``Everyone in Hollywood is waiting for the phone call that will change
his life,'' says artist Ron Cobb. In Cobb's case, the call came 10 years ago.
It was from Steven Spielberg asking Cobb to direct a feature film. ``How many
people does that happen to?'' says Cobb. ``Steven Spielberg wants me to direct
a movie. I've never directed a movie in my life and Steven Spielberg wants me
to direct a movie.''

``I said, `Steven, I don't know if I can direct. I mean, how do I even
know?'''

Spielberg didn't care, says Cobb. ``He said, `If John Carpenter can
direct ``The Fog,'' you can direct this (he was talking about the film which
would later become ET). Get yourself an agent.'''

```Get yourself an agent,''' repeats Cobb in wonderment. ``That's a real
Hollywood story. People are just dying to get into the film business and I'm
saying, `Well, okay.'''



Cobb is talking in the study of his big, arched, tiled and patioed house
in a quiet corner of northwest Santa Monica. There's a large spiked and
brightly painted Mexican lizard inside the front foyer, a spaceship model on
a table in the living room and in the middle of the kitchen a cafe-sized
espresso maker on a butcher block island.

At 50, Cobb is bulky, bearded and adolescently enthusiastic--a guy who,
back in high school, was more excited by monster comics and the idea of a
Mars landing than football rallies or Friday night dances. This morning
Cobb's graying hair is still damp from the shower but his mind is racing full
tilt (with emphasis on the tilt). He laughs, talks, gestures wildly with his
hands and jokes non-stop.

Actually, it's a good thing that Cobb has so much energy because at the
moment he's stretched to the limit. He just finished designing some new
dinosaurs for a new Disney time travel ride. Warner Brothers has just
optioned ``Atoll,'' his science fiction comedy about a temporary occupation of
earth by cosmically indifferent aliens. He's just started set design on Jim
Cameron's ``Abyss,'' an underwater epic for Fox. In whatever spare time
remains, he works with a small group of computer, film and music people who
have volunteered their services to make an inspirational short film promoting
world peace through a joint Soviet-American mission to Mars.

``I have always had a kind of churning enthusiasm about life and the
natural world and mankind,'' says Cobb. ``The monsters and the saints. The
drama and the folly. It all interests me. The universe is an incomprehensive,
infinite mystery."

Cobb is ``exceedingly intelligent,'' says his old friend Mitchel Harding,
a radio host on KCRW, but he never went to college and only had C grades in
high school. Although this saved him from being ``crammed into the acceptable
boxes,'' it also for a long time prevented him from making a living as an
artist, a field in which he had no formal training anyway.

After graduation from high school in Burbank in the mid-fifties, Cobb
supported himself building movie props, delivering mail working in assorted
factories. Then, after a brief detour to go to Vietnam with the US Army in
the early 60's, Cobb rented a house on Franklin Street in Hollywood for
$45/month. ``All these strange people were moving in around me,'' he says.
``I noticed something was happening. I guess it was the sixties.''

To try and eke our a living, Cobb began doing monster magazine covers
and painting bizarre beasts such as amputee lizards (with prosthetic arms),
alien astronomers, ``asymmetrical abominations,'' mythic figures and wondrous
castle-like structures unlike anything ever seen on earth. In those years,
Cobb blossomed as an artist, becoming much more interested in color (``LSD
turned me away from monochromatic designs,'' he says.) And ``I began to see
where religion came from,'' an awakening, he says, which both made him much
more ``sympathetic to the religious impulse'' and much more ``effective in
attacking it.''

At the same time, he also began doing realistic landscapes, such as ``Man
on Lizard Crossing Over,'' showing an oriental swordsman riding a huge
dinosaur-like lizard through a traditional western background of barren flat-
topped mesas, cobalt skies and fleecy white clouds. Years later when George
Lucas saw the painting on John Milius's wall, he appropriated the lizard for
Star Wars. (Cobb later created five of the aliens for Star Wars' famous
cantina scene.)

``I'm very impressed by the act of creation,'' says Cobb. ``I like
inventing hypothesis. I like mythmaking. Film offers me an opportunity to do
all these things. I can do the architecture. I can do the sets. I express my
interest in technology. I can express my interest in story, plot and
character, the psychology of the characters. Film is very satisfying.''

Cobb's first brush with fame came not from film however, but from the
sharp-edged political cartoons he started to do for the Los Angeles Free
Press in the mid-sixties. Although Cobb made hardly any money from them, they
were reprinted in counter-culture and underground newspapers throughout the
country and the world--all of which still didn't prevent Cobb from going into
a terrible two year decline when the Sixties ended. ``I couldn't paint or draw
or think straight,'' he says. ``I couldn't snap out of it. I couldn't finish
anything. I was taking amphetamines. It was really an awful time. And I
didn't know what it was. The only thing that broke it was that my (future)
wife called me from Australia: `Hello. I'm Robin Love. This is the Aquarius
Foundation here in Sydney. Your cartoons are very well known here. We wonder
if you would be interested in coming to Australia?'

