We Don't Need Roads: The Making of the Back to the Future Trilogy (8 page)

Thursday, January 24, 1985

T
he white 1984 GMC Value Van, marked with the words
DR
.
E
.
B
ROWN
ENTERPRISES
—24
HR
.
S
CIENTIFIC
SERVICES
, sat parked on the smooth black asphalt as a dozen or so men busied themselves in its immediate vicinity. The ground, which had been hosed down by the special effects team moments earlier, reflected the bright lights used to illuminate the parking lot, an old movie trick to give depth and texture to evening shots. White smoke seeped out of the top of the vehicle, foreshadowing what was soon to come. As the rear aluminum ramp began to descend, it revealed that the interior body of the box truck was completely engulfed in a haze of thick white mist. Two red brake lights pierced through the cloud. Then, the details of the DeLorean DMC-12 came into better view: the bumper; the smooth gray body, which was begging to have a hand run across its side; and the California license plate with
O
UTATIME
imprinted between two large exhaust vents. With a subtle fluidity, the camera ascended, showcasing a mess of wires, screws, connectors, and coils, along with a nuclear reactor, cleverly retrofitted from the hubcap of a Dodge Polara from the 1960s. In just a few
moments, Christopher Lloyd would hop out of the car and greet Marty, setting into motion the experiment with Einstein and a scene filled with exposition about the rules of time travel and the way his invention worked.

In life it may be impolite to show off, but in the movie business, it is encouraged. This extends not only to film stars, but also to filmmakers and how they choose to shoot a scene. When executed well, essential information to drive the narrative forward can be given by what is included, or omitted, in a single frame. This is not only true for this moment in the film, but throughout the entire movie. For example, the first time the audience sees Michael J. Fox in
Back to the Future
is in a close-up of the actor with guitar in hand and reflective aviator sunglasses, epitomizing teenage male coolness circa 1985. In that same opening sequence, the camera slowly pans across a variety of different clocks, establishing the motif of time. After George McFly rescues her character from Biff Tannen’s rape attempt in Doc’s car outside of the Enchantment Under the Sea dance, Lea Thompson is filmed from above—so she has to look up at the camera, mirroring the way she now looks up to George for his heroic action—in a shot that showcases her beauty. The DeLorean time machine’s first glamour shot sought to communicate to the viewer that while the car may look like the DMC-12 most in the audience were familiar with, it was capable of a lot more than just driving.

Consider the shot’s placement in the film. After Marty arrives at the Twin Pines Mall, he pets Einstein, and is interrupted by Doc’s white box truck’s rear lift unfolding automatically. Before long, the DeLorean time machine is fully exposed, having pierced through a cloud of white smoke. As visually interesting as this moment is, from a practical standpoint this moment in the film’s narrative seems to stretch the limits of common sense. Doc Brown
presumably entered the car and drove it into the truck, sure, but how did the cabin become filled with smoke? Why did he trap himself with no escape route? How did he even lift the gate in the first place, and how did he know when to let it down? It appears to be the theatrics were all to impress Marty, except Doc is surprised to see his friend standing beside the car once the car’s gull-wing door opens up. While there may be a convoluted theory as to why the scientist went through these lengths—chalk it all up to his eccentricities?—the most logical reason for the shot is that it was meant to captivate the audience with a few seconds of automotive eye candy and generate a few moments of wild speculation within a viewer’s mind as to what function the time machine’s exterior components served. “It’s a classic reveal,” special effects supervisor Kevin Pike says. “There are a lot of ways that you could have shown that car to the audience, and a lot of ways that Doc Brown could have shown the car to Marty. There’s no story point that says that the truck had to be full of smoke because of some plan that Doc had that didn’t go right. That was all Bob Zemeckis’s dream. He puts power into all of these little pieces that we would jump through hoops, as best we could, to satisfy. That is pure art going on there.”

