#melissa mathison

Obit of the Day: The Woman Who Wrote E.T.

Melissa Mathison wrote the screenplay for E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial in eight weeks. Steven Spielberg later recalled how he felt after reading the script: “I was just knocked out. It was a script I was willing to shoot the next day. It was so honest, and Melissa’s voice made a direct connection with my heart.” Audiences felt the same way, and E.T. would earn $793 million worldwide and Ms. Mathison would garner an Academy Award nomination for her work. 

A student at UC-Berkeley studying political science, a family friend convinced Ms. Mathison to take a job in the film industray. The friend was Francis Ford Coppola, for whom she babysat, and the job was location assistant on The Godfather, Part II. 

It was also under the encouragement of Mr. Coppola that Ms. Mathison began to write scripts. Her first was The Black Stallion, the 1979 film that starred Mickey Rooney. It was the first of five screenplays she would pen in her career.

Following the success of E.T., Ms. Mathison wrote the second story of the 1983 film version of The Twilight Zone, directed by Mr. Spielberg. The segment, written under the pseudonym “Josh Rogan,” told the story of a magic game of “kick the can” that turned nursing home residents into children.

In the late 1990s, she wrote the screenplays for The Indian in the Cupboard (1995) and Kundun (1997). The latter came from an interest in Buddhism and was a project supported by fellow Buddhist Richard Gere. All of her scripts were notably child-focused, and Ms. Mathison recognized that she was “sort of famous for writing little boy stories.”

At the time of her death on November 4, 2015 her last screenplay, The BFG (based on Roald Dahl’s novel of the same name), was in post-production and scheduled to open in theaters in 2016. Like her biggest hit, the film will also be directed by Steven Spielberg.

Ms. Mathison was 65 years old.

Sources:LA Times,Variety, and IMDB.com

(Image is copyright of Universal Studios and courtesy of  moviepostershop.com)

Also relevant on Obit of the Day:

Frederica Sangor Mass - Screenwriter of the silent film era

Carlo Rambaldi - The man who designed E.T.