We Don't Need Roads: The Making of the Back to the Future Trilogy (13 page)

Friday, April 26, 1985

M
ichael J. Fox made his way to Stage 12, the 29,500-square-foot soundstage at Universal that was the largest on the lot and the eighth largest in the world. The expansive building was the ideal place for the crew to build several large sets required for filming, including Doc’s 1985 garage and the inside of Doc’s Packard, where Lorraine kisses Marty outside the Enchantment Under the Sea dance. Today marked the conclusion of a relatively easy and uneventful week for the otherwise jam-packed
Future
shoot. Monday of that week took production to Chino, about an hour eastbound down Interstate 210, to shoot the scene where Marty scares the elderly couple outside the Lyon Estates gates shortly after his arrival to 1955, but after that, the remaining weekdays were spent on the soundstage and backlot.

Even those who hadn’t read the day’s production call sheet could sense filming on
Back to the Future
was winding down. The heavy lifting was over, and as a result, fewer and fewer principal cast members were called to work. On this day, the 107th that the cameras rolled on the film, only Michael J. Fox and Tiger, the dog playing Einstein, were called so the crew could get some
pickup process shots of them inside of the DeLorean. With
Family Ties
wrapped for the season, the actor was able to get a proper night’s sleep and arrive on set at the comfortable and convenient time of 10:00
A
.
M
.
After just a few hours of work, the actor gave his thanks, said his good-byes, and made his way back home. As the crew disassembled the lights, Bob Gale took a final look at the call sheet. At the bottom, production manager Jack Grossberg, who took over the job for Dennis Jones for the final weeks of production, wrote in sprawling cursive, “That’s all folks! Principal photography completed!”

Now the real work began. Arthur Schmidt and Harry Keramidas, along with the rest of the postproduction team, went into overdrive to complete the picture so it would be ready by its mid-August release date. “Artie and I often joke that we invented the ‘speed-it-up’ schedule and all the editors in Hollywood probably hate us now,” Keramidas says. “It was the first time that we turned in a big movie that quickly after shooting.” The duo rushed to complete what is known in the business as a “workprint,” a rough cut of the movie that included some placeholders for the completed score, sound effects, and incomplete ILM shots. The editors put in long hours at night and on weekends in order to deliver the preview cut on time, which was screened in front of an audience at the Century 22 movie theater on Olsen Drive in San Jose in mid-May, just three weeks after the cameras stopped rolling on
Future
. For Zemeckis and company, the mood going into the test screening was a familiar mix of nervousness and excitement. The audience was completely in the dark in terms of what to expect, having only been informed that they were going to watch a movie starring Michael J. Fox and Christopher Lloyd.

“It was a very restless audience from the beginning,” Arthur
Schmidt says. “They weren’t with the movie during the first ten, fifteen, twenty minutes—maybe even the first half hour. I remember that some of the kids that were sitting in front of Harry and me were poking each other and talking. It was upsetting Harry a lot more than me, to the point where I finally asked him to go somewhere else in the theater.”

As audiences have come to appreciate,
Back to the Future
is a movie that rewards patience. Early on, there are two sequences that set up a significant amount of exposition, which require a greater level of attention from the audience than your typical summer popcorn flick. The opening shot, with all of Doc Brown’s clocks, was a late-breaking addition to the script, conceived in the transition out of the Stoltz era. Not only are viewers introduced to the motif and imagery of the importance of time, but careful observers might also notice a bit of clever foreshadowing—a clock with Harold Lloyd hanging off of it, harkening back to the iconic shot from the 1923 silent film
Safety Last!
, which mirrors the predicament Doc Brown will find himself in about an hour and a half later into the movie. The scene was devised to save money, as the set for Doc’s garage was already built and the opening scene as scripted would have required the construction of another location, but it didn’t make life any easier for the special effects team.

