We Don't Need Roads: The Making of the Back to the Future Trilogy (24 page)

The
Three
shoot also brought about a first for artist Drew Struzan, the creator of the franchise’s iconic promotional art: He was able to have actors pose for him for a movie poster. Since the
original film, Struzan had been an integral addition to the franchise’s branding and marketability. His one-sheet poster for the film, with Marty staring at his watch, standing with one foot in the DeLorean, the other on the ground, while trails of fire run underneath his legs and a smoky blue and orange sky fills the frame, had become an emblematic representation of the series. While the image became iconic almost instantaneously, arriving at the winning concept required a lot of time and effort.

Prior to designing the art for the
Back to the Future
poster, Struzan hadn’t read the script or seen any of the shot footage. Instead, the Bobs, along with Spielberg, talked him through the major beats—there was a teenage kid played by Michael J. Fox, a mad scientist played by Christopher Lloyd, Crispin Glover and Lea Thompson play his parents, a portion of the film takes place in the 1950s, there’s a time-traveling DeLorean, and lots of clock imagery. He was provided with three-ring binders stocked with hundreds of Ralph Nelson’s photographs from the set. Struzan came up with six or seven ideas and presented them to the production team, who, fortunately, saw potential in everything the artist had created.

“They were very respectful and open-ended,” Struzan says. “It’s why they were great to work for, because they respect other people’s creativity. That’s why they came to me. They’d seen other things I’d done and liked what they saw. It wasn’t one of those jobs where it was hell and I couldn’t figure out what they wanted. I had a whole lot of freedom. I think that’s why I remember it fondly, because it was so respectful and so easy to do.”

The Bobs and Spielberg liked all the artwork and couldn’t decide which concept they wanted to proceed with. They asked for Struzan to work on full-color paintings for each concept, or comps, as they’re called in the business, short for
comprehensives
. Then
there were notes. One painting had Marty sitting on an oversize watch, but they suggested the artist change it to an older watch. Wait, how about a futuristic watch? What if his parents were reflected on the outside face of an antique pocket watch? In the end, there was quite a bit of trial and error, and none of those paintings were commissioned.

It would be easy for him to take credit for coming up with the winning idea, but even decades later, Drew Struzan still concedes that he doesn’t know where the concept came from. As
Back to the Future
’s release date was nearing, Spielberg had another thought in mind that he wanted the illustrator to test out. He liked the artist’s style and work on
Future
to date, but wanted him to try his hand at an idea that had been pitched by someone in-house at Universal—Marty looking at his watch in disbelief. The executive producer presented Struzan with a photograph of Marty standing in his now-familiar pose. This was the image the production team wanted to represent their film. The artist completed a comp, which the Bobs and producers loved, and a finished one-sheet soon followed.

Part II
’s poster includes Marty in a similar pose alongside the now-flying DeLorean with Doc joining him, and it took longer to arrive at that design than one might expect. “Everybody seems to have his own recollection and his own memory of the circumstances,” Struzan says. “Usually they will say, ‘We wanted to keep the concept to have a nice consistency through the three of these pictures.’ The fact is, I did about thirty-five drawings, pursuing every concept for the second one that I could think of. I did tons of these drawings. It wasn’t until the very last among those drawings that there was one with both of the guys standing there. At the very end they decided, ‘That’s what we should do. Everybody loved the first one—why not just repeat it?’”

With the design concept in tow, Struzan got to work on
Back to the Future Part II
’s final one-sheet. Production on
Three
was already under way, and with Michael J. Fox significantly more accessible than he was during the first two films, the producers hired the illustrator to not only work on the promotional art, but also pose the actors the way he wanted them so he could take reference photographs that he would use while working on the painting at his studio. For Struzan, this was an attractive offer. Over the course of his long career, he had never had the opportunity to have an actor pose for him before. For the first film, someone had posed Fox in order to take the photograph that Spielberg had presented him with, but it was virtually unusable as a working guide for his painting. The artist found the pose unnatural and unsuitable to help sell Michael J. Fox as an emerging movie star. “He did such a rotten job on the photo session that—and this is something I’ve never told anybody—I reposed for that picture,” he says. “The body is my body with Michael’s head. The picture the other guy took was poorly lit—it just didn’t have any soul. So I redid it to my pleasure, to my taste, to my feelings. Apparently it was the right decision, because they’ve used that pose ever since.”

