We Don't Need Roads: The Making of the Back to the Future Trilogy (10 page)

John Ellis served as supervisor at the optical department, the branch of ILM responsible for matching the effects to the camera focus and adding coloration to each shot. Takahashi would do his work on black or white paper, and then hand it over to Ellis’s team for the finishing touches. “I would say—and I hope nobody is checking any records of my time cards—it probably took a week to do one shot,” Takahashi says. “And we’re just talking about the ten different animated elements generating the time slice effect.” While he was spending a significant amount of work creating the look of the DeLorean’s passage through time, it was equally important for the animator to focus his efforts on creating lightning for the clock tower scene. The Bobs’ script called for “the most spectacular bolt of lightning in the history of cinema,”
a truly monumental task for an animator to pull off. For all of the impact that moment has on-screen in the finished film, Takahashi still sees an abundance of unrealized potential in his work.

“I never liked the animation that was finally approved of the gigantic bolt of lightning that hit the clock tower,” he says. “That one shot went through numerous iterations. ‘The biggest bolt of lightning in cinematic history’? Well, that could be interpreted many ways. If you make electricity too fat, it’s just big white space and you lose all dimension, which, to me, never really worked. I started out trying to have this electricity start way off in the background and just creep up quickly towards the foreground and hit the clock tower. I was doing a lot of conceptual painted designs of lightning over color photos of the clock tower, and Bob Zemeckis chose this S-shaped one. That’s what I animated, but it wasn’t very convincing to me as animation. I wish I could have submitted other designs, or maybe just taken a little longer on that one shot, but given that I was the person who was doing all the electricity in the movie, I was pretty strapped for time.”

The attention given to the clock tower sequence is fitting, given that the scene is arguably the most important one in the film. The narrative structure of
Back to the Future
sets up two goals for the main character: One, Marty has to fix his parents up, and two, he needs to return to 1985. As a result, there are two separate resolutions to these problems. When George kisses Lorraine at the Enchantment Under the Sea dance, the emotional climax of the film is realized. Marty’s parents will fall in love and, providing our hero achieves his second goal, all will be fine. From a storytelling standpoint, this makes the sequence depicting the greatest thunderstorm in Hill Valley history the scene with the most import in the film. If Marty misses the lightning strike, his existence will still be threatened, and all the time spent connecting
his parents will be undone. The sequence was meticulously storyboarded ahead of time, because of the effects that would be added in postproduction. They were then shot on film and cut together, so the editors would have a working guide of how the finished scene was supposed to look. It was a lengthy sequence to put together, but one that Zemeckis and company were unwilling to compromise on. The end result is one of the most iconic shots in cinematic history. As a testament to the significance of the lightning strike to the franchise, it is the only piece of footage that appears in all three installments of the trilogy. “It was good for me,” Bob Yerkes, the circus performer who served as Christopher Lloyd’s stuntman in this scene, says. “I got paid for the other shows and didn’t have to do any extra work.”

But as captivating as that sequence is to watch, it was difficult to film. As Marty is shouting up to Doc to warn him about the Libyan terrorists, Michael J. Fox was required to yell take after take as an industrial-strength wind machine blew in his face, making it impossible for him to hear his own voice. Meanwhile, Christopher Lloyd experienced his own difficulties. While Bob Yerkes slid down the wire from the tower to the ground, the remainder of the shots were up to Lloyd to handle. “We hung Chris from a harness off the clock tower for one shot,” Bob Gale says. “Today we’d have used a green screen.” The close-ups of the actor were obtained on a soundstage at Universal; but for the long shots, the actor had to venture up to the top of the high building that overlooked the Universal backlot.

“I was on break before we got around to shooting the clock tower sequence, and, by myself, climbed the stairs up to the top,” Christopher Lloyd says. “That’s when I realized that where I was supposed to film was just a ledge.” The actor, who is afraid of heights, took one look at the ground, and came to a conclusion:
There was no way he was going to stand up on that ledge to film. He thought of a solution and took it to Bob Z.

“I was thinking . . .” The actor paused. The director looked back at him quizzically. Zemeckis was preoccupied with other business at the moment, and Lloyd knew it, but he had to get his feelings off his chest as soon as possible so the crew could start to work out a solution. “I was thinking that I could do the scene kneeling down.”

