FIXATIONS : Messenger Who's Ahead of His Time : 'Back to the Future' buff Marc Goldstone warns Irvine residents that their city is being threatened by overdevelopment.

By JIM WASHBURN

March 25, 1992 12 AM PT

SPECIAL TO THE TIMES

IRVINE — Is life ever fair? Here I finally get to see what the world looks like from inside the sleek confines of a status-packed DeLorean, one of the finest cars ever tied up in a narcotics sting operation, and people are just pointing and laughing.

OK, some are gaping, guffawing, doing double-takes and falling off their skateboards, but none of the people we’re driving past in this verdant and typically characterless Irvine housing tract are reacting with the respectful, awe and resentment one would expect a stainless-steel power car to engender.

Perhaps that’s because Marc Goldstone has tricked out his early ‘80s DeLorean with fins, hoses, trash can sections and a coffee grinder so that it’s a spitting replica of Doc Brown’s balky time-traveling car from the “Back to the Future” series. Kids may love it, but the gadgetry makes the once-sexy auto look about as seductive as the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile.

“At first I was a little apprehensive,” Goldstone said about getting behind the wheel of his creation, “but at this point if someone looks at it like, ‘What a jerk! Who’d drive that thing?’ it’s counterbalanced by all the kids and the young at heart who enjoy it.”

Goldstone is a science-fiction buff, with a particular love for the “Back to the Future” films whose posters and 3-D lobby displays decorate his house. The 36-year-old bachelor considers himself a futurist, and, no great surprise, works in the computer industry, as principal design engineer of disc drives at Western Digital in Irvine. He is also a community activist, which gives him an interesting slant on his “Back to the Future” hobby.

Here’s his rap: “Marc Goldstone comes back from Irvine’s future in the year 2010. The Irvine general plan states that Irvine will be built out by that year, with a population of 250,000, more than double the 1990 population of 120,000. That’s right in the plan,” which he says was designed by the Irvine Co. “The reason I came traveling through time to 1992 in my ‘Back to the Future’ DeLorean is to let people know that if they get involved that they really can make a difference, and the people in the future are very upset with all the overdevelopment which was approved in the ‘90s.”

Goldstone’s is a frequently heard voice at Irvine City Council meetings, and he is running for the board of directors of the Woodbridge Village Assn., which represents some 22,000 residents. The longtime Republican is on the board of the slow-growth organization Irvine Tomorrow and admits to being disappointed that the group isn’t too big on adopting his sci-fi time travel theme in its campaign against Irvine Co. development.

Goldstone said: “They seem to think more conservatively than that, even though they’re painted to be radicals by the Irvine Co. (which wholly owns the city’s free weekly newspaper and its cable TV service). The others in Irvine Tomorrow are not sure that (using the DeLorean) would get the word out, or that people wouldn’t laugh at it.

“But I really feel that politics is supposed to be fun, and it isn’t fun any more at any level. It’s been made anything but fun, I think, because those in power don’t want people to get involved in it.”

Goldstone, meanwhile, is keen on the idea of parking his car in front of Irvine’s City Hall with a banner reading, ‘I’ve seen Irvine’s future and you’re ruining it.’ He also tried persuading a Times photographer to doctor photos to make it look as if he and the DeLorean were up in the sky, buzzing City Hall.

He says he’s always loved the look of the DeLoreans, and seeing one used in the first “Back to the Future” film convinced him to buy one in 1985. Since you can’t exactly pick up a time machine conversion kit at Johnny’s Speed and Chrome, Goldstone freeze-framed parts of the film on video and took exacting measurements off his screen, using the taillights to determine the scale. He then fabricated most of the parts himself in a machine shop. For the Mr. Fusion reactor mounted on the rear deck Goldstone used a Krupp coffee grinder, which is exactly what Universal used in the film.

Using a kitchen appliance as an atomic reactor is only fair, since a fair amount of the kitchen counter space in Goldstone’s roomy house is devoted to his attempt at a real fusion reactor, a mess of glass and coils intended to duplicate the famed, ill-fated Pons-Fleischman cold fusion experiment of a couple of years ago.

“I got palladium rods and platinum wire and I still have a quart of deuterium oxide heavy water. My neighbors would be happy to know that the experiment didn’t work.”

He thinks answers to Irvine’s and other cities’ woes can be gleaned from the “Future” films. In Goldstone’s ideal future, things would indeed run on non-polluting fusion power, and traffic would be eased by “telecommuting.”

“That solution came out in ‘Back to the Future Part 2,’ ” Goldstone said, “There’s a scene where Marty McFly Sr. in 2010 only has to walk into his living room to talk with his boss on a big TV screen.” (Not to be a downer on what our future holds, but in the film this wonderful system was being used by Marty’s Japanese boss to tell him he was fired.)

“I see telecommuting as the solution to getting people off the roads, so there’d be no need to pave over every square foot of Orange County,” Goldstone said.

He’s seen the “Back to the Future” trilogy dozens of times and even leaves the videodiscs running for his dogs--three mini-Samoyeds--to watch while he’s out doing his activist activities, which have included picketing Irvine Co. Homefinder offices and promoting initiatives to limit the company’s development plans.

If it’s the sneering Biff Tannen family that represents evil in the “Back to the Future” films, Goldstone seems to think the Irvine Co. is the real-life equivalent.

“I do not like those people at all, do not like the way they do business. But they who have the gold make the rules: The most we can do is deliver an inexpensive flyer or two to people’s doorsteps, while on the ballot measure election last year the Irvine Co. spent $70 per vote for each vote they got.

“We live in what I like to call the Plantation Irvine, and our taskmaster is (Irvine Co. chairman) Donald Bren. We’re indentured servants for 30 years, and, if we refinance, 30 more.”

He thinks crowded new company developments--”where you can practically reach out your bathroom window and hand a roll of toilet paper to your neighbor’--are destroying the environment and the quality of life in the city.

It’s only fair to grant the Irvine Co. equal time here, which we will gladly do as soon as Donald Bren glues a coffee grinder on his car or starts riding a hover board.

In the meantime, it should be pointed out that Goldstone does live in a house built by the Irvine Co., and likes it, and has abided in the city 13 years. And it’s never taken a time machine to get an inkling of where the city’s development plans were headed, or that there seems to be a controlling hand at work, seemingly dedicated to eliminating any spark of surprise or originality in the town. You only have to install a duck-shaped weather vane in your yard and the legal documents and blandishments begin to fly.

If I lived there I’d probably start nailing goofy stuff to my car too, just to get the feeling I still lived in America. Irvine may be fine for some--and Goldstone may feel he can make it fine for others--but as Orange County country musician Chris Gaffney recently opined, “I’d rather be where I can have deer horns on the garage, a tire swing, and be able to park my car wherever I want on the lawn.”