"[Clocks ticking]" "ANNOUNCER:" "Octoberis inventory time." "So right now, Statler Toyota is making the best deals of the year on all 1985-model Toyotas." "You won't find a better car at a betterprice with betterservice anywhere in Hill Valley." "NEWSCASTER:" "The Senate is expected to vote on this today." "In other news, officials at the Pacific Nuclear research facility have denied the rumor that a case of missing plutonium was in factstolen from their vault two weeks ago." "A Libyan terrorist group had claimed responsibility for the alleged theft." "However, officials now attribute the discrepancy to a simple clerical error." "The FBI, which is investigating the matter, had no comment." "[Buzzer blares]" "MARTY:" "Doc?" "Doc?" "HelloI Anybody home?" "Einstein, come here, boy." "[Marty whistles]" "MARTY:" "What's going on?" "God." "JesusI" "Thatis disgusting." "[Marty muttering]" "[Clocks ticking]" "[Machine humming]" "[Humming grows louder]" "[Humming grows very loud]" "[Dial clicking]" "[Electric guitar note plays]" "[Marty grunts]" "[Marty groaning]" "Rock 'n' roll." "[Alarm bell ringing]" "MARTY:" "Yo." "DOC:" "Marty, is thatyou?" "Doc." "Where are you?" "DOC:" "Thank God I've found you." "Meet me at Twin Pines Mall tonight at 1:15." "I made a breakthrough." "I'll need your assistance." "1:15 in the morning?" "Doc, what's going on?" "MARTY:" "Where you been all week?" "DOC:" "Working." "MARTY:" "is Einstein with you?" "DOC:" "Yeah, he's right here." "You left your equipment on all week." "DOC:" "My equipment." "That reminds me, Marty." "Do not hook up to the amplifier." "There's a slightpossibility of overload." "Yeah. I'll keep that in mind." "DOC:" "Good." "I'll see you tonight." "Don't forget." "DOC: 1:15 a.m., Twin Pines Mall." "MARTY:" "Right." "[Clocks all ringing, chiming, cuckooing]" "DOC:" "Are those my clocks I hear?" "MARTY:" "Yeah, it's 8:00." "DOC:" "PerfectI My experiment workedI" "They're all exactly 25 minutes slowI" "Wait a minute, Doc." "Are you telling me that it's 8:25?" "DOC:" "Precisely." "MARTY:" "Damn!" "I'm late for school." "[The Power of Love playing]" "MARTY:" "Jennifer." "jennifer:" "Strickland's looking for you." "If you get caught, it'll be four tardies in a row." "All right, come on. I think we're safe." "This time it wasn't my fault." "The doc set all his clocks 25 minutes slow." "The doc?" "Am I to understand you're still hanging around with Dr. Emmett Brown, McFly?" "Tardy slip for you, Miss Parker." "And one for you, McFly." "I believe that's four in a row." "Let me give you a nickel's worth of free advice, young man." "This so-called Dr. Brown is dangerous." "He's a real nutcase." "Hang around with him, you'll end up in big trouble." "Yes, sir." "You got a real attitude problem." "You're a slacker." "You remind me of your father when he went here." "He was a slacker, too." "Can I go now, Mr. Strickland?" "Your band is on the roster for the dance auditions after school today." "Why even bother?" "You don't have a chance." "You're too much like your old man." "No McFly ever amounted to anything in the history of Hill Valley." "Yeah, well, history is going to change." "Next, please." "[Synthesizer playing]" "All right." "We're the Pinheads." "MARTY:" "One, two, three." "[Playing Power of Love]" "Okay, that's enough." "Thank you, fellas." "Hold it, fellas." "I'm afraid you'rejust too darn loud." "Next, please." "Next group, please." "ANNOUNCER:" "Re-elect Mayor Goldie Wilson." "Progress is his middle name." "MARTY: "Too loud." l can't believe it." "We'll never get a chance to play in front of anybody." "Marty, one rejection isn't the end of the world." "I just don't think I'm cut out for music." "But you're really good, and your audition tape is great." "You've got to send it in to the record company." "lt's like Doc's always saying." "l know." "If you put your mind to it, you can accomplish anything." "That's good advice." "All right." "What if I send in the tape and they don't like it?" "What if they say I'm no good?" "What if they say, "You got no future"?" "I can't take that kind of rejection." "I'm starting to sound like my old man." "He's not that bad." "Save the clock tower." "He's letting you borrow the car tomorrow night." "Check out that 4x4." "MARTY:" "That is hot." "ATTENDANT:" "Back her up." "Someday, Jennifer." "Someday." "Wouldn't it be great to take that truck up to the lake?" "Throw a couple of sleeping bags in the back." "Lie out underneath the stars." "Stop it." "What?" "Does your mom know?" "About tomorrow night?" "No, get out of town." "My mom thinks I'm going camping with the guys." "My mother would freak out if she knew I was going with you." "I'd get the standard lecture about how she never did that stuff when she was a kid." "Look, I think the woman was born a nun." "She's just trying to keep you respectable." "She's not doing a very good job." "Terrible." "WOMAN:" "Save the clock tower." "Save the clock tower." "Mayor Wilson is sponsoring an initiative to replace that clock." "Thirty years ago, lightning struck that clock tower and the clock hasn't run since." "We at the Hill Valley Preservation Society think it should be preserved the way it is as part of our history and heritage." "MARTY:" "There's a quarter." "WOMAN:" "Thanks." "WOMAN:" "Don't forget to take a flyer." "Save the clock towerI" "Where were we?" "[Car horn honks]" "jennifer:" "Right about here." "MAN:" "Jennifer!" "It's my dad. I've got to go." "MARTY:" "I'll call you tonight." "I'll be at my grandma's." "Here, let me give you the number." "'Bye." "[Power of Love music playing]" "[Dog barking]" "radio dispatcher:" "Bravo, Tango, Delta 6-2-9." "Tow forimpoundment." "Any unit, please respond." "MARTY:" "Perfect." "Just perfect." "[Biff speaking muffled]" "biff:" "I can't believe you'd loan me your car without telling me it had a blind spot." "I could've been killed." "Now, Biff, I never noticed that the car had any blind spot before when I would drive it." "Hi, son." "biff:" "Are you blind, McFly?" "How else do you explain that wreck out there?" "MR. MCFLY:" "Biff, can I assume that your insurance is going to pay for the damage?" "My insurance?" "It's your car." "Your insurance should pay." "Who's going to pay for this?" "I spilled beer when the car smashed into me." "Who'll pay my cleaning bill?" "And where's my reports?" "I haven't finished those up yet, but I figured since they weren't due 'til" "Hello?" "Hello?" "Anybody home?" "Think, McFly." "Think!" "I got to have time to get them retyped." "Do you realize what would happen if I hand in my reports in your handwriting?" "I'll get fired." "You wouldn't want that to happen, would you?" "Would you?" "Of course not." "I wouldn't want that to happen." "Now, look." "I'll finish those reports tonight and I'll run them on over first thing tomorrow." "Not too early. I sleep in Saturday." "Your shoe's untied." "Don't be so gullible, McFly." "Got the place fixed up nice." "I have your car towed to your house and all you got for me is lite beer?" "What are you looking at, butthead?" "Say hi to your mom for me." "I know what you're going to say, son and you're right." "You're right." "But...." "Biffjust happens to be my supervisor and I'm afraid I'm just not very good at confrontations." "But the car, Dad." "[Car driving away]" "MARTY:" "I mean, he wrecked it." "He totaled it." "I needed that car tomorrow night, Dad." "Do you have any idea how important this was to me?" "MR. MCFLY:" "I know, and all I can say is, I'm...." "l'm sorry." "MR. MCFLY:" "Believe me, Marty, you're better off without having to worry about all the aggravation and headaches of playing at that dance." "david:" "He's absolutely right." "The last thing you need is headaches." "[Mr. McFly laughing]" "[David laughing]" "[TV audience applauding]" "Kids, we're going to have to eat this cake by ourselves." "Your Uncle Joey didn't make parole again." "[Mrs. McFly sighs] lt would be nice if you all dropped him a line." "MARTY:" "Uncle "Jailbird" Joey?" "He's your brother, Mom." "Yeah. lt's a major embarrassment, having an uncle in prison." "We all make mistakes in life, children." "david:" "Goddamn it. I'm late." "MRS. MCFLY:" "David, watch your mouth!" "You come here and kiss your mother before you go." "Come on, Mom." "Make it fast. I'll miss my bus." "david:" "See you later, Pop." "[David exclaims]" "Time to change that oil." "[Laughing]" "linda:" "Marty." "I'm not your answering service." "While you were outside pouting over the car Jennifer Parker called you twice." "MRS. MCFLY:" "I don't like her." "Any girl who calls up a boy is just asking for trouble." "linda:" "Mom." "There's nothing wrong with calling a boy." "I think it's terrible." "Girls chasing boys." "When I was your age, I never chased a boy or called a boy or sat in a parked car with a boy." "linda:" "Then how am I ever supposed to meet anybody?" "Well, it'll just happen." "Like the way I met your father." "That was so stupid." "Grandpa hit him with the car." "It was meant to be." "[Linda sighs]" "Anyway if Grandpa hadn't hit him, then none of you would have been born." "Yeah, well." "I don't understand what Dad was doing in the middle of the street." "MRS. MCFLY:" "What was it, George?" "Bird-watching?" "What, Lorraine?" "What?" "Anyway, your Grandpa hit him with the car and brought him into the house." "He seemed so helpless." "Like a little lost puppy, and my heart just went out to him." "linda:" "Yeah, we know." "You've told us this story a million times." "You feltsorry for him." "You decided to go with him to the Fish Under the Sea dance." "No. lt was the Enchantment Under the Sea dance." "Our first date. I'll never forget it." "It was the night of that terrible thunderstorm, remember, George?" "[indistinct chatter on TV]" "Your father kissed me for the first time on that dance floor." "It was then that I realized that I was going to spend the rest of my life with him." "[Mr. McFly laughing]" "Oh, no." "[Music playing on radio]" "[Telephone ringing]" "[Sighing]" "Hello." "DOC:" "Marty, you didn't fall asleep, did you?" "MARTY:" "Doc." "No." "No, don't be silly." "DOC:" "Listen, this is very important." "I forgot my video camera." "Can you pick it up at my place on your way to the mall?" "Yeah. I'm on my way." "Einstein!" "Where's the doc, boy?" "[Einstein whining]" "[Machine humming]" "[Gate unlocking]" "[Mysterious instrumental music]" "[Engine revving]" "[Dramatic instrumental music]" "[Steam rushing]" "Doc!" "Marty!" "You made it!" "Yeah." "Welcome to my latest experiment." "This is the one I've been waiting for all my life." "Well, it's a DeLorean" "All your questions will be answered." "Roll tape and we'll proceed." "ls that a Devo suit?" "Never mind that now." "DOC:" "Not now." "MARTY:" "I'm ready." "Good evening. I'm Dr. Emmett Brown." "I'm in the Twin Pines Mall parking lot." "It's Saturday morning, October 26, 1985, 1:18 a.m." "This is temporal experiment number one." "DOC:" "Come on, Einie." "Get in there." "In you go." "Sit down." "Put your seat belt on." "[Einstein grunting]" "MARTY:" "Okay." "Please note that Einstein's clock is in precise synchronization with my control watch." "DOC:" "Got it?" "MARTY:" "Right." "Check, Doc." "DOC:" "Have a good trip, Einstein." "Watch your head." "MARTY:" "You got that thing hooked up to the car?" "DOC:" "Watch this." "MARTY:" "Yeah." "Okay." "MARTY:" "Got it." "Jesus!" "Not me!" "The car!" "[Tires squealing]" "[Engine revving]" "If my calculations are correct when this baby hits 88 miles per hour you're going to see some serious shit." "[Remote control beeping]" "[Tires squealing]" "[Remote control beeping]" "[Tires squealing]" "[Remote control beeping]" "[Tires squealing]" "Watch this!" "[Beeping growing faster]" "[Dramatic instrumental music]" "[Doc laughs]" "What did I tell you?" "88 miles per hour!" "The temporal displacement occurred exactly 1:20 a.m. and zero seconds!" "Jesus Christ!" "Jesus Christ, Doc!" "You disintegrated Einstein!" "Calm down. I didn't disintegrate anything." "The molecular structure of both Einstein and the car are completely intact." "Then where the hell are they?" "The appropriate question is, "When the hell are they?"" "Einstein has just become the world's first time traveler." "DOC:" "I sent him into the future." "One minute into the future, to be exact." "At precisely 1:21 a.m. and zero seconds we shall catch up with him and the time machine." "[Dramatic instrumental music ends]" "Wait a minute, Doc." "Are you telling me that you built a time machine..." "...out of a DeLorean?" "The way I see it if you're going to build a time machine into a car, why not do it with style?" "Besides, the stainless-steel construction made the flux dispersal" "[Watch beeping]" "Look out!" "[Tires squealing]" "[Remote control beeps]" "[Time machine steaming and creaking]" "[Doc gasps]" "MARTY:" "What?" "is it hot?" "DOC:" "It's cold." "Damn cold." "[Doc laughing]" "Einstein, you little devil!" "Einstein's clock is exactly one minute behind mine and still tickingI" "MARTY:" "He's okay." "DOC:" "He's fine." "He's completely unaware that anything happened." "As far as he's concerned, the trip was instantaneous." "That's why his watch is exactly one minute behind mine." "He skipped over that minute to instantly arrive at this moment in time." "I'll show you how it works." "First, you turn the time circuits on." "[Machine powering up]" "[Machine whirs]" "DOC:" "This tells you where you're going, this where you are and this where you were." "Input your destination time on this keypad." "Say you want to see the signing of the Declaration of lndependence." "[Machine bleeps]" "DOC:" "Or witness the birth of Christ." "Here's a red-letter date in the history of science." "November 5, 1955." "Yes, of course." "November 5, 1955." "What happened?" "That was the day I invented time travel." "I rememberit vividly." "I was standing on my toilet hanging a clock." "The porcelain was wet." "I slipped, hit my head on the sink." "When I came to, I had a revelation." "A vision." "A picture in my head." "A picture of this." "This is what makes time travel possible." "The flux capacitor." "Flux capacitor?" "It's taken almost 30 years and my family fortune to realize the vision of that day." "My God, has it been that long?" "Things have certainly changed around here." "I remember when this was all farmland as far as the eye could see." "Old man Peabody owned all of this." "He had this crazy idea about breeding pine trees." "This is..." "This is heavy-duty, Doc." "This is great." "Does it run on regular unleaded gasoline?" "Unfortunately, no. lt requires something with a little more kick." "Plutonium." "Plutonium." "Wait a minute." "Are you telling me that this sucker is nuclear?" "Keep rolling there." "No, this sucker's electrical but I need a nuclear reaction to generate the 1.21 gigawatts of electricity I need." "You don't just walk into a store and buy plutonium." "Did you rip that off?" "Of course." "From a group of Libyans." "They wanted me to build them a bomb." "I took the plutonium and gave them a bomb casing full of pinball machine parts." "DOC:" "Come on." "Let's get you a radiation suit." "MARTY:" "Jesus!" "[Breathing distorted by suit]" "[Sucking]" "It's safe now." "Everything's lead-lined." "[Suspenseful instrumental music]" "DOC:" "Don't lose those tapes now." "I need that as a record." "Let's put this back here." "There we go." "Almost forgot my luggage." "Who knows if they got cotton underwear in the future." "l'm allergic to all synthetics." "The future." "That's where you're going." "Right." "25 years. I've always dreamed of seeing the future, looking beyond my years seeing the progress of mankind." "MARTY:" "Why not?" "I'll also be able to see who wins the next 25 World Series." "MARTY:" "Doc." "Look me up when you get there." "Indeed I will." "Roll 'em." "[Doc clearing throat] I, Dr. Emmett Brown am about to embark on an historic journey." "What am I thinking of?" "I almost forgot to bring extra plutonium." "How do I expect to get back?" "One pellet, one trip." "I must be out of my mind." "[Einstein barking]" "What is it?" "[Ominous instrumental music]" "My God." "They found me." "I don't know how, but they found me." "DOC:" "Run for it, Marty!" "MARTY:" "Who?" "Who do you think?" "The Libyans!" "[Man shouting in Arabic]" "Holy shit!" "[Gunshots firing] I'll draw their fire!" "Doc, wait!" "[Doc screaming]" "No!" "Bastards!" "[Shouting in Arabic]" "[Grunting]" "[Gun clicking]" "[Swearing in Arabic]" "[Grunting]" "Go!" "[Engine stalling]" "Go!" "[Tires squealing]" "[Engine starting]" "[Tires squealing]" "[Machine beeping]" "[Gunshots firing and ricocheting]" "[Shouting]" "Come on!" "Move!" "Goddamn it!" "MARTY:" "Jesus!" "[Dramatic instrumental music]" "Holy shit!" "Let's see if you bastards can do 90." "[Tires squealing]" "[Rumbling over ground]" "[Screaming]" "[Crashing]" "[Chickens clucking]" "[Crickets chirping]" "[Dog barking distantly]" "[Door creaks open]" "[Car blinker clicking]" "WOMAN:" "Pa, what is it?" "What is it, Pa?" "Looks like an airplane without wings." "That ain't no airplane." "Look." "[Hydraulics hissing]" "[Muffled breathing]" "[Screaming]" "Don't look!" "MARTY:" "Listen" "[Cows mooing]" "Hello." "Excuse me." "Sorry about