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

There are plenty of movie cars, but it's hard to imagine one that's more recognizable than the Delorean from Back to the Future, the most fantastic and flashy four-wheeled

time

machine

in movie hi

story

. 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 beauti

full

y, almost like a Parisian gourmet meal or something, but of course the car was the main course. 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 cheering his success. Ironically, it is now during Delorean's nightmare that his dream can finally come true. The mystique around the Delorean brand only makes people want to know more about Delorean. synonymous with success, he was this handsome, rich and successful man, married to the most popular supermodel at the time, he was the epitome of what every man wanted to be and who every girl wanted to be with, he knew what people wanted and he was a marketing genius. pure courage, pure chutzpah, that guy had former general motors executive john

delorean

had mocked the big automakers by saying he would show the industry how to build cars, while many commercials were presenting at the time the most anticipated new car of the century and I think it was the car that stimulated a lot of the imagination, so it's woven into the fabric of our society, like they said in the movie Back to the Future, where we're going, we don't need roads, you've got the cinematic aspect. creative aspect you have the

story

of the car you have the man himself john

delorean

all of that comes together into this big thing it's almost like a nostalgic connection with all these characters you know the delorean time machine is part and parcel of the fabric of pop culture i have to say that that's not the real star of the movie, 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 I can't put a price on it.

I must have signed half a million of these. Our memories take us back in time and our hopes, dreams and imagination take us forward. You'd be hard-pressed to find another car that can do that when this baby hits 88 miles per hour you'll see something serious when I was a little kid in elementary school I used to tell people when I'm older that I'm going to go to California and work for Walt Disney Comics and science fiction were a great influence in warping my brain. The Twilight Zone was my favorite TV show and of course watching the time machine really blew my mind.

Thousands of centuries had passed, man finally learned to control both the elements and himself. stop and discover that he was always writing science fiction stories and I even made my own comic when I was in high school it was called Green Vomit and it was about a superhero who had the superpower of being able to vomit at will on anyone. about bad boys and his archenemy was a super brat who could do the same with his nose. California was the place to be because Hollywood was there and I transferred to 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 college students in what was largely a graduate department We decided we should team up and figure out how to get into the film business We were more interested in Dirty Harry and James Bond and the grad students were more interested in francois truffaut and jean-luc gadot we want to do things larger than life and maybe we can blow up some things we want to entertain people I mean this is what excited us when we were going al movies, so we wanted to make the kind of movies we wanted to see, so we came up with this very rudimentary idea called professor brown visits the future, that's it, we had the idea that there would be this kind of crazy professor who invents the time travel, but we could never really figure out how there was going to be a story that would keep the audience interested, so every once in a while we would go back to that and never get anywhere, cut to August 1980, Bobs, Mike and I . i made a movie in columbia pictures called used cars i went to st louis my hometown to promote it the city boy makes a good story i stay with my parents when i found my dad's high school yearbook i saw this it looks interesting and it's cool to see what my high school was like in 1940 and I'm flipping through it and I found out that my dad was the president of his class, so I'm looking at this picture of my dad and I'm thinking about the president of my graduating class. class, who was this kid with school spirit rah-rah I couldn't stand it and I thought, gee, was that the kind of kid my dad was, if I had gone to high school with my dad, would I have even been friends with him? bingo boy That's when lightning hit me in the head and I said, "There's that time travel movie we always wanted to make." That's the hook.

A boy goes back in time and ends up in high school with his father. We immediately went to Bob's medical department and got rolling with this thing. We put together two drafts of Back to the Future at Columbia Pictures and Columbia decided they didn't want to make the movies. It was too pretty and too sweet. They wanted stripes. They wanted porky, they wanted something more bold. We took this project to everyone in Hollywood over and over again, sometimes to the tune of over 40 rejections, so finally what comes back to the future is Bob Zemeckis making a hit movie called Romance with Stone, everyone and their uncle want to do business with Bob Zemackis and the movie Bob wants to make more than anything is Back to the Future.

Now let's go back a couple of years that Steven Spielberg had read into the future. We gave it to Stephen. Because we had been in the business with Stephen, we made our first three movies with Stephen, so now Bob Smacks has this hit movie Romancing Stone and he says I don't want to be in the business with any of my new fair-weather friends. I wanted to do business with someone who always believed in this project, and coincidentally, Stephen was founding Amblin Entertainment at Universal, so Back to the Future became Amblin Entertainment's first project. Now the second draft of the script was not the movie we really wanted.

We ended up making, we made a lot of changes, which was to be expected, one of which was that the time machine in the first two drafts was a time chamber built from a refrigerator, obviously, one of the questions you have in a time travel movie is How does someone travel through time? You know, you can do it if you get hit on the head, you can do it by making a wish, that's what I would like to do with the year I just lived, rewrite it, play it again, but we. We grew up in the 50s and 60s with the shadow of Sputnik and we believed that to make the audience believe in time travel there had to be a physical time machine which was taken for granted at some point in the writing of this next draft .

Bob was putting on his director's hat instead of just his writer's hand, walked into the office and said, hey, Bob wouldn't have been smart enough to have built the time machine into a car so it would be mobile, I said. which yes, that makes a lot of sense if you were to actually build a time machine, it became clear that it would be silly not to make it mobile and carry it with you so you could give back, and then he came up with the most brilliant idea. idea and if that car was a Delorean I said oh yeah oh yeah well this happened to be in August of 1984 and john delorean was on trial it was kind 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 shiny doors, but it also gave the car this great mystique, so I mean, before you can have a machine of the delorean time back to the future, you must have it.

A Delorean to begin with, most of us know very little about how John Delorean rose to power and became as infamous a public figure as he is today. John came to GM in the late '50s and early '60s, one of the things he did early on was take the pulse of society at that time he would go to woodward street in detroit there and watch the hot rodders testing cars and doing all these fun things between him and bill collins, another engineer there, they decided to launch a big engine, a smaller frame car and they called it gto, they backdoored it into the GM world and it became a great success.

GM didn't really realize they were a little mad at first, but it had such blockbuster sales that it really set the tone for the kinds of things John could do there, the GTO and other high performance muscle cars, they made John delorean into an auto industry star in the mid-1960s, several years later he is vice president of general motors and on track to be the next president if he plays his cards right, which to GM's detriment really wasn't the place where I was going to excel because at that time I was more of a paper pusher on the 14th floor and less on the ground doing the engineering and the type of ideas with the people in these In other divisions you reach a point where you already You can't be an engineer, if you want to get promoted you have to be something else and you become a so-called manager, so it was really an intense competitive game and you were like, the quarterback of a team, well, all of a sudden, when you become executive of a group, it was like owning the stadium and suddenly you are renting the facility, but you don't really have much say over what happens in it. and a funny thing happens to you in any organization when little by little you reach the top, the first thing you realize is that you are surrounded by a bunch of parasites and, yeah, man, it doesn't take much for that to turn you into an egomaniac. , you can see his success as a businessman within GM and his becoming this kind of young, sexy playboy character around the same time he's getting a little plastic surgery to get the chin implant he has and the side burns he's dealing with. dresses. the Italian suits that GM bosses aren't too crazy about, but that definitely set him apart in the mainstream world.

