60-SECOND SCREENPLAY
Alien: Covenant Fassbent out of shape.
As Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) sweatily guns that gull-winged DeLorean up to 88.8mph, his mad scientist bud, Doc Brown (Christopher Lloyd), waits at the Hill Valley clocktower for lightning to strike at 10.04pm and send McFly shuttling through time from 1955 to 1985.
As an audience, we know the exact details that need to be correct for this to work, thanks to a previously seeded scene plotting the setup with a scale model. So when the storm downs a tree and yanks the key conductor line apart, we understand that this moment – the very meaning of the film’s title – could go horribly wrong. McFly may not get back to the future if Doc can’t fix things in the seconds he has left. Dangling off the clock hands, Doc rights himself, zip-lines down the cable and struggles to the disconnected plug…
Tense and almost real time (Doc tells Marty they have “precisely seven minutes and 22 seconds” to complete the manoeuvre, which then unfolds in eight minutes, seven seconds of screen time), this moment is the only one to feature in all three BTTF films and showcases the talent in front and behind the camera that made the movie such an instant classic. Despite working a punishing night schedule due to star Fox’s daytime contractual obligations on TV show Family Ties (director Robert Zemeckis reckons he shot the movie “half asleep”), magic was created thanks to Fox’s sitcom-honed pep, ILM’s effects and Zemeckis’ propulsive direction and editing.
Shot at the clocktower on Courthouse Square on Universal’s backlot (originally built for 1948’s An Act Of Murder and later seen in To Kill A Mockingbird), the scene called for a gale force storm courtesy of an industrial McBride wind machine on a cherry picker while Lloyd provided horrified close-up reaction shots as he dangled off the clock (recalling Harold Lloyd’s famous Safety Last!, which is nodded to in the opening sequence as the camera pans across a Lloyd novelty timepiece). But for the wide shots and hero zip-line, stunt legend and inventor of the stunt crash bag, Bob Yerkes, was called in. “He was always the first guy you’d try to get when you needed someone up high,” recalled co-writer Bob Gale.
ILM created practical effects of the flaming tyre tracks (a mix of gas and pyro fluid, daubed on the road by SFX head Kevin Pike) and hand-animated the rotoscoped bolt of lightning post-production to add visual tension. But the pyrotechnics were merely the icing on the cake of a nail-biting crescendo that makes us feel that every second counts – especially as that famous on-screen clock shows us how close we’re getting, second by second. Truly timeless. JC