FLYING BICYCLE

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In 2012, to celebrate its centenary, Universal Pictures ran a public poll to settle upon the most beloved scene from its glorious history. In second place was a shocked Chief Brody (Roy Scheider) telling shark-hunter Quint (Robert Shaw), ‘You’re gonna need a bigger boat.’ But even Jaws couldn’t match the sight of 10-year-old Elliott (Henry Thomas) cycling his floating BMX past a luminous full moon with E.T. in its basket.

E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial might have been Steven Spielberg’s idea of fashioning a small-scale, personal movie – it riffed on the imaginary friend he conjured up as a youngster – but it’s pure cinema born of shimmering imagination and glimmering spectacle. Set in the Californian suburbs, it tells of an alien lost on Earth, and the heart-warming friendship it develops with the equally lost Elliott.

The film’s most magical scene, which became the iconic logo of Spielberg’s production company, Amblin Entertainment, has Elliott cycling through a misty forest with E.T., wrapped in a blanket, in his bike’s basket. Suddenly the bike is not under Elliott’s control. It barrels off the edge of a gully but no sooner has it begun to drop than it soars into the night sky to the ecstatic strains of John Williams’ dreamlike score. Trees pass far below. And then, the money shot: Elliott and E.T. drifting past the bloated moon, made more memorable still by the fact that Elliott is still pedalling.

‘That was me on a bike on a crane arm on a soundstage with a blue screen behind me,’ Thomas later said. ‘I was going, “Woo-hoo! Wow! Amazing!” Of course, in the theatres you see it with the rear projection, and it’s this beautiful redwood forest floating beneath you.’

In an age when audiences knew less about special effects, it was pure movie magic. Film critic Roger Ebert wrote, ‘I remember when I saw the movie at Cannes: even the audience there, people who had seen thousands of movies, let out a whoop at that moment.’ And so it was that Spielberg’s intimate movie, rejected by Columbia Pictures for not being commercial enough, garnered nine Oscar nominations (winning four), launched a million Halloween costumes and overtook Star Wars to become the biggest box-office hit of all time – a record it held for 11 years until Spielberg himself surpassed it with Jurassic Park.

How’s that for flying high?