Anatomy of a Scene: Doc Brown sends Marty home in ‘Back to the Future’
We live in a world now in which the prospect of having a time machine seems more and more enticing. Imagine being able to go back to a place before Donald Trump was president, when nobody had heard of Covid-19 and when a chocolate bar didn’t cost an hour’s pay. Luckily, we have movies that will do that for us, and there are simply none better than Back to the Future.
Few films have aged quite as well as Robert Zemeckis’ magical 1985 comedy sci-fi; not only is it a love letter to both 1950s and 1980s Americana, it serves as just short of two hours of genuine big screen escapism, of the feeling that anything might be possible if you wish hard enough, twinned with that intangible mystery of what your future self might be like.
It is packed full of wonderful moments, like the first time Marty McFly is shown the DeLorean time machine by his eccentric friend Doc Brown, the skateboard chase round the town square, George McFly knocking Biff Tannen out, but the climactic scene in which Marty has to take the silver car up to 88mph while Doc frantically attempts to connect the clock tower to a forthcoming lightning strike is pure Hollywood gold.
It doesn’t matter how many times you watch this film, and most of us have watched it a lot, the tension and the despair are still palpable as the storm gathers over Hill Valley and Marty desperately tries to get the DeLorean started, knowing this represents his one chance to get home to his family. Zemeckis ramps things up even further by having a frantic Doc Brown climbing to the clock face, fumbling with cables and knowing time is running out.
The brilliance of the director is shown time and again throughout the final moments as he drops barrier after barrier in the way of our heroes. Marty has written Doc a letter warning him he’ll be killed in the future, but Doc finds it and tears it up. Then, having finally got everything ready, Doc’s connection to the clock tower gets tangled in a tree and won’t reach. Meanwhile, having finally started the car, Marty is hurtling toward him, desperately trying to get it up to speed before the pivotal moment.
By this point, the Doc is hanging by the hands of the giant clock, knowing he’s going to have to use himself as a human lightning conductor as the clouds crackle ominously overhead, ending up doing a death-slide back to the ground in order to complete the connection as the DeLorean hits 88mph and the moment of reckoning arrives, sending Marty flashing back to 1985 in a track of fire on the street. But interestingly enough, that fantastic scene was only done that way due to budget cuts.
As Zemeckis recalled, the original ending of the film was due to be very different, saying, “The climax of the movie [originally] took place at an atomic test site in Nevada, and our heroes had a big dish that was going to harness the atomic energy, they were hiding out in one of those fake houses with all the mannequins. [But] the studio said ‘we’re not going to pay for any of that’.”
Left in a lurch, they looked around for solutions and found themselves standing on gold: “We had to figure out a way to use the courthouse square because we had built it, and so we said, ‘We’re here on the lot, we’ve spent the money to make this look like the 1950s, how do we end the movie here?’ That was the mission, so we came up with the idea of doing it on the clock tower in a lightning storm. It was just much, much more romantic and much better for the movie.”
Luckily, the cheaper solution proved to be the perfect one, and Zemeckis and executive producer Steven Spielberg went further, sprinkling little bits of magic here and there for the eagle-eyed to spot. For instance, on the right of the wide shot, you can see a shop sign reading ‘Time to travel?’ with a small clock showing the same time as lightning strikes the tower. And when Marty is trying to get the DeLorean started, he signals ‘SOS’ to Doc using the car’s headlights.
Of course, in the end, Marty made it home and got the Toyota and the girl, if only for a few minutes before an ever-frantic Doc arrived breathlessly back from the future in a flying version of his car, letting his friend know that “It’s your kids, Marty! Something’s gotta be done about your kids!”
