the nuclear-powered thing...
...required them to drive it out
onto a nuclear testsite in New Mexico.
And that was the climax of the movie,
and itstayed that way...
...until budgetproblems
made itimpossible for us to do that.
The thing with the nuclear testsite....
We actually wentinto production
expecting to design that...
...and the idea was in all the early drafts
of the screenplay.
The only place they were able...
...to get enough energy was...
...they had to bring the time machine
to the Nevada nuclear testsite...
...in the '50s, where they set up
all those little villages and towns...
...to blow up with nuclear bombs.
And Marty and the Doc sneak onto that...
...and the big countdown
was to the nuclear blast.
When Marty went back in time,
he arrived at ground zero...
...and there was a bunch of tourists there,
taking his picture and stuff.
We were told that we had to cut
$2 million out of the budget.
And that's one of the things
where there's method to the madness.
Because the realization that we weren't going
to be able to go and move the company...
...to Nevada or to Arizona
orsomeplace and shoot.
We were going to have to do the whole thing
at the studio, to do it for the price.
Butit turned out
thatit became a much betterscene.
It became a much betterscene because...
...there was no way to involve the Doc,
actually, if I remember right.
It wasjust over the walkie-talkies...
...where Doc wasjust there,
on a side of a mountain, watching all this stuff.
And of course,
just tying everything into the town...
...and keeping it all local in the town,
just made it all absolutely better.
And it's one of those things where necessity
becomes the mother ofinvention.
"You gotta cut thatscene out. "
Bob and I spent a weekend...
...walking around the back lot at Universal
trying to figure out:
"If this is the only environment we have
thatisn't gonna cost us any money...
"... that we can completely control,
exactly what are we gonna do?"
We managed to cook up
the clock towersequence.
One of the most memorable characters
in the movie is, of course, Doc Brown.
I wasjust wondering
ifyou had any kind ofinspirations...
...or any kind ofinfluences...
...that helped you create thatparticular character.
Christopher Lloyd always said
that he made the character Doc Brown...
...a combination ofAlbert Einstein
and the conductor Leopold Stokowski.
So all those big, broad gestures
that he's always doing....
Chris is a big classical music aficionado.
So that's what he had in his mind,
a big shock of hairlike Stokowski.
Ifyou don't remember who Stokowski is,
just watch the beginning of Fantasia.
That's Leopold Stokowski.
In the early drafts of the screenplay,
the reason we....
We always wrote him as Professor Brown.
That had a good ring to it.
You know, he was a professor.
We never wrote him as a Doc.
And Sid Sheinberg, the head of the studio,
insisted that we change his title...
...from professor,
because he thoughtitjustsounded too corny.
There's those famous Sid Sheinberg stories
which we can tell you.
He had three notes
when Steven gave him the screenplay to read.
One was that we couldn't call
the Doc "Professor. "
The second one was,
in the original draft of the screenplay...
...he had a chimp as a mascot,
instead of the dog...
...and Sid said,
"You have to get rid of the chimp...
"... because no one is gonna see a movie
with a chimp in it. "
We actually had this meeting with him.
It was hysterical.
He said, "I've done the research.
"No movie with a chimpanzee in it
has ever made a profit. "
I said, "Well," because in the '80s,
"there were these two Clint Eastwood movies...
"... Every Which Way But Loose
and Any Which Way You Can.
"So, what about those movies, Sid?"
And he said,
"That was an orangutan in those movies. "
And the third one was, he hated the title.
But we stuck to our guns on that one.
There was a fourth one, which