Great Scott! Secret Cinema Brings Their Back To The Future Experience To LA
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There are a lot of big anniversaries these days. This year alone marks the 35th anniversary of Ridley Scott’s classic Alien, not to mention that last weekend saw Ghostbusters get a theatrical rerelease to commemorate its 30-year mark. Next year we will all be celebrating the three-decade mark for another of our all time favorites, Back to the Future, and if you live in Los Angeles, there will be one hell of a way to observe the occasion.
Secret Cinema organizes themed event screenings for films, and they have staged showings that are much more than just that for the likes of Top Gun, Dirty Dancing, Grease, and a popular one for Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel. They recently wrapped up a gig in London for Back to the Future where they recreated the fictional town of Hill Valley—the burg where Michael J. Fox’s Marty McFly resides—and now it’s being reported that they’re taking their show on the road to the City of Angels.
This kind of set up is standard operating procedure for Secret Cinema, who routinely create elaborate sets, choose unusual settings, and populate the screenings with actors in full costume and character. Fabien Riggall, founder and creative director of the company, said, “”We looked to build the most epic and detailed experience of this classic and wonderful film…I feel we have delivered this and reinvented how films could be experienced in the future. Audiences are looking for something different, they want to be part of the story and take part in an adventure through the films and music they love.”
In early 2015, Secret Cinema plans to jump the pond and launch their first events in the U.S. They’ll kick things off with a series of their Tell No One events, where people don’t know what film they’re about to watch until it actually begins, or at least not until shortly before film starts to roll and the lights go down.
The Back to the Future event will follow in the summer, and while they didn’t drop a ton of details about what this installation will entail, or even say how many screening they plan to hold, we can look to the London event for a potential road map.
That event featured fully functioning replica of the town, complete with 20 plus stores, Marty’s high school, and, of course, the clock tower. There was even a cast of 74 actors wandering around the set dressed in 1950s garb as the film screened on the side of the town hall. All in all, more than 75,000 people bought tickets, which were a whopping $88.50 each, and that actually helped the film, which again is almost 30 years old, crack the box office top ten in the U.K. one last time.
Though this is pricey, it sounds totally worth the expenditure if you can swing it. So, if you’re in Los Angeles next summer and are looking for something memorable to do, you may want to give this a shot. Just make sure that if you take a date you agree to go Dutch before hand.
