88MPH: The Story of the DeLorean Time Machine | Full Documentary

there are a lot of movie cars but it's hard to imagine one that's more recognizable than the back to the future delorean the most fantastic flashy four-wheel time machine in the history of movies i think it's the most important movie car period it's perfect it's not just a sci-fi movie it's not an action adventure it's just all those elements combined so beautifully almost like a gourmet parisian meal or something but of course the car was the main dish are you telling me you built a time machine out of a delorean when the delorean car first rolled out of the factory in ireland last year much of america was rooting for its success ironically it is now during delorean's nightmare that his dream may finally come true the mystique around the delorean brand only makes people want to know more delorean was synonymous with success he was this handsome rich successful man married to the hottest supermodel at the time he was the epitome of what every guy wanted to be and who every girl wanted to be with he knew what people wanted and he was a marketing genius it was pure courage pure nerve that guy had former general motors executive john delorean had thumbed his nose at the big automakers saying he'd show the industry how to build cars as a lot of commercials set at the time the most anticipated new car of the century and i believe it was the car stimulated so much of the imagination so it's woven into the fabric of our society as they said in the film back to the future where we're going we don't need roads you've got the filmmaking aspect the creative aspect you have the history of the car you have the man himself john delorean all that stuff combines into this big thing it's almost like a nostalgic connection with with all of these characters you know the delorean time machine is part and parcel of the fabric of pop culture i have to say that isn't the real star of the film the car well yeah but you don't have to tell me that falling in love with a movie like this and then seeing it come to life in front of your eyes you can't put a price tag on it i must have signed a half a million of these our memories take us back in time and our hopes and dreams and imagination takes us forward and uh you'd be hard-pressed to find another car that can do that when this baby hits 88 miles per hour you're gonna see some serious [Music] when i was a little kid in grade school i used to tell people when i grow up i'm going to go out to california and work for walt disney comic books and science fiction were huge influences on warping my brain twilight zone was my favorite tv show and of course seeing the time machine really kind of blew my head apart thousands of centuries had passed man finally learned to control both the elements and himself i had to stop and find out i was always writing science fiction stories and i even made my own comic book when i was in high school it was called the green vomit and it was about a superhero who had the superpower able to throw up at will on anybody on bad guys and his uh arch nemesis was super snot who could do the same thing with his nose california was the place to be because that's where hollywood was and i transferred usc a year later i met bob zemeckis in 1971 and we became fast friends he wanted to be a director i want to be a screenwriter we were both undergraduates in what was largely a graduate department we decided that we should team up and figure out how to get in the movie business we were more interested in dirty harry and james bond and the graduate students were more interested in francois truffaut and jean-luc gadar we want to do larger than life stuff and maybe we can blow some stuff up we want to entertain people i mean this is what got us excited when we were going to the movies so we wanted to make the kind of movies that we wanted to see so we came up with this very rudimentary idea called professor brown visits the future that's all we had the idea that there would be this kind of wacky professor who invents time travel but we were never able to really figure out how there was going to be a story what was going to keep the audience interested so we would every once in a while we would return to that and never get anywhere cut to august 1980 bobs and mike and i made a movie at columbia pictures called used cars i went to st louis my hometown to promote it the hometown boy does good story i'm staying with my parents when i found my father's high school yearbook i saw this looks interesting to be cool see what my high school looked like in 1940 and i'm paging through it and i discovered that my dad was the president of his graduating class so i'm looking at this picture of my dad and i'm thinking about the president of my graduating class who was this rah-rah school spirit guy couldn't stand the guy and i thought gee was that the kind of guy my dad was if i had gone to high school with my dad would i've even been friends with him boy bingo that's when the lightning bolt struck me in the head and i said there's that time travel movie that we always wanted to do that's the hook a kid goes back in time and ends up in high school with his dad so when i come back to california i immediately go over to bob's medicine apartment and we just started rolling on this thing we rode two drafts of back to the future at columbia pictures and columbia decided that they did not want to make the movie it was too nice and it was too sweet they wanted stripes they wanted porkys they wanted something launchier we took this project around to everybody in hollywood over and over and over again sometimes to the tune of over 40 rejections so finally the thing that gets back to the future made is that bob zemeckis makes a hit movie called romancing the stone everybody in his uncle wants to be in business with bob zamacus and the movie that bob wants to make most of all is back to the future now let's rewind a couple years steven spielberg had read back to the future we gave it to stephen because we'd been in business with stephen we made all three of our first movies with stephen so now bob smacks has this hit movie reminiscing stone and he says i don't want to be in business with any of my new fair weather friends i want to be in business with somebody who always believed in this project and fortuitously stephen was just then setting up amblin entertainment at universal so back to the future became the very first amblin entertainment project now the second draft of the script was not the movie that we actually ended up making we made lots of changes which is to be expected not the least of which was the time machine in the first two drafts was a time chamber built out of a refrigerator obviously one of the questions that you have in a time travel movie is how does somebody travel through time you know you can do it by getting hit on the head you can do it by making a wish that's what i'd like to do with the year i've just lived rewrite it play it over again but we grew up in the 50s and the 60s with the shadow of sputnik and we believed that to make the audience believe in time travel there had to actually be a physical time machine that became a given it was at some point in the writing of this next draft bob was putting his director hat on instead of just his writer's hand he came into the office and he said hey bob wouldn't doc have been smart enough to have built the time machine into a car so that it was mobile i said yeah that makes a lot of sense if you in fact were to build a time machine it became very apparent that you'd be foolish not to make it mobile and to take it with you so that you could give back and then he came up with the most brilliant idea and what if that car was a delorean i said oh yeah oh yeah well it so happened that this was in august of 1984 and john delorean was on trial he was sort of notorious i mean this was on the news every day in august and so that was what made the delorean an even cooler car than it already was not only does it have these glowing doors but it just gave the car this great mystique so i mean before you can actually have a back to the future delorean time machine you have to have a delorean to begin with most of us know very little about how john delorean came to power and became such an infamous public figure as he is today john came to gm in the late 50s early 60s one of the things he did early on was take the pulse of the society at that point he would go on to woodward street in detroit there and saw the hot rodders testing out cars and doing all these fun things between him and bill collins and other engineer there they decided to drop a large engine and a smaller frame car and called it the gto they sort of back doored it into the gm world and it became a huge hit gm didn't really realize it they were sort of pissed at first but it did such blockbuster sales that it really set the mark for the types of things that john could do there the gto and other high performance muscle cars made john delorean an auto industry star in the mid-1960s fast forward several years he's vice president of general motors on track to be the next president if he plays his cards right which to the detriment of gm was really not the place that he was going to excel because at that point he was more of a paper pusher up on the 14th floor and less on the ground doing the engineering and sort of idea stuff with the people at these other divisions you get to a point where you can't be an engineer anymore if you want to be promoted you have to be something else and you become a so-called manager so it was really it was an intense competitive game and you were like the quarterback of a team well then suddenly when you become a group executive it was pretty much like owning the stadium and all of a sudden you're renting out the facilities but you really don't have much to say about what goes on in them and a funny thing happens to you in any organization when you slowly get to the top the first thing you know you're surrounded by a bunch of sort of hangers on and yes man it doesn't take very much for that to turn you into a egomaniac you can see his success as a business person within gm and his conversion into this sort of young sexy playboy character at about the same time he's doing a little bit of plastic surgery getting the chin implant he's got the the sideburns he's dressing in the italian suits that the gm brass aren't super excited about but definitely set him apart in the mainstream world he kept himself fit he loved having the hollywood lifestyle he liked just being known for who he was john would spend a lot of time in california with a lot of his hollywood friends to sort of be inspired by things you would you know offer cars to various actors to drive or to be used in productions jam would get pissed off about this but they wouldn't realize that that was really what was driving sales he wasn't just a showman he actually was a brilliant engineer he's got two or three dozen patents to his name the pontiac gto stands out based on the fact that that set the course for the muscle car era he met sales that have never been beaten before and he would do that through talking with his fellow engineers the people on the lines making the cars so he was a real people person i think