your barn." "[Gunshot fires] lt's already mutated into human form!" "Shoot it!" "Take that, you mutated son of a bitch!" "[Screaming]" "BOY:" "Wait!" "BOY:" "Shoot it, Pa!" "MAN:" "My pine!" "Why you...." "[Gunshot fires]" "MAN:" "You space bastard!" "You killed my pine!" "[Dramatic instrumental music]" "[Tires squealing]" "MARTY:" "Okay, McFly." "Get a grip on yourself. lt's all a dream." "Just a very intense dream." "[Brakes squealing]" "[Mysterious instrumental music]" "[Somber instrumental music]" "MARTY:" "Listen, you got to help me." "WOMAN:" "Don't stop, Wilbur!" "It can't be." "[Machine beeps]" "This is nuts." "[Engine stalling]" "[Engine stalling]" "Come on." "Perfect." "[Machine beeping insistently]" "[Mr. Sandman playing]" "[Car honking]" "[Bell dings]" "[Gas attendants speaking]" "[Mr. Sandman continuing]" "[Boy counting]" "[Bell chiming]" "ANNOUNCER:" "Remember, fellow citizens, the future is in your hands." "Ifyou believe in progress, re-elect Mayor Red Thomas." "Progress is his middle name." "Mayor Red Thomas' progress platform means morejobs, better education bigger civic improvements and lower taxes." "On election day, castyour vote for a proven leader." "Re-elect Mayor Red Thomas." "MARTY:" "This has got to be a dream." "[Davy Crockett playing on jukebox]" "MAN:" "Hey, kid." "You jump ship?" "What?" "What's with the life preserver?" "I want to use the phone." "It's in the back." "MARTY:" "Brown." "Great." "You're alive." "[Watch beeping]" "[Marty sighs]" "[Phone ringing]" "Come on." "MARTY:" "Do you know where 1640 Riverside-- MAN:" "Are you going to order, kid?" "Yeah." "Give me a Tab." "I can't give you a tab unless you order something." "Right." "Give me a Pepsi Free." "MAN:" "You want a Pepsi, pal, you're going to pay for it." "Just give me something without any sugar in it, okay?" "Something without sugar." "[Door opens]" "biff:" "McFly." "What are you doing?" "Biff." "I'm talking to you, McFly, you Irish bug!" "GEORGE:" "Biff." "Guys." "How are you doing?" "biff:" "You got my homework finished?" "Actually, I figured since it wasn't due 'til Monday" "Hello?" "Hello?" "Anybody home?" "Think, McFly." "Think!" "I got to have time to recopy it." "You realize what would happen if I hand in my homework in your handwriting?" "I'll get kicked out of school." "You wouldn't want that to happen, would you?" "Would you?" "Of course not." "No." "l wouldn't want that to happen." "What are you looking at, butthead?" "Get a load of his life preserver." "Dork thinks he's going to drown." "biff:" "How about my homework, McFly?" "Okay, Biff." "I'll finish that up tonight and then I'll bring it over first thing tomorrow morning." "Not too early. I sleep in Sundays." "Your shoe's untied!" "Don't be so gullible, McFly." "l don't want to see you in here again." "Okay." "All right." "Bye-bye." "What?" "You're George McFly!" "Yeah." "Who are you?" "Why do you let those boys push you around like that for?" "They're bigger than me." "Stand tall." "Have some respect for yourself." "If you let people walk over you now, they'll walk over you the rest of your life." "Look at me." "You think I'll spend my life in this slop house?" "MAN:" "Watch it, Goldie." "goldie:" "No, sir!" "goldie:" "I'll do something." "I'll go to night school." "One day, I'm going to be somebody." "That's right." "He's going to be mayor." "Yeah, I'm" "Mayor!" "Now that's a good idea!" "I could run for mayor." "A colored mayor." "That'll be the day." "Wait and see. I will be mayor." "I'll be the most powerful man in Hill Valley and I'm going to clean up this town." "Good." "You can start by sweeping the floor." "Mayor Goldie Wilson." "I like the sound of that." "[Bicycle bell rings]" "Hey, Dad!" "George!" "Hey, you on the bike!" "He's a peeping Tom!" "Dad!" "[Horn honking]" "[Dogs barking]" "Wait a minute." "Who are you?" "Stella!" "Another one of these damn kids jumped in front of my car!" "Come out hereI Help me take him in the houseI" "[Thunder rumbling]" "Mom?" "Thatyou?" "lorraine:" "There, there, now." "Just relax." "You've been asleep for almost nine hours now." "I had a horrible nightmare." "I dreamed that I went back in time." "It was terrible." "lorraine:" "Well you're safe and sound now back in good old 1955." "1955?" "[Marty gasping]" "You're my...." "My name is Lorraine." "lorraine:" "Lorraine Baines?" "MARTY:" "Yeah." "But you're...." "You're so...." "You're so thin!" "Just relax, Calvin." "You got a big bruise on your head." "[Panting]" "[Marty exclaiming]" "Where are my pants?" "Over there on my hope chest." "I've never seen purple underwear before, Calvin." "Calvin?" "Why do you keep calling me Calvin?" "That is your name, isn't it?" "Calvin Klein." "It's written all over your underwear." "I guess they call you Cal, huh?" "No, actually, people call me Marty." "[Sighing]" "Pleased to meet you, Calvin" "Marty Klein." "Do you mind if I sit here?" "No." "Fine." "No." "Good." "Fine." "Good." "That's a big bruise you have there." "[Marty shouts]" "STELLA:" "Lorraine, are you up there?" "Oh, my God!" "It's my mother!" "lorraine:" "Quick!" "Put your pants back on!" "STELLA:" "Marty, how long have you been in port?" "MARTY:" "Excuse me?" "STELLA:" "I guessed you're a sailor." "That's why you wear that life preserver." "Coast guard." "Sam, here's the young man you hit with your car." "He's all right." "Thank God." "What were you doing in the middle of the street?" "Don't pay attention to him." "He's in one of his moods." "Quit fiddling with that thing." "Come in here to dinner." "STELLA:" "You already know Lorraine." "This is Milton, this is Sally that's Toby, and over there in the playpen is little baby Joey." "MARTY:" "So, you're my uncle Joey." "Better get used to these bars, kid." "STELLA:" "Yes." "Joey just loves being in his playpen." "He cries whenever we take him out, so we leave him in there all the time." "Well, Marty, I hope you like meat loaf." "Well, listen, I really ought to" "Sit here, Marty." "Sam, stop fiddling with that thing and come in here and eat your dinner." "[Sam chortling]" "Look at it roll." "Now we can watch Jackie Gleason while we eat." "[Muffled voices on TV]" "Our first television set." "Dad just picked it up today." "Do you have a television?" "Well, yeah." "You know, we have two of them." "Wow!" "You must be rich." "Honey, he's teasing you." "Nobody has two television sets." "[Marty exclaiming] I've seen this one." "This is a classic." "This is where Ralph dresses up as a man from space." "What do you mean, you've seen this?" "It's brand-new." "Yeah, well, I saw it on a rerun." "What's a rerun?" "You'll find out." "You know, Marty, you look so familiar to me." "Do I know your mother?" "Yeah, I think maybe you do." "STELLA:" "Then I'll call her." "I don't want her to worry about you." "You can't." "[Stuttering] That is, nobody's home." "Yet." "Listen." "Do you know where Riverside Drive is?" "It's on the other end of town." "A block past Maple." "East end of town." "A block past Maple." "That's John F. Kennedy Drive." "Who the hell is John F. Kennedy?" "lorraine:" "Mother?" "With Marty's parents out of town don't you think he ought to spend the night?" "After all, Dad almost killed him with the car." "That's true, Marty." "I think you should spend the night." "I think you're our responsibility." "Well, gee, I don't know." "He can sleep in my room." "MARTY:" "I got to go!" "Thanks very much." "You were all great." "See you all later." "Much later." "[Door closes]" "He's a very strange young man." "He's an idiot." "Comes from upbringing." "His parents are probably idiots, too." "Lorraine, you ever have a kid who acts that way, I'll disown you." "[Knocking on door]" "[Electronic warbling]" "MARTY:" "Doc?" "Don't say a word." "DOC:" "No names. I want to know nothing about you." "MARTY:" "Listen, Doc-- DOC:" "Quiet!" "DOC:" "Don't tell me anything." "MARTY:" "You got to help-- DOC:" "Quiet." "[Electronic warbling] I'm going to read your thoughts." "Let's see now." "You come here from a great distance?" "Yeah." "Exactly." "Don't tell me!" "DOC:" "You want me to subscribe to the Saturday Evening Post." "No." "Not a word now!" "Quiet." "Donations." "You want me to make a donation to the Coast Guard Youth Auxiliary." "Doc..." "[Electronics grow silent] ...I'm from the future." "I came here in a time machine that you invented." "Now, I need your help to get back to the year 1985." "My God!" "Do you know what this means?" "It means that this damn thing doesn't work at all!" "MARTY:" "You got to help me." "You are the only one who knows how your time machine works." "[Whispering] Time machine?" "I haven't invented any time machine." "Okay. I'll prove it to you." "Look at my driver's license." "Expires 1987." "Look at my birthday." "I haven't even been born yet." "And look at this picture." "It's my brother, my sister and me." "Look at her sweatshirt, Doc." ""Class of 1984"?" "DOC:" "Pretty mediocre photographic fakery." "They cut off your brother's hair." "I'm telling the truth." "You got to believe me." "Then tell me, future boy who's president of the United States in 1985?" "Ronald Reagan." "Ronald Reagan?" "The actor?" "[Doc exclaims]" "Then who's vice president?" "Jerry Lewis?" "DOC:" "I suppose Jane Wyman is the First Lady." "MARTY:" "Wait, Doc!" "DOC:" "And Jack Benny is treasury secretary." "MARTY:" "Listen to me." "I've had enough jokes for one evening." "Good night, future boy!" "MARTY:" "No, wait, Doc." "MARTY:" "The bruise on your head." "I know how that happened." "You told me." "You were standing on your toilet hanging a clock and you fell and hit your head on the sink." "That's when you got the idea for the flux capacitor which is what makes time travel possible." "[Mysterious instrumental music]" "MARTY:" "There's something wrong with the starter, so I hid it here." "DOC:" "After I fell off my toilet I drew this." "MARTY:" "The flux capacitor." "[Electric crackling]" "It works!" "[Doc laughing] lt works!" "I finally invent something that works!" "You bet your ass it works." "We've got to sneak this back to my laboratory." "We've got to get you home!" "This is it." "DOC ON TV:" "Never mind that now." "DOC:" "Why, that's me!" "Look at me!" "l'm an old man!" "I'm Dr. Emmett Brown." "I'm in the Twin Pines Mall parking lot." "Thank God, I've still got my hair." "What's this thing I'm wearing?" "This is a radiation suit." "Radiation suit?" "Of course. 'Cause of all the fallout from the atomic wars." "This is truly amazing." "A portable television studio." "No wonder your president has to be an actor." "He has to look good on TV." "MARTY:" "This is the part coming up." "This sucker's electrical but I need a nuclear reaction to generate the 1.21 gigawatts...." "What did I just say?" "...this sucker's electrical, but I need a nuclear reaction..." "...to generate the 1.21 gigawatts of...." "1.21 gigawatts!" "1.21 gigawatts." "DOC:" "Great Scott!" "What the hell is a gigawatt?" "How could I have been so careless?" "1.21 gigawatts!" "Tom, how am I going to generate that kind of power?" "It can't be done, can it?" "MARTY:" "Doc, look." "All we need is a little plutonium." "DOC:" "I'm sure that in 1985 plutonium is available in every corner drugstore but in 1955, it's a little hard to come by." "Marty, I'm sorry, but I'm afraid you're stuck here." "Doc, stuck here?" "I can't be stuck here." "I got a life in 1985." "l got a girl." "ls she pretty?" "Doc, she's beautiful." "She's crazy about me." "Look at this." "Look whatshe wrote here." "Thatsays it all." "Doc, you're my only hope." "Marty, I'm sorry, but the only power source capable of generating 1.21 gigawatts of electricity is a bolt of lightning." "MARTY:" "What did you say?" "DOC:" "A bolt of lightning." "Unfortunately, you never know when or where it's ever going to strike." "We do now." "This is it!" "This is the answer." "It says here that a bolt of lightning is going to strike the clock tower at 10:04 p.m. next Saturday night!" "If we could somehow harness this lightning channel it into the flux capacitor itjust might work." "Next Saturday night we're sending you back to the future!" "All right." "Saturday's good." "I can spend a week in 1955." "I can hang out." "You can show me around." "That is out of the question." "You must not leave this house." "You must not see or talk to anybody." "Anything you do can have repercussions on future events." "Do you understand?" "Yeah." "Sure." "Okay." "Marty have you interacted with anybody else today besides me?" "Yeah, well, I might've sort of bumped into my parents." "Great Scott!" "Let me see that photograph again of your brother." "Just as I thought." "This proves my theory." "Look at your brother." "MARTY:" "His head's gone. lt's like it's been erased." "Erased from existence." "They really cleaned this place up." "Looks brand-new." "DOC:" "According to my theory, you interfered with your parents' first meeting." "If they don't meet, they won't fall in love, get married or have kids." "That's why your brother's disappearing." "Your sister will follow, and unless you repair the damage, you're next." "MARTY:" "Sounds heavy." "DOC:" "Weight has nothing to do with it." "Which one's your pop?" "[Bell ringing]" "That's him." "Okay." "Okay, you guys." "[George pretending to laugh]" "Very funny." "You guys are being real mature." "Maybe you were adopted." "GEORGE:" "Okay, real mature, guys." "GEORGE:" "Okay, pick up my books." "STRlCKLAND:" "McFly." "That's Strickland." "Jesus, didn't that guy ever have hair?" "Shape up, man." "You're a slacker." "Do you want to be a slacker for the rest of your life?" "No." "What did your mother see in him?" "l don't know." "I guess she felt sorry for him 'cause her dad hit him with the car." "He hit me with the car." "That's the Florence Nightingale effect." "It happens in hospitals when nurses fall in love with their patients." "Go to it, kid." "George, buddy." "I have been looking all over for you." "You remember me, the guy who saved your life the other day?" "Yeah." "There's somebody I'd like you to meet." "Lorraine?" "Calvin!" "I'd like you to meet my good friend George McFly." "Hi. lt's really a pleasure to meet you." "How's your head?" "Good." "Fine." "I've been worried about you ever since you ran off the other night." "Are you okay?" "[Bell ringing]" "l'm sorry. I have to go." "Come on!" "Isn't he a dreamboat?" "She didn't even look at him." "This is more serious than I thought." "Your mother is infatuated with you instead of your father." "Wait a minute, Doc." "Are you trying to tell me that my mother has got the hots for me?" "Precisely." "This is heavy." "There's that word again. "Heavy."" "Why are things so heavy in the future?" "is there a problem with the Earth's gravity?" "The only way we're going to get them to mate is if they're alone." "You've got to get them to interact in some sort of social...." "You mean like a date?" "Right!" "What kind of date?" "What do kids do in the '50s?" "They're your parents." "You must know them." "What are their common interests?" "What do they like to do together?" "Nothing." "DOC:" "Look!" "There's a rhythmic ceremonial ritual coming up." "The Enchantment Under the Sea dance!" "They're supposed to go to this." "That's where they kiss for the first time." "All right, kid." "You stick to your father like glue and make sure he takes her to that dance." "MARTY:" "George, buddy remember that girl I introduced you to, Lorraine?" "What are you writing?" "Stories." "MR. MCFLY:" "Science fiction stories about visitors..." "Get out of town!" "I didn't know you did anything creative." "Let me read some." "No, no." "I never let anybody read my stories." "MARTY:" "Why not?" "What if they didn't like them?" "What if they told me I was no good?" "I guess that would be pretty hard for somebody to understand." "No." "No, not hard at all." "So anyway, George." "About Lorraine." "She really likes you." "She told me to tell you that she wants you to ask her to the Enchantment Under the Sea dance." "Really?" "Yeah." "All you got to do is go over there and ask her." "Right here, right now, in the cafeteria?" "What if she said no?" "I don't know if I could take that kind of rejection." "Besides, I think she'd rather go with somebody else." "MARTY:" "Who?" "Biff." "Don't kid around." "Come on." "Come on." "Leave." "biff:" "You know you want it." "You know you want me to give it to you." "Shut your filthy mouth." "I'm not that kind of girl." "Maybe you are and you just don't know it yet." "Get your meat hooks off of me." "MARTY:" "You heard her." "She said, get your meat hooks off." "MARTY:" "Please." "What's it to you, butthead?" "biff:" "You been looking for a fight." "[People exclaiming]" "Since you're new here, I'm going to cut you a break today." "So why don't you make like a tree and get out of here." "[Boy laughing]" "MARTY:" "George!" "GEORGE:" "Why do you keep following me?" "George, I'm telling you, if you do not ask Lorraine to that dance..." "..." "I'll regret it for the rest of my life." "l can't go." "I'll miss my favorite TV program, Science Fiction Theatre." "Yeah, but Lorraine wants to go with you." "Give her a break." "I'm just not ready to ask Lorraine out to the dance and not you or anybody else on this planet is going to make me change