Screenwriter Melissa Mathison died in Los Angeles earlier this month of neuroendocrine cancer. As a writer, she wasn’t particularly prolific. She only has seven big screen scripts, one English language translation, and one tv movie to her credit. Admittedly, that’s more produced scripts than most of us ever write, but compared to someone like Nora Ephron or David Koepp who have scripts well into the double digits, her output is pretty modest. In fact, her claim to fame might have been that she was married to Harrison Ford for almost 22 years and was the mother of his two children. However, that is not what Mathison was best known for. Her greatest notoriety came from this:
With input from director Steven Spielberg, Mathison wrote the script for 1982’s E. T. The Extra Terrestrial. The film, of course, was a cultural phenomenon, and has been referenced, imitated, and ripped off ad nauseum since it came out. When you adjust for inflation, it is also the 6th highest grossing film of all time. Of course, much of that credit goes to Steven Spielberg for his deft direction and to the cast and special effects crew for making a stubby little puppet made out of rubber and foam seem convincing and compelling. But it is impossible to make a great film or even a good one without a solid script. It is the screenwriter who establishes setting, time, character, and action. It is the screenwriter who puts the words into the characters’ mouths that make us love them, hate them, fear them, and quote them. Mathison’s script not only gave us lines that are still part of our cultural vernacular but also provided us with unforgettable moments, like the sequence in which E.T. home alone in Elliot’s house discovers the joys of beer and proceeds to get drunk. But since he and Elliot have some kind of empathetic psychic link, the boy gets drunk too – at school. In the middle of science class when he’s supposed to be dissecting a frog. He frees the frogs, kisses the girl, and chaos ensues.
Mathison did that. Her words, her ideas.
Of course, nothing else she wrote ever came close to the
same level of success or fame. She averaged a couple of scripts per decade,
including a biopic of the Dalai Lama called Kundun that was directed by Martin
Scorcese. At the time of her death, she was working with Spielberg again on a
script for his version of Roald Dahl’s The BFG. I look forward to that film to
see if, once again, Mathison’s words and Spielberg’s direction can make some
movie magic.
In the meantime, while we all wait for what, unfortunately,
has turned out to be Melissa Mathison’s swan song, remember some wise words she
wrote a couple of decades ago:
No comments:
Post a Comment