He stayed in shape. He loved having the Hollywood lifestyle. He liked to just be known for who he was. John spent a lot of time in California. with many of his Hollywood friends for inspiration from things you would know, offering cars to various actors to drive or use in productions, Jam would get upset about this, but they wouldn't realize that that was actually what it was. driving sales he wasn't just a showman he was actually a brilliant engineer he has two or three dozen patents to his name the pontiac gto is notable for the fact that it set the course for the muscle car era it achieved sales that they had never had before.

He had been defeated before and he did it by talking to his fellow engineers, the people on the lines that made the cars, so he was a real person. I think he felt like he was being restricted from what he could do and I think he had bigger dreams. He definitely had an eye on what the public wanted, he showed it by working at GM and now GM wouldn't let him do the other things he wanted to do. His resignation was requested by General Motors. It is so unusual for a man that he intends to resign where Was it a resignation or was he actually asked to leave?

No. I left. I attended my resignation almost immediately after I was promoted and given a tremendous bonus. I rose from head of Chevrolet to executive of the North American auto and truck operations group and I did that for about a month, spending every minute sitting in a committee meeting listening to the same people say the same things and I said: I just don't I can imagine doing this for 18 more years. I can't, I couldn't survive. There is a lot of controversy about whether he was fired and fired from GM or if he resigned of his own volition to set the record straight, he was pushed out, but he really set the course for bigger and better things that everyone knows him for. .

It's the DMC-12 from the time John was kicked out of GM, that was in 1973. He spends a year raising capital to figure out ways to design his own sports car, so John was trying to do something which was make a production car. en masse, not a special car because other people make special cars like ferraris and other types of low number cars, but making one that was hope

full

y going to compete with the big three was something unthinkable, but john had high aspirations and was prepared to do it here's a man who did it working for one of the largest automakers in the world and left to not only build a different kind of car but a different kind of company.

He wanted to make a relatively inexpensive sports car that would last for years and the company he wanted to be theethical automobiles, brings in Bill Collins, one of the other GM engineers with whom he had designed the GTO, and between the two of them they decide to go. to make this car, giorgito giugiaro in italy, one of the most famous italian designers at the time will write it giorgietto, what a beautiful name for a talented guy, he is most famous for many of his mid 80's wedge designs, the bmw m1, they delorean the lotus esprit and the only parameters they established were the fact that it had to have stainless steel leather doors and a mid-engine, those were the parameters gigaro pins this shape for the car that is super super clean, looks sporty and lively, fast, stylish and attractive, the windshield is relaxed, it's true, but the side of the body slopes up, we call it camber at home, and that keeps the car from looking square and then when you go down to the side bottom of the windows, there is this beautiful thing. shape as the body comes back and starts to curve down there, the rear barely tapers, it just cuts off, kind of a square front, it's not a tiny front, it looked futuristic with the shiny doors, which is actually a beautiful design , most people confuse with them.

They think it takes a lot of space, but in reality it requires less space to open a winged door than a conventional door. The door itself, as you can see, measures 14 inches at its widest point. It's a little misleading, 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 a normal car if you have someone very close to you come back with this amazing design and they make the first prototype proto one made in 1975 and then in 1976 , was when they started raising money by using the car as a sort of 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 a sexy car. It had excellent fuel. economy, but it was also very sporty, the auto industry in the '70s, when John left GM, was pretty stagnant, most automakers, other than those that came from Japan, didn't necessarily come up with the most exciting things on the roads. that anyone could think of or even try. but thinking about making your own mass produced car at that time was crazy. The Delorean's gullwing doors rise effortlessly and invite you inside.

The elegant stainless steel Delorean beautifully designed for long life. The Delorean is one of the most anticipated cars in automotive history. delorean lives the dream today it's a brave kind of design language for a car brave decision to make it stainless steel brave to make it brave to make a sports car with an engine in the back no matter what Porsche says you know when I was In school, as a car designer, everyone talked about it, we all looked at that and said this guy is an individual and whether or not you thought his choices would sell, you knew he was just chasing a dream and so everyone admired that. he wanted to see it succeed john delorean designed that car with a lot of features that people never expected to see in a sports car right, the original prototype was supposed to have airbags anti-lock brakes all these revolutionary things that none of the cars had in those days, so that was the beginning of what I was hoping to achieve with the car, now what ended up being produced was a different car than the prototype was sold in, but they got it out, started raising the financing and started considering various says that, with luckily, the intention was to make it big in the US, there were no real states offering the kinds of tax breaks and incentives that would make it viable to launch this auto division, and suddenly, in the late '70s, you get a An agreement was reached with Northern Ireland and the United Kingdom to build the car in war-torn Belfast.

The role of the army in Northern Ireland is to keep peace between Catholics and Protestants. Ambushes, sectarian murders, fierce shootouts across the border. You have to understand it. Northern Ireland in the late 70's is just a war zone 40 percent unemployment based on all the war that was going on there between the Protestants and the Catholics their interest was to try to find companies to come there so they could get people employed, more people employed, probably fewer people. In the streets fighting, all of a sudden they see this white knight in a six foot four inch silver haired John Delorean with this magic car who said within two and a half years I can produce 3,000 jobs and then within a few years further. which probably another 3,000 jobs because at the end of the day the point was not just to have the sports car, there would be other cars.

He was trying to build a real Delorean engine company, not just a one-off, they basically gave him everything. he wants them to reach an agreement in less than three weeks, which is incredible. They offered him something like point blank range. Here is 150 million dollars. Here is a piece of land. Please come here and build your car, and they didn't really do much research. and they really checked it out long before they did it. You know they just wanted a major car company in their country. They built this factory in a record time of two and a half years in a brand new, state-of-the-art factory.

John signed that agreement with Northern Ireland. He was already in trouble. For some reasons, they did not have a production car at that time. They had a prototype and the prototypes look beautiful on the outside and to the touch, but in terms of capacity. To take it to a track or give it to 10,000 people, a lot more engineering was needed for the car. It sounds like you have a lot of unanswered questions for a car that's about to go into production. no, no, we're talking about having quite a few months here, you've got to figure out some of that stuff, it was kind of an ocean moment where okay, I've been talking about building this car for all these years, now I really have to go away To do it they brought in Lotus and a guy called Colin Chapman who was also in the UK to help them produce the car and in doing so the innards of the car completely changed.