my mind." "MARTY:" "Science Fiction Theatre." "[Muffled breathing]" "[Loud rock music plays]" "[Stops music]" "Who are you?" "[Plays music]" "[Stops music]" "MARTY: [Muffled] Silence, Earthling." "My name is Darth Vader." "I am an extraterrestrial from the planet Vulcan." "Marty!" "[Car honks]" "Marty!" "Marty!" "George, buddy." "You weren't at school." "What have you been doing?" "I overslept. I need your help." "I have to ask Lorraine out, but I don't know how to do it." "Keep your pants on." "She's over in the cafe." "God!" "How do you...?" "MARTY:" "What made you change your mind?" "Last night, Darth Vader came down from planet Vulcan and told me that if I didn't take Lorraine out, he'd melt my brain." "Let's just keep this brain-melting stuff to ourselves, okay?" "Yeah." "Yeah." "All right." "There she is." "Just go in there and invite her." "GEORGE:" "But I don't know what to say." "MARTY:" "Say anything." "Say whatever's natural, the first thing that comes into your mind." "Nothing's coming to my mind." "Jesus. lt's a wonder I was even born." "What?" "What?" "Nothing." "Tell her destiny brought you together." "Tell her she is the most beautiful girl you have ever seen in the world." "Girls like that stuff." "What are you doing?" "l'm writing this down." "This is good stuff." "Yeah." "Okay." "Can you take care of that?" "Right." "[The Wallflower playing]" "[People chattering]" "Lou, give me a milk." "Chocolate." "GEORGE:" "Lorraine." "My density has popped me to you." "What?" "[Mumbling]" "What I meant to say was" "Wait a minute." "Don't I know you from somewhere?" "GEORGE:" "Yes." "Yes. I'm George." "George McFly." "I'm your density." "I mean your destiny." "[Sighing]" "biff:" "McFly." "[Music stops] I thought I told you never to come in here." "Well, it's going to cost you." "How much money you got on you?" "GEORGE:" "How much do you want, Biff?" "[Biff grunts]" "[All gasping]" "biff:" "All right, punk." "Now I'm going to" "Biff." "What's that?" "[Biff grunts]" "[All gasping]" "That's Calvin Klein." "My God, he's a dream." "Kid!" "Kid, stop!" "Stop!" "[Boy protesting]" "[Dramatic instrumental music]" "MARTY:" "I'll get it back to you." "BOY:" "You broke it!" "Come back here!" "[Cars honking]" "Look at him go!" "Get him!" "[Dramatic instrumental music]" "biff:" "To the car!" "Go!" "girl:" "What's that thing he's on?" "BOY:" "A board with wheels." "He's an absolute dream." "THUG 1:" "Come on, come on!" "THUG 2:" "Look out for the car!" "[Shouting]" "[Tires squealing]" "[Screaming]" "[Brakes squealing]" "[Woman grunts]" "[Tires squealing]" "biff:" "I'm going to ram him." "ALL:" "Shit!" "[Brakes squealing]" "[Crowd murmuring]" "[Exclaiming]" "Thanks a lot, kid." "I'm going to get that son of a bitch." "Where does he come from?" "Yeah, where does he live?" "I don't know but I'm going to find out." "[Audio rewinding]" "DOC ON TV:" "My God." "They found me." "I don't know how, but they found me." "Run forit, MartyI" "[Audio rewinding]" "My God." "They found me." "I don't know how, but they found me." "Run forit, MartyI" "Doc?" "Hi, Marty. I didn't hear you come in." "Fascinating device, this video unit." "Listen, Doc." "MARTY:" "I haven't told you about -- DOC:" "One shouldn't know about his own destiny." "You don't understand." "l do." "If I know too much I endanger my own existence just as you've endangered yours." "You're right." "Let me show you my plan for sending you home." "Please excuse the crudity of this model." "I didn't have time to build it to scale or paint it." "lt's good." "Thank you." "We run industrial-strength electrical cable from the top of the clock tower down, suspending it over the street between these two lampposts." "Meanwhile, we've outfitted the time vehicle with this big pole and hook which runs directly into the flux capacitor." "At the calculated moment you start off from down the street driving directly toward the cable, accelerating to 88 miles per hour." "According to the flyer, at precisely 10:04 p.m. this Saturday night lightning will strike the clock tower, electrifying the cable as the connecting hook makes contact thereby sending 1.21 gigawatts into the flux capacitor and sending you back to 1985." "DOC:" "All right, now." "Watch this." "You wind up the car and release it." "I'll simulate the lightning." "[Wind-up mechanism twisting]" "[Electrical humming]" "Ready." "Set." "Release." "[Car whirring]" "[Marty exclaims]" "[Gasps]" "MARTY:" "You're instilling me with a lot of confidence." "Don't worry. I'll take care of ideas." "You take care of your pop." "By the way what happened today?" "Did he ask her out?" "l think so." "What did she say?" "[Knocking at door]" "It's your mom!" "She's tracked you down!" "Quick!" "Let's cover the time machine." "Hi, Cal...." "Marty." "MARTY:" "Lorraine." "How did you know I was here?" "I followed you." "This is my doc...." "My uncle Doc Brown." "Hi." "Hi." "lorraine:" "Marty, this may seem a little forward but I was kind of wondering if you'd ask me to the Enchantment Under the Sea dance on Saturday?" "You mean...." "You mean nobody's asked you?" "lorraine:" "No." "Not yet." "What about George?" "George McFly?" "He's kind of cute and all, but not...." "Well...." "l think a man should be strong so he can stand up for himself and protect the woman he loves." "Don't you?" "Yeah." "I still don't understand." "How am I supposed to go to the dance with her if she's already going to the dance with you?" "Well, because, George, she wants to go with you." "She just doesn't know it yet." "That's why we got to show her that you, George, are a fighter." "You're somebody who stands up for yourself and will protect her." "Yeah, but I've never picked a fight in my entire life." "Look, you're not going to be picking a fight, Dad...." "Dad-dad-daddy-o." "You're coming to her rescue, right?" "Let's go over the plan again." "8:55, where are you going to be?" "I'm going to be at the dance." "And where am I going to be?" "You'll be in the car, with her." "Right around 9:00, she's going to get very angry with me." "Why is she going to get angry with you?" "Well, because, George, nice girls get angry when guys take advantage of them." "[George exclaims]" "You're going to go touch her on her" "No." "No, George, look." "It's just an act, right?" "So, 9:00, you're strolling through the parking lot." "You see us struggling in the car." "You walk up, you open the door, and you say...." "Your line, George." "[Exclaiming]" "Hey, you, get your damn hands off her!" "You really think I ought to swear?" "Definitely." "Goddamn it, George, swear." "Okay." "So now you come up." "You punch me in the stomach." "I'm out for the count, right?" "And you and Lorraine live happily ever after." "You make it sound so easy." "I just...." "I wish I wasn't so scared." "There's nothing to be scared of." "All it takes is self-confidence." "You know, if you put your mind to it you can accomplish anything." "ANNOUNCER:" "Hill Valley weather this Saturday night." "Mostly clear, with some scattered clouds." "Lows tonight, in the upper forties." "Are you sure about this storm?" "Since when can weathermen predict the weather, let alone the future?" "You know, Marty, I'm going to be very sad to see you go." "You've made a difference in my life, given me something to shoot for." "Just knowing that I'm going to be around to see 1985." "That I'm going to succeed in this!" "That I'm going to have a chance to travel through time!" "[Emotional instrumental music]" "It's going to be hard waiting 30 years to talk to you about everything that's happened in the past few days." "I'm really going to miss you, Marty." "I'm going to miss you." "Doc, about the future" "No!" "We've agreed that information about the future can be extremely dangerous." "Even if your intentions are good, it can backfire drastically." "Whatever you've got to tell me I'll find out through the natural course of time." ""Dear Dr. Brown:" ""On the night that I go back in time..." ""...you will be..." ""...shot by terrorists." ""Please take whatever precautions are necessary to prevent this terrible disaster." ""Your friend..." ""..." "Marty."" "'Evening, Dr. Brown." "What's with the wire?" "Just a little weather experiment." "What you got under here?" "No!" "Don't touch that!" "Some new, specialized weather-sensing equipment." "Got a permit for that?" "Of course I do." "DOC:" "Just a second." "Let me see if I can find it here." "[Playing rock 'n' roll music]" "[Music continues faintly]" "[Marty sighs]" "Do you mind if we park for a while?" "That's a great idea. I'd love to park." "I'm almost 18 years old." "It's not like I've never parked before." "What?" "Marty, you seem so nervous." "is something wrong?" "No." "No." "[Opening bottle]" "Lorraine, what are you doing?" "I swiped it from the old lady's liquor cabinet." "Yeah, well, you shouldn't drink." "Why not?" "Because you...." "You might regret it later in life." "Marty, don't be such a square." "Everybody who's anybody drinks." "Jeez, you smoke too?" "You're beginning to sound just like my mother." "[Jazz song ending]" "[Crowd applauding]" "We're going to take a little break, but we'll be back in a while so don't nobody go nowhere." "Marty?" "Why are you so nervous?" "Lorraine have you ever been in a situation where you knew you had to act a certain way, but when you got there, you didn't know if you could go through with it?" "You mean like how you're supposed to act on a first date?" "Sort of." "I think I know exactly what you mean." "You do?" "You know what I do in those situations?" "What?" "l don't worry." "[Marty protesting muffled]" "lorraine:" "This is all wrong." "I don't know what it is but when I kiss you, it's like I'm kissing my brother." "I guess that doesn't make any sense, does it?" "Believe me it makes perfect sense." "[Footsteps approaching]" "Somebody's coming." "[Marty grunts]" "You caused $300 damage to my car, you son of a bitch and I'm going to take it out of your ass." "Hold him." "Let him go, Biff." "You're drunk." "Well, lookee what we have here." "No!" "Stay right here with me." "Come on, Lorraine." "lorraine:" "Let me go!" "MARTY:" "Leave her alone!" "Take him in back. I'll be right there." "Just admit thatyou wantit." "Come on." "Well, go on." "This ain't no peep show." "[Marty grunts]" "[Lorraine and Biff struggling]" "[Suspenseful instrumental music]" "THUG 1:" "Hey, let's put him in there." "THUG 2:" "Yeah!" "That's for messing up my hair." "What the hell are you doing to my car?" "Hey, beat it, spook." "This don't concern you." "Who you calling spook, peckerwood?" "THUG 2:" "Listen, guys I don't want to mess with no reefer addicts, okay?" "marvin:" "Get home to your mama, boy." "THUG 1:" "Biff!" "THUG 2:" "Hurry, Biff!" "MARTY: [Muffled] Let me out of here!" "[Pounding and shouting]" "Reginald, where are your keys?" "MARTY: [Muffled] The keys are in the trunk." "marvin:" "Say that again?" "MARTY:" "I said, the keys are in here." "lorraine: [Muffled] Let me go!" "biff: [Muffled] Come on!" "Hey you, get your damn hands off...." "[Sighing] I think you got the wrong car, McFly." "George, help me!" "Please!" "Just turn around, McFly, and walk away." "lorraine:" "Please, George." "biff:" "Are you deaf?" "biff:" "Close the door and beat it." "[Lorraine whimpering]" "No, Biff." "You leave her alone." "All right, McFly." "You're asking for it and now you're going to get it." "[George groaning]" "Stop it!" "Biff, you'll break his arm!" "[Gasping]" "lorraine:" "Biff, no!" "marvin:" "Give me a hand here, Reginald." "[Exclaiming]" "Damn it, man!" "I sliced my hand!" "Whose are these?" "Mine." "Thanks." "Thanks a lot." "You're going to break his arm!" "Biff!" "Biff, leave him alone!" "Let him go!" "Let him go!" "[Biff laughing]" "[Suspenseful instrumental music]" "[Biff grunts]" "[George panting]" "Are you okay?" "[Tender instrumental music]" "Who is that guy?" "That's George McFly." "That's George McFly?" "Excuse me." "[Thunder rumbling]" "The storm." "Guys, you got to get back in there and finish the dance." "Look at Marvin's hand." "He can't play with this hand, and we can't play without him." "Marvin, you got to play." "They kiss for the first time at the dance." "If there's no music, they can't dance." "If they can't dance and kiss, then they can't fall in love and I'm history." "The dance is over unless you know somebody that can play the guitar." "[Playing Earth Angel]" "This is for all you lovers out there." "marvin: [Singing] "Earth Angel, Earth Angel" ""Will you be mine" ""My darling dear"" "lorraine:" "George, aren't you going to kiss me?" "I don't know." "Scram, McFly. I'm cutting in." "[Lorraine protesting]" "[Playing dissonant notes]" ""Earth Angel, Earth Angel" ""The one I adore"" "Hey, boy, you all right?" "I can't play." "George!" "[Boy laughing]" "[Oppressive instrumental music]" "[Ominous instrumental music]" "[Boy laughing]" "George!" "George." "Excuse me." "[Boy grunts]" "[Uplifting instrumental music]" "marvin: [Singing] "The vision ofyour happiness" ""Earth Angel, Earth Angel" ""Please be mine" ""My darling dear" ""Love you for all time" ""I'mjust a fool" ""A fool in love" ""with you"" "[Crowd applauding]" "marvin:" "Yeah, man, that was good." "Let's do another one." "No. I got to go." "Come on, man." "Let's do something that really cooks." "Something that cooks." "[Cheering]" "MARTY:" "All right." "marvin:" "All rightI" "All right." "All right, this is an oldie, but...." "Well, it's an oldie where I come from." "All right, listen, this is a blues riff in B." "Watch me for the changes, and try and keep up, okay?" "[Playing Johnny B. Goode]" ""Way down in Louisiana Down in New Orleans" ""Way back up in the woods among the evergreens" ""There stood a log cabin made of earth and wood" ""Where lived a country boy name of Johnny B. Goode" ""He never everlearned to read or write so well" ""He could play the guitar justlike he's ringin' a bell" ""Go go Go Johnny go, go" ""Go Johnny, go, go, go" ""Go Johnny go, go"" "George, I heard you laid out Biff." "Nice going." "You ever think of running for class president?" "MARTY: [Singing] "Johnny B. Goode" ""Go Johnny go, go" ""Go Johnny go, go, go" ""Go Johnny go, go" ""Go Johnny go, go, go" ""Johnny B. Goode"" "Chuck!" "Chuck, it's Marvin." "Your cousin, Marvin Berry?" "You know that new sound you're looking for?" "Well, listen to this." "[Music growing wilder]" "[Marty playing heavy metal riffs]" "[Feedback]" "[Playing sustained high-pitch note]" "[Amplifiers humming]" "I guess you guys aren't ready for thatyet butyour kids are going to love it." "[Jazz playing faintly]" "Lorraine." "Marty, that was very interesting music." "Yeah." "I hope you don't mind, but George asked if he could take me home." "Great!" "Good." "Good, Lorraine." "I had a feeling about you two." "I have a feeling, too." "Listen, I got to go, but I wanted to tell you that it's been educational." "lorraine:" "Marty, will we ever see you again?" "I guarantee it." "Well, Marty, I want to thank you for all your good advice." "I'll never forget it." "Right, George." "Well, good luck, you guys." "[Marty exclaims]" "One other thing." "Ifyou guys ever have kids and one of them, when he's eightyears old accidentally sets fire to the living room rug go easy on him." "Okay." "Marty." "Such a nice name." "Damn!" "Where is that kid?" "[Suspenseful instrumental music]" "Damn!" "Damn!" "Damn!" "[Brakes squealing]" "DOC:" "You're late!" "Do you have no concept of time?" "Hey, come on. I had to change." "Do you think I'm going back in that zoot suit?" "The old man really came through." "It worked." "He laid out Biff in one punch." "I didn't know he had it in him." "He's never stood up to Biff in his life." "Never?" "No." "Why?" "What's the matter?" "All right!" "Let's set your destination time." "[Machine beeping]" "DOC:" "This is the exact time you left." "Let's send you back at exactly the same time." "It'll be like you never left." "Now, I painted a white line on the street way over there." "That's where you'll start from." "I've calculated the precise distance taking into account the acceleration speed and wind resistance retroactive from the moment the lightning strikes which will be in exactly 7 minutes and 22 seconds." "When this alarm goes off, you hit the gas." "Right." "[Dramatic instrumental music]" "Well, I guess that's everything." "Thanks." "Thank you." "DOC:" "See you in about 30 years." "I hope so." "Don't worry!" "As long as you hit that wire with the connecting hook at precisely 88 miles an hour the instant the lightning strikes the tower..." "DOC: ...everything will be fine." "MARTY:" "Right." "[Thunder rumbling]" "What's the meaning of this?" "You'll find out in 30 years." "It's about the future, isn't it?" "DOC:" "Information about the future." "MARTY:" "Wait a minute." "I warned you about this, kid." "The consequences could be disastrous!" "Doc, that's a risk you're going to have to take." "Your life depends on it!" "No!" "I refuse to accept the responsibility." "In that case, I'll tell you straight out." "[Thunder crashing]" "Great Scott!" "[Thunder clapping]" "You get the cable, I'll throw the rope down to you." "MARTY:" "Right!" "I got it!" "[Wind howling]" "[Gasping]" "Doc!" "DOC:" "Come on, come on." "Let's