We Don't Need Roads: The Making of the Back to the Future Trilogy (16 page)

“I certainly know Crispin was a bit of a handful, but you definitely got your money’s worth out of him,” Lea Thompson says. “He’s just a great actor. Crispin did this funny thing in the scene where we were watching
The Honeymooners
in the beginning of the film where he was laughing at the TV. We couldn’t stop laughing. We blew like twenty takes and nobody even cared. We were just laughing at Crispin because he was being so ridiculous. I had to try not to laugh, though, because if you laughed too much, you would break the seams of the makeup on the sides of your face. It was a really happy moment on set.”

Like the majority of the rest of the cast, Courtney Gains, who played Dixon, found Glover easy to work with. The two were previously acquainted while working with director Trent Harris on
The Orkly Kid
, a 1985 short that was eventually released as a part of
The Beaver Trilogy
in 2001. In the vignette, Glover played Gary, a man obsessed with Olivia Newton-John who took to performing as her in talent shows. “I started doing my lines, and then this bathroom stall opens and Crispin Glover is dressed in the black outfit that she wore in
Grease
, with the wig and everything,” Gains says. “I was watching this guy, thinking,
This is surreal
. As an artist, the guy is brilliant. I don’t use that word a lot, but Crispin is a fucking interesting actor. That’s one thing you can’t say about Crispin, that he’s ever not interesting. Whatever he does, you’ve got to watch him. As actors, that’s what we recognize, that artistic genius. That being said, he’s definitely a bit of an eccentric. For the crew, who are not as interested in his acting chops, maybe he comes off a little crazy.”

Although not a household name at the time of
Future
’s filming, the actor is the only child of two actor parents and had several significant credits of his own prior to
Back to the Future
, including guest appearances on
Happy Days
and
The Facts of Life
. While some have chalked up his behavior to quirks, at least one of his peers feels Glover’s vocal unhappiness with the film’s ending was the result of something else—entitlement. “Crispin was privileged, and because of it, he was able to live through his politics,” Harry Waters, Jr., says. “That was his choice, but some of us, and especially as artists, were not even thinking politics—we were thinking survival.”

Despite his unhappiness with the script, Glover claims that he continued to play nice during the duration of the shoot, primarily out of fear. The memory of Eric Stoltz’s abrupt firing, with no clear explanation given to the actors as to the reason why, was stronger than his moral outrage. Glover tempered the theatrics for the remainder of the shooting, and despite their occasional differences on set, the Bobs were willing to cast their personal disagreements with the actor aside in order to have him reprise his role in the sequel. “Crispin gave a terrific performance in
Part I
, and it’s still a pleasure to watch,” Bob Gale says. “And I got along with him fairly well. It’s unfortunate that he has chosen to blame me for the decision he made in repeatedly turning down the several opportunities we gave him to return in the sequels, solely over money.”

In the decades following the first film’s release, Gale has received the brunt of Glover’s ire, with the actor frequently mentioning in interviews that the producer has been giving misinformation about the details of the sequel negotiations. For his part, Gale is undeterred by what he considers to be the actor’s self-serving revisionist history. “I don’t waste my time with Crispin’s
versions of events,” he says. “We asked him to be involved before we even conceived the sequel story, as we did with Lea and Tom. This would have been in 1986 or 1987. Crispin, via his agent, Elaine Goldsmith, asked for the same money that Michael J. Fox was receiving, as well as script approval and director approval.”

Court documents from a 1990 suit state the amount requested as $1 million. With the actor having received less than $60,000 for his work on the first film, an increase of over ten times that, plus perks, was a nonstarter as far as Gale and the other producers were concerned. “I told Elaine that this was so far out of line that I wouldn’t respond with a counteroffer,” he continues. “She knew it was out of line too, but she was legally obligated to convey her client’s terms. I told her to try to talk some sense into him and come back with a reasonable offer within two weeks or we’d write him out of the sequel.” But threatening to make the sequel without Glover didn’t mean writing the movie without the character of George. At least partially because Gale was exasperated with the actor’s behavior on the first film, as well as the anemic state of contract negotiations, the first draft of
Number Two
, which Gale wrote almost entirely alone due to Zemeckis’s other commitments, saw George’s role drastically reduced from the original film.

