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Geek Dad
21 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Geek Dad
Review – Justice League: Dark Tomorrow Special #1
Justice League: Dark Tomorrow Special #1 cover, via DC Comics. Ray: The DCU has been thrown into flux in more ways than once since the death of Darkseid, and one of those ways is that time just isn't what it used to be. We just saw a Legion of Doom from the past come to the present and begin terrorizing the heroes, only to leave dozens of time-displaced heroes stuck in the present. Now, someone is hunting the time travelers of the DCU – as this oversized tie-in issue kicks off with Waverider and Extant being murdered. A mysterious masked time traveler nicknamed Legend battles his way to the present day to seek the League's help – but he's not the only one who arrives. Gold Beetle, the young protege (daughter?) of Booster and Beetle is seeking help for her own temporal anomaly, seemingly causing her to blink in and out of existence. And that's the first clue that something very wrong is going on with Omega-powered villains targeting heroes across time. Hunted. Via DC Comics. While this isn't the start of a new series, it does put a new team together – Legend assembling a squad of time-displaced heroes, including Air Wave, Amazing Man, Batman Beyond, the Helena Wayne Huntress, and a very reluctant Jonah Hex. This group on a ship together, including the very hyper Gold Beetle, is mileage enough for a series, but they're not going to have much time to bond. They have to go up against an army of shadow-powered Omega Demons who are led by a familiar face from the thirtieth century, tying into an upcoming event taking place in the pages of Superman. The reason this is only a one-shot is made pretty clear at the end, as our heroes find themselves in a serious fix. It's great to see some of the DCU's top cult heroes again, particularly Jonah Hex, and the ongoing subplot of Air Wave seeking redemption is very compelling. More of this crew after the next event, please. To find reviews of all the DC issues, visit DC This Week. GeekDad received this comic for review purposes. Liked it? Take a second to support GeekDad and GeekMom on Patreon!
Geek Girl Authority
17-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Geek Girl Authority
THE LIBRARIANS: THE NEXT CHAPTER Episode 10 Sneak Peek: It's Slammer Time!
One thing we can always count on with The Librarians: The Next Chapter is that the episode titles are epically straightforward. If the title is 'And the Ghost Train,' there's a ghost train. If it's 'And the Hangover From Hell,' they'll experience a hangover (of sorts). When the title is 'And Going Medieval,' it ain't no euphemism. They are literally going back to medieval times. RELATED: Catch up with our recap of the previous episode of The Librarians: The Next Chapter , 'And the Feast of the Vampir' In the sneak peek clip below, Vikram (Callum McGowan) has done something to strand the team in medieval times, and they aren't happy about it. So, not a team-building, mutually agreed-upon excursion. Image Credit: TNT The Librarians: The Next Chapter, 'And Going Medieval' With the season finale around the corner(!), it's not surprising Vikram's pulled a time travel stunt. After all, we never thought he'd give up on returning to Anya (Olivia Morris), did we? And in Season 1 Episode 9, 'And the Feast of the Vampir,' he gave off major on-the-edge-of-something-big vibes. RELATED: TV Review: The Librarians: The Next Chapter Season 1 Some fun details in this jailhouse clip. Vikram trots out his linguistic skills, chatting up the other inmates in what Connor (Bluey Robinson) identifies as a derivation of Albanian. However, Connor is less enthusiastic than we'd expect with time traveling. He definitely seems skeptical of Vikram's translation. An interesting development, considering how devoted he's been to Vikram's mentorship until now. Image Credit: TNT If we are to believe Vikram's intel-gathering, they are in the better of the two detention centers. The other is inside the stone fortress and referred to as a torture chamber. Charlie's (Jessica Green) concern with germs might be a moot point if they end up somewhere more … sharp. RELATED: Dean Devlin Dishes on The Librarians: The Next Chapter 's Magical Homecoming But the real meat of the story is in the episode's logline: When Vikram attempts to return to 1847, he inadvertently travels the entire team back to the days of King Arthur, where they learn the truth about a Knight of the Round Table, Camelot, and … Elaine. Image Credit: Aleksandar Letic Oh, yes. Elaine. As in Elaine Astolat, aka Mrs. A. Did you take my advice all those weeks ago and research her name? If you did, you'll know why her truth lies in medieval times. Such a fantastic twist, да? RELATED: Read our recaps of The Librarians: The Next Chapter The Librarians: The Next Chapter Season 1 Episode 10, 'And Going Medieval,' airs on TNT on Monday, July 21 at 9 pm ET. On Location: The Belgrade Fortress on TNT's THE LIBRARIANS: THE NEXT CHAPTER Diana lives in Vancouver, BC, Canada, where she invests her time and energy in teaching, writing, parenting, and indulging her love of all Trek and a myriad of other fandoms. She is a lifelong fan of smart sci-fi and fantasy media, an upstanding citizen of the United Federation of Planets, and a supporter of AFC Richmond 'til she dies. Her guilty pleasures include female-led procedurals, old-school sitcoms, and Bluey. She teaches, knits, and dreams big. You can also find her writing at The Televixen, Women at Warp, TV Fanatic, and TV Goodness.
Yahoo
07-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Look: 'Outlander: Blood of My Blood' pics show Claire, Jamie's relatives
July 7 (UPI) -- Starz released new photos from Outlander: Blood of My Blood on Monday. The new series premieres Aug. 8. Blood of My Blood is a prequel to Outlander, starring Sam Heughan and Caitriona Balfe as couple Jamie and Clare Fraser. The Blood of My Blood photos show Rory Alexander as young Murtagh Fraser and Jamie Roy as Brian Fraser, ancestors of Heughan's Jamie. Harriet Slater also plays Ellen MacKenzie, who becomes Jamie's mother. Other photos show Tony Curran as young Simon Fraser, Lord Lovat, Sam Retford as young Dougal MacKenzie, Séamus McLean Ross as Colum MacKenzie and Conor MacNeil as Ned Gowan. Hermione Corfield and Jeremy Irvine star as Julia Moriston and Henry Beauchamp, the parents of Balfe's Claire. The time travel romance spans from 18th-century Scotland to World War I. Photos show Henry and Hemione laughing together, Jamie and Ellen standing and embracing in the Highlands, and the couples standing on opposite sides of the stones that allow them to travel through time. Matthew B. Roberts serves as showrunner for Blood of My Blood and also executive produces with Ronald D. Moore, Maril Davis and Jim Kohlberg. The show will air weekly on Starz and the Starz streaming app. Outlander will end with Season 8. Blood of My Blood has already been renewed for a second season.
Irish Times
06-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
My wise 100-year-old friend Frances: ‘I used to pursue people who didn't like me. I don't have to do that any more'
Frances and I were time travellers. She was born in 1925, and was 94 when we met. Starting with Calvin Coolidge, she lived through 17 American presidents. Frances had more friends – and more stories from the last American century – than anyone I knew. After I watched the film noir Born to Kill (1947) she told me she knew the film's roguish star Lawrence Tierney. He was a piece of work in the film and, she told me, he was no cakewalk in real life either. In my mind, we were friends before I was born. I see pictures of Frances as a young woman, and I think, 'I know her, too'. I imagine us both aged 35, laughing our heads off in PJ Clarke's on 3rd Avenue, circa 1959. Frances Ballantyne, who died on June 10th aged 100, had quite a life. She used to say, 'I have a lot of acquaintances, Quentin, but very few friends.' I took that as a hint, not that she was icing me out of her knitting circle, but that she counted me among those she held dear. I was honoured to be included among her friends. Grace Kelly 's father taught her how to play poker, and she once appeared in newspaperwoman Dorothy Kilgallen's New York Evening Journal Voice of Broadway column as 'the girl in the red raincoat with the sad eyes'. But Miss Frances didn't have sad eyes for very long, not for most of her 100 years, anyway; she had curious eyes even when she lost her sight. She had eyes burning with a fire that consumed books, jazz, politics and Life – not the magazine, but that thing that is all around us, all the time. I called her almost daily during lockdown and, at 7pm every evening, we listened to a tentative, faraway trumpet together on the telephone, sounded in honour of medical workers. She thought it was a child on the trumpet. I guessed it was a young adult still learning how to play. READ MORE She 'saw' me, even though she was blind by the time we met each other. I loved seeing myself through