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1. Who directed E.T.?
Steven Spielberg
Spielberg drew on an imaginary friend he had invented after his parents' divorce. He made it between Raiders of the Lost Ark and his segment of Twilight Zone: The Movie, and for years called it his most personal film.
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2. What's the name of the boy who finds E.T.?
Elliott
Henry Thomas got the part with an audition in which he cried on cue, thinking about the day his dog died, and Spielberg hired him on the spot. Michael is his older brother.
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3. Which candy does Elliott use to lure E.T.?
Reese's Pieces
Mars turned down the chance to put M&M's in the film, and Hershey said yes to Reese's Pieces. Sales of the sweet rose by a reported sixty-five per cent within weeks of the release.
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4. Who plays Elliott's little sister, Gertie?
Drew Barrymore
Barrymore was six and had auditioned for Poltergeist, which Spielberg was producing at the same time. She told him she was in a rock band called the Purple People Eaters, and he cast her.
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5. What does E.T. say he wants to do?
Phone home
Two of the first words he learns, from Gertie and a Speak & Spell, and he builds the phone out of a coffee can, a saw blade and an umbrella lined with foil. The line was voted one of the most memorable in American film.
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6. What does E.T. dress up as on Halloween?
A ghost, in a sheet
A sheet with two eyeholes, which lets Elliott walk him through the streets in plain sight. On the way he spots a child dressed as Yoda and tries to follow him home.
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7. Who provided most of E.T.'s voice?
Pat Welsh, a retired woman with a smoker's voice
The sound designer Ben Burtt heard her heavy smoker's voice in a camera shop and recorded her for nine hours. Debra Winger and Spielberg himself contributed a few sounds, and so did a raccoon and some sea otters.
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8. What happens to the flowers in Elliott's house as E.T. grows weak?
They wilt, and bloom again when he recovers
A pot of geraniums Gertie gave him, which the film uses as a thermometer for his health. It's one of the few effects in the picture that's just a flower.
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9. How do the children get away from the government agents in the big chase?
On bicycles, which E.T. lifts into the air
The image of the bikes crossing the moon became the logo of Spielberg's company, Amblin. In the 2002 re-release the agents' guns were digitally replaced with walkie-talkies, a change Spielberg later undid.
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10. Who wrote the screenplay?
Melissa Mathison
Mathison had written The Black Stallion and was on the set of Raiders of the Lost Ark with her then-partner Harrison Ford when Spielberg told her the idea. She wrote the first draft in eight weeks and was nominated for an Oscar.
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11. Who designed the creature?
Carlo Rambaldi
Rambaldi, who had built the alien in Alien and the ape in King Kong, based the face partly on Albert Einstein, Ernest Hemingway and Carl Sandburg. He won an Oscar for it.
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12. Who composed the score?
John Williams
Williams won his fourth Oscar for it. Spielberg liked the final flying cue so much that he re-edited the scene to fit the music rather than the other way round.
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13. What's the government agent known as, after the sound he makes?
Keys
Peter Coyote's character is shown only from the waist down for most of the film, a ring of keys jangling at his belt, so that the adults stay faceless until late on. The film never gives him a name.
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14. Which film finally broke E.T.'s box-office record?
Jurassic Park
E.T. held the record for eleven years, until Spielberg beat himself in 1993. It had taken the record from Star Wars.
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15. How many Academy Awards did the film win?
Four
Score, Visual Effects, Sound and Sound Effects Editing, from nine nominations. It lost Best Picture to Gandhi, whose director, Richard Attenborough, said he had expected E.T. to win.