There is no airbag, no anti-lock brakes, it is no longer a mid-engined car, but a rear-engined car that completely changes the car from being a true sports car and more of a type of touring car, obviously the engine changed, it is a sports car, it looks like it should go fast, but they used a pretty anemic engine, the reason what ended up happening was that even back then there were so many rules and laws in terms of getting US transportation approvals. To make their cars street legal they basically used a peugeot renault vevo engine that had already been approved for the US market and was in other cars with the anticipation that they would be turbocharging that engine within the next one or two Years after the car's release, which would have really given it the kind of performance numbers it deserved, the one thing John won't let them touch is the stainless steel. leather and the gullwing doors because he is a marketer and he knew that sexiness was going to sell the car, he knew he wanted it to be stainless steel, he was going to offer a lifetime warranty on the body of course, I think many accountants talked He got it out of that, but he wanted something that would last a long time and was willing to put a warranty on it and looking at all the Deloreans today, he would have been fine with doing a lifetime warranty on the body panel.

I have friends. who have 500,000 miles on their cars and the car looks fresh from the showroom, I mean stainless steel you can clean it with a polish pad and windex and it looks beautiful so I think that's an important testament to the design of the car they wanted. do it in a way that was 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 lightweight. but it was such a new technology that they were several years away from being able to actually implement it in a production car, so they switched to the technique itself, which is the technique that Lotus uses to make their cars, which was also like stamping. foam, a kind of plastic material that the car was made of and the color that was given to it in the case of the Delorean, they basically used that type of casing under the body and then they just put the stainless steel on the outside to dress it up.

They did something that no other automaker had done at that time, they were building the factory in conjunction with the engineering of the automobile in conjunction with the design of the parts for the car, all to be able to meet this two and a half year deadline that they had promised the manufacturer. British government that they would be up and running with jobs what they achieved was an incredible feat, everything is in place, they are hiring the best people, they really brought in the dream team of an international team to produce and manufacture the car, but there are so many elements which was dedicated to manufacturing and selling a car of this nature and at the volume it wanted to sell, which was 30 to 40,000 cars a year at the end of 1980, the first cars began to be produced and the first one went on sale in January 1981. and was Hoping there would be basically 30 or 40,000 pre-sales in the door once they started going well, the recession of the early '80s hit terrible weather in 1981, when the car debuted, the entire Midwest was hit by severe snow storms that could not.

I couldn't get the cars to the dealers like they promised, so we talked about how half of us couldn't get these cars and he was really depending on those sales to keep the car company in business. Johnny Carson picks up his car. You know, there's a lot of advertising. Sammy Davis Jr has his car and a couple thousand cars are sold, but you start hearing these reports that you know Johnny Carson's car broke down on the highway because the alternator broke or people get locked in their cars. because the lock solenoids are not working properly. Fit and finish was not good on the first Deloreans to come off the line, with that in mind, you know that every Delorean was built in Ireland, shipped here to the US, which went to one of two manufacturing centers. quality control and spent countless hours fixing. these cars coming that weren't right needed a tune up, you know, later in '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 problems with cars that let you know the first releases.

They needed time to resolve some of these issues and they did, but there's always that first impression and unfortunately for some buyers that had a big impact and they cancel their pre-order or cancel the pre-order because of how bad the economy was. at that time and then it was really a search to try to find the right buyer who had expendable income between the recession and high inflation and interest rates were where they were, it just set the tone pretty badly at that time that uh John started to talk about this car and I wanted to do it, I wanted to make it accessible to the general public, so it was supposed to cost twelve thousand dollars, it was priced at twenty-six to twenty-eight thousand dollars in 1982, that's 12,13,000 more than what it cost.

The original price was supposed to be set when people put down deposits on the car, so it's kind of a perfect storm or rocky start for the Delorean motor company. John Delorean, the charismatic former vice president of General Motors, is betting his future on the success of this luxury sports car, the DMC-12, now the problem was that he was working on borrowed time, he had to start selling cars immediately because his deal with the UK was that he had to keep getting jobs and he had to pay back some of the money they were giving him and then a combination of events happens and ultimately he gets stuck in this corner where he needs money to keep the company in business. functioning now that he was part of that problem.

John hoped to take the company public. and in doing so, he was trying to make the figures look large and, therefore, he was increasing production in a period when he should have reduced production to maintain a certain reserve in the bank building for inventory. . It is not good sensible business practice in the automotive sector. Business and Delorean did exactly that last fall, the public option didn't happen for various other reasons, and suddenly you were out of money and ports full of cars. I think that's where the hemorrhaging of the company's boss began. goes into receivership at the beginning of 1982 and from that moment on it is a race against time to try to appease the British government to show them a way forward withother investors putting money into this company, people are starting to get a little tired based on some of the The first cars with quality control, the Delorean name is being tarnished a little in the press, it's not as shiny as it used to be, so that trying to get investments right now from traditional banks, financiers and hedge funds has proven to be difficult and that's where he eventually gets trapped, one of John's greatest assets, but also deficiency was the idea that he could continue to take risks and not get hit at the end for taking one of these risks, the last risk he took, which was a very dangerous game.

The cat and mouse story was this undercover operation where he got involved with cocaine and the US government. It's a story of big business, big pressure, money and cocaine crime. It's the story of how and why the FBI nabbed automaker john z delorean and It became a little clearer today that the US attorney's office here in Los Angeles engineered the scheme that brought John Delorean together with William Hetrick, described by authorities as one of the largest cocaine traffickers in California. His quasi-neighbor called him one day out of the blue, who he was. I haven't talked to a guy named Hoffman in a few years, and he says, Hey, I heard you're in trouble.

I have some investors who would like to invest in your company. Yes, they are Colombians. They are going to sell drugs to clean up the money. through the company he said: listen, I will do any kind of shady deal as long as the money comes from a reputable bank. Now this is where the government gets involved. Hoffman was a paid informant for the US government. He was working with his own business. and made a deal with the government to rat out other drug traffickers. Now the problem here is that John Delorean wasn't in the drug business, he was a desperate guy trying to save his company and they brought him into this, say what you want. morally versus legally, he wasn't a drug dealer, but regardless, he gets caught up in this and the government does everything they can to get their big buck because at the time all this was going on, Reagan was new in office and He was having a big initiative on the war on drugs.