her eyes. I felt good about myself when I was around her. It's funny to have a friend who has never seen your face. I endeavoured to help her out with that: 'How do I describe myself? Do you know Brad Pitt?' She'd shake with laughter. She knew that I didn't look anything remotely like Brad Pitt. Born into an Irish-American family in Connecticut, she never liked cod or porridge because she ate so much of it during the Great Depression. Frances Ballantyne and Quentin Fottrell on the Upper West Side We signed up for tap-dancing classes on 72nd Street. Frances asked, 'Quentin, what colour is your tutu?' Every week I described a different colour; sometimes they were shorter and had more ruffles. She got a kick out of that and, the greatest compliment of all, she got a kick out of me, the good and the bad and the exasperating, which meant a lot, because she was a pretty tough customer. Once she ordered me to call a fellow, who I had nothing in common with, to cancel a planned second date. She was fair and she was kind. As someone with little time left, she didn't want me to waste any of it. She moved to New York in the 1940s, and hung out on the stoop of her brownstone in Hell's Kitchen in the 1980s, where her neighbour, a young actor called Kathy Bates, would shoot the breeze and have a beer. She slept in Central Park with other New Yorkers in the era before air conditioning. They carried gas cylinders up the stairs to the tenement flat; the smell of gas got into their clothes. Wiseguys from a nearby Italian restaurant protected Frances and her girlfriends from men who tried to harass them. New York city, I knew from her personal experience, could be a glamorous place, but also dangerous for women in a world before CCTV. When Frances turned 100, I told her she was my only 'centurion' friend. I meant to say 'centenarian', but I didn't correct the record. 'You are a centurion,' I said. She fought the good fight for more years than I have been alive. In the 1980s, during the height of the Aids epidemic in New York, she recalled how some people jumped up from a park bench if a person with symptoms of Kaposi sarcoma sat down. It was important for her never to forget. She had in-depth knowledge of JFK's domestic and foreign policies, and did not put him on a pedestal like other Irish-Americans. I had never before had a friend like Frances, and I probably never will again. 'Quentin, New York is my home. My roots are here. Your roots are in Ireland. That's your home.' Photograph: Leonardo Munoz/AFP via Getty She was patient, funny, smart and a politically active New Yorker. Frances could argue her point, but she never lost her cool. We talked about sex, relationships and politics. Although she was a Democrat, she did have friends who were Republican. Even from behind her dark glasses, which protected her eyes from the light, she believed in dialogue over judgment. When a person who 'sees you' disappears into the divine, ethereal nothingness of time, or the afterlife, they leave a void, but she embarked on that journey, willingly and with dignity. Such was her strength, it took weeks for her to finally slip away. Covid was one of the strangest eras she lived through, she said, but McCarthyism remained one of the darkest. She left us during the protests in LA, but she passed the baton during her lifetime. When Frances wanted to make a change, or file a complaint, she wrote directly to the chief executive officer. She trained as an actor, appeared in a TV comedy pilot, and among her many career trajectories, worked for an organisation that found housing for people with low income. She described herself, jokingly, as 'shanty Irish' and me as 'lace-curtain Irish', even though she had a well-known penchant for Campbell's loose tea. I, meanwhile, scoured the internet for Barry's. She also taught me the difference between being alone and loneliness, and that the latter is an inside job She taught me about friendship, letting the right ones in, letting go of needing to be liked by others, and the importance of liking and accepting yourself for who you are. 'Once upon a time I used to pursue people who didn't like me,' she told me. 'If I finally had them in my life, what did I do? I had people in my life that I was so upset about and I had to pretend that I liked them, and pretend that I was whoever it was they wanted me to be. I don't have to do that any more. This is who I am. The people who do like me are the people I want in my life and I am delighted to have them.' She spoke in a slow, considered manner, in those aged, earthy tones. She also taught me the difference between being alone and loneliness, and that the latter is an inside job. 