We Don't Need Roads: The Making of the Back to the Future Trilogy (17 page)

In order to achieve this vision, Paull was adamant that the scenes in and around the Hill Valley town square not be shot on location, which was what Zemeckis and company had originally planned on doing. “We scouted Petaluma, in the Bay Area, as Hill Valley, but the expense of taking out modern streetlights and the basic cost of buying out a lot of businesses who would have been impacted made it out of the question,” Bob Gale says. “After that scouting trip, Bob Z realized that Larry was right, and that our money would go further on the Universal Town Square.”

“We were going to shoot in November into December, in the height of the Christmas season, when all these real stores are out there trying to make their year-end money,” Paull says. “I said that we should be conscious of money too, but we should be doing it in a way that we’re used to, by incorporating the backlot. I’d explored the backlot and laid it out in my head—what were going to be the key stores in the film. Then it became just reaching into the past or into
Look
and
Life
magazines, finding these places that really existed in the fifties. I could put them all together and make the backlot representative of 1955 California.”

Having won that battle, Paull was less successful in fending off the invasion of product placement the producers demanded he integrate into the set. The production designer thought it was an unfortunate restriction to dictate which companies would and would not appear in the film depending on how many dollars they threw at the producers, but since it was a mandate, he played ball. When possible, he was insistent on including certain brands over others, in order to keep Hill Valley a familiar-seeming place for the
audience. For example, an undisclosed gas company was willing to give a significant chunk of change to have their logo on the gas station in Marty’s town, but Paull insisted on using Texaco, primarily because it reminded him of a gag from
The Milton Berle Show
. In the end, the filmmakers were able to make the product placement work out to their advantage, creating some very memorable sequences in the film by juxtaposing the differences between products Americans used in the 1950s and 1980s. During filming, Deborah Lynn Scott costumed one of the extras in a vintage gas attendant costume for the Texaco scene. When Zemeckis saw this, he came up with an idea. Scott took her directive, returned with three more extras in matching costumes, and the director shot a quick gag where a driver pulls into the station and is swarmed by attendants eager to help by checking the tire pressure and oil, cleaning the windshield, and filling the gas tank, all in a few seconds. These seemingly inconsequential visual jokes create a more realistic mise-en-scène, a cinematic term used to describe all the elements that appear before a camera, and also allowed the filmmakers opportunities to use shorthand to compare the different time periods in the film.

These were the occasional straws Paull put on the camel’s back while in production, and before hiring was started on
Paradox
, it appears one of those had broken it. “I wanted to come back,” he says. “But Bob and I had a . . . what we call a ‘creative difference’ over something that happened on the original, and I was not asked back.” Instead, the job was offered to Rick Carter, another veteran of
Amazing Stories
. The two met when Zemeckis was hired to direct an hour-long episode of the series, “Go to the Head of the Class,” which starred Christopher Lloyd and included music from Alan Silvestri. The two hit it off, and when someone was needed to fill the vacancy left by Paull, the director
sent a copy of the script to his former colleague. “That story, pleasantly, fried my brain,” Carter says. “And I enjoyed the sensation. We had so much to think about and so much to visualize. It was fun to imagine jumping into that world, especially after having seen the first
Back to the Future
.”

The first order of business, of course, was designing what the Hill Valley landscape would look like in the four time periods the film is set in: 1955, 1985, 1985-A—the alternate version of the present day, where Biff has taken over the town—and 2015. Rick Carter began by looking at the first film for clues not only about how to re-create the visuals of the original picture, but also how to extend and expand upon those visual themes to create an original, yet coherent, vision for the series. “It was different than any other movie, where you could actually go film at a place that really existed,” Carter says. “In this case, it certainly existed in everybody’s minds because the first production was so good, and the movie was so successful, and that town square was so iconic. It was about knowing that Hill Valley was the heart and soul of the movie on a visual level.

