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back with me": first impressions to last |
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CURRENT TIME: June, 2000
As I am writing this - ready for publication on July 3, 2000, the fifteenth anniversary of Back to the Future.
TIME OF DESTIATION: 1986 or 1987
I can't remember when exactly. Great time traveller I'd make!
The Scene: INT. Friend's Lounge Room
I am about to watch Back to the Future for the first time - not knowing what effect it would have on me. Not knowing that in fifteen years' time I'd be writing regular articles about this film and its sequels.
Not knowing there would be sequels!
The Scene: INT. Friend's Lounge Room - Two Hour's Later
The whole film exhilarates me, even the throwaway ending, though I am frustrated by the 'To Be Concluded' title card at the end.
Somewhere within those 120 minutes, I have discovered a film that introduced me to the great comic actor Christopher Lloyd, the time-travel movie and such great filmic techniques as foreshadowing, pay-off and the homage or in-joke. Not that I realised much of that at the age of eleven or twelve. (I was already a fan of Michael J. Fox from his work on Family Ties.)
Fifteen years later, I don't remember much of that viewing. You're probably wondering if I remember anything very specific about it at all. Well, of course. Why bring you back in time, to this juncture in the space-time continuum, if it wasn't important?
I remember the Lyons Estates concrete entrance. And I remember my friend pointing them out as Marty skates through them early in the film and saying, "Remember that. It's important." Remember those gates, I thought. Why?
I have always loved going to the cinema. I remember going to see E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial when I was six or seven. I distinctly remember seeing Ghostbusters when I was about 10 years of age and how I jumped at the vision of the ghostly librarian. Well, perhaps she wasn't a librarian, but that's how I thought of her at the time! I kind of still do.
Both of those films were important to me. E.T. introduced me to the works of Spielberg. Ghostbusters initiated my interest in the supernatural. Or, at least, the supernatural on screen! Neither of them struck me as important at the time. Though they were great films. Not just great kids' films. Real fun-for-the-whole family stuff.
Having been told to note the name of Marty's community estate, I was to learn the fun of the pay-off from foreshadowing. When Marty goes back in time and finds the Lyons Estate not- yet-built, I had a revelation. What a great image to use - setting in stone, so to speak, how the past and the future looked different! Were different.
As regular readers of BTTF.com know, I have spent most of the last twelve months compiling the myriad of interesting details that make up the Back to the Future trilogy. It started off as a bit of fun with another friend of mine. We were trying to out-do each other. Trying out tricky trivia questions on each other. Pointing out various in-jokes or homages to other films or television. Watching each other squirm as we revealed a little bit of the trilogy to the other person for the first time.
"Back to the Future - A Trilogy Chronology" is the culmination of those long e-mail trivia sessions and face-to-face discussions about three films we adored. And on top of all the minutiae we already knew and housed in my Chronology, I have been e-mailed hundreds of times in the last year with other facts on every aspect of Parts 1, 2 and 3.
But that's just the last year. It has taken 15 years and multiple viewings for me to discover all I know and love about Back to the Future - the original film, in particular.
TIME OF DESTINATION: June, 1989
Eleven years ago, almost to the day, as I write this.
The Scene: EXT. Universal Studio's Back Lot
I am on the tour of Universal Studios with my family and the tour bus stops so that we can check out the Clocktower from Back to the Future. We are a fair distance away - just before proceeding into the Battlestar Gallactica feature of the tour. Just before being attacked by Cylons.
Most of the tours of Universal take you through the streets of Hill Valley, right past that square! But not for us. Not in June, 1989. Not in the middle of production on Back to the Future, Part II!
I didn't know at the time that I had missed out on seeing the Clocktower up close. I didn't learn that until years later. All I knew at the time was that I could see the square (through binoculars) and that it didn't look exactly like the one I remember. But it had been a couple of years.
Mostly, though, I was excited that the "To Be Continued" title card was no longer just a tease. It was going to become a reality. Back-to-back, because they were filming Part III at the same time. Unheard of in those days. Never happened! It's like all my "BTTF" dreams had come true at once.
It wasn't until 1994 or 1995 that I met someone who had toured the Universal Studios back lot later that year. While the crew was off making Part III, the tour returned to taking people past the Clocktower - only now it was the one of 2015! Oh, how I envied the thousands of people who were able to travel to the future, if only briefly.
TIME OF DESTINATION: 1994
The Scene: INT. Screenwriting Classroom
For two years over 1993 and 1994, I studied writing and editing. I was doing come practical courses, but in between learning how to edit and proper grammar (who, but a writer, would ever need to know what a dangling modifier was), I was learning how to write screenplays.
I was also immersing myself in film culture. Watching films from Orson Welles' Citizen Kane to Bernardo Bertolucci's The Conformist. From Vittorio De Sica's The Bicycle Thief to Robert Altman's Nashville. All great films. Most of them even entertaining… But what of the films I had enjoyed growing up? What of mainstream American film fare?
It wasn't until I started to read books on screenwriting that I began to truly understand how storytelling on film really works. And most, if not all, of these books are written with mainstream American films in mind - and often used as examples. And while the best known book on how to write film, Syd Field's 'Screenplay,' uses classic films as examples (Chinatown, Network, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof), I was pleased to discover Linda Seger's 'Making A Good Script Great.'
In the acknowledgments at the opening of Seger's book, Bob Gale and Robert Zemeckis are thanked for allowing Seger to quote from Back to the Future! Of course, I had already known it was a good film, a fun film. It was one of those I had on tape and watched over and over. But I hadn't known it was a great film. I hadn't realised it was a paragon of How to Structure Film, How to Build Conflict and How to Create Dimensional Characters. For a fan and aspiring writer, this was an amazing discovery.
