We Don't Need Roads: The Making of the Back to the Future Trilogy (3 page)

While
1941
was in production, Spielberg signed on to executive-produce
I Wanna Hold Your Hand
, a screenplay the Bobs wrote and which Universal picked up. This time Zemeckis would direct. The
movie was released in 1978, and two years later Columbia Pictures released their second film,
Used Cars
. The Bobs put their hearts and souls into both, but while critics loved them, as with
1941
, the movies failed to connect with the general public. “It wasn’t that
Hand
and
Used Cars
weren’t well received—we had dynamite sneak previews for both,” Gale says. “We simply never had audiences show up on opening day.”

“Zemeckis’s early films he made with his writing partner Bob Gale just have such an incredible kinetic energy,” film critic Leonard Maltin says. “They seem to be supercharged with adrenaline. That’s what I think about first and foremost. I love
Used Cars
, and I’ll never understand really why that didn’t become more. Even over the years it never really built the following that it deserves, but I don’t know why. Is it too snarky? Too cynical? I don’t know. Maybe just the name
Used Cars
connotes something that people don’t find appealing.”

Although Columbia Pictures only made a minuscule profit on
Used Cars
, with the movie earning $11.7 million against an $8 million budget, Frank Price, the head of the studio, wasn’t ready to give up on the two young filmmakers. The movie had received the highest ratings in test screenings in the studio’s history, and what did it matter that few people saw it, really? Those who did thought it was hilarious—the studio head included. Shortly after the film was released, Price asked the Bobs to bring their next idea to him as soon as they had one—which, as it turned out, was sooner than expected, as an idea had been marinating between the two filmmakers.

Just a few weeks before Price approached them, Bob G was in his hometown of St. Louis to do some publicity for
Used Cars
and attend the local premiere of his film. While visiting his parents’ house, he discovered his father’s 1940 University City High School
yearbook. Before he was the patriarch of the Gale family, Bob’s father was the senior class president, a fact the filmmaker hadn’t known until he stumbled across his dad’s black-and-white photo. As Bob stared at the face on the printed page, he realized his own time as a student must have been very different from his father’s. The younger Gale, who graduated from the same school in ’69, would never have run for student government. Although he achieved straight-A’s, he wasn’t one of the eggheads. He loved music—not rock and roll, like some of the other students, but movie scores. His spare time was spent reading comic books or science fiction novels, making movies, or working in the art studio. Girls were interesting but expensive, so he didn’t date until his senior year. As a student, he had a wide range of interests, but making speeches in front of his peers and hanging up
GO WITH GALE
or
BET ON BOB
posters in the hallways was not among them. The young filmmaker’s mind went into overdrive while he stared at his father’s yearbook photo. He couldn’t help but wonder: If he and his father had attended school at the same time, would they have been friends?

The Bobs had been trying to come up with a time-travel story since they’d begun collaborating on scripts, having both been influenced heavily by H. G. Wells’s
The Time Machine
, as well as Rod Serling’s
The Twilight Zone
television series, but couldn’t come up with an original idea worthy of being told. However, as Gale packed the yearbook away, he thought he had come up with the germ of a great idea. When he returned to Los Angeles, he shared his thought with his collaborator. Zemeckis saw the potential in the concept and started adding his own extemporaneous suggestions into the mix:
What if your mom, who always said she had never kissed a boy while a teenager, was actually the school slut?
They quickly fleshed out some additional details of their story and brought the idea to Frank Price.

It took the studio head less than three minutes to realize that their project was a winner. During the pitch, Gale sensed that Price was interested, but it took Zemeckis a bit longer to read the tea leaves. The director’s enthusiasm led him to prattle on with minor plot details and gags that the duo had come up with. After a few minutes of monologue, his partner gave him a nudge, stopping Bob Z just long enough for the two to be offered a development deal at Columbia to expand their idea into a screenplay.

Within a few days, the two got to work. “Bob and I always sat in the same room, usually our office, and talked through everything,” Gale says. “We would first outline the movie on index cards and put them up on a corkboard on the wall. Once we had a structure and plan for the film, we’d start with the first scene and talk it through. We’d work out the dialogue in each scene together, and I’d make detailed notes.”

“It was a true collaboration,” Zemeckis adds. “We were very much in sync, and when a good idea got sparked, it was pretty much just back-and-forth, talking everything through. We said everything that came to our minds; we were never worried that we might be saying something that wasn’t a good idea or a valid idea. Anything that we thought of, we would run it up the flagpole for the other guy because you just never know. You never know what might spark another idea.”

“Because I could type and Bob couldn’t, each night I’d type up the day’s work into script form,” Gale continues. “When we started writing the first draft, I was using a manual typewriter which I’d had since I was a college freshman and I still have to this day. I don’t recall if I made carbon copies as I typed, or if we xeroxed the pages the next day. Either way, the result was that Bob Z had a copy of what I typed up. We moved into the next scene, and when I was typing that day’s work, Bob would review
the typed pages I’d given him that morning, making notes, revisions, whatever. I never read what I typed until there was a complete script. That way, I could read it from beginning to end and get a sense of the pace, which Bob could not do, since he dealt with it scene by scene.”