But this time, things would be done his way from the start. The artist made the four-hour drive to Sonora, with a photographer alongside him, and spent the day on set. Michael J. Fox and Christopher Lloyd changed out of their western costumes, back into their outfits from
Part II
. The photographer set up the lighting, and all moved into their respective roles. Struzan played art director, instructing his subjects to adjust their stances as he exuded the enthusiasm of a fashion photographer. “Okay, stand over here. That’s right, right here. Do the watch pose. Okay, now both of you do it. Move to the left. A little more. No, Chris, stay there. Michael, a little more to your left. Michael, can you—”

“Wait a minute—” Fox threw his hands in the air. Everyone froze. The actor took center stage as Struzan’s heart dropped. He had offended the star of the movie. He would be packing up and heading home within minutes. The actor looked him straight in the eye and walked toward him.

“Are you
the
Drew?”

“I’m Drew, yeah.”

“I’m your greatest fan.” Fox knew Struzan had provided the artwork for the first film, but he had no idea the man who had shown up with a photographer here in the middle of the desert was the same person whose work he so admired. The artist appreciated the compliment. It was a fantastic first impression of what it was like to be in the presence of Michael J. Fox.

When it came time to work on the one-sheet for
Part III
, Struzan was once again invited to pose and photograph the actors. Like most aspects of the trilogy, it was easier the third time around. This time there was a concept—Marty and Doc would be painted next to the DeLorean while the car was on train tracks. The actors remembered him and greeted him warmly, with Fox even taking a few moments to chat Struzan up about some poster art for other films.

The shoot for the
Part III
one-sheet was done at Stage 12 at Universal, where several pickup shots were being done. Before Struzan arrived on set, the scene was lighthearted, as Zemeckis was preparing to shoot the sequence with the DeLorean in the cave on the soundstage. “Wait, now. Wait a minute. Wait, wait, wait.” The director was watching as the crew was setting up the lights. It was supposed to be dark in the closed-off cavern, and Bob Z thought the aesthetic was wrong for what he was trying to accomplish. “Where’s the light coming from inside of this cave?”

“From the same place the music is coming from.” Dean
Cundey didn’t skip a beat. Just as the audience would accept Alan Silvestri’s score coming from some unseen place, the cinematographer knew questions about the source of the light he needed to properly cover the scene were equally irrelevant. Moviemaking is about selling an illusion, and as long as you operate within the realm of reality, the audience will go along for the ride. Zemeckis accepted the gentle ribbing from his friend, acknowledged that Cundey was right, and the crew continued about their work. In the meantime, Struzan was free to borrow the two lead actors. Fox and Lloyd got into costume, photos were taken, and the artist returned to his studio. The basic visual motif from the first two films would be repeated for the third installment, but there was an element of the concept that spurred uncertainty and debate. “We went through, like, sixty comps before they could come up with it,” Struzan says. “Their idea was to have three ‘somethings,’ but they didn’t know what. How about Marty, Doc, and horse? Marty, Doc, and train? How about Marty, Doc, and—it was just all these crazy ideas. In the end, they were printing the poster of just Marty and Doc and the westernized car. While it was on the printing press, they finally made up their minds and said, ‘Wait a minute, I think we really should add Mary Steenburgen in it.’ Once again, when they’re up against the clock, they made a good decision. Obviously, it was the right one to make, but it took many, many incarnations to get to that point.”

By the time the decision was made, Struzan was unable to photograph the actress. Instead, the illustrator described what he needed to the producers, and they arranged for Steenburgen to be photographed by a third party, using the pictures that were previously taken of her costars as a guide. When the stills were sent to Struzan, it was too late for him to redo the entire one-sheet. Instead, he took out a separate piece of illustration board,
painted Steenburgen’s image on it, cut his work very carefully out of its canvas, and pasted it into the main artwork. Thankfully, the final product was seamless and audiences who saw the posters displayed in their local multiplexes were none the wiser.