'I'm not uncomfortable being alone and I'm never bored,' she said. 'I accept my life a day at a time.' I felt guilty leaving New York, and our coterie of friends on the Upper West Side, but she said, 'Quentin, New York is my home. My roots are here. Your roots are in Ireland. That's your home.' I left a lot behind when I left Dublin, and I left a lot behind when I left New York. But her words made my decision easier. She knitted hats and scarfs for prisoners, and I took a couple of those, knitted with love and dedication, with me. [ Quentin Fottrell on a Dublin scam: After more than 10 years in New York, nothing like this had ever happened to me Opens in new window ] In school she was scolded by the nuns for having friends outside of her 'own kind'. She was friends with people of all religions and cultures – gay, straight, black, white, Jewish, Christian – and when she told the nun that the Bible preached inclusivity and generosity of spirit, the nun slapped her. But that slap only propelled her forward. Her parents weren't thrilled either, but she found her own family in the Metropolis. She married three times and her first husband was black; interracial marriage was not at all common in the 1940s, but she lived by her own moral compass and her own social mores. Of course, she still voted. She moved to New York at the end of the second World War, and she hung out in the West Village. When he missed the train home, James Baldwin crashed on her sofa. That was before he was a celebrated writer and cultural icon. But it was just a side note for Frances in a rich life that will mostly be known only to her. 'Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced,' Baldwin said. Frances never stopped learning and listening to jazz. She had a ferocious curiosity. When she could no longer read, friends read to her and she rented countless audiobooks from the library. Frances Ballantyne and Beth in Cafe Arte, New York During one of our last dinners, I told her I had to have potentially life-saving heart surgery . At the end of our meal, our friend Beth, Frances and I all held hands. We sat in silence. I needed calm, and I needed courage. We had more than 200 years between the three of us. And yes, it made a difference. The quiet moments with loved ones are filled with a powerful, healing energy if you choose to seek it. Here was a woman with a life force in the 0.02 per cent – that's roughly how many people live for a full century. She was cool as a cucumber with bad news, and she was cool as a cucumber with good news. She did regret never visiting Ireland, so memorialising her here is my gift to her. I'm not sure if Frances believed in an afterlife, but she talked about going to her cloud and, as our friends Beth and Kathrina reminded me, the first thing she wanted to do was apologise to anyone who needed an apology from her during her lifetime. In a world of selfies, Frances thought of how she could be of service to others, no matter their political beliefs. She worked hard to maintain humility. It was a daily practice. 'I am still interested in growing,' she said. 'I do have character defects that I'd like to get rid of. I need to change because I want to change.' She may indeed now be on her cloud and, even if it's only in my mind's eye, it makes me fear death that little bit less She did not complain, although she had plenty of reason to; she asked for help when needed and offered it to others when asked. She couldn't see, but she cooked every day and lived independently. But finally her time came. After days of semi-consciousness she had a lucid day and, when Kathrina put me on speakerphone, Frances said, 'Did you purchase your house yet?' Those were her last words to me. How could she care at a time like this, or even remember at a time like this that I was househunting? Because, simple as it seems, she was genuinely, wholeheartedly invested in other people. Some of Frances's ashes were scattered by friends near the Eleanor Roosevelt Monument in Riverside Park. She may indeed now be on her cloud and, even if it's only in my mind's eye, it makes me fear death that little bit less. If she can exit so gracefully, perhaps so can I. That's the hope, anyway. For Frances to have a spiritual connection, she needed a human connection. That might be why her landline almost never stopped ringing. There's one way I can keep her around, and make sure she is never far away during my own lifetime. Whenever I am faced with a challenging situation, I can ask, 'What would Frances do?' Frances Ballantyne, a New Yorker, was born on March 5th, 1925 and died on June 10th, 2025
