Steven Spielberg has revealed that he briefly thought about adapting the children’s book E.T.: The Book Of The Green Planet for a 1980s sequel.
The unexpectedly huge success of 1982’s E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial inevitably led to some discussion of a sequel, particularly from its studio, Universal Pictures.
As regular readers of these pages will probably be aware, a treatment was written in the 1980s called Nocturnal Fears, credited to Spielberg and Melissa Mathison, with whom the director wrote the original E.T. It pitched a much darker story than the 1982 film, with its cast of kids being abducted (and tortured) by evil aliens. The idea never got beyond that initial story stage, which is probably for the best.
In recent days, Spielberg talked a bit about that post-E.T. period of his career, and how at the time he didn’t have the clout to prevent a sequel from happening without his say-so – what he called 'freezing rights’.
There’s another interesting detail from that interview, however, that was easy to miss. As noted by IndieWire, Spielberg mentioned that he’d “flirted” with the idea of making a sequel, but this time made no mention of the grim, torture-riddled Nocturnal Fears. Instead, he referred to something called The Green Planet.
Here’s Spielberg’s quote in full:
“I flirted with it for a little bit – just a little bit to see if I [could] think of a story – and the only thing I could think about was a book that was written by somebody that wrote the book for it called The Green Planet, which was all going to take place at E.T.’s home,” he said. “We were all going to be able to go to E.T.’s home and see how E.T. lived. But it was better as a novel than I think it would have been as a film.”
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The book Spielberg refers to above is E.T.: The Book Of The Green Planet, a novel written by William Kotzwinkle and first published in 1985. Kotzwinkle had previously written the novelisation of the original E.T., and being a respected author of children’s stories, was given the chance to pen his own original follow-up.
Illustrated by David Weisner, the book takes place immediately after E.T.’s end credits. The title alien stands aboard his ship, clutching the geranium given to him by Gertie (Drew Barrymore in the movie) and watching sadly as his human friends vanish from view. We learn that E.T. is a ‘Doctor of Botany’, that he’s hundreds of years old, and on his home world – the Green Planet of the title – he was once a farmer.
Missing his old friend Elliott (Henry Thomas), E.T. repeatedly tries and fails to contact him telepathically. Eventually, the alien decides to steal a ship and visit Elliott, who in the time took E.T. to get back to his home world has grown into a teenager. Throughout, Kotzwinkle’s story intercuts between E.T’s fantastical planet, with its exotic flora and fauna, and Elliott’s budding romance with a fellow student named Julie.
It’s a charming little story with some dense world-building by Kotzwinkle; so dense, in fact, that realising it all as a movie probably would have been beyond the budget and technical scope of filmmakers in the 1980s.
Like Nocturnal Fears, The Green Planet movie never happened, and E.T. remains one of only a few major films from the 1980s that hasn’t been sullied by a sequel or prequel.
If you’re interested, you can ‘borrow’ a digital copy of E.T.: The Book Of The Green Planet from archive.org.