go!" "MARTY:" "All right!" "Take it up!" "Go!" "Doc!" "[Shouting indistinctly] I have to tell you about the future." "DOC:" "What?" "MARTY:" "I have to tell you about the future!" "What?" "On the night I go back in time you get" "[Clock bells ringing]" "Doc!" "[Doc screaming]" "Go!" "No, Doc!" "Look at the time!" "You've got less than four minutes." "Please, hurryI" "[Dramatic instrumental music]" "[Bell ringing]" "DOC:" "Yeah!" "Damn it, Doc!" "Why did you have to tear up that letter?" "If I only had more time." "Wait a minute. I got all the time I want." "I got a time machine." "I can just go back early and warn him." "Okay." "Ten minutes ought to do it." "Okay." "Time circuit's on." "Flux capacitor, fluxing." "Engine running." "All right." "[Engine stops suddenly]" "No." "No, no." "Come on." "Come on." "Not this time." "[Doc screaming]" "[Engine clicking]" "[Grunts]" "MARTY:" "Come on." "[Alarm ringing]" "Here we go." "Here we go." "This time." "Come on." "Please." "Please." "Come on!" "[Shouts]" "[Engine starts]" "[Tires squealing]" "[Grunts]" "[Screaming]" "[Dramatic instrumental music]" "[Screaming]" "Doc." "[Wind blowing]" "[Doc shouting gleefully]" "[Helicopter whirring]" "[Music playing on radio]" "[Explosive crashing]" "[Tires squealing]" "Crazy drunk driver." "[Marty exclaims]" "All right." "Fred." "You look great." "Everything looks great." "[Marty panting] 1:24." "I still got time. I'm coming, Doc!" "[Engine dies]" "No!" "No, not again!" "Come on!" "Come on!" "[Tires squealing]" "[Terrorists shouting indistinctly]" "Libyans." "[Suspenseful instrumental music]" "MARTY:" "NoI" "BastardsI" "terrorist:" "Go!" "[Tires squealing]" "[Gunshots firing]" "MARTY:" "Doc!" "Doc!" "[Marty sobbing]" "[Tender instrumental music]" "MARTY:" "No!" "You're alive." "Bulletproof vest?" "How did you know?" "I never got a chance to tell you." "What about all that talk about screwing up future events?" "The space-time continuum?" "Well, I figured, what the hell." "[Uplifting instrumental music]" "MARTY:" "So how far ahead are you going?" "About 30 years. lt's a nice round number." "Look me up when you get there, all right?" "Guess I'll be about 47." "I will." "MARTY:" "Take care." "You, too." "Right." "Bye-bye, Einie." "MARTY:" "And watch that re-entry." "It's a little bumpy." "You bet." "[Explosive crashing]" "[Dog barking]" "[Radio plays Back In Time]" "What a nightmare." "linda:" "If Paul calls, tell him I'm working at the boutique late." "david:" "Linda, I'm not your answering service and somebody named Greg or Craig called you just a little while ago." "linda:" "Which one was it?" "david:" "I can't keep up with your boyfriends." "[Marty calls]" "MARTY:" "What the hell is this?" "Breakfast." "david:" "Did you sleep in your clothes again?" "Yeah. l" "What are you wearing, Dave?" "Marty I always wear a suit to the office." "david:" "You all right?" "MARTY:" "Yeah." "MRS. MCFLY:" "We need a rematch." "MR. MCFLY:" "A rematch?" "Why?" "Were you cheating?" "No." "Hello." "Good morning." "Mom!" "Dad!" "MR. MCFLY:" "Hit your head?" "MRS. MCFLY:" "Are you okay?" "You guys look great." "Mom, you look so thin." "Why, thank you, Marty." "George!" "Good morning, sleepyhead." "MRS. MCFLY:" "Good morning, kids." "david AND linda: 'Morning." "linda:" "Marty, I almost forgot." "Jennifer Parker called." "I sure like her." "She is such a sweet girl." "Isn't tonight the night of the big date?" "What?" "What, Ma?" "Aren't you going up to the lake?" "You've been planning it for two weeks." "We talked about this." "How can I go to the lake?" "The car's wrecked." "MR. MCFLY:" "Wrecked?" "david:" "Wrecked?" "When did this happen?" "Why wasn't I told?" "MR. MCFLY:" "I'm sure the car is fine." "david:" "Why am I the last to know?" "MR. MCFLY:" "See?" "There's Biff out there waxing it now." "Now, Biff, I want to make sure we get two coats of wax, not just one." "l'm just finishing up the second coat now." "Now, Biff, don't con me." "I'm sorry, Mr. McFly." "I meant I was just starting on the second coat." "Biff." "What a character." "Always trying to get away with something." "I've had to stay on top of Biff eversince high school." "MR. MCFLY:" "But, if it wasn't for him-- MRS. MCFLY:" "We'd never have fallen in love." "Mr. McFly!" "Mr. McFly, this just arrived." "Hi, Marty. I think it's your new book." "Honey!" "Your first novel." "MR. MCFLY:" "I've always told you, if you put your mind to it, you can accomplish anything." "Marty, here's your keys." "You're all waxed up, ready for tonight." "Keys?" "[Tender instrumental music]" "How about a ride, mister?" "Jennifer!" "Are you a sight for sore eyes." "MARTY:" "Let me look at you." "Marty, you're acting like you haven't seen me in a week." "I haven't." "You okay?" "is everything all right?" "MARTY:" "Yeah." "Everything is great." "[Explosive crashing]" "[Brakes screeching]" "Marty!" "You've got to come back with me!" "Where?" "Back to the future." "What are you doing, Doc?" "I need fuel." "Go ahead." "Quick!" "Get in the car." "No, no. I just got here." "Jennifer's here." "We're taking the new truck for a spin." "DOC:" "Bring her along." "This concerns her, too." "What are you talking about?" "What happens to us in the future?" "Do we become assholes or something?" "No, Marty." "Both you and Jennifer turn out fine." "It's your kids, Marty." "Something has got to be done about your kids." "We better back up." "We don't have enough road to get up to 88." "Roads?" "Where we're going, we don't need roads." "[Jets firing]" "[Back In Time playing]" "Subtitles by SOFTlTLER" "Hello, everybody, and welcome to the Back to the Future Q and A session here at the University of Southern California." "We have the distinct honor to have the two Bobs:" "Director-Writer, Robert Zemeckis, and Producer-Writer, Bob Gale." "They're here to answer questions about the making of Back to the Future." "And having justscreened the film, I'm sure there will be plenty of questions." "My name is Laurent Bouzereau and I am producing the Back to the Future DVD in collaboration with Universal Studios Home Video." "I will be moderating today's event." "I will be also repeating each of the questions so that the audience can hearit." "And all ofyou at home watching this DVD and listening to this audio commentary can also hear what the questions were." "So here we go." "Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale." "Well, let's getstarted, Bob and Bob." "Can you tell us a little about where you were atin your career at the time thatyou started working on Back to the Future?" "Bob Zemeckis, tell us aboutyour career at the time." "Where we were when we wrote the screenplay was different from when we made the movie." "When we wrote the screenplay, we hadjust finished Used Cars and we couldn't get a movie made." "We couldn't get a movie made anywhere." "It was like a three, maybe four-year dry spell." "We wrote Back to the Future during that time." "And then I went off and made Romancing the Stone and then we were able to get Back to the Future made after that movie, thankfully it was a hit." "Because I've got a...." "In my archives, I've got a rejection letter from every single studio." "Every single studio." "Sometimes more than one from the same studio." "Sometimes they sentit back twice, rejecting Back to the Future as an idea for a movie." "Bob Gale, do you want to tell us a little bit about how you guys write together how you came up with the actual idea for Back to the Future?" "And, maybe, begin with yourinitial fascination with time travel." "We'd always wanted to do a time-travel movie." "Actually we were fascinated by the fact thatpeople always predict the future wrong." "We thoughtit would be interesting to make a movie that took place in a future scene like the 1939 World's Fair, that had everything wrong in the future." "So that was...." "The idea of doing a time-travel movie kind of came out of that." "But there was really no movie there." "After Used Cars came out, I went back to visit my parents in St. Louis, Missouri and I found my father's high school yearbook." "I discovered that my father had been the president of his graduating class." "Something that I didn't know." "I started thinking about the president of my graduating class who was somebody I would've had nothing to do with." "I was head of the Student Committee to Abolish Student Government." "So I thought, "If I had gone to high school with my dad..." ""...would I have been friends with him?" And that was the spark of the idea." "So when I came back to California, I told thatlittle story to Bob." "Hejumped up and said:" ""Yeah, and wouldn'tit be interesting ifyour mom, who said thatshe'd never, ever..." ""...kissed a boy on a date or anything, turned out to be the school slut?"" "So we started cooking on this and that's how the concept got going." "Of course, there was only one way to have a kid go to high school with his parents." "And that was, from ourpoint of view, to do itin a time machine." "We'd seen plenty of movies where...." "Plenty ofstories...." "In A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court he gets hit on the head and he's suddenly back in the past." "And we never bought that." "So we decided thatifsomebody was going to go back in time it had to be with a time machine." "So that's how the creativejuices got flowing." "Obviously, the parting the past in the movie takes place in 1955." "The Academy Award for Best Picture thatyear went to a movie called Marty." "Is itjust a coincidence or was it a conscious decision to call Michael J. Fox's character in the movie Marty?" "I think that was a coincidence." "I don't remember us thinking about that." "No." "We never thought about that." "The fact that Marty had never even occurred to me until you just mentioned it right now." "Sometimes we name characters that are insidejokes, other times I think, in the case of Marty, I think it wasjust a name that...." "Sometimes wejust name characters that have a good sound to them that they roll offyour tongue kind of easily." "Then other times we name them afterpeople." "Like Biff Tannen." "Ned Tannen was the president of Universal." "When we were making I Wanna Hold Your Hand at one meeting that we had he gotirate with us in his office and threw the script on the floor and accused us of wanting to make an anti-Semitic movie even though I'm Jewish." "So, in honor of good old Ned, Biff got his last name." "How much research did you find yourself doing on the 1955 time period to make sure that everything was accurate?" "We did quite a bit of research." "Itseemed to be the process of coming up with ideas was to just go and immerse yourselves in...." "We would immerse ourselves in...." "We'd go to the library and read the newspapers of the time." "You know, those great Time-Life series and photograph books of the time." "You have to sort of be a history buff to enjoy doing something like this." "When we came up with specific scenes we would research, specifically, if we could do a certain thing." "But most ofit wasjustsort of getting a flavor for the time." "Then, of course, once the production gets going, then it gets to be really fun, because then everything starts to get real and you have teams of researchers in the art department, and they start..." "It wasn't a foregone conclusion automatically that 1955 was the year." "In fact, when we wrote the scripting 1980, it was also 1955 then." "And as the years went by because it was fouryears later that we actually got the movie made we gave Marty an older brother and an oldersister so thatyou would understand the age of his parents that they would be in high school in 1955." "But 1955 was important because we wanted Marty to invent rock 'n' roll." "That was one of the ideas that we had real early on." "So, ifit was any later than 1955, that couldn't have worked." "We knew it had to be after rock 'n' roll." "It wouldn't have worked ifit was 1950 or 1949." "When you were writing the script, did you have any specific actors in mind?" "No, I don't think...." "You know, Bob and I actually entertain ourselves by saying:" ""Wouldn'tso-and-so be funny to do this?"" "But I've found, over the years, we do that on specific lines of dialogue." "We'll sit there and say:" ""Nicholson." "He would really be able to do this line great."" "So, for me anyway, they become these kind ofshadow characters." "And I never really see anyone specifically when we're writing." "I don't." "Do you?" "No." "Sometimes, in terms of trying to conceive how a character would deliver dialogue we would imagine in our heads, like, Jack Nicholson or Jimmy Cagney orsomebody who has a very distinctive way ofspeaking." "And that'sjustsort of a guideline to putsomebody's voice in our head that allows us to give the dialogue a certain style." "Sometimes it's based on somebody that we actually know." "Again, just to give the character a style of talking." "In Back to the Future, since most of the characters were young people and there aren't any big stars that are going to be young people we never thought of that at all." "Could you talk a little more specifically aboutyour collaboration and how you actually write together?" "Yeah, we write together." "Wejustput ourselves in the office together and we write together." "I think that the way I sort of describe it is that wejust, basically springboard ideas back and forth and actscenes out together and then if we come up with something good, Bob writes it down." "He writes itin longhand." "We firststarted outlining it with index cards." "And a lot of times we'll think of a scene, and we don't know where it goes." "For example one of the firstscenes in this movie was Marty lnvents Rock 'n' Roll." "So we write that down on a card and we pin it up on the wall and you say to yourself, "Okay, if Marty's going to invent rock 'n' roll..." ""...we have to establish the fact that he can play rock 'n' roll."" "So that automatically tells you there has to be a scene at the beginning of the movie that has him, it turned out to be his audition so thatyou could see that he knows how to play it." "So, one scene then becomes two scenes." "And every time we come up with an idea...." "He's gonna invent the skateboard." "So we have a card thatsays Skateboard Chase and that means we have to see him on a skateboard somewhere in the beginning of the movie." "So, again, one scene then becomes two scenes." "And pretty soon we have a bunch of cards up on the board and a lot of times there'll be a lot ofspace in between them, and we'll say:" ""How do we get from this scene here to thatscene over there?"" "And we'll start kind of focusing on what would have to happen." "We always use pushpins on those cards because we're always moving them around." "Sometimes we'll say:" ""We can't have thatscene here." "It's gotta come two scenes later."" "And eventually we have a full outline." "And then we start really talking about each scene, and the dialogue, and the physical action that takes place." "It might be noteworthy...." "I remember, to say a few things about my recollection about writing the screenplay, which was, it took years." "It took us years." "I mean, this was...." "I think it took us atleast three years to write this." "Is that about right?" "No." "Maybe it feltlike three years." "Well, from when we finally made the movie it was." "But we started writing in...." "I think it was around September of 1980, after Used Cars came out." "And the first draft has a February '81 date on it." "And then we spent two months doing a re-write on that." "And that was the draft we took everywhere in town and everybody passed on it." "I remember, one of the things that we suffered over one of the big breakthroughs was the...." "We didn't know how to get Marty out of the Oedipal situation with his mother." "I remember that." "I think that took us months to figure that one out." "And we didn't know how we got...." "We knew we had this greatstory that got us to this place." "And then we didn't know what to do." "And I remember we were stuck on the fact that the Marty character had to do something." "We couldn't figure out what he could possibly do." "And then the big breakthrough came when we decided that...." "And my favorite line that we wrote in the entire movie is when she says:" ""It's like I'm kissing my brother."" "Thatjustsolved that whole problem." "We were able to actually make thatstory work." "We struggled over that for a really long time." "And I think the other big breakthrough which made the movie just charged the screenplay, was when we came up with the idea of making the time machine mobile." "Our first drafts were, the time machine was this machine that was this big" "It was a chamber." "It was in Doc's lab and if he had to go anywhere, he had to putitin the back of a pickup truck." "In fact, in that early draft, the nuclear-powered thing required them to drive it out onto a nuclear testsite in New Mexico." "And that was the climax of the movie, and itstayed that way until budgetproblems made itimpossible for us to do that." "The thing with the nuclear testsite...." "We actually wentinto production expecting to design that and the idea was in all the early drafts of the screenplay." "The only place they were able to