he just felt like he was being restricted what he could do and i think he had bigger dreams he definitely had an eye on what the public wanted he proved it working at gm and now gm wasn't letting him do the other things he wanted to do your resignation was drawn by general motors is that unusual for a man who intends to resign where was it a resignation or were you in fact asked to leave no i i left i attended my resignation almost immediately after i was promoted and given a tremendous bonus i moved up from the head of chevrolet to the group executive of north american car and truck operations and i did that about a month spending every minute and sitting at a committee meeting listening to the same people say the same things and i said i just can't imagine doing this for 18 more years i can't i couldn't possibly survive there's a lot of controversy as to whether he was let go and fired from gm or if he resigned on his own accord to set the record straight he was pushed out but it really set the course for the bigger and better things that everyone knows him for which is the dmc-12 [Music] from the time that john was was pushed out of gm that was in 1973. he spends a year to sort of raising capital figuring out ways to design his own sports car so something that john was trying to do which was to make a mass-produced car not a specialty car because other people make specialty cars like ferraris and other low number types of automobiles but to make one that was going to hopefully compete with the big three was something that was unthinkable but john had big aspirations and he was prepared to do it here's a man who has it made working for one of the largest automobile manufacturers in the world and he quits not only to build a different kind of automobile but a different kind of company he wanted to make a sports car relatively inexpensive that would last for years and the company he wanted the company to be the ethical car company he brings in bill collins one of the other engineers at gm that he had designed the gto with and between the two of them they decide they're going to make this car georgeto giugiaro in italy one of the most famous italian designers of the time is going to pen it giorgietto what a beautiful name for a talented guy he's most famous for a lot of his wedge designs from the mid 80s the bmw m1 the delorean the lotus esprit and the only parameters that they set forth were the fact that it had to have stainless steel skin going doors and b mid-engine those were the parameters gigaro pins this shape for the car which is super super clean it looks sporty and live and fast and sleek and handsome the windshield's laid back it's true but the body sides slope in at the top we call it tumble home and that keeps that car from looking boxy and then when you come down to the bottom of the windows there's this beautiful shape as the body kind of returns and begins to curve under there the back hardly tapers at all just gets kind of cut off kind of a square front end it's not some weeny front end it looked futuristic with the glowing doors which in reality is actually a beautiful design most people are confused with them they think that it takes a lot of space but in reality it requires less space to open a gallwing door than it does a conventional door the door itself as you can see it comes out 14 inches at its widest point it's a little deceptive but that's all that comes out so it's actually a lot easier to get out of this car in a parking lot than there's a regular car if you have somebody real close to you comes back with this amazing design and they make the first prototype proto one made in 1975 and then in 1976 that's when they start raising money using the car as sort of a sales tool the automotive press and the world reacted super positively to this car because they were excited about the prospect of what it meant it was the sexy car it had great fuel economy but it also was very sporty the automotive industry in the 70s when john left gm was pretty stagnant most automotive makers other than the ones coming from japan weren't necessarily coming out with the most exciting things for anyone to even think about not even try but to think about making their own mass-produced car at that point was insane the delorean gull wing doors rise effortlessly beckoning you inside the sleek stainless steel delorean beautifully crafted for long life the delorean is one of the most awaited automobiles in automotive history drive the delorean live the dream today it's a brave kind of design language for a car brave decision to make it out of stainless brave to make it going brave to make a sports car with a motor in the back no matter what porsche says you know when i was in school as a car designer everyone was talking about it we're all looking at that and saying this guy is such an individual and whether or not you thought his choices would sell you knew that he was just pursuing a dream and for that everyone admired him you wanted to see him succeed john delorean designed that car with many features which people never expected to see on a sports car right the original prototype was supposed to have air bags anti-lock brakes all these revolutionary things that none of the cars had in those days so that was the onset of what he was hoping to accomplish with the car now what ended up being produced was a different car than what the prototype sort of sold but they take the prototype out they start raising the financing and they start looking at various states the intent was to hopefully make it in the u.s there were no real states that were offering the types of tax breaks and incentives that would make it feasible to sort of launch this car division then all of a sudden in the late 70s he gets a deal struck with northern ireland and the uk to build the car in war-torn belfast of all places [Music] the army's role in northern ireland is to keep the peace between the catholics and the protestants ambushes sectarian killings ferocious gun battles across the border you got to understand northern ireland late 70s it's just a war zone 40 of unemployment based on all the war that was happening there between the protestants and the catholics their interest was trying to find businesses to come there so they could get people employed more people employed probably less people in the streets fighting all of a sudden they see this white knight in the six foot four silver-haired john delorean with this magical car who said that within two and a half years i can produce 3 000 jobs and then within a few more years after that probably another 3 000 jobs because at the end of the day the point was not to just have the sports car there was gonna be other cars he was trying to build an actual delorean motor company not just a one-off they basically give him everything he wants they strike the deal in less than three weeks which is incredible they offered him just kind of a point blank here's 150 million dollars here's a piece of land please come here and build your car and they didn't really do a lot of investigation and really checking on it too much before they did it you know they just wanted a major car company in their country they build this factory in two and a half years record time on a total green field state-of-the-art factory the moment john signed that deal with northern ireland he was already in trouble that was for a few reasons they didn't have a productionized car at that point they had a prototype and prototypes look beautiful on the outside and to the touch but in terms of being able to go take it on a track or give it to 10 000 people there was a hell of a lot more engineering that needed to go into the car seems like you've got a lot of unanswered questions for a car that's about to go into production no no no we're talking about having quite a few months here yet to resolve some of those things it was kind of an ocean moment where okay i've been talking about building this car for all these years now i actually have to go do it they brought on lotus and a guy named colin chapman who was also in the uk to help them productionize the car and in doing so the guts of the car completely change no airbag no anti-lock brakes no longer a mid-engine car but a rear engine car which completely changes the car from being a true sports contending car and more of a sort of touring automobile obviously the engine changed it's a sports car it looks like it should be going fast but they used a pretty anemic engine the reason that ended up happening was even back then there were so many rules and laws in terms of getting approvals uh from the u.s transportation to have your cars be street legal they basically used a peugeot renault vevo engine that had already been approved for the u.s market and were in other cars with the anticipation that they would be turbocharging that engine within a year or two of the car's release which really would have given it the sort of performance numbers that it deserved the only thing john wouldn't let them touch is the stainless steel skin and the gull wing doors because he's a marketer and he knew that sexiness was going to sell the car he knew he wanted it done in stainless he was going to offer a lifetime warranty on the body of course i think a lot of bean counters talked him out of that but he wanted something that was going to last a long time and he was willing to put a warranty on it and looking at all the deloreans today he would have been just fine doing a lifetime warranty on the body panel i have friends that have 500 000 miles on their cars and the car looks like it just rolled off the showroom i mean the stainless steel you can clean with a brillo pad and windex and it looks beautiful so i think that's a major testament to the car's design they wanted to make it in a way that was going to be super ethical so the stainless steel was the outer layer but underneath the layer they were working on a composite technology and it was supposed to help with safety and then it was also supposed to be extremely light but it was such brand new technology that they were several years away from being able to truly implement it into being a production car thus the switch to the very technique which is the technique being used by lotus to make their cars which was also like a stamped foam sort of plastic material that the car was made out of and the color was baked into in the delorean's case they basically used that sort of under body shell and then they just put the stainless steel on the outside to dress it up they did something that no other automotive maker had done at that point they were making the factory in tandem with engineering the car in tandem with designing the parts for the car all so they could stick to this sort of two and a half three year time frame that they had promised the british government that they would be up and running with jobs what they pulled off was an amazing feat everything's in place he's hiring the best people he really brought in the dream team of an international team to productionize and make the car but there's so many elements that go into making and selling a car of this nature and at the volume that he wanted to sell which was 30 40 000 cars a year by late 1980 the first cars start getting produced and the first one rolls off in