Actual
Southern California locations where "Back to the Future" was
filmed.
.[
Click here for an interactive MAP of all B.T.T.F.
locations!].
Marty then seeks
out (the younger) 'Doc Brown'. First, he goes back to his garage/lab
(above)
and then discovers the Doc's house
is still standing in 1955 (below), and it turns out to be
(in real life) a very well-known Pasadena landmark: The
Gamble House,
a 1908 Craftsman home designed by famed architects Greene & Greene.
It's located at 4 Westmoreland Place,
in Pasadena, CA, and offers
tours.
(The tours emphasize the architectural history of
the house, not the movie.)
The
Gamble House is located in the 300
block of N. Orange Grove Boulevard,
three blocks north of Colorado Boulevard (the street made famous by the
Rose Parade).
The
movie revisits the school (Whittier High)
and 1955 Hill Valley (the Universal
Studios set), then gives us a new location. It's for the "Enchantment
Under the Sea" school dance,
where Marty hopes to reunite his parents, by staging a mock fight and a
'rescue' of his young Mom (Lea Thompson).
But the school dance scene
wasn't filmed at Whittier High or any
other school. It was filmed in the basement of a church just north of Hollywood
Boulevard. It's the Hollywood United Methodist
Church, to be exact, located at 6817
Franklin Avenue (at Highland Avenue, north of the Hollywood
& Highland center), in Hollywood.
So Marty tries to get fresh with his young
mom in a car in the school parking lot,
so that
his young dad can then 'rescue' her and play the hero. But his plan doesn't
work out that well.
His mom turns out to be far less naive than Marty had thought, and the
bully Biff ends up
locking Marty in the trunk of a car. Fortunately, his dad shows up and
actually rescues his
mom from Biff, insuring their future union.
These scenes were also shot at Whittier High (12417
E Philadelphia Street, in Whittier),
but not in the parking lot. They were filmed at a part of the school we
haven't seen before;
it's actually a grassy quad behind the main building, on the east side
of the campus. In the movie,
they just parked the cars on the grass and the wide sidewalks to give the
illusion of a parking lot.
And here are two photos from
Steve Mynott of that side of the school,
as seen in 2009:
Back inside the "Enchantment
Under the Sea" dance, Marty watches as his parents
nt their budding relationship on the dance floor, then launches into a
wild
version of Chuck Berry's "Johnny B. Goode"
that shocks the dancers (and inspires
Chuck Berry's 1958 hit). This takes place upon the stage
at the same Hollywood United Methodist Church in
Hollywood, (which in real life is
about 27 miles away from Whittier High School).
Finally, 'Doc Brown' figures out a way
to send Marty "back to the future". Because the clock
atop the Courthouse stopped when it
was hit by lightning in 1955, they know when it will be struck.
So Doc devises a plan to use the electricity from the lightning bolt to
power the time-traveling
DeLorean back into 1985. This scene was shot, of course, back at 'Courthouse
Square', which
is a large outdoor set you can see on the backlot tram
tour at Universal Studios Hollywood.
Before the movie ends, we return
to the Twin Pines Mall
(for a reenactment of the original
shootout with the terrorists), then we end up back at Marty's
house(where Marty discovers
the favorable changes he has accidentally brought about by tinkering with
time travel), and the
time-traveling DeLorean roars off for the future over Marty's
Street (in Arleta).
[ Click
here for an interactive MAP of all B.T.T.F. locations,
including aerial photos
of all of the locations!]