Back To The Future

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Hello, dear listeners, and welcome back to What Went Wrong, your favorite podcast, Full Stop, that just so happens to be about movies and how it's nearly impossible to make one, let alone a good one, let alone a classic in its genre, beloved by many, many millions of people that I think had a famously terrible production.

Maybe not terrible, A troubled production.

I'm one of your hosts, Lizzie, here as always with Chris Winterbauer.

And Chris, what do you have for us today?

We're going back, Lizzie.

We're going back 40 years.

It's the 40th anniversary.

40 years to Back to the Future.

And if Back to the Future were made today, it would send us back to 1995.

So if that doesn't make you feel old, I don't know what does.

But we are covering.

Robert Zemekis's Back to the Future, released 40 years ago.

As you said, Lizzie, a beloved film by many.

I'm assuming you had seen Back to the Future before.

What were your thoughts upon first watching it or re-watching it for the podcast?

I had seen Back to the Future before, not that many times, to be honest.

This is one that I didn't really grow up with.

I just think my family, this was like not a big movie in our house.

And I'm sacrificing myself on the pyre here right at the top.

I am.

I am somewhat underwhelmed by this movie.

Oh, no.

Get in the DeLorean.

Go back.

I'm sorry.

Go back.

Let me just.

Actually, well, okay, the first time I watched it, I was pretty underwhelmed by it.

I don't know if it's because the hype around it was so high and people love this movie so much and all you hear is like Marty McFly this, Marty McFly that.

And I watched it and I was like, that's it.

You know, as Peggy Lee said, is that all there is?

But I actually enjoyed it a lot more upon re-watching it for the podcast.

Obviously, I know there's a very famous little switcheroo that happens that I'm excited to learn more more about in terms of the casting in this movie.

And I was thinking a lot about that as I was watching it in terms of like, what, what was it about Michael J.

Fox that, you know, made him really perfect for this.

And he is.

And I think it's one of those things where like everybody else around him is way more fun to watch, but that's like, that's his job.

That's like, that's what that character is.

He's the straight man to everybody else.

And he does a really, really wonderful job in this, I think.

My biggest takeaway from this viewing is that that I loved Doc Brown.

I think this doesn't work without him and how much he's winking, including sometimes directly into the camera.

And I just thought Christopher Lloyd was an absolute joy.

So that's my take on Back to the Future.

It's it's fine.

Back to the Future.

It's fine.

Use that as your pull quote for the 40th anniversary release.

I similarly didn't watch this a ton growing up.

Within the science fiction genre, I was more of a Star Wars hound than a Back to the Future, although I...

Plus, too, Star Trek.

Yeah, I watched the trilogy and I really enjoyed these movies.

I want to save some of my thoughts because they actually mirror the thoughts of a couple people involved in the film.

And I had a really interesting time researching this project.

This is a movie that's a fantastic example of how

iterative the filmmaking process is.

And there are so many versions of this movie that almost were, and versions of this movie that nearly led to its demise and so it's a great example of what i love most about this podcast which is instances in which the making of the movie mirrors in many ways the themes of the movie itself and i think there is i know there is a trove treasure trove of information on this film online there are fan communities and subreddits and documentaries and books and there is so much.

I hope that I have found a couple of things that will be new to even the most die-hard

fan out there.

Maybe one thing only, but I'm excited to talk about it.

And I hope that if you guys enjoy this episode and if you like the movie, you will dive into the resources that we used for this podcast because they are all fantastic and incredibly well researched.

And we hope that this will serve as a jumping off point to dive deeper into the world back to the future.

I want to amend part of my earlier statement, Chris, before you dive into all of this, because I just realized sort of as you were talking about this and the themes of the movie being, you know, sort of almost like a butterfly effect thing that you're talking about.

And I realized in that moment.

this movie was maybe one of the first times that we've actually sort of seen the idea of the butterfly effect in kind of a comedic way.

And I think that we've seen it so many times since across movies and TV that maybe by the time I saw this, I was a little bit, it didn't feel so novel or clever to me.

It just felt like, yeah, obviously, like, you know, the thing about them disappearing from the picture, we've literally seen that across, you know, tons of TV shows and movies, but I think it didn't register for me that that probably came from this.

So I should give Back to the Future a little bit more credit.

Fair enough.

All right, the details.

Back to the Future is a science fiction comedy film directed by Robert Zemekis.

It was written by the two Bobs, as we'll call them, Robert Zemekis and Bob Gale, produced by Bob Gale and Neil Canton under the Amblin Pictures banner and distributed by Universal Pictures.

And, I should mention, very much ushered into existence or midwifed by Steven Spielberg.

We will get to his involvement.

It was released on July 3rd, 1985, and the film stars Michael J.

Fox as Marty McFly, Christopher Lloyd as Dr.

Emmett Brown or Doc, Leah Thompson, MVP, as Lorraine Baines.

Oh, Oh, really?

I love Leah Thompson.

Crispin Glover as George McFly, Thomas F.

Wilson as Biff Tannen, and many more.

And as always, because I forgot on one of our recent films to read it, the IMDb log line reads: Marty McFly, a 17-year-old high school student, is accidentally sent 30 years into the past in a time-traveling DeLorean invented by his close friend, the Maverick scientist, Doc Brown.

Pretty good.

Sources for today's episode include, but are not limited to, We Don't Need Roads, The Making of Back to the Future by Cassine Gaines, The Making of Back to the Future, The documentary, Lucky Man, a Memoir by Michael J.

Fox, Back to the Future, The Ultimate Visual History, written and compiled by Michael Kasterin with Randall Adamaniac, along with interviews, articles from the trades, etc., and many more.

And I really do recommend all of these books and the documentary.

They're so fun.

And the visual history in particular contains so many wonderful scans of storyboards, concept art, memos.

We'll get to a couple of them.

It is a really, really well archived visual history of the movie.

So, Lizzie, how did a couple of USC grads, fresh off a pair of flops, the studio's second-choice sitcom actor, and a script that went through more rewrites than Doc Brown did Plutonium, become arguably the most beloved time travel movie of all time outside of the house of Lizzie Bassett?

And to find out, we're going to need to travel back in time to 1971 when we were not born.

Now, Lizzie, one of the many rules of time travel, as we've learned, especially since Back to the Future, is that the main character tends to wind up in two places at the same time.

Right.

So one of the rules is don't contact yourself.

That could be bad.

Or your grandfather or your mom.

She might want to sleep with you.

So So it's only fitting that this episode begins with a young man named Bob meeting another young man named Bob.

The year was 1971, and Chicago-born Robert Bob Zemekis was a transfer student at the USC School of Cinematic Arts, and he was feeling a little out of place.

Because Lizzie, Bob Zemeckis was a popcorn guy.

He liked James Bond and Clint Eastwood.

Wasn't really into the French new wave.

Turns out one of his classmates felt the same way.

Bob Gale was one of the only other undergrads in a mostly grad class.

Now, Gale was a Missouri transplant, and he'd come to Hollywood with the childhood dream of working for Walt Disney.

He and Zemekis were outsiders with a shared vision of what a movie should be, and it's a vision I think you'll appreciate.

A movie, above all else, should be entertaining.

Yes, A plus.

A plus, five stars for the Bobs.

If it proved thought-provoking upon deeper reflection, That would be an added bonus.

Sure, icing on the cake.

Yeah.

Now, they lucked out in that they were not the exact same person.

Zemekis wanted to direct, Gail wanted to write.

They worked on each other's student films together, and they graduated with an extremely commercial spec script that they were ready to take to the town.

It was called Bordello of Blood, and it was a movie about vampiric sex workers.

So

they realized it might be a tough sell, and they decided to try to break into television instead.

Now, it should be mentioned, Bordello of Blood would get made into a movie nearly 25 years later, although it was completely rewritten and the Bobs were not involved i believe it was done under the tales from the crypt banner and starred dennis miller was it called bordello of blood it was called bordello of blood name i remember seeing it in the video store i have not watched it so bob zimekis had heard a mythical story a fantastical apocryphal story going around hollywood this was the story of how a young man named steven spielberg got his start in the biz

he just walked onto the universal lot and hung around so long that somebody assumed he worked there and they offered him a directing job.

Now, this is not true, to be clear.

But Bob said, maybe.

And he

walked onto the universal lot and started hanging out.

He did not get offered a directing job.

Did he get escorted out by armed personnel?

No, he was a tall white man.

He was fine.

He should probably be here.

He did get some hot gossip.

Colchak, the Night Stalker, which was a spiritual precursor to the X-Files that only won a season, was getting canceled.

So longtime writers from the show were jumping ship, and Zemekis saw an opportunity.

So he went back to Bob Gale and he said, We got to write a treatment for Kolchak the Nightstalker.

He wrote it.

They took it to Universal and Universal bought it from the guy that had just snuck onto their lot.

The Bobs were in.

God damn it.

This, you can't.

1971.

Anymore.

I wish you could.

Yeah.

So Zemekis and Gale write a couple more scripts for the Universal Television Division for shows like McCloud and Get Christy Love.

These are both procedurals at the end of the day.

They're police crime dramas.

One is starring Dennis Weaver and the other one starred Teresa Graves.

And it was actually pretty revolutionary because it was the second black female lead in a non-stereotypical role for a U.S.

weekly series.

So Universal decides, these guys are talented.

Let's lock them down.

They offer the Bobs a seven-year contract to write for the studio's NBC TV programming.

So they would be shuffled across whatever shows Universal needed to fill.

Each would get an annual salary of $50,000, which may not sound like a lot in today's time.

No, in the 70s, that is a lot.

Mid-1970s, the median household income was just over $11,000.

And if you simply adjust for inflation, this is roughly equivalent to a $350,000 salary each today.

Fantastic.

For seven years.

But the Bobs said said no thanks whoa

because they didn't want to make television lizzy they wanted to make movies and the bobs knew that there was one thing more valuable than money what's that ownership time

time

and it turns out they were in the right place at the right time now Bob Zemeckis did meet the mythical hero of the Steven Spielberg origin story, Steven Spielberg, in 1974 at at a screening of the Sugarland Express, which was his first theatrical feature.

But everything changed in 1975.

Lizzie, Steven Spielberg, 1975, summer, give it to me.

What do we got?

Donna.

What do we got?

Dana, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, jaws.

Jaws.

That was the theme song.

Jaws.

I wish.

That would be so good.

So in the summer of 1975, Steven Spielberg's Jaws debuts to record box office numbers.

We don't need to go go into this now.

We have an episode that covers the film, but it would be the highest-grossing film of all time for a couple of years until Star Wars.

And it proved a very simple formula.

Action, adventure, high-concept hook, big-time marketing, wide release.

The Summer Blockbuster was born.

And that's when the Bobs and Steven almost killed it.

So around this time, Zemekis and Gale took a spec script called Tank to John Milius.

Now, Milius would go on to be nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay for his work on Apocalypse Now, which he co-wrote with Francis Ford Coppola.

But at this point in time, he's most famous for writing Jeremiah Johnson, the first two dirty hairy films, and he'd made his directorial debut with Dillinger in 1973.

They met him through USC and they were hoping that Milius would produce it.

I cannot figure out what this movie was about.

I'm assuming it's military-themed in some way.

If anybody knows.

It's called Tank and it's involving John Milius.

Yeah.

It's a bunch of guys in a tank smoking cigars.

That's probably what the movie is.