Although it is a decision that has received far less attention over the three decades following the film’s release than the one to switch lead actors midstream, the Bobs’ most significant last-minute change might have been transforming the time-traveling chamber into a car. In the earliest draft of the
Future
script, the chamber was driven around in the back of a pickup truck. Before settling on the clock tower lightning strike as the energy source to send Marty back to 1985, the original climax of the film saw Doc and Marty driving the chamber to a nuclear test site as an explosion went off. It was an interesting idea, but they sensed
they could come up with a more compelling ending to their movie than showing a truck driving across the desert to await an explosion. When they were writing
Back to the Future
, the Bobs had a simple set of governing rules: check your ego at the door, write a film that both of us would want to see, and if someone thinks they can improve upon an idea, it must mean there’s a better one out there. During the summer of 1984, their rules led them toward an inspired concept: What if Doc Brown’s time-travel device wasn’t just on wheels, but was also a little dangerous? They had just the perfect car in mind: the DeLorean DMC-12.

Since its founding in 1975, the DeLorean Motor Company, headed by former General Motors vice president John DeLorean, was marred by controversy and misfortune. DMC struggled financially to produce vehicles up to par by quality control standards, and was unable to move enough units to stay afloat. By early 1982, the American car market was in shambles—the worst the country had seen since the Depression era. Sales of all vehicles slowed dramatically, with luxury cars taking the largest hit. Thousands of DMC-12s, the only model the company produced, languished in the Irish factory where they were constructed, unable to be sold. The company went into bankruptcy that May. While this was a damning blow to its founder, it paled in comparison to the allegations that the millionaire, while jet-setting around the world to try and attract investors for his fledgling empire in its waning days, agreed to participate in a cocaine trafficking ring. Undercover FBI agents had videotaped their interactions with DeLorean, and on October 12, 1982, he was arrested. Two years later, as the Bobs were working on their fourth draft of the
Future
screenplay, he was cleared of all eight counts. The defense successfully argued their client was a victim of entrapment. Regardless of its controversial reputation, the Bobs thought
the stainless-steel vehicle would be the perfect vessel for Doc Brown’s invention. It didn’t look like anything else on the road, and its notorious creator added an air of mystique to the vehicle. Spielberg was fine with the original chamber concept, but since the Bobs were enthusiastic about their new idea, he was supportive of their decision to make the change.

It could easily be argued that the most important character, and the biggest diva on set, was the DeLorean. The vehicle was heralded as a stroke of creative genius when integrated into the screenplay, yet it required a significant amount of attention, some due to the demands of the script, while others were the result of the inherent limitations of the DMC-12 model. “It was tight and uncomfortable,” Christopher Lloyd says. “Usually we had to shoot with the windows closed. One time we were in there with Einstein, Doc’s dog. He did not smell too good. We got pretty close and it got pretty stagnant in there.” Despite the cramped quarters, Lloyd recognized the DeLorean’s value. “It looked great. It was streamlined, it was futuristic—it was Doc’s car, plain and simple. It was the ideal vehicle for his mission.”

When the DeLorean was written into the movie, the aesthetic value of the vehicle was paramount. In the fourth draft of the screenplay, the Bobs wrote that the time machine was modified with “wicked-looking units,” making it look and feel “dangerous.” It was noted that there were coils along the front and rear of the body, but besides that, the Bobs were otherwise unspecific as to how the car would look. They were perhaps equally nonplussed about how a DMC-12 would handle the rigors of their production schedule. They had heard of the many problems that plagued the DeLorean Motor Company, and the reports of the cars’ poor craftsmanship, but neither Bob had personal experience with the car. As cameras started rolling on
Future
, they discovered that the
vehicle’s performance was as horrible as its design was unique. “It was a cool-looking car, but it really wasn’t a good car,” Neil Canton says. “There’s a reason why it never really became a successful seller.”

The final look of the movie car, with its abundance of gadgetry, is the result of the art and special effects departments harvesting the best of the talent they had available. Once the change was made from a chamber to a DeLorean, illustrator Ron Cobb was pegged to spearhead the design concept for the new and improved time machine. The artist came to Spielberg’s attention by way of director John Milius, who was a fan of Cobb’s paintings and political cartoons. By the time Spielberg was looking to hire a production artist on
Raiders of the Lost Ark
, the social critic had made the transition to working on feature films like the original
Star Wars
and
Alien
, assisting the production designers and special effects teams with concept art. Milius brokered a meeting between Cobb and Spielberg, who hit it off, and Cobb was hired to work on
Raiders
.

