Mac and Me is a 1988 American comic science fiction film co-written (with Steve Feke) and directed by Stewart Raffill. Starring Christine Ebersole, Jonathan Ward and Tina Caspary alongside Lauren Stanley and Jade Calegory in their only film appearances, the film centers on a "Mysterious Alien Creature" (MAC) that escapes from nefarious NASA agents and is befriended by a wheelchair-using boy named Eric Cruise. Together, Eric and MAC try to find MAC's family from whom he has been separated.
Mac and Me | |
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Theatrical release poster | |
Directed by | Stewart Raffill |
Produced by |
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Written by |
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Starring |
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Music by | Alan Silvestri |
Cinematography | Nick McLean |
Edited by | Tom Walls |
Production companies |
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Distributed by | Orion Pictures |
Release date |
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Running time | 99 minutes |
Country | United States |
Language | English |
Budget | $13 million |
Box office | $6.4 million (domestic) |
Despite praise for Calegory's lead performance, the film met with unanimous critical censure and failed at the box office. Reviewers noted imitation of numerous concepts from E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982) and excessive product placement (mainly of McDonald's and Coca-Cola) as its principal flaws. The film was nominated for four Golden Raspberry Awards while winning Worst Director and Worst New Star (for Ronald McDonald). On the other hand, it received four Youth in Film Awards (now Young Artist Awards) nominations.
The film holds a 0% approval rating at review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes and is widely regarded as one of the worst films ever made. It has however, attained cult status.
Screenplay
A NASA spacecraft has landed on an unknown planet and begins to take rock and soil samples. Four aliens discover it and are sucked up through its vacuum after which it makes its way back to Earth. The aliens are able to escape from a military base by using their powers (with which they can destroy or heal anything they touch). During the escape, the youngest one hides in a passing van occupied by a wheelchair-using boy named Eric Cruise, his older brother Michael and their single mother Janet who are moving to California from Illinois.
Shortly after the Cruise family arrives at their new home, Eric becomes suspicious of the alien's presence. The next morning, he finds that it ends up ruining much of the house and learns its identity but is blamed alongside Michael by Janet for what has happened. After seeing it again, Eric tries to catch up to it, but ends up sliding down a hill and falling into a lake where he nearly drowns but is rescued by it. He is not believed at all when he tries to tell his family about its actions.
Later that night, he sets a trap with the help of his new friend Debbie who has also seen the alien. They trap it inside a vacuum cleaner which malfunctions and causes the entire neighborhood to suffer a power surge. After it is released, Michael now believes Eric but it leaves before Janet can be convinced. Eric's behavior towards it changes after it fixes all of the damage it caused to the house and leaves behind several newspaper clippings which Eric believes are an attempt to communicate.
FBI agents Wickett and Zimmerman, who were present when the aliens had escaped from the base, have tracked down the youngest one to the Cruise residence. They are immediately recognized by Eric and Michael. Eric is forced to take the alien whom he has now named MAC (Mysterious Alien Creature) to a birthday party at a McDonald's restaurant where Debbie's older sister Courtney works. Wickett and Zimmerman follow but now disguised in a teddy bear suit, MAC starts a dance number as a distraction and escapes with Eric on his wheelchair. Wickett and Zimmerman chase them through a nearby neighborhood and shopping mall with additional help but they are rescued by Michael. Having witnessed the chase in the mall, Janet catches up to Wickett and Zimmerman and inadvertently learns from the former that MAC is indeed real.
Eric, Michael, Debbie and Courtney decide to help reunite MAC with the other three aliens which they learn are his family. With his help, they travel towards the outskirts of Palmdale and manage to find them in an abandoned mine. While stopping at a gas station, they accidentally alert security. After MAC's father steals a gun from a security guard, the police arrive and an unintended shooting takes place in the parking lot followed by an explosion with Eric being caught in the crossfire and killed. Once Wickett, Zimmerman and Janet arrive by helicopter, MAC and his family use their powers to bring Eric back to life.
For saving Eric, MAC and his family are granted citizenship with the Cruise family, their neighbors, Wickett and Zimmerman in attendance at the ceremony. The film ends with MAC's father driving his family along with the kids who helped them.
- Christine Ebersole as Janet Cruise
- Jonathan Ward as Michael Cruise
- Jade Calegory as Eric Cruise
- Tina Caspary as Courtney (credited as Katrina Caspary)
- Lauren Stanley as Debbie
- Barbara Allyne Bennet as Scientist
- Martin West as Wickett
- Danny Cooksey as Jack, Jr.
- Squire Fridell as Ronald McDonald
- Jennifer Aniston and Nikki Cox appear as uncredited extras
Development
Producer R.J. Louis had previously worked on advertising campaigns with McDonald's and had an association with their charitable arm Ronald McDonald House Charities (RMHC). He explained that at the time Ronald McDonald was "even more than Santa Claus", but that the release of E.T. was close behind and thus felt that the next "generation" needed an E.T. of their own. Louis was required to negotiate the rights to use the McDonald's brand and its elements within the film. He pitched the project as a cross-promotional endeavor which could be promoted at its restaurants, and with its profits helping to support RMHC.
