Movie memorabilia is a serious business, which is why this E.T. model that appeared in Steven Spielberg’s hit 1982 movie could fetch as much as a million bucks in a Sotheby’s auction that ends on April 3.
The E.T. model is part of a collection of movie-related items being brought to auction by the estate of its creator, Italian special effects artist Carlo Rambaldi, who also worked on legendary movies such as King Kong (1975), Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), and Alien (1979).
The E.T. model up for auction is the one that appeared in the movie’s iconic closet scene in which the alien tries to disguise itself among Elliott’s stuffed animals to avoid being discovered by his mother.
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The model is 17 inches wide, 36 inches tall, and 12 inches deep (43.2 x 91.4 x 30.5 cm), and has an aluminum frame covered with latex, foam, straw, acrylic paint, and adhesive.
“There was one ground rule in the studio where Rambaldi and the special effects team brought the creature to life: ‘E.T. is not a monster,’” the auction house says in the lot’s description on its website.
“Working from Melissa Mathison’s screenplay that intentionally declined to include a physical description of its central character, Rambaldi created the look of E.T. entirely off reference images provided by Spielberg.
“The director recalled: ‘I remember saying to Carlo, ‘Here’s some pictures of Albert Einstein, Ernest Hemingway, and Carl Sandburg. How can we make E.T.’s eyes as frivolous, wizened, and also as sad as those three icons?””
Six months after first showing Spielberg his vision for E.T., Rambaldi and his team of four assistants completed the first of four full-scale working models of the diminutive alien.
Rambaldi’s E.T. models could colledctively make 86 different movements — from blinking eyes to delicate grasps of the hand — through a combination of animatronics, mechatronics, and puppetry. The original animatronic model sold for a colossal $2.6 million at an auction in 2022.
You can put in a bid for the lot now (you’ll need a minimum of $500,000), with the hammer coming down on April 3.
What the winning bidder will do with the E.T. model is anyone’s guess. They could do the sensible thing and put it in a museum, or alternatively have some fun with it and stick it in the passenger seat for trips to the mall. That would turn a few heads.