The first draft of the sequel script began very similarly to how the film materialized on-screen: Marty and Doc go to the future, Biff steals
Grays Sports Almanac
, the present timeline is altered, and our heroes have to fix it. Where it differed significantly was in the third act. Instead of going back to 1955, Biff thought it would be cool to see the sixties, and gave himself the book in 1967. The adventure takes place there, with George McFly as a college professor, away giving a lecture at the University of California at Berkeley and, thus, absent from the majority of
the script, and Lorraine as a flower child. As one more needle in Glover’s side, his character’s birthday was changed from August 18, as it appeared in the first film’s novelization, to April 1. While it was uncertain whether or not Crispin Glover would return—the Bobs knew it was unlikely, but the door was left open for negotiations to continue if the actor and his representatives wanted to operate in good faith—one thing was now guaranteed: If the actor were to return, it would be as April’s fool.

“Bob and I had decided we would devise the story around the cast that we would have,” Gale says. “Because Crispin chose not to be in the sequel, but Lea and Tom had agreed, that motivated our creating the alternate Biffhorrific 1985 story in which George was a tombstone.
Number Two
had George making a brief appearance only because I thought Crispin might change his mind.”

Zemeckis liked Gale’s script, but realizing they might be missing a unique opportunity, he suggested the two continue to think of a better way to continue their story. They remembered their governing rules: Check your ego at the door, write a film that both of them would want to see, and if someone thinks they can improve upon an idea, it must mean there’s a better one out there. The two gave it some thought and, in almost no time, decided to make a sharp move in a paradoxically different, yet familiar, direction.

“Bob and I looked at each other and said, ‘You know what? We have a very, very unique situation here,’” Zemeckis says. “‘We have the potential to make a sequel of a story where the inherent device is time travel and we could actually do what the audience really, really wants, which is go back and revisit the movie they just saw.’ That is the thing that excited me the most, this idea of seeing the same movie from a different angle. It was a very unique situation that will never happen again because I’ll probably never
make another movie about time travel where the character can actually go back into the first movie.”

“The idea of revisiting the first movie and creating an additional story taking place within it is the single best idea of
Part II
,” Gale says. “That’s what makes it unique, and Bob Zemeckis deserves the credit for coming up with it. When you’re working with a great idea, it makes the writing process easier because you know you’re working toward something special.”

A second draft was written under what became the official working title for the sequel—
Paradox
. The 165-page screenplay began in a fashion similar to that of the first draft, but the second act was a large-scale return to the first film. The third section, which began a little past the hundred-page mark, introduced a number of brand-new characters, as Doc Brown was accidentally sent from 1955 to the Old West by a lightning strike to the DeLorean. There was a new love interest, this time for the Doc, a schoolteacher named Clara Clayton, as well as a new antagonist in Buford Tannen, who at the time was nicknamed “Black Biff” instead of the finished film’s “Mad Dog,” the somewhat distant relative of Tom Wilson’s character from the first film. Bob Gale loved what he had written, in concept, but was displeased with how it was coalescing on the page. It was too rushed, and more important, he felt it was too jarring to introduce so many new characters into Marty’s world that late in the film. While looking for a place to start making cuts, Bob G had a nagging feeling that while he was tasked to write one sequel, he had actually been developing a comprehensively fleshed-out treatment for two.

He spoke with Zemeckis, whose
Roger Rabbit
was now in postproduction in London, and expressed his concern. Gale was sabotaging his own film—and their hard work—by making edits
that would damage the story. He wanted to write the sequel script the way he wanted to see it on-screen, and he wanted his partner’s blessing to do so. Bob Z agreed, and the portion of the screenplay that took place in 1885 was fleshed out. The result was an epic clocking in at more than 220 pages, which Gale shared with Zemeckis and his coproducer.