Some have reported that the film was—at least partially—financed by McDonald's, which Louis denies. However, he did receive funding from Golden State Foods, a food service distributor closely associated with McDonald's; Louis had encountered its CEO in his efforts to pitch the film and was attracted by its charitable goals. Despite McDonald's specifying that they did not want Ronald McDonald to appear in the film, he nonetheless appeared in a scene set at a McDonald's restaurant which featured an extended dance sequence. The character also appeared in the theatrical trailer.
Louis noted that he was one of the first to leverage the chain as a platform for promoting films; Disney would later enter into a long-term deal with McDonald's to cross-promote its properties such as films through in store campaigns such as Happy Meals although this relationship ended in May 2006, amid pressure to reduce the promotion of junk food to children.
Despite this, Louis remarked that he was "still the only person in the universe that ever had the exclusive motion picture rights to the McDonald's trademark, their actors, their characters and the whole company."
Stewart Raffill
Stewart Raffill, who had made a number of family films, was brought on as director despite the film not even having a script written yet. He says he was recommended to the producer by James Brolin, who Raffill made High Risk with.
Raffill later recalled:
I was hired out of the blue. And the producer asked me to come down to the office. So I did and he had a whole crew there, a whole crew on the payroll. It was amazing. He had the transportation captain. The camera department head. The AD. The Production Manager. He had everybody already hired and I said, “Well, what’s the script?” And he said, “We don’t have a script. I don’t like the script. You have to write the script. You’re gonna have to write it quick so prep the movie and write the script on the weekends.”
The crew aimed to distinguish the film from E.T. by having Mac be a member of a family and having powers and skills.
Raffill says the producer wanted to use an actor who was handicapped. "So he found a kid who had spina bifida. The kid had never acted before, but he was a wonderful kid. But when they finished it was as if the fact that they used a real encumbered person to play the person didn’t mean anything to even the people who lived in the world." Raffill says "the moment Disney heard we had this deal with McDonald’s, they went in and hammered out a three year deal to get all their toys put in their Happy Meals and have that relationship with Coca-Cola. As such, the McDonald’s people were then not particularly enthused with us as they now had Disney, but they had to fulfill their arrangement with us."
Filming
In one scene, Eric Cruise (played by Calegory, who has spina bifida and uses a wheelchair in real life) is seen rolling off a cliff in his wheelchair; Raffill noted that he performed a portion of the stunt himself, explaining that "it's very hard to do physical things when you're in that condition. It's very hard to make a wheelchair work, because it's not a very balanced thing. When you start going fast in a wheelchair, you place tremendous risk on the child, so you have to try and figure out how to do that in a controlled fashion."
The shooting of Eric was explicitly shown in the Japanese VHS release of the film.
- Soundtrack
The film's soundtrack album was released by Curb Records, featuring one track from its musical score by Alan Silvestri and the theme song "Take Me (I'll Follow You)" by Bobby Caldwell.
Track listing:
- Score
In 2014, Quartet Records released a limited edition disc (1000 copies) of Silvestri's complete score. The disc also includes "You're Not A Stranger Anymore (Theme From Mac and Me)" and "Take Me (I'll Follow You)," which Silvestri co-wrote for the film.
Box office
The film premiered in Hong Kong on August 5, 1988 with a United States release following on August 12. A box office bomb, it grossed $6,424,112 in the U.S. against a $13 million budget. It had a profit-sharing arrangement with Ronald McDonald House Charities.
Critical response
Upon release, the film was widely panned as a duplication of Steven Spielberg's E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982). Los Angeles Times critic Michael Wilmington wrote: "It's an amazingly bald-faced copy of E.T., even though this is E.T. in a sticky wrapper, left under the heater two hours too long. Almost everything in the earlier movie has a double here." Richard Harrington of The Washington Post amended the famed "E.T., phone home" phrase to "E.T., call lawyer" and said: "Why is it so hard to like this film? Having seen it done so much better by Spielberg doesn't help, of course."
The contrivance of the "Mysterious Alien Creature" being referred to by the acronym "MAC" (the McDonald's Corporation's signature product is the Big Mac), a dance number at a McDonald's featuring Ronald McDonald and characters' wearing of McDonald's clothing, prompted Deseret News journalist Chris Hicks to declare: "I'm not sure I've ever seen a movie that is as crass a 90-minute commercial as Mac and Me." Hicks along with Caryn James of The New York Times observed additional promotion of Coca-Cola and Sears—the latter brand carried McKids, the McDonald's line of children's clothing. James also took exception to the "awfully irresponsible" treatment of wheelchair-using main cha
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