Zemeckis’s response was simple: “No fucking way.” He wasn’t angry, per se, but he made it clear that Doc Brown was not going to crawl along the clock tower ledge during the film’s most important scene. When it came time to get that shot, the stunt team attached one end of a cable to Christopher Lloyd; the other was on a crane. If the actor had lost his footing atop the ledge, he would have fallen no more than a few feet before he was caught. With a secure system in place, the actor felt relatively confident during the shoot. His fear of heights would still remain, but at least he had evidence of one time he had overcome it.

With the scene in the can, Harry Keramidas got to work. He used the storyboards that were shot and edited together as his foundation in cutting the sequence. As footage came into his workspace, he switched out the storyboard footage. At any time, Zemeckis could see how the scene would look in its finished state, since the storyboards were filmed and used as placeholders until the entire sequence was put together. Because of the time required to see this project through to completion, the clock tower sequence wasn’t done all in one clip. Instead, Keramidas bounced back and forth between that and the other—meaning shorter and easier—scenes to edit as they made their way to his trailer workspace. Overall, the process took weeks, with Zemeckis continuing to make his regular visits during his lunch “break” and after filming wrapped to give notes.

In terms of the production schedule, it made sense to front-load these scenes. Not only were they a beast to film; they would also require a significant amount of attention before the movie hit the theaters. If practice makes perfect, perhaps it was best that portions of each of these were worked out first during the Stoltz era, then revisited weeks later when all involved had a firmer grasp of the director’s vision and expectations. Of course, it was also important for each scene to work in terms of audience buy-in to the story. Introduced within the first few minutes of the film, the clock tower was an important character in its own right, helped in large part because of the scene with Marty, Jennifer, and an overly passionate representative from the Hill Valley Preservation Society played by Elsa Raven.

“When I was called in, I auditioned for Mr. Zemeckis in a tiny little room,” she says. “It was longer than a closet, and it was just the two of us. When I started reading, it startled him because I yelled out, ‘Save the clock tower!’ and Mr. Zemeckis was standing two feet away from me. He kind of recoiled, and I said, ‘Well, she’s got to reach the people. She’s got to be loud!’” The two got to talking and realized they had something in common: They had both worked with Steven Spielberg before—she on
The Twilight Zone: The Movie
. “That made the difference,” she says. Although she only received the pages of the script her character appeared in, and only had a minimal idea of what
Back to the Future
was about, she was aware of the gravity of the scene in setting up the importance of the blue flyer her character gives Marty. When Doc of the 1950s mentions to Marty that only a bolt of lightning could generate the 1.21 gigawatts required to send the DeLorean back to the future, it’s likely that careful observers in the viewing audience might remember Raven’s character and the piece of paper containing the details of the infamous Hill Valley storm.

“Maybe it’s subconscious, but I think sometimes the fun and charm of the
Back to the Future
films is the fact that there is dramatic irony, which I think is such a great tool,” Dean Cundey says. “The fact that the audience knows something the characters don’t. It’s like you’re always making the audience feel smarter than the characters.”

In the run-up to the film’s release, Michael J. Fox took to describing the movie as one that audiences should plan on spending $20 to see, four times the average going rate for a multiplex ticket at the time. His reasoning was that it would take several viewings to catch all of the hidden gems the Bobs had incorporated into their script, such as the film titles on the Hill Valley cinema marquee and the ledge of the clock tower either appearing wholly intact or broken, depending on whether the characters were in the timeline where Doc had chipped the ledge or not. “Bob Zemeckis is still my directorial hero,” Lea Thompson says. “He was so smart and so awesome to watch work. I just remember him being so detail-oriented and so into the story and the idea of giving the audience their money’s worth with every single shot. I have nothing but incredible respect for him.”

Sometimes Zemeckis’s detail-oriented eye led to more work for the cast and crew. “Special effects are interesting,” Harry Keramidas says. “Sometimes they look like visual effects, but they’re actually done practically, like when we were doing the skateboard chase in 1955. Bob would go back and reshoot things. While we were editing that scene, he said, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if we had sparks coming off at the back of the skateboard when Marty tries to stop it?’ He went back and did that shot again and that was a physical effect. We had sparklers at the end of the skateboard. Kevin Pike was the guy who was doing a lot of those effects on the first film, and he did a great job.”

“Back in those days I was much more of a taskmaster. I would make my actors hit those marks and always be in their light, and now I’ve kind of—I don’t care as much anymore,” Zemeckis says. “I wouldn’t allow there to be a camera bobble in any of those films. If the camera jiggled one frame, I’d have to do the take again. But nowadays, audiences are so different. I don’t think they appreciate the attention to detail. Maybe subconsciously they feel it, but maybe they don’t. Having a perfectly composed shot doesn’t matter if you are watching it on an iPhone, does it? You wouldn’t see it.”

With the majority of the heavy lifting done for the clock tower scene, Zemeckis and company moved right along, back to the Hill Valley set, left relatively untouched from the Stoltz era. As Michael J. Fox stepped out into the Hill Valley square, with bright orange vest, the clock tower high above, and period cars driving down the street, someone on the production team called the director’s attention upward. Zemeckis looked up to the bright blue sky. The most beautiful clouds he had ever captured on film were suspended above the backlot, as if ordered out of a catalog and hung by the art department. In and of itself, the weather would have been enough to please the director, but there was added satisfaction in this moment. Fox, in his bright costume and with the equally bright landscape behind him, was a marked departure from the footage Zemeckis and his editors had screened months earlier. The Bobs had written what they hoped would be received as a lighthearted story, and at least for the time being, it seemed they were taking steps in the right direction toward realizing that vision
on-screen.

Thursday, March 14, 1985

L
ea Thompson sat in her dressing room—a small yet comfortable section of a trailer hooked onto the back of a semitruck in the lot of the United Methodist church on Franklin Avenue in Hollywood. For a location shoot, this was quite the convenient spot, less than ten minutes away from home base at Universal. Today had the potential of being arduous and taxing, with several principal actors called, dozens of extras, and an auditorium devoid of air-conditioning. With the seemingly ceaseless shooting schedule just a little over a month away from its conclusion, this week—when the Enchantment Under the Sea dance was being filmed—was one that Thompson was looking forward to.

She sat awaiting the call that she was needed on set, singing loudly to no one in particular. Scattered around her were magazines, which she regularly thumbed through when she wasn’t reviewing her lines. Occasionally she stumbled across an ad that caused her eyes to widen, because she found it to be offensive or misogynistic, outmoded or obsolete. But these were trappings from a different era, not magazines from the 1980s.
Every actor has a different process by which they prepare to create magic in front of the camera. Some prefer to be called “Marty” at all times, while Thompson preferred to close herself off from the rest of the world for just a few moments and immerse herself in Lorraine Baines’s reality. She found the character to be foreign to her, a marked departure from the role she had just previously played in
Red Dawn
: a tomboy feminist who also happened to be a ballet dancer. Playing the seemingly naive yet sweetly seductive and soft-spoken character didn’t come naturally, so excelling required some additional homework. While others might have been catching up on the latest issue of
People
or
Time
, she was reading
Look
and
Life
from the early to mid-1950s, which she had gone to great lengths to find and transport with her each day to the set. She kept a small purse nearby with vintage coins inside, which she would regularly remove from their container, look at, and pass between her fingers, as if studying them for clues as to whom their previous owners had been and how to best channel their spirits. She would take out the lipstick she had purchased especially for the film, a classic shade of pink, and when she was feeling particularly out of character, as she was at this moment, she would play music from the period loudly and sing along: “Please turn on your magic beam / Mr. Sandman, bring me a dream . . .”

“They eventually put the song in the movie, thank God,” she says. “It was so goofy, but it would put me in the mood to be Lorraine. For some reason, the old Lorraine was just in my body. I think I was playing one of my girlfriends’ mothers or something. That was really easy for me, but it was the young Lorraine that was actually really hard. To really commit to that silliness and not wink at it? To play that innocence was really very hard, so singing ‘Mr. Sandman’ and reading those magazines really helped.”

While the actress focused on her own makeshift time-traveling methods to transport herself to the middle of the century, Robert Zemeckis had a much taller order ahead of him. The sequence at the dance encompassed many elements, such as corralling dozens of extras and filming choreographed songs with complicated camera moves. Over the course of this week, the production team would film several musical sequences, including an elaborate showstopping number by Michael J. Fox. There would be shots using a jib, a mechanism by which a camera is attached to a weighted boom with a seesaw-like device. This enables an operator, who sees what the camera is capturing by watching a monitor, to capture sweeping shots that have to travel a distance. The jib was useful in filming the shot during Marty’s “Johnny B. Goode” performance that goes from the back of the gymnasium, through a dancer’s legs, to a close-up of Fox’s fingers strumming away on his cherry-red Gibson ES-345 guitar, an instrument that wasn’t made commercially available until three years after the dance takes place. Despite the difficulty with the camera—Dean Cundey hadn’t had much experience using that particular bit of equipment and was initially skeptical that the footage would be usable—the inclusion of those challenging shots in the dance sequence adds just the right amount of fun and excitement to a moment already filled with energy. Zemeckis was still proving himself every day on the set, but his visionary sensibilities as a director, and that USC training that so annoyed Kathleen Turner during the filming of
Romancing the Stone
, were coming together.