“Re-creating 1955 was a lot of fun in the sense that we got to reimagine something that you knew everybody had already responded to,” he continues. “The challenge, of course, was to project that not only forward in the future, but also in the alternate version of the present for Biffhorrific, as it was labeled by Bob and called at the time. On the first
Back to the Future
, they really seemed to exude a kind of warmth toward the time periods they were expressing, so I wanted to do that. We created this terrific alternate version of 1985, a ‘Las Vegas meets Bangkok meets some derelict New York,’ early seventies version of a run-down city. Sex and pollution were dominant in those scenes, and there was an exaggeration of the value of money. There was a lot
to play with there, and a lot to express with all the signage and lighting. It was really fun.”

Joanna Johnston also found it a healthy challenge to continue the work someone else began. Deborah Lynn Scott’s contributions to the first film were just as memorable as Larry Paull’s production design, and her successor was determined to preserve the integrity of the original design, while also adding her own personal touches.
“
Scott’s stuff was really quite challenging,” she says. “The style of it was really interesting to me because I’m not American, and I had not lived in America at all at this point, so I was going in and looking at the cultural stuff of American clothing. It was just totally different from what was going on in London at the time, but I had to do it. There was not even the possibility of shifting off it, because you’re picking up somebody else’s baton. You need to honor that.”

This was less of a challenge when it came to the more fantastic time periods in the picture, like 1985-A and 2015. “Biffhorrific, well, it was just that,” Johnston says. “It was everything going wrong. Bob wanted Lea Thompson to look really tacky and sleazy, so we put a fake full chest on her with this enormous cleavage. All of her clothes are completely revolting, and so are Biff’s. It’s easy, that stuff, because you just go to the wrong side. I suppose there was a counterbalance to what the rest of the film was doing with the optimistic Hill Valley future.”

In designing the future, the team was able to flex their creative muscles. It’s true that “not
Blade Runner
” can only be carried so far as an edict, but Bob Gale’s screenplay provided valuable clues as to how the Bobs wanted the twenty-first century to appear on-screen. Technology would be more ubiquitous, but in a helpfully efficient way, not an oppressive one. Instead of trying to predict where technology was headed in the real world and forecast
those guesses on-screen, Gale went for humor, expanding upon some of the gags from the first film, like Marty inventing the first skateboard, and including some in-jokes to mock 1980s popular culture, like the seemingly endless
Jaws
sequels and even the momentous appeal of Zemeckis’s own
Roger Rabbit
.

However, even without trying, the filmmakers did make some accurate prognoses. For example, the residents of Hill Valley have thumb pads that enable them to make quick payments, as Old Biff does after exiting the taxicab. In fact, thumbprint technology is completely integrated into Zemeckis and Gale’s future, with its uses including, but not limited to, the ability to unlock doors, just as it has become a popular means of punching in at workplace time clocks and unlocking telephones in recent years. “The big crime was going to be people’s fingers being cut off,” the director told his team before filming. “People will cut off fingers, and they’ll run the tissue to the bank, the ATM, and get your money out.” Much has been made of the film’s prophetic inclusion of videoconferencing, multichannel television viewing, and flat screens. In Hill Valley’s future, cosmetic surgery has become easy and commonplace. Doc Brown’s face is made more youthful by visiting a “rejuvenation clinic,” and careful observers will notice the presence of Bottoms Up, a breast enhancement company, which advertises on the McFly television and can be seen in the background of some future scenes. There is instantaneous written correspondence, although the film inaccurately thought there would be an expansion of fax technology, which, of course, was superseded in the real world by email and text messaging. In both the fictional and real 2015, televised advertising is virtually omniscient, like Goldie Wilson III’s hover conversion commercial that broadcasts over the square, and personally targeted ads are indeed part of everyday life now—just not often in
the form of a large digital shark projecting from movie theater marquees.

Perhaps the best, and most underrated, example of one of Gale’s jokes turning into a reality can be found in the
Number Two
draft of the script. Marty inadvertently stumbles upon a Huey Lewis and the News concert, but realizes in short time that the band isn’t actually there. Instead, it’s a realistic hologram on a theater stage, eternally preserving his idols in their best physical condition. In the real world, holographic concert technology has been on display at least since 2012, with deceased music artists like Michael Jackson, Tupac Shakur, and Lisa “Left-Eye” Lopes “performing” in front of audiences of thousands.