“The clocks had to all be set for the same time,” Kevin Pike says. “Some of them worked, some of them didn’t work. You had to stop them from going until they started the shot so they didn’t get ahead of the time that it was supposed to be. We had twenty people behind the wall with strings, and wires, and buttons, and electric switches, just on the clocks. Then, take two, you had to reset everything. The camera does this very fluid pan, starting at a machine that drips hot coffee, ending where the dog food sort
of flops into the bowl. The dog food that we originally had poured very comfortably into the bowl, but at the last minute they changed gears with branding, and we ended up with a different kind of food that had to be shaken out, and you couldn’t do that in the shot. We actually had to have somebody underneath the camera with a blowtorch to heat up the dog food because it had to be an unopened, fresh can for each shot.”

In total, the opening was filmed three times, as Zemeckis wanted to see all of the elements on-screen in one long take without any edits. The effect on the audience is strong, especially on repeat viewings, but at the San Jose preview, the viewers quickly grew anxious. Additionally, the first dinner scene at the McFly family home, with Lea Thompson and Crispin Glover in their old-age makeup, was another sequence that seemed to cause that first audience discomfort. While the growing seat-shifting during the test screening was a concern for the editors and some others in the crew, the Bobs never lost faith in their original concept to front-load the movie with information that would be valuable for the audience once Marty’s adventure kicked into high gear at the Twin Pines Mall. “No one ever sees a movie in a vacuum,” Bob Gale says. “They know at least a little something about it when they buy their ticket. That’s the reason we were never worried about the long exposition at the beginning. We always will opt for taking a little more time to present exposition if there’s a worthwhile payoff later. We believe in what I call the ‘twenty-five-minute rule.’ An audience will sit still for twenty-five minutes before their attention goes south—but you still should give them the sense that something is going on, that the filmmakers have a plan and know what they’re doing, even if the audience isn’t sure what it is. Show them interesting things, get them invested in the characters. It’s different from writing a
TV show, where you have to make sure the viewer won’t change the channel. In a movie theater, it’s rare for people to walk out, and especially rare that they walk out in the first thirty minutes.”

“I remember worrying that there was too much exposition, too much portent, and that it might not pay off,” Clyde E. Bryan says. “But of course, then it did, so you’re exhilarated when it works.” The Bobs’ faith in the audience was proven right. When the DeLorean was revealed, Zemeckis and company could tell their viewers were regaining their focus. Once Doc put Einstein in the car and began his experiment, they were captivated. When the DeLorean disappeared, they were uneasy and confused—perhaps believing the dog had been killed, and certainly unsure as to what to make of Christopher Lloyd’s character and invention. However, once the time machine made its way back and Doc explained what had happened, they were buckled in and ready to go eighty-eight miles per hour with the characters. “It was still a work in progress at the time of that screening,” Neil Canton says. “The ILM visual effect shots weren’t done, and the music wasn’t done, but the audience was just so into the story. You go, ‘Holy smokes, remember this moment because it might never happen again. We won’t have a time machine to come back when we wake up some morning and feel depressed. We won’t be able to go back to San Jose and experience that moment again.’”

“It absolutely exceeded our expectations,” Bob Gale says. “There were several moments throughout where the audience erupted in applause. It was amazing. The very last shot in the movie, with the flying car, was in black and white, but the audience didn’t care—they went nuts for it. Bob and I, and the editors, were particularly worried about the ‘Johnny B. Goode’ scene because we actually stopped the movie to do a musical number. It’s the only scene that doesn’t advance story or character, and we
didn’t know how that was going to play. We always knew we could cut it out, but our concerns were totally unfounded.”

The overwhelming audience reaction wasn’t just restricted to jubilation during the screening. After the movie ended, the response cards that were returned to the production team indicated that around 90 percent of those who had seen the movie thought it was “excellent” or “very good.” While the filmmakers were excited about their numbers, they remained cautious, carefully considering the pacing of the film. They continued to tighten the edit. Overall, about seven minutes were removed from the movie following San Jose: The Darth Vader scene was trimmed substantially, creating an accidental continuity error wherein the hair dryer Marty is holding jumps from his belt to his hand after a cutaway shot to George McFly; a scene before the problematic McFly dinner scene, where a neighbor sells George an abundance of peanut brittle, was cut; a scene was removed where Dixon, the redheaded kid with braces who cuts in during George and Lorraine’s dance during “Earth Angel,” locks George in a phone booth at the Enchantment Under the Sea dance; and a few seconds were taken out of the sequence where Marty first walks around the Hill Valley town square in 1955. “There were various other internal cuts in other scenes we made just to keep the pace moving along,” Bob Gale says. “None of the cuts were made as a result of any specific critique or comment. We could just feel it in the audience when scenes went on too long.”