“By the time I got to
Back to the Future
, I had pretty much been through any kind of baptism by fire that a director could go through,” he says. “From being immersed in an ensemble cast of young actors, to having to do movies on a very, very small budget,
to all the rigors of giant stunts and shooting in the jungles of Mexico. I was ready for anything that could be thrown at me. I would say I certainly knew my way around the camera by then. You learn from every movie. Certainly
Back to the Future
wouldn’t have been anywhere near as good as it is if it had been my first film.”

There were challenges and more compromises to make, sure, but part of what made this scene fun to work on was that it hadn’t been tested out during the Stoltz era. “When I was cast, they had shot most of the movie up until the Enchantment Under the Sea dance with Eric Stoltz before they replaced him,” Harry Waters, Jr., who plays the musician Marvin Berry, says. “By the time I showed up on the set, it was all new material that everybody was excited about. It was like, ‘Okay, now we’re getting to something new.’”

Waters first heard about the film back in November of the previous year, while he was taking low-paying theatrical jobs in between the occasional television commercial and guest appearance on television series. While he was appearing in
The Me Nobody Knows
, a 1970 Broadway musical that was being staged in Los Angeles, his agent landed him an audition for the role of the lead singer of the Starlighters, the all-black band that plays during George McFly and Lorraine’s first kiss. Although he was somewhat jittery about auditioning for a major motion picture, let alone one with Steven Spielberg’s involvement, he felt he could nail it. When he made his first trek to Amblin, the other fifteen or so people waiting to be seen didn’t faze him. He went in, sang his sixteen bars a cappella, and left feeling confident.

But after a while, those feelings of confidence started to dissipate. Weeks passed, and Waters and his agent hadn’t heard back from the film’s producers. The actor scored a callback audition for
He’s the Mayor
, an upcoming ABC series, and kept his fingers
crossed for that gig to come through as he continued his stage work. In December, a phone call came. Waters was wanted back at Amblin. The actor warmed up his voice and was prepared to sing again. But his follow-up didn’t go as planned, as, instead of having an audition proper, the actor was called into an interview with Bob Z. “It was just the two of us chatting,” Waters says. “Our conversation became about what I was doing. I said I was doing the musical and working with a friend of mine on a piece of theater about black storytelling. I had no expectation that I was going to land the role. I figured they were going for actors with name recognition, because that’s what I had experienced before I even moved to L.A. The industry usually goes with people that have a known track record.” Their sit-down lasted for about twenty minutes. The director thanked him for coming in, the actor expressed what an honor and opportunity it was to have had the chance to audition, and the two went in their separate directions. Before heading home, Waters took the opportunity to survey Universal Studios—after all, who knew if he would be back again?

Less than half an hour after getting back home, his phone rang. It was his agent. Waters was one of two finalists being considered for the lead in
He’s the Mayor
, and his agent told him that he could no longer sit on the fence. The start dates were around the same time for each project, and the actor would be unable to do both. In the off chance that both came through, which would he pursue? The answer came quickly. He wanted to work with Zemeckis.

On New Year’s Eve, the actor received the offer to appear in
Future
. For Waters, who would go on to become an associate professor of theater at Macalester College in Minnesota, the road to his first major motion picture role is one that bears a lesson worth remembering. “I always remind my students that I wasn’t sitting
around waiting for the next audition before
Back to the Future
,” Waters says. “I was always working on my craft, so when I went into auditions I had something to talk about. It wasn’t, ‘Oh, my god, I’ve got to get this job right now because I’m not doing anything else.’”