The Guardian
04-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘The film wouldn't even be made today': the story behind Back to the Future at 40
The actor Lea Thompson has had a distinguished screen career but hesitated to share it with her daughters when they were growing up. 'I did not show them most of my stuff because I end up kissing people all the time and it was traumatic to my children,' she recalls. 'Even when they were little the headline was, 'Mom is kissing someone that's not Dad and it's making me cry!'' Thompson's most celebrated role would be especially hard to explain. As Lorraine Baines in Back to the Future, she falls in lust with her own son, Marty McFly, a teenage time traveller from 1985 who plunges into 1955 at the wheel of a DeLorean car. Back to the Future, released 40 years ago on Thursday, is both entirely of its time and entirely timeless. It was a box office summer smash, set a benchmark for time travel movies and was quoted by everyone from President Ronald Reagan to Avengers: Endgame. It is arguably a perfect film, without a duff note or a scene out of place, a fantastic parable as endlessly watchable as It's a Wonderful Life or Groundhog Day. It also, inevitably, reflects the preoccupations of its day. An early sequence features Libyan terrorists from the era of Muammar Gaddafi, a caricature wisely dropped from a stage musical adaptation. In one scene the young George McFly turns peeping tom as he spies on Lorraine getting undressed. To some, the film's ending equates personal fulfilment with Reagan-fuelled materialism. It caught lightning in a bottle in a way that is unrepeatable. 'If you made Back to the Future in 2025 and they went back 30 years, it would be 1995 and nothing would look that different,' Thompson, 64, says by phone from a shoot in Vancouver, Canada. 'The phones would be different but it wouldn't be like the strange difference between the 80s and the 50s and how different the world was.' Bob Gale, co-writer of the screenplay, agrees everything fell into the right place at the right time, including the central partnership between young Marty (Michael J Fox) and white-haired scientist Doc Brown (Christopher Lloyd). The 74-year-old says from Los Angeles: 'Oh man, the film wouldn't even be made today. We'd go into the studio and they'd say, what's the deal with this relationship between Marty and Doc? They'd start interpreting paedophilia or something. There would be a lot of things they have problems with.' Gale had met the film's director, Robert Zemeckis, at the USC School of Cinema in 1972 and together they sold several TV scripts to Universal Studios, caught the eye of Steven Spielberg and John Milius and collaborated on three films. The pair had always wanted to make a time travel movie but couldn't find the right hook. Then Gale had an epiphany. 'We put a time travel story on the back burner until I found my dad's high school yearbook and boom, that was when the lightning bolt hit me and I said, ha, this would be cool: kid goes back in time and ends up in high school with his dad!' Gale and Zemeckis pitched the script more than 40 times over four years but studios found it too risky or risque. But Spielberg saw its potential and came in as executive producer. After Zemeckis scored a hit with Romancing the Stone in 1984, Universal gave the green light. The character of Doc Brown was inspired by Gale's childhood neighbour, a photographer who showed him the 'magic' of developing pictures in a darkroom, and the educational TV show Mr Wizard which demonstrated scientific principles. Then Lloyd came in and added an interpretation based on part Albert Einstein, part Leopold Stokowski. Thompson was cast as Lorraine after a successful audition. She felt that her background as a ballet and modern dancer gave her a strong awareness of the movement and physicality required to play both versions of Lorraine: one young and airy, the other middle-aged and beaten down by life. 'I was perfectly poised for that character,' she says. 