january of 1981. [Music] and he was hoping that there was going to be basically 30 or 40 000 pre-sales at the door once they started coming out well the early 80s recession hit terrible terrible weather in 1981 when the car debuted all of the midwest was hit with severe snowstorms they couldn't get the cars to the dealers that they promised so we talked about half the us couldn't get these cars and he was really depending on those sales to keep the car company going johnny carson picks up his car you know there's a lot of publicity sammy davis jr has his car and a couple thousand cars sell but you start hearing these reports of you know johnny carson's car broke down on the highway because the alternator broke or people are getting locked in the cars because the lock solenoids aren't working correctly the fit and finish was not good on the first deloreans coming off the line with that in mind you know every delorean was built in ireland shipped here to the us which went to one of one of two quality assurance center and they were spending countless hours fixing these cars coming over that weren't right needed fit you know later in the 81 they got a lot better these things were to be expected it's a brand new car company even traditional car companies today have issues with cars that get you know first releases they needed time to work out some of these issues and they did but you know there's always that first impression and unfortunately for some buyers that made a big impact and they either canceled their pre-order or they canceled the pre-order because of how poorly the economy was at the time and then it was really a hunt for trying to find that right buyer that had expendable income between the recession and the high inflation and the interest rates being where they were it just it set the tone off pretty poorly at the time that uh john started talking about this car and wanted to make this car he wanted to make it accessible to the mass public so it was supposed to cost 12 000 was priced at 26 to 28 dollars in 1982 that's 12 13 000 over what it was supposed to be originally priced when people put their deposits on the car and so it's kind of the perfect storm of of a sort of tough start out of the gate for the delorean motor company john delorean the charismatic former general motors vice president is gambling his future on the success of this luxury sports car the dmc-12 now the problem was he was working on borrowed time he had to start selling cars right away because his deal with the uk was that he had to continue to get jobs and he had to pay back some of this money that they were giving him and so a combination of events occur and he gets painted into this corner ultimately where he needs money to keep the company going now he was part of that problem john was hoping to take the company public and in doing so he was trying to make the numbers look great and so he was upping production at a time period where he should have reduced production to keep a certain reserve in the bank building to inventory is not a good sound business practice in the automobile business and delorean did exactly that last fall the public option didn't occur for various other reasons and all of a sudden he was left with no money and ports full of cars i think there was a start of the bleeding out of the lorry lorca [Music] the company goes into receivership in early 82 and from that point on it's a race against time to try and appease the british government into showing them a path forward with other investors putting money into this company people are starting to get a little weary based on some of the early cars with the quality control the delorean name is being tarnished a little bit in the press it's not as glowing as it was before and so to try and get investment at this point from traditional banks and financiers and hedge funds has proven to be difficult and that's ultimately where he gets trapped one of john's greatest assets but also deficiency was this idea that he could just continue to take risks and not ultimately get hit at the end for taking one of these risks the last risk he took which was a very dangerous game of cat and mouse was this sting operation that he got involved with with the cocaine and the u.s government it's a story of big business big pressure big money and the crime of cocaine it's the story of how and why the fbi caught automaker john z delorean and it became a bit clearer today the u.s attorney's office here in los angeles designed the plan that brought john delorean together with william hetrick described by authorities as one of california's biggest cocaine dealers his quasi neighbor called him one day out of the blue who he hadn't spoken to in several years a guy named hoffman and he says hey i heard you're in trouble i have some investors that would want to invest in your company yeah it's colombian guys they're going to sell drugs to sort of clean the money through the company he said listen i'll do any sort of shady deal as long as the money is coming through a reputable bank now this is where the government gets involved hoffman was a paid informant for the us government he was working off his own bust and he made a deal with the government to snitch on other drug folks now the problem here is john delorean wasn't in the drug business he was a desperate guy who was trying to save his company and he got roped into this say what you want about it morally versus legally he wasn't a drug guy but regardless he gets looped into this and the government goes to great lengths to sort of land their big goose because at the time that this was all going down reagan was new in office and he was having a big initiative on a war on drugs the fbi's mandate was we need a big bust and all of a sudden john delorean falls in their laps and they're off to the races the first part of the scheme is get john to give us two million dollars to invest in the drugs and that's how we'll nab him well john didn't have two million dollars and so the government comes back and says well you can give us collateral in the form of two million dollars so john in his typical sneaky way gives them collateral but it's basically fake collateral it's stocks and it's vin numbers to cars that the government doesn't even get the titles to so they take this and they sort of run with it and their whole case sort of is built around this infamous fbi tape on october 19th in a hotel room in los angeles the trap was sprung on john delorean a suitcase full of cocaine was put before him and he called it better than gold gold is more than that a few minutes later the fbi arrived and john delorean was put under arrest fred graham cbs news los angeles you see john toasting with the champagne saying that uh you know the the drugs in front of him is as good as gold and then he gets busted their thought process was a jury of 12 is never going to let this guy off when they see this tape the question of entrapment whether john delorean was unlawfully lured by federal agents into committing a crime is one strategy delorean's new attorney will have to tackle howard weitzman the amazing attorney completely demolished the prosecution's case and john delorean was found not guilty a cheer went up as john delorean left court this afternoon a free man acquitted on all charges of cocaine conspiracy earlier as the clerk read the verdict count one not guilty count two not guilty delorean buried his face in his hands and said praise the lord his lawyer said the 12 members of the jury sent a message to the government that its conduct in this case was wrong but john delorean is still in trouble authorities in britain and the united states want to know what he's done with millions of dollars that were to be used for his ill-fated car factory in northern ireland this week's favorable drug charge ruling may be only the beginning of mr delorean's legal wrangles although he was found not guilty dmc of course was shuttered by then by october of 1982 john's busted and that was the final straw for margaret thatcher and the british government to put the axe on dmc all the employees are let go the last car comes off the assembly line in november december of 1982 and that was unfortunately the end of delorean motor company [Music] john's trials really take over his life at that point and the drug trial is in 1984. it was a several year affair and his name was tarnished and he had no ability to sort of re-enter the workplace in any meaningful way unfortunately well outside of the fact that i've aged about 600 years in the last two and that that life as a hard-working industrialist has been tattered and torn i don't know would you buy a used car from me carr was going to be relegated to the scrap heap of automotive history well did anyone know when they all agreed that the car was going to be converted to a time machine the very next day they delivered three used deloreans in my parking lot they made exactly the right choice bob gale made a lot of great choices on that movie finally we finished the third draft we had it in and universal isn't gonna make the movie unless we cut one million dollars out of the budget so bob and i struggled with how are we gonna cut a million dollars onto the budget well the time machine was always nuclear powered whether it was refrigerator or the delorean and the climax of the movie took place at a nuclear test site so this was going to involve going out to the desert building one of these little towns that they would blow up to do these tests so we said well this is the most expensive thing in the script this sequence maybe there's a way that we could figure out how to do this on the back lot at universal where we were already going to shoot bob and i walked the town square and we brainstormed and we came up with this idea about harnessing lightning instead of harnessing a nuclear bomb it turns out sometimes that having some sort of limits on your creativity makes you even more creative because the clock tower sequence was way better than the nuclear test site sequence could have ever been now we were able to hand in a budget that fit universal's parameters and we were green lit we were able to start hiring more people bobs and mike has hired two of the best people that he got from romancing the stone cinematographer dean cundy fabulous cinematographer and alan silvestri and there's a reason why allen has done all bob's movies ever since because he's that good now here we were finally making the movie universal hired a product placement company to make deals to put certain products in the movie that the production would get some money for some of the products were picked out by us for example you see pepsi in the movie but you don't see coke why because pepsi's logo changed from 1955 to 1985 and it was a way of helping to define the period whereas the coca-cola logo remains the same to this very day but one day the product placement guy comes into my office and he says hey bob if you will change the delorean to a ford mustang ford motor company will provide the company 75 000 i said richard doc brown doesn't drive a mustang get out of here our first production illustrator andrew prober did a lot of storyboards for many sequences my two beginning projects were battlestar galactic against star trek and eventually ended up