The FBI's mandate was that we need a big bust and all of a sudden John Delorean falls into their laps and they're off to the races. The first part of the plan is to get John to give us two million dollars to invest in the drugs and that's how We'll catch them, well, John didn't have two million dollars, so the government comes back and says, well, can you give us a guarantee? in the form of two million dollars, then John, in his typically sly way, gives them a guarantee, but it's basically a false guarantee. it's the stocks and vin numbers of cars that the government doesn't even get the titles for so they take this and they run with it and their entire case is built around this infamous FBI tape on October 19th in a room of hotel. in los angeles they set up john delorean they put a suitcase full of cocaine in front of him and he called it better than gold gold a few minutes later the fbi arrived and arrested john delorean fred graham cbs news los angeles you see john toasting with champagne saying that, you know, the drugs in front of him are as good as gold and then they arrest him.

His thought process was: a jury of 12 will never let this guy go when they see this tape. The trick question of whether john delorean was illegally tricked by federal agents into committing a crime is a strategy that delorean's new lawyer will have to confront howard weitzman, the incredible lawyer, completely demolished the prosecution's case and john delorean was found not guilty, a cheer was heard as john delorean left court this afternoon, a free man was acquitted of all charges of cocaine conspiracy before, as the clerk read the verdict, count one, not guilty, count two, no guilty, Delorean buried his face in his hands and said he praised the lord, his lawyer said the 12 jurors sent a message to the government that their conduct in this case was wrong but john delorean is still in trouble the authorities of britain and the united states want to know what he has done with millions of dollars that were to be used for his ill-fated car factory in northern ireland this week's favorable ruling on drug charges may be just the beginning of mr delorean's legal wrangling although he was found not guilty dmc of course was closed by then in october 1982 john's arrested and that was the last straw for margaret thatcher and the british government to put the ax on dmc all the employees are fired the last car leaves the assembly line in November December 1982 and that was unfortunately the end of the Delorean motor company John's testing really took over his life at that time and the drug testing is in 1984.

It was a multi-year affair and his name was tarnished and I had no ability to re-enter the workplace in any meaningful way, unfortunately, aside from the fact that I have aged about 600 years in the last two and that the life of a hard-working industrialist has been tattered and torn I don't know, would you buy me a used car? Carr was going to be relegated to the scrap heap of automotive history, did anyone know when everyone agreed the car was going to become a time machine the next day. They delivered three used Deloreans to my parking lot.

They made exactly the right decision. Bob Gale made a lot of great decisions in that movie. We finally finished the third draft where we had it and universal. We won't make the movie unless we cut a million dollars from the budget, so Bob and I struggled with how we're going to cut a million dollars from the budget. Well, the time machine was always nuclear powered, whether it was a refrigerator or a Delorean. and the climax of the movie took place at a nuclear test site, so this would involve going to the desert to build one of these little towns that would be blown up to do these tests, so we said, well, this is the most expensive thing in the world. . the script for this sequence maybe there is a way we can figure out how to do this in the back lot of universal where we were already going to film Bob and I walked through the town square, brainstormed and came up with this idea about taking advantage of the rays.

Instead of harnessing a nuclear bomb, sometimes it turns out that having some kind of limit on your creativity makes you even more creative because the clock tower sequence was so much better than the nuclear test site sequence could have been now. Since we were able to deliver a budget that fit Universal's parameters and we had the green light, we were able to start hiring more people. Bobs and Mike hired two of the best people he got from his romance with Stone. The cinematographer Dean Cundy, the fabulous cinematographer and Alan Silvestri, and there's a reason why Alan has I've done all of Bob's movies since then because he's so good now that we were finally making the universal movie we hired a company of product placement to make deals to put certain products in the movie and the production would get some money for some of the products were selected by Us, for example, you see Pepsi in the movie but you don't see Coca-Cola, because the logo Pepsi's logo changed from 1955 to 1985 and was a way to help define the period, while the Coca-Cola logo remains the same to this day, but One day, the product placement guy comes to my office. and he says, Hi Bob, if you trade in the Delorean for a Ford Mustang, Ford Motor Company will give the company 75,000.

I said Richard Doc Brown doesn't drive a Mustang. Get out of here. The first production's illustrator, Andrew Prober, did a lot of storyboarding for many sequences. My initial two projects were Battlestar Galactica and Star Trek and I finally ended up getting a job and back to the future, even though it wasn't his job to design the Delorean, he couldn't help. He came up with a lot of interesting designs himself, but what was missing in what he was doing was that they were all very skilled, very polished. We had the idea that Doc Brown built this thing in his garage and it had to look earthy, it had to look.

Dangerous Bob and I met Ron Cobb while John Millius was making a movie called Conan. He had also done some designs for other sci-fi films that we talked about working together on, so this was an opportunity to really make that happen. He was a little discouraged. that he was the one who was going to design the car instead of me, but he wouldn't let anyone else do it besides ron. Ron was quite expensive, we were only able to hire him for a week or two, but in that week or two, Ron was on board, he really focused on it, it was a fun thing that Spielberg asked me to do one day, how would you turn a Delorean into a time machine?, he practically left it to me and I just had to do it.

They made up some three view drawings and Zircon and Gail came up with the idea of ​​using a Delorean because of the stainless steel body and thought it would be an interesting idea that because it's stainless steel it could become 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 visible. I just thought that anything I made had to be quite visible, so I wanted to make those coils that were surrounded. It's like I created a field, I mean obviously no one knows exactly how time travel happens, but I just wanted to create a bunch of believable things that would seem to put the car in a certain state or something.

He was asking questions and thinking about the design. It is wise to say that if the Delorean is nuclear powered, where is the nuclear reactor? has 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 this stuff, Ron said, there has to be a logic for this I also thought it should look a little homemade because supposedly Dr. .Brown was making it in his lab at home and he would be using parts from Radio Shack or something, so I made my version to make it look like what it was. all types of screwing and additions to delorean.

I'm always pretty good at adding that stuff, you know, that kind of texture, just something real and complex, I mean, a flexible capacitor never occurred to me, although I tried this, I tried that. I tried a lot of designs for myself and when I finished the project they still hadn't figured out what it was supposed to look like, the Delorean wouldn't be what it is without his creative vision and input, so then we couldn't. afford to pay more to ron we went back to andy we said okay andy develops this a little more for us, he had his reactor in the back on the side and then he had a single exhaust port for that and the producers thought that maybe the reactor back in the middle would have been better with another exhaust port.

I felt like the flow bands around the car could have been arranged better to encompass more of the car in that field, so I just moved them around a little bit, that was it and they basically became the working drawings and then we had to say, well, 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 will be some wiggle room, some creative input from 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 is 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 that Mike was involved in designing the vehicle in Blade Runner, so we brought in Mike Fink. I got designs from police for the outside of the door and they said we just want you to guard the door and make sure it moves. Going forward and building it right, oh, I think things, so I said, "Okay, Mike Fink had a very special job that went back and forth between Film Tricks Kevin's store in North Hollywood and the studio at that time had started my company Film Tricks incorporated in the north." Stephen from Hollywood wanted to make sure of the secret and says build it there, don't let anyone take pictures of it and they barely decided on the Deloreans in the store they walked into, just like they came out of time, how many of them?