“That script,” Neil Canton says. “The first time I read it, when I put it down I was like, ‘Holy smokes! This could be the greatest movie ever made.’ There was so much in the movie. No one was going to believe it. We’re in the future, we come back to the present, we’re in the alternative timeline, and now somehow Doc disappeared and Marty’s in the West. I just thought—wow. It was like if you took every fan’s letter who wrote in saying, ‘This is what it should be,’ and sort of put them into a blender, it wouldn’t have been as great as this could have been.”

However,
Paradox
would never see the light of day. From the moment Gale first admitted his desire to free himself from the standard motion picture format, he knew that he might be sabotaging himself in a different way: What if Universal refused to approve of the script as presented? The movie would have been more than three hours long, well past the first film’s running time. As a preemptive measure, he began lobbying Zemeckis and the rest of his production team to push for not just one sequel, but two. “Sheinberg was resistant, although he denies it now,” Gale says. “So I asked our production manager, Joan Bradshaw, to budget the new long version as two separate films.” Within short time, the numbers were in: $50 million for one film, $70 million for two.

Nowadays, it’s not unusual for a major motion picture to have a budget of well over that figure, but in the mid-1980s, spending that amount of money on a film—even one almost guaranteed to have a successful opening weekend—was risky
business. The first
Back to the Future
had a final price tag close to $19 million. By comparison, if you added the expenditures for the two original
Star Wars
sequels, they would have cost less than
Paradox
would have, and just slightly more if you adjust for inflation. The sequel would have been tied with 1978’s
Superman
for the third most expensive film ever made to date, behind 1988’s
Rocky III
and Zemeckis’s own
Roger Rabbit
. Sure, the
Back to the Future
sequel—or sequels—would be nearly certain to make money, but there is no such thing in Hollywood as a guarantee.

With the numbers crunched, Steven Spielberg took the spreadsheets to Sheinberg’s office and gave him the pitch. Weren’t Michael J. Fox and Christopher Lloyd contracted for two more sequels? Lea Thompson and Tom Wilson were so amenable to working with the Bobs again, they would likely welcome an opportunity to extend their time spent as Lorraine and Biff, respectively. If the second film was successful, wouldn’t it be better to already have another film in the pipeline instead of having to round up all the actors again two or three years down the line for a third volume? No one knew exactly how things would shake out with Crispin Glover yet, but it would be no more difficult for him to return for one sequel than two. Both films could be shot consecutively, with editing on the third installment being wrapped while the second was in theaters. Sheinberg too saw the potential.

By the time the decision was made to split
Paradox
into two, it was the end of January 1989. The majority of the cast and crew were waiting for their start date, unaware that, as with work on the first film, their tenure with Zemeckis and company was soon going to be extended far beyond what they had originally bargained for. And once again, Michael J. Fox would have
to make significant sacrifices. The 1988–1989 season would be
Family Ties
’ last, meaning that for a significant portion of work on
Paradox
, Fox would be up to his old moonlighting tricks. But now there were additional considerations. The actor was a newlywed and his wife was pregnant with their first child. Agreeing to go back to the future, he would soon find out, was just the beginning of what was to be a very draining year and change for all
involved.

Wednesday, February 8, 1989

B
ob Gale thumbed through the inches of white, canary, pink, blue, green, and golden pages on his desk that were bound together by a trio of brass fasteners. The multicolored tome was a testament to the several rewrites completed in the preceding three months, all in preparation for the impending
Paradox
shoot, which was scheduled to start in just a few weeks. With Sid Sheinberg having given the okay to two sequels, the crew was notified to plan on sticking around for a bit longer than they originally expected. The screenwriter turned to a page in the middle of his book, where he had inserted an important revision on colored paper—
As Marty bends down to attempt to revive the unconscious Doc, we CRANE BACK. Superimpose title: “TO BE CONCLUDED NEXT SUMMER IN
BACK TO THE FUTURE 3
!”
He wasn’t sure that would be enough to do the trick, but he hoped it just might be.