getting a job and back to the future even though his job was not to design the delorean he couldn't help himself he came up with a lot of interesting designs but what was missing from what he was doing was they were all very slick very polished we had this idea that doc brown built this thing in his garage and it had to look earthy it had to look dangerous bob and i had met ron cobb while john millius was doing a movie called conan he'd also done some designs for some other science fiction movies we talked about working together so this was an opportunity for that to actually happen i was kind of bummed that he was the one that was going to design the car instead of me but i would have nobody else do it besides ron ron was pretty expensive we were only able to hire him for a week or two but in that week or two that ron was on board he really focused on it it was just a sort of a fun thing that spielberg just asked me to do one day how would you make a delorean into it into a time machine he pretty much left it up to me and i just had to concoct some three view drawings and zircon and gail both came up with the idea of using a delorean because of the stainless steel body and he thought that that would be an interesting idea that because of stainless steel it could be turned into a time machine you know beyond that they didn't have too many suggestions except for the flux capacitor you know they wanted something that was kind of visible about that i just thought that whatever i i did had to be fairly visible so i wanted to do those coils that sort of surrounded it as though creating a field i mean obviously no one knows how one travels through time exactly but um i just want to create a lot of believable stuff that seemed to put the car in a certain status or something he was asking questions and thinking design wise to say if the delorean is nuclear powered where's the nuclear reactor it's got to have one where is the cooling vent all nuclear power plants have to have a cooling map there had to be a plutonium chamber so all these things ron said there has to be a logic to this i also thought it should look a little bit homemade because dr brown was supposedly doing it in his lab at home and it would be using parts from radio shack or something like that so i i did my my version to look like it was all kind of bolted on and added to the delorean i'm always pretty good at adding that stuff you know that kind of texture just something real and complex i mean i could never come up with a flex capacitor though i tried this i tried that i tried a lot of design for me and by the time i was off the project they still hadn't figured out how it was supposed to look the delorean would not be what it is without his creative vision and input so after we couldn't afford to pay ron anymore we went back to andy we said okay andy flesh this out a little more for us he had his reactor in the back off to one side and then he had a single exhaust port for that and the producers thought maybe the reactor back in the middle would have been better with another exhaust port i felt that the flux bands around the car could have been better arranged to more encompass the car in that field so i just moved those a little bit that was it and those basically became the working drawings and then we had to say okay how are we going to translate this into reality when it comes down to it my drawings are just concept art they're not like blueprints so there's going to be some wiggle room some creative input by those who take that off my board and build it we've hired our production designer larry paul larry most famous for blade runner and larry paul said there's a guy i know named mike fink mike fink is an amazing man he was like a tank commander among other things he knows everything about everything mike was involved in the vehicle design on blade runner so we brought mike fink in i got round cop's designs for the exterior of the door and they said we want you to just take care of the door and make sure it's moving along and getting built right all right so i said okay mike fink had a very special job which was running back and forth between film tricks kevin's shop in north hollywood and the studio at that time i had started my company film tricks incorporated in north hollywood stephen wanted to make sure the secrecy and he says build it in there don't let anybody take pictures of it and no sooner had they decided on the deloreans in the shop they came in just like they came from out of time how many of these are we going to have the thing about production cars they always break down so we knew we had to have at least two we decided we would buy three deloreans one was about 18 grand 15 grand and 12 grand respectively because of their condition and we went to work right away we put them in the shop and started taking them apart and figuring out what we're going to do for designs and we got sketches but they didn't make the sketches looking at a box of parts and numbering them they didn't make blueprints they were just some concept sketches we got a sense of how busy it was look at all the lights they put in these pictures and all the parts and oh my gosh mike fink had this job this amazing job of interpreting the sketches finding stuff that would kind of look like that that they wouldn't have to build from scratch you know i would sit in the car with kevin and the guys might say okay please go right here this goes right there this goes over here but then something else came along so mike said i can't do your movie but i know a guy you should meet and i brought in my cafe and they met mike and mike and i spent like a week together he wanted an assistant a little before back to the future i had my first tv job which was doing a self-driving car and the show was called knight rider knight rider a shadowy flight into the dangerous world of a man who does not exist he called me one day and said maybe you could spend a day with me and you know we could run around and look at stuff because i need someone who knows how things should look who knows how stuff is built and who can draw so we spent a day together and he said you know i've got another show to go on to so if you'd like my job you can have my job but you'll have to be nice with the art department so that's what got me over there i said i'm telling you this guy is brilliant he's gonna be fine and it was it might be a brilliant shot mike was perfect he had some great credits so we brought mike on board mike fink and kevin pike had managed to get that car well underway i never even heard of the movie so i go into the shop and there's a delorean sitting there and it's got the rear hatch off and the back deck off and they're welding up aluminum and they had some idea of how they wanted the interior to go together as well they were beginning to position things on the car it was started it was rolling mike chaffey came in and he could figure out what would be the best interpretation of the drawings in addition to our 20-man crew we had a wonderful forum in dave wishneck we had the electronics engineer bill klinger and they contributed to interpreting what mike thought should go in the car mike didn't put anything on the car that was our job and we advised him well if you put that there that'll cause a consequence with this over here and this won't fit how can we do that and together they helped to construct what is the delorean time machine we started building manufacturing and coming up with parts that looked something like was in the sketches or would convey the idea it had to be very very busy it was a nuclear reactor so we had to have those kinds of looks and mechanics to it with that big hub in the back where they put in the plutonium we figured out how to make a latch that would open and close but the idea about what are we going to do so then we made these cylinders and then made a little swivel on the bottom it could open up there was a little bayonet fitting on the patch for the plutonium and it really worked with little pins that engaged in these little slots very visually it drops that red tube in and everybody thinks uh oh it's ready to go and we figured out how to do it with just a lathe and a metal cutting saw and some welding rather than having to machine the parts you know fully with a milling machine or anything like because it should look like doc brown put it together bob gale came to the shop and said this is getting too neat you've got to make this more homemade doc brown did this in his lab we went back over the welds and made them a little thicker and fatter and exposed more of the homemade element to it and everywhere we could we really tiptoed around any kind of fabrication work try to keep the build it from scratch stuff to a minimum because it's really time consuming but the guys there they were capable of doing anything mostly it was putting junk on the car kind of work wait a minute what are you doing doc i need fuel mr fusion that's 100 chauffeur they asked me if i could design a mr fusion i knew part of it should look like something to do with coffee because mr coffee so that's why i use that little crust coffee grinder to make mr fusion the practical question was where are we going to get these parts and so there's a place in north hollywood i believe where everybody goes to get old aircraft parts scientific parts apex surplus electronics you could find anything you want there mike went out there and just said this would look cool this would look cool and he started picking this and this and this and this it was like an expedition really sometimes to go up to apex they have stacks and stacks of stuff say oh i need some of this and some of that and steve would say what are you guys building what are you building because like you know there's all this crazy stuff that we would buy there are a lot of little easter eggs in there things you'll recognize if you're a car guy like the dodge palera wheel cover things you'll recognize if you've worked on a turbine engine there's a big switch which has for its handle a battery post cleaner but why wouldn't dr brown use it right half the junk i chose was stuff that i couldn't identify because i figured if i didn't know what it was no one would know what it was and then it wouldn't be like a red flag to people watching the movie like oh that's so silly look at that it should all look a little believable you know i was hoping to find a gauge for the plutonium chamber and i ran across a rentkin meter that measures radiation it's like how perfect is this because i would leave the part of the meter that says renkins but then put a doc brown label dymo label underneath it this is plutonium chamber you know doing a car like the delorean is a delicate thing because it's supposed to look goofy there's this professor type and everything he's invented has been a failure part of the movie is just that set up like failure after failure the brainwave analyzer all that crazy stuff that he does so you're prepared for this thing not to work and it's got to look like a crackpot to put it together but it has to look like a crackpot who really knew how to build things put it together right so it's a delicate line it has to look silly enough that you go oh come on and it has to look believable enough that you say yeah maybe