes doing schoolwork, right? And it got me away from that situation at home to where my mom and my dad were fighting a lot and going through that trauma.

• 27:54Dana Schwartz?

  The drama Matt's referring to is a pretty seismic event in the life of a kid. In between Matt being fitted for his suit and the start of shooting, his parents made a big decision.

• 28:09Speaker 05

  There was a few weeks before we started when he was living at home. And so when I went out to get fitted, and when I went to Carlo Ramboli's studio to practice in the costume and meet with the crew and just, and prepare before shooting, that's when my dad lived at home. But then when we were actually shooting, my dad was actually living apart from us.

• 28:31Dana Schwartz?

  Matt's ET family was, at least for a time, more stable than his actual family. In addition to making friends with Henry and Robert, Matt also met ET's other half. This ET was a 34-year-old adult named Pat Bylon, who was roughly 2 feet 9 inches tall and weighed 45 pounds. Pat was born with cartilage hair hypoplasia, a bone growth disorder that can lead to dwarfism. Pat was used for ET scenes that didn't require ET tipping over. For example, the one in which ET is being stashed away

• 29:15Dana Schwartz?

  in a bicycle basket and wrapped in a blanket, plus other walking scenes.

• 29:21Speaker 05

  I remember he was a really nice guy. He didn't have any ego about him. We kind of filmed ET in sequence, or that's the way the story's been told anyway. So I came on about two weeks into filming, two or three weeks into filming. And Pat never made me feel like I was on the outside looking in.

• 29:40Dana Schwartz?

  Pat's background was fascinating. He had only recently broken into films, working on a Chevy Chase movie titled "Under the Rainbow", a fictitious retelling of the filming of "The Wizard of Oz" and the rumors surrounding its little people performers getting wild after filming.

• 30:00Dana Schwartz?

  Before acting, Pat had been a bouncer at a bar in Ohio. It was a publicity stunt for the business, but it worked. He later became a dispatcher for a sheriff's office. By the time E.T. rolled around, Pat was having some back problems. He might start a scene, then realize he needed to rest. Or the action might be too dangerous for Pat, whose condition didn't allow for him to fall down much. That's where Matt came in.

• 30:31Speaker 05

  I did a lot of the same scenes that Pat did, and Pat was tired. They'd bring me in, and I'd do like a, just the same thing, but it'd be a different actor in the costume.

• 30:41Dana Schwartz?

  Despite Matt doing most of the stunts, it was Pat who probably came closest to having an E.T.-related emergency room visit. Pat was in the costume and sporting a battery pack when the power source caught fire, setting the adorable alien ablaze for a brief moment before a crew member stepped in.

• 31:04Speaker 05

  It could have gone another way. It could have gone really bad, but they were just lucky, and they got him out of the costume in time, or whatever. However, they'd resolved that situation. But it's like, yeah, you can't foresee all these things, because like you said, it's no, nothing like this has ever been done before.

• 31:20Dana Schwartz?

  At one point, there was a third E.T., a woman named Tamara Detrow, who stepped in for Pat when needed. E.T. also had a different set of hands for many scenes. They belonged to Caprice Roth, a mime hired by the production who wound up becoming the connective tissue of E.T.'s performance. She managed to make a cohesive team out of the many puppeteers controlling his facial movements, synchronizing them with her gestures. Of course, anyone controlling a puppet will give in to the temptation of satisfying on-set boredom.

• 32:02Dana Schwartz?

  And with up to 15 puppeteers, there were plenty of opportunities. There are scenes you'll never see of E.T. picking his nose, puffing on a cigar, or pinching the rear end of a passing production crew member. Mostly, though, people believed in E.T., deeply and wholeheartedly. And they believed in Matt, who was coming through in a big way despite acting in a vacuum. Owing to the secrecy surrounding E.T., Matt didn't get a script or see dailies of the footage. He was just living in the moment.

• 32:44Dana Schwartz?

  But Matt's best memory on set didn't come from a scene. It came when his father paid him a visit. His parents didn't normally come to filming, having their own jobs and trusting a Steven Spielberg set would be a safe place for their child. The production sent a car to pick Matt up every morning and drive him back at night. So Matt's dad showing up was a big deal.