Gale’s screenplay was ambitious, and not only because of the number of pages that passed through his typewriter. Partially because of the way the original film concluded, and partially because of letters the filmmakers received from the public pitching
ideas of how to best reconcile the original film’s cliff-hanger ending,
Paradox
started off just a few moments before Doc arrives back from his first trip to the future, directly revisiting the last few minutes of the first movie. The Enchantment Under the Sea dance, along with several other moments, were also revisited and looked at from another perspective. For the lead actors, visiting more time periods meant embodying even more iterations of their characters, making it crucial that the principal performers were okay with the new game plan before filming began. Once the decision was made at the beginning of the year to split and expand
Paradox
into two, Sheinberg made deals with Lea Thompson’s and Tom Wilson’s agents for a third installment. This was as easy as the producers thought it would be, as the two were happy to renew their membership in the Zemeckis club. “I just thought the story was great,” Thompson says. “And I loved all the weird stuff I got to do, like being eighty-year-old Lorraine.”

In the return to Hill Valley, the more that things would change, the more they would stay the same. In the interest of maintaining a consistency of vision, Zemeckis and company sought out as many members of the original team as possible to return for
Paradox
. A number of people, like Dean Cundey, Clyde E. Bryan, Arthur Schmidt, and Alan Silvestri, made the journey over to England to help the director on
Roger Rabbit
and were happy to continue their working relationship with Bob Z. And as with Thompson and Wilson, there was little or no opposition to the change in production schedule and additional film among the cast and crew. The first half of the
Paradox
script, what would become
Back to the Future Part II
, would be filmed first. The crew would then break for a few weeks, and start working on what would become the third film. “The feeling was that it was going to be an economies-of-scale situation because we would all
be just continuously making sets and shooting,” Dean Cundey says. “And the studio didn’t know if anybody would sit for three hours of Marty McFly. It turned into being a great thing, which everybody loved. Outside of the fact that it was so much fun working on the films, people would be employed for a longer period of time. I was working for a year and two weeks doing the two films back to back, with very little time off in between. It was great because you were working on one large project, with intricacies and story points that were related. Props from this film could work in that film. There was not a single moment where anybody said, ‘Oh, no, this is going to be tedious.’ Everybody agreed it was going to be a great adventure, which it was.”

In order to make good on the story the Bobs had constructed, as well as deliver on audience expectations, it was decided early on that as many of the original actors as possible should be invited back. Harry Waters, Jr., who had landed a number of guest appearances on television shows like
What’s Happening Now!!
and
227
since the first film, was among the featured actors eager to return. “It was 1989, so we were all older and more evolved,” he says. “I had more experience working in the industry. When we got the call, I was actually able to tell my agent, ‘Here is what we should ask for,’ and it wasn’t because I thought they had to have me. It was like, ‘Wow, I get to do the next version of this. How cool,’ but I wanted to get compensated.”

As for most of the actors, Waters’s salary was adjusted for inflation. “I was able to get a nice deal because I had also done another TV series. I had a little bit more pull,” Waters says. “You know how they have all those things in billing? I got to be top of the card. It was amazing getting on the set with the Starlighters because they were able to find the same guys again. I couldn’t believe they were able to pull them back together.”