get enough energy was they had to bring the time machine to the Nevada nuclear testsite in the '50s, where they set up all those little villages and towns to blow up with nuclear bombs." "And Marty and the Doc sneak onto that and the big countdown was to the nuclear blast." "When Marty went back in time, he arrived at ground zero and there was a bunch of tourists there, taking his picture and stuff." "We were told that we had to cut $2 million out of the budget." "And that's one of the things where there's method to the madness." "Because the realization that we weren't going to be able to go and move the company to Nevada or to Arizona orsomeplace and shoot." "We were going to have to do the whole thing at the studio, to do it for the price." "Butit turned out thatit became a much betterscene." "It became a much betterscene because there was no way to involve the Doc, actually, if I remember right." "It wasjust over the walkie-talkies where Doc wasjust there, on a side of a mountain, watching all this stuff." "And of course, just tying everything into the town and keeping it all local in the town, just made it all absolutely better." "And it's one of those things where necessity becomes the mother ofinvention." ""You gotta cut thatscene out." Bob and I spent a weekend walking around the back lot at Universal trying to figure out:" ""If this is the only environment we have thatisn't gonna cost us any money..." ""...that we can completely control, exactly what are we gonna do?"" "We managed to cook up the clock towersequence." "One of the most memorable characters in the movie is, of course, Doc Brown." "I wasjust wondering ifyou had any kind ofinspirations or any kind ofinfluences that helped you create thatparticular character." "Christopher Lloyd always said that he made the character Doc Brown a combination ofAlbert Einstein and the conductor Leopold Stokowski." "So all those big, broad gestures that he's always doing...." "Chris is a big classical music aficionado." "So that's what he had in his mind, a big shock of hairlike Stokowski." "Ifyou don't remember who Stokowski is, just watch the beginning of Fantasia." "That's Leopold Stokowski." "In the early drafts of the screenplay, the reason we...." "We always wrote him as Professor Brown." "That had a good ring to it." "You know, he was a professor." "We never wrote him as a Doc." "And Sid Sheinberg, the head of the studio, insisted that we change his title from professor, because he thoughtitjustsounded too corny." "There's those famous Sid Sheinberg stories which we can tell you." "He had three notes when Steven gave him the screenplay to read." "One was that we couldn't call the Doc "Professor."" "The second one was, in the original draft of the screenplay he had a chimp as a mascot, instead of the dog and Sid said, "You have to get rid of the chimp..." ""...because no one is gonna see a movie with a chimp in it."" "We actually had this meeting with him." "It was hysterical." "He said, "I've done the research." ""No movie with a chimpanzee in it has ever made a profit."" "I said, "Well," because in the '80s, "there were these two Clint Eastwood movies..." ""..." "Every Which Way But Loose and Any Which Way You Can." ""So, what about those movies, Sid?"" "And he said, "That was an orangutan in those movies."" "And the third one was, he hated the title." "But we stuck to our guns on that one." "There was a fourth one, which was that originally Marty's mother's name was not Lorraine." "It was Meg." "Remember that?" "That's right." "He didn'tlike that name, so he said, "Name her Lorraine."" "Coincidentally, his wife's name is Lorraine." "So we knew how to pick our battles." "I think Sid's comment was that nobody was going to see a movie with the word "future" in the title." "So we decided that was the one." "We would give up the others." "We changed the chimp to a dog and the names." "But we stuck to Back to the Future." "Then, afterwards, we were having a meeting, a celebratory meeting in Sid's office, after the movie was a giantsuccess." "We said, "Well, you see, Sid?" "People went to the movie."" "And he says, "Yes." "But I'll never know if I was right or not, will I?"" "And I guess not." "Bob Gale, can you actually reveal what the alternate title was?" "Well, the alternate title...." "This got hot and heavy during the production and postproduction of the movie because we'd given Sid what he wanted on these otherissues and he kept on this." "And he decided that the hip title for the movie should be Spaceman from Pluto." "And that's because of the comic book that the kid has in the barn Space Zombies from Pluto." "Sid actually sent us a memo where he outlined certain changes thatshould be made in the movie to reflect this new title Spaceman from Pluto." "One of them was thatinstead of Marty saying, "I'm Darth Vader from the Planet Vulcan" he should say, "I'm from the planet Pluto."" "There were one or two other things like that." "Bob and I got this memo, and we were really scared and worried because he meantit." "You gotta be careful about the kind of fights thatyou pick with the head of the company." "He wasn'tjust the head of the studio, he was the head of the company." "Everyone at Universal thought Back to the Future was a great title, except for Sid." "So we went to Steven with this memo, because Steven had been copied on it and we said, "Steven, what are we gonna do?" "He really means it." ""He really wants to change the title."" "And Steven, in this one solution to the problem I think earned all the money that he made off of all these movies." "He wrote a memo back to Sheinberg, and he said:" ""Dear Sid, thank you so much foryour most humorous memo." ""We really all got a big laugh out ofit."" "Steven knew that Sid was too proud to admit that he'd meantitseriously and we never...." "That was the end ofit." "Going back to the time machine itself, what convinced you to choose the DeLorean?" "Thejoke in the barn, because...." "That's what my memory is." "We backed itinto thatjoke because we thought a car from...." "What would really look like a spaceship landing in the barn in the '50s?" "We said, "Hey, a DeLorean's got these gull-wing doors." ""That'll really look like a futuristic machine from outerspace."" "And that was basically it." "And it was stainless steel." "And we had no idea there'd be all this cocaine controversy and it would be such an infamous car when we wrote thejoke." "We actually got a fan letter from John DeLorean after the movie came out." "Hejustsent us this glowing letter, how much he enjoyed the movie and thanked us for keeping his dream alive, and said that any of the people that worked on the caring the movie could have ajob on his design team." "Can you explain why you don't really go into the back story of the relationship between Doc Brown and Marty?" "We never really thought aboutit." "We thought that the familiarity of him being able to just walk into his lab...." "Actually, you know what?" "We always saw it as the way Leave lt to Beaver was with Gus the Fireman." "Beaver always had the Fireman that he could go to, as basically like his therapist." "And he went there and he would tell him about all the problems he was having with his family." "We always said, "Let's have a relationship..." ""...between Marty and Doc." Marty would be this kid who was attracted to this crackpotscientist who was building inventions in this garage down the street." "But wejust felt to build a whole back story would take too long." "Wejustsort of did it by trying to blast through it with the fact that obviously they know each other because they're so familiar." "When I was a kid, people had moved next door to us." "The guy was a retired professional photographer." "Not retired, he wasjust much older, and he had all this great darkroom equipment." "I was eightyears old, and I'd neverseen any of this kind ofstuff before." "So this guy was like a magician to me and me and my brothers would go over there and watch him develop film." "We developed a relationship with him." "He wasjustsomebody that was kind ofin my head as the type of thing." "Plus, in a smaller town, if everybody tells you there's a guy who's dangerous, a crackpot well, every kid's gonna want to find out who that guy is and get to know him." "And every single movie story can be found in episodes of Leave lt to Beaver." "So for all you screenwriters out there ifyou're struggling with a problem in yourscreenplay, watch Leave lt to Beaver." "You'll find the way to fix the script in thatseries." "As you took the script around town, and kept getting rejections did you, at any point, go back to the drawing board and revise the script?" "What happened was that Spielberg wanted to do it right after Used Cars." "He was the only guy who gotit." "But we had made two movies that he executive produced that flopped." "Plus 1941 which we took...." "We took the blame." "Yeah." "His only money-losing movie up to thatpoint was the one that we wrote." "I said to Steven, "If we make this movie, and it doesn't work..." ""...we'll probably never be able to work again."" "And he said, "You're right."" "Wejustputit on the shelf." "We actually even had one meeting on the movie with a studio executive, who I won't name who was so excited aboutit." "We sat down in his office and he went, "Yeah, yeah, yeah."" "We're telling him what we want to do, and we thoughtit was a really good meeting." "And he said, "So what's Steven's involvement?"" "And we said, "Well, nothing." He said, "Oh."" "And the meeting was over and we knew that that was it." "So then after Romancing the Stone, now everybody wanted to make it." "Bob and I felt that the only upstanding thing to do was to bring it to the only guy who had original faith in it not based on our box-office track record." "So we broughtit back to Steven." "Then he had become famous with E.T. and everything." "So it was like this perfect fit, because he was becoming this..." "...fantasy brand name" "Master of fantasy and family entertainment." "That was one of the big objections to the script is everybody told us thatit was too sweet." "It was too nice." "Everybody was looking for R-rated, raunchy comedies." "Except Disney, who said it was too dirty." "Remember that?" "Because of the thing with his mother, they said, "No, no."" "That was before the Eisner-Katzenberg days." "That was the old Disney." "They said, "No, we can't make this."" "It wasn't raunchy enough for moststudios, and too dirty for Disney." "So we were stuck." "How did you go about coming up with the mechanics of the time travel?" "Well, the mechanics of time travel...." "The fact that everybody says, "Why 88 miles an hour?" "What's so special about that?"" "It's easy to remember." "That's all." "There's no special significance to that." "The whole idea of what the time machine should look like...." "We decided way early on that if there was going to be a working time machine one of the problems we had to solve writing-wise, was "Where did it come from?"" "First we said, "Well, it could come from the government." ""The government could be working on it."" "We thought aboutit and said, "No, if they builtit, it wouldn't work."" "Then we thought, "Some major corporation could be working on it."" "Then we said, "No, we don'tlike the idea that a major corporation is working on time travel."" "That opens up a big can of worms that we didn't want to deal with." "We thought that the American myth is that there's a guy who, in his garage invented the automobile engine that gets 200 miles to the gallon." "He invented the reusable match that the match companies won'tlet us have because it'll put them out of business." "The car companies won'tlet us have the engine." "That's the guy that would invent time travel." "And he would look like Dr. Emmett Brown." "One of the things that we keptstressing to our art department and the people that we hired to help design the DeLorean was thatit really needed to look dangerous and look like it was builtin somebody's garage." "It couldn't have a real Star Trek machined look because a guy that's trying to inventstuffin his garage wouldjuststick something on the side of his car temporarily to see ifit worked." "Then he'd forget thatit was temporary." "He'd putsome other coil on there." "Pretty soon you'd have this big mishmash." "So we wanted it to look dangerous." "At the same time, because it was nuclear we did do some homework on nuclear reactors." "Those big vents that are on the back those are supposed to be cooling towers, like you have at a nuclearpowerplant." "After the plutonium fires off, you have all this big steam come out of there because that's what would happen in a nuclear reaction." "So we did actually try to have some sense oflogic that we could stick to and make sense out of, that was a guide." "But as far as the actual nuts and bolts of time travel itself that's one of the things that Bob and I were really proud of." "We were absolutely fanatics about dealing with what the real rules of time travel would be." "We basically based our time-travel theories on The Time Machine by H.G. Wells." "Simply, we stuck to that one which is thatyou travel through time, you don't travel through space." "Most ofyour time-travel stories and movies make that fatal mistake." "You're in California, and you travel back to ancient Rome." "How did you get to Rome, ifyou're in this latitude and longitude?" "And in the H.G. Wells stories, the time machine never moved in space except at the very end, when he drags it a few feet." "Right." "So that's exactly what Bob and I did in how our time machine worked." "We were very careful." "As a matter of fact, I wasjust thinking aboutit as I was watching the end of the moviejust now." "I remembered that we had...." "The whole reason why we had the car not be able to start after he got back, at the end of the movie, to the future was so that we didn't have to deal with the duplication of two DeLoreans." "We only had to deal with him being duplicated once." "And that one paradox, we cleaned up real quick." "And, of course, ifyou talk to all the time-travel scientists and the people who study this stuff they think that we'll probably be able to figure out how to travel into the future." "Traveling to the past will be much more difficult because of the paradoxes involved." "Eric Stoltz was in the movie prior to Michael J. Fox." "Can you tell us why you had to re-cast the role of Marty?" "The lesson that I learned was you have to stick to your convictions at all costs, no matter what." "What happened to me...." "It was completely my fault, and I miscast Eric Stoltz." "I didn't know it at the time." "I felt I was going to be able to make it work." "I had always envisioned Michael in the part but he was doing this TVseries." "And conventional wisdom was thatyou can'tpossibly do a feature film with an actor who's in a TVseries." "It's impossible." "One of the other mandates I was given by Mr. Sheinberg was if I didn't have the movie for Memorial Day, I'm not making it." "So I was stuck, and I had to castsomebody and Eric was the best that I had available." "Then, when I shot the first couple weeks of the movie he wasn't understanding, or I wasn't able to communicate the type of humor that I was seeing in the movie." "The other reason that Steven deserves the money he made off of this movie was the fact that when I went to Steven and said:" ""I've got to re-cast Eric," he said:" ""You're right." -"You're right."" "He went to Sid, and got him to agree." "Not only got him to agree to let me re-cast him, of course, the painful part was everything thatpoor Eric had to go through but then, also, to agree to allow us to make a movie...." "Basically, we made this entire movie at night." "We made this movie from 6:00 p.m. to 6:00 a.m because Michael was working on the TVshow during the day." "Then he'd drive to the studio." "We stayed on nights." "It was the most" "It was splits, most ofit." "It was splits most ofit, butit was pretty insane because we were on soundstages shooting, lighting the soundstages for daylight at 2:00 a.m." "It was pretty insane, the way we did it." "We didn't make the Memorial Day date, but we did make the Fourth of July." "The irony ofit all is that because we put Eric Stoltz in the movie is the reason we got Michael J. Fox." "We approached Gary Goldberg, who was the producer of Family Ties." "That was the firstphone call we made, because we wanted Michael in the movie." "And he said...." "He read the script, he said, "This is perfect for Michael." ""I cannotlet him read this script." ""When he reads this, and I tell him that I'm not going to let him out of the TVshow to do it..." ""...he'll hate me for the rest of his life."" "Meredith Baxter-Birney, who played his mother on thatshow was pregnant at that time, and Michael was really carrying the show." "So thatjust right away put him out ofit." "We keptpushing ourstart date back while we kept trying to find the perfect Marty McFly." "By the time we made the realization that we had to make a change it was now the beginning of January, 1985." "Meredith Baxter-Birney had already had her baby." "So we went back to Gary Goldberg and said, "We are up againstit, Gary." ""There's