These were going to have a thing with production cars, they always break down, so we knew we had to have at least two. We decided to buy three Deloreans. One was going for around $18,000, $15,000 and $12,000 respectively due to its condition and we got to work. We immediately put them in the shop and started taking them apart and thinking about what we were going to do for the designs and we got sketches, but they didn't make them, they looked at a box of parts and numbered them. making plans, they were just some concept sketches, we had an idea of ​​how busy he was, look at all the lights they put in these images and all the pieces and oh my God, Mike Fink had this job, this incredible job of interpreting thesketches, finding things that would look like this and they wouldn't have to build from scratch.

You know, I'd sit in the car with Kevin and the guys might say, Okay, go here, this goes there, this goes here, but then something else came along. Then Mike said I can't do your movie, but I know this guy you should meet and I brought him to my cafe and they met Mike and Mike and we spent like a week together. He wanted an assistant for a bit before returning to the future. My first job in television was making a self-driving car and the show was called Knight Rider Knight Rider, a grim flight into the dangerous world of a man who doesn't 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 things because I need someone who knows how things should look, who knows how things are built and who can draw, so we spent a day together and he said, you know I have another show to do. If you want my work, you can keep my work, but you'll have to be nice to the art department, so that's what got me there. I'm telling you, I'm telling you, the guy is brilliant, he'll be fine.

It was, it could be a brilliant take, 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 going. I didn't even hear about the movie, so I walked into the shop and there was a Delorean sitting there and it had the rear hatch removed and the rear deck removed and they were welding aluminum and they had an idea of ​​what they wanted the interior to be like and they were starting to put things in. in the car. started, was rolling, Mike Chaffey came in and was able to figure out what the best interpretation of the drawings would be, in addition to our 20 man crew, we had a wonderful forum at Dave Wishneck, we had electronic engineer Bill Klinger and they helped interpret what Mike thought that should go in the car.

Mike didn't put anything in the car, that was our job and we advised him well that if you put that in there it will cause a consequence with this here and this won't fit and how can we do it? that and together they helped build what is the Delorean time machine that we started building, fabricating and creating parts that looked like what was in the sketches or that would convey the idea that it had to be very, very busy, that it was a nuclear reactor, so we had To have that kind of look and mechanics with that big center in the back where they put the plutonium, we figured out how to make a latch that would open and close, but the idea of ​​what we were going to do so we did it . these cylinders and then he made a little twist on the bottom so he could open it, there was a little bayonet on the patch for the plutonium and it really worked with little pins that would hook into these little slots very visually, drop that red tube in and everyone thinks uh oh, it's done and we figured out how to do it with just a lathe, a metal cutting saw and some welding instead of having to machine the parts that you know completely with a milling machine or something like that because it should look like doc. brown put it together bob gale came to the store and said this is getting too clean you need to make this more homemade. doc brown did this in his lab, we went over the welds and made them a little thicker and fatter and exposed more homemade elements and everywhere we could, we really tiptoed around any type of fabrication job, we tried to keep construction from scratch to a minimum because it takes a long time, but the guys were there. able to do anything mainly was put garbage in the car type of work wait a minute what are you doing doctor?

I need mr fusion fuel that's 100 irritations they asked me if I could design a mr fusion I knew part of it should look like something has to do with coffee because mr coffee that's why I used that small crop coffee grinder to make mr fusion. The practical question was where are we going to get these parts and so I think there is a place in North Hollywood where everyone goes to buy old airplanes. scientific parts apex surplus parts electronics you could find anything you wanted there mike came out and just said this would look cool this would look cool and he started picking out this and this and this and this it really was like an expedition sometimes to go to apex they have lots and lots of stuff they say oh I need a little bit of this and some of that and steve would say what are you guys building, what are you building because, as you know, there's all these crazy things that we would buy, there's a lot There are little Easter eggs that You will recognize if you are a car enthusiast, like the wheel cover of the Dodge Palera.

Things you'll recognize if you've worked on a turbine engine. There is a large switch that has a battery post cleaner as a handle. but why does dr. Brown didn't use it well? Half the crap I picked out was stuff 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 that. a red flag for people watching the movie like, oh, that's so dumb, look it should all seem a little believable. You know, I was hoping to find a meter for the plutonium chamber and I found 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 brown doc label dymo label underneath it? This is a plutonium chamber. You know, making a car like the Delorean is a tricky thing because it's supposed to look ridiculous. There is this teacher. guy and everything he's invented has been a failure part of the movie is just that setup like failure after failure the brain wave analyzer all this crazy stuff he does so you're prepared for this not to work and he has to look like a nut together, but it has to look like a nutcase who really knew how to build things, put it together well so that it's a delicate line, it has to look silly enough for you to say, oh, come on, and it has to look believable enough for you to say yes. , May be.

It really had a bit of depth to it, you could look down through the layers and still see the car, so it's a great case of design work for the movies, this little ring of nozzles here is from a turbine engine. gas that they use to power things like helicopters. These are small heat sinks. They are placed in a large aluminum tube in which there is a Dodge Polaro wheel cover. These ducts were made at Kevin Pike's movie trick shop and painted by reserve painter Lyle Dickey. I think they are air. oil separators on a dry sump aircraft engine, you have to allow some of the oil to settle and the air to settle out of the oil so you don't pump air bubbles through the thing and there's kind of a fantastic combination of oil hoses. freestyle on Here the idea is that you have to cool a nuclear reactor and that will involve a lot of heat transfer to get big exhausts for the heat.

I grouped things into three because I had this vague idea that if we suggest that, Doc Brown is using three-phase power for this. We could take some people. Mike Fink had already designed these things and Kevin's guys were building them. When I first came into the program, the idea is that you have a lot of big connectors. power flows through here to generate a powerful field and these connectors here are actually for what they call oh look, Michael demonstrated it they're for what they call a spider box these are the type of connections that you see on the set of a movie when you're using big, powerful lights.

This you also know is before GPS, so the doctor, being the careful guy that he is, puts a little compass in there and, out of concern for the passenger, also has this warning about shielding your eyes from light, which i love it originally ron cobb had drawn this with a lot of stuff between the driver and the passenger and andy did some sketches where he started to open that up because if you have like a choker shot one person can get away with it but if you want two shots or you want to shoot through the side of the car like this, you absolutely have to have an open path here so the camera can see through when there are so many people trying. to make something and where it goes, you are on top of each other, not only can you put two people inside and think about working upside down and overhead and backwards behind you, they were tight spaces, one of the surprises we had was how small the Delorean really was.