• 33:11Speaker 05

  On one of the days that he was on a manic high, he decided to come down to the set and surprise me, which is great because my mom hadn't been there, my dad hadn't been there, and for him to share a day on the set with me was awesome. I remember him putting me on his shoulders and walking me around the set, and he was introducing himself as my dad, and he's met Spielberg and Carlo and a lot of the cast and crew. You know, he was with me, he was happy, he experienced it, and I came away with one great memory of him being there with me on the set.

• 33:51Dana Schwartz?

  As with most movies, there was a few-month gap between E.T. wrapping filming and its release. After returning to school but before the film had come out, Matt noticed something a little strange. He wasn't being bullied as often. It wasn't because the kids knew he had played E.T. They didn't know anything about E.T. It was because Matt had a secret, one that gave him a sense of confidence and self-worth.

• 34:22Speaker 05

  They didn't know why I was gone, but there was like an intangible security and confidence that I got from it. Because as soon as I got back to school, the bullying did not resume. It stopped completely. And it wasn't because the movie came out, it was just, you know...

• 34:39Dana Schwartz?

  Matt had never intended for his work to be some big secret. But in order for audiences to believe in E.T., Steven Spielberg was reluctant to admit the alien was the work of Hollywood. E.T.'s success hinged in part on Matt and everyone else involved with the creature being invisible.

• 35:09Dana Schwartz?

  In the weeks leading up to the premiere of E.T., the movie gained more and more momentum. Test screenings weren't just successful. Audiences were enraptured, laughing, crying, and falling for an alien who didn't meet what you would consider conventional standards of attractiveness. The reception E.T. received even took Spielberg by surprise. The film made its entire $10 million budget back in a single weekend. It was the number-one film in America for six weeks and kept returning to that position throughout the rest of the year. It just kept playing and playing.

• 35:53Dana Schwartz?

  By the next year, it had outgrossed Star Wars to become the most successful film in history. It was a modern Wizard of Oz, the rare family film that didn't pander to kids or bore adults, the movie that became must-see viewing. Here's Simon Bru again.

• 36:16Speaker 01

  Everyone at my school saw E.T. at the cinema, pretty much everyone. I mean, it was Star Wars, E.T., and Superman 3. Those were the three things that were most important in your life to watch.

• 36:26Dana Schwartz?

  Why did people respond to E.T.? For children, it was that the movie understood them and took their problems seriously. For adults, it was the ability to see through younger eyes and recall the excitement and fears of an unknown world. The next time you watch the film, try to notice how Spielberg... Spielberg shot it. The camera is often just a few feet off the ground, as though the audience is experiencing it from the perspective of a kid or a short alien. For Simon and millions of other kids, E.T. was a controlled catharsis.

• 37:08Dana Schwartz?

  With his team of craftspeople, actors, and Melissa Matheson, Spielberg had somehow made people believe in E.T. And in E.T.'s bond with Elliot, which made their separation at the climax all the more wrenching.

• 37:25Speaker 01

  We just went in to see it. And I mean, all I remember as that seven-year-old was just being traumatized, just being absolutely inconsolable on the way out. And I still get that as well. And every time I watch it, I still get it. But it was a thing. I mean, all we were told going in is, you're gonna see it and you're gonna come out crying. And we still all just went in. Our parents still all took us, the sadists.

• 37:52Dana Schwartz?

  Matt went to see the movie, of course, with his parents, and kept looking for scenes in which he appeared under pounds of rubber as E.T. There was the scene with E.T. inebriated, and the one where a Polaroid flash causes him to topple over.

• 38:11Speaker 05

  The other scene, so it was all the kitchen scenes. Anytime E.T. is in a bathrobe, that's me. So the scene where she, where Dee Wallace comes home, the mother, and she's putting everything in the refrigerator, she's completely distracted, and she doesn't see me walking around her. And then she opens the refrigerator door and it hits me in the face, and I fall over. That was me.

• 38:33Dana Schwartz?

