Back to the Future’s Best Change Was To Lower The Budget

Back to the Future’s Best Change Was To Lower The Budget

Zemeckis’ Back to the Future had its budget cut, which meant Marty McFly and the DeLorean time machine had their scene with the clock tower.

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Back to the Future’s Best Change Was To Lower The Budget

Back to the Future endured many production problems and changes during its time, but perhaps the best of these changes was the film’s budget being lowered because it afforded them a different road entirely. The time machine wasn’t always going to take the form of a car, and the ending was originally intended to be something much different. From Doc Brown’s dazzling DeLorean time machine and the heart-pounding musical score composed by Alan Silvestri to the impressive cast gracing the screen, Back to the Future is one of the most exciting and uplifting films ever made, and it’s largely thanks to its climactic clock tower scene when Marty McFly traveled back to the future in the DeLorean, a scene the audience almost didn’t get.

Back to the Future saw a 1985 Marty McFly (played by Michael J Fox) accidentally transport himself back in time to the year 1955 in a DeLorean-based time machine invented by Doc Brown (portrayed by Christopher Lloyd), by unwittingly speeding the DeLorean up to 88mph. Now stuck in the past, with no plutonium (the power source needed for the machine’s nuclear reactor), Marty McFly had to find the 1955 Doc Brown and convince him of what happened, for Doc to then devise a plan to get Marty back to 1985 in the absence of plutonium, using an alternative power source.

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In Netflix’s The Movies That Made Us, it’s divulged that the original idea for the ending was to have the time machine (which was originally a refrigerator) at a Nevada test site in the desert. According to Dennis E. Jones, unit production manager on Back to the Future, the original plan was to have a tower built approximately 80 feet high through which an atomic bomb would be dropped, with the effect of the explosion to follow. This plan was $6 million too expensive. The co-creators of Back to the Future, Bob Gale and Robert Zemeckis, had to replace the proposed scene with more frugal ideas, and the forced rewrite improved the film significantly.

Many believe the clock tower scene in Back to the Future is one of the tensest sequences in all of cinema, and it’s because so much didn’t go according to plan (much like the film production itself). Doc’s cables running from the clock tower down to the road became detached due to the storm, forcing him to climb the tower and attempt to reattach them whilst precariously hanging from the clock face hands, in true Harold Lloyd style. Meanwhile, Marty couldn’t get the DeLorean’s engine to start on time, forcing him to be late, which in turn encouraged a high-speed adrenaline-fuelled rush of excitement as the DeLorean rushed down the street to get to the cables in time to receive the channeled bolt of lightening to travel back to the future.

Downscaling their logistics and thinking more creatively helped the filmmakers invent a sequence that was altogether more intimate, more character-driven. The scene otherwise would have consisted mainly of the spectacle of special effects as the bomb went off, leaving nothing in its wake but a devastated town and a lonely mushroom cloud. For Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, director Steven Spielberg, who was also an executive producer on Back to the Future, finally brought this forgotten scene to life.

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The climactic time-traveling scene viewers got instead was intense, gripping drama, and one of the only special effects implemented in this whole clock tower sequence was the lightning bolt itself. In The Movies that Made Us, Bob Gale admitted that “the creativity that you draw on when you don’t have the budget makes you come up with better ideas.” Furthermore, one character in Back to the Future is often overlooked and has become a powerful symbol in sci-fi cinema and blockbuster cinema in general, and that’s the DeLorean itself. If it wasn’t for these budget cuts forcing rewrites of that world-famous time-traveling scene, our favorite movie car might also have been lost in time forever.

Link Source : https://screenrant.com/back-future-ending-change-original-atomic-bomb-lightning-budget/

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