so it really had a little bit of depth you could kind of look down through the layers and still see the car so it's a great case of doing design work for the movies this little ring of nozzles here is from a gas turbine engine that they use to power things like helicopters these are little heat sinks they're fit onto a big aluminum tube on which is a dodge palero wheel cover these ducts were fabricated in kevin pike's shop film tricks and painted by the standby painter lyle dickey i think that these are air oil separators on a dry sump aircraft engine you've got to allow some oil to settle out and air to settle out of the oil so you're not pumping air bubbles through the thing and there's just sort of a fantastic freestyle combination of hoses in here the idea being you've got to cool down a nuclear reactor and that's going to involve a big transfer of heat so you get some big exhaust for the heat i group things in threes because i had this vague idea that if we suggest that uh doc brown is using three-phase power for this we might take some people along mike fink had already got these things designed and kevin's guys were building these when i first came on board the show the idea is that you have big connectors a lot of power flowing through here to generate a powerful field and these connectors here these are actually for what they call a oh look they've michael proved it they they're for what they call a spider box they're these are the kind of connections you see on a movie set when you're running big powerful lights this is also you know it's before gps so doc being the careful guy that he is puts a little compass in there and out of his concern for the passenger he also has this warning about shielding your eyes from the light which i love originally ron cobb had drawn this with a great deal of stuff between the driver and the passenger and andy did some sketches where he began to open that up because if you've got uh like a choker shot on one person you can get away with that but if you want a two shot or you want to shoot through the side of the car like this you absolutely have to have an open path here for the camera to see through when you have that many people trying to manufacture something and where it goes you're on top of each other you can't only put two people in the interior and think about working upside down and overhead and backwards behind you it was cramped quarters one of the surprises that we had was how small the delorean really was it was so small that we could not fit a panaflex camera in there so one of those three deloreans had to actually literally be cut apart so that we could situate a camera there to do the through the windshield shots for the first movie there are three cars the a car the hero car that got all the bells and whistles full tilt b car we put everything on the outside they're just going to use it for driving shots they're going to use it for stunts they're never going to see inside the car that lasted until the second day of shooting can you put everything in the a car in the b car we got polaroids from the set still man and we try to remember exactly what we did okay we can replicate that we can replicate that the b car had a little bit less detailing but it really is as good as the a car for the most part and the b car was rigged for special stunts it had the fire for the when the cars going up the speed that it would light up the wheels the c car they cut that car up and that car was using all three films that's so they can put the camera in the car and everything the c car was the process car we don't need any of this stuff we don't need any of that stuff but we do need the interiors we do need to see all the dash everything in there but it was on the stage it was on the rockers it was front of rear screen but it was basically something that you could tow around and it was like a half a delorean the other shock that we had was when we looked inside the delorean speedometer only went up to 85 miles per hour no car manufactured in the 80s had a speedometer that went above 85 miles per hour so we created a new template and put it in there anybody that goes and looks inside of a real delorean will see that the speedometer only goes up to 85. we started shooting in november of 1984. accent worked in there from october all the way up to christmas and we had pretty much all the cars ready for shooting around the horn of the new year in january and then we were off to the races we had one of the nicest stunt teams that i've worked with walter scott him and his crew came over they went through it well it's kind of funky in the front it bites and the shocks are of course very small pancakes the car was totally underpowered car had a six-cylinder volvo engine the weight of the car was extraordinary everybody was always complaining about the delorean for one reason or another the visibility in it wasn't great the actors were hitting their head on the door all the time the special effects didn't always work the way we thought they were going to work there was times when rain came about and the way that we took out the back window that water could go down and hit the battery and so all of a sudden the battery was dead the vents on the back they actually encapsulated the trunk deck by hugging that valence that's on the back over the lights that every time you had to get to the engine you had to take all those off to lift the deck lid or we had to take them off at night to leave them for the mechanics to do some tune-ups and work like that we had a set of mechanics from the teamster department they had a full truck of every part for that car that they could need if they had to replace it there was always some issue with it remember this is 1984. we don't have the technology that we have today which is oh you just put some led lights in there and tiny little battery and boom they light up now we had to have all these wires coming out of the back all kinds of equipment to make those time displays light up all those lights had to be on their own circuits there was an onboard transformer on the car so they were running 9000 volts to the neon tubes so on like a wet morning it was really exciting to be around that car just crackling and buzzing you know i remember the first time i saw the delorean time machine was actually in the parking lot of puente hills mall and they rolled it out i started seeing the movie it's a little out of the back of the van and i just i couldn't believe i was seeing you it was amazing it was such an audacious insane idea and it worked so beautifully and what was really fun though is when we finished the take i mean conventionally you'd get out of the car and let the teamster get in and take it back to one and then you'd get in and drive it to take in but i got pretty proficient with this let me just take a bag of one myself and back it up [Music] quickly we thought it was interesting that the car would be hot and then it would be cold so the dry ice effect when it became cold we milked that in the twin pines mall scene we kind of didn't do much with that after that but the fire effects were always important because the idea that it left a trail and kevin and his guys came up with this stuff that i think they called go juice we came up with a great chemical that didn't have a high temperature and it marvelously went from the orange flame when it's hot to the cool alcohol look when it was done they would pour the stuff on the ground and then light it up and start shooting and the stuff would burn for 35 or 45 seconds long enough for us to get a tape you'll be seeing this face everywhere you look this summer everyone's trying to cash in on the latest star we had kids lined up seven deep to try to catch a glimpse of michael j fox mom and i looked at each other and said he really is a big star that was the first inkling that we had that it was going to be more than just a movie that came and went he's an absolute dream you know if you have a crush on someone maybe you send him a note or something you're waiting for the reply you hardly dare look in the mailbox because because there's so much riding on it right and that's how it is to work on a movie that you have hopes for you can hardly bear to wait till the thing comes out because it's not up to you let's say you're doing props for a movie what is up to you story acting editing music nothing nothing you're making props for a show you're just kind of hoping and you can't afford to hope too much because it's foolish you can't allow your satisfaction to depend on what's gonna happen at box office i remember going to the screening now like cast and crew and just thinking oh my god they really pulled it together it turned out better than we even hoped back to the future becomes the biggest hit movie of 1985 plays in fact all the way into 1986 in theaters studio of course wanted a sequel we weren't so sure about a sequel well the movie made so much money that sid scheinberg came to us and he said gentlemen universal is making back to the future part two you can either get on that train or not get on that train but we're making it one way or another we would much appreciate it if you guys would drive that train well we're going we don't need roads so by the time we were in a production on sequels we had seven deloreans each car from the first movie was used in all three movies the a car was usually for first unit work b car was more stunt second unit work although sometimes it was used first unit and the c car was used all throughout then they built a fiberglass car that they could hang from a crane and they would use on a forklift and everything for the third movie they introduced two new cars that were built on modified delorean frames with sand rail frames they took the learning frame in the middle cut it up put this other suspension on which is basically volkswagen so they had these two cars that were made to go in the desert scenes the b car from the first movie was modified to be on the rail tracks and then they built a second rail car which was designed to do the stunt with the wheelie and everything by the time we were halfway through the production of the third movie we were busting up some of these cars pretty significantly i recall that we took one car and decided we're just going to use this car for parts the first show was completely different than the second and third 27 people in the art department on part two part one we're on a shoestring let's just do it we have no time let's get this thing done but the sequels were totally different experience they had five time visual effects oscar winner ken ralston down here with a new piece of hardware no one had ever seen before the tandro the computer memorizes every nuance of that camera move and then plays it back exactly the same way every time it allows us to have one actor play multiple roles in the same shot but not have to have the camera locked down like they used to have to do in the old movies when it came time to hit the car with the train at the end of the third movie it was important to destroy the car for a couple of reasons one not the least of which was nobody thought we would ever do something like that the audience reaction first time we screened the movie i mean it was like an old friend being killed right it was