When I booked the tickets for Secret Cinema’s screening of Back to the Future, I covered my eyes. I didn’t look at the ticket confirmation on the screen that confirmed I would be paying a whopping £100 for two tickets, plus booking fee, I simple looked between my fingers for the button that said ‘confirm payment’ and clicked it.
I had been sat for about 30 minutes (plus two hours the day before) constantly refreshing multiple tabs on my computer desperately trying to get tickets. It was harder than getting tickets to Glastonbury, and even with my accompanying friend still a ‘maybe’ I took the plunge, grabbed what I could get and made it official, I was going back in time.
Needless to say I felt very foolish in the run-up to the event, which was still months away. First the internet was alive with the chaos and inconvenience of the booking system, then I endured constant emails about the costumes I needed to get and the fact that I was expected to travel across London, without my phone, and meet my friend at an undetermined location. Finally, a few weeks before the big day, the whole thing kicked off again after the last minute cancelling of the launch events. By this point I had pretty much kissed my £100 goodbye.
When we arrived at the event in early August, decked out in our 50s finery, phones stuffed into socks and new identities in hand (I was a student at Hill Valley High School but my unfortunate friend had been labelled a farm labourer) we were still a little unsure about what we saw. From a distance, the fenced-off site in a commercial part of east London looked like a particularly unimpressive fairground, but we joined the depressingly long queue to get inside, resigned to holding down hats and dresses against the wind.
As we waited, the first signs of the Secret Cinema began to show themselves, in the form of Biff and his bullying friends wending their way up the queue and picking on people. George McFly cycled past us, before getting stopped and pushed to the ground by Biff, and I suddenly began to worry that I hadn’t done my homework like the last email had told me to.
By the time we had shown our tickets and got through security I was skipping with excitement at the 50s world we were walking into. When you find a film that you love, and you watch it over and over so much that you learn the lines, you always dream about actually walking into it and being a part of it, and that is what Secret Cinema managed to give me. It was incredible.
We entered Hill Valley and passed Lorraine’s house, the Doc’s house and a few other local homes before reaching the town square. People were milling around talking to girls from the High School, buying drinks and snacks. Hungry, we wandered to a great little place we knew for a burger, Lou’s cafe.
The cafe was significantly scaled up from the one in the film, in order to fit everybody in, but it was pretty amazing inside. We got our burgers and took a seat, and were looking around in a slightly awestruck fashion when Goldie Wilson took a break from sweeping the floor to come over to chat to us. Fortunately my friend managed to keep his cool and hold a conversation with him, all I want to do was shout “that’s right, he’s going to be mayor!” in his face, and I’m guessing he’d already heard that several times that day.
After we’d eaten, we decided to check out the High School, as I was enrolled as a student, and wandered in to the long, low building off one side of the square. Inside was incredible, a long corridor of lockers led into the main hall of the school, in which the Enchantment Under the Sea dance was in full swing.
Back outside a while later, as we took in the sights of the town, the Doc roped us in to one of his hair-brained experiments and we followed Marty around for a little while as he tried to deal with the shock of being in 1955. It was really exciting having the characters milling around with us, even if their dialogue was a tad lost in the wind.
When the film started, the characters appeared again, and there was a general cry of glee as the dreaded Libyans crashed into the square and began tearing around after Marty in the Delorean. All the key parts of the film were played out before us, the chase around the square with Biff, the classic punch at the prom and the Doc swinging down a zip wire from the clock tower. Throughout the entire performance I was like a five year old in a sweet shop, my face painted with joy, mouth wide open, laughing and gasping at all the right moments.
Secret Cinema manage to create a totally absorbing cinema experience. Every detail was meticulously thought out, and the whole effect can only be described as magical. They manage to really put you in to your favourite films in a way I would never have thought possible.
Expensive it may have been, chaotic and fraught with potential disaster too, but it was absolutely amazing and I think it was worth every penny.
Emma Pocklington 