In Back to the Future III (1990) there was a gag about having to get an old steam engine to help push their time-traveling, but out of gas, DeLorean up to 88 mph before car and train both fly off the tracks and crash into a canyon below. With their DeLorean out of gas, it was the only way for the characters, Marty and Doc, to escape the Old West past, which they had traveled to in their time machine. Got it? The scripts were well-written, and most people did get it.
My boss, Ken Ralston, was searching for a location to shoot this scene. I thought I knew of a place that would be perfect: an old rock quarry up in the hills of northern Marin County. The quarry had been defunct for years, but my stepfather used to work there in the 1950s and he even lived there for a time after it closed. The owners preferred having someone on the property, so he lived there for free—quite an accomplishment in such a high-priced area as Marin.
As a kid, I would go up there on weekends with a friend and we would hike out into the hills behind the quarry to go camping, often taking rifles for squirrel hunting. There were acres of land to explore, so I knew it fairly well. We used to find huge stone bowls there that the local Indian tribe, the Miwoks, used for grinding corn eons ago. George named the Ewoks in Star Wars after these early Marin County Miwoks, so it seemed fitting that this place be used to shoot a movie. I had even shot one of my student films there; it was a horror movie before that genre exploded at the box office with films like Night of the Living Dead.
It seemed like wherever I went in Marin, some of my family history was there, and not all of it was pleasant. But my attitude was to wade right in and confront whatever ghosts of childhood I might encounter. Not everyone feels that way. My brother went to school with a guy in Marin that belonged to a family of the biggest political figures in the state. Governors, judges, and high officials were threaded closely through it. He grew up under intense pressure to succeed and he did succeed, but a haunted childhood home life of alcoholism and God knows what else controls him to this day, making any thought of ever returning to Marin abhorrent. My view is to revisit whatever demons you might have had in the past and take back the control you lacked as a child. I’m for metaphorically driving your Mercedes up on the lawn of your old self and announcing your return. Now, here I was back at the rock quarry.
After my father died, my mother moved to Marin and bought a 1951 baby blue Cadillac that had belonged to Bill Harrah, the Reno gambling magnate. Apparently Harrah had bought it for a girlfriend who didn’t work out. My father had told momma to get a good car, and in those days a good car for a widow meant a Cadillac.
By now an old suitor had shown up, a family friend during the good old days in Sausalito when she was the daughter of a rich man. His name was Yates, and he was a poor Southern boy from South Carolina who had run away from an abusive home. He had traveled a lot, first as what they called a “peanut butcher,” selling candy and nuts on the railroads, then as a “wiper,” the lowest engine room position on freight ships that went all over the world. But in my mother’s teenage years he delivered for a drugstore on a motorcycle, drove a cab, and hung out at the fire department. My grandmother liked him and he was always welcome at the big Sausalito house where my grandfather brought all kinds of people home for Sunday dinner.
Yates had taught himself to read and write and had the classic Southern manners of a gentleman, but a working-class one. He had dated all the “Mason Girls” (my mother and her sisters) at one time or another, but he was a poor boy and they were the daughters of a millionaire.
After my father died, Yates was back in full pursuit. His job record was sketchy, he was too heavy, he wasn’t from her class at all, and he had a problem with alcohol. By rights, my mother should have married another doctor or someone––anyone—else. She was still quite attractive, and only forty years old. But that didn’t happen, and when most of my father’s family met a man who couldn’t hold his liquor, they disappeared from our lives. On my mother’s side, they all sent ice buckets as wedding gifts.
The irony here is that by the time my mother got really sick, and was in and out of hospitals, and the bills were piling up, Yates had become a highly paid heavy-equipment and tall-crane operator. He had worked his way up in the Operating Engineers Union and was in demand, having brought his drinking under control. He would still go on benders, but not while working on projects. His union paid all the hospital bills. As I grew older, Yates became a more and more complicated figure. As he slowly gained in wealth, he became a gift-giver who offered short and hilarious vacations from our increasingly humble lives. These were the benders. We would stay at the best hotels and eat at the finest restaurants, all on Yates.