only one guy that can play this part."" "He said, "I'll let Michael read it." "If he wants to do it..." ""...it's fine with me, as long as you guys understand that Family Ties is always first." ""If there's a conflict between us and you, we win." "Family Ties wins."" "So that was the rules." "Of course, when Michael read the script, he flipped forit." "He said, "Try and stop me from being in this movie."" "One of the amazing things about the movie is, of course, the performances." "I wasjust wondering how much of those performances are in the script and how much of the performances was improvisation by the actors." "I don'tlike to watch actors improv in movies." "I hate watching actors trying to think up lines while they're acting." "Butif they can take the essence of what we wrote and improve it...." "Make it theirs." "Make it theirs." "I'm fine with that." "The whole pointis that the screenplay is supposed to be this blueprint for the movie." "I've always said that good directing is good casting and good writing." "You cast the right actor, and you've got a good script your directing looks great." "The mannerisms that Crispin Glover has that's what he brought." "He came in to read and he started doing all thatstuff with his hands." "Wejustlooked at each other and said, "This guy was probably born to play..." ""..." "George McFly."" "Right." "Myjob as the director, in that case, was the endless throwing the net over Crispin, because he was completely off about 50 percent of the time in his interpretation of the character." "He had bizarre ideas of what the character's wardrobe should look like and what his hairshould look like." "Probably the single hardest thing that we had to do in the movie was at the very end, when he comes in as the new George McFly and he looks like a normal, middle-class, American citizen that was pulling teeth to get him to do that." "Crispin thought that when George shows up at the end of the movie he should be wearing gray baggy pants and a sleeveless, tank top T-shirt like some guy in the barrio." "I swear to God, he absolutely...." "He did those scenes totally underprotest." "That was the second time we filmed them." "We filmed them once and they weren't right." "He actually went around dressed the way Bob just described on the set trying to solicit the crew to say, "Don'tyou think this is how George should look?"" "Nobody on the crew agreed with him." "There's a scene in the cafeteria when he's writing his stories and ifyou look real close at his performance his face is all red, and his eyes are puffy and bloodshot because Crispin insisted that his hair should be sticking straight up." "The day before, we had shot Michael's side of the scene with his hair down." "It didn't make any sense." ""Crispin, I don't understand this."" "He said, "When I write, I think my hairshould be straight up."" "I said, "But I don't get that." He said, "You don't get that?" I said, "No."" "He couldn't explain it." "When Bob said, "It's not going to match with what we..." ""...shotyesterday," he said, "Brando never matched."" "That was his answer to that." "Wasn'tit difficult for Michael J. Fox to shoot his television series and shoot the movie at the same time?" "How did he manage?" "How could he even function doing that?" "He was young." "He was young in those days." "We started shooting with Michael around the first orsecond week of January, 1985." "I think his show ended shooting about the second or third week of March." "Then we wrapped photography in the third week in April." "We also had the problem of we had to finish everything in the square that was the 1950s, because we had to turn it around to the 1980s, so we actually shot the daytime scenes on the back lot, on the weekends." "So Michael didn't even get to sleep on the weekends because the only time we could get him for a full day oflight was on Saturday and Sunday at great expense, because everyone's working platinum time on Sunday to shoot." "He didn'tsleep hardly at all during that whole ten to twelve-week period that we were making the movie." "How did you go aboutselecting Christopher Lloyd to play the character of Doc Brown?" "Neil Canton worked with Christopher Lloyd on Buckaroo Banzai." "As I remember, the guy that we first wanted to have play Doc Brown was John Lithgow who also was a veteran of that movie." "He wasn't available, and Neil said, "You guys have got to meet Christopher Lloyd."" "Chris came in." "Didn'tsay a word, justsatin the office." "But he looked at us with those eyes and we said, "That's Dr. Emmett Brown."" "As a matter of fact, Chris never said a word." "I never had a conversation with him the entire movie." "Chris is so shy that I'djustsay, "All right, Chris..." ""...we're going to hang you in a harness, up on the thing." ""The camera will be here." "You're going to hang from the clock." ""There will be lightning and wind." He would go, "Okay."" "It took this entire movie for Chris to warm up to me enough for us to have conversations in the following movies." "Chris wouldjustsay, "Okay."" "The amazing thing about him is that he would be different every time." "Every take he'd do something a little different." "You never exactly knew whatit would be, butit was always right." "He created such latitude with this character that we always had an embarrassment of riches in the editing room." "He'djust do some crazy thing with his eyes on one line and one take and then he'd do something else in another take." "It was always a tough decision to say which of these moments we would use." "He was always wonderful, and it was good for the other actors." "It was especially good for Michael J. Fox because Chris keptsurprising him." "So he was able to react a little bit differently in each scene in each take, and that kept his performance fresh." "It kept him on his toes when he might have preferred to go into his trailer to take a nap." "You've got to love Chris." "Somebody asked a question earlier about what happens...." "How does a performance get designed?" "For example, I think Chris is 6'4" 6'2", and Michael is not that tall." "You've gotta love Chris, because Chris does the whole movie hunched over, so I could keep them both in frame." "Chris did the whole performance like this: "MartyI"" "He did that for me, because otherwise I couldn't keep these guys in frame." "Hejust kept himselfin frame for me and made the characterlive that way." "The other thing I rememberis Chris absolutely would neverletyou know what he was going to do until the camera was rolling." "He would only ever do a rehearsal or a camera blocking, literally at quarterspeed." "He would stumble through his lines, and he would have the scriptpages with him so then when we would say, "RollI" he was nowhere where the camera operator could find him in frame." "Basically, Ijuststarted rolling the camera all the time, telling everybody:" ""We don't know what's going to happen, butit will be good."" "The only way to get a full-speed rehearsal is to roll film." "It was a thing Chris had about that." "Did you always have a sequel in mind because, of course, at the end of Back to the Future Doc Brown comes back in the car?" "No." "I've said in this other documentary if we were planning for a sequel, I wouldn't have put the girl in the car." "The ending was ajoke." "It was ajoke." "It was ajoke:" ""Something's got to be done aboutyour kids."" "We had no idea whether this movie would make a dime." "We would have been happy ifit hadjust barely broke even because our other movies lost money." "We didn't know that anybody would have any interesting seeing this picture." "The characters go riding offinto the sunset." "That's the end of the movie." "What were you looking for when you were casting the role of Biff?" "Interestingly, there's a character in the gang with a crewcut who's credited as "Skinhead." His name is J.J. Cohen." "He was somebody we were very seriously considering to play Biff." "He came in andjust knocked us out." "He didn't have the physical presence." "Playing against Eric Stoltz you would have never believed that he could push Eric Stoltz around." "If Michael J. Fox had been in the movie at that time J.J. Cohen might have ended up being Biff, because he would have been four or five inches taller than him." "We wanted somebody that had a real physical presence and Tom Wilson is a big guy." "Absolutely nothing like the character of Biff." "Just the sweetest, most gentle guy in the world." "He says that when he was a kid, he gotpicked on and that's where he drew his inspiration for what he did." "Can you make comments about Lea Thompson and working with her on the film?" "Lea wasjustso great and wonderful and sweet and she did everything she was told and never gave us any problems." "Like a dream." "She wouldjust work and do itperfect every take." "She wasjust absolutely fantastic." "We can't tell great Lea Thompson stories...." "Because there are none." "She was a director's dream." "Always on time, always knew herlines." "Always did it right." "Actually, something we should talk about is that one of the important decisions that we made in the movie was using young actors to play themselves old." "At the time, there were executives that thought maybe we should find actors thatlooked like them to play them older." "We went through quite a lot of makeup tests to prove that it could be done this way." "Normally, certainly at that time this wasn't done." "You didn't take an 18-year-old or 22-year-old actor, and put makeup on them and make them look like they were 47." "So we did a lot of extensive makeup tests with Ken Chase, we hired." "He'd done all the prosthetic makeup on Roots." "Ken always told us thatit would have been easier for him if he were making these 18-year-olds look like they were 75 instead of 45." "Then he could have put full makeup on all over their face but he had to create these appliances so the actual face of the actor would be able to move, and everybody didn'tlook like they had too much Botox." "It's a tribute to all the cast that they were able to create things in theirperformance that made you buy them at age 47." "It wasn'tjust the makeup, it was theirposture and their body language and their wardrobe, of course." "Can you tell us about working with Dean Cundey, your director ofphotography and Larry Paull, the production designer on Back to the Future?" "I had worked with both Dean and Larry on Romancing the Stone, and got along with them great." "The design of the movie, basically...." "The thing we started with was the town square." "We wanted to make this cynical statement about what it used to look like, and whatitlooks like now." "That was a lot of fun to do and to be able to just take it from there." "We actually considered shooting that on location, remember?" "Right." "We scouted Petaluma." "We went to Petaluma, which is where Joe Dante made Explorers which came out a couple weeks before our movie did in 1985." "It had this greatlook to it, but when we started realizing all the headaches we would have trying to change the light fixtures, the streetlighting everything, every business that had to be bought out to change a modern-day town and take it back 30 years...." "It ended up thatit was pointless to do anything exceptshootit on the back lot." "In terms of the car Michael J. Fox talks about how demonic that car was." "Do you have any memories about how difficultit was to work with it as a prop?" "Oh, yeah, it was a terrible car." "The frame is plastic." "They had a four-cylinder Volvo engine in that model DeLorean." "It didn't have any pickup at all." "It was impossible to shoot around." "We had to cut one apart because it was too small to get a camera in." "So all the scenes that we have inside the DeLorean, where Michael is sitting in there and driving it were a process done on the stage." "We actually had to cut the car apartso we could pull the back wall out and get the camera in there." "Yes, but all movie cars are like that." "As soon as you bring a picture car on the set, itjust doesn'tstart." "Orit runs out of gas." "It never fails." "It'sjust one of those curses." "I've never had it not happen." "One of the problems that we had a lot was and nobody would have ever thought of this one we'd be shooting outside on the back lot, and at night it got cold out there." "It was winter when we were shooting it." "The way that the DeLorean gull-wing doors stayed up was there were these little gas-jet things, like you use to open up a door." "When we left the door open for a while the gas would condense in the cold and the door would start to drop down in the middle of a take." "Finally, in between takes, we had the special effects crew out there with portable hair dryers and they were in there heating up those valves heating up that gas so that the car door would stay open through an entire take." "ILM did the special visual effects for all three movies." "Obviously, they were in their early days at the time you made the firstpicture." "I wasjust wondering ifyou had any concern at the time aboutsome of the visual effects that had to be done to the picture." "There's no digital work." "Everything was optical." "There's only about 30 shots in the whole movie." "Everyone sees it as a big special effects movie, but there weren't that many shots." "In those days, everything had to be a lock-off." "They had this little Vista Vision camera that could only run a minute of film." "That was real old-fashioned optical stuff from the early days of Star Wars." "That's what everything was." "The car at the end was a miniature that they made movejustlike they did the spaceships in Star Wars on an articulated arm." "They had a motion-controlled camera they had up at ILM with a green screen and a blue screen." "Just all the old optical work." "We neversaw a decent optical until about a week before the picture had to be turned over to negative cutting." "We were terrified, because this was the first time we'd ever worked with ILM." "We would get these comps down, and they would be terrible." "Bob would have these frantic conversations with Ken Ralston about why this didn'tlook right, and why this didn'tlook right and would it even be possible to getitin time." "ILM did." "There's the one shot thatstill doesn't work Ken just couldn't get the one where you see his eye through his hand." "That's the imperfection that we putin there for...." "We didn't want to insultAllah." "It's a movie, so it's perfect enough." "ILM worked on all three movies." "Obviously, when Back to the Future was made, they were in their earlier days." "I'm wondering ifyou had any concerns aboutsome of the work that had to be done in the movie, in terms of visual effects." "In the shots of Chris on the clock tower, you can see the cable on his harness." "Which would be an insult if I paid $9 to go see Spiderman and I actually saw a cable in the shot." "There's no excuse for that now." "But, in those days, there was no way to remove it." "That was the best-played piece ofperformance." "This movie would be so easy to make now." "Can you imagine how I would have done the town square?" "I would havejustpainted itin." "I would've had huge buildings." "And then, when I went back to the '80s, it would've been so completely different." "I wouldn't have had to do it all physically." "I could have made it better, if I had digital technology." "Movies have always been this technical thing." "It all, ultimately, comes back to the script and the imagination of the filmmaker." "The digital stuffisjust a tool." "Being a director and a screenwriter was there a particularscene thatyou were excited about going in and directing?" "Did thatscene come out exactly the way you had imagined it?" "Ijust couldn't believe how lucky I was on the day we shot Michael walking into the town square for the first time, because I had those great cumulus clouds in the sky." "If I was doing the movie today, Ijust would have painted all those in." "The sky would have looked perfect." "Butit was, "I can't believe..." ""...how lucky we were to have thatsky."" "That was a great thing." "So, you have those, or there's millions of times in this movie, where the actor will do something you neverimagined, and you go, "WowI" ""I never thought I'd eversee an actor do a reading like that, or hear that."" "Those are the gems." "But, as far as my work, it's alwaysjust compromise." "It's always less than I everimagined it." "I always have to go in and say:" ""We'll piece this together." "We'll figure out a way to make it work, somehow." ""If we had another day, it could have really been great."" "That's how I come away from everything." "In this movie, we did have the unusual circumstance of actually getting to redo a couple of those scenes." "We did make them a little bit better." "They were also angst-ridden, because once you go back, you feel you're compelled to make it better." "That's why, any time you re-shoot, it's always a pain because you're going, "Oh, no." "I've got to make it better now."" "There's nothing worse than re-shooting." "Michael J. Fox would go crazy because we'd have these conversations, "When we did this scene before...."" "He'd go, "Damn it." "I never did this scene before."" "Some