Following the edits, there was another test screening in the Hitchcock Theatre on the Universal lot, with all the studio executives on the invite list. Hollywood lore had it that the venue was cursed, because the majority of films that had been tested there since its 1980 opening had underperformed with the public. To
an extent, Zemeckis believed in the superstition surrounding the venue. He didn’t think the venue was haunted per se, but he believed that it was impossible to get a good score from an audience that is going to see a Universal movie on studio property with a bunch of suits in the back. When the film started to roll, the director couldn’t have been happier to be wrong, as
Back to the Future
continued to rewrite history. It was another smash, and this time there would only be one change made. Sid Sheinberg was pleased with what he saw on-screen and elated by what he read on the response cards. Now he was seeing green, not only for money, but also for go—and fast. His feedback: Don’t touch a frame, and do what needs to be done to get the film in theaters ahead of its mid-August release date, in time for the Fourth of July holiday weekend. The more weeks a film plays during the summer, the better its chances for fiscal success are, and Sheinberg was willing to spare no expense to make sure the movie was released as early as possible. The team at ILM, the editors, sound mixers, and Alan Silvestri all made their contributions in record time, turning in a completed print on June 23. As an acknowledgment of the demands on their schedules, Universal took out an ad in
Variety
listing the name of each postproduction crew member, thanking them for an expedient job well done.

The race to complete the film under the new truncated timeline wasn’t the first time a Sid Sheinberg note created agita among the production team. The executive loved the story for
Back to the Future
, but hated its paradoxical title. The story goes that while filming was under way, he wrote a memo stating that he wanted the movie renamed to something slightly less nuanced and more direct:
Spaceman from Pluto
, a title the exec hoped the audience would identify as a reference to a prop seen briefly in the film. As soon as Marty arrives in 1955, he crashes into Old
Man Peabody’s barn and the family comes down from their house to inspect. Sherman, the young boy with a name inspired by the popular
Rocky & Bullwinkle
characters, holds up a comic book with striking artwork on its cover, designed by production illustrator Andrew Probert and styled after the old EC Comics from the era. Alongside a spaceship and an alien wearing a one-piece getup, there is a prominently displayed red box with the text “Space Zombies from Pluto” visible. Since Marty is initially mistaken as an extraterrestrial and spends some time in a radiation suit, the executive thought his suggested title would be a better fit for the film. Not only that, but Sheinberg failed to understand what the title was supposed to mean. How exactly could someone go
back
to the
future
?

Eventually the Bobs would find the memorandum that was sent down from the studio head’s office funny, but at the time it was gravely serious. They didn’t want to risk offending Sheinberg, whom they felt had been incredibly accommodating despite the production hurdles, but they felt even more strongly about not wanting to concede their title, which Zemeckis and company knew to be one of their strongest assets. “A good title is crucial,” Leonard Maltin says. “And
Back to the Future
is a great title. It’s entered the vernacular. It’s clever without being off-puttingly so, and it evokes the film. It’s not just a nice play on words; it essentially tells you what the film is about—time travel in both directions.”

As the well-circulated story goes, Zemeckis went for assistance to Spielberg, who, once again, swiftly came up with the perfect idea. He drafted a carefully couched response to the studio head thanking him for his note. He wrote that the production staff all got a good laugh out of it and appreciated Sheinberg’s sense of humor. Spielberg knew the executive would be too
embarrassed to explain that he was serious. Crucial crisis averted. While this version of the story has been shared repeatedly over the past three decades, not everyone agrees with this version of events.