Despite the producers’ best efforts, some of the audience’s favorite featured characters would be absent from the second installment. Although the Enchantment Under the Sea dance would be heavily revisited in the sequel, and re-created using the same costumes, set pieces, and even some of the same dancers, the character of Dixon was omitted from the sequel, a disappointment to Courtney Gains. Additionally, two scenes were shot and removed from the movie before its release, leaving two more characters on the floor of the cutting room. During the Biffhorrific sequence, Marty was supposed to stumble upon his brother, who was now a down-and-out alcoholic. “That was pretty fun,” Marc McClure says. “It was a pretty wild night. Spielberg was on set during that particular sequence. There was fire and a bunch of people there. It was a big night for the extras.” However, when the film was shown to test audiences, viewers wondered what had happened to Linda, Marty’s sister, and why she wasn’t in the film. Wendie Jo Sperber, who played the role, was pregnant at the time of filming and unable to reprise her character. In the interest of clarity, it was easier to remove the scene altogether. Bob Gale called McClure to give him the word shortly before the theatrical release. There was also a scene removed with Will Hare, who played Old Man Peabody, in the portion of the film where Marty and Doc return back to 1955, because the filmmakers didn’t think the character had made a strong enough impression in the first film to have been remembered.

Due to her mother’s battle with cancer, Claudia Wells relinquished the part of Jennifer. “I knew that I couldn’t do it at that point,” she says. “There was so much going on at home. It’s such a stressful experience in the family dynamic to have your mom die. There was no choice for me.” Instead, Elisabeth Shue, who starred in 1984’s
The Karate Kid
opposite Ralph Macchio and
1987’s
Adventures in Babysitting
, was hired to pinch-hit. Although she isn’t a dead ringer for Wells, she did meet regulation Jennifer height. At five foot two, she was okay to play opposite Michael J. Fox by the metric the Bobs had set on the first film. The actress was outfitted in the same costume, and her hair was treated to match Wells’s as best as it could. It wasn’t the perfect solution, but it would have to do.

The first few pages of the
Paradox
script called for Zemeckis to re-create the last moments of
Back to the Future
, with a few new lines of dialogue for Biff, once again clueing the audience in to the fact that they would be revisiting some material from the first installment from a new perspective. With the first film four years removed, the hope was that the scene re-creation would have the added benefit of helping mask that the role of Jennifer had been recast. “I actually thought it was really smart the way they did that,” Claudia Wells says. “I was more impressed than thinking it was odd. I’ve always admired Elisabeth Shue’s acting, so to have her be cast in my part was a compliment to me. That’s how I took it. I mean,
Leaving Las Vegas
and all the other films she’s done? She’s an incredible actress, so it was flattering.”

For the rest of the cast, news that Wells’s role was being recast stirred mixed emotions. Lea Thompson and Claudia Wells didn’t work together much on the first movie, since their only shared scene was the film’s final one, where Doc returns back from 2015. Though she was empathetic for Wells’s family situation, Thompson was pleasantly surprised to have another opportunity to appear on-screen with Elisabeth Shue. The two were well acquainted after having appeared in a number of Burger King commercials several years earlier, and although they too only worked together briefly—on the scene in the 2015 McFly home in Hilldale—the two actresses were happy to reconnect.
For Christopher Lloyd, the change required a larger adjustment. “Claudia Wells not coming back was very disappointing,” Lloyd says. “But it had to happen. It was wonderful working with Elisabeth Shue, but I was very comfortable with Claudia.”

While Wells was handling family issues, Shue was engaging in similar struggles. The actress’s experience filming the
Back to the Future
sequels was not a happy one. In August 1988, the actress met up with her brothers at their parents’ summer home in Maine. One of her brothers, William, was on a tire swing and the rope broke above him. He landed on a broken tree branch, which impaled him upon impact. It was a fatal freak accident. In recent years, she has described the experience filming both movies as one she barely remembers. She wasn’t really in a proper headspace to enjoy it like most of the other actors did.

There were also some significant changes to the creative team. While in London, Zemeckis met and worked with a number of people whom he wanted to bring into his regular repertoire of collaborators, including a young England-born costumer named Joanna Johnston.

