E.T. and Me

Originals.

This is an iHeart original. It's late summer nineteen eighty one. Eleven year old Matt de Merit is at his house in Torrance, California. When the phone rings, his mother picks it up. Matt can hear just one side of the conversation.

Yes, Yes, that's my son.

Who jaws Steven Spielberg.

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

In the distance, I could hear my mom and I keep by having this very interesting conversation with someone who is interested in hiring me. That's Matt, and basically told my mom that they're doing a movie and it involves someone being in a costume. Didn't want to give away too much for someone being in a costume to walk around.

To put this call in perspective, Matt wasn't a child actor or a performer of any kind at eleven. He also wasn't a cinematographer or effects artist. He was just a suburban kid enjoying his summer before he had to go back to school, and school wasn't going so well

Mom, Who's Stephen Spielberg.

For iHeartRadio, this is Very Special Episodes and iHeart original podcast I'm your host, Danish Schwartz, And this is Et and Me. Et is one of those movies that I have such a distinct memory of my dad taking us to see the 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.

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's similar. This is a good lane for us where we have some beloved film and we're getting a lot of the behind the scenes from the people who actually made it. Yeah.

Also the big surprises like the creature for the Black Lagoon shows up. I love this one for was all the Hollywood history.

Should we dive back in Hell? Yea.

In a lot of ways, Matt de Merret'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.

I would draw a lot as a kid. I love to look at my dad's drawings and ask him to draw me monsters and stuff. I was so fascinated when you could draw creatures for me, so I tried to emulate him.

That was kind of kid I was.

I drew a lot, and I skateboarded a lot, and I like to hang out with my friends and go to the park and do stuff like that.

That's Matt.

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

Well, apparently, my mother took an anti nausea medication which she was pregnant with me called ben Deckton, and that was a popular drug at the time for that condition. And it turned out that there were a lot of birth defects that seemed to be correlated with the drug, and so all the parents file to class action lawsuit against the maker the drug, MERYLO. Meryl DAO had a lot of lawyers and basically were able to counter all the evidence that they had that it might have caused

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

While all this was happening, Steven Spielberg was grappling with something of a creature feature of his own, one that would require Math's unique abilities, though no one quite knew that yet. By this point in the nineteen eight eighties, the director was enjoying that rare blend of critical, commercial and financial success that proved elusive for a lot of filmmakers. His adaptation of Peter Benchley's beach read Jaws in nineteen

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

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

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.

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 from Melissa Matheson, whom he had met filming Raiders of the

It was in the end production illustrats ed Verrowe, 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 ET to be quote a creature that only a mother could love, which I really really love as well.

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

And what Rambaldi told Spielberg is you're gonna need nine months to do this. Spielberg gave him six, and they just worked around the clock to put this creature together. And I mean they really made it. I think they made in the end three different ets with different electronics

But even Rembaldi didn't have a perfect solution for Et walking or performing big physical movements like falling down To try and control his feet via remote robotics would make him look like a jerky ma net or a clumsy battery operated toy. It would also cost another million dollars 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

So Universal Studios reached out to UCLA Medical Center to see if there was anyone with dwarf fism 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 be able to come down for an audition, So the doctor gave him my number.

Matt's doctor acted as his talent agent very la That's how a producer wound up phoning Matt's mom and how Matt wound up going to audition for Steven Spielberg, a guy he barely knew. In fact, Matt's father needed to take him to see Raiders that summer to give Matt a better idea of just what he was getting himself into. Oddly enough, Matt was already a fan of Carlo Rambaldi.

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

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

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.

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

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

The hands for feet method proved surprisingly effective. It gave et the kind of distinctive not of this earth Gate Spielberg wanted one people weren't used to seeing, and practically no one but Matt could do it. But it would be a little while before Matt heard anything definitive. Then 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.

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.

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.

They would 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.

So in September nineteen eighty one, Matt went off to do something he never dreamed of, play a crucial role in making the Ultimate Creature Feature come to life. Like Elliott, he'd be taking on new responsibilities that would distract him from his own problems, but in order to do that, he'd have to overcome his inherent shyness while taking direction

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

This was probably something Spielberg preferred. The details surrounding the character of Et were highly classified in the pre Internet, as it was easier to plug leaks to the media. Spielberg wanted his young actors left in the dark, making their first impression of the creature a genuine one. Matt, 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.

