Really, E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial earned its popularity not with clever marketing but with the film's intrinsic quality. People tend to focus on its emotional content, but it is neither a cutesy nor sickly maudlin movie. It is a sincerely beautiful story of friendship and love told with enough poetry and tart fear and paranoia to keep it standing up forty years after its release.
The significance of that anniversary makes a book like Caseen Gaines's E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial- The Ultimate Visual History an expected publication, but the fact that the E.T. story hasn't been told to death the way Star Wars' has makes this book much more welcome and necessary. And Gaines has really put together the ideal telling of that story. He follows the film from concept to aftermath in step with the film's own spirit of love and joy. The people who worked on the film, many of whom Gaines interviewed, have an enduring affection for it and really seem to have had magical experiences making it. In an age when we're constantly bombarded with the horror stories behind beloved films, it is heartening to know that the intrinsic goodness of E.T. seeped into every aspect of its making. While some of the kids who made the movie would have their share of problems after the film's release (Henry Thomas was bullied at school, and Drew Barrymore's substance abuse issues are well documented, though not at all in this book), director Spielberg, producer Kathleen Kennedy, and writer Melissa Mathison were positive parental figures who took every precaution to kept their young cast physically and emotionally safe.
And since E.T. is a one-and-done movie, a very complete and satisfying account of its making fits well into the usually limited "visual history" format. Gaines makes room to go into minutiae about every aspect of the film and the lovable alien himself. Seriously-- whole sections are devoted to the creation of E.T.'s skin, arms, eyes, heart, and voice. The author delves into the film's more sinister early concept, its return as an oddly affecting Comcast commercial in 2019, and the infamous video game tie-in that ended up ruining Atari and clogging a land fill in New Mexico.
The only glaring hole is the lack of any mention of a sequel proposed in the eighties, which got as far as a treatment by Spielberg and Mathison, that would have gone in the darker direction of the film's initial concept. Instead, the book sticks to the narrative that Spielberg never had any intention of making a sequel that might sully the first film's legacy. That may be true, and the tonally off E.T.: Nocturnal Fears treatment may have only been written to force the studio to lose interest in a sequel, but it's a very interesting historical tidbit that gets lost amidst the wealth of information Gaines decided to include.
Even with all that information, E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial- The Ultimate Visual History still leaves plenty of space for its visuals: Ed Verreaux's marvelously cartoony concept art, behind-the-scenes shots, props, publicity portraits, poster art, merchandise (really, I'd love to see a whole book focused on E.T. toys, lunchboxes, games, books, and Burger King glasses), and everything else E.T. you can imagine. There are also a dozen detachable extras gummed onto its pages: repros of movie tickets, storyboard panels, annotated script pages, concept art, puppet notes, Spielberg's security pass, schematics, an audience response survey, video game instructions, and a congratulatory ad depicting the Star Wars gang hoisting E.T. over their heads that Lucas published when his buddy's new film outgrossed his own franchise. These extras are inessential but fun. The book they're glued into is fun and entirely essential.