scenes I shot exactly the way I shotit with Eric." "Completely, camera in the same place." "Other times, I was able to go back and say:" ""We can improve this by doing this."" "And the best thing is, you get to...." "The advantage of going back and redoing stuff, is you know whatyou don't need." ""Let's not waste our time doing that." ""That wide-angle, we're never going to use it." So that was helpful." "Can you comment on the editing of the film?" "Was it as frantic as the shooting, in terms ofschedule and are there any deleted scenes?" "I was coming into the editing room about two hours before the call." "So I'd go and I'd edit, and then I'd...." "Because we were shooting nights, I'd edit, then I'd go see dailies and then I'd start to work." "I think the editing rooms were trailers near the back lot." "Toward the end, I'djust geting a golf cart and zip over and they'd look atit." "Look at a scene, give them my notes." "We had to put two editors on, because we had to have this accelerated release." "Because, when did we wrap?" "We wrapped, I think, on April 20." "And the movie came out on" "July 3." "So nine and a half weeks from when we wrapped, the movie was in the theater." "This movie ruined postproduction schedules in Hollywood." "Because nobody thought this was even possible." "And at the point when we changed actors Universal was resigned to the fact that the movie probably wouldn't come out until the middle ofaugust now." "So, we were kind of thinking that we'd have a release date in the middle ofaugust." "And then we had this dynamite sneak preview." "And Mr. Sheinberg sees the movie with this audience and they go nuts." "And the visual effects weren't finished and the lastshot was in black and white." "It was still rough." "But the audiencejust gotit, and gotit big time." "And he pulled us aside, and he said:" ""Is itpossible?" "What will we have to do..." ""...to get this movie out for the Fourth of July weekend?"" "And we said, "Write some checks."" "And he said, "Okay, whateverit costs, do it."" "And we actually had sound crews working 24 hours a day." "In the Hitchcock Theater, where we were doing the mix we had a pre-dub crew working the graveyard shift." "They'd start work at 8:00 p.m. and go home at 7:00 a.m." "And then we'd come in at 8:00 a.m and mix the picture with the tracks that they had pre-dubbed the night before." "So that was insane." "Bob Gale, can you tell us a little more about those sneak previews?" "Any surprises after the first one?" "The firstsneak preview...." "We had two sneak previews." "The first one was in San Jose, and we didn'tinvite the studio to that one." "One of the advantages of having Steven Spielberg as your executive producer is you can close the door on people thatyou don't want there." "We didn't want their feedback yet." "We didn't want the studio to give their feedback." "We wanted to hear what the audience had to say." "One of the things that...." "The movie had gotten no publicity." "Back then, there was no Internet, there was no advance word about anything." "Here we had a recruited audience that only knew they were seeing a movie that had Michael J. Fox, who they knew from Family Ties and Christopher Lloyd from Taxi and it was a comedy, and they didn't even know whatit was about." "They didn't even know it was about time travel." "So when the DeLorean came out of the truck, they didn't know whatit was." "And, I remember, when Doc does his time-travel experiment with Einstein and the car and the dog disappear." "This very nervous thing happened in the audience where people thought thatsomething bad might have happened to that dog." "They were real worried about that." "There was a big sigh of relief when the dog comes back and he's okay." "And I remember that the point in thatscreening where they gotit was when Marty sees his fathering the cafe in thatscene where Biff and those guys come in and start harassing: "Hey, McFly."" "At thatpoint, you knew they were totally with it and they completely went with it." "We cutsix orseven minutes out of the picture after thatscreening." "And that was the last time that ever happened." "Thatpeople didn't know it was a time-travel movie." "Once they knew it was a time-travel movie and the word got out it was about a kid who meets his parents a lot of the stuff at the beginning played differently than it did with a completely cold audience." "And, of course, no one was ever again worried about the dog." "Can you tell us a little bit about Steven Spielberg?" "Whatis he like to work with on a day-to-day basis in production and postproduction?" "Was he very hands-on?" "With me, Steven's great." "Steven's a director, so he doesn't ask you to do insane things." "He's always respected my vision as a director." "I can'tspeak for other directors, but for me he's never meddled in the process anywhere." "Tell them the story about how Steven was so concerned about the score." "Remember that?" "For this movie?" "No." "Bob had worked with Al Silvestri on Romancing the Stone." "And Steven wasn't that enamored with the score of Romancing the Stone." "And he made no bones about making that clear." "And he thought we needed somebody who could do a more John Williams kind of a score." "And he was always paranoid about what the score was going to be." "So, in that firstpreview we had a mixture of temp music and we'd had the first two days ofscoring." "So we had some of the real score cutinto the movie." "So one ofal's cues came on during the sneak and Steven says to Bob, "That's whatyourscore should sound like."" "And Bob said, "Thatis the score, Steven."" "Yeah, right, I remember that." "Steven's always trying to do what's right foryou and the movie." "And you just have to sometimes...." "You just have to cherry-pick his ideas." "Because sometimes he'll have really good ideas and sometimes he's not making the movie you're making." "So, it's like he'sjust another opinion in the mix." "Bob has a theory." "He says:" ""If one person says something, that's their opinion." ""If two people say the same thing, probably millions ofpeople will agree."" "So, if one person said, "I don'tlike that" and somebody else said, "I like that, I didn'tlike this" and there's a difference of opinion about everything we'djustshrug ourshoulders and say, "Let's not worry about that."" "Butif two or three people keptsaying:" ""That thing where Biff does this really bothers me."" "Then we'd look at that and say, "Maybe there's a problem with that."" "Did you guys have any concerns, and what was the reaction before the movie came out?" "We had two previews in theaters and one on the studio lot." "There was a controversy about that, too, because they hadjust built the Hitchcock Theater and supposedly it was cursed." "Meaning that any movie that everplayed in the Hitchcock...." ""If the movie is a comedy, neverplay it at the Hitchcock..." ""...because nothing plays in the Hitchcock Theater." ""Everything we everscreened there is...."" "I remember Sid got up and said" "We turned to him, and we said, "So much for the curse of the Hitchcock Theater."" "And Sid says, "The curse of the Hitchcock Theater has been shitty movies."" "Right." "And the other thing was, we developed the original screenplay at Columbia." "And Steven originally developed E.T. at Columbia." "So when the lights came on after Sid saw the movie, he said:" ""I get the beststuff from Columbia PicturesI"" "It was something like that." "So, anyway the previews...." "I remember that I got incredibly, almostparalyzed with fear when I had all these good previews." "Because I understood that the movies I Wanna Hold Your Hand and Used Cars also had tremendous previews." "And it didn't mean anything." "It's two different worlds." "There are so many wonderful movies that are made and they're great, and they work, but nobody wants to go see them." "So I was really terrified that they weren't going to be able to open this movie." "I wasjust terrified that the movie might not find its audience." "But then, I also remember that I didn'tlike the TVspots." "And I realized on making this movie that that's an art form that I don't understand and I shouldjust butt out of the marketing because I forget who it was, but whoever cut the TVspot...." "Every single piece of marketing material had that one line of Michael Fox's in there where he said:" ""Are you telling me that my mother has the hots for me?"" "And I thought the way you sell this movie is with all my effects and my action." "But they saw the movie and they said, "This is what the spotshould be."" "And that one line was in everything, and there was something about that." "They understood that that's whatpeople would come in for." "Seeing Michael J. Fox say that was the whole campaign." "For me, the first time that I thought maybe we might have something happening was...." "We shot the exterior of the high school stuff down at Whittier High School." "And one night, we were shooting the dance stuff and word got out that Michael J. Fox was in this movie and suddenly we had kids lined up seven-deep, trying to catch a glimpse of Michael J. Fox." "That never happened to us before on any movie we'd done and we said, "WowI This guy's really a star."" "We didn't realize how big a staryou can be from being in a hit TVseries." "And Michael was unavailable to do any promotion." "I remember that, because Sid was angry about that." ""So we've got the star of this movie, and we can't even put him on TVI"" "Because Michael on top of anything else, with Family Ties they decided they were going to shoot an entire season in Europe." "Like Family Ties Goes to Europe." "Goes to London." "Yeah." "And that was the summer the movie opened." "So Michael wasn't around to A:" "Enjoy all the insanity of the success of the movie and B:" "He wasn't around to promote the movie." "Hejust kept hearing on the phone that the movie's a success." "Do you remember good reviews?" "Bad reviews?" "Were you concerned about reviews or even paying attention?" "The reviews?" "No." "There were some...." "We got a lot of good reviews butsome people didn'tlike it." "That's what makes the world go round." "Ifyou start worrying about that, you can really make yourselfinsane." "I remember Steve Martin, I saw him do an interview once where he said:" ""The critics who..." ""...give my movies good reviews are insightful, wonderful, genius people..." ""...and those who give my movies bad reviews are worthless scum."" "At whatpoint did you guys realize that not only did you have a hit butyou had a mega hit?" "And how did it change yourlife and career?" "Second weekend, the box-office gross was higher than the opening weekend." "You don'tsee that anymore." "When the movie was released, we were only in 1,100 or 1,200 theaters." "And I think our opening box-office gross was $10 million for the weekend which was big." "And, in fact, thatsummer, 11 out of 12 weeks from when the movie was released, it was the number one movie in America." "One weekend we got knocked out by National Lampoon some National Lampoon movie." "Our big concern was that we were going to get clobbered by the Mad Max Road Warrior, Beyond the Thunderdome." "Right." "I remember." "Oh, that was going to be it." "And we rolled right over them." "So we were really excited about that." "What's interesting about this movie was I went to a couple of theaters to watch itplay with the public." "And people, when Michael got back and he did that thing with his family...." "Everyone assumed that the movie was over, and some people started to leave and then they would come running back in because the movie was still going." "Because we had so many different endings on this movie thatpeople were trying to guess the endings, and, of course, they were wrong." "Can you explain how you stay in tune with the popular culture, what's going on?" "Is that awareness important to you and is itpart ofyour creative process?" "The awareness is thatit's a constantsort of anxiety and fear because you don't know why itis, and when it's going to go away." "And you look around and see it happening to other filmmakers all over the place." "And the landscape of everything is changing so dramatically." "But Ijust keep asking myself the two questions which are:" ""Do I want to go see this movie?"" "And, "Do I think anybody else wants to go see it?"" "Because that's the best I can do, and it's really out of my control." "We find thatifyou try to second-guess the audience too much you're going to shootyourselfin the head." "There's plenty of movies where you see thatsomebody in the studio is saying, "Oh, this is hot right now." ""We've got to put Britney Spears in a movie." Or whoeveritis." "Whoever's hot, or whatever the big thing is has to be in the movie." "And it's a bad idea because it's not true to somebody's vision." "Yeah, one studio executive, when we were trying to make this movie going back to the early days, you know again, I won't mention his name, but he said:" ""Look." "Time-travel movies never work." ""Theyjust don't work."" "That's what he said." "The Back to the Future trilogy was a huge success, of course." "I'm wondering if there were any times where you had creative differences when you were working together on the films." "We truly respect each other's talent and opinion." "What happens when we'll have a difference of opinion aboutsomething instead of believing that one of us is right and the other one is wrong I'll say, "Whatis it about this that bothers you?"" "He'll start explaining it, so that I can try to getinside his head and figure it out." "Generally what would happen is that we would come up with something brand-new that was better than what my original idea was or what his idea was." "That's true collaboration." "You get a synthesis and instead of two plus two equals four, it equals eight." "There is something about that, that I think a movie like Back to the Future which is a movie that really benefits from the writers being a team." "When you have a collaboration like mine and Bob's, whatever thatis because it does work." "Another thing thatit has is there's no ego involved." "When one of us comes up with a greatidea the otherperson says, "That's a really greatidea."" "That goes rightinto the script." "Why I think it's good forpop movies like this is because we're able to temper each other's own indulgences." "So we don't getself-indulgent, like you can when you're writing." "You don't have somebody there killing your darlings or calling you on it." "It gets very self-indulgent." "You say, "This scene is going on forever." "Cut this stuff out."" "You're making mass entertainment so you might as well be collaborating." "It's notsomething that's like a poem where it's supposed to bejustyour..." "...emotional vision." "Your vision." "You're already bringing in actors and technicians, and all these otherpeople to help you realize a vision, so all filmmaking is collaborative, all the way through." "Bring each otherinto it, and bring the audience in that way." "At the end of the day, we want the movie to work for an audience." "What's the pointif nobody's going to go see it?" "Orif they go see it and they don't getit?" "Make sure that they getit." "Can you tell us about the music, how you went about choosing it notjust the score, but also the actual songs." "Huey Lewis and the News was such a big part of the movie." "Johnny B. Goode was always in the original script." "There was no second choice." "It had to be Johnny B. Goode." "That turned out to be the most expensive piece of music in the movie." "We were thinking, "We've got a movie that's got..." ""...teens in it." "We've got to have a record on the radio."" "From the beginning, we knew we wanted to have a signature song that we could get on the radio." "Alan said, "You've got to hear this guy, Huey Lewis."" "Al Silvestri." "And I said, "Okay." I didn't know." "The Sports album hadjust come out." "We called them, and they were very enthusiastic to getinvolved." "They wrote a song that wasn't right." "I brought Huey into the editing room and I showed him the cutscene." "This was during this insane postproduction." "I think I cut I Want a New Drug to it." "Just to give him an idea, when Michael blasts out of the Doc's thing on a skateboard." "Huey said, "I get this." "You want a majorsong." "We've got to do a song in a major key."" "That was it." "He went off and wrote Power of Love." "I remember when Neil Canton called me, and he said:" ""Ijust found out Power of Love," this is two weeks before the movie came out..." ""...is going on the radio in heavy rotation."" "I said, "Great." We had to send all the field people out to all the radio stations to remind them to say:" ""From the movie Back to the Future."" "The studio always wants the song to be the title of the movie." "Huey Lewis said, "I can't work that way." "I've got to just write the song..." ""...thatis going to be right forit."" "Then he decided to write the second song." "We only asked him to write one." "They wrote the second song, and we put thatin there." "I think it was the only number one single that Huey ever did." "It was some big breakthrough record for these guys, even after the album." "And it got nominated for an Academy Award." "It