One interesting thing is though, that the recipe for Latex was much worse back then, because latex shrank and Latex doesn't have a lot of pores in it. But if he shrinks the porson and it smaller, so long story short, the costume would get smaller and hotterer every time I got into it because the latex shranks, so thankfully that didn't show on camera, I definitely felt it.

Originally, Matt was hired for just one scene where Et needed to take a tumble, but it turned out Et would be doing that a lot, so Matt's responsibilities kept growing on set. He quickly became known as stunt et.

Pratfalls. Yeah, Pratfall's agility, falling down, all that stuff.

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

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 pro taking my faith.

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

And I remember being so excited because I was walking very easily in the costume, and I felt like I could do everything that they're directing me too. I could hear all the directions very clearly. I saw the marks that they wanted me to hit. And whenever they want me to kind of play up the fall a little bit, they wanted me to not fall immediately, which is what I did. They want me to extend it a little bit, and like you had some expression to it. I remember when I did that, and I do that the kind

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

We completely bonded as soon as we met because we were like, well, I was going to say we're the same age group, but actually Rob was the same age as the older kids, but he had more like youth mentality in He also knew that it would be it would benefit all of us to kind of like bond together. So we were our own group on that set, and that was fantastic because it rescued me from that situation.

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.

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

Matt's ET family was at least for a time, more stable than his actual family. In addition to making friends with Henry and Robert, Matt also met ET's other half. This ET was a thirty four year old adult named Pat Bylon, who was roughly two feet nine inches tall and weighed forty five pounds. Pat was born with cartilage hare hypoplasia, a bone growth disorder that can lead to dwarfes.

I remember he was a really nice guy. He didn't have any ego about him. We kind of filmed the Eten sequencer. That's the way the story has been told anyway. So I came on about two weeks into filming, two or three weeks into filming, and Pat number made me feel like I was in the outside.

Looking in Pat's background was fascinating. He had only recently broken into films, working on a Chevy Chase movie titled Under the Rainbow, a fictitious retelling of the filming of The Wizard of Oz and the rumors surrounding its little people performers getting wild after filming. Before acting, Pat had been a bouncer at a bar in Ohio. It was a publicity stunt for the business, but it worked. He

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

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

On another way. Could have gone really bad, but they were just lucky. And they got him out of the costume in time or whatever however they'd resolved that situation. But it's like, yeah, you can't foresee all these things because, like you said, it's nothing like this has ever been done before.

At one point there was a third Et, a woman named Tamara de Troux, who stepped in for pat when needed. Et also had a different set of hands for many scenes. They belonged to Caprice Roth, a mime hired by the production who wound up becoming the connective tissue of ET's performance. She managed to make a cohesive team out of the many puppeteers controlling his facial movements, synchronizing them with her gestures.

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

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

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

It was just, you know, Matt had never intended for his work to be some big secret, but in order for audiences to believe in ET, Steven Spielberg was reluctant to admit the alien was the work of Hollywood. ET's success hinged in part on Matt and everyone else involved with the creature being invisible. In the weeks leading up to the premiere of ET, the movie gained more and

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

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

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

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

Over the other scene. So it was all the kitchen scenes. Anytime Et is in a bathroom, that's me. So the scene where she where de Wallace comes home the mother and she's putting him everything in the refrigerator. She's completely distracted and she doesn't see me walking around her, and then she opens the refrigerator door and it has been in the face and I fall over.

That was me.

In the midst of all this, the media always kept going back to a central question, how how had Et been cobbled together to make for one of the few truly convincing creatures in movie history. Time and time again, Spielberg would dodge the question. Et was mysterious. Even the first trailer for the movie avoided showing what he looked like. He told the press at the con Film Festival where Et premiered that Et was made out of love and

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

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

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

There's a curious thread that weaves through ET. From the beginning, Spielberg had envisioned it as a way into his feelings about his own family. The divorce of his mother and father in the film Elliot mirrors that same struggle, and in Matt's world, the film had come at a time his family suffered an incredible loss.