Animator John Bell, who proved to be an invaluable addition to the creative team, designed many of the ancillary aspects of the future set. Even in its earliest version, specific elements, like flying cars, were written into the 2015 portion of the film. Years before Gale submitted his first draft to Universal, during that “unofficial preproduction” period, Amblin and ILM took baby steps toward pushing the sequel toward the green light, which included coming up with elements of Hill Valley’s future landscape. “I was less than a year into my employment at ILM at the time,” Bell says. “I had just finished working on
Star Trek IV
and was in between projects. Back then, there were just two other people in the art department with myself. One of the producers at ILM, Patty Blau, came into the art department, knowing there wasn’t a lot going on, and told me about the project. At that point, all we knew was that Bob was going thirty years into the future and there was something called a ‘hoverboard.’ They asked me to just come up with some ideas.”

Over the course of the next six weeks, Bell completed dozens of detailed images: a vibrant town square, the interior of Doc’s laboratory, and the Hill Valley courthouse with large glass windowpanes
above the clock and a monorail nearby. The artwork was sent to the director, who left them to languish in storage as filming began on
Roger Rabbit
in December 1986. Bell started working on Ron Howard’s 1988 film
Willow
without giving
Future
too much of a second thought, until a phone call came from Rick Carter that August. “The film has been green-lighted and we’re getting ready to start,” he said. “We have a script now. Can you come down to Los Angeles and come up with some designs for some specific vehicles and moments?” Bell’s planned three-week journey to L.A. ended up lasting months.

Bell and Johnston collaborated on concepts for some of the futuristic costumes, particularly the look of Biff’s grandson, Griff, and his gang. Harkening back yet again to the original film, the antagonistic Tannens were given a band of bullies to parade around with in every time period. The costumes for the gang of 2015 would have to appear not only intimidating and distinctive, but congruous with the palette created by the art department. This was an assignment that required a lot of attention, with work beginning almost as soon as both the animator and costume designer were hired. “Designing for the future was easy. You just use certain fabrics and leathers and bits and accessorize. They were pretty much all monochromatic, just with a few highlights,” Johnston says. “For the girl, she was in the same vein, but I kept her quite girlie. She was really pretty, kind of androgynous. She was edgy—sexy and tough all at the same time.

“The strongest thing about Bob is that he has no fear about where to go,” she continues. “That’s why he gathers like-minded people around him. Although I was quite apprehensive about the job, because I was so new to the game, I knew I could just spin off into crazy places and he’d be happy with all of that, whereas a lot of directors would want to rope you in.”

Zemeckis’s vision of the future, and the need for increased functionality of technology, also extended to the clothing. Not only did he want the designs to be original, but also practical. One of his ideas was that, in the future, clothing stores would no longer carry multiple sizes of the same item. If people outgrew a particular size, why should they have to throw out their old garments? Instead, all clothing would be one-size-fits-all and adjustable to a person’s body. The result was Marty’s retractable jacket and self-lacing Nike Mag sneakers. Johnston made the jacket out of rubber because of another Zemeckis idea: “Make it so that you wouldn’t have to take it to the dry cleaner’s or Laundromat. You could just hose it down.”

When Johnston was hired, Frank Marshall told her that a component of her job would involve working with Nike on product placement for the film. The executive producer grew close with Pamela McConnell at the footwear company back when Michael J. Fox was hired for the first movie. Deborah Lynn Scott outfitted him in wardrobe and brought him out to show Zemeckis, his producers, and the Amblin Trio, but she had neglected to put him in Marty-specific shoes. The actor wore a pair of white low-top Nike Bruins with a red swoosh to the costume fitting, and Zemeckis instructed the actor to just wear what he came in with. They were perfect. The next day, Scott called Marshall, frantic. She had tried to go out that morning and buy ten pairs to use for filming, but none of the local shops were still carrying the sneaker. The shoes Fox had worn had been discontinued. Marshall called some friends who worked for Nike, who directed him to McConnell. He explained the situation and she was happy to assist. It might be because product placement wasn’t as prevalent in the mid-1980s, but Nike didn’t charge Universal a dime. They sent ten pairs of sneakers, and a beautiful
relationship between the producers and the company was started, which maintains its strength to this day.