We Don't Need Roads: The Making of the Back to the Future Trilogy by Caseen Gaines Page A

travel at that speed to transport himself through time, the Bobs are quick to note that the number was chosen for only one reason: It would be easy for the audience to remember. This somewhat arbitrary decision inadvertently created a problem for the effects team. Thanks to a 1979 law set by President Jimmy Carter’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, all cars released after September of that year were to have a speedometer that topped out at eighty-five miles per hour, in an effort to encourage drivers to travel at safer speeds. The legislation was overturned less than two years later, but its legacy lasted in all models of the DMC-12, as production had ceased by the time of repeal. With the magic number that time machine had to hit being out of range, Pike not only replaced the manufacturer’s speedometer with one that went beyond the regulated amount, but added a digital display for additional good measure.
    While working on his round of design sketches, Ron Cobb mentioned that he believed the time machine would go outthrough the time portal at a burning-hot temperature, but come back cold. To that end, the special effects team lit fire trails whenever the DeLorean was beginning a journey. For shots of its return, the car would have to endure a somewhat complicated process to make it appear encased in a thin layer of ice. “When the car got cold, one of the obvious flaws in design was that the gas condensed in the cylinders of the rods that held the doors up, causing them to sag,” Pike says. “When we loaded it up with ice and made it heavy and colder yet, Michael would open the door and stand up. When he’d go to get back in, the door would sag and he had to be very careful he didn’t hit his head. We had a crew with hair dryers that constantly reheated those hydrogen-filled pistons to keep that from happening. I remember that when he shifted in the car in excitement, he would bang his elbow against the mechanism on the console. It was tight quarters, but it was a time machine. It wasn’t a luxury Cadillac or something.”
    Because of the height differential between Eric Stoltz and Michael J. Fox, some of the custom parts added to the car were harder to utilize than they otherwise would have been. For one, when Marty attaches the electrical conductor hook to the back of the DeLorean before the scene where lightning strikes the clock tower, Fox was initially unable to reach the female end of the connector due to the protruding exhaust vents on the back of the vehicle. In order to accommodate their new leading man, a wooden step was fashioned to provide Fox with some extra lift.
    After filming each time-traveling sequence, the footage was given to Arthur Schmidt and Harry Keramidas, who would continue editing with Zemeckis’s regular supervision and approval. When Keramidas was brought on board, the two editors looked through the script and decided that they would each take one of the action sequences in the film—the Twin Pines and clock towerscenes—and work on them individually. Artie chose the mall parking lot scene, while Harry took the other. While Editor A was working on his major sequence, Editor B would tackle the other dialogue-heavy scenes as they came in, and vice versa.
    Because both scenes rely heavily on optical effects that had to be added by ILM in post, the sequences required the editors to think beyond what they were seeing at the editing bay in front of them, just as they would have to anticipate how sound effects and an orchestral score would complement the moving pictures. “You have to use a lot of imagination to visualize what those effects are going to be, and how long a cut needs to be in order for those effects to be incorporated into the shot,” Arthur Schmidt says. “Because visual effects and animation are very expensive, you’re always asked to turn over a shot to its, hopefully, exact length with no extra frames. The reason is so that the visual effects people or