Having slowly awakened from a childhood where everyone’s parents were business executives, judges, law partners, doctors, or just wealthy, we began to notice that some people drove cabs or waited tables for a living, at a dollar or two an hour, while our stepfather was a laborer yet made $17 an hour. Many heavy-equipment operators where drinkers and unreliable; Yates was a drinker but completely reliable, a rare commodity. As my mother’s marriage to Yates failed, he was exiled, first to the maids’ quarters and eventually out of the house altogether. He still took my brother and me on trips, but he had moved to the rock quarry.
Slowly things changed. My uncle sold the house, and I went to live with my Aunt Leonore in Boonville. My brother and I were split up, and we only saw our stepfather Yates occasionally now. He bought me a car when I turned sixteen, and we had one more wild excursion with him, where he closed for a day a bowling alley he had invested in so I could drink at the bar as an underage college kid.
I never saw the quarry again until my boss Ken rode up there with his wife on horseback one weekend and pronounced it perfect for the set. Our model shop had built a ¼th-scale period steam engine to match the full-size one they had commandeered at the production’s location, in the old gold-mining city of Jamestown in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada.
At the quarry they constructed twenty yards or so of track and a partially destroyed railroad trestle, all to scale. The story involved the characters escaping the past as their DeLorean blasted them back to the future, but with the steam engine that propelled their car shooting off the broken trestle bridge and diving into the quarry canyon. Of course, the engine appeared to explode as it hit the bottom. We never failed to explode something if we could possibly help it. Buster Keaton ran a real steam engine off a trestle in his masterpiece The General and guess what? It didn’t explode. That’s because there was nothing to explode except steam from the boiler perhaps. Ours did explode—it’s a movie cliché. A car goes off a cliff, it explodes. Especially if there is a bad guy in it. It should only explode on a good guy if he has made a last-second escape.
In movie parlance, the girl screams when she sees a monster or the killer. She also falls down in trying to escape either one. That is usually caused by the presence of stylish footwear, but it can even happen in sneakers. Men don’t scream at either monsters or killers, but they do forget to bring their gun. You can shout advice at the screen all you like, but for a time he is going to be unarmed and vulnerable. I think this is one of the reasons the NRA has been so successful in arming America––movie guns. I left a preview screening of a new movie once and heard one studio executive ask the other, “What did you think?” and the other executive said, “No guns.” This meant he thought it was going to fail at the box office, and it did. You break movie logic at your peril.
Still, the Back to the Future scripts were beautiful things. Just to pull off the complex time-travel story lines alone was a feat, but to additionally still have good character development, action, and humor, all in a satisfying movie story—that makes both sense and fun of itself. It is a rare thing.
I drove up to the Western town sets in both Jamestown, where the full-size steam locomotive was a famous local attraction, and the nearby town of Sonora, where additional sets were built. Other movies had been shot in Jamestown using the loco, including the depot sequence in perhaps my favorite movie, High Noon. (Somewhere I read that Bill Clinton ran High Noon something like eleven times while he was in the White House.)
My aunt Dru Barner lived in this same gold country area and had once dated the man who wrote the book The Tin Star, on which High Noon was based. The family called her Druie and she was a true horseman, gender aside. She was the first woman to win the Tevis Cup, riding her horse on a grueling trek over an old Pony Express route. It was a hundred-mile trail ride that had to be completed in twenty-four hours. She started at 5:15 a.m. near Truckee, California, went across the crest of the Sierra Nevada, and ended at 5:15 a.m. in Auburn, California, the town where she lived. She carried a Pony Express mail sack with a letter to me, which I still have. I was fourteen, and this was an endurance ride for horses and people that I didn’t fully understand, but I have subsequently met horse people who, when they learn that Dru Barner was my aunt, look a little astonished. My aunt was almost fifty years old when she finally won this race, and she neither screamed nor fell down on this ride . . . ever.