By the summer of 1984, Cobb was regularly at the Amblin offices, the quaint compound at Universal that Sid Sheinberg took to calling “Taco Bell” because of its southwestern architecture, which Spielberg himself designed. The Bobs’ offices were across from where Cobb was regularly sketching with other animators, putting
Back to the Future
on his radar. He thought the concept for the movie was interesting, a feeling that was confirmed when Spielberg approached him directly as the movie’s principal photography start date loomed ahead, just a few months away.

“Could you be a part of this time-travel movie and come up with a design for a time machine that’s made out of a DeLorean?”

“A DeLorean?” Cobb hadn’t heard many details about the film and was struck by the oddity and ingenuity of the concept.
“That’s really good, I like that. But why a DeLorean?” Spielberg wasn’t entirely sure. As far as he knew, the Bobs just thought it would look interesting. Either way, Spielberg’s answer, or lack thereof, was irrelevant. The illustrator wanted in, regardless of why the DeLorean was picked.

There were very few parameters put on the artist as he prepared to start his first drawing. It was important that the car look not only like it could actually travel through time, but that it look like an inventor had built it in his garage. Cobb had always been interested in science, and his previous cinematic work had included science fiction elements, but now he felt he had a real opportunity to go into overdrive. He took appraisal of the list of requisites: The car had to have a nuclear reactor in the back, appear to be street-legal, and include a flux capacitor, the mechanism by which, in the fantasy of the film’s narrative, time travel was possible. In between the other projects he was working on, he came up with “bogus physics” to explain how the vehicle’s many supplemental parts, which the Doc could have harvested from junkyards and hardware stores, would actually make the machine travel through time.

“A movie car should tell you instantly how it works, just by looking at it,” he says. “When someone invented the paper clip, you could immediately understand how it was used. It didn’t have to be explained. I wanted that sense for the DeLorean. Like the grid around the car—I knew right away that everyone would buy it because it
looks
like something you’d need to punch through hyperspace and arrive in the fifties.”

Cobb completed three detailed design sketches and submitted them to the art director, Todd Hallowell. Once Larry Paull, the film’s production designer, was hired, he was given the sketches so he could figure out how to best realize them
on-screen. There were only six or seven weeks in the schedule before the DeLorean would be needed for production, so there was no opportunity for significant changes to the design. “I didn’t have time or the energy, quite candidly, to dot every
i
and cross every
t
, to execute it exactly the way he had designed it,” Paull says. Andrew Probert, one of the film’s production illustrators, was called in to make further revisions to the design concept, as Cobb was assigned to work on other Amblin projects. Probert had previously worked on
Battlestar Galactica
and
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
, but he was perhaps best known in the industry for his significant contributions on
Star Trek: The Motion Picture
. Probert gave a second pass at the design, relying heavily on what Cobb had come up with. DeLorean Design 2.0 was complete within a few days.

Michael Scheffe, another freelance artist, was hired and tasked with synthesizing Cobb and Probert’s artwork into the final concept for the time-traveling vehicle, which he worked on just around the time Kevin Pike was hired as special effects supervisor. Scheffe’s design blueprints were very close to what materialized on film largely because, before he was hired for the film’s art department, he had spent a day inventorying parts that might work for the time machine with visual effects supervisor Mike Fink. Fink was brought on to
Back to the Future
as a liaison between the art department, based out of Amblin, and Kevin Pike’s shop, Filmtrix, located a few miles away on Chandler Boulevard in North Hollywood, where the DeLorean would be built and the other effects would be worked out. On one of his many excursions for add-on components, Fink purchased the parts that would be used for the flux capacitor, but he found the process of making the regular excursions to shops and junkyards too arduous to go at alone. He invited Scheffe to join him on one such
adventure, and the two spent an afternoon driving to supply houses, with Scheffe dutifully keeping a running list of appropriate parts that could be used to bring the sketches to reality—where they were located, how many of each piece was in stock, and what the prices were. Since three cars would be used for production—the A (or hero) car, with full amenities; the B car, which would be used primarily for stunts and distant shots, which wouldn’t require all of the interior elements; and the C car, which would be used for process or effects shots—it was essential that multiples of all of the various knickknacks that would be attached to the car be available. The goal was to present the list to Pike, have his team decide what they thought was useful, and then make purchases, so as not to waste time and money getting pieces that wouldn’t be used.