The role of Marvin Berry is small, but because of Waters’s performance, and Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale’s screenplay, it is one of several unforgettable bit-player parts in the film. During the writing process, the Bobs gave particular attention to their characters, believing wholeheartedly that an audience will forgive a fault in your film if they are engaged with the people on-screen. The Bobs were especially aware of the potential of smaller featured roles to be significant catalysts within the story, and they were determined to create each with a unique style and point of view. “Often, we imagine a particular actor in a role,” Gale says. “It’s not necessarily an actor we think we’ll cast—sometimes we’ll imagine a movie star from the past in the role, just so that there’s a voice in our head. James Cagney talked a certain way, which was different from James Stewart, which was different from Bogart, or John Wayne or Burt Lancaster or Brando or Al Pacino. That’s a trick that helps us give a character a certain voice. And when even a small role has enough for an actor to sink their teeth in, it attracts better actors, and gives them more to work with. We always encourage actors to make a part their own, and that’s when you can have magic happen. Plus, Bob Z has a natural ability to bring out the best in his casts, and to know the type of things to have actors do that will make audiences remember them. It’s something we learned from watching Billy Wilder, Frank Capra, and John Ford movies.”

James Tolkan was hand-selected by Bob Z to play Principal Strickland. The character has no lines in the Enchantment Under
the Sea scene, but has a great bit of physical comedy immediately after the “Johnny B. Goode” number, where he is seen removing his hands from his ears because of the music that Marty accurately speculates his audience isn’t ready for just yet. Due to a continuity error, Tolkan can actually been seen doing this movement twice within a short period of time, no doubt one of the compromises Zemeckis had to make with his editors in the futile effort to make a flawless film. Curiously, the character’s first name has been a source of debate among fans of the film since its release. When George Gipe wrote the movie’s novelization, he christened Strickland with the name “Gerald,” an eponym not cleared with the Bobs. They both hated it, but since their script failed to provide a first name for the character, Gipe’s decision prevailed. When the filmmakers set out to write the
Back to the Future
sequels, Zemeckis suggested putting a nameplate on Strickland’s door identifying his initials as
S
.
S
.
, to evoke the Nazis. Decades later, when Telltale Games released their video game inspired by the film franchise in 2010, Bob Gale was given an opportunity to finally establish the principal’s first name once and for all as “Stanford.”

Prior to appearing in
Future
, Tolkan had parts in a number of films, including Sidney Lumet’s
Serpico
(1973), Woody Allen’s
Love and Death
(1975), and Stuart Rosenberg’s
The Amityville Horror
(1979), but had resisted moving to Los Angeles to seriously attempt breaking into the movie industry. In 1984, he was performing in David Mamet’s
Glengarry Glen Ross
on Broadway when he received a telephone call from Zemeckis, who had seen the actor in the 1981 movie
Prince of the City
, asking him to join his cast. There was no audition, and according to what he was told during their conversation, no one else was considered for the role of the no-nonsense school administrator with a hatred for slackers
and a love for discipline. “I’d always said, ‘I’m never going to Hollywood until Hollywood sends for me,’ because I was a New York actor for all these years,” Tolkan says. “I just said, ‘Okay, this is a chance for me to go to L.A. and see what it’s like there.’”

The actor spent several days filming at Whittier High School alongside Eric Stoltz in the early days of production, in scenes that were reshot months later. Revisiting old material didn’t bother him much. In fact, the actor initially had a very laissez-faire attitude toward the movie in general. It didn’t appear to be anything special while filming, and while enjoyable to work on, it certainly did not seem a project predetermined for greatness. The story was wonderful, but the actor found the production to be relatively modest. The trailers were small; the lead actor was a bit disconnected, and then was changed midstream. For all the hubbub among the industry chattering class of this being a Spielberg picture, Tolkan’s impression was that the executive producer’s involvement was minimal. “Steven Spielberg was more interested in the picture he was working on at the time called
The Goonies
than he was interested in
Back to the Future
,” he says.

The two movies were indeed in production during the same time between the fall of 1984 and the spring of 1985, though accounts of Spielberg’s involvement on both projects vary. Although Bob Gale recalls Spielberg essentially leaving both Zemeckis and
Goonies
director Richard Donner alone during filming—“Steven knew Bob Z and Donner knew how to make movies, and he had too much professional respect to get involved”—it’s been widely reported that Spielberg was incredibly hands-on when it came to
Goonies
, occasionally seeming like less of a producer and more of a codirector. With the dust settled after the Stoltz shake-up on the
Future
set, and
Goonies
based out of Warner Bros. Pictures in Burbank, Spielberg found himself spending less time with the
Bobs and more time with Donner and his young cast. As shooting continued, Frank Marshall, who also served as
Future
’s second unit director, became the primary representative from Amblin to check in on how production was going.