Other modern films used as examples in Seger's book include Jaws, Witness, Schindler's List, Star Wars, Places in the Heart and The Fugitive. This is great company for Back to the Future to be keeping! I would even recommend this work over Syd Field's as 'Making A Good Script Great' doesn't reduce screenwriting to a formula, as Field has a tendency to do.
TIME OF DESTINATION: 1998
The Scene: INT. My Home
Having purchased the Back to the Future trilogy on video tape and in letterbox format, I pop the tape in to discover that the full frame version I had been so used to watching wasn't as badly panned and scanned as I had thought. In fact, the letterboxed videos I had purchased had mainly just masked off the top and the bottom of the full screen image.
It was a good lesson to learn. Sometime films are shot full screen with thought to the video version. Though now DVD is becoming more and more widely used, full screen may eventually become a thing of the past. (Yes, I am one of those people who are waiting desperately for the "BTTF" trilogy to be released on Digital Versatile Disc. These titles have probably been the longest DVDs to be "in production." I know they'll be released eventually, but when. Universal? Are you reading this? Sure…)
TIME OF DESTINATION: July, 1999
The Scene: INT. The Internet
"Back to the Future - A Trilogy Chronology" debuts on the internet at http://web.solutions.net.au/~kwgow (no longer in operation). Within a week I am receiving responses to a work that was comprehensive about the first two films, but was yet to include anything more than the major details of Back to the Future, Part III. Most of the responses came because of my posting to the BTTF.com message board.
The "Chronology" kept growing and growing and I was delighted by the response. It moved to Future Features section of BTTF.com in October of 1999 and my first 'Future Feature' article debuted on November 22 - as a tribute to Back to the Future, Part II.
What had begun as a simple project to see the entire trilogy in chronological order, became bigger than I ever thought it would or could. And I am very proud of all the work that has gone into it. Proving again and again that Back to the Future is more than it first appears.
TIME OF DESTINATION: October, 1999
The Scene: INT. My Home
"The Back to the Future Trilogy" soundtrack CD finally arrives. Living overseas can slow down getting these things, but that doesn't dull my enthusiasm. I suppose ever since first watching the film (and especially after seeing the first sequel), I have been in love with Alan Silvestri's score. The exciting and aggressive string music in the Clocktower sequence makes the scene one of the most memorable in film history. No wonder Robert Zemeckis reprised parts of the scene in both Back to the Future, Part II and Part III!
A passion for film scoring is something that eluded me for a long time. For the most part, I could only appreciate the music as it played along with the film. And while I don't think Silvestri's score alone changed my mind on this matter, the main title theme, the skateboard chase and the Clocktower music remain three of my favourite pieces of film music. They are energetic and can definitely be appreciated outside the context of the film.
Upon getting "The Back to the Future Trilogy" CD, I was ecstatic to have so much more of the original film's music. (To be honest, the CD skimps on the other two films, especially Part III.)
CURRENT TIME: Today
Or whenever you get around to reading this in the future!
The Scene: INT. The Internet @ BTTF.com
Back to the Future is certainly one of the best science fiction comedies ever made. Forget, for a moment, that there were ever any sequels made. Just for the time it takes to read the rest of this article.
Back to the Future works on many different levels. Technically it works very well over every aspect of its production - from the writing through the directing and acting and to the post-production special effects and the film's score. Even without the benefit it gained from becoming a franchise, Back to the Future would still be remembered as a great achievement, though with probably less of a mainstream following that it has now. (Certainly the gimmick of releasing a second film with a cliffhanger that was already shot and ready to be screened in a matter of months cemented the "BTTF" universe in the general public's mind.)
Can you think of many single films out there that generate their own websites? Not many, I'd guess. It is once they become a franchise that they are better remembered and duly enshrined on webpages across the world.
Fifteen years ago we had a film starring two men best known for their work in television sit-coms, from a director whose biggest film had been Romancing the Stone, working with a writer with whom he had last collaborated on Steven Spielberg's 1941 - one of Spielberg's weakest films.
But the talent was definitely there. And Zemeckis and Gale's association with Spielberg paid off when his company, Amblin Entertainment, stood behind their script and persuaded Universal to back this uniquely humorous, action-packed, science fiction fantasy. It was a script that had been roundly rejected by every single production company in Hollywood up until that time. Which goes to show that Spielberg has vision - which we already knew. I'd seen E.T., remember.
Perhaps without the sequels I wouldn't be writing this column for you. But I would like to think I would still remember Back to the Future and everything that it had taught me. How to really pay attention to films. A little bit about how to write and structure them. (Seger's book was originally published in 1987 - before the sequels - and BTTF was in there then, a film she describes as "one of the best films for understanding foreshadowing and pay-off.") And most of all, that films that appear to be one thing - fun fantasies - can also be many and varied other things.
It's more than just filled with homage and in-jokes. More than just a myriad of things set in place just to be played out later - in a traditional or predicable manner. Looking past the comedy, we can see: comments on growing up; societal differences between the 50s and the 80s; we are shown a different view of generational conflicts and misunderstandings; we see a boy struggling to find his direction in the world and a crazy scientist finally justifying his own place in the space-time continuum.
For that, for all that, I shall be grateful - for all time.
"YOU'VE GOT TO COME BACK WITH ME": FIRST IMPRESSIONS TO LAST was originally written for BTTF.com and first published on July 3, 2000. Revised in November, 2002.
 TRILOGY CHRONOLOGY |
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