Spielberg admits ‘mistake’ of censoring ET the Extra Terrestrial
The famed director revealed his regret at editing guns out of the beloved film and warned against pandering to modern sensibilities.
Steven Spielberg has spoken of his regret at editing guns out of ET the Extra Terrestrial and warned against censoring to pander to modern sensibilities.
The original 1982 cut of ET includes a scene where federal agents chase children with weapons drawn, but for a 20th-anniversary release the firearms were replaced with walkie-talkies.
Spielberg, one of Hollywood’s most influential filmmakers, later reversed the decision and put the guns back in but said he still regrets the original decision. “That was a mistake,” he said, speaking last week at a forum in New York sponsored by Time magazine.
“ET is a product of its era. No film should be revised based on the lenses we now are either voluntarily [peering] or being forced to peer through.”
Spielberg, 76, said that he had been “sensitive” to showing images of agents approaching children with guns so he replaced them with walkie-talkies. He reverted to the original scene in time for a 30th-anniversary release of the film, which features a young boy befriending a gentle alien.
“I should have never messed with the archives of my own work, and I don’t recommend anyone do that,” Spielberg said.
“All our movies are a kind of a signpost of where we were when we made them, what the world was like and what the world was receiving when we got those stories out there. So I really regret having that out there.”
Spielberg’s comments come amid a wave of censorship of books, films, television shows and music, as studios and sometimes artists themselves try to make artworks less controversial to modern audiences.
Roald Dahl’s novels are among those that have been amended in some way, with language deemed offensive by the publisher removed. Changes included characters no longer being described as “fat” and “ugly”.
Spielberg, a three-time Academy Award winner, condemned such revisions.
“Nobody should ever attempt to take the chocolate out of Willy Wonka! Ever!” he joked.
“For me, it is sacrosanct. It’s our history, it’s our cultural heritage. I do not believe in censorship in that way.”
It has become easier to make revisions in an increasingly digital world, and when it comes to streaming services, this often leaves viewers with no way of watching the original version. Netflix removed a graphic suicide scene from the series 13 Reasons Why in 2019, more than two years after the offending episode first aired.
In 2020, Tina Fey asked that four episodes of her acclaimed sitcom 30 Rock, in which characters blacked up, be cut from streaming services.
And last year Beyonce edited the lyrics of a song from her Renaissance album over claims a word she included was an ableist slur.
Sir Salman Rushdie is among the prominent artists to criticise instances of censorship.
The 75-year-old novelist was stabbed at an event in New York last year, more than 30 years after a fatwa was issued against him over his book The Satanic Verses, published in 1988 (the following year, Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, ordered Muslims to kill Rushdie and the book’s publishers — bookshops were bombed, protesters killed and a Japanese translator murdered).
Responding to the changes made to Dahl’s work, Rushdie said: “Roald Dahl was no angel but this is absurd censorship. Puffin Books and the Dahl estate should be ashamed.”
Spielberg’s stance on the issue places him alongside another of Hollywood’s most revered filmmakers, Martin Scorsese, who has previously said he would never even release a director’s cut of one of his movies.
Speaking in 2019, he said: “No, no, no, no, no! The director’s cut is the film that’s released — unless it’s been taken away from the director by the financiers and the studio. (The director) has made their decisions based on the process they were going through at the time.
“There could be money issues, there could be somebody that dies (while making) the picture, the studio changes heads and the next person hates it.
“Sometimes (a director says), ‘I wish I could go back and put it all back together.’ All these things happen … But I do think once the die is cast, you have to go with it and say, ‘That’s the movie I made under those circumstances’.”
Taika Waititi, known for his work on Marvel movies, is another filmmaker who is against director’s cuts and believes the original work should be left alone.
Spielberg’s latest film The Fabelmans, a semi-autobiographical tale based on his adolescence, earned seven Oscar nominations, including for best picture, but did not win any.
His next project is reported to be a film based on the main character from the 1968 drama Bullitt, with Bradley Cooper set to star.
The Times
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From small tails to Titanic touches, beware the tinker
Isn’t it great when successful people admit to mucking up? Steven Spielberg says it was a mistake to edit the cops’ guns in ET and replace them with walkie-talkies in the 20th-anniversary release in 2002. “I never should have done that,” Spielberg said at the Time 100 Summit in New York. “ET is a product of its era.”
I agree, even though America’s skewed moral compass means guns are less likely to be airbrushed than harmless nudity, as happened when Splash landed on
Disney+. Daryl Hannah’s behind was at one point covered with icky digital fur.
Other changes make more sense, such as versions of the 1955 war movie The Dam Busters that dub the dog’s name from the n-word to Trigger. Nor do I have a problem with the tweaks made to the opening song of Disney’s Aladdin (1992).
Arab-American groups understandably objected to the lines: “Where they cut off your ear/ If they don’t like your face/ It’s barbaric but hey, it’s home.” In the video release they were changed to “Where it’s flat and immense and the heat is intense”, which is much more boring but them’s the breaks.
Spielberg’s friend George Lucas is of course Hollywood’s most inveterate tinkerer, having fiddled incessantly with his original Star Wars trilogy. That was mainly for aesthetic reasons, although the ropy CGI Jabba the Hutt he inserted into the first film hardly qualifies as a thing of beauty.
There was one quasi-political alteration: the bounty hunter Greedo shoots Han Solo first in the 1997 “special edition” of that movie. Solo shot first in the original version and the idea was to make him appear more honourable. It backfired, so to speak, because he’s meant to be a bit of bastard. Far and away the most hilarious rejig came when the 3D version of Titanic was released in China in 2012. Censors there said that “considering the vivid 3D effects, we fear that viewers may reach out their hands for a touch and thus interrupt other people’s viewing”.
The offending scene was the one in which Leonardo DiCaprio draws Kate Winslet in the nude. Did they seriously think moviegoers would try to fondle the image? Apparently so, because the re-edited sequence showed her from the neck up. What a boob.
The Times
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