'I understood both the dark and the light of Lorraine McFly and understood the hilarity of being super sexually attracted to your son. I thought that was frickin' hilarious. I understood the subversive comedy of it.' Thompson has previously worked with Eric Stoltz, who was cast in the lead role of Marty at the behest of Sidney Sheinberg, a Universal executive who had nurtured Spielberg and put Jaws into production. But over weeks of filming, starting in November 1984, it became apparent that Stoltz's serious tone was not working. Gale recalls: 'He wasn't giving us the kind of humour that we thought the character should have. He actually thought the movie turned out to be a tragedy because he ends up in a 1985 where a lot of his life is different. People can argue about that: did the memories of his new past ripple into his brain, did he remember both his lives? That's an interesting conversation to have and it gets more interesting the more beer you drink.' Eventually it fell to Zemeckis to inform Stoltz that his services were no longer required. Gale continues: 'He said he thought that possibly Eric was relieved: it was not like a devastating blow to him. This is just hindsight and speculation but maybe Eric's agents thought that it would be a good career move for him to do a movie like this that had Spielberg involved. Who knows?' Stoltz's abrupt departure came as a shock to the rest of the cast. Thompson says: 'It was horrible. He was my friend and obviously a wonderful actor. Everybody wants to think that making a movie is fun and that we're laughing for the 14 hours we're standing in the middle of a street somewhere. 'But it's also scary because you need to feel like you've made a little family for that brief amount of time. So the minute someone gets fired, you're like, oh wait, this is a big business, this is serious, this is millions of dollars being spent.' Stoltz was replaced by the young Canadian actor Michael J Fox, whom Zemeckis and Gale had wanted in the first place, and several scenes had to be reshot. Fox was simultaneously working on the sitcom Family Ties so was often sleep-deprived. But his boundless charm, frazzled energy and comic timing – including ad libs – were the missing piece of the jigsaw. Thompson comments: 'He is gifted but he also worked extremely hard at his shtick like the great comedians of the 20s, 30s and 40s: the falling over, the double take, the spit take, the physical comedy, the working on a bit for hours and hours like the greats, like Laurel and Hardy and Charlie Chaplin. Michael understood that. 'Being a dancer, I was fascinated and kind of weirdly repelled because it didn't seem like the acting that we were all trying to emulate: the De Niro kind of super reality-based acting that we were in awe of in the 80s, coming out of the great films of the 70s. I feel like Eric Stoltz, who is a brilliant actor, was trying to do more of that. Michael was the face of this new acting, especially comedy acting, which was in a way a throwback and a different energy.' It was this lightness of touch that enabled Fox and Thompson to carry off moments that might otherwise have seemed weird, disturbing and oedipal. When 1950s Lorraine – who has no idea that Marty is her future son – eventually kisses him inside a car, she reports that it is like 'kissing my brother' and the romantic tension dissolves, much to the audience's relief. Thompson says: 'It was a difficult part and it was a very dangerous thread to put through a needle. I have to fall out of love with him just by kissing him and I remember Bob Zemeckis obsessing about that moment. It was also a hard shot to get because it was a vintage car and they couldn't take it apart. Bob was also worried about the moment when I had to fall back in love with George [Marty's father] after he punches Biff. 'For those moments to be so important is part of the beauty of the movie. These are 'small' people; these are not 'great' people; they're not doing 'great' things. These are people who live in a little tiny house in Hill Valley and to make the moments of falling out of love and falling in love so beautiful with that incredible score is fascinating.' Back to the Future was the biggest hit of the year, grossing more than $200m in the US and entering the cultural mainstream. When Doc asks Marty who is president in 1985, Marty replies Ronald Reagan and Brown says in disbelief: 'Ronald Reagan? The actor? Then who's vice-president? Jerry Lewis?' Reagan, a voracious film viewer, was so amused by the joke that he made the projectionist stop and rewind it. He went on to namecheck the film and quote its line, 'Where we're going, we don't need roads,' in his 1986 State of the Union address. Thompson, whose daughters are the actors Madelyn Deutch and Zoey Deutch, was amazed by Back to the Future's success. 