Johnston, who had worked on Steven Spielberg’s
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
and
The Color Purple
, recalls getting a long-distance call from Zemeckis in Los Angeles. She was more than five thousand miles away, in London, where the two had met when she served an assistant costumer on
Roger Rabbit
. “Jo, I’d like for you to come and do the next
Back to the Future
. You’ll be okay coming to Los Angeles and doing that, won’t you?”

“I was pretty young and quite green,” she says. “But I was absolutely in awe of him as a filmmaker. We got on really well, so I went quite blindly to work in L.A. on an entirely American project. The only people I knew were Bob and Steve Starkey.”

Steve Starkey made his start in the business serving as an
assistant editor on George Lucas’s special-effects-heavy original
Star Wars
sequels. By 1985, he was working on
Amazing Stories
, a half-hour television series produced by Amblin for Universal’s NBC network. He had caught wind of the company’s newfound attachment to
Roger Rabbit
and made it known that he was interested in working on the project. Robert Watts, the head of postproduction at Amblin, was looking for someone to supervise the visual effects and additional components of postproduction for the film, and Starkey got the job. The
Roger Rabbit
shoot was a long one, nearly as long as the first
Future
film’s, and the postproduction period was even longer. For slightly over a year, all of the animation and live-action components were painstakingly blended together, along with sound and score, to make a revolutionary and visually realistic spectacle. The picture went on to win a number of awards, including Oscars in the postproduction categories of Film Editing (Arthur Schmidt), Sound Effects Editing (Charles L. Campbell and Louis L. Edemann), and Visual Effects (Ken Ralston, Richard Williams, Ed Jones, and George Gibbs). Williams also took home a special award for his animation direction and creation of the cartoon characters for the film. While the special and visual effects of
Back to the Future
were applauded, Zemeckis knew
Paradox
would require even more attention. To that end, he wanted Steve Starkey on board to help make sure everything remained on track, as he had done to such success in their first collaboration.

While Zemeckis was assembling his dream team, some
Future
veterans were asked to sit out. Although the aesthetic of Hill Valley, in both its past and present-day iterations, was an integral component of the first film, production designer Larry Paull was not rehired for
Paradox
. In their depiction of the future, the Bobs knew they wanted to avoid what they felt had become commonplace
cinematically—presenting a bleak and desolate Orwellian world. Before working with Zemeckis, Paull had helped create the iconic look of Ridley Scott’s futuristic world in
Blade Runner
, which had earned him an Oscar nomination. There likely would have been differing opinions between Zemeckis and Paull about how to best realize the future in
Paradox
, just as there were differing opinions while making the original movie.

In his concept for the first film, Paull sought to create a saccharine look for the 1955 set, which was then altered for the modern-day scenes. Remnants of consistency remained, such as the Essex Theater, but there was an obvious deterioration in terms of the quality of life for Hill Valley’s 1985 residents. Instead of
Cattle Queen of Montana
being shown, which starred Ronald Reagan decades before his presidency, the pornographic
Orgy American Style
is the prominent title on the marquee. The design, in effect, highlighted a subtle, understated critique the Bobs’ script made about the 1980s. Maybe Marty and other teenagers believed their current decade was great, but there was an innocence and naïveté lost between the 1950s and the 1980s. Maybe “the good old days” wasn’t just an expression, but a distinct period in time that would be foreign to the McFly-aged viewers showing up to movie theaters on the Fourth of July weekend.

“I wanted the present-day Hill Valley in
Part I
to be representative of the eighties, in how it was dressed,” Paull says. “It was really run-down and funky. It was what happened to small towns ten, twenty, or even thirty years ago. The towns were dying and the stores were going out of business. We see this in documentaries and on the news all the time. Various towns or cities are just falling apart at the seams because no one shops there anymore. That’s why Hill Valley in 1985 was so much different from Hill Valley of 1955. What we needed to do, for story
purposes, was introduce elements into 1985 that were not there in 1955. In the beginning of the first movie, you can see that Dr. Brown’s garage was right next door to a Burger King, right? That’s because his house is torn down. All that’s left is the garage.”