It was so small that we couldn't fit a Panaflex camera in there, so one of those three Deloreans had to literally be cut into pieces so we could put a camera in there to take the shots through the windshield. first movie there are three cars car a the hero car that has all the bells and whistles at full speed car b we put everything on the outside they are only going to use it for driving shots they are going to use it for stunts We will never see the inside of the car that It lasted until the second day of filming.

Can you put everything in car a in car b? We got polaroids of the set, still man, and we tried to remember exactly what we did, okay, we can replicate. We can counter that car b had a little less detail, but it's actually as good as car a for the most part and car b was set up for special stunts, it had fire for when the cars picked up speed. that would light up the wheels of car c, they cut that car out and that car was used in all three movies so they could put the camera in the car and everything, car c was the process car, we don't need any of this stuff we don't need any of that, but we do need the interiors, we need to see the whole board, everything that's there, but it was on the stage, it was on the rockers, it was in front of the back screen, but it was basically something.

It could be towed and was like half a Delorean. The other surprise we had was when we looked inside the Delorean. The speedometer only reached 85 miles per hour. No car made in the '80s had a speedometer that went over 85 miles per hour. time, so we created a new template and put it there. Anyone who goes and looks inside a real Delorean will see that the speedometer only goes up to 85. We started filming in November 1984. The accent ran there from October until the end. Until Christmas and we had almost all the cars ready to film around the New Year's horn in January and then we were off to the races.

We had one of the best teams of specialists I have ever worked with. Walter Scott, he and his team came over, they gave it a good look, it's a little strange at the front, it bites and the shock absorbers were of course very small pancakes, the car was underpowered, the car had a Volvo six engine cylinders, the weight of the car was extraordinary, everyone always complained. on the Delorean for one reason or another the visibility in it wasn't very good the actors were hitting their heads on the door all the time the special effects didn't always work the way we thought they were going to work there were times when it rained It came up and the way That we took out the rear window meant that the water could come down and hit the battery and all of a sudden the battery died.

The vents at the rear actually encapsulated the trunk deck by hugging that valance at the back. about the lights that every time you had to get to the engine you had to take them all 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 group of mechanics from the engine department truckers. They had a full truck with all the parts for that car that they would need if they had to replace it. There was always some problem.

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 a little battery and boom, they light up now we had to have all these cables 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 in the car, so they ran on 9000 volts for the neon tubes, so like on a humid morning, it was really exciting to be around that car. , creaking and whirring, you know, I remember the The first time I saw the Delorean time machine was in the parking lot of the Puente Hills shopping center and they took it out.

I started watching the movie. I was a little outside the back of the truck and I couldn't believe I was seeing you. It was amazing, it was such a bold, crazy idea and it worked so beautifully, and what was really fun was that when we finished the take, I mean, conventionally you would get out of the car and let the trucker get in and take you back to you. and then you would go in and drive it over to receive it, but I became quite proficient with this, let me grab a bag of one myself and back it up by cleaning the place.

We thought it was interesting that the car would be hot and then it would be cold, so the dry ice effect when it was cold we took advantage of in the Twin Pines mall scene, we didn't do much with it after that, but the fire effects always were important because the idea of ​​him leaving a trail and Kevin and hisYou guys came up with this thing that I think you call juice. We came up with a great chemical that didn't have a high temperature and went beautifully from the orange flame when hot to the cold alcohol appearance when it was ready.

They would pour the material on the ground and then light it and start shooting and the material would burn for 35 or 45 seconds, long enough for us to get a tape. You'll see this face everywhere you look this summer. Everyone is trying to get paid. At the last star, we had kids lined up seven deep to try to catch a glimpse of Michael J. Fox Bob and I looked at each other and I said he really is a big star, that was the first hint we had that it was going to happen. I know more than just a movie that comes and goes, it's an absolute dream.

You know, if you're in love with someone, maybe you send them a note or something. You are waiting for the answer. You hardly dare to look in the mailbox because there are so many things. do it right and that's what it's like to work on a movie that you have hopes for, you can barely stand to wait until it comes out because it's not up to you, let's say you're making props for a movie, what's up? your story, acting, editing music, nothing, nothing, you're making props for a show, you're just waiting and you can't afford to have too much hope because it's stupid, you can't let your satisfaction depend on what's going to happen in the box. office I remember going to the screening now as the cast and crew and just thinking, Oh my god, they really pulled it off, it turned out better than we expected.

Back to the Future becomes the most successful movie of 1985, in fact it plays until 1986. at the movie studio of course we wanted a sequel, we weren't so sure about a sequel, well the movie made so much money that Sid Scheinberg came to see us and said that Gentlemen Universal is making Back to the Future Part 2, or you can jump on that train. or not get on that train, but we are doing it one way or another, we would really appreciate it if you would drive that train. Come on, we don't need roads, so when we were in a sequel production.

We had seven Deloreans. Every car from the first film was used in all three films. Car a was generally for first unit work. The b car was more of a double for second unit work, although the first unit was sometimes used and the c car was used at all times. they built a fiberglass car that they could hang from a crane and would use on a forklift and all for the third movie, they introduced two new cars that were built on modified Delorean frames with sand rail frames, they took the bottom frame in the middle and they cut it down.

They put in this other suspension that's basically Volkswagen, so they had these two wagons that were made to go in desert scenes. The B car from the first movie was modified to be on the train tracks and then they built a second car that was designed to do the trick with the wheelie and everything, when we were halfway through production on the third movie we were tearing up some of these cars quite significantly. I remember we took a car and decided we were just going to use this one. car for parts the first show was completely different from the second and third 27 people in the art department in the second part part one we are with very little money, let's do it we don't have time, let's finish this but the aftermath was totally different experience they had on the five times Oscar winner for visual effects, Ken Roston, here with a new piece of hardware that no one had seen before the tandro, the computer memorizes every nuance of that camera movement and then reproduces it exactly the same way every time it allows it . having an actor play multiple roles in the same take, but not having to have the camera locked like they used to do in the old movies when it came time to crash the car into the train at the end of the third movie.

It was important to destroy the car for a couple of reasons, one of which was that no one thought we would do something like this. The audience reaction the first time we showed the movie, I mean, it was like an old friend was killed. Great, I mean, in terms of the emotional investment that the audience had in the Delorean, we had to destroy the car because it only You wanted to say, "Okay, this is done," we can't use the car to go back in time anymore. We're putting a point on this, at this point, of course, we had really decided that we weren't going to make a fourth movie.

We wanted to make that very clear, why don't you do a fourth part creatively? There is nothing more to say. We are done with these characters, we have seen too many movies in which they make too many sequels, two sequels too many, we had a story to tell and we told it and the story has a wonderful ending and that is a good way to end. we finished the third part universal took possession of all the cars it's your money it's your property the fiberglass Delorean replica was displayed in the movie exhibit at Universal Studios Hollywood and after many years it was reported that it was destroyed the Oxnard car was a dedicated stunt car after filming a part three, the car was used to film part of the ride and was later displayed at Universal Studios Florida, it has suffered several deteriorations and is currently only in storage for the scenes that were filmed in Monument Valley.

They made two buggies. cars one was bought by two private collectors and was restored and then sold at auction the other car was used as a spare car, they removed parts from this car and put them in other cars, like car c, at the end of filming it was It looked like this However, after filming the third part, they added only the bottom panels and put it on a second cinematic screen so that people could see it and when it came time for Universal Studios Japan to open an attraction, they took parts of this car and the The car c e made a replica of the time machine.

Car c was left in storage and eventually placed outside where it remained as a feature. The car was used to build a replica car for Universal Japan. The v car was a sacrificial lamb. was the one they read with explosives and was hit by the train this car lives in several other cars jay orberg, who built promotional cars, used parts of it to make his promotional cars on tour and then even took the panels and put them together to play on hollywood at their hawaii restaurant it is now currently in the collection of bill and patrick shea the car was displayed at the universal tour in california they filmed the trip with it they used it for an earth day special for cbs they used the a-car in the cartoons for some of the early shows had live action footage with christopher lloyd and then it was just used throughout the studio it was an attraction, they would take it to events, they would do this and eventually they would just sit outside along Over the years, I have found that people who have Deloreans either have them because of the movie or have kept them because of the movie.

Now people have gone further to make their Deloreans as screen-exact replicas as possible. Some people do it themselves. Some people. I received additional help. I was 10 years old and I saw that car and I thought, "That's my dream car." Once I started, I found this whole community of other builders, people who had already worked, people who were working together. and you know, at first it was great because everyone shared with each other and it became a family of like-minded crazy people. I say, oh, you're my people, I think there's probably a handful of people who get mad at the people who make Back to the Future cars out of regular Deloreans because they feel it's sacrilege to damage the car that way, but there are also many ways to do it where you can reverse it. and it doesn't damage the car.

The first one took me about four years to build to fully restore it and do all the back to the future stuff, so I started slowly recreating the pieces as I could and putting them up. my car and the first one, I think it was the most fun car ever built. I'm working on number 20 right now for full cars, but now I'm making it for everyone else who wants to do it. I build a lot of parts for guys who are doing it themselves in their garage, so I probably have my hand and at least 100 of the Deloreans out there in some way or another there is a part in there that I probably built or had in my hands, have Keep in mind that those cars are toys.

They were never supposed to carry that much weight, you won't surprise them as a daily driver, it was crazy enough driving a Delorean, but when you drove the car like a time machine down the road, people lose their minds, now sir. 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 give you the go-ahead, they pull up in front of you and they want to take the lead. immediately. I thought, "I don't think we can drive this thing anymore.

We've been stopped by the best law enforcement officers from around the world who wanted to check our paperwork and make sure everything was in order, I had my car on a platform and people followed it." , a guy got out and was legitimately crying, I never thought I'd see this in real life and there's something emotional about this because of this movie because of all the things that work in the movie, the story, the characters, the music, all of them. those things when they see the car that is a symbol of that moment, what they felt and when what they feel when they see it and look at it again and look at it again, you know I ended up building my own replica of the machine.

Delorean time and there are a lot of things that, as someone who knows a lot about them, I know are not very accurate, but you know I'm happy with the way they look and how it makes me feel that there are things that I did to my car that were specific to a certain scene in the second part because in my mind that's what I wanted to build. You know, there's wiring that's wrong everywhere else, but that's how I wanted it to be. There is a very rabid interest in these movies and the car and all that and it's a good thing, the only thing is that sometimes I think people get so involved that they forget that the real thing is what was on the screen, we are all fans and yes people realize that there's no big trophy at the end for being the biggest fan, so there's room for everyone, you know, we're not chasing anyone who goes back to the future Delorean, even if they're not a big player, because you're all ambassadors of the movie because people see a Delorean even if there is no Back to the Future modification and it makes them smile and makes them think about the movie and that's great when people have gone the extra mile to put in a flux and timing capacitor .

It shows in it God bless you we love you thank you thank you thank you very much it is a compliment and I love seeing them and I love talking to them when we go to conventions they are full of joy and full of questions and I am happy to help I know how much work is involved need, I know those people are building those cars in their garages with no air conditioning, I know they are taking money that could have gone to something else, honey, trust me, this is going to be great. a dream like Delorean had a dream like Doc and Marty they have a dream if it wasn't for the movie afterlife I would never have met the transporters two amazing people who decided to build like a folk art Delorean and just put things in the car so it looked like the movie we were one of the first we were not the first but it was early on August 4, 2000 oliver wakes up from his sleep and is in terrible pain, his brother and I rushed him to the hospital and he is diagnosed cancer had a tumor the size of a football the doctors came from other operating rooms just to see him they told us that he has cancer and has six months to live which we had to say that when you receive news like that you take care of your business you put your house in order when They gave him his diagnosis.

There was no chemotherapy or radiation program that suited his situation. It was useless. It was the end and that is what we had to face. But they said we would like to. To monitor the progress of the disease, a friend of ours helped us. to make a will, not that we had much to pass on to anyone, but you can get the legal parts when you're 30, you don't expect this, so get our Living in order was very important to us and we sat down with our minister and he He said, "Well, what do you want to do?" and practically at lunch that day, Oliver said, I really want to build a time machine.

Looking at me, I said, "Okay yeah." We're only six months old let's have as much fun as we can what would that be because thinking about that wasn't going to help anyone we had to watch a videotape of the movie from the movie on a 20 inch screen we thought big Screen, pause and try of figuring out what the parts were, what the words were, we lived more in the spirit of Michael Chaffee, you know, hey, let's make this look good, does it work? Does it fit, you know, yeah, that looks pretty good, you know? We would use our imagination and we would rescue surplus places, old electronic scrap shops, junkyards and we would havegave, we restored it to the nuclear reactor version because that's really the purest version.

I felt it come off the back of the doctor's truck at that moment. There are so many things you know. It varies from movie to movie and sometimes from scene to scene in the original back to the future, they say, well, we do it from this scene or the flow boxes, you know, if there are debates like that every day and, well, You know, what we do. It became kind of an amalgamation of the best, but there's no such thing as perfection, so that's why so many people are so unhappy when they get into building their cars.

Perfection does not exist. The card looks like it should look. It looks like it rolled away. On the back of the truck, personally, I probably would have shown a little more wear. Everyone has their own reasons and points of view with these things and how to restore them. If I were the fist of the Universal Studios bow, I would have said this car stays. exactly the way it stays cracks, blemishes, dents and everything and no one touches it but that's not the way it happened the car was left outside and it was so gone it couldn't be left so at that time it wasn't known could show, so it had to go through a complete restoration for me.

The car was about the original people who made the car. The original workmanship of the people who built the car. Know? Would a car be better if it was just cleaned up and as good as it was? I don't believe it. I think you have to capture the magic. I'm proud to have that experience. I wouldn't change it for anything, but I'm so close to it that I see the work I did and what everyone else did. the boys did it and this is what i always like to tell people is like you can't meet doc brown you can't 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 car it is as if you meet a character from the past the movies of the future unfortunately for me it is not the same again but that is the compensation you get when working with your heroes it changes things I remember it was it was a moment of silence when it was finally done and we all turned off the lights and sat there and looked at it for a while no one said anything no one said a word it was it was like you were in a church it was amazing my god what a job these guys did the Peterson, where they shows off the car.

It has a wonderful display of cars from the movies. You get a lump in your throat when you see that Peterson is one of the largest public automobile collections in the world that we can. To allow enthusiasts to see the car in person, the car does not belong to Peterson, but has a permanent home here. Much of what we tell in that gallery is that symbiotic relationship between science fiction and the automotive industry, including the devices we use. Today they are inspired by science fiction, it is people's imagination saying what if and that catalyst eventually becomes something we have in our pocket every day or something we drive on the road every day.

Bob's creation showed the potential that cars have and we still don't. reach that future, but it's possible that one day what I've learned over the years is that we must depend on the fans to preserve the legacy because they love the movie more than anyone, talk about the fans, you know the movie, they are , are. It's so amazing and amazing and supportive, it's a good group to be with. You know, we're still amazed that she has these legs that it's become such a classic and that's such a beautiful thing that's literally a part of people's lives and I love it.

That woman came up to me and told me I'm a rocket scientist because I saw the movie and I saw, you know, Doc Brown, actually, the future fans have been incredible supporters of the foundation. It's awesome that they have events going back to future related events. President of Delorean related events. from the seat dances all kinds of things and it's really gratifying to see that they have personally touched that, now they love the movie, but they have taken a little bit of our personal stories into their hearts. and just the fact that they think about you and know how to support you, kids who saw the movie in 1985, have kids of their own and say, hey, I want to show you this movie that I loved as a kid in the same way. that my parents said you have to see the wizard of oz, it's just transcending through these different generations.

We were talking to a guy named Tom, he told his kids that it's important for them to watch certain movies so they can function in society and understand. the references he said in Back to the Future is certainly a movie I've shown my kids over the years, it's part of our culture, honestly it's not just pop culture, it's a big part of our culture and it deserves to be remembered as such. so many great films that add art and greatness to people's lives and that are worth perpetuating so that we can continue to do so the history of our country is made up of the experiences that all artists, all creative people, have made and have influenced the direction people are going with the idea that the time machine look of the automobile was designed by one a guy in his garage is a truly American idea a pariah of society is the visionary who comes up with something that no one else can think of is a piece of great American folklore and is told over and over again in the history of American invention and so embodied in this car there is an extra level of American ingenuity.

I mean, it's every creative person's dream to be involved in something that has a life of its own. You know who knew that would happen with Back to the Future? You expect it because it's kind of like pressed flowers, you know there's all this period stuff in there, the cars that are on the street, what people thought was cool and really stood the test of time and you don't know in that moment if something is going to be good. You have to leave it in people's hands, let time realize that it's been an incredible privilege just to see that happen, just to be connected to this.

I mean, I only worked on a few props, but I'm proud to be a 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 pieces to make it work. You see the genius of those guys in Kevin's store and the patients of him. I know what was done to make it. I remember those nights and days, I remember what it was like when they were filming the place 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. time and I go oh my god this is really good if I look at the car I see all that I see the corners we cut and I see how far we went to get it all right there are a lot of feelings I had about the car, how I felt about it when I was a designer about cars, how I felt about the choice when they made the movie and then what had happened and what was happening in the press. I don't think they could have chosen better.

A DNC 12 Legacy is the story of an American dream, the car that stimulated much of the imagination. Even though the car was built in Northern Ireland with English engineering and many French and English parts, there was something truly American about it all. the story, just the The courage he had, he was a self-made man. I met John later in life. You know, you could see the appreciation he had from the Delorean owners who approached him and the kind of love and admiration they had for the good. things he did because listen, at the end of the day, no one is perfect, we all have our flaws, he just happened to be a little bigger than others, but the things he did that were great were a little bigger than maybe others achieved in life.

Also, that's the most interesting part, I mean, he basically made a car that is like him, it looks sexy on the outside, but there were a lot of shortcomings, that's the word, even though he didn't manage to surpass his car, yeah and that car needs. To be cared for, valued and seen for what it is, this car could have been just a footnote in automotive history, it ended up being an icon and that was because of what the Bobs did by implementing it into one of the best science fiction movies in history. i did bob samaca steven spielberg and i jointly received a letter from john delorean and john just said gentlemen last week i had the opportunity to see the movie back to the future i thought it was brilliant and i'm delighted that you selected my vehicle for immortality something In that sense, the design team went back to the future and knew who they were.

He said: Ron Cobb, uh, Michael Chaffee, Andy Probert and Kevin Pike, you can all be part of my next design team on my next project, you can't think of going back to the future without thinking about the Delorean, you can't look at the Delorean without thinking. in back to the future it's just an incredible unification it's not like uh no offense to Star Trek but it's not like a corporate starship model on your mantelpiece it's a damn car that someone dreamed up and made it happen and you can turn the key, you can ride in that car, the Millennium Falcon from Star Wars, you can't see it on the 405, but you can see a Delorean, you know what I mean and when you do.

You instantly went back there, you know how you play Star Wars with your friends, you 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 out there. there's no better place for this car than Peterson, this is where it belongs, it has a home, it's safe, it's about future generations and saying, "hey, this is special," you know, take care of this because we're all caretakers, it will live to always. one really works, you see, this one can actually travel through time, no one believes that, but it really works, this is something worth doing.

Santa's sleigh is special because Santa rides it. The Millennium Falcon is special because it is the one that Han Solo flew. That's why we have all these things that's why we have car museums it's the interaction of people with cars the artifact is what the car itself is it's not like that it's the whole package I think that's the attractive thing is that it's not just a cool car it's the story I followed it it's exciting to be part of the movie it's exciting to have been able to drive that Delorean it has to take me to the future and beyond and I'm glad it still takes you to places too so so so you