'But when I look at the movie, I do understand the happy accident of why it's become the movie it's become to generation after generation. The themes are powerful. The execution was amazing. The casting was great. The idea was brilliant. It was a perfect script. Those things don't come together usually.' And if she had her own time machine, where would she go? 'If I could be a man, I might go back to Shakespeare but as a woman you don't want to go anywhere in time. Time has been hard on women. So for me, whenever I'm asked this question, it's not a lighthearted answer. I can only give you a political answer.' The film ends with Doc whisking Marty and girlfriend Jennifer into the DeLorean and taking off into the sky. But Gale points out that the message 'to be continued' was added only for the home video release, as a way to announce a sequel, rather than being in the original theatrical run. Back to the Future Part II, part of which takes place in 2015, brought back most of the main characters including the villain Biff Tannen, who becomes a successful businessman who opens a 27-storey casino and uses his money to gain political influence. Many viewers have drawn a comparison with Donald Trump. Gale explains: 'Biff in the first movie is not based on Donald Trump; Biff is just an archetype bully. When Biff owns a casino, there was a Trump influence in that, absolutely. Trump had to put his name on all of his hotels and his casinos and that's what Biff does too. 'But when people say, oh, Biff was based on Donald Trump, well, no, that wasn't the inspiration for the character. Everybody has a bully in their life and that's who Biff was. There's nothing that resembles Donald Trump in Biff in Part I.' Back to the Future Part III, in which Marty and Doc and thrown back to the old west, was released in 1990. A year later Fox was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease at the age of 29. He went public with his diagnosis in 1998 and became a prominent advocate for research and awareness. He also continued acting, with roles in shows such as The Good Wife and Curb Your Enthusiasm, and in October will publish a Back to the Future memoir entitled Future Boy. Thompson, whose brothers both have Parkinson's, sees Fox twice a year. 'He's endlessly inspiring. He's very smart and he's done the spiritual work, the psychological work on himself to not be bitter about something awful happening to him but also be honest: this sucks.' Time's arrow moves in one direction but Back to the Future found a way to stage a comeback. One night after seeing the Mel Brooks musical The Producers in New York, Zemeckis's wife Leslie suggested that Back to the Future would make a good musical. Gale duly wrote the book and was a producer of the show, which premiered in Manchester in 2020 and has since played in London, New York and around the world. Gale says: 'It was total euphoria. The first time I saw the dress rehearsal with the DeLorean, before we had an audience, I went out of my mind how great it was, and then to see the audience going completely out of their minds with everything was just such a joyous validation. 'I'm so blessed to have a job where I get to make people happy. That's a great thing to be able to do and get paid for that. I don't ever take any of this for granted. I'm having a great time and the idea that Back to the Future is still with us after all these years, as popular as it ever was, is a blessing. I think about it all the time that if we had not put Michael J Fox in the movie, you and I probably wouldn't even be having this conversation right now.' Why, indeed, are we still talking about Back to the Future four decades later? 'Every person in the world wonders, how did I get here, how did my parents meet? The idea that your parents were once children is staggering when you realise it when you're about seven or eight years old. 'Your parents are these godlike creatures, and they're always saying, well, when I was your age, and you're going, what are they talking about, how could they have ever been my age? Then at some point it all comes together. If you have a younger sibling and you're watching them grow up, you realise, oh, my God, my parents were once screw-ups like me!' And if Gale had a time machine, where would he go? 'I don't think I would go to the future because I'd be too scared,' he says. 'We all see what happens when you know too much about the future. My mom, before she was married, was a professional musician, a violinist, and she had a nightclub act in St Louis called Maxine and Her Men. I'd like to travel back in time to 1947 and see my mother performing in a nightclub. That's what I would do.'