great i mean in terms of the emotional investment that the audience had in mind delorean we had to destroy the car because you just wanted to say okay this is done we can't use the car to go back in time anymore we're putting a period on this at this point of course we really had decided that we weren't going to do a fourth movie we wanted to make that really clear why don't you guys do a part four creatively there's nothing left that we needed to say about these characters we're done we've seen too many movies where they make one too many sequels two too many sequels we had a story to tell and we told it and the story has a wonderful ending and that's a good way to go out after we finished part three universal took possession of all the cars it's their money it's their property the fiberglass delorean replica was put on the cinematic display at universal studios hollywood and after many years was reported destroyed the oxnard car was a dedicated stunt car after filming a part 3 the car was used for some of the filming of the ride and then it was put on display at universal studios florida it's gone into various decay and right now it's just in storage for the scenes that were filmed at monument valley they made two dune buggy cars one was bought by two private collectors and was restored and then sold at auction the other car was used as a parts car they took parts off this car and put them on other cars such as the c car at the end of filming it looked like a wreck however after filming part three they actually put just the lowering panels on it and put it in a second cinemagic display so people could see it and when it came time for universal studios japan to open a ride they took parts of this car and the c car and made a replica time machine the c car was left in storage and then eventually they put it outside where it was left to the element the car was used to actually build a replica car for universal japan the v car was a sacrificial lamb it was the one that they read with explosives and was hit by the train this car lives on in various other cars jay orberg who built promotional cars used parts of this to make his promotional tour cars and then he even took the panels and put them together for playing hollywood at their hawaii restaurant it's now currently in bill and patrick shea's collection the a car went on display at the universal tour in california they filmed the ride with it they used it for an earth day special for cbs they used the a-car in the cartoons for some of the beginning of the shows they had live-action stuff with christopher lloyd and then it was just used all around the studio it was an attraction they would take it to events they would do this and that eventually though it would just sit outside [Music] i have found over the years that people that have deloreans either have them because of the movie or they have kept them because of the move now people have gone beyond beyond to make their deloreans as screen exact replicas as possible [Music] some people do it themselves some people get some extra help i was 10 and i saw that car and i was like that's the car that's the car of my dreams once i started i found this whole community of other builders out there people who had already done work people who were doing work alongside each other and you know in the early days it was great because everyone would just share with each other and it just became like a family of like-minded crazy people i'm like oh you're my people i think there's probably a handful of people that get pissed off about the people that make the back to the future cars out of regular deloreans because they feel like it's sacrilege to be damaging the car in that way but there are also a lot of ways to do it where you can reverse it and it doesn't mess up the car the first one took me about four years to build to restore the car completely and to do all the back to future stuff so i just started little by little recreating the parts as i could and putting them on my car and my first one i think was the absolute funnest car ever built i'm working on number 20 right now of complete cars but now i'm doing it for everybody else that wants to done i build a lot of parts for guys that are doing it themselves in their garage so i probably have my hand and at least a hundred of the deloreans out there some way or another there's a part on there that i've probably built or had my hands on keep in mind those are toys those cars were never meant to carry that much weight you're not going to amaze them as a daily driver it was nuts enough driving a delorean around but when you were driving the car as the time machine down the road people lose their stop mind now [Music] that is awesome and it's actually quite dangerous for the driver because they're not trying to run you off the road they're trying to they pull up next to you they want to take pictures they're giving you thumbs up they pull in front of you and they want to take so right off the bat i was like i don't think we can drive this thing anymore we have been stopped by all the finest law enforcement officers all over the world who wanted to check our paperwork and make sure that uh everything was in order i had my car on a flatbed and people have followed it one guy got out and was crying like legitimately he's like i never thought i would get to see this in real life and there is something emotional about it because of this film because of all the things that work in the film the story the characters the music all those things when we see the car that is a symbol of that moment what they felt and when what they feel when they watch it and re-watch it and re-watch it well you know i've ended up building my own delorean time machine replica and there's a lot of stuff that as someone that knows so much about it i know it's not super accurate but you know i'm happy with how it looks and how it makes me feel there's stuff i did on my car that was specific to a certain scene in part two because in my mind that's what i wanted to build you know there's wiring that's wrong in any other part but that's how i wanted it to be there's a very rabid interest in these movies and the car and everything and it's a good thing the only thing is sometimes i think that people get so involved they forget the real thing is what was on the screen we're all fans and if people realize that there's not some big trophy at the end for being the biggest fan then there's room for everyone you know we don't go after anybody that makes it back to the future delorean even if it's not a great one because you are all ambassadors for the film because people see a delorean even if there's not back to the future modification in it at all and it makes them smile and it makes them think about the movie and that's great when people have gone the extra mile to put a flux capacitor and time displays in it god bless you we love you thank you thank you thank you so much it's a compliment and i love seeing them and i love talking to when we go to the conventions they're just full of joy and full of questions and i'm happy to help i know how much work it takes i know those people are building those cars in their unair-conditioned garages i know they're taking money that could have gone to something else honey trust me this is going to be so cool they have a dream just like delorean had a dream just like doc and marty they have a dream if not for the afterlife of the movie i never would have met the haulers two amazing people who decided to build like a folk art delorean and just put stuff on the car so it looked kind of like the movie we were one of the first we weren't the first but it was early on august 4th 2000 oliver wakes up from sleep and he's in horrific pain his brother and i rush him to the hospital and he's diagnosed with cancer i had a tumor the size of a football doctors came from other operating rooms just to see it we're told that he has cancer and he has six months to live which we had to say what when you get news like that you take care of business you put your house in order when he was given his diagnosis there was no chemo program and no radiation program that fit his situation it was hopeless it was the end and that's what we had to face but they said we'd like to monitor the progress of the disease a friend of ours helped us make a will not that we had much to pass on anybody but you can kind of get the legal parts when you're in your your 30s you don't expect this so getting our lives in order was very important to us and we sat with our minister and he said well what do you want to do and pretty much at lunch that day oliver said i really want to build a time machine looking at me i'm like okay if we only have six months let's have the most fun we can have what would that be because the dwell on it wasn't going to help anybody we had to watch a videotape of the movie of the movie on a 20-inch we thought big screen and pause it and try to figure out what the parts were what the words were we live in more of the spirit of michael chaffey you know hey let's does this look good does this work does this fit you know yeah that looks pretty good you know let's we used our imaginations and we would go to salvage surplus places old electronics junk shops scrap metal yards and we'd have kind of a list i would i would draw pictures of what i would see on the the tv so i'm like okay we need a box like this big and it needs to be gray and has to have a window in it so she'd be on aisle four you know in this pile of junk she'd be like i think i got it and she will have dug out of this big pile of stuff a box about that size it wasn't gray it was bright yellow yeah it didn't have a window but it had the right latching and the size was good yeah i'm like well we can paint it and we can cut out a hole and put a window in it but but the most important part was how much was it ten dollars ten dollars for a flux capacitor so that fit our budget the more you you learn in a process like this like building a time machine the more you become yourself you're becoming more of you you're working through problems and coming up with solutions and i was like a i guess a honeybee with the car and i would be working on the front end and i was like i don't know how to attach this i don't know how i'm going to integrate this in so i'd be like oh well it'll come to me and i'd go to the back of the car and i'd work on something that i didn't know how to do and then in the middle of the night i'd wake up with the answer and i'd be like i got it all right she'd be like goodbye and and i worked night and day three and a half months solid out in the driveway we didn't have a garage so i would go back and forth back and forth i killed the grass between the the car and my little workshop making little things carrying it back to the car fitting it shaving off a little bit to make it fit better and again i was just driven i i didn't get tired and i just knew the whole time it was going to work out i had faith this is going to be a time machine you know soon i'm going to get this done and once it was accomplished my request oliver was please don't let it sit in the driveway so it didn't we drove it around and what we found driving it around any stop we made people wanted to see it we were finding dollar bills stuck