  In the midst of all this, the media always kept going back to a central question: How? How had E.T. been cobbled together to make for one of the few truly convincing creatures in movie history? Time and time again, Spielberg would dodge the question. E.T. was mysterious. Even the first trailer for the movie avoided showing what he looked like. He told the press at the Cannes Film Festival where E.T. premiered that E.T. was made out of love, and that it took 12 hearts to make E.T.'s heart beat.

• 39:14Dana Schwartz?

  Asked what materials were used, he said that "you will not hear the answer to that question from my lips." It seemed like Spielberg and Universal wanted E.T. to remain an illusion. They had never expressly told Matt not to discuss his work in the movie, but Spielberg's reluctance to explain the techniques used was something of a hint. Plus, think about it. What if a kid in your school said he was in the biggest movie of all time? You couldn't see him, but he was there. It's kind of like the kid who kept insisting his uncle worked for Nintendo. It just smelled like baloney.

• 39:55Speaker 05

  I mean, I might have started telling them, and then I think maybe I initially did, and then they'd say they'd seen a TV segment or read Starlog magazine or something, how it was a robot, or how maybe it was just this one actor or whatever, and they disbelieved me. And I think after that, I didn't even try and convince them. I just figured eventually they'd figure it out.

• 40:23Dana Schwartz?

  Almost everyone involved with E.T. experienced the shadow of it. Henry Thomas remembers getting mobbed after the movie came out. Even Pat Bylon got plenty of press attention. But Matt was different. He was famous in plain sight: an anonymous celebrity. But notoriety wasn't really the point. It was about an experience that had come along at a good time. The highs of E.T. were in sharp contrast to Matt's home life. His parents had separated, his father's bipolar disorder going untreated and slowly getting worse.

• 41:05Dana Schwartz?

  Then, later in 1982, Matt heard the news no child should ever have to endure. Tragically, his father died by suicide.

• 41:17Speaker 05

  So yeah, just lucky happenstance if something came along at that time that would bring all this residual stuff that would help me absorb the impact of my father dying.

• 41:29Dana Schwartz?

  There's a curious thread that weaves through E.T. From the beginning, Spielberg had envisioned it as a way into his feelings about his own family, the divorce of his mother and father. In the film, Elliot mirrors that same struggle. And in Matt's world, the film had come at a time his family suffered an incredible loss.

• 41:52Speaker 05

  It was crazy. I mean, who knows? You know, if I didn't have the cushion of E.T. to counterbalance the bitterness of that experience, I don't know what would have happened or what kind of person that I'd be today. You know, like making all those new friends and having them as my support system after my dad died was huge. Like, Robert found out, Robert McNautin, the guy who played Michael, the older brother in E.T., he was really supportive after that. Like, he'd heard about my father. Like, we'd gotten together a couple of times after E.T. came out and really had a good time.

• 42:33Speaker 05

  But after he heard my father kill himself, he'd make an effort to come by my house and we'd go do stuff on the weekends, like go watch movies or go play tag and water balloons and all that stuff. And just do the stuff would distract me, the horror of that time. That was really great. So E.T. came along at a great time.

• 42:58Dana Schwartz?

  E.T. never really lost that power, for Matt or for anyone. It was re-released in theaters periodically through the 1980s. Spielberg refused to allow it to be available on VHS until six years later, in 1988. There was a magic to it that he largely kept preserved. There would never be a sequel or even much talk of one. Henry Thomas, who portrayed Elliot... appeared with E.T. in a 2019 commercial for Comcast that Spielberg approved of, but not much else. And while it might seem easy to conjure up E.T. as a CGI creation, or even another

• 43:42Dana Schwartz?

  latex costume, it's not. Comcast used a hybrid option.

• 43:47Speaker 05

  There's a reason for that, because latex, you just can't do a one-to-one copy of the original puppet. There's something's gonna be off, the paint, the wrinkles, the eyes. I don't know. Well, in the movie itself, you kind of see where E.T. almost has like a lazy eye, because they just couldn't get the, one of the eyes to quite be symmetrical with the other one. You know, they did a photo session with Michael Jackson. You see, there was something about E.T.'s eye that was degenerating. So, yeah, so, I mean, going back to what we're saying about the sequel, even if you got everything right, but you just couldn't nail E.T., you couldn't get that E.T. look good matchup from the first movie.

• 44:29Dana Schwartz?

  Matt wasn't completely done with the film business, though E.T. would be a tough act to follow. A few years later, in 1985, he appeared in The Fourth Wise Man, a biblical tale playing a leper. He also appeared in Cyborg 2, a sequel to a 1989 Jean-Claude Van Damme film that couldn't even manage to re-enlist Jean-Claude Van Damme.

• 44:55Speaker 05

  I had a speaking part in that. I'm not in costume, well, I'm not in like a latex costume. So that was like a futuristic dystopian picture. Angelina Jolie's in it, Jack Palance, Elias Coteas, a lot of great stars in that, Billy Drago from The Untouchables. And so, yeah, so I had a speaking part in that one. That was probably my most memorable experience after E.T. was actually doing a legit speaking scene, dialogue scene with, with those actors. I played a character named Manhole Man. He was like a doorman to the overworld.

• 45:33Dana Schwartz?

  But for all of his immediate success, Matt didn't fall in love with acting.

• 45:38Speaker 05

  It never felt natural to me. And then the number of roles that come to, you know, handicap people, especially someone who doesn't have any legs, they're few and far between.

• 45:51Dana Schwartz?

  Matt went on to teach English and then got into writing and podcasting. He makes convention appearances, a way for fans of ET to put a human face to the character. Matt Demerit, the Creature Kid, didn't know it at the time, but he became part of a legacy: people who breathed life into fantastic creations. Once, not long ago, Matt found himself at a convention and sitting alongside Rico Browning, the man who played the Creature from the Black Lagoon. A 1954 classic Matt grew up watching with his dad.

• 46:29Speaker 05

  I was very flattered because he gave me his autograph and told me how much he loved ET and we struck up a conversation and I realized as I was talking to him that, hey, you know, this is the company I'm in, you know? I'm part of this company. I was a man in a very famous Creature suit.

• 46:47Dana Schwartz?

  This is ET for Matt, a time in his life that was a mixture of happiness and loss. The movie is something audiences have treasured, but it was the making of ET that allowed Matt to believe in himself.

• 47:03Speaker 05

  There's a great word, bittersweet, you know? And I think life is just bittersweet. It's not always bitter, it's not always sweet, you know? It's sometimes it just, it converges into an experience like that, you know, where these two concurrent things happen, both positive, one positive, one incredibly negative. It gave me the confidence to discourse with people and interact with people, you know, because I did have this hook. It wasn't just my disability wasn't just the subject of the conversation, but this glorious movie that people cried during and laughed at, you know? So it's really hard for me to get my mind around that.

• 47:45Speaker 05

  So there's always going to be a bit of a detachment from that, like pinching myself. Is it still real? You know, like when I do convention with, with Robert and Henry today, it's like, I can't believe 40 years later, we're still talking, you know? And we're still having the same laughs that we had back then and we're still celebrating this movie 40 years later.

• 48:11Speaker 01

  GLP-1s are changing weight loss.

• 48:13Speaker 02

  My sister had amazing.

• 48:14Speaker 01

  The ideal treatment is.

• 48:16Speaker 00

  Seems like everyone's a GLP-1 expert these days. But when it comes to your health, it pays to listen to someone who actually is. Orderly Meds makes it easy to get started with personalized support along the way. And with your first month's order, we're giving you the second month free. Visit orderlymeds.com. Bringing orders to the chaos of GLP-1s. Individual results may vary. Eligibility and prescription required. Not medical advice. Visit orderlymeds.com for details. Compound and medications are not FDA approved.

• 48:43Speaker 01

  Okay, we usually cast these stories at the end. It's kind of hard to make this one a movie. And I've also been very against making any ET sequels all these years. But does anyone want to pitch an ET sequel on the fly here?

• 48:57Dana Schwartz?

  Oh, God, an ET sequel. Okay, Elliot goes to his planet, right? That's the classic sequel reversal.

• 49:03Speaker 01

  Oh, that's good. I like that. That's brilliant. Write that. You have to write that.

• 49:08Dana Schwartz?

  Yes, I'm sure I'll write that. That everyone will be clamoring for.

• 49:12Speaker 01

  I was thinking about a vengeful ET later in life coming back. Less of a heartwarming story than what we're done. Oh.

• 49:20Dana Schwartz?

  A vengeful ET.

• 49:21Speaker 01

  He comes back to destroy the earth.

• 49:24Dana Schwartz?

  Or ET comes back as Elliot is getting a divorce as an adult and he has to work through that.

• 49:30Speaker 01

  Ah, yes. Midlife crisis Elliot. Brilliant. These are all good, Dana. Yeah. For a very special character. So in Cold Open, that was my youngest daughter Juliette, who we roped into doing a little voice acting. She gave us multiple takes. Total pro. If nepotism is not allowed for these official rankings, but we're cool with looking the other way for some medical ethics, I would pick the doctor who got his former patient his start in Hollywood. Oh, yeah. Good point.

• 49:59Dana Schwartz?

  I'm going to actually say the casting director who's like, we should call a hospital. That's the move.

• 50:07Speaker 01

  I'm going with the crew who went and put the fire out. I thought that was brilliant because you got to have those people fast acting, clear headed, no panic. Also loved Simon Brew. Another shout out to Simon to coming on and giving us some Hollywood history.

• 50:20Dana Schwartz?

  I love Simon.

• 50:21Speaker 01

  Old friend, great voice, good podcast. Go check out Film Stories after this, as Dana said. So this was a hard one to cast, by the way, because you have the main actor.

• 50:31Dana Schwartz?

  Like Matt, he's got to play himself, right? I mean, these are automatically, this is the Jackie Robinson story. You got to play yourself, brother. But other than that, I could cast Steven Spielberg as Jesse Eisenberg. I thought that one worked. I could see that. Melissa Matheson, screenwriter, Emma Stone, but as a brunette. And then Carlo Rimbaldi, Adrian Brody. He feels like the outsider's outsider in Hollywood. I think he can bring that right creature feature energy. And then finally, as Pat, the little person, I thought the actor Danny Woodburn, who played Seinfeld's comic friend on Seinfeld, is a kind of like a brilliant little person actor. I thought he could give you that Hollywood veteran vibe. That sounds great.

• 51:06Speaker 06

  Love it. I would see that version of this. I don't know if it's officially an E T sequel, but let's talk. But I do want to see Dana's.

• 51:12Dana Schwartz?

  A hundred percent. Both of them, actually. My alien, it's sort of like an Alien Three situation.

• 51:20Speaker 04

  Very Special Episodes is made by some very special people. This show is hosted by Dana Schwartz, Sarah Burnett, and Jason English. Today's episode was written by Jake Rossen. Our producer is Josh Fisher. Our story editor is Marisa Brown. Editing and sound design by Jonathan Washington and Josh Fisher. Mixing and mastering by Baheed Frazier. Official thanks to our voice actors, Jessica Krychich and Juliette English. Original music by Elise McCoy. Research and fact checking by Jake Rossen and Austin Thompson. Show logo by Lucy Quintanilla. Our executive producer is Jason English. Want to email the show?

• 52:02Speaker 04

  You can reach us at very speciales episodes at gmail dot com. Very Special Episodes is a production of iHeart Podcasts.

• 52:16Speaker 01

  G L P ones are changing weight loss.

• 52:18Speaker 02

  My sister had amazing.

• 52:19Speaker 01

  The ideal treatment is.

• 52:20Speaker 00

  Seems like everyone's a G L P one expert these days. But when it comes to your health, it pays to listen to someone who actually is. Orderly Meds makes it easy to get started with personalized support along the way. And with your first month's order, we're giving you the second month free. Visit orderly meds dot com. Bringing orders to the chaos of G L P ones. Individual results may vary. Eligibility and prescription required, not medical advice. Visit orderly meds dot com for details. Compound and medications are not F D A approved.

• 52:46Speaker 07

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.