The Power of Movies, is a Curious Thing

...with apologies to Huey Lewis

Perhaps you are aware that Glen Powell has a sequel to the 1996 special effects extravanagnza “Twister” coming out next weekend. If not… if you’ve somehow managed to miss this vital piece of pop culture information, you’re in luck. As part of the movie’s manadatory media blitz, Powell did an interview with the Telegraph in which he said many interesting things, including this: “my belief is there’s no problem facing Hollywood that can’t be solved by a really good movie.”

And this, naturally, made me think of “Back to the Future.”

This past Fourth of July weekend I decided to watch “Back to the Future” with my 13-year-old son. Not only is he the same age now as I was when I first saw BTTF in theaters, but it turns out that this past Independence Day was the 39th anniversary of the movie’s arrival in theaters.

BTTF is a perfect movie, and by that I don’t simply mean that it’s great (it is), I mean that it’s a structurally perfect movie. It is a seemingly endless series of clever set-ups and payoffs that come at you so fast-and-furious it takes most people years and dozens of viewings to catch them all.

Structurally, the entire movie is a complex high-wire act (time travel stories are notoriously difficult to pull off) and yet when the movie ends there are no loose ends. Not one.

Let’s take a moment to go in-depth into one of these set-up/payoff cycles because it’s fascinating to look behind the curtain and see how the great storytellers operate. But also because it’s a master class for aspiring screenwriters. If you want to write something great, this is how you do it.

In BTTF, the “Flux Capacitor” equipped time-travelling DeLorean needs to run on plutonium for two critical story reasons. 1) It has to run on a fuel source not available in 1955 because Marty needs to be stranded in 1955 in order for the plot to work. After all, if Marty could just turn around and go right back to 1985, the movie would be over. And 2) in order to increase the third act stakes, Doc Brown has to die in the first act sequence where Marty goes back in time. And it just so happens that there was a contemporaneous real life scenario in 1985 where a specific fuel source (plutonium) and a motive for someone wanting to murder poor Doc Brown might naturally intersect… Libyan terrorists looking to get their hands on a nuclear bomb.

Doc steals the plutonium from the Libyans in order to build the time machine, but before he can load extra plutonium in the trunk for his return trip from the future, the Libyans have shot him and Marty suddenly finds himself on the run in the DeLorean, accidentally hitting 88 miles per hour and catapulting himself into movie history, as well as actual history… with no way home.

OK so now we’ve got Marty stranded in 1955 with a time machine that runs on a powerful fuel source not available in 1955… what now? How do we get him home? Well, Doc Brown has an answer, but it’s not a good one…

”The only power source capable of generating one point twenty-one gigawatts of electricity is a bolt of lightning… unfortunately you never know when or where it’s ever gonna strike”, he says.

Except that we do…

In an earlier scene, one in which we are given important information about Marty’s life and relationship with his parents, Marty and his girlfriend Jennifer are interrupted by an activist just as they are about to kiss… and isn’t that just like an activist? Anyway, she’s soliciting money to repair the town clock tower, destroyed by a bolt of lightning back in 1955. She hands Marty a flier which, like every other person in the world, Marty would normally just throw away at his very first opportunity. Except that this flier has, type-written upon it, all the information Marty will later need to get back home.

So, how do we get Marty all the way back to 1955 with that critical flier still in his pocket?

The answer is simple, if not exactly easy. Marty tells Jennifer he’ll call her later, except she’s staying at her grandmother’s house and runs back to give Marty the unfamliar phone number. She writes the number on… wait for it… the flier. She even adds a little note which reads “I love you!”, and as any man who was ever 18-years-old and had a girl knows, when she wrote “I love you!” on something, you damned sure kept it.

And that’s why, thirty minutes later, when Doc Brown laments that you never know when or where a bolt of lightning will strike, Marty is able to produce the flier, stick it right in his face and say “we do now.”

That’s storytelling...

But to return to Glen Powell’s point, the power of great storytelling is a curious thing and, I believe, it does indeed have the ability to fix what ails Hollywood. I know because I saw it happen last weekend.

My son doesn’t love movies the way I do. He likes them well enough, but if you give him another option, he’ll almost always take it, especially if that option is video games. And that’s fine. In this regard I suspect he isn’t that different from every other teenage boy on planet Earth here in 2024. In fact, one of the biggest problems facing Hollywood today is that kids, who have always been Hollywood’s best customers, have a million options they didn’t have thirty years ago. Fully-immersive video games are only one of them.

He also has ADHD, which is to say he is a normal American boy, and so he fidgets when we watch movies at home. He gets distracted easily. And he loves to talk while we’re watching.

But an amazing thing happened when we were watching BTTF together… during the big final sequence when Marty goes “back to the future”, from the moment the tree falls on the power cord and pulls the plug, to the moment the DeLorean disappears in twin tire tracks of flame, he sat on the edge of his seat, totally silent, both hands over his mouth… rapt.

That sequence, one of the greatest of all time, was like an “off” switch for his ADHD. It was truly incredible to watch.

Nothing else but a great movie has the power do that.

Glenn Powell is right… the audience is out there… they are ready to go back to theaters… they want to see movies… we just have to give them something great.

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