Word: rambaldi
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Well, no. The gremlins really are an army of latex-skinned puppets devised by Special Effects Maven Chris Walas (Piranha, Raiders of the Lost Ark) and assembled for a bargain-basement $1.3 million. (By contrast, Carlo Rambaldi's E.T. creature alone cost $1.5 million.) The greenish-brown monsters, standing 23 in. tall with their 10-in. bat ears, were controlled by hands, cables, rods, radio signals and a simple but effective method that Walas describes as "throw-'em-across-the-room puppetry." The most complicated gremlin had 60 cables operated by a dozen technicians standing...
...appears on the screen is a highly evolved creature. One special-effects crew tried to make the spaceman and failed, spending a reported $700,000 in the process. Then Spielberg turned to Carlo Rambaldi, an Italian painter and sculptor. Rambaldi first came to the U.S. in 1975 as a consultant on King Kong, then in 1978 set up a small shop in Los Angeles. He explained the construction of E.T. to TIME'S Joseph Pilcher, beginning with sketches and a series of clay models for screen testing for Spielberg before building the creature. Finally, Rambaldi made an aluminum...
...Rambaldi's monsterpiece is about the height of a four-year-old child, with a large, lumpy, pulsating skull, a neck that extends or retracts according to mood, skin that is a very alien gray-green when E.T. is healthy, and long, marvelously graceful arms with four-digit hands. He is very strange and complex in his repertory of emotions, although he is allowed only a ten-word speaking vocabulary (his voice is that of an 82-year-old woman with some electronic distortion). He is onscreen most of the time, and he takes a firm, sure hold...