Films may last forever, but props generally don’t – even ones that have made an indelible mark on popular culture. Props are made to look good on the screen, not for longevity, and after the director calls cut on the final shot, anything can happen.
Some iconic items find a loving home – Steven Spielberg famously bought a surviving Rosebud sled from Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane and recently donated it to the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures. Others are literally consigned to the scrapheap – a few canny collectors in Australia have items from Star Wars, Superman Returns and The Matrix culled from dumpster-diving at Fox Studios.
And others have a longer public life, like the DeLorean time machine from Robert Zemeckis’ comedy/sci-fi classic Back to the Future. Piloted in the film series by Michael J. Fox’s Marty McFly and Christopher Lloyd’s eccentric scientist, Doc Brown, the car was destroyed on screen at the end of Back to the Future Part III. But that was only one of three DeLoreans used for the movies, and while a second was eventually dismantled, the third and most detailed spent a long time doing promotional duties at parades, fairs and the Universal Studios backlot before it was eventually mothballed.
But now it lives again! The documentary Saving the Delorean Time Machine takes us through the painstaking process of bringing the DeLorean back up to spec. Working under the exacting Joe Walser, and with the full endorsement of Back to the Future writer and producer Bob Gale, a driven restoration team went to extraordinary lengths to make the now decades-old car look as good as it did when we first saw it looming out of the back of Doc Brown’s truck in 1985.
And boy, did they have their work cut out for them. When recovered, the car was severely degraded to the point where rats and birds were nesting in it. What’s more, over the years fans had repeatedly helped themselves to pieces of the car as souvenirs, with repair work taking place on an ad hoc basis, meaning that even in working order the DeLorean no longer closely resembled its on-screen incarnation. A full refit and repair process was called for.
This didn’t just mean going back to factory specs but getting as close to the screen version as possible, which was heavily modified. Some changes, like the big exhaust ports and the ‘flux capacitor’ that, in the film, enables travel through time, are obvious, but others are less so – such as the fact that the speedometer in a factory DeLorean doesn’t actually go up to 88 miles per hour, and so a custom speedo was required.
Not like any other: inside the DeLorean Source: SBS VICELAND
What’s readily apparent is that the whole process was a labour of love, not just for the restoration team but for Back to the Future fans around the world. Walser and his crew put out a call asking for anyone who might have filched a piece of the car to return it under a kind of amnesty, and many did just that, making the restoration process that much easier – although one holdout meant that a unique piece had to be bought at auction for thousands.
That anonymous person represents the negative side of nostalgia, but Saving The Delorean Time Machine is a celebration of the positive: a group of fans coming together to return a beloved item to its former glory. Thanks to Walser and his team, the DeLorean lives again - at least for the foreseeable future.
Saving The Delorean Time Machine is now available at SBS On Demand:
