SAVE.T.HIS ALIEN
Family of puppet’s creator lovingly restore movie icon
Skin powdering to dust at the slightest touch, eye sockets protruding from his skull, his exposed metal skeleton lying limp in a tangle of wires.
These images reveal the remains of E.T., 40 years after the extra-terrestrial captured our hearts and moved us to tears as he appears to die by his friend Elliott’s side in one of the most touching movie moments of all time.
Four decades after the adorable alien became a global superstar following the film’s US release on June 11, 1982, he looked to be dying again.
Many of the 13 models used in the film, including mechanical puppets, costumes, and a head designed for close-ups, had disintegrated almost beyond repair in 2018 when they were unpacked from the crates the majority had been kept in since the film wrapped.
Today, the family of E.T.’s designer and maker, the late special effects artist Carlo Rambaldi, describe how the once cuttingedge latex that formed the little alien’s skin perished, leaving only the animatronic structures beneath.
Yet just as the extra-terrestrial’s heart would glow again, E.T., for whom Carlo won an Oscar, is being painstakingly resurrected by the Carlo Rambaldi Foundation, led by daughter Daniela.
Since October, restoration work has been carried out by 10 special effects experts headed by Leonardo Cruciano at a secret warehouse in Milan.
This week, they have been putting the finishing touches to the reborn star. For Daniela, 52, overseeing this labour of love has been a full-time job, and she talks emotionally about the puppet considered a “family member”.
“We’ve been trying to stop the decay of these materials that for the 80s were advanced, but today are fragile as a flower,” she explains. “The skin was decaying, it was like touching a petal, crumbling in your hand.”
Leonardo says working with an icon who could disintegrate has been terrifying. “The latex was very dry and it would fall apart,” he says.
“When we excavated the boxes we used very soft gloves and pillows. The unboxing alone took a week.
The unpacking of the head took
three days. At any moment we could have lost it all.”
The fragments were sprayed with a latex fixative, then cleaned of dust, rust and oils before being consolidated again with another compound.
Finally, the strengthened fragments have been pieced back together.
“It’s been a puzzle, we’ve needed a lot of patience,” says Leonardo. “Some pieces have been impossible to save, or lost. It’s like restoring a mummy.”
The team only managed to save four of E.T.’s iconic fingers.
They have also built a full replica as he originally looked. All the figures, including the animatronic model, with 85 points of movement, which Daniela describes as E.T.’s “soul”, will be exhibited in the future.
The animatronic structure alone is worth an estimated £5-10million, but E.T.’s value far surpasses money.
Daniela was 12 when her father created him. Carlo, who died in 2012 aged 86, had worked with Steven Spielberg on the 1977 film Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
She recalls a call came at midnight. “Steven told my father he had a big problem, shooting on E.T. had started but he did not like the E.T. made by another team of designers,” she says.
Carlo had six months to create a new alien. “One day he said, ‘Can you come to the lab?’,” she recalls. “He was working on a clay model, and asked, ‘What do you think, what does it tell you?’
“And I said, ‘Well, Daddy, it’s kind of ugly, but it’s kind of cute also and has a very genuine look. I loved the back, it looked like Donald Duck’s.”
E.T.’s eyes were inspired by the family’s cat, Chicca, a blue point Himalayan. “He tried to give E.T. that innocence through the eyes,” she says.
She recalls his earliest inspiration as a child was when an asteroid fell on his village in northern Italy. “He’d draw planets and how he’d imagine a city in outer space,” she says. Although Daniela was not allowed on the film set, she recalls her dad’s tales. She tells of one about Drew Barrymore, who played Gertie, aged six.
“They were on a break and she started putting her snack in E.T.’s mouth. The risk was she’d pour a coke down too! She did not realise he was a puppet.”
E.T.’s resurrection today would greatly move her father. She believes he saw the alien, in a way, as his child. “He saw E.T. as his own, he gave E.T. a heart and soul. We used to call Dad, Geppetto,” she adds, referring to Carlo Collodi’s character, who made Pinocchio, a puppet who was like a son.
Tellingly, her father sought out copies of that story in every old book store he visited.
■ Find out more at www.fondazioneculturalecarlorambaldi.it emily.retter@mirror.co.uk @emily_retter