If anybody, by the way, wants a reference point for John Milius, I could be wrong about this, but I believe that Walter from the Big Lebowski is loosely based upon John Millius.

1,000% based on John Goodman's character.

It's totally John Millius.

I didn't watch my bodies die face down in the mod.

Yes, John Millius.

So Milius did not like Tank, but he did like the Bobs' writing.

So as Zemekis later said, Milius asked them, have you guys got any other ideas for any movies?

And we came up with this outrageous concept about hysteria on the home front in the days following Pearl Harbor.

Lizzie, any idea where we're going?

A movie that takes place during 1941?

1941?

Bingo!

This idea became 1941, an amalgamation of three real events.

A Japanese submarine that was sighted off the coast of Santa Barbara in February of 1942, which led to the great Los Angeles air raid, in which flat cannons were fired in the air at basically nothing, and the Zoot Suit riots of 1943.

So Millius agrees to produce this.

They take the script to Steven Spielberg while they were skeet shooting.

John Milius and Steven Spielberg loved to go skeet shooting.

Also, little aside, Quentin Tarantino, first time he met Spielberg, skeet shooting with John Milius and Steven Spielberg.

Oh, we got to go skeet shooting with John Milius.

I feel like we're going to die.

Yeah, for sure.

Spielberg liked the set pieces, but he did tell Empire that the script he was given was not a comedy at first.

They then tried to make it into a comedy, which may explain the confusion upon its release.

Yeah.

We will cover this film.

1941 was Steven Spielberg's first first certified big-time flopper TM.

The studio tinkered and forced the running time down, and what should have been the Bobs' first big blockbuster fizzled at the box office.

The Bobs had turned down seven years of security for a movie the New York Times called as much fun as a 40-pound wristwatch.

Not quite.

The Bobs were smart, Lizzie, and they had greater ambitions than providing Steven Spielberg scripts.

They had lined up 1978's I Want to Hold Your Hand for Universal, and they followed that up with 1980's Used Cars for Columbia.

Have you ever seen I Want to Hold Your Hand or Used Cars?

No.

Neither were particularly popular upon their release, but I watched them for the podcast, and they're very informative as to how we get to Back to the Future.

I Want to Hold Your Hand is basically an American graffiti ripoff.

Ripoff is ungenerous.

It's about six teenagers from New Jersey who run off to try to see the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan show.

Tickets be damned.

One thing that's really interesting about I Want to Hold Your Hand, it's very funny, it's very charming, and they take like a Ben-Hur approach of never showing the Beatles in the way that you never see Jesus.

Oh, yeah, you can't.

Which is very funny.

You do see them in archival footage and they do voice reenactments, etc.

One thing that's really interesting, so first of all, the movie stars, amongst other people, Wendy Joe Sperber, who plays Marty's sister in Back to the Future.

Oh, okay.

She's so funny in I Want to Hold Your Hand.

She's funny in the like one scene she's in and Back to the Future, too, two scenes.

Yes, and she's hilarious, and she's in love with Paul, and she's trying to get him by all means possible.

And one thing that I think is interesting, not that this is some sort of feminist movie, but the female characters are, I think, written very well and given a lot to do.

It's almost like a bridesmaid-style humor with them.

There's one scene where one of the young women has gotten into the Beatles' hotel room, and she's just like oggling all of their things, and then like borderline making love to one of their guitars.

And then she realizes that their food has been left out, and she just throws the guitar on on the floor and starts licking their cups.

And it's just like, it's so over the top, but it is pretty funny.

And so then used cars feels like this 180 from I Want to Hold Your Hand.

Used Cars stars a young Kurt Russell, who is very, very charming in the movie as this smarmy used car salesman who's attempting to kind of weaken at Bernie's his dead boss's car shop.

Basically, he's trying to raise a bunch of money so he can become a politician.

It's very convoluted.

Sounds like he would absolutely crush that.

He's great.

In my opinion, the movie's pretty juvenile and it's actually pretty mean-spirited.

This is a hard R black comedy.

It feels much more national lampoon.

There is excessive nudity.

There's just an extended sequence of this woman nude on national television and we're just cutting to different homes where all the little boys are like, dad, look, bear tits.

And the dads are staring and the wives are getting angry.

It just feels very much like an unusual departure.

Well, they were trying something else.

They were.

No, they were.

They were trying to prove we could do both of these things.

And this is very much the era of Animal House, so I think it makes sense.

But what I want to point out is the two films in terms of theme very much represent, I think, two halves of Back to the Future.

You have a nostalgic look at the America of the past, and you have a very cynical look at the corrupt America, the decaying America of the present, from the perspective of the filmmakers.

So both films were marginally better received critically than 1941.

I think especially I Want to Hold Your Hand and Used Cars has become a cult classic.

But they couldn't find their audience.

As Bob Gale later said, quote, it wasn't that hand and used cars weren't well received.

We had dynamite sneak previews for both.

We simply never had audiences show up on opening day, end quote.

But Lizzie, sometimes an audience of one is enough.

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Now, we've talked a little bit about Frank Price at Columbia.

Like the Bobs, he had gotten his start in television at Universal, but he had taken that salary job that they had passed.

So he had been in TV for 17 years when he took the leap to move into features and he became the president of Columbia Pictures.

Maybe it was his lack of experience in film.

Maybe he was just risk tolerant.

Maybe he was trying to make up for lost time.

but he became known for taking big swings on movies that other people wouldn't necessarily greenlight.

So a little bit of a maybe Alan Ladd Jr.

streak to him.

Kramer vs.

Kramer, Tootsie, Gandhi, the Karate Kid, Ghostbusters, if you remember.

So in 1980, Frank Price is two years into his role at Columbia.

He has fallen in love with used cars.

He greenlit it.

And he calls up the Bobs and he asks them the question that every writer and director in Hollywood wants to hear.

What's next?

Now, Lizzie, you went to college.

You went to college out of state, I believe, too.

I did.

Yes, indeed.

Would you agree that there is a weird form of time travel that takes place when you've left home and you return after a period of time for the first time?

Of course.

Yes.

Kind of feels like you're stepping straight back into the past.

At least I've felt that way.

Going back to my twin bed.

Right.

Yes.

Yeah.

The twin bed, the day bed, you know, the basement, the attic, the little little hole under the stairs, like Harry Potter, wherever it is.

The closet that my daughter actually lives in right now.

Yes.

Exactly.

I'm very much guessing that this is what writer Bob Gale felt when he went back to St.

Louis, Missouri in the summer of 1980.

He'd gone to the same high school as his dad, something I did, and found himself thumbing through his old man's yearbook.

And he realized, My dad was class president?

He'd had no idea that his dad was class president of his high school.

And Bob Gale had hated his class president.

And then he wondered, would I have hated my dad?

if we'd gone to high school together?

Would we have been friends?

And I will say, this is the number one question that men everywhere think about all the time.

Would I have been friends with my dad if we were the same age?

Male listeners, please let us know.

This is something I think about constantly.

Has never crossed my mind.

Well, you're more secure than we are.

It was an oddly pure, in my opinion, universal thought, as he later said, quote, all of us have that revelation when we understand that our parents were young once too.

That's a big moment.

Then there is this message that we all have control over our destinies.

I thought we could dramatize those two things.

End quote.

And Bob Zemekis had a really sweet angle to punch it up a notch, Lizzie, as he later said, what if your mom went to the same high school?

What if it turned out that she was the school slut?

Is that, well, that's not what we wind up with.

No, no, I think Gail said, we can probably do better than that, but yes and, and let's keep going.

Bit of a no-but.

Yes.

Yeah.

Yeah.

No, but.

So Gail and Zemekis had been toying with a time travel movie for years, but they had yet to come up with a good hook.

And all of a sudden, this is a good hook.

What if you went back and you got to go to high school with your parents?

It's a fun idea.

On paper, their timing couldn't have been better.

So Lizzie, at the beginning, you kind of mentioned, was this movie seminal in some way to the time travel genre?

And I think that in a number of ways, it is that we'll get to.

But in terms of timing, it actually, I think, two movies greased the wheels for it in in a big way.

And let's talk briefly about the history of time travel movies.

So time travel on film through the mid-1950s was really more of a wish fulfillment fantasy subgenre than it was science fiction.

So, right, you're traveling back in time through dreams.

You're traveling back in time because you get knocked on the head, magical villages, genies, clothing, descendants swapping places with their ancestors, lots of fantastical devices.

In fact, do you know which book most time travel movies technically were based on between 1901 and 1955?

And it's kind of time travel because you're only observing the past.

A Christmas Carol.

A Christmas Carol.

The majority of time travel movies.

Yeah, well, it makes sense.

Technically.

It's a wonderful life.

Yeah.

Yeah, exactly.

Scrooge, there were a number of different names.

And then there were a number of movies based on the Mark Twain novel, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, in which a mechanic is hit on the head, transported back to King Arthur's reign.

And there's a bunch of Looney Looney Tunes cartoons based on that.

So 1950s, Hollywood embraces the atomic age and all of the anxieties that come with it, right?

We're embracing science.

You can split the atom, you can travel to space.

And this is when we start getting our first sci-fi-based time travel films.

They're oftentimes low budget, B-movie fair, World Without End, Terror from the Year 5000, Beyond the Time Barrier.

And of course, We finally get an adaptation of H.G.

Wells's The Time Machine, which had been written in 1895.

The movie comes, George Powell directs it in 1960.

I think the most important film in this run is actually Chris Marker's photo montage, La Gette, which I'm not sure if you've seen it, Lizzie, but

have you seen 12 Monkeys?

Yes.

Yeah, so Terry Gilliam's 12 Monkeys is based on Chris Marker's La Jette.

It's one of the first stable time loop movies where in trying to go change the past, you ensure that the future that you've come from happens.

So the loop is the character has witnessed his own death, spoiler alert, and he completes the circle through the movie.

It's really, Lagete's incredible.

It's so beautiful.

It's only 28 minutes long.

It's technically a photo montage.

So it's sound and music, and then it's still images for the most part that you're looking at.

We get the first run of blockbuster time travel movies, I would say, with Planet of the Apes and its sequels.

So that's 1968 to 72, kind of sort of 2001, a space odyssey with the, you know, light travel at the end.

But there weren't many recent examples of time travel when the Bobs take their idea and pitch it at Columbia.

You have Superman, 1978.

He kind of does time travel at the end of the movie.

But Frank Price is intrigued, I think, because, again, it's more of a teen movie than necessarily a time travel movie at this point in time.

They're suggesting he's going back to high school to spend time in high school.

And we have a lot of successful teen movies coming out around this time.

And I think that something like Animal House would be an example.

American Graffiti had come years earlier, but you're about to start going into the big national lampoon run, Fast Times at Ridgemont High.

Anywho, by the fall of 1980, they have a two-step deal with Columbia.

Basically, you'll get paid for a first draft and you'll get paid for a rewrite.

And then we'll decide if we're going to greenlight your movie.

And the movie has a really great name.

And it sounds like a turd going through time because it's called Professor Brown Visits the Future,

which is my favorite name.

The movie was really, really hard to write.

So they use this index card method to keep track of all the causally linked elements of the film between the future and the past.

You know, Marty inventing rock and roll, although in the very first draft, I believe he actually uninvents rock and roll accidentally.

I'm sure we'll talk about that scene later.

That's one of the few in the movie that does not age super well.

There's a couple funny things about that.

There's some smart decisions that they make, and then there are a couple of funny ones that are, I think, inadvertently ironic in what they're presenting.

They've already been inventing skateboarding.

The first draft takes them about five months to write.

Columbia gives them some notes.

They do a second draft that takes about six weeks.

And I'd like to spend just a quick moment on this draft because this is where maybe I can provide a little insight that doesn't already exist online.

So there's a lot about Back to the Future online, including five drafts that I could find of the scripts.

There's the first draft dated February 2nd, 1981.

There is a quote revised first draft.

That's October 31st, 1984.

I think that's technically actually a third draft or like a second and a half draft.

There's then what's called the third draft, November 7th, 1984, the fourth draft, December 10th, 1984, and the revised fourth draft, April 16th, 1985.

Everything from 1984 or five that I just mentioned came either during pre-production or production on the film.

So what's missing from here is the second draft that they took to Columbia in the spring of 1981.

You can't find this online, but they had it at the Writers Guild Library.

And so I went there and I I read it and it's really interesting.

And it was a lot of fun to go to the Writers Guild Library.

It's in Los Angeles and you don't have to be a member to go.

So you guys can make an appointment and you can go and you can read scripts.

That's so cool.

So I'd like to tell you a few things about this draft and we'll talk more about the differences as we go through the movie and the making of it.

So like in the first draft, Marty and Doc are running a bootleg VHS pirating business.

That is how they are funding Doc's continued endeavors and Marty, his kind of day-to-day life.

It begins with Marty pirating a copy of Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

Fun little reference to Steven Spielberg.

Marty does not wear a vest.

He wears a silver Porsche jacket.

He does play the guitar.

He practices Chuck Berry.

Professor Emmett Brown owns a chimp named Shemp.

There is no dog named Einstein.

There is not a DeLorean.

The Time Machine is described as, quote, a morass of equipment of 1940s and 50s vintage that looks like something out of amazing stories or weird science comics.

A series of lenses is the final end to the maze, indicating that a ray of some sort is to be beamed down on whatever.

It looks like it might be a time machine.

End quote.

Biff Tannen was a security guard in the first draft.

He's a police officer in the second draft.

He is more bullying Marty

and not George in this draft.

The Libyan terrorists are agents Reese and Foley from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

And there are a bunch of other differences that are a little more minor, including a raunchier tone.

Marty bootlegs a porn film in the first draft.

And then in the second draft, he gives Biff Tannon a copy of Star Wars for his niece that Marty reveals to be deep throat.

The way that his mother comes on to him is much more graphic.

Oh, no.

And the entire film is built around nuclear tests as a plot device that will eventually send Marty back to the future.

So they established that Marty's watching a lecture on nuclear testing and a video on nuclear testing at school, and the the teachers freaked out about how bad the future is going to be.

And then at the end of the film, Marty and Doc leave the town, they leave Hill Valley to go to Nevada to utilize the power of a nuclear test to activate the time machine to send Marty back to the future.

So you leave the town, there's no clock tower, there's no lightning.

And I think the biggest difference I felt, aside from any superficial, you know, factual difference or character difference, is that regret really permeates this version of the story.

Professor Brown regrets the family fortune that he wasted.

George McFly regrets the fighter that he never became.

He had a dream of becoming a boxer that he never realized.

Mary Ellen, Marty's mom, regrets the husband that she's lost.

His brother, Dave, seems to regret the childhood that got cut short by having his kids young.

The teacher, Mr.

Arkey, regrets the loss of this bright, shiny future for humanity that he'd been promised.

And there's this real sense of generations looking past one another.

Marty looking past his parents, were they ever really alive?

And And then when he gets back to the 50s, there's a Saturday evening post headline that says, quote, what's wrong with the younger generation?

End quote.

It's a darker-toned movie.

And I actually do think Back to the Future is much darker than people think.

Yeah.

I mean, there's one particular plot line that is very dark.

Yes.

And the Bobs, again, want to emphasize we're writing this.

in the midst of a very weak economy and a very strong scrutiny of the American dream.

So unemployment heading into 1981 hovered around 7.5%.

Inflation Inflation had spiked at the end of the 1970s.

It had hit 11% in June of 79.

So in the spring of 81, they sent Back to the Future into the studio.

With two commercial strikes against them, they needed a hit.

They needed a summer blockbuster.

But time, Lizzie, had passed them by.

Because Columbia did not give Bobs the green light, they gave them the boot.

According to Bob Gale, the studio told them, well, it's a really nice, sweet story, but we're kind of looking for raunchier comedies these days.

No thanks.

thanks, we're going to pass on this.

So they took it around town to rival studios.

The response was largely the same.

The American economy took a nosedive.

We went into a recession.

Unemployment hit 10%.

The Bobs hired a new agent.

A year later, he sent it back around town.

And Universal executive Ned Tannin sent back a note:

We didn't like it the first time, pass, end quote.

Yikes.

Bob Gale said that they received over 40 rejections.

Wow.

It's so interesting that the like recession, loss of jobs, sort of like everything being down then translates into like, nah, we want it to be like, you know, more, more boobs, more boobs.

And which I get, I mean, listen, I understand.

I see how the red string connects the dots.

I wonder, I mean, are we headed into?

It was not escapism in quite the same way that I think the studios wanted.

It felt a little bit more reflective of that mood at the time, like you're saying.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, and also if the whole thing is like sort of, which you still get a little bit of, but if the whole thing is looking back and being like, what have our kids become?

Like, where is our future headed?

And this sort of fear of the future at every turn, like, you don't really want that.

If you're where we are now, I think we're all a little afraid about the future.

I agree.

So the Bobs took the script to Steven Spielberg.

And to be clear, they probably took it to him earlier in this process.

He was proving that he was big time flopper proof and recession proof Lizzie with 1981s, Indiana Jones, and the Raiders of the Lost Ark, which was making boatloads of money.

So as he later put it, the Bobs actually wanted him not to produce the movie, but just to gut check the script.

I think they were feeling really disoriented that nobody seemed to like this idea.

Here's what Spielberg said.

They told him, nobody gets this.

Maybe we're crazy.

Will you read this and let us know what you think?

And I read it, and it was a very unusual story.

And yet it was based on a lot of old-fashioned principles of family, coming of age, getting your first car, all the dreams and desires that you have for your own life, the dreams and desires that your parents might have, but didn't succeed in realizing.

And it was about the generation gap.

And that was all done through this amazing object lesson, which was an accidental trip to the past.

So Spielberg really seems to have understood the project, and he offered.

to produce the movie, but the Bobs were hesitant because they didn't want to burden Spielberg with another box office bomb.

Basically, Zemeka said to him: if I can't make a movie without Spielberg attached to it, I will never have any success in this industry.

And if I make another movie that you have midwifed into existence and it bombs, my career is over, which Spielberg basically agreed with.

Yeah, I mean, that's true.

So they took the script to Disney because most of the studios were saying it's just not raunchy enough for us.

But it was way too raunchy for Disney.

The incestuous running gag of Marty being hit on by his mom was brutal.

And the description is far more graphic in that second draft than it is in the final film.

She launches herself onto Marty, puts his hands on her breasts, and basically goes to town on him.

It still ends in the same way where she pulls back.

She says, this is wrong.

It's like, you're my father or my brother, which I think is a good save.

But the script couldn't find a home.

Too hot, too cold, not quite right.

And Zemekis had another theory, which is he and Gail were unproven and they were trying to do something in a semi-unproven genre they were kind of mixing the wish fulfillment nostalgia of the fantasy time travel with the hard science fiction of the more sci-fi time travel and also correct me if i'm wrong but this doesn't sound like a super cheap movie on the page either especially not this draft because they end up doing a nuclear explosion in order to send the time machine back in time so the final film would end up being smaller.

So he and Bob Gale nearly got another movie going, like this 20-set gangster movie, but the the studio pulled the plug.

And Zemeckis is really depressed at this point.

And he says, look, I just need to direct the next good script that comes across my desk.

And he lucks out because the next script that comes across his desk is Romancing the Stone.

Oh, there you go.

Michael Douglas, Kathleen Turner, Danny DeVito, kind of a ripoff of Indiana Jones with like a fun female perspective.

I love Romancing the Stone.

I do too.

It's so fun.

So Michael Douglas hired Zemekis, I think both because he was a Spielberg protege and because Douglas had liked used cars.

And you can definitely see some of Kurt Russell's character in Michael Douglas' character in Romancing the Stone.

They have the same hair to a certain extent.

Yes, yes, yes.

So Zemekis knows that if he pulls off stone, he can get the green light on this dream project he's been working on for a while.

But the dream project turns out to have been Cocoon.

Oh.

So I guess he was also developing Cocoon at the same time.

So he directs Romancing the Stone.

20th Century Fox, which produced Romancing the Stone, sees a rough cut of it and they hate it.

So they fire fire Zemekis from Cocoon and bring in Ron Howard, which then frees Zemekis up to go back out with Back to the Future.

Wow.

Okay.

So then Romancing the Stone comes out, defies studio expectations, and it's $75 million at the box office against a $10 million budget.

And all of a sudden, Bob Zemeckis is a hit filmmaker.

Great.

So they go back to Spielberg.

They set up Back to the Future under Amblin.

It's going to be the first Amblin film not directed by Spielberg.

And this is a very powerful combo, Bob Simekis and Steven Spielberg.

But Universal, which will distribute the film, has a couple of conditions, Lizzie.

Studio head Sid Sheinberg, who had been the first person to give Steven Spielberg his first shot, has some notes.

Number one, Marty cannot be a video pirate bootlegging pornos in this movie.

Check, got it.

Good note.

Yeah.

Number two, Coca-Cola was used as the secret ingredient to power the time machine along with plutonium in the first one.

No, no, no.

Nope, can't do that.

Also, Coca-Cola owns rival studio Columbia.

We're not going to give Coca-Cola free marketing.

Get him out of here.

That's right.

Call up Joan Crawford on the board of Pepsi.

Yeah.

Number three,

and you're going to love this one, is a very smart note.

Professor Brown prof isn't catchy.

Marty should call him Doc.

I do love that note.

They're right.

Good note, Sid.

Number four, get rid of the chimp.

Movies with chimps don't make money.

To which Zemekis apparently tried to counter, what about every which way but loose and any which way you can with Clint Eastwood?

To which Sid Sheinberg apparently said, That sir was an orangutan.

True.

Also, that gym will rip your face off.

You don't need it in there.

Get it out of there.

Change Marty's mother's name from Mary Ellen to Lorraine, which was, of course, Sid Scheinberg's wife's name, actress Lorraine Gary, who is Roy Scheider's wife and Jaws, among many other roles.

Yes, she's great.

And most important, Back to the Future was going to come out no later than Memorial Day, 1985, less than a year away.

Here we go.

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Time was against them, but they knew who they wanted for their Marty.

Producer Kathleen Kennedy has said that from the beginning, everybody wanted Michael J.

Fox.

Oh, but he wasn't available.

I didn't realize that he was.

The first, so hold on.

Please.

Walk me a little bit through because I don't know a lot about Michael J.

Fox.

This is pretty much my only reference point for him.

I thought this was like his big breakout.

It was.

Okay.

It was theatrically.

So he had had two theatrical releases before this film, Midnight Madness and Class of 84, neither of which was a hit, but he was minting it on television.

The 23-year-old boy Wonder was most famous for his role as Alex P.

Keaton, a young Republican whose embrace of Reaganomics confuses his hippie baby boomer parents on the hit series Family Ties.

That's right.

Okay.

This show, interestingly, meditated on the American social shift from hippier liberalism of the 60s and 70s to the Reagan-era conservatism of the 80s.

Right.

So there are some similar themes to Back to the Future.

Now,

I want to be clear.

Family Ties was popular, but the show wouldn't shoot up the charts until after Fox was in Back to the Future.

So I believe it was the 84-85 season.

So this is while they're casting it, Fox is blowing up.

It shoots up to become the fifth highest rated primetime television show.

It has a Nielsen rating of 22.1, which means 22.1% of all households with a TV are tuned into that show.

Wow.

I think it would become the second highest rated show behind the Cosby show the following year.

And Michael J.

Fox is, I think, universally beloved as kind of the show's MVP.

He's the standout of this television show.

Yeah, I don't know anybody else on that show.

That's the only one I know.

Meredith Baxter, his father is played by Michael Gross, who's maybe best known, at least to folks in my generation, as survivalist Bert Gummer in the Tremors franchise.

And his younger sister is played by Justine Bateman, filmmaker, actress, and older sibling of Jason Bateman.

So Spielberg calls up Family Ties creator Gary Goldberg.

He's a friend of Spielberg's and he's apparently Spielberg's neighbor.

And he asks him, hey, look, we've got this script.

It's called Back to the Future.

Bob Zemekis is directing it.

Can you share it with Michael J.

Fox?

We We think he'd be perfect.

Gary's like, yeah, let me read it.

And Gary reads it and he thinks, this script's amazing.

There is no way I am going to give this to the lead of my television show.

Whoa.

So he decides not to show it to Fox.

He doesn't want him to be distracted by some time travel nonsense.

And Fox is under contract to make family ties.

So casting begins because Michael J.

Fox is not available.

That is...

Chate.

Every young actor in Hollywood, according to producer Frank Marshall, wanted to to play Marty McFly.

You can see many of these auditions online.

Let's discuss a few visions of the future that almost were.

Johnny Depp.

It just, it would have a very different energy.

John Cusack.

Okay, would have been great.

Charlie Sheen and John Cryer.

Yeah.

Yeah, sure.

George Newburn, you might not recognize his name, but have you seen Father of the Bride?

Yes.

He plays Brian McKenzie, her fiancé, love interest.

Okay.

Ben Stiller.

Okay.

Very young Ben Stiller.

I mean, yes, would have been great.

Again, very different energy, a darker energy, I think.

C.

Thomas Howell and Eric Stoltz, who's probably the name that you recognize.

That is the one, yes.

All right.

So Zemekis and Gail also visited editor Arthur Schmidt while he was cutting 1984's Firstborn to check out footage of Christopher Collette and Robert Downey Jr.

Okay, also would have been great.

Downey Jr., I think could have have been fun.

Zavekis didn't like either of them for Marty.

He later did hire Schmidt as the editor for Back to the Future.

So that was a very fruitful visit.

So the consensus pick out of this whole list was C.

Thomas Howell.

And he was breaking out.

If you remember Pony Boy Curtis and The Outsiders, that was his kind of big breakout role.

And then he starred opposite Patrick Swayze and Jamie Lee Curtis in 1984's Grand View USA.

And then he was in Red Dolly with Swayze and Charlie Sheen.

He's very cute.

Very, very cute.

Yes.

He's very cute, but still a little nerdy.

And he does have a good, fun, comedic energy.

John Cryer seems kind of similar to me in his energy.

Yeah, C.

Thomas Howell has more of like, yeah,

he's got that energy where it's like, girls would probably still have posters of him, you know?

I agree.

No disrespect to John Cryer.

No, John Cryer, very handsome man.

No disrespect at all.

But he had been kind of typecast with the ducky, you know, sort of thing.

Yes.

Most important to our story, Zemekis and Gail and others felt that C.

Thomas Howell actually had the funniest audition.

And I want to emphasize that fact because this movie is surprisingly dark.

The movie is very light on its feet, but the vision of the future or the present is bleak at the beginning of the film.

And at the end.

Alcoholism, regret, social and moral decay, and the vision of the past, although aesthetically attractive, is also rough.

You have extreme bullying, harassment, misogyny, racism, segregation, attempted rape.

Sexual assault.

Yeah.

By the way, attempted rape, which in the second, first or second draft, I can't remember, Mary Ellen says specifically, Biff Tannon.

So Biff tries to rape her twice.

And she actually out loud says, geez, I just needed a ride home.

I'm paraphrasing.

And this guy tries to rape me.

And they kind of just, you know, play it off and they keep going.

Well, they also play it off in this, where at the end, she's still just like, oh, Biff, you know.

The funny rapist who waxes my car.

Well, that was the weird thing about the very end of the movie.

It's like either an extreme power play or just some trauma repression at the end of the film.

So the movie has a breezy quality in its finished execution, but I think that's really a consequence of the way in which the movie's shot and the way the performances are given.

Yes.

Because the subject matter itself could be really heavy.

I think there's a couple of performances that give it enough zaniness that it doesn't feel super dark.

And to me, those are Doc Brown, Crispin Glover as George McFly, and to a certain extent, resident rapist Biff Tannon as well.

Tom Wilson, yes.

Yes, who I also absolutely love on Freaks and Geeks.

He is so good as the gym teacher.

I think he's very, I mean, it's an unsavory role, but he's really good.

Oh, he's great in this.

He's great.

So Sid Scheinberg did not agree with C.

Thomas Howell as Marty McFly.

Actor Eric Stoltz had just shot Mask for Universal Opposite Share.

Have you seen Mask, Liz?

Yeah, that's a very serious movie.

It is.

It's a very heavy movie.

And Eric Stoltz is fantastic in that movie.

And so Scheinberg was certain.

Mask had not been released, but he had seen the dailies.

Maybe, I don't know if he'd seen a rough cut by this point.

He was convinced.

Stoltz is a star, and Stoltz is very handsome.

I think Stoltz is more handsome than Michael J.

Fox.

He's like a classic, more of a classic movie star cutout.

He's, I think, eight inches taller than Michael J.

Fox.

So Mask was a critical and commercial success.

And if you guys haven't seen it, Stoltz plays Rocky Dennis, a boy with craniodiaphasial dysplasia, also called lionitis.

And undercutting Seinberg's logic, though, is the fact that you never actually see Stoltz's face in mask.

He's wearing such extensive prosthetic makeup that the movie would actually win the Academy Award for best makeup.

So Scheinberg didn't mince words, though, when he made his choice known.

He said it boiled down to chicken salad, Stoltz, versus chicken shit, Howl.

Jeez.

Little brutal.

What the hell?

Now, this is where things get a little tricky on the recollections of what happened next.

Bob Gale has said that Sid Sheinberg was so confident in Stoltz that he explicitly said, if it didn't work out, we could shoot the movie with somebody else.

Sheinberg disputes this claim, although not entirely.

Oh, I'm sure he does.

Yeah, he says, if I was fighting for Eric, I wouldn't concede the fact he might be wrong for it.

I believe that.

But Steven Spielberg and Robert Zemeckis are two of the strongest, most successful directors, producers, writers in the world.

If they thought it was such a terrible idea, they could have just said no.

But Zemekis has said he didn't have time to fight Scheinberg.

The movie had a ticking clock.

It needed to be released in May.

And the production start had been pushed back twice to allow more time to find their Marty.

So Zemeckis said, being a young and hungry filmmaker and maybe having a bit of an inflated ego, he thought, I can make this work.

My guess is that the difference between Howell and Stoltz was not as big for Zemekis and Spielberg as the difference between, for example, Fox, who was not available and those two actors.

And so they thought, okay, if Sid's going to make our lives really difficult, let's just go with Stoltz.

He's a good actor.

You know, we can keep the production on time.

Well, can I ask, what was it about Stoltz that they were concerned about?

Is it that it was a heavier, not quite as fun?

Okay.

It was the humor.

Which that makes sense.

Yeah, it seems like from the beginning, the concern was the humor.

Now, some people online have pushed conspiracy theories that Spielberg and Zemeckis cast Stoltz just to keep the production on track with the intention of firing him later and taking Sheinberg up.

I don't buy it.

And they shoot so much of this movie with him, it just doesn't pass the smell test.

I just don't think they would do that.

Like, I also think everything that we've learned about Steven Spielberg, and I think also Robert Zemeckis, I don't think they would do that to a young actor.

I genuinely don't.

I agree, but they would do something else to a different young actor at the end of this episode that was maybe not as shitty as that,

but crossed, I think, a couple of ethical lines.

Okay.

We'll discuss.

Okay.

So, meanwhile, Michael J.

Fox was developing quite the case of FOMO.

And I would like to play you a clip, Lizzie, of how Michael J.

Fox finally found out about Back to the Future.

Oh, my God.

Poor Michael.

I was shooting Teen Wolf, and we were in Pastina and we were shooting, and I had all the stuff on my face, all the wolf drag.

rubber and hair and I'm feeling miserable and I can't eat.

And to make matters worse, just down the road, there was a scouting crew there for another film.

And we found out that it was for this new Spielberg-produced film called Back to the Future.

Then I heard that Christman Glover was in it, and I knew Crispin from other things.

I'd worked with him before, and I thought, man, Christman Glover's in this Steven Spielberg movie.

And I'm like, teen wolf.

Poor Michael J.

Fox.

He honestly, he is the most likable.

Like, he just seems like the sweetest, kindest, you want to be in a room with him, which comes through on the screen as well.

I love him.

I agree.

Now, hiring Eric Stoltz had some unexpected silver linings.

First of all, that's really how we get Leah Thompson, I think.

So while checking out Stoltz, Zemekis caught sight of Leah Thompson in a Cameron Crow, penned starring high school comedy, not Fast Times at Ridgemont High, The Wildlife, which starred Chris Penn, not Sean.

Okay.

But he saw Leah Thompson in that.

And Leah Thompson had also starred opposite C.

Thomas Howell in Red Dawn.

She'd kind of starred opposite all of these guys.

She was a mainstay in these teen films at the time.

She donned an old lady wig and at her last audition, Steven Spielberg was actually the one who was operating the camera as Bob Zimmer auditioned her, which was pretty cool.

Can I say something about the old age makeup in this movie?

Yeah, please.

And how it's insane.

At first, I was like, oh, it looks pretty good.

And then I thought about it and I was like, is she 80?

Is she 80 years old?

Well, they're like, she's a hardcore alcoholic, I guess is what they're saying.

Will they make him look ancient too?

Yeah, I guess.

I guess.

Like, she has like a sclerotic liver.

And yeah, I think she's supposed to be 47 in this movie.

47.

No, they've made her like minimum 70.

Jowls.

She's got jowls.

Her, like, she's puffy.

She has like, you know, a 75-year-old old lady hair.

Hagsploitation, right?

Like, they're doing hag exploitation with her at the end.

So.

What's funny is if you look at the screen tests of her, like with just the wig and less old age makeup, I actually think she looks more like a more convincing 47, but yeah, it's not that big a difference.

The problem is Michael J.

Fox is older than her in real life.

And so I think they really wanted to exaggerate.

They wanted to make sure that they didn't feel like they were younger than Michael J.

Fox.

She also beat out Jennifer Jason Lee for this role, who is apparently the second choice.

And I think also would have been really good.

It would have been great.

I had loved Jennifer Jason Lee.

Yeah.

Now, Crispin Glover, as you mentioned, who's three years younger than Michael J.

Fox, had just started to break out.

He'd been in My Tutor, Tutor, Friday the 13th, the final chapter.

He played an unstable high school student in teachers.

He had auditioned for a different movie, didn't nab the part, director liked him, introduces him to Steven Spielberg.

Spielberg introduces him to Zemekis, brings him in.

He auditions, but apparently he didn't audition for the older father part.

He didn't realize he was going to be playing Marty McFly's father until he started filming.

Wow.

Very interesting.

So then Tom Wilson also might have had Eric Stoltz to thank for his casting.

He was inexperienced, fresh off, you know, first guest bookings on TV, and he was going up against some bigger actors, although most of them would be bigger later.

Billy Zayn, who did you recognize Billy Zayn in the film?

I sure did.

He appears as Biff's henchman right behind him.

Yep.

Tim, human giant Tim Robbins.

Enormous man.

Also auditioned for Biff.

Peter DeLouise, who would go on to be opposite Johnny Depp in 21 Jump Street a couple of years later.

Tim Robbins as Biff.

There's something about that that's more sinister, maybe because I think he comes across as very smart, which is scarier.

I agree.

J.J.

Cohen says he was the original choice, and some sources say that he was, but he was dropped because he wasn't tall enough to tower over the six-foot-tall Eric Stoltz.

And so, Tom Wilson, who was actually auditioning for a different movie, I think the casting director saw him, just yanked him in and said, You're auditioning for this.

And that's how he landed this role.

Well, he looks perfect.

He's so

big, you know, such a sort of meathead-looking guy.

Now, Lizzie, if there's one other Hollywood weirdo goofball who's very tall and has an odd way of talking and has played a scientist or at least a mathematician before that could play Doc Brown, any guesses?

He also plays the jazz piano.

He has a funny way of talking.

Oh,

of course.

Yes.

Could it be Jeff Goldblum?

Jeff Goldblum.

Jeff Goldblum was also considered.

He's 14 years younger than Christopher Lloyd, and Christopher Lloyd was shooting a movie in Mexico City.

I think that's 1986's Miracles.

He gets a call from his agent.

I've got this great script for you.

It's called Back to the Future.

And Lloyd says, I'm not interested.

I'm going to go do theater.

I'm going to be a real actor.

And he'd just done a bunch of sci-fi.

He'd done the adventures of Buckaru Bansai across the eighth dimension and Star Tech 3, The Search for Spock.

But a friend says, Hey, look, just read the script.

You never know.

So he reads the script and he thinks, Oh, you know, maybe.

And then he goes and meets with Bob Zemekis.

And he left the meeting and he thought, if this man is involved in this project, it's something I should do.

And very adamantly in.

So then we have a very small role, but there's a very fun actor that almost got this part.

So Jennifer Park, this is Susie in earlier drafts.

This is Marty's girlfriend.

Kira Sedgwick auditioned,

but Claudia Wells, who does play the role eventually, was offered the part.

But then ABC decided to pick up a pilot that she'd shot, so she had to drop it.

In comes 17-year-old Melora Hardin, a.k.a.

Jan Levinson

from the office, and many more, including Transparent.

It was life-changing until it wasn't.

All right.

October of 1982, Lizzie, let's go back in time for one quick second to the invention of the DeLorean.

The DeLorean car had been created in the late 1970s, early 1980s, and John DeLorean's dream of bringing the world a car that would last forever died when he was caught on videotape in a sting operation agreeing to bankroll drug trafficking.

Yes.

He was eventually acquitted.

Insane.

Yeah.

He was acquitted, but his company declared bankruptcy.

They made one model of car, the DeLorean.

Also, wasn't it like notoriously a piece of shit?

Yeah, I did read one online commenter say this is a car for someone who doesn't need a car.

And I read that it needed a lot of time at the

DMC DeLorean Quality Control Center before it could get shipped to an actual dealership.

Although I did read that the motor itself is a known Peugeot, Renault, Volvo motor that was decently reliable.

Would love to hear if anybody out there in our audience has ever driven a DeLorean.

Please send us a message or head to our Patreon and you can join for free and comment on this episode.

All to say that the car was obscure.

I believe less than 10,000 actual DeLoreans were ever manufactured.

So concept artist Ron Bob, an alum of used cars, was a little surprised when Steven Spielberg asked him, how would you make a DeLorean into a time machine?

So originally, Lizzie, Marty ends up in a lead-lined refrigerator next to a nuclear detonation.

The nuke powers the focusing machine of the time machine, which sends him and the refrigerator back to the future.

During pre-production, the Bobs realized they need something more mobile than, you know, something that you put on the back of the truck.

By the way, Spielberg would steal that ending for the beginning of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

20 years later.

A classic film that we all loved.

We do.

Nuking the Fridge almost happened back in 1985.

Spielberg was apparently also worried that kids would see the film and start crawling into refrigerators to try to time travel, which I think is actually a very thoughtful and smart bit of foresight.

Yeah, because because you can't get out.

You can't.

They automatically latched at this point in time.

This is a big departure from established time travel lore, Lizzie.

And this is, I think, where Zemekis and Gail do add a lot to the time travel canon, which is like Wells's time machine, you remain fixed in place and then you travel through time.

And they're saying, no, you actually have to get enough speed that you can travel through time, although you're technically doing it in the same place, but it's a moving time machine, which is relatively new outside of space travel.

Why a DeLorean?

A few reasons.

They thought it was funny that like the car of the future that failed would be the car of the future in this movie.

They loved the Gulf Wing doors because it made it look like a UFO.

Yeah.

They thought it was cool.

Basically, John DeLorean was seen as kind of this badass in the media, even though he was a total nut.

And so they thought it gave the movie some credibility and it had a cool look.

I would also think it was a bit easier to shoot, right?

Because of the way that the door lifts up.

You're not dealing.

Yeah, well, they also sawed one of them in half to put the camera wherever they needed it to go.

Sure.

So they give it this kind of grimy, jerry-rigged feel.

And SFX supervisor Kevin Pike goes to Glendale, land of the car dealerships.

He buys three models from a shuttered DeLorean dealership.

They have the A car, the hero car, the B car that's just the exterior for driving shots, and then the C car where they just like slice it up and they use it for rear projection, blue screen, towing shots, like whatever they need.

And the finals result, I think, it pulls very liberally from the Millennium Falcon in my mind.

Although there's also references to George Powell's The Time Machine, the red, yellow, and green LEDs that display when they're going and where they're coming from.

And again, guys, check out Back to the Future, the Ultimate Visual History, for more on the design.

Now, Lizzie, in October of 1984, Sid Sheinberg sends the Bobs an important memo.

Although I believe that the present draft is terrific and I marvel at the improvements that have been made from the Columbia version, I continue to believe the title leaves much to desire, meaning Back to the Future.

There are a number of reasons why I find this title less than wonderful, but my primary concern is that it appears to make the picture a genre picture.

I think that the script deserves a better title than this.

Now that I have buttered you up, I would like to suggest the title Spaceman from Pluto.

End quote.

No.

That is a real quote.

Sid Scheinberg subsequently denied that he ever sent that memo, but there is a copy of the memo in the ultimate visual history, and the Bobs didn't know what to do and freaked out.

So Steven Spielberg sent Sid Sheinberg a memo back and said, Thank you so much for the humorous memo.

It really lifted our spirits, Steven Spielberg.

And that's how they got the name Back to the Future to stick.

Wow.

Which is just such a good strategy.

So Sid Schinberg admitted later he just didn't understand the title.

They're trying to get back to the present, not the future.

But he was adamant about something else, and that is the budget.

So this movie was going to be expensive, but Sheinberg was not going to let it be a dollar more than needed.

So instead of shooting on location, they're going to confine the film to the universal backlot.

So much of the film, Lizzie, is on the universal backlot.

You guys can go see it.

It kind of looks like that.

Totally.

They cut an ending in which Marty returns to a 1985 that's very futuristic.

So in the original, like first and second drafts, the future has been changed by Marty's influence and all of Doc's inventions exist.

And they go to this beautiful, futuristic city.

And Marty's like, this is the most beautiful city I've ever seen.

What is it?

And Doc says, it's Cleveland.

And it actually is a pretty funny joke.

Sid Sheinberg says, you got to cut 5 million from this budget.

Like, I am not giving you a dime more.

And that's when the Bobs realize they got to drop the bomb, literally.

So the third act of the film involves a nuclear explosion.

They can't afford it.

So they say, what if we just drop a bomb in the middle of Hill Valley and we just like nuke the town?

And they think, well, you would kill everybody.

So we probably can't do that.

It's not any cheaper.

Yeah, maybe don't do that.

And that's when lightning struck for the second time.

So in the third act of their debut film, I Want to Hold Your Hand, one of the characters is trying to stop the Beatles broadcast on the roof of the Ed Sullivan Theater with an axe when he gets struck by lightning.

And they think, what if we use lightning?

And they realize we could put a clock on the courthouse, strike it with lightning, and power the DeLorean that way.

And it became this homage to the silent film Safety Last.

Lizzie, I'm sure you've seen the image of silent film actor Harold Lloyd hanging off a giant clock face over a busy street.

Yes.

So they would do their version with Christopher Lloyd hanging off of a giant clock face.

No relationship between the two, but definitely a fun connection.

Principal Photography begins November 26, 1984.

They're going to shoot for 66 days on Bushnell Avenue in South Pasadena.

That's where they're starting, walking distance from my house.

I walk down this street almost every single day.

Crispin Glover was over an hour late, so they filmed his Peeping Tom Tree Fall with stunt doubles.

They're going to then go to the Universal Backlot.

They're going to do location work in Los Angeles, including City of Industry, and they're going to release the film Memorial Day 1985.

Everybody's really excited.

Melora Hardin's got this really big crush on Eric Stoltz.

Everybody's jazzed.

But from the beginning, Lizzie, something was off.

And it wasn't just Crispin Glover's hair, which he'd cut himself without permission from the production.

Leah Thompson has said that she noticed that something was off from the first read-through.

And I'd like to play a clip of her in an interview on Pop Goes the Culture describing this first read-through.

After the first read-through of Back to the Future, everybody's sitting around going, ha ha ha, isn't that great?

You know, because it really was a great script.

And they said, Eric, what do you think?

And Eric said, I think it's a tragedy, really.

Silence,

Tumbleweeds.

And they said, why do you think it's a tragedy?

And he said, and rightly so.

He said, my entire family remembers a past and I, Marty, remember a completely different past.

It's a very sad thought to think.

that you would remember something, all kinds of memories that no one else remembered.

He was right, but wasn't the time

to bring that up.

He should have done that over cocktails with just me and a few close friends.

So things just kind of went awry,

you know.

Okay, so I will say I had that exact thought at the end of watching Back to the Future that like how alienating and strange it would be for Marty, for Marty's entire childhood essentially to no longer exist and to only have existed for him because they don't really discuss this, but like his parents' entire trajectory has changed.

Their attitudes toward life have changed.

It's almost certain that Marty's, the way that he was raised, the adventures they would have gone on would be completely different and would their interactions would have been gone.

He basically does not have the parents that he grew up with, which in the movie is positioned as a very good thing.

And, you know, for a lot of reasons, they're happier and everything and all that.

But I don't disagree with him.

I did, I felt that.

I was like, wait, this is like, this is a little sad that he's going to be essentially alone for the rest of his life in this outside of dock because it no longer exists.

I agree with you.

And

there's a scene in the second draft right at the end of the film that's kind of this unusual moment of quiet where Marty's still stuck in 19, it's 1952 in that draft because they're writing it in, you know, 81, 82.

And he's standing inside this 50s tract house that's been been assembled in a fake neighborhood in the middle of a desert that's about to be exploded by a nuclear blast.

And if you guys remember from the old videos of nuclear tests, they would build these paper towns that would be demolished and they would videotape them to see what would happen.

And he's sitting there and howdy duty is playing on the television and the table is set and it's very idyllic.

And it's this nuclear dream, this nuclear life, this nuclear family that's about to be obliterated.

So he can return to a time in which not only does this dream no longer exist, but as you mentioned, all of his memories no longer exist either.

And he kind of smiles in this very poignant way and says to himself, the fabulous 50s.

And then he climbs into the, you know, the refrigerator and the nuke goes off and he gets sent back to the future.

And then, you know, they play it off for humor at the end.

But it is this kind of poignant moment that I think points to a deeper sadness.

And I can very much see Stoltz in that version of the movie.

I can too.

And

maybe that's the thing about this movie that has not appealed to me as much as I think it did to some others is that it never takes the time to pause and have that moment of gravity.

And that's not the movie that the Bobs were interested in making.

Which is fine.

It's great.

Like 100%.

I understand not wanting to do it.

So Thompson would go on to say that Stoltz was also kind of doing a form of method acting.

He would only respond to you if you called him Marty, not Eric.

He grew out his fingernails because that's what real guitar players do.

And his method acting rubbed some of the cast the wrong way.

Sometimes, literally, when he was shoving Biff, Tom Wilson, he shoved him so hard after Tom Wilson had told him to stop that he left bruises.

And he would question Zemekis on his motivation, you know, in very simple things like, I don't think my character would cross the street this way.

And Zemekis is saying, well, I need you to cross the street this way because I need you to come around this car for the camera, right?

There's not a real motivation behind it.

But Stoltz just seemed to be on it in a a different movie

in many ways than the rest of the cast and crew.

Cinematographer Dean Kundy has recalled that there was this awkward disconnect between Stoltz's desire to ground the character and Zemekis' desire to provide the most entertaining movie possible.

Yeah.

The character looked different too.

They dyed his hair black.

You guys can see him online.

And again, he's very cute, but they wanted him to be this, you know, teen idol.

He looked kind of like a greaser.

He's got either a black turtleneck or a black jacket.

He's got black hair and he has a darker, heavier feel to him.

So after 28 shooting days, which is nearly halfway through production, and I've read varying reports on how much was filmed with him, I've read 40%, I've read more than 50%.

Oh my God, that's so much.

The point is, the production was three days behind schedule, which isn't that big a deal.

The problem is Zemekis went and viewed what they'd cut so far and he called producer Neil Canton.

Quote, Bob told me there was good news and bad news.

The good news was that Chris Lloyd is really good and Tom's really good and Leah and Crispin are really good.

The bad news is there's a big hole in the middle of it all.

Stoltz wasn't working.

And again, it's not that he was, I think, bad.

It's that the movie wasn't fun.

Yeah.

So Zemekis sat down with Spielberg.

They watched a 45-minute assembly and they both agreed Eric Stoltz had to be replaced.

Now, Spielberg very smartly said, don't tell the studio, we don't want to shut down production.

Just keep filming and I will send the script one more time to Family Ties creator Gary Goldberg.

I think they realized they needed a comedic heavy hitter.

They needed somebody with the comic timing of a sitcom.

Also, like what Michael J.

Fox has in this role is what, like, to a certain extent, Jason Bateman has in Arrested Development.

Yes.

And it's one of the hardest things to do, which is that he has to be as funny as everyone else around him without having the ability to be this wacky zany character.

And I think that's the hardest job.

And he does it the same way that Jason Bateman does it on Arrested Development.

And neither of those two shows work without that one person.

So they send the script to Goldberg and he says, okay, I'll share it with Fox if you agree that if he does this, you have to work around his family tie schedule.

We are not changing our schedule.

And it seems like maybe the reason Goldberg would share it now and not earlier is that A, they were closer to wrapping the season.

Also, Michael J.

Fox knows about it now.

Yeah, B, Michael J.

Fox's co-star, Meredith Baxter, had returned from maternity leave, and so he was no longer carrying the show as much as he had been in her absence.

So on January 3rd, 1985, Goldberg gave the script to Fox and told him, you have one night to read this.

You have one night to decide if you want to do it.

If you do it, it's on top of your work here, meaning it is during nights and weekends, and shooting starts next week.

Fox looked at the title, then smiled at Goldberg and said, I love it.

Oh, he didn't read it.

He was in.

So the Bobs and Spielberg went to Scheinberg and laid it all out.

The change was going to cost at least $3.5 million.

They would need to honor Stoltz's contract and pay him out.

They would need to shoot all of his footage again with Fox from the first five weeks.

To be clear, there are probably shots they wouldn't need to reshoot that don't involve Stoltz's character, including coverage of other actors, establishing shots, et cetera.

Although he's in most of the movie.

I was going to say, did they keep any shots of Stoltz?

It's debated.

There's one shot of the punch on Biff where some people have said that that is Stoltz's hand.

Zemekis himself has said the only way they could know is if they went and checked the film negative and it would damage the film and they're not going to do it.

So the release date would need to push to August.

It had actually already pushed from May to June to July just because of production delays.

And Bob Gale has said that they showed it to Sheinberg.

They showed him the footage to convince him.

But Sid Sheinberg has said that that's not true.

He said, it didn't take me one minute.

They wanted me to go down and look at film.

and I said, you guys must be crazy.

You think I'm going to take the two of you on?

Life is too short.

If you guys feel the way you do, make the change.

I think if I would have said, continue making the movie you don't think is working, then I would have been an idiot for sure.

End quote.

I buy that.

Sheinberg's probably smart enough to listen to two of his best directors at this point.

Well, especially since this was the thing that he pushed really hard for and they said, okay, we'll make it work.

And he has said, you know, I don't regret pushing for Stoltz.

I still think he would have been good.

They disagreed.

We'll never know.

So I can see both sides.

By January 7th, the decision was final.

Zemekis had permission to move forward with Fox.

He'd already started preparing for the role.

He'd been practicing guitar, skateboarding, and they broke into the cast.

So Leah Thompson had actually, against the productions rules, left to visit her boyfriend, Dennis Quaid, over the holidays in Germany.

And she came back to wherever she was staying.

And she had a voicemail that was like, it's Gilpus Bob Gale.

You got to call me right now.

And she thought she was getting fired because she had left the production.

Oh, no.

But it was because they were letting go of Eric Stoltz.

And she was very upset.

She liked Eric, she liked working with him.

And apparently, she said that she was very snotty at the time.

She was very upset that all of a sudden she was going to be acting across a quote sitcom actor.

But she later said that acting in a sitcom is the hardest thing that she's ever done.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Christopher Lloyd was also upset for his own mental health reasons.

He'd poured everything into Doc Brown for six weeks and he was going to have to reshoot almost all of it.

Yeah.

But of course, no one was more devastated than Eric Stoltz.

He was fired on January 10th, 1985.

He has been pestered to no end.

If you guys are that interested, you can listen to him talking about it online.

I think he's been very gracious about it.

I'm sure it was brutal for all parties involved.

He's a great actor.

I hope, and I believe he found peace in his career in the years after Back to the Future.

And I really think we need to stop doing the what-if of, you know what I mean, of him and leave him alone as much as possible.

Now, his exit had some unexpected ripples, Lizzie, mostly because Michael J.

Fox is so damn short.

And Malara Hardin is very tall, if you've ever seen The Office.

And she towered over him.

The filmmaking team pulled the crew.

And apparently, it was actually the female crew members who felt most strongly that Marty's girlfriend shouldn't be taller than him.

And according to Hardin, it was two female executives who ultimately made the decision.

So the Bobs sent her flowers.

They told her that she's lovely and it had nothing to do with her.

And she would actually apparently later channel the energy that she felt of those two female executives into her performance as Jan Levinson on the office, like the need to perform masculinity as a woman in a male-dominated workspace.

So Claudia Wells, whose pilot had been picked up but then not renewed, was now available and brought back into the film as Jennifer Park.

So Michael J.

Fox steps into Back to the Future on January 15th, 1985.

And to pull it off, he'd virtually have to be in two places at the same time.

So he would shoot family ties all day.

Then he was driven to City of Industry.

He'd get there at 6.30, go through hair makeup, wardrobe, shoot for a few hours, head home, nap, and do it again.

Oh, my God.

As he said in his memoir, quote, I'd climb into the back of a production van with a pillow and blanket, and yet another Teamster driver would take me home again, sometimes literally carrying me into my apartment and dropping me onto my bed.

And he actually gave the Teamster drivers keys to his apartment so they could come in and wake him up and make sure that he was getting back to set.

Oh, God.

He had no idea if his performance was even usable.

He started forgetting what he was shooting.

Bob would ask him about scenes from the day prior and he couldn't remember what they'd done.

One day on Family Ties, he had a panic attack because he was desperately trying to find Marty's video camera on the prop table until he remembered he wasn't on Back to the Future.

He was on Family Ties.

He was operating on roughly three hours of sleep a night and he thought that he was terrible.

Quote, I was practically unconscious because I was so tired.

And he wasn't the only one.

The crew was also working almost exclusively nights to accommodate his schedule.

And they were reshooting scenes they'd already done.

Were the new versions going to be as good as what they'd already shot?

But Lizzie, their spirits were oddly high because Michael J.

Fox

is very funny.

Yeah, he is.

And he's not just funny on camera, he's funny in person too.

So everybody had this infectious energy that was stemming from Fox and his ability to react to everything.

And I think that's what you talk about with Bateman.

It's that Fox gives a very funny but grounded reaction to all of the zaniness that's happening around him.

He's both above it and experiencing it at the same time.

Now, this also led to some other great changes.

He was too short to wear Stoltz's costume, eight inches between them.

So they changed him into an orange puffer vest when they ditched the austere black turtleneck.

He was also dwarfed by Tom Wilson and Christopher Lloyd, which made the physical comedy way funnier.

He was literally more of an underdog.

If you guys want to read about just the crazy day-to-day schedule, you can read an entire breakdown of every week of filming in the ultimate visual history of Back to the Future.

I'm not going to do a taxonomy of that.

Production wraps on April 26, 1985.

They'd been filming for six months, Lizzie, and they would need to do their first test screening in three weeks.

This is a nightmare.

Editors Arthur Schmidt and Harry Karamaitis worked around the clock.

Back to the Future tested in San Jose in mid-May of 1985.

Supposed to release in August.

The audience is restless.

They were apparently talking, bored, unengaged.

Harry Karamites was so upset by their reaction after working so hard on this cut that he said, if those teen boys don't shut up, I'm going to go and knock one of them out.

So Arthur Schmidt had to send him into another room so that he wouldn't go and beat up the audience that they were trying to test the movie with.

The DeLorean shows up and the audience locks in.

Bob Gale has said that it was actually when Biff starts bullying George in the past in the same way that he did in the present that the audience kind of clues into what the movie is.

The VFX weren't done.

ILM was obviously going to be working until the last minute.

The music wasn't done.

Alan Silvestri would be working until the last minute, but the story was captivating.

But was the power of love in it yet?

Yeah, yeah.

The very last shot in the movie with the flying car was in black and white, but the audience didn't care.

They went nuts for it.

It apparently scored a 96, higher than any other Universal film had gotten.

The team cut seven minutes from the movie.

They screened it for the Universal executives.

It was the moment of truth, right?

Had the Bobs and Spielberg been right to replace Eric Stoltz.

Sid Sheinberg loved it so much, he pulled in the release date by a month to July 4th.

Sid, don't do that.

ILM had to boogie.

Now, I want to call out FX supervisor Ken Ralston.

He was about a month into his work on Cocoon of all films when he read Back to the Future and agreed to do the film's 30 or so VFX shots.

Why did he want to do it, Lizzie?

Because there was a nuclear explosion at the end, which of course got cut by the time he actually got to do the movie.

So in the end, he pulled a Marty McFly.

He worked on Cocoon during the day and Back to the Future at night, often working 24 hours at a stretch.

Now, there's a lot online about the lightning bolt, about the way they did the DeLorean disappearing.

I'll leave those because they are handled much better visually, but there are two shots that apparently didn't meet his standards that still bother him.

The flying car at the end, which bothers him because the trees don't cast shadows on it.

That's a one-fifth model.

and Marty looking at his disappearing hand.

Apparently they shot that on such a wide-angle lens that when they used a properly sized hand, it looked enormous relative to him.

So, that is a one-third scale hand that they're using in the foreground that's disappearing, which I find very funny.

Alan Silvestri had three weeks to record his score for the test screening.

And then, of course, Huey Lewis in the news provided two original songs, The Power of Love and Back in Time.

But they had a lot more time because, Lizzie, I don't know if you noticed this.

Huey Lewis has a cameo.

Of course, I noticed Huey Lewis has a cameo.

One of the teachers judging Marty's band performance in the first act.

Yes.

An uncredited Mark Campbell sings Johnny V.

Good at the end, and Tim Mae performed the guitar solo.

And very briefly, Lizzie, let's talk about it.

I can't tell if this is just the Bobs thinking, wouldn't it be funny if Marty went back in time and invented rock and roll?

Or if it's them actually doing something a little bit more thought out and saying, wow, this is just like Elvis, who was so influenced by Chuck Berry's music.

And then he took that sound and popularized it with white audiences.

I have no idea.

I think it could be interpreted both ways, ways, but I can't figure it out.

Yes, a white man stealing black men's music and then teaching it back to them as though he is the one who had created it.

Yes.

There was actually more of Marty teaching them rock and roll in at least the second draft of the script that they removed, I think smartly.

There are a couple of things they removed.

There's a scene that was actually shot where Marty fears that like, you know, what if I go through with this with my mom and then in the future I'm gay?

And then like if they're trying to set up a joke where Doc's like, why wouldn't you want to be happy?

And he just doesn't understand what Marty's saying.

But I think they smartly cut that.

One, I think, addition that was very smart is they do not address the segregation of the 1950s in the first couple of drafts.

And introducing Wilson, the town's mayor, I think is a very smart way of just showing, hey, there has been progress, by the way.

It's not just that we're just going to do this revisionist history of the past.

There has been progress to the 1980s.

Things have gotten better for some people, even if they haven't for the McFlys.

So everybody seemed to smell, Lizzie, that a hit was coming, including the producers of Teen Wolf, who decided our movie's not great.

We're going to push it to after the release of Back to the Future and see if we can ride on the coattails of this movie.

And Universal, I will say, in a classy move, took out an ad in Variety thanking each post-production member by name for their tireless work on the film.

An unexpected move.

So, Back to the Future opened wide on July 3rd, 1985.

Michael J.

Fox got a call from his agent.

He was out of town at the time of the release, and he immediately apologized for his performance.

And his agent said, shut, shut, shut up, Marty.

Shut your mouth.

Shut your mouth.

Back to the Future is going to be the biggest movie of the summer.

But of course, Lizzie, he was wrong.

It was going to be the biggest movie of the year.

Wow.

So reviews were generally positive.

The New York Times and Gene Siskel were really positive on it.

Although the LA Times kind of took it to the woodshed, saying it's big, cartoonish, and empty with an interesting premise that is underdeveloped and overproduced.

Now, Sid Scheinberg's decision to pull in the release date was very smart.

It gave Back to the Future a lot more screenings, upwards of 100,000 during the peak of movie attendance season, July.

It also made it clear that the studio believed in the movie and wasn't dumping it in August.

So he wanted to get away from that perception of the late summer movie being a dump.

It made $11.3 million its opening weekend, and then it did not drop.

10.6 its second weekend, 10.3 its third, 9.5 its fourth, 8.4 its fifth, 8.1 it's sixth, 7.2 its seventh, 6.9 its eighth, which is when Teen Wolf came out and somehow made 6.1 on just Fox's name alone.

It was the number one movie at the box office for 11 of its first 12 weeks in theaters.

Amazing.

This movie raked it in.

It won one Oscar, Best Effects, Sound Effects Editing.

It was nominated for three more, Best Sound, Best Original Song, Power of Love, which became Huey Lewis in the News' first international hit.

What beat that for Best Original Song?

Ooh, Lionel Ritchie, Say You,

Say Me.

From what movie?

White Knights.

No, sorry.

Wrong.

Wrong.

Wrong.

We'll fix that.

Sequels would follow, although they were not planned.

The title card, To Be Continued, did not appear in the original film that was added in 1986.

It was written and conceived as a a standalone movie.

Back to the Future would become a career-defining trilogy for many involved in the production, although not all.

And I want to focus on one actor, Lizzie, who you mentioned, the surprisingly handsome Crispin Glover.

Crispin Glover was famously or infamously not invited for Back to the Futures Part 2 and Part 3.

I didn't mention this earlier, but on the first film, there have been some reports, although this is not universally stated, that Glover

may not quite have fit in, not dissimilar to Stoltz, a little bit more of a method acting approach.

He's very exaggerated in his performance, and it seems to have, in particular, rubbed Bob Gale the wrong way.

There seems to be a real beef between the two of them.

And Gale has kind of said the hardest thing was getting him to act like a completely normal person for the final scenes of the movie.

I like that he's not.

I mean, I love

to say Glover.

Yeah, he's a total weirdo.

Exactly.

And it's fun.

And there's a real contrast to Marty, who's so secure with himself.

Salary issues and creative differences are both cited as to why he didn't return.

Now, I think we do know he was offered a substantially lower fee than Leah Thompson on the subsequent films.

About half is what I've read.

I also had read one report that he had asked for a million dollars on the second film, and they just said, absolutely no way.

I did not find a direct quote from him, you know what I mean, or anybody else on that.

Now, the creative differences that Glover had with Zemekis were also about money.

Glover has said that he fought Zemekis over the ending of the film.

Here's what Glover had to say.

I said to Robert Zemekis that I thought it was not a good idea for our characters to have a monetary reward because it basically makes the moral of the film be that money equals happiness.

What I was arguing for was that the characters should be in love and that the love should be the reward.

Zemekis got really mad at me when I said this.

So.

Actor Jeffrey Weissman was hired to play George McFly in Back to the Future Part 2.

And when Glover saw the following film, he found himself staring at himself.

Lizzie, have you ever seen Jeffrey Weissman as George McFly?

No.

Let me show you a photograph of what they did.

So this on the left will be Crispin Glover, and on the right will be Jeffrey Weissman in Back to the Future Part 2.

What?

Wow.

Is that prosthetic makeup on him?

Very good.

What it looks like is it looks like if someone were to make like a puppy-mâché jigsaw style puppet of Crispin Glover, that is what that looks like.

Would you like to play a game?

Yeah, it's like saw.

Audiences thought it was Glover.

It was like he was in two places at the same time, which was, of course, impossible.

As you correctly assume, Lizzie, The filmmakers had used a face mold of Glover's face that had been made during the production of the first film to assist with the old age makeup.

And they had used it to make prosthetics for relatively unknown and impersonation actor Jeffrey Weissman to wear.

They also did use, I believe, some footage from the first film in certain shots in Back to the Future part 2 of Glover as well.

Now, Weissman has said that he was even unaware of the extent to which he was replacing Glover.

And he has said, and one source I read said that he thought he was just a photo double, meaning his body, like he, you know, over-the-shoulder shots, like him, you know, wide shots, nothing of the face.

So Glover sued Universal and Amblin.

And his reasoning was they did not own his likeness and did not have permission to utilize it.

Universal countered that they owned George McFly, the character, and his continuing story.

Now, the case was settled out of court, but has rippled across time.

And I'm guessing they settled it because it would be cheaper to settle and pay it off.

And they probably didn't want two of their biggest directors getting tied up in depositions and a lawsuit that might spiral out of control.

If you guys have noticed, you know, the Baldoni Lively case, for example, has consumed the careers of both of them.

Glover's case led to, to a certain extent, the Screen Actors Guild taking a hard stance in their bargaining on the use of an actor's likeness, which has been particularly relevant, especially in the advent of deep fakes and AI.

Yeah.

Two technologies that Robert Zemeckis has very much embraced.

In particular, I believe the use of deep fakes to de-age actors.

Most recently, what he did with Tom Hanks and Robin Wright, amongst other actors, in his film Here.

I have a secret.

Go ahead.

I think I don't like Robert Zemeckis.

Okay, no, that's an interesting point.

So what's interesting about Zemekis is I do think that he has, or at least with Gale, there was heart to his stories.

And in Back to the Future, I think they did a pretty good job of straddling the fun and clever scientific elements of time travel and technology and the heart of what they were going for with realizing your parents are people and they have regrets as well.

Across his career, it feels like Zemekis has become more and more invested in the technological aspects of storytelling and divested in the emotional aspects of storytelling.

And so I've just become less and less interested in his movies.

Yes.

And I also think that there is,

even with something like Forrest Gump, there is nostalgia at the expense of actual emotional depth, I would say.

And I think that that is the same thing in Back to the Future, although I think you're right that Back to the Future

has

more of it.

Like to me, these movies,

I don't know, it's almost like there's a surface level.

to these movies that I think it makes it seem like the pond is deeper than it is, if that makes sense.

That's kind of the way that these come across to me.

I don't know.

I mean, I, what do you think, Chris?

I've been thinking about this a lot because when I first watched this again for the podcast, my just gut reaction was,

wow, these are two filmmakers who maybe really do think that the past was better.

But then the more I read about the movie and the time in which it was written and the way it evolved, I actually don't think that's the case.

And there's a lot that's been said about how they specifically wanted to create a version of the 1950s that isn't what existed and that impacted the production design and the costume design.

And it was very much designed to look like a vision of the 50s that we see at the movies.

So it was supposed to be removed a little bit from reality.

And even the vision of the 19, the mid-1980s that they've created, I mean, this was the Morning in America moment.

This wasn't the recession of the late 1970s and early 1980s.

So to me, the movie feels very localized to the McFlys.

And I think that it really succeeds on those terms.

It succeeds less

as a broader commentary on where America is now, because so much progress was made between 1955 and 1985.

But as a meditation on one family wondering,

where did things go wrong?

Where did my parents go wrong?

When did they stop being alive?

I think the movie works really, really well on those terms.

Because I do think that those terms are really universal.

And the fear that the next generation, that my kids will not do as well as me, for example, or that my kids will not respect me

or love me or that I've failed them or let them down, I think those are all really universally relatable emotions.

And just to bring it back to Zemekis, I feel that he has moved away from these core universally relatable emotional concepts and toward technology as the engine for entertainment.

And so the reason I think Back to the Future works is because the emotion powers the entertainment and it's a wildly entertaining movie.

And then later in his career, I think he's leaning more on technology to provide that entertainment.

And it just doesn't just doesn't do it for me.

Yeah, I agree with that.

I'm looking back at Robert Zemekis' filmography, and I think that maybe one of my favorite movies he's made, which I'm probably going to sound dumb for saying this, but Castaway.

Castaway is great.

It's great.

And I feel like he didn't have the same like pizzazz to rely on for Castaway.

And it's fantastic.

It's entertaining.

And the whole thing is it's entertaining with just a volleyball, but also got to shout out what lies beneath and death becomes her.

So it turns out I do like Robert Zemekis because I fucking love those.

Yeah, he's a great director.

Don't get me wrong.

I just find that as he gets more invested in technological advances, I tend to get less invested in his.

Yeah, it's the later films.

It's like Polar Express Forward, where it starts to kind of, I'm sorry, David's yelling at us via text, Contact.

Yes.

Although Contact was...

contact was a bit of a director switcheroosky, though, David.

I don't think that was Zemekis the whole time, as you may remember from our episodes about Mad Max Fury Road.

Last thing really quickly about the Chris Benglover thing, because I don't think we talked about it that much.

That's fucked up.

I think that that is fucked up.

I will come out and say I am fully on Team Crispin Glover for that one.

I think that

replace the character.

Kill the character.

Like you want to do another movie and you want to, you know, not use him, that's fine.

That's your prerogative.

That's totally fine.

Kill him.

Kill the character.

Have him just all of a sudden be a dick, divorce the mom, whatever you want.

Great.

Like do something or just replace him.

They do that all the time where all of a sudden it's a different actor playing the dad and the same name.

That's fine too.

Like you can make it work.

Don't literally remake that man's face on another man and have that person try to imitate the performance of Crispin Glover, who like, like you said, that's Crispin Glover.

That's the way that he he acts and looks and behaves.

It's kind of his shtick.

It's very strange to have someone redo that.

I agree.

For what it's worth, he and Robert Zemekis worked together again on Beowulf.

So it seems like they patched things up at some point.

It does seem like there's a

terrible.

It does seem like there's an existing rift between him and Bob Gale in particular.

And it seems like that's where more of the rift was.

To begin with, there are some secondhand quotes of Spielberg that I'm not going to read because I could not get them firsthand about some things he said about the process.

If you guys are interested, you can look up more about this online.

But I agree, it's disrespectful to a performer to attempt to trick the audience into thinking they've continued to exist in this world when they have not and they are no longer participating creatively or economically in the film.

Yeah.

So I was trying to think of how to wrap up, you know, this episode and Zemekis, and there's a quote on the first page of the first couple of drafts of the script, which you mentioned contact.

It's a Carl Sagan quote.

And I want to get to it in one second.

I think as I was thinking about it, I think a filmmaker's greatest tool, and we talked about this with Sam Raimi on Evil Dead, is the ability to manipulate time, right?

Sam Raimi saw that his father had cut together a video film of a birthday party in which the candles were blown out before the children arrived at the party.

And it blew his mind that you could rearrange, you you could time travel with movies.

And that's what movies allow us to do.

They allow us to time travel.

We can also travel through space and you can compress time, expand it, you can rearrange it.

You can trick the audience into thinking they've got it worked out and show them that the whole thing's backward.

You can just totally butcher it like tenant.

I agree.

You can make them feel things that are really hard to feel in real life.

Maybe because they're happening too slow to notice, or they took place a long time ago, or they're happening too far away to worry about.

Now, the Carl Sagan quote reads: Physicists propose that two alternate histories, two equally valid realities, could exist side by side, the one you know and the one in which you don't exist.

Time itself may have many potential dimensions, despite the fact that we are condemned to experience only one of them.

One of my favorite aspects of making this podcast is that you see in your mind's eye, or at least I do, I feel like I do when I research it, all of the different versions of the movie that nearly existed or could have existed or maybe even should have existed.

All those other universes, as Carl Sagan were to put it, that we will never be privy to.

In the case of Back to the Future,

I think

we got

the greatest timeline.

I think of all of the universes to bear witness to this movie, in,

we got the best possible one.

That concludes our coverage, Lizzie, of Back to the Future part one.

Let's get to the rest of the trilogy.

Is there anything that you felt went right?

I must ask you.

There's a lot that went right.

I have to go with the obvious one here, which is Michael J.

Fox.

He

seems like a delight on and off screen.

And I think the only way that you pull off something like this, where you're running on three hours of sleep, and you're able to somehow energize not only your own performance, but the people around you, is that you are a genuinely good and

light person.

And

I do think it sounds like from everything you've told me, because I've always wondered, you know, why was Eric Stoltz fired?

What was it about his performance that wasn't working?

I understand where they're coming from because this is the movie they were making.

And without Michael J.

Fox at the center of this movie, I don't think it works.

I don't think it has,

because there isn't a ton of depth underneath it, I don't think he brings

so much to this role, but in a way that's still light and fun that doesn't make you,

I don't know, it both does and doesn't make you question everything.

I just think he's wonderful.

I think that we're lucky to have him.

And I don't really need to know what the Eric Stoltz version would have been because I think Michael J.

Fox is fantastic.

So I think what went right is Michael J.

Fox.

I love that story about him not even reading and just saying, yes, I'm going to do this.

So yeah.

Despite how hard I've been on Bob's Meccus and his recent films, I would love to give mine to the Bobs and specifically their ability to iterate.

I think, so this movie has been referred to by many people as a perfect movie, structurally perfect movie.

Everything that's planted is paid off, et cetera.

You know,

I won't dispute that.

It is a very tightly paced, extremely cleverly constructed movie.

Agree.

It was not always that.

And so many of the most classic elements of the story were consequences of desperate changes that were needed to facilitate budget cuts or to get the script to the right place tonally.

And this movie was rewritten again and again and again during pre-production, during production, during the edit itself.

And I think it's a great example of how

film is

never a medium in which

the thing arrives fully formed.

The script is never done.

The edit is never finished.

And the only reason the movie is done at the end of the day is because Sid Sheinberg says it's time to put it in theaters.

And I have a deep respect and admiration for anybody who has the ability to rewrite something

as endlessly as the Bobs did and as cleverly as they did, and to continue to see that it could improve across every version of this script.

And I encourage you guys to read the different versions online and go to the Writers Guild Library because you can see very important realizations that they have.

You know, an obvious one is Marty does not disrupt the flow of his parents' relationship until the midpoint in the earlier drafts.

And so the movie really lacks an an engine from the end of Act One when he travels back in time until the midpoint.

And you can tell they smartly realized that at some point and they, you know, pulled it in.

Sid Sheinberg's feedback that you should use a dog, I actually think is a very smart

decision because it makes you care about, holy shit, what happened to this dog?

Not that you wouldn't care about a champ.

Yeah.

Honestly, I don't care about the chip as much.

I was so mad when he put that dog in the car at the beginning.

Even though I know the dog's going to be fine, I was like, how dare you?

So, my what went right goes to rewriting.

And the Bobs did a great job of that on this film.

I think that's a great what went right.

I was honestly very surprised when you told me how many times this movie had been rewritten early on because in previous episodes, that's generally been a harbinger of potential disaster.

And so it does take a lot of perseverance and I think maybe self-awareness to be able to say, we're going to rewrite this, but we're going to make it better.

And that's really cool.

All right, Lizzie, what do we have coming next week for the fine folks at home?

Well, we have a fantastic picture starring Catherine Hepburn, which sounds like just an absolute shit show to make.

And I can't wait.

This was one of my favorite movies when I was little.

It is The African Queen starring Humphrey Bogart and Catherine Hepburn.

And as our researcher, Jesse, pointed out, it is bound to be a depressing watch given how many times he calls beautiful 44-year-old Catherine Hepburn, old gal.

It's either her or the boat.

Not sure who he's referring to.

Talking her.

That's right.

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Number four,

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But that being said, we have gotten some interest from folks who are not in New York.

So we are going to live stream our first live show from the caveat theater in Manhattan.

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So if you would like to see our first live show from afar, head to patreon.com slash whatwentwrong podcast and join our $5 tier.

We are going to be coming at you live over Patreon on Thursday, October 9th.

The show will start at 9.30 p.m.

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Head to patreon.com slash what went wrong podcast.

While you're there, you can sign up for free if you're not interested in the live stream and get some musings, updates, and corrections from me.

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We just ran a great Halloween poll.

You can join for $5, get access to our live stream and all of our bonus content, as well as an ad-free RSS feed.

And for $50, you can get a shout-out from Marty McFly, straight from the universe in which he was played by Chris Winterbauer.

Doc, Doc, Doc, wait.

Are you telling me these people are paying for a podcast?

No, Marty.

For $50, you could live on for the rest of time.

Or as long as Apple's servers continue to host this show.

Frank Scott, Angeline Renee Cook, Polly Ho Yen, Evan Downey, Jose Salto, Kevin McCoy.

Come on, Marty, say the names, say them with me, Marty.

All right, Doc, sheesh.

Nathan Sentineau, Jory Hillpiper, Slipnuts9,

Kay Cabana,

James McAvoy, Cameron Smith, Suzanne Johnson, Ben Schindelman, Scary Carrie, The Provost Family.

It's serious, Doc.

It's serious.

Yalen and Miguel, the Broken Glass Kids.

David Friscalanti, Adam Moffat.

Film it yourself, Doc.

Film it yourself.

Chris Saka, Kate Elrington,

M.

Zodia,

C.

Grace B,

Jan Mastromarino, Christopher Elner, Blaise Ambrose, Jerome Wilkinson, World Juror, Juror, Lance Stater, your kids are gonna love it, Lance.

Nathan Knife, Lena, Half Grey Hound,

Brittany Morris, Darren and Dale Conkling, Jake Killen,

Matthew Jacobson, where are we gonna get plutonium?

Grace Potter, Ellen Singleton, J.J.

Rapido,

Scott Gerwin, Sadie, just Sadie, Brian Donahue,

Adrian Peng Corea, Chris Chris Leal, Kathleen Olson, Brooke, Leah Bowman, Steve Winterbauer.

That's my, if I meet my dad, when he was my age, are we going to be friends, Doc?

Don Scheibel, Rosemary Southward, Wendy Olgeschlager-McCoy, Tom Kristen, Jason Frankel, Soman Chainani, Michael McGrath, Lon Rillad, Lydia Howes.

I don't know anything about this podcasting, Doc, but it seems crazy to me.

Well, I think we can all agree that we dodged a bullet in that I didn't exist when Back to the Future was made.

So there was not even a theoretical chance that I could have ever starred in it.

And with that, guys, we conclude our coverage of Back to the Future.

Until next time, it's me and the old hag signing off.

Bye.

Go to patreon.com slash what went wrong podcast to support what went wrong and check out our website at whatwentrongpod.com.

What went wrong is a sad boom podcast presented by Lizzie Bassett and Chris Winterbauer.

Editing and music by David Bowman.

Research for this episode provided by Jesse Winterbauer with additional editing from Karen Krupsaw.

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