21 years ago in TIME

Director Steven Spielberg has remarked that “if E.T. hadn’t come to Elliott, he would have come to Michael’s house.” He reflects that Jackson is like a hybrid of outer space’s most famous tourist and of Chauncey Gardiner, the video-bedazzled innocent whom Peter Sellers portrayed in Being There … Jackson lives at home in Encino, Calif., with his mother, father and two youngest sisters. He supervised the recent redesigning of the sprawling Tudor house, and the result is a cross between a vest-pocket Disneyland and Citizen Kane’s Xanadu in suburbia. The menagerie, the soda fountain, the screening room are dream toys of childhood and the diversions of Southern California show-business affluence, all awash in the pastels of perennial boyhood. He takes trips to the Disney parks as to a shrine. He has spoken often about doing a movie musical of Peter Pan. –TIME, March 19, 1984

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