was great." "All the DJs were saying, "From the movie Back to the Future."" "It wasjust one of those things where all the synergy all came together." "The plan came together." "Bob Zemeckis, I was wondering ifyou could tell us how you feel about the movie, looking back atit today." "Other than there being some sloppy stuffing the movie from a technical standpoint." "I was watching that early remote head and I hadn'tseen this movie on the big screen since it came out." "I'm sitting there and I'm watching in the dance scene, we had this terrible remote head called the "hot head," and you could see itjerking." "I'm going, "Oh, man."" "Nowadays, all thatstuffis perfect." "I don't know if I'd be doing this comedy that broad kind of comedy." "Maybe, if the scriptis right, maybe I will." "I don't know." "It's a pretty good movie, actually." "It's pretty good." "I don't know if we've grown as screenwriters from this." "This is the best thing we've ever written." "It's a pretty terrific screenplay." "We're always flattered that we hearit's used in classes, as a quintessential example of how you setstuff up, and how you pay it off." "All thatstuff works." "Those are tried and true rules ofstorytelling, and we made them work." "That's the nice thing of having the writers be the filmmakers when the director totally gets the script because he wrote it." "We start talking about Sid Sheinberg a lot." "When the movie came out, he said, "Thatscreenplay is like a Swiss watch."" "He's right." "There is not a single frame of that movie thatisn't doing what they told us we're supposed to do in film school:" "Advance plot or character." "It's really economical, this movie." "Can you discuss the deleted scenes that were in the movie and were taken outprior to the release?" "God, I don't remember." "I know what they are, because we pulled them out to put them on the DVD." "The Darth Vaderscene was a whole lotlonger." "Right." "But that wasjustshortened." "That was shortened." "That was two minutes longer." "Everything was pretty much lifts." "There was a scene where Doc Brown in the '50s, opens up the suitcase that we see him putin there." "He's going through all of his personal belongings and he wants to know, "What's this thing?" and he pulls out this hairdryer." "He's got this fixation on underwear, so he pulls out this pair of underpants and he's disappointed that they're cotton and that the underwear of the future isn't made out ofpaper." "We had a little scene where as a stall to get George McFly out to the car the kid in the red hair that cuts in at the dance, locks him in a phone booth." "When he looks at the clock, to see what time itis he decides he'd better be sure and calls the time and temperature to find out exactly what time itis and ends up being locked in the phone booth." "That turned out to be a scene that we didn't need." "How'd he get out?" "We showed Strickland coming over and saying:" ""See what happens to slackers, McFly?"" "We filmed them letting him out, but we didn't ever use it." "You'd see him come out and knew that Strickland must have let him out." "This is how dangerous itis, how you can getso self-destructive." "We almost cut the whole Johnny B. Goode scene out of the movie." "Do you remember this?" "Yes." "It was the eleventh hour, and it was because of this thing:" "It's the only place in the movie where the storyline stops." "For Michael to do this performance." "I actually had Artie liftit, and I looked at the movie withoutit and it worked okay, and then Artie, my editor, said:" ""Why don't we leave itin for the preview?"" "These things are scary, what happens." "You lose your focus, and you're thinking:" ""Maybe I should make the movie shorter." And, "It doesn't advance anything." ""It's fun to watch this, but...."" "Once the audience went crazy, then, you know." "It's really a shame that we can'tpreview anymore, because previews are so important." "You can't because the movie is reviewed on the Internet the next hour." "It's a terrible tool that's been destroyed." "It's so important to be able to do that." "One of the end sequences, with Doc in the car, uses fusion." "Itis a contemporary concept now, but how did you know aboutit then?" "Fuel cells." "We knew about that." "We read about that." "Fusion was something that everybody's been experimenting with." "I think aboutsix or eight months after the movie came out was when those scientists in Utah claimed that they had figured out cold fusion." "That was all over the news for four or five months, until nobody could replicate those experiments." "It turned out they didn't know what they were doing." "We actually got a letter from the Defense Department when the movie came out." "They wanted to know what we knew about fusion power." "Very scary, kids." "The government, that's how it works." "The sneak previews wentpretty well, and, obviously there was greatpotential for the movie, but were you still concerned somehow that the movie would lose money and not turn a profit?" "It's the studio's money, and the way we rationalize itis, we say:" ""The studio has decided thatit's worth..." ""...$20 million to them to make this movie."" "We're going to realize it as best we can but they pushed the button and said we're going to write this check against this movie and hope thatit works." "Otherwise, you'd drive yourself crazy." "You have better odds ifyou took your $20 million, went to Las Vegas and put the $20 million on the come line at the crap table." "Your odds are better than making money on a movie." "That's the business we've chosen, so there's nothing we can do." "We have to do this gambling." "You have a little more control, because you do actually make the movie yourself." "But, as far as the odds of what movies make money and what movies don't most movies actually lose money." "Bob Zemeckis, at the time you were developing this screenplay your name was attached to the project as director." "Was that a plus in getting the project made?" "Before I made Romancing the Stone, it was a hindrance and after I made Romancing the Stone, it was a help." "But the script was the same." "The script was the same, but nobody ever read the script and said:" ""We'd like to give this script to this other director to make."" "Because nobody liked the script." "All these rejection letters that Bob has in his archives we got 42 or 44 of them from studios and differentproducers." "It wasn'tlike anybody was calling us up and saying:" ""I'll do anything to make thatscript Back to the Future."" "There wasn't anybody that was interested." "That wasn't a decision that we ever had to wrestle with." "Bob was going to direct the movie, end of conversation." "Before Romancing the Stone, I was getting the worstpossible reputation which is:" "His movies are good, but they don't make any money." "Man, that was the kiss of death." "Bob Zemeckis, you mentioned earlier thatyou noticed a few flaws in the movie things that the average viewer would not catch." "Whatis your take on that?" "That'sjust me seeing all the little flaws." "That's the way itis." "I look at movies that I love and I think they're perfect." "Then I talk to the filmmakers and they don't know what I'm talking about." "It's always the same in all the arts." "A painter will look at his painting and he'll look at that tree limb that he never got right." "That's the only thing he'll focus on." "When everybody else is looking at the whole canvas, saying, "What a greatpainting."" "I don't think you'll ever find a director that will say, "I made the perfect movie."" "If they do say that, the movie is probably a complete piece ofjunk." "At the end of Back to the Future Marty returns to a new and improved 1985." "Was it always written that way?" "Yeah." "It was 1985." "You've got to look at that ending in historical context." "It was a very '80s ending." "The fact that things changed for the better as a result of his actions, was always something that...." "It's the story of a kid who teaches his father how to be a man." "Yes, but things changed for the better, they were material things." "They were possessions." "He had a truck." "His father had a BMW." "But his fatheris a successful author." "Come on." "Yeah, butit was the '80s." "It's interesting." "There were a couple of reviews that came out of Europe that keyed in on the blatantidea that how can these filmmakers equate this kind of happiness with material possessions?" "But not a single critic, that I remember, talked aboutitin America." "There's a lot ofproductplacementin the movie." "Was this meant to be a directslam against the materialistic attitude that we had in the '80s?" "In terms of creating an image of the past one of the ways thatyou create the past is through brand names." "We made a conscious effort to find products that had a differentlogo in the past so that we could use those." "It used to be, in the '60s or the '70s they'd make a movie, and a car would pull into a gas station and there would be no name on the gas station." "We would say, "That's ridiculous." "It has to be...." ""Somebody owns that gas station." "It's some brand of gasoline."" "Put the brand in there, that makes it real." "There was a productplacement department at the studio that hadjust gotten started and they were trying to cram all kinds ofstuff at us." "We would nix anything that didn't work too well." "Shell gasoline, for example would have paid more for a placement than Texaco did but Shell didn't change theirlogo." "So Texaco was the perfect gas station because, how different a Texaco station looked in the '50s, compared to the '80s." "The same with Pepsi versus Coke." "A Coke bottle in the '50s and a Coke bottle in the '80s were the same but a Pepsi logo was completely different." "When we talk about the sequels, we'll tell you all the productplacement horrorstories." "Nobody cares aboutproductplacement until they know the movie is going to be a hit." "That's one problem with sequels." "There is one story I've got to tell you." "The productplacement department hired this real sleazy guy." "A lot of these productplacement guys are sleazy because they try to figure out how to graft these corporations and make these ridiculous promises." "So he made this deal with the California Raisin Board that Back to the Future was going to do for raisins what E.T. did for Reese's Pieces." "They came to me with this proposal to put raisins in the movie." "I'm saying, "What brand?" "Sun-Maid Raisins?" "No." "Just raisins." ""Can'tyou have a bowl of raisins at the dance?"" "I'm going, "A bowl of raisins looks like a bowl of dirt." ""How is that going to photograph?"" "If we can'tput a brand name somewhere...." "They had taken $50,000 from the California Raisin Board for this placement that wasn't going to happen in the movie." "Finally, what we gave them was the bum on the bench in 1985, when the DeLorean comes back at the end itsays "California Raisins" on that bus bench." "That was what came out of that deal." "When the California Raisin Board saw it, they were livid." "I didn't realize at the time they'd already actually paid the money." "They told the studio they were going to sue them and the lawyer at the studio called me and asked me aboutit." "I said, "You'd bettersettle and give them back their money..." ""...because I'd be happy to be a witness for them."" "Because of the way they'djust tried to force this on us, and we weren't going to do it." "So the California Raisin Board ended up notpaying for that exposure." "The lesson I learned on this, in the subsequentsequels was never do productplacement." "Ever." "Anymore." "The only real way to do productplacement is to getpermission and then get cooperation." "Ifyou're going to do Texaco, and they give you signs and uniforms and stuff, thatyou don't have to make." "That's the only way." "I never take money anymore, because..." "...you've got another creative person." "You've got anotherproducer that's saying, "What am I getting for my money?"" "Productplacementjustisn't worth it." "You've touched on it throughout this whole discussion, but I'mjust wondering ifyou could tell us what was your favorite part of making this film." "My favorite part of making this film was writing it." "The actual making of the movie, I don't remember any good times." "Seeing the movie work when it was finally put up on the screen that was a thrill." "But the actual shooting of the movie wasjust survival." "It was cold." "I remember never having enough sleep, always being half-asleep." "I was the most unhealthy I ever was when I made this movie." "I was the fattest, and the most out ofshape and sick that I ever was, making this movie." "So, I guess, the writing and the finishing were the favorite parts." "And the actual shooting wasjustsurvival." "I think the best moment I had on the set was Michael J. Fox's first day." "When he walked in front of the camera and he started doing the scene and Ijust felt, "Thank God." "That's Marty McFly." ""It's gonna work now." "It's gonna work."" "Kind of along the same lines, aboutyour expectations with the actors you said you were very happy with the performances." "But would you say that they exceeded your expectations?" "Yeah, they're brilliant." "This is one of those movies where everybody is on the same page." "Once Michael came into the movie, it was like everything just gelled together." "Everybodyjust got the tone of what the humor of this movie should be." "All the performances around Michael were better." "Lea was fine with Eric Stoltz, and Chris was fine, but when Michael J. Fox was working with them, itjustsupercharged it." "Itjust wentinto the stratosphere." "Ifyou talk to actors, they'll talk about give and take and how importantitis to be playing a scene with somebody that gives back something for them to work from." "And that was always what was happening." "I would say, honestly, they're better than I thought they could ever be." "I've been fortunate to work with so many great actors thatit's always better than I everimagined." "It really is." "It really, truly is." "How much control did you have over the final cut?" "That's the final cut." "You know, I've never had any of these final cutproblems." "Never, ever, once in my entire career have I ever had to have a struggle over the cut of the picture." "Now, of course, I contractually have final cutin everything that I do." "But even in the early days I didn't have final cut, but nobody wanted to tamper with it." "You know, I really believe that moststudio executives don't want to do the filmmaker's work." "And it becomes more of a personality clash than it has anything to do with the movie when you have these issues about final cut." "I've never had anyone ever try to take the movie away on any movie I've ever made." "Are you making any changes to the movie for the DVD?" "Taking out, for example, the wires thatyou mentioned." "The ones we see in the clock towerscene." "Nope." "I hate that." "I don't think you should ever do that." "That would be like...." "That's like colorizing a movie, a black-and-white movie." "Itis whatitis." "Warts and all." "I don't get this adding scenes back in and re-cutting the movie." "I don't get that at all." "Itshould be the way it was." "At that momentin time, this is the movie and this is the way it was, and that, I think, is whatit's supposed to be." "For those ofyou that have only seen the movie on home video on the video itsays, "To be continued" at the end." "You didn'tsee that here." "That was never on the theatrical release." "It won't be on the DVD." "We only put that on the video as a way of telling the world that there was going to be a sequel." "So, if anybody says, "That's different," nope." "The film thatyou saw was a new print made from the original elements." "It's been re-mastered in hi-def and itlooks absolutely great." "I supervised the video transfer." "Butitis the movie thatyou justsaw." "Is the trailer for ill going to be on the end of ll?" "Yes." "And the only thing that's different about thatis that at the end of that traileritsaid, originally, "Coming summer 1990."" "And now it doesn'tsay, "Coming summer 1990."" "Ifyou could travel in time, where would you go?" "It depends." "If I could come back I would go to the future." "I mean, I would go to the past." "Butif I could only go one way, I would go to the future." "And Bob Gale?" "Where would you go?" "Maybe I'd go back and see what my parents were like in high school." "That would certainly be about the mostinteresting thing I can think of." "Can you tell us who were some ofyour majorinfluences when you were making this movie?" "Any other writers, directors, that truly inspired you?" "The classic American directors." "I mean, I think that the main influences on this movie are definitely you know, Frank Capra and Billy Wilder." "Throw a little John Ford in there when you start getting into the sequels." "But I'd say it's more like a Billy Wilder movie more than anything." "Maybe?" "But those are the filmmakers that we love." "The classic American filmmakers." "I think we're gonna end on that note." "Robert Zemeckis, Bob Gale, thank you so much foryour time." "This was really, truly an amazing experience." "Thanks so much, everybody." "Thank you."