Screenwriter
Born: June 3, 1950
Died: November 4, 2015
MELISSA Mathison, who has died of cancer aged 65, got her foot in the Hollywood door when she was 12 and agreed to babysit for Francis Ford Coppola. She went on to work for him as an assistant and writer and then teamed up with Steven Spielberg and wrote the screenplay for the film that was to become the highest-grossing movie of all time.
Spielberg had been struggling for years with the idea of making an alien movie with a difference – one in which the alien is cute and lovable, gets left behind when his spaceship leaves without him, and befriends a lonely little boy. Spielberg was drawing on personal childhood memories of creating an imaginary alien friend after his parents split up.
Mathison turned his ideas into a feasible screenplay in the space of eight weeks. The end result was ET. It cost about $10million, it was released in 1982, grossed around $800million and set a record that stood until the release of Spielberg's Jurassic Park 11 years later.
Mathison and Spielberg met on the set of Spielberg's Raiders of the Lost Ark in 1980. Mathison was dating Harrison Ford, who played the protagonist Indiana Jones. They married three years later. But the marriage ended in 2004 with one of the costliest divorce settlements in Hollywood history.
Mathison had put her career on hold to bring up their two children, while Ford banked $20million from films. The divorce settlement took into account Ford's earnings from films made while they were married and was reportedly worth as much as $118million.
Melissa Marie Mathison was born in Los Angeles in 1950. She was one of five children, her father was a journalist and her mother a writer, publicist and "food entrepreneur". She grew up surrounded by eccentric and creative individuals, including Coppola, who was a decade older than her and just getting started as a film director.
She studied political science at the University of California Berkeley, but continued to babysit for Coppola and his wife Eleanor, not just at their home in Los Angeles, but on location, picking up valuable experience of the industry.
She served as an assistant on both The Godfather Part II (1974) and Coppola's Vietnam War epic Apocalypse Now (1979), on which she met Harrison Ford. He had a tiny role in the film before he was famous.
The film industry seemed in terminal decline when Coppola, Spielberg, Lucas and Scorsese came along with a string of hits which lured audiences back to the cinema. Coppola had great success with the Godfather films, but struggled to hold Apocalypse Now together during a difficult location shoot in the Philippines and a protracted editing process.
Writer Peter Biskind, in his book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, records how Coppola was losing confidence, but that Mathison's "wide-eyed adoration" reassured him. Apocalypse Now was another hit and is now regarded as a classic.
Mathison worked as a writer for Coppola's company American Zoetrope on The Black Stallion (1979) and The Escape Artist (1982) and there was talk of Coppola leaving his wife for her, but it did not happen. Meanwhile Ford's first marriage was on the rocks and Mathison and Ford became a couple.
She visited him in Tunisia when he was shooting Raiders of the Lost Ark and got to talking with Spielberg about his alien project. She was nominated for the Oscar for best original screenplay.
Motherhood limited her writing, but she scripted the family film The Indian in the Cupboard (1995) and continued to develop her passion project, Kundun, a biographical film about the Dalai Lama. Martin Scorsese came on board as director and the film came out in 1997, but it was expensive and failed to recoup its costs. It was her last script to make it onto the screen. Recently however she was reunited with Steven Spielberg on a new version of Roald Dahl's children's book The BFG (Big Friendly Giant) and it is due out next year.
She is survived by her two children.
BRIAN PENDREIGH
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules here