"Part of the fun in setting up this scene was having our art department actually find computer equipment that was working in 1969. Hard to find that stuff anymore."

"It's also amazing to think that the computers you see in this room, the big jobs with the tapes rolling, about 100 of them would equal your laptop for computer power today."

"Gee that was interesting. Let's not use that."

They seem to say this immediately after Cosmo says, "Pepperoni pizza, please. Shaken, not stirred." 😅

"And here you hear the beginning of a theme that James Horner wrote for the movie. We had used as a temp track what are commonly called contemporary minimalist composers like Philip Glass, and Steve Reich, and John Adams, and I thought James captured the feel of that beautifully."

I agree 💜

#JamesHorner #SteveReich #PhilipGlass #JohnAdams #ContemporaryMinimalist #MinimalMusic

Scene with young Marty in the van: "I remember doing this scene in, on a sound stage that was frozen so that, because we wanted to see the actor's breath, uh, so the effects department went to a lot of trouble to uh, get the stage incredibly cold, and you'll notice, you can't tell." (laughs) 😅

"Right? I don't think he breathed."

"He just inhaled." (laughs)

"I always love that shot, of the shadows of the policemen on the wall of the building."

"Yeah, meant to look like the headlights, although most cars don't have them on this side." (laughs)

"And now here was the purpose of that smaller frame is that we could dissolve from the snow on the campus to the snow on a monitor, and then pull out of the monitor and you're into a wide frame again."

"And I'll never forget how difficult it was explaining that to people all the time we were shooting. No one quite understood what we were doing."

"And that's a scene from the Orson Welles' 'Touch of Evil' in which the line, 'I looked in that box and there was nothing there', is sort of a harbinger of the end of this film."

"We were criticized by one reviewer who said we used that for no purpose at all, and I always wanted to tell him."

"This shot is one of the reasons that we, at great expense, went to San Francisco, for location scout for our shooting, and looking at it now I realize we didn't actually have to go to San Francisco. The studio was right." (chuckles)

"But we ate very well while we were there."

"One of my favorite little bits of business in the film is when the fire alarm goes off, the security guard, played by Bodhi Elfman, consults his manual."

Bodhi is the son of Richard Elfman and Rhonda Joy Saboff 🤯

Richard Elfman directed the cult musical film "Forbidden Zone" (1982). Danny Elfman is Richard's younger brother.

#BodhiElfman #RichardElfman #DannyElfman

"This bank that we shot at is long abandoned, it's been empty for many years and it's been used as locations in a lot of films, and in fact in 1983, a picture I wrote called All of Me used the lobby of the bank for the hallway where Steve Martin goes to the elevator, walking like a woman and talking like a man."

"In fact, I seem to recall that the night that we finished shooting there, MC Hammer came in and shot a video the next night."

"Yeah, it's used all the time for commercials too."

"Now among the bank executives up here, the fellow in the front with the glasses looking particularly stony-faced...there he is, on the far-right, is Lin Parsons who was our line producer."

IMDB lists him as Lindsley Parsons Jr.

"When we shot the scene of Bob coming out of the bank, this was in San Francisco, after one take he just got into a car of some passerby and drove off. I think that was his way of telling us that he was finished with the scene." (laughs)

"I always wonder what these tourists who had rented this car felt when Robert Redford walked in their car."

"I always hate the way those backlit photographs look because they look like Kodachrome, and those particular ones we made black & white and color negatives and we blended the black & white and color together--I think it was about 80-20 color-to-black & white--so that they were very desaturated and your eye didn't go to them, because it never looks very urban to me when they turn bright colors."

Note: I think he's talking generally here, and is happy with the backlit photos in the movie (?)

"This set actually had to be built on one of the bigger stages at Universal. I think it was the stage that they used for Phantom of the Opera, right?"

"That's right, the original 1920's Phantom of the Opera was from this stage."

"And I think after us, Jurassic Park shot there."

Dannemora refers to the Clinton Correctional Facility, a "a New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision maximum security state prison for men located in the Village of Dannemora, New York."

"And Tim Busfield had a great idea that when he was pretending to be an NSA agent in this sequence, he was going to have his hair sort of a little looser and kind of slightly more like Bob's. Later on in the movie, when you realize that he's working for a Cosmo character played by Ben Kingsley, Tim was going to wear his hair slicked back more like Cosmo's. It was a nice idea."

"And we of course humored Tim and made him think that in fact his hair did look like Bob's." (laughs)

"Because we were going to show the Federal Building standing and then disappeared we had to have some landmarks to tie the audience to that location. So we start with this post office that was in San Francisco. We cut to this building which is on the back lot of Universal with the George Bush posters. And the next time that we see this torn down, we start with the post office and cut to an empty lot in San Francisco."

Marty drives an orange 1967 Volkswagen Karmann Ghia convertible.

"And this was one of my favorite scenes to do. We decided we were going to do this whole scene in one shot, constantly moving. The actors are constantly moving and the camera is constantly moving. People walk off camera, disappear from view, emerge from another direction, and the basic idea was the two supposed NSA agents are cornering Bob, I mean they're cornering him in an emotional sense in the scene, but he keeps moving to keep them from trapping him physically. ..."

(continued)

"Whenever they come near him he always walks away and finally at the end they have surrounded him and they've, he's in the chair and he can't move. So we shot this--there's a long scene--and we shot it the better part of a day. And as I recall John you had a lot of people carrying lights and flags and all kinds of things around the sets of behind the camera there's about a half-dozen people moving equipment. It was an amazing piece of choreography, not just...."

(continued)

"... the actors on camera but everybody behind the camera to stay out of the shot. Before we shot this scene we played a tape on the set for the cast and crew a wonderful sequence in the Orson Welles film 'Touch of Evil' when the shoe-box is discovered and it was several pages long and, like this, people walk in and out of the shot and it was wonderful to see how a master does that."

"And here's Bob physically trapped as he is--in a story sense--trapped"

"This was an abandoned movie theatre in Oakland. Beautiful sort of late-afternoon glow on that scene."

This is the Fox Oakland Theatre, which was subsequently "refurbished in the 2000s and reopened as a concert venue on February 5, 2009."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_Oakland_Theatre

#Oakland #FoxOaklandTheatre #NationalRegisterOfHistoricPlaces

"Yeah, I liked it too. One thing I remember is every time we turned around it meant lighting a football field, so things took a little longer than I anticipated frequently."

"You still apologizing for that, huh John?" (teasingly)

"No, I was trying to blame [production designer] Patrizia." (laughs)

"This was a beautiful location. It was a private school in Pasadena, I think."

"Uh huh"

"And we had found a wonderful young piano prodigy to...who was really playing, and she was wonderful." 🎹

Note: As he enters, Marty holds a rectangular gift with a red ribbon behind his back (possibly chocolates). The final edit of this scene does not show him attempting to give it to Liz, but we do briefly catch a glimpse of it on the piano as they subsequently walk around the room.

"That door in the background as I recall we had a very hard time getting permission to put lights back there."

"Some reason we weren't allowed to see into that room or light it, and now I don't recall what it was that...."

"I think there was a religious--it was a chapel."

"Exactly. Yeah, that's right, you're right. It was a little chapel and they didn't want us to shoot it."

(continued)

"How did we get the lights back there?"

"I think in the end they allowed us to put one in if we did a couple Hail Marys." (laughs)

"If we promised to lead a good life."

"That's right. I'd rather light at 2K than curse the darkness." (laughing)

Note: I believe John is talking about the wattage of the lighting here (viz., 2000 W, or 2kW).

The Pasadena school appears to have been the Mayfield Senior School of the Holy Child Jesus, a "a girls' college preparatory high school".

I was unable to find a photo of the chapel through the doors after a brief search. It seems the administration has remodeled parts of the school in the ensuing years.

"The mirror on the back was actually angled."

"I think we tipped it up or down it was actually something I remember going to see a mansion in Newport, Rhode Island once where they said it was once considered impolite to have a mirror on the wall that reflected people, so they intentionally tipped them up to show the ceilings and stuff, and I always remembered that--and a common movie trick now."

"We were shooting I think wardrobe tests on this actor. We were shooting tests on the projection."

"The projection, yeah."

"And somebody walked in front of the projector with a white shirt and we looked at each other and said 'That's what the actor is gonna wear.'"