This process continued until, on February 21, 1981, the two completed the first draft of
Back to the Future
. While the main crux of the story that materialized on-screen is present—boy has crackpot inventor friend, crackpot inventor has time machine, boy is accidentally sent back in time and disrupts his parents’ first meeting—there are several significant differences between that screenplay and what made it to the screen. In this script, Marty McFly was a video pirate, running a secret black market operation with his friend Professor—not Doc—Brown, who had a pet chimpanzee named Shemp. His girlfriend’s name is Suzy, his mother’s is Eileen, Marty travels back to 1952, and his parents have their first kiss while the band Lester & the Moonlighters plays Eddie Fisher’s 1951 single “Turn Back the Hands of Time” at the Springtime in Paris dance.

Frank Price still thought the general conceit of the movie was good, but believed the screenplay was too rough around the edges. The Bobs, ever hopeful, went back to their office with index cards in tow. “Inevitably, our opinion regarding our own first rough draft was that it was terrible,” Gale says. “This was true with every script we’d ever written. We proceeded to revise, deconstruct, and overhaul the work.”

A second draft was completed on April 7. Price thought their second go-around was better, but he passed on giving
Future
the green light.
Used Cars
was a raunchy comedy, Zemeckis’s only R-rated film until 2012’s
Flight
, and Price was hoping the Bobs would bring him another picture that fit that mold. A
quaint movie about a kid trying to fix up his parents might make a good film, but as far as Price was concerned, he didn’t know anyone besides himself who would be interested in seeing it. The script was given back to the filmmakers in what is known in the industry as a turnaround deal, an arrangement whereby a studio—for example, Universal—can purchase the rights to a script developed at another studio—like Columbia—so the original studio can recoup their initial investment.

Which was precisely what happened. The Bobs were free to take their script to other movie studios, which initially proved to be less than fruitful. From Paramount to Universal, 20th Century Fox to Warner Bros., every executive they met with asked them a variation of the same question:
What about Steven?
Spielberg was interested in executive-producing
Future
—he saw the potential in Zemeckis and Gale’s script and the ingenuity of their idea—but the Hollywood heavyweight was asked to stand down during the pitch process. The Bobs liked working with him, but their first two films had underperformed. They were afraid that if that precedent continued, they would never be given an opportunity to make another for a major studio. Even worse, they would be perceived among those in the industry as two people who scored undeserved opportunities to waste studio money because of their friendship with one of the most profitable directors of the past decade. Thus, Zemeckis asked his friend for some space in an attempt to prove he could stand on his own two feet.

As the Bobs continued to shop the film around to every studio in Hollywood and back again, they frequently heard that
Future
’s script was too saccharine to attract the rebellious youth of the 1980s. Although history would ultimately prove them wrong, one can’t fault the uniform thought process of notoriously risk-averse film executives. In the four years that it took for the
duo to convince a studio to finance and release their picture, R-rated teen comedies like
Fast Times at Ridgemont High
,
Porky’s
, and
Risky Business
were all huge hits at the box office. Not only that, but three time-travel films also hit cinemas—
The Final Countdown
,
Somewhere in Time
, and
Time Bandits
—and only the latter was a modest success. The record was set and well corroborated: raunchy comedies made money; time-travel movies did not. All of the studios passed on it primarily for those reasons, except for Tom Wilhite, the vice president in charge of development for feature films and television at the Walt Disney Company, who had his own complaints. The suit was appalled by the scene with Marty and his teenage mother sharing a brief, awkward kiss in Doc’s yellow Packard convertible. The movie was officially a nonstarter—too provocative for Disney and not provocative enough for any other studio.

Although the Bobs both hoped to see
Back to the Future
made, reality soon set in. It was nice to continue to pursue a dream, but it was better to have money so they could eat. The Bobs got an opportunity to set up
Gangland
, a gangster movie for a short-lived feature film division of the ABC television network, but about five weeks into preproduction the company killed the picture. The project wasn’t one that either Bob was particularly jazzed about, but it was the final straw for Zemeckis. He was tired of running on the hamster wheel—developing an idea, writing a script, pitching to studios, and then repeating the process, only to watch a green light go red, or fail to turn green at all. He informed his partner that he would direct the next decent script that came by. Gale understood. No hard feelings.

As if he spoke it into being, a screenplay that appealed to Zemeckis’s interests soon landed in his lap. He was offered to direct Michael Douglas, Kathleen Turner, and Danny DeVito in
1984’s
Romancing the Stone
, a romantic comedy-action film about a woman from the big city embarking on an adventure that takes her through the jungles of Colombia. The film, which marked the director’s first collaboration with Dean Cundey, was shot primarily on location in Mexico. Although the director and cinematographer got on well, the shoot was occasionally problematic, with Turner frequently becoming frustrated with Zemeckis’s style of directing. She thought he was a bright-eyed kid fresh out of film school, more preoccupied with the cameras and special effects than he was attentive to his actors. The director not only failed to impress his leading lady, but he, more detrimentally, failed to win any accolades from the studio executives at 20th Century Fox.

“He wasn’t the Bob Zemeckis that we all know now, with all the fabulous films. He had made those other two movies, which, financially, had not done well at all,” Clyde E. Bryan, who served as first assistant cameraman on
Romancing the Stone
, says. “Instead, the studio executives were counting on a picture called
Rhinestone
to be a huge hit. It was with Dolly Parton and Sylvester Stallone. It was an awful combination, a terrible movie. They put tons and tons and tons of money into that movie. They spent almost no money on
Romancing the Stone
, and at one point they had sent the bonds people down there to pull the plug on it. It was, at that time, not a very expensive movie, nine or ten million dollars. They just had no idea about how it would perform.”

“It was kind of a different film for the period,” Cundey says. “When they saw the first rough cut of
Romancing the Stone
, one of the guys at the studio said that he thought the film was unreleasable.” While the director continