Steven Spielberg regrets editing the guns out of E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial
"All our movies are a kind of a signpost of where we were when we made them."
Aux News E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial
20 years ago, for the 20th anniversary rerelease of E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial, director Steven Spielberg famously edited the scene where Elliott and E.T. are running from the police to replace the guns in the officers’ hands with radios. The decision makes sense on paper, since it’s weird to have cops waving their guns at a kid and his alien friend, but it always felt like a weird move for Spielberg—since it seems more like something his buddy George Lucas would do anyway.
Speaking at the Time 100 Summit (via Variety), Spielberg says it was “a mistake” to edit out the guns, adding, “I never should have done that.” Spielberg says that E.T. “is a product of its era” and “no films should be revised based on the lenses we now are, either voluntarily or being forced, to peer through.” And while Steven Spielberg regrets messing with his own movie, he also went on to add that he doesn’t think anyone should ever be doing that to their movies (cough cough, George): “All our movies are a kind of a signpost of where we were when we made them, what the world was like, and what the world was receiving when we got those stories out there.”
Spielberg’s comments come as the hot new trend in publishing has become reprinting old works with all of the prickly, poorly aged bits removed, like the books of Roald Dahl, Ian Fleming, and Agatha Christie. (It’s tough to argue with it for the Fleming books if we’re being totally honest, since he had a habit of making James Bond comment on everyone’s race for some reason).
What this really means, though, is that we’ll probably have to wait a long time for some brave soul to make a Special Edition of Jaws where the crummy animatronic shark is replaced with a slick CG model. The soulless, dead-eyed nature of CG creations will actually work this time, because the shark is supposed to have lifeless eyes. Black eyes. Like a doll’s eyes. When he comes at ya, he doesn’t even seem to be livin’… till he bites ya, and those black eyes roll over white and then you hear that terrible high-pitched screamin’.
88 Comments
I don’t think the Bond books should be edited just because I think everyone should see what a colossal pile of shit they are. Trying to make them last longer is a detriment to the ultimate goal of James Bond fucking off and fading away.
Children’s fiction is commonly edited over time. It is not a new trend. Christie’s and Fleming’s books were edited in their own lifetime with their own approval.
As were Roald Dahl’s.
The decision makes sense on paper, since it’s weird to have cops waving their guns at a kid and his alien friend…I hate guns, but if I had to deal with a fucking alien with magic powers, you better believe I’d be armed to the teeth.
There is no scenario, modern or “of its time”, in which cops with guns would not be waving them at an actual alien, kid or no. The unrealistic part is where they’re not shooting.
Imagine if E.T. were black!
He is an Alien of Color
and I think he might be drunk!
Ok, or blackened.
Definitely illegal alien
ahem…”undocumented”!
Came here to say the same thing.
Ya they would have lit their asses up.
You would think so, but I just pooped my pants the whole time. That alien was scary.What? What movie?
I don’t know if they’d actually have guns out (though that does seem to be cop MO, especially in a situation like this) but from a story perspective it added a lot to the stakes from the kids’ POV. Plus it’s not like they were taking aim and someone had to jump in front of a cop last second before he blew Elliott away.
See, I think movies should be revised to view under modern lenses. Books get revised editions. Video games get remastered. Instead of messing around spending millions of dollars producing and marketing a remake of a classic movie that will break even and be forgotten almost immediately, just re-cut the classic movie to make it more accessible to modern audiences. Special Edition everything. As long as the originals are preserved, why not?
Because the only way the originals will be preserved is illegally.
What? That’s not true. The theatrical cut and the “Final Cut” of Blade Runner are both readily available for purchase on iTunes. So are the theatrical cut and the Donner Cut of Superman II. You’re thinking of the Star Wars trilogy, and I don’t like that Lucas tried to scrub the theatrical versions from existence, but that’s not the only possible outcome.
It’s not just ‘Star Wars.’ It’s also ‘Heat,’ ‘Last of the Mohicans,’ ‘Lawrence of Arabia,’ and ’Blood Simple.’ And if you want to be really pedantic, ‘2001’ and ‘The Shining.’
It’s literally thousands of films. Thousands.
So your answer is to buy (never technically own) a digital copy that a large corporation rents out to you? Sounds smart.
The theatrical cuts for Blade Runner and Superman II are both available for purchase on Blu-Ray as well, so my “answer” is to ensure that the original versions always remain available.
But they don’t remain available. Your example is two literal blockbusters that have massive followings, even to this day. There are tens of thousands of movies that are no longer available. That never made it from VHS to a disc format. That have been out of print for decades.Allowing bullshit special editions to be churned out over and over only incentivizes these shit conglomerates, I mean studios, to peddle garbage to us. It makes the resale market price gouge. It makes piracy the only real answer to preserve film. Per your own example – finding a copy of non-special edition star wars garbage was incredibly expensive for over a decade, because they stopped offering anything but that. So the resale market drove prices up. But don’t worry – LucasFilm and Disney have a solution! Extremely over priced collectors editions of the original (with minor changes still intact)!
There are tens of thousands of movies that are no longer available. That never made it from VHS to a disc format. That have been out of print for decades.Because they were recut and the recuts are now the only versions available, or for different reasons that have nothing to do with what I’m talking about? Per your own example – finding a copy of non-special edition star wars garbage was incredibly expensive for over a decade, because they stopped offering anything but that. Right, which isn’t the case for either Blade Runner or Superman II. I think it was wrong of George Lucas to not make the theatrical versions easily available; it didn’t even make sense from a financial perspective because there was very a clearly a demand for the unaltered editions. And in my original comment, I said: As long as the originals are preserved, why not?If the originals aren’t preserved, then there are a million reasons not to do this. Your self-righteous responses are predicated on ignoring parts of my comments where I address preservation concerns. It makes piracy the only real answer to preserve film.Literally preserving film is the only real answer to preserve film. Piracy is a band-aid.
Heres looking at you, Star Wars Despecialized
Most revised editions of books are basically the literary equivalent to a director’s cut that restores portions of the author’s original manuscript that the original publisher cut. I guess you can describe that as a “special edition” but it’s usually the book as the author originally intended (usually long after the author has died) very rarely is “new” stuff added by an author.
And video game “remasters” are a lot of the time technically remakes since they have to rebuilt the game from the ground up and are sometimes changed drastically.
I read The Hardy Boys as a kid. I am not 110 years old. The owners of those properties revised, updated and marketed them in the 1970s.It worked. My parents bought them.Updating dated materials for a modern audience is a business choice. A lucrative business choice.
Yes, and in the 1970s, the Hardys and Nancy Drew listened to modern music and had modern things. It did not change the essence of the whodunits necessarily.Taking the guns out ET, ruins the narrative structure of that scene. No guns, no menace. Those kids could have easily ridden around or through the blockade. It makes less sense for ET to levitate them out of the situation if there wasn’t any element of danger for the kids involved.The drama comes from wondering whether the Feds would shoot at ET and harm the kids.
I have a mixture of my dad’s Hardy Boys books from the 1930s/1940s and my own from the 1970s/1980s. Even back in the 1970s all the references in the originals to “greasy Italians” and “inscrutable Chinamen” wouldn’t pass muster. Oh, and having the Black and Asian characters speak in “comically” incorrect English.
Bad take.
Boo! Boo this man!
Boo-urns! Boo-urns this man!
Because this is fucking stupid, that’s why.
See, I think movies should NOT be revised to view under modern lenses. As long as the originals are preserved AS THEY WERE CREATED AT THE TIME, why not? I hope you don’t mind I did a little creative revision based on what I feel at the moment after reading your comment, and I think MY version is better. And you can’t complain, it’s a modern take on your outdated view.:)
My original comment remains available, so I’m fine with it. I’m intrigued by your version, but have some questions. For example, isn’t adding “AS THEY WERE CREATED AT THE TIME” redundant given that the subject is “originals,” which in context is clearly referring to how the movie was originally created at the time? I don’t understand how that modifier improves the comment. And in the original comment, I gave a little context as to why I thought movies should be revised to view under modern lenses (admittedly not enough; I wish I could go back and edit it), but you don’t provide any reasoning for why you think movies should not be revised to view under modern lenses.Overall, your creative revision is an expression of you and I hope you can accept some constructive criticism. But next time I read a comment about revising movies, I’ll be reading the original.:)
I see what you did there, and I award you all the stars I have to give in recognition of your efforts.
Assuming the original material (ie negatives, soundtracks, etc) are even available, it’s not just a matter of “re-cutting” a film. Everything that goes into making a film is of its age. The lenses, the camera moves, the acting, the technology available for special effects. By the time you were done “re-cutting” a film and fixing all of that, you might as well have just shot a new movie.
If it was more effective to just tweak existing films instead of dropping tens or hundreds of millions of dollars on new ones, studios would 100% be doing that instead.
This sounds like an interesting idea, but in practice… It sounds like what happens when you find a stranger in the alps!This is unreasonable to ask and I don’t expect you to provide one, but try thinking of an example and what you would change to make it play better today. It gets tricky real quick, I think. Maybe only barely relevant, but it still cracks me up:
Honestly, my first thought was of just editing down really long movies. I’d really love a 90-minute cut of the Peter Jackson King Kong, for example. I thought Zack Snyder’s Justice League was a bloated mess, but I enjoyed it enough that I would rewatch it if it was at least an hour shorter. I saw The Irishman in theaters and had to take a pee break in the middle. When I checked Netflix to rewatch the part I didn’t see, it turned out that what I had missed wasn’t that important to the story (IMO). It probably would’ve been better without it.I saw a modern trailer for Superman: The Movie on YouTube the other day, and I realized there is a whole little cottage industry of people cutting “modern” trailers for old movies. I guess people don’t see that as problematic because the movies themselves aren’t being touched, and trailers are viewed as so disposable, but why not take it one step further? There are already fans that cut their own versions of Star Wars and other nerd movies. It’s transformative. The original creators probably don’t like it, but in this increasingly hellish capitalist landscape, it’s not like the conglomerates are going to respect creative wishes for much longer.
“It sounds like what happens when you find a stranger in the alps!”Hey, as of Tuesday I get that reference!
“Why not”? How about “why”? You talk about re-editing old movies instead of remaking them as if those are the only options, but how about we do neither? I like watching ‘Willow’, say, and thinking, “This was what a fantasy epic was at this time. With the resources they had to work with, and the cultural viewpoint of the time, this is what the filmmakers thought would bring a little wonder to the movie-going public.” I think it’s valuable knowing that. ‘Willow’ is not ‘The Lord of the Rings’ and that trilogy is not ‘Dungeons & Dragons: Honour Among Thieves’. They are each their own thing, and part of a continuum.
In the completely hypothetical future I made up, then you would just keep watching the original cuts. I don’t want re-edits to replace the original; I want them to exist side by side, and there’s nothing wrong with you preferring to watch Willow as it was released at the time. As to the “why,” I just like watching alternate cuts of movies. I think comparing alternate cuts to the theatrical version provides valuable insight into the filmmaking process, and shows the effect certain choices have on the audience. What’s wrong with us both being able to watch what we like?I saw a modern trailer for Superman: The Movie on YouTube the other day, and I realized there is a whole little cottage industry of people cutting “modern” trailers for old movies. I guess people don’t see that as problematic because the movies themselves aren’t being touched, and trailers are viewed as so disposable, but why not take it one step further? There are already fans that cut their own versions of Star Wars and other nerd movies. It’s transformative art. The original creators probably don’t like it, but in this increasingly hellish capitalist landscape, it’s not like the conglomerates are going to respect creative wishes for much longer.
When I took my young nephews to see ET they were more afraid of the jangling keys.Is there a lesson there?
I saw E.T. as a kid at my grandmother’s house and it freaked me the fuck out. Not the movie as a whole, E.T. himself. I couldn’t walk past the big bushes at my elementary school because I believed he would jump out, I began insisting that one of my parents stay in the bathroom while I showered to make sure E.T. wouldn’t get me while my guard was lowered… Still hate that ugly weirdo, tbh!
Same! ET freaked me the fuck out of me when I was like 4.And those little bastards from The Gate when I was like 6 or 7.
Thirded, that movie put me off baked potatoes for a month cause they looked too much like E.T.’s head.
My scary thing was the twins from The Shining. I swore they would show up in every hallway I was in.
Aw, turn on your heartlight!
No ❤️
It’s so funny the first I heard about this was on that episode of South Park. I thought it was a joke until I looked it up.
Free Hat
Yeah, that’s the one where Spielberg and Lucas rape Indiana Jones along with our childhoods.
Non-SE original Star Wars trilogy please
I actually think Warner Bros. had the best way of dealing with problematic material when they put out old “Looney Tunes” shorts, where they prefaced the problematic episodes with a message acknowledging it, but saying that if they were to edit that material out it would be like pretending it never existed, which is equally problematic.There’s also cases of this where the push to censor and change is just downright stupid (e.g., the Roald Dahl flap) or fundamentally changes the nature of the material in the same way as when Ted Turner was trying to colorize every black and white movie back in the 1980s (I believe Orson Welles was said to have asked people to protect “Citizen Kane” and keep Ted Turner’s “crayons” away from his movie).In 2011 a revised edition of “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” was released. It removed the n-word racial slur and replaced it with the word “slave.” The revision was put forward by Alan Gribben, a professor of English at Auburn University, who said his intention was to alleviate some of the controversy around the novel which is one of the most challenged books in the American Library Association’s list of literature banned from libraries, schools, and universities and has been called a “racist book.”But whether we like it or not, Mark Twain didn’t write the word “slave” in the novel when the characters are slinging a slur at Jim. He wrote what he wrote, and trying to whitewash it misses what Twain was getting at, which was a slur directed toward someone more decent than every other character in the novel. It’s a story in which the main character is made uncomfortable and conflicted by how the bullshit he’s been taught doesn’t match with Jim’s self-evident humanity. If the reader is made uncomfortable by Jim’s treatment and situation, well … THAT’S THE POINT!
“I actually think Warner Bros. had the best way of dealing with problematic material when they put out old “Looney Tunes” shorts, where they prefaced the problematic episodes with a message acknowledging it, but saying that if they were to edit that material out it would be like pretending it never existed, which is equally problematic.”Agreed, what’s the saying if you don’t lean from history you’re doomed to repeat it.
Warner Brothers never censored their cartoons… LOL!https://www.intanibase.com/gac/looneytunes/censored.aspx
Me and my friends would’ve killed E.T. with hammers I can tell you that much
I can respect this. If he were George Lucas he’d be be doubling down with a new cut of Schindler’s List that excluded all those pesky Nazis.
Aw, man. I was hoping to see a cut of “War of the Worlds” with all of the alien tripods edited out and it’s just an entire film of Tom Cruise running for no reason while people disintegrate randomly around him.
Does scientology have an pending apocalypse in their belief system? Just edit in a scene where he punches Xenu in the face.
Like Garfield Without Garfield on an epic scale. I’m in.
I’d love to see a cut that edited out Dakota, her screams, or maybe both of the miserable children. Probably throw the excruciating sequence with Tim Robbins in there for good measure.
I too think the scene in Jaws where the shark leaps onto the rapidly sinking Orca could be made better with CGI, but I doubt it will happen in my lifetime…Also, why did Munich have that loud sex scene between Eric Bana and Ayelet Zurer during the film’s climax? Was that needed?
Forget loud – how much sweat poured off of Bana in that scene? He looked like he jumped out of the shower and onto his wife without drying off. Completely weirded me out.
I’m hoping Jaws is recut in my lifetime such that the scene where the shark leaps onto the rapidly sinking Orca includes cutaways to that loud sex scene between Eric Bana and Ayelet Zurer in Munich.
Finally, a convincing use case for AI.
What’s the big deal? He’s been saying this for years.
Today’s staff was in high school way back in 2018, the last time this came up.
He should have erased the FBI agents. As we all know, guns don’t kill aliens, FBI agents kill aliens.
The problems with Bruce actually made “Jaws” a better, scarier and more successful film because, as Val Lewton could have told Spielberg, what the audience imagines is always far scarier than anything you can show them. It’s why the attack on the woman swimmer at the beginning of the film is far more effective than the mechanical shark chomping on Robert Shaw at the climax. As for tinkering with movies years after they’ve become a part of the public’s collective memories-bad idea. Even if the movie is legitimately it’s too late. It is an artifact of its time and a piece of people’s lives. Leave it alone. The only exception I can imagine being legitimate is letting a director or editor restore a film to it’s original cut if a studio tampered with it and even then the original theatrical cut should still be made available because that’s the version audiences saw at the time and sometimes the recut film actually is better. Daryl Zanuck’s cut of “My Darling Clementine” is actually better than John Ford’s cut and Nick Meyer himself thinks that the studio cut of “The Wrath of Khan” is overall the better version with the exception of the shot of Spock’s torpedo coffin.
Don’t worry, I still have an original non-bullshit copy on VHS.
“The decision makes sense on paper, since it’s weird to have cops waving their guns at a kid and his alien friend” Nice one Sam. Way to make the same mistake Spielberg did two decades ago and pretend cops don’t actually wave their weapons at kids and their alien friends. You’re right dude gUNs R wEIrD and radios make waay more sense..
To be fair, cops don’t actually wave guns at kids’ alien friends, just the kids themselves.
To Spielberg’s credit, at least he didn’t try to bury the existence of the original cut like George Lucas did; the DVD for ET had both versions of the movie.
Also I think it’s the wrong move to remove those guns, because it suggests that government agents wouldn’t do such a thing as point guns at children, which… come on, of course they would.
In the Legends of Tomorrow episode that is an homage to ET they have to go back in time to prevent the government from dissecting the baby alien and killing young Ray Palmer who was trying to protect him because of course they would
To be fair, he wasn’t pointing a gun at the kid. They were sweeping the house, weapons ready because they didn’t know if there would be resistance, and found them in the closet. That picture looks worse than it was.
Don’t be fair. Cops never do.
Made for a good South Park gag though didn’t it
“it’s weird to have cops waving their guns at a kid” and yet they constantly do exactly that IRL.
Bond was an upper-class Brit working for a service that consisted almost entirely of the same. He’s EXACTLY the kind of guy who would be race-conscious, even if not overtly racist. No reason to not allow that point to present itself, as in “yes, this is the way MI6 was in the 1960s.” (I have no idea how it is now)
The decision makes sense on paperNo, no it doesn’t. It makes absolute sense that the kinds of agents who would respond to every other situation with guns would do likewise here. It’s tough to argue with it for the Fleming books if we’re being totally honestNo, not it’s not. If we agree with what Spielberg is saying — that works of art are reflective of their time, importantly so, and ought not be revised according to our modern perspective — then that applies even to the things that make us uncomfortable. I mean, that’s the whole point.
The A.V. Club: Bringing you the news of the past . . . TODAY!https://uproxx.com/movies/steven-spielberg-no-digital-enhancement-movies/
People seem to forget how ridiculously racist Charlie And The Great Glass Elevator is. Try listening to that as an audio book.
Good thing they never edited the guns out of The Goonies. Ba-bam!
He should regret adding a Mcdonalds product placement into Close Encounters.