ET will soon have a new home to call: the puppet of cinema’s most cult alien will go up for auction on Saturday, 40 years following the release of American director Steven Spielberg’s masterpiece.
Estimated between two and three million dollars, the ‘number one’ robot designed for the film will be put up for sale by the specialized house Julien’s Auctions. The price of this meter-tall mechanical figurine might skyrocket.
With its aluminum frame and exposed cables, the puppet is a little gem of engineering, made up of 85 mechanical joints capable of moving the nose, eyes, eyelids, neck and arms.
Animated by a dozen people on set, the alien seemed so real that actress Drew Barrymore, who played ‘Little Sister [d’Elliott, ndlr] in the film, really believed that ET belonged to a real living species, ”reminds AFP Martin Nolan, the executive director of Julien’s Auctions.
At the time, in a cinema without digital, Steven Spielberg spoke to special effects specialist Carlo Rambaldi. The Italian, father of the ‘King Kong’ of 1976 and the ‘Alien’ of Ridley Scott in 1979, had won thanks to ET a third Oscar. The alien’s big blue eyes, which have melted generations with the replica ‘ET home phone’, are inspired by those of his Himalayan cat.
Beyond this puppet, enthusiasts will also be able to acquire unpublished sketches used for the design of the character, or even one of the bicycles, which follows Elliott and ET in the cult scene where they fly to the Moon.
Scheduled Saturday and Sunday in Beverly Hills and online, the auction brings together around 1,300 legendary objects, drawn from decades of Hollywood life.
Several dresses of the icon Marilyn Monroe (between 40,000 and 80,000 dollars), the raised staff with which Charlton Heston split the Red Sea in ‘The ten commandments’ (between 40,000 and 60,000 dollars), or even a model of ‘Shooting Star’, one of the broomsticks straddled by certain characters of the saga ‘Harry Potter’ (between 30,000 and 50,000 dollars) will also be put up for sale.
/ATS