Once, two visionary friends Bob Gale and Robert Zemeckis came up with a story about a teenager traveling in a time machine. Many years passed, and the invention turned into one of the legendary American films "Back to the Future."
Instruction manual
1
Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale met in the 60s when they were in school. They dreamed of working at the Dream Factory. Young people stubbornly walked toward their goal. Zemeckis became a director in Hollywood and directed a couple of films based on Gale's scripts. One day in 1980, Bob Gale arrived in St. Louis with his parents. In the basement, he was sorting out old things and saw his father's school photo album. Bob wondered if he and his father would be friends if they suddenly studied in the same class. Then the concept of a future scenario about a schoolboy began to crystallize, which is transferred to the past and there he meets his parents.
2
In the original version of the script, the main character was a video pirate and traveled in time with a refrigerator. But the children could decide that the film story is true and would start to climb into the fridges. Then it was invented to use the car as a time machine.
3
Details of time travel have been discussed by Zemeckis and Gale for a long time. It was planned that Marty and Doc would go to a military training ground in Nevada to arrange a nuclear explosion there. His energy would be enough to move. Shooting only this episode would cost $ 1, 000, 000, which was a truly fantastic amount for the mid-80s. The idea of a lightning strike turned out to be less costly. This decision allowed to kill two more birds with one stone: the action would not go outside the town of Hill Valley, and the clock in which lightning strikes would symbolize Time.
Steven Spielberg, one of the producers of Back to the Future, used the ideas about the refrigerator and the nuclear explosion many years later when he shot the film Indiana Jones: Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.
4
When the script was written, it needed to find money. The producers refused because the project seemed unprofitable. It was much easier to find investors for a simple youth comedy without the distortions of the space-time continuum. Not a single Hollywood film studio agreed to film Back to the Future, citing the idea as highly questionable. At the Disney studio, they said the film was indecent, as there is a romantic touch between Marty and his mother when a teenager is in the past. But at Columbia Pictures, on the contrary, they considered the film to be children's, claiming that cinema without erotica, violence and alcohol could not become successful. Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale rewrote the script at least twice, but there was still no money for the picture and the studio that would agree to shoot it.
5
In 1984, Zemeckis’s film “A Novel with a Stone” was a huge success, and then the director, “suddenly” turned out to be talented, no one could refuse. But Zemeckis himself believed that the producer should be only Spielberg, who was originally crazy about the script.
6
To create the atmosphere of the 50s, the artist of the film "Back to the Future" Lawrence Paul had to consider about a thousand photographs and watch dozens of films made in those years several times. In many scenes, the elements of the scenery were authentic details, which enhanced the effect of immersion in the past.
7
For the filming of the film, a whole fake city was built. Facades of buildings were erected near the Universal Studios Courthouse Square. The idea of filming in any real town had to be abandoned, since no one allowed to rebuild the whole square in the style of the 50s. First, they shot all the scenes of the past, and then the present. The scenery was aged, adding modern elements to it, and on the square in front of the building with a clock instead of a lawn, an asphalt parking area was made.
8
The home of Dr. Brown was filmed in the "Blacker House", classified as historical values. School scenes were shot in a real school, which at one time graduated from the founder of the studio "Pixar" John Lasseter and US President Richard Nixon. A suitable ballroom for the school ball was found at the Methodist Church in Hollywood.
9
When the shooting was completed, George Lucas' Industrial Light & Magic studio created all the special effects for the film in just two months, including lightning striking at the clock and Delorian’s flight. For the scene where Marty's sister and brother appeared on the photo due to a changed past, a giant guitar neck was specially designed, and the picture itself was increased several times. It was impossible to create a similar effect in 1985. In total, the film "Back to the Future" used 32 visual effects.
note
In America, "Back to the Future" has collected 210 million dollars in fees, and worldwide rental brought another 380 million. The film was recognized as the highest grossing for the whole of 1985.