``I said, `Yes, I'll come! I'll come!'''

At the end of the tour, Cobb moved in with Love and, for the first five
years of their marriage, she supported him. ``I never expected Ron to make any
money,'' she says. ``Ron could have been doing everything he wanted to do a lot
sooner if he had hustled. But he is not an ambitious person.''

Cobb didn't earn a living from his art until he was over 40 and
screenwriter Dan O'Bannon hired him to design the earthship for Alien. ``He
was paid $400 a week,'' says Love. ``We thought it was wonderful. It was the
first regular money Ron had ever earned since (working in the Post Office
nearly 20 years before). Even now, she says, money means so little to him ``he
doesn't even know how much money he made last year.'' Which, she says, ``is one
of the nice things about him.'' If he lost everything he would be content to
live in a one room apartment again as long as he could have his artist's
tools, his wine and his cats. Cobb is crazy about the cats, says Love. He
says that one of the reasons he doesn't want children is that ``they don't
purr.''

``I distinctly remember accepting the idea that I would never have
money,'' says Cobb. ``I would always be poor. I didn't have any training. I
would never be a big success.'' Now that he has money, life is easier than
before and he doesn't have to make so many compromises. But the basic issues
haven't changed. In the final analysis, says Cobb, ``I'm like everyone else. I
want attention. I want to be noticed. I want friends. I'm lonely. I still
waste a lot of time feeling inadequate about my work. But I'm at peace with
that."



Although it was Cobb's share of ET's profits that finally made him
financially secure, Cobb not only didn't get to direct ET, he had virtually
nothing to do with the film. He was working as production designer on John
Milius's "Conan the Barbarian'' at a time when Spielberg was down the hall
working on "Raiders of the Lost Ark.'' When Cobb didn't have anything else to
do, he'd go talk storyboarding with Spielberg. ``I would suggest angles,
ideas, verbalize the act of directing--`Let's do this and do that and we
could shoot over his shoulder and then a close-up of the shadow.' Steven used
a lot of my suggestions. I was very flattered.'' And one day, says Cobb,
Spielberg told him, ``I think you can direct. I want to back a film for
you.''

At the time Spielberg was planning to make a film about the Kelly
Hopkinsville Incident, a supposedly true story about a farm family terrorized
by five little glowing aliens. The family, however, didn't want any more
notoriety and threatened to sue. To avoid a possible lawsuit Cobb offered to
make up an equivalent story. ``So while I was working on Conan (in Spain) they
flew me to Paris and I told Steven the story. John Sayles was brought in to
write the script.'' The name was ``Dark Skies.'' But the film never got off the
ground--the $3.5 million it would take to do the special effects for five
aliens was too much for the budget.

To try and save the project, Spielberg reduced the number of aliens from
five to one. Since this made it necessary to totally revise the script,
Spielberg brought screenwriter Melissa Matheison (wife of Harrison Ford).
``Then the rumors started coming. I realized that Steven had changed the
script a lot. He went back to a story he had told me about years before--an
alien is abandoned and protected by a little boy. It wasn't scary anymore. It
was kind of sweet. So my picture became ET. There was a long silence. I was
really busy on Conan. Finally, (Spielberg's associate) Kathy Kennedy, called
to say, `Steven doesn't know how to tell you this but ET is very close to his
heart and he wants to make that his picture next year and he's decided to
direct it himself. So what we would like to do when you get back is work out
another picture for you. Because Steven really wants to back your career.'''

Actually, says Cobb, he was sort of relieved. From what he could tell
from Spain the script was getting a little too cutesy for his taste anyway.
As compensation, when he returned from Spain Kathy Kennedy let Cobb play one
of ET's doctors in the hospital scene. ``I got to carry the little tyke out,''
he says.

Cobb and Love went to see ET when it opened, but they didn't care for
it. ``A banal re-telling of the Christ story,'' he says, ``sentimental and self-
indulgent, a pathetic lost puppy kind of story.''

Cobb's assessment not withstanding, it rapidly became clear that ET was
going to be far more successful than anyone had ever dreamed. Love, in the
meanwhile, had looked into the fine print of Cobb's contract and discovered
that they would get a $7500 kill fee if for any reason Cobb didn't get to
direct the film, plus a consolation prize of one point.

Love says she really didn't have high hopes of getting any money. ``All I
had was a deal memo.'' But she typed up an invoice and sent it to Universal.
She was talking on the phone when a big manila envelope with a pre-printed
label arrived. ``I thought it was junk mail,'' she says. But inside was a check
for over $400,000.

ET went on to become the highest grossing movie in history, so far
making $637 million worldwide. And quarterly checks have been arriving ever
since. ``I guess it will keep going forever and ever,'' says Love, which to her
is a kind of ironic justice. ``Ron spent all those years doing cartoons and
not getting paid anything and then . . . he gets a million for not doing
anything. Friends from Australia always ask, `What did you do on ET?' And Ron
says, `I didn't direct it.'''