under our windshields if car was in the parking lot alone we're in the restaurant eating or seeing a movie we'd find these dollars around or a little love letter we found a little arsenal you made my day the the car would get such a wonderful reception anywhere and everywhere we went and we realized gee we're not the only ones that are enthusiastic about this and we thought well if we could relate their enthusiasm towards something useful uh we might be able to accomplish something so about the same time we were building the car uh debbie brooks sat down with michael j fox and they were building the michael j fox foundation for parkinson's research they're the world's largest funder of parkinson's research next to the us government we kind of just started putting our efforts towards supporting them he'd see the doctor started it three months the next three months the next three months the next three months well let's go to every six months so the next three or four years was every six months after about five years of this he said oliver i don't want to see you anymore you've shown very poor progress with cancer and i said well likewise and uh thanks see you later it's been said by a few people but most touchingly by bob gale that maybe the car may be having that focus on something else saved his life to give something back oliver and terry now take this delorean all around the world they have a collection box built into the car and it all goes to michael's foundation and they're just wonderful people they've driven hundreds of thousands of miles around the world supporting michael j fox's foundation there's everything good about people in that story have the dream put in the effort do something good makes everyone's lives better it's been an amazing experience to meet the people who are willing to invest that kind of effort our original goal was a million dollars and to reach all 50 states and and that is uh the 50 states have been accomplished the mileage on the vehicle after being driven in 28 countries is 800 and i just looked 27 000 miles and we've raised just about a dollar for a dollar the same amount in uh donations so we'll get to that million we're going to get to that million soon uh i i hope i'm going to tell them a secret i've never told the secret before it's the secret to successful time traveling [Music] me oh that's sweet thanks having a a really good adventure buddy okay you got your dinner [Music] the first time i ever saw the a car was in 1985 and it used to be on display in front of the queue line for the universal studios tour the next time i saw the car was at the premiere for back the future three at the cenoramado and that was literally coming straight off of the production probably in like 95 completion i mean the only thing was not on the car was mr fusion was not there so then fast forward to 1997 that was the next time i got to get up close to the car and it had been missing a few pieces by that point but it was still in pretty good shape but you can see that had been out in the sun for years and it started the sun started you know wearing away at the car you know it wasn't built with the expectation this is going to outlast the years over time the car just gets more decrepit parts go missing most of the fandom including myself up until about 2008 everyone thought it was a b car we all thought the a car was like in steven spielberg's private collection eventually nike was having an event they were doing nike air mags for an auction for michael j fox foundation nike wanted to do a promotion to create the shoe that was in back to the future part two as part of the event that they had to announce this they had this event at the studio and they brought the car out it was a mess i couldn't believe that they had let it get into such disrepair it looked terrible stephen clark was there with gail and he was actually there as part of actingfuture.com and he got pictures and he was right there at the moment that gail saw the car there and that was the moment that the restoration really took foot terry had his car at the evening event and the contrast between the fan car and the original movie car basically fruit to the idea of the restoration of the a-car i was like hey rather than hire a restoration company the fans should restore it they know this car inside and out it should go to them bob said that's a great idea why don't you produce the restoration once you get the guys together and so i met these guys that were filled with art designers and engineers that were sneaking on the universal lot at night to study the real car and then they would like forensically like down to the tiniest screw take down the information so that they can rebuild it back at their house and they were trying making the most accurate car i was like i want to know those guys i hired them to put together my car which became at the time one of the most accurate ones in the world i had a partner joe walser and we went to universal and we brought my car next to the real car and the execs came from the theme park came down and they were like oh my god this is the real car i mean there was rats living inside it it was like it was in horrible shape and that was it bob gail had got us restoration and like literally took custody of the car and we just started taking it apart to try and figure out how we were going to fix it it was this group project of like three dozen guys of fans that were just giving up hours now there was way too much time joe of course walter is it will will forever be the alpha and omega of of this hobby i've never seen somebody more knowledgeable or dedicated to one car so much in my life he hand-picked the best time machine builders and the best restoration people that he knew to build the a-car at this point joe knows more about the details of the car i did that 30-some years ago right when he came to us with the restoration project we were all just stunned like really really the the the a-car we're gonna we're gonna restore the hero a car yep i was like i'm in they were saying hey we need parts do you have any parts and i said i do i said what kind of parts are you looking for so we need uh do you have a trw keypad that's how they input the time destination i said i have like five of them and he goes okay he says you got to help us with this car more it was a coming together of many different parties you know delorean mechanics and art departments and engineers just people who are just appreciated as a piece of art so when we were restoring the a car the first mandate was get the car restored to like a showroom delorean and then once it got to a perfect delorean then we took it from the delorean to the time machine i remember the first time i spread all the pieces out on the floor there was a sense of reverence where i just kind of stood over and i looked at a pile of my childhood on the ground and i'm like i get to help we knew that we had the responsibility of bringing it back so it was it wasn't like oh you know like there's it's not like that it was more like okay we need to get serious maybe the way a doctor would be when he's going into surgery you know what i mean it's just about okay let's get to work and and and save this patient so as an archivist and a conservator my mantra is leave it alone don't touch it but unfortunately things deteriorate and break down so that's when the conservation comes in it's like how do we preserve this with the integrity for example like the goodyear tires those are the original tires well you can't drive on them so i was like let's put an inner tube on inside of the original tire so therefore the inner tube's holding the air so that's where i think the artistry of conservation comes in it's like you're looking at the original tire from the movie but also you've kept the structural integrity to hold the car up so it looks like it should but you're not erasing any of the history and every single thing you do as a conservator that's the way you approach it all every single step on the vehicle was done with lots of discussion what's the most appropriate way to make this thing look the way that the public wants it to look the flux boxes for example they were completely beyond repair and had been destroyed over the years they weren't even worth repairing just had to make new ones so using the ones that came off the car we'd do a little bit of prop forensics on the piece then i would start building new pieces from scratch precision just really really paying attention to it and joe would come over and be like tweak this angle okay we tweak it a little bit the flux bands i hate them i hate them everyone hates them because they're hard to do they're always the hardest part of every build and you have to bend them by hand in increments back against the car and a little bit check the angle bend a little bit and all you got to do is screw up once and you throw it out get another bar start over again they had done their homework and their research to extensive levels you know and they also had the complete support of universal it was very difficult i mean it was it was all-nighters you know all dares i mean anytime we had spare time we'd be working on this thing and even some days it didn't matter if we had other commitments and people killing themselves to get it done but glad to be dying i've never seen more of a labor of love in my life it was exhilarating because you were literally looking at the fingerprints of the production crew who put it together originally like you were taking things off that had never been off of a panel since they were put on like the flux capacitor and you'd see pencil markings from from the crew and you're like wow you have this sense of honor just being anywhere near it having said that it was exhausting we didn't ask for nearly enough money we should have asked for easily another 150 000 to do it nobody made any money off of it because we just wanted the gig it was it was overwhelming first class or no class was the mantra that i had in my head it's like everything has to be perfect and of course joe had that exact same mindset because the restoration was done by the fans there was a madness for obsession that was something universal wouldn't you handed back a car that resembled the delorean time machine they would they would have been happy because they're like most people be like oh yeah that kind of looks like the thing this team would obsess about a screw that you couldn't even see but they knew was under a piece of equipment and they would try to go find that special screw just because they knew it was there that was the level of authenticity that was a battle every day that was the level of accuracy that they they went for oh that's a lot there's a lot of drama that follows that community of delorean replica people and it all played big time when you had the holy grail you know it it was like treasure of the sierra madre and people went mad personalities clash and everyone everybody in in this hobby are very motivated type a individual so you know of course we would occasionally fight like brothers and then you know you make up go get a pizza and come back and turn a wrench i think we all crawled away from the restoration for a couple of years and just needed to hibernate but absolutely worth every drop of sweat and blood your toughest moments that you're tiredest you would just look back at the car and remember what you're doing give some of the magic back to that that it gave to us we restored it to the nuclear reactor version because that's really the purest version of it felt like at that moment it came off the back of doc's truck there's so much you know that varies over the films and sometimes from scene to scene in the original back to the future say like well do we do it from this scene or the flux boxes you know like they're debates like that every single day and um you know what we came to was sort of an amalgam of the best but there is no perfect then that's why so many people are so unhappy when they get into building their cars there is no perfect the car looks the way it should look it looks like it did rolling off the back of the truck personally i probably would have let a little bit more wear show through everyone has their own reasons and points of view with this stuff and how to restore it if i was the universal studios arc fist i would have said this car stays exactly the way it stays cracks blemishes dings and all and no one touches it but that's not the way it happened the car was left outside and it was so far gone that you couldn't leave it that was it was undisplayable by that point so it had to go through a complete restoration to me the car was about the original people who made the car the original workmanship from the people that built the car you know would the a car be better if it was just cleaned up and as shell as it was i don't think so i think you have to capture the magic i'm proud to have that experience i wouldn't trade for anything but i'm so next to it that i see the work that i did and what all the other guys did and here's the thing i always like to tell people it's like you can't meet doc brown you cannot meet marty mcfly you know they're not real but the time machine is real so when you are in the presence of the real a car it's like you're meeting a character from the back of the future films unfortunately for me it's not quite the same again but that's the trade-off you get to work with your heroes it changes things i remember it was it was a silent moment when it was finally done and we all we shut the lights off and just sat there and looked at it for a while nobody said anything nobody said a word it was it was it was like you were in a church it was incredible my god what a job these guys did the peterson where the car is on display has a wonderful display of cars from the movies kind of have a little catch in your throat when you see that thing peterson is one of the largest public automotive collections in the world we're able to allow enthusiasts to see the car in person the car does not belong to the peterson but it's got a permanent home here a lot of what we tell in that gallery is that symbiotic relationship between science fiction and the automotive industry even the gadgets that we use today are inspired by science fiction it's people's imagination saying like what if and that catalyst eventually turns into something that we have in our pocket every day or something we drive on the road every day bob's creation showcased what potential cars have and we still haven't hit that future but we might someday what i've learned over the years is that we need to depend on the fans to preserve the legacy because they love the movie more than anyone talk about fans you know of the movie they're just so surprising and amazing and supportive it's a good group to be in you know we are still surprised that it's got these legs that it has become this classic and that is a such a beautiful thing it's like literally a part of people's lives and i love that one woman came up to me and said i'm a rocket scientist because i i saw the movie and i saw you know doc brown actually future fans have been amazing supporters of the foundation amazing they have events back to future related events delorean related events chairman of the seat dances uh all kinds of stuff and it's uh it's really gratifying to see that they've kind of personally such thing that they uh they now love the movie but they've taken a little bit of our own personal stories into their hearts and and just the fact they think about you and you know how to support you [Music] kids who saw the movie in 1985 they have their own kids and they say hey i want to show you this movie that i loved when i was a kid same way that my parents said you have to watch the wizard of oz it just is transcending through these different generations we were talking to a guy named tom he's told his children that it's important for you to watch certain films so that you can function in society and understand the references he said in back to the future it's certainly a movie that i have shown my children over the years it's part of our culture honestly it's not just pop culture it's a huge part of our culture and deserves to be remembered as such you know there's so many great films that add art and greatness to people's lives and that is worth perpetuating so we can keep doing it the history of our country is formed by the experiences that all the artists all the people who are creative have made and that has influenced the direction that people go the idea that the time machine aspect of the car was designed by one guy in his garage it's a truly american idea an outcast of society is the visionary that comes up with something that nobody else can come up with it's a piece of great american folklore and it's told and retold again in the history of american invention and so embodied in this car is this extra level of american ingenuity i mean it is the dream of any creative person to be involved in something that gets a life of its own you know who knew that would happen with back to the future you hope because it's kind of like pressed flowers you know there's all this stuff of the time in there the cars that are on the street what people thought was cool and it really did stand the test of time and you don't know at the time whether something's going to be good you have to leave it up to people you leave it up to time to figure that out it's been an unbelievable privilege just to see that happen just to be connected with it i mean i just worked on some props but i'm proud to be part of it you really see the genius of ron cobb and andy in that design you see the genius of mike fink calling out the parts to make it work you see the genius of those guys in kevin's shop and their patients i know what went into making it i remember those nights and days and i remember what it was like when they were shooting a location and i remember the stories that would come back and i remember the doubt and the hope that people had i remember how it felt to read that script for the first time and i'm going oh my god this is really good if i look at the car i see all of that i see the i see the corners we cut and i see the lengths we went to to make it right everything there are many feelings i had about the car how i felt about it when i was a car designer how i felt about the choice when they made the movie and then what had happened and what was going on in the press i i don't think they could have chosen better a legacy of dmc 12 is an american dream story the car that stimulated so much of the imagination even though the car was built in northern ireland with english engineering and a lot of french and english parts there was something really american about the whole story just that the nerve that he had he was such a self-made man me getting to know john later in life you know you could see the appreciation that he had from delorean owners reaching out to him and the sort of love and admiration that they had for the good things that he did because listen at the end of the day no one is perfect we all have our flaws his just happened to be a little larger than others but the things he did that were great were a little larger than what maybe others accomplished in life too that's the part that's most interesting i mean he basically made a car that's like him it looks sexy on the outside but there were a lot of deficiencies that's the word even though he didn't make it through his car did and that car needs to be nurtured and valued and seen for what it is this car could have just been a footnote in automotive history it ended up being an icon and that was because of what the bob's did by implementing it into one of the greatest sci-fi films ever made bob samaca steven spielberg and i jointly got a letter from john delorean and john just said gentlemen last week i had the occasion to see the movie back to the future i thought it was brilliant and i am delighted that you selected my vehicle for immortality something along those lines the design team went back to the future and he knew who they were he said ron cobb uh michael chaffee andy probert and kevin pike can all be part of my next design team on my next project you can't think of back to the future without thinking of delorean you can't look into delorean without thinking about back to the future it's just an amazing unification it's not like uh no offense to star trek but it's not like a starship enterprise model on your mantelpiece it's a freaking car that someone dreamed up and made real and you can turn the key you can travel in that car the millennium falcon from star wars you can't see that on the 405. but you could see a delorean you know what i mean and when you do you're instantly back there you know how you play star wars with your buddies get some stupid lightsabers you don't fight with your back to the future friends it's not a battle it's not a war you play you just want to protect all those things there's no better place for this car than the peterson this is where it belongs it has a home it's safe it's sort of about future generations and saying hey this is special you know take care of this because we're all caretakers it's going to live forever this one really works you see this one can actually time travel nobody believes that but it really does this is something that's worth doing santa sleigh is special because santa rides it the millennium falcon is special because that's the one that han solo flew around that's why we have all this stuff that's why we have car museums it's the people's interaction with cars the artifact is what it is the car itself isn't it it's the whole package i think that that's what's alluring is that it's not just a cool car it's the story that went with it it's exciting to be a part of the movie it's exciting to have been able to drive that delorean have to take me to the future and beyond and i'm glad it still takes you places too [Music] [Music] so [Music] [Music] [Music] so [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Hagerty Drivers Foundation

Views: 27,333

Keywords: delorean, 88mph, documentary, backtothefuture, time machine, dmc-12, dmc 12, cars, bttf

Id: fgOb22gz_TY

Length: 97min 36sec (5856 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 15 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/QuigleyFilms]

Here's a good write-up about what is included!

https://www.hagerty.com/media/entertainment/back-to-the-future-delorean-back-in-the-spotlight-in-star-studded-documentary/

[u/tomplace]

Another one?!