No replies to this topic

[Suaviterinmodo]

AT THE MOVIES; Lelouch film runs 3 hours; 6 if you'd like.
Published: June 11, 1982
The New Yotk Times

On ''E.T.,'' which opens today, 28-year-old Kathleen Kennedy was co-producer with Steven Spielberg and 35-year-old Frank Marshall was production supervisor.) On ''Poltergeist,'' which opened a couple of weeks ago, Frank Marshall was co-producer and Kathleen Kennedy was production supervisor.

''The titles don't necessarily mean anything,'' Miss Kennedy said. ''Steven and Frank and I like to think of ourselves as one little family. We do everything together.''

Already responsible for two of the four top-grossing pictures in movie history (his ''Jaws'' and ''Raiders of the Lost Ark'' are two and four on the list, his friend George Lucas's ''Star Wars'' and ''The Empire Strikes Back'' are one and three), Mr. Spielberg is expected to break his own records with this summer's double entry. And the astonishing fact is that ''E.T.'' and ''Poltergeist'' were virtually made, according to Mr. Marshall, ''on top of each other. While we were finishing 'Raiders,' both stories were in development.''

If Mr. Spielberg's mother had been writing his reviews, he couldn't have gotten better ones. ''Poltergeist'' is given credit for being an entertaining thriller (''It taps childhood fears,'' says Miss Kennedy, ''but it's not 'Psycho,' O.K.? It's not where you're never going to take a shower again'') and ''E.T.'' has turned normally tough critics positively maudlin, causing them to use words like love and wonder and beauty.

'Obviously,'' Miss Kennedy says, with a degree of understatement, ''we're pleased with these results.'' Once upon a time, Miss Kennedy wanted to be a ski instructor, but she studied nursing so she would have ''a career to fall back on.''

Her first cadaver drove her out of the lab and into public television, in San Diego, where she operated a camera, covered football games, messed around a news room, and produced a talk show. She gave this up to come to Hollywood, after an introduction to Steven Spielberg got her ''bits and pieces'' of work on ''1941.''

The film ''1941'' was Mr. Spielberg's only lemon, but for Miss Kennedy, it was a break. ''I began to get involved in everything Steven was doing. I was always enthusiastic. I wanted to know everything. If Steven took a meeting, I went into the meeting, I didn't wait to be asked. I figured the worst that could happen is I'd be thrown out.

''And then one day he said to me, 'Pay attention to what goes on in ''Raiders'' because you're going to produce my next film,' and I jumped up and backed into a 'Black Stallion' poster hanging on the wall, and it came crashing down. It's strange, because Melissa Mathison was one of the writers on 'Black Stallion,' and she ended up writing 'E.T.' ''

Mr. Marshall, Miss Kennedy's alter ego, worked for Peter Bogdanovich before tying up with Mr. Spielberg, and he hadn't figured on getting into the movie business either. ''I was going to go to law school, which I never did.''

Mr. Marshall says that Heather O'Rourke, the little girl in ''Poltergeist,'' was cast by Mr. Spielberg when he saw her sitting in the M-G-M commissary. ''She was having lunch with her mother and sister. Her sister was in 'Pennies From Heaven,' and Heather was just there because her mother couldn't leave her at home. And Steven said, 'Get her.' And that was it. We should have been at Schwab's.''

Miss Kennedy says the way Henry Thomas, the little boy in ''E.T.,'' was cast was also right out of a movie magazine. Although he'd been wonderful in ''Raggedy Man,'' Henry had done a fairly pedestrian reading for Mr. Spielberg. But then the director had him improvise a scene in his own words. ''And Henry started talking about how E.T. was his friend, and why should anybody have the right to come and take him away and hurt him,'' Miss Kennedy remembers. ''Tears were running down his face, and we were videotaping him, and tears were running down all our faces, and on the tape, you can hear Steven saying, 'Kid, you got the job.'''

As for E.T., the piece of equipment that plays the alien, and cost a million and a half dollars to fashion, most of the cast and crew began to think of it as a friend, rather than a machine. ''E.T.'s eyes,'' Miss Kennedy says proudly, ''are my blue.''