I was crazy, I made who knows, you know. If I didn't have the cushion of ET to counterbalance up the bitterness of that experience, I don't know what would have happen to What kind of person did I 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 McNaughton, the guy who played the Michael, the older brother in ET. He was really supportive after that, like he'd heard about my my father. Like we gotten together a couple of times after ET came out and

ET never really lost that power for Matt or for anyone. It was really least in theaters periodically through the nineteen eighties. Spielberg refused to allow it to be available on VHS until six years later in nineteen eighty eight. There was a magic to it that he largely kept preserved. There would never be a sequel, or even much talk of one. Henry Thomas, who portrayed Elliott, appeared with ET in a twenty nineteen commercial for a comcast that Spielberg approved of,

There's a reason for that because Latex you just can't do a one to one copy of the original puppet. There's something's going to be off the paint, the wrinkles, the eyes. I don't know. Well, in the movie itself, you can kind of see where Et almost has like a lazy eye because they just couldn't get the one of the eye to quite be symmetrical with the other one. You know, they did a photo session with Michael Jackson. You see there was something ET's i that was degenerating.

Matt wasn't completely done with the film business, though Et would be a tough act to follow. A few years later, in nineteen eighty five, he appeared in The Fourth Wise Man, a biblical tale, playing a leoper. He also appeared in Cyborg two, a sequel to a nineteen eighty nine Jean Claude van Damn film that couldn't even manage to re enlist Jean Claude van dam.

I had a speaking part in that I'm not in costume while I'm not in like a latex costume, So that was like a futuristic dystopian picture. Angelina Jolies in it, Jack Plants, Elias coteis of a lot of great stars, and that Billy Drago from The Untouchables and so yeah. So I had a speaking part in that one. That was probably my most memorable experience after ET, was actually doing a legit speaking scene, dialogue scene with those actors.

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

With acting and never felt natural to me. And then the number of roles that come to handicapped people, especially someone who doesn't have any legs, few and far between.

Matt went on to teach English and then got into writing and podcasting. He makes convention appearances away for fans of ET to put a human face to the character. Matt de Merit the creature Kid. I didn't know it at the time, but he became part of a legacy

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

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.

There's a great word or sweet, you know, and I think life is just bittersweet. It's not always bitter, it's not always sweet, you know, It's sometimes it just it converges into an experience like that, you know, where these two concurrent things happen, both positive, one positive, one incredibly negative. It gave me the confidence to discourse with people and interact with people, you know, because I did at this hook.

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

Here?

Oh?

God, an ET sequel? Okay, Elliott goes to his planet, right, that's the classic sequel reversal.

Oh, that's good, like that, that's brilliant.

Write that. You have to write that.

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

I was thinking about Avengeful Et later in life coming back less of a heartwarming story than what we're done.

Oh oh, Avengefully he comes back to destroy the earth, or Et comes back as Elliott is getting a divorce as an adult and he has to work through that.

Ah.

Yes, midlife crisis Elliott. Brilliant. These are all good.

For a very special character. So in the cold open, that was my youngest daughter Juliette, who we roped into doing a little voice acting. She gave us multiple takes. Total pro if nepotism is not allowed for these official rankings, but we're cool with looking the other way. For to some medical ethics, I would pick the doctor who got his former patient. He's start in Hollywood.

Oh yeah, good points.

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

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 with fast acting, clear headed, no panic.

Also loved Simon brew Another shout out to Simon to coming on and giving us some Hollywood history. I love Simon, old friend, great voice, good podcast. Go check out film stories after this. As Dana said, totally.

This was a hard one to cast, by the way, because you have the main actor like Matt He's got to play himself, right. I mean, this is automatically, this is the Jackie Robinson story. Got to play yourself.

Brother.

But other than that, I could cast Steven Spielberg as Jesse Eisenberg. I thought that one works. You can see that Melissa Matheson screenwriter Emma Stone, but as a brunette. And then Carlo Rimbaldi Adrian Brody. He feels like the outsider's outsider in Hollywood. I think he can bring that right creature feature energy. And then finally as Pat the little person. I thought the actor Danny Woodburn, who played Seinfeld's comic friend on Seinfeld, is a kind of like

Love it.

I would see that version of this. I don't know if it's officially an et squel, but let's talk. But I do want to see Dana's one hundred percent both of them.

Actually, I am my alien. It's sort of like an Alien three situation.

Very Special Episodes is made by some very special people. The show's hosted by Danish Schwartz, Sarah Burnette and Jason English. Today's episode was written by Jake Rossen. Our producer is Josh Fisher. Our story editor is Marisa Brown, and sound design by Jonathan Washington and Josh Fisher. Mixing and mastering by Behead Fraser. Special thanks to our voice actors Jessica Krinchitch and Juliette English. Original music by Elise McCoy, Research