“If we can somehow harness this lightning... channel it into the flux capacitor...it just might work. Next Saturday night – we're sending you back to the future!”
Marty McFly (Michael J
Fox) has to engineer his own parents’ romance
after being whisked back to the 1950s in this enjoyably
slam-bang fantasy.
The setting of ‘Hill Valley’ is fictitious, and the
town square is a much-re-used set on the Universal
lot, but many of the other locations can be found
around LA.
The striking home of Doc Emmett Brown (Christopher
Lloyd), ‘1640 Riverside Drive, Hill Valley’, is
one of LA’s
great architectural joys, the 1908 Gamble
House, 4 Westmoreland Place in Pasadena,
just a little to the south of the Pasadena Historical
Society.
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To The Future location: the front door and the interior of Doc's house: Blacker House, Hillcrest Avenue, Oak Knoll
Built for the Gamble family (as in Proctor and...),
this charming, Japanese-influenced wood shingle house
is open to the public (tel: 818.793.3334). The Doc’s
workshop, where the time-travelling DeLorean is stored,
is actually the Gamble House bookshop, alongside the
main house. The front door on which Fox knocks, though,
and the house interior, is the 1907 RR
Blacker House, a similar Japanese-inspired
design by Charles and Henry Greene, at 1177
Hillcrest Avenue, Oak Knoll, Pasadena.
If youíve seen the deleted scenes on the Armageddon DVD, you’ll recognise the Blacker as the house where Bruce Willis
bids goodbye to his dad.
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To The Future location: Marty visits George as Darth Vader: 1711 Bushnell Avenue, Pasadena
The fifties neighbourhood of Fox’s parents-to-be is also Pasadena. The house of George (Crispin Glover), where Marty pays a nighttime visit as Darth Vader, is 1711 Bushnell Avenue in South Pasadena. Supposedly just across the street (but a few doors along on the same side) is the home of Lorraine ( Lea
Thompson), outside which Marty gets hit by a car while saving George: 1727 Bushnell Avenue.
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To The Future location: Marty's mum's house – supposedly across the street: 1725 Bushnell Avenue, Pasadena
A few miles further south you’ll find ‘Hill Valley
High School’, down in Whittier, southeastern LA,
hometown of Richard Milhaus Nixon. And indeed the
school, Whittier Union High
School, 12417 Philadelphia Street at Pierce
Avenue, is where Tricky Dickie graduated in 1930.
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To The Future location: 'Enchantment Under the Sea' dance: First United Methodist Church of Hollywood, Franklin Avenue, Hollywood
The ‘Enchantment Under The Sea’ dance, though, where
Marty finally unites his parents and invents rockíníroll, was filmed in Hollywood, in the gymnasium
of the First United Methodist
Church of Hollywood, 6817 Franklin Avenue. You can see the church's exterior in the period Hollywood scene in The Godfather.
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To The Future location: Site of Doc's house in the 80s:
North Victory Boulevard, Burbank
Back to the eighties. The Doc’s house in 1985 (the
garage of the old mansion, which supposedly burned
down) was constructed for the film behind Burger
King, 535 North Victory Boulevard, Burbank (a stretch of road seen in Christopher
Nolan’s Memento). It's from here that Marty heads off to school at the beginning of the film.
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To The Future location: The McFly home: Roslyndale Avenue, Arleta, California
The 80s McFly ‘Lyon Estates’ home is beneath the power pylons of Arleta in the San Fernando Valley. It’s
9303 Roslyndale Avenue, a quiet sidestreet
off Sunburst Street.