In addition to Alan Silvestri’s score, which put western variations on some of the familiar
Back to the Future
musical themes, the producers wanted to find a way to integrate a recording artist of the day into the film. Chosen in large part because of their easily recognizable extra-long beards, which looked right at home in the Old West, ZZ Top was asked to make an appearance and provide a song for the soundtrack. “My favorite sequence in terms of the filming was the festival in
Part III
,” Bob Gale says. “We had live music on the set, the weather was decent, and the entire atmosphere of the scene was very upbeat and positive. Because it was night, it really felt like we were back in time. Everyone enjoyed seeing the ZZ Top guys jam with the local musicians.”

“ZZ Top was very different from Huey Lewis, just in terms of the sound of their music,” Neil Canton says. “I’m a big fan of ZZ Top. I’m also a big fan of Huey’s, but we needed to get someone to be in the movie and write a song that was appropriate for the plot. ZZ Top look like they belong in the West, and so that was that. In theory, you would think that would have been a hard group to get, but because of the success of the first movie, they were very receptive to it.”

“Me and the band—you know, the five black guys—we knew that we wouldn’t be in the third one because there was no way they could write us into the Old West,” Harry Waters, Jr., says. “We did have a conversation with Bob Gale, who said that they were trying all sorts of ways to figure out how we could be there, but it just couldn’t happen, so that was a bit of a disappointment. I was pleased that it took ZZ Top to replace us.”

Jeffrey Weissman also found himself disappointed to not have a greater role in
Part III
. Michael J. Fox played the part of Seamus McFly, Marty’s distant relative, in a part that was originally offered to Crispin Glover as a negotiation tool back when there was a chance he might have been involved with the sequels. But the gag wouldn’t work as well with Weissman in the role. While Weissman maintains that he was initially told he would be playing that role back when he was hired for
Paradox
, Bob Gale disagrees, claiming the actor was never considered for the role of Seamus. Either way, the end result was the same—Zemeckis and company harkened back to a memorable effect from
Part II
to realize Seamus on-screen. In the second film, there was a sequence where Fox played his son, daughter, and an older version of Marty in the same scene. The shot was achieved with a VistaGlide camera, which was revolutionary technology at the time of production. Greg Beaumont of ILM built the camera specifically for the needs of Zemeckis and the film crew. The camera, which was about the size of a small refrigerator and noisy as all hell, would enable an operator to take multiple exposures on a single frame of film. The negative for the VistaGlide was four times the size of a standard thirty-five-millimeter frame, so that it could be photographed on that many times. Each time the film was developed in the lab it was reduced in size until it was the same size as all the other footage. “If you look at a lot of
Back to the Future Part II
, it’s a lot of big, sweeping, high-concept camera stuff,” Robert Zemeckis says. “The actors have to do that dance with the camera. I’ve been very fortunate to work with actors who don’t chafe under that.” Since the effect was successful and seamlessly executed in the second film, the idea was just to reproduce it for the third.

“I’m especially proud of how we pulled off some of the motion control work with multiple Michael J. Foxes,” Bob Gale
says. “I love the tracking shot of Marty and Seamus at the festival, and the shot in
Part II
in the Café 80s in which Marty takes the hat of Marty, Jr., and puts it on his own head. It’s brilliant and goes by so quickly that the audience doesn’t even stop to wonder how we did it.”

One of the elements of the picture that received the most attention was the lengthy sequence near the end where Marty and Doc try and power a steam engine up to eighty-eight miles per hour. Like the hoverboard stunts from the second film, the spectacle was achieved with a mixture of both special and visual effects, practical and optical. The actual locomotive used during filming is Sierra Railway No. 3, which made it easy for the prop department to convert it into No. 131 for the shoot. It had been built in 1891 and had appeared in over a hundred films and television shows. Shooting the train sequence took seven weeks, nearly as long as the hoverboard work on
Part II
, and provided another opportunity for the lead actors to do some minor stunt work of their own. Christopher Lloyd may have had trepidation about standing on the ledge of the clock tower for
Part I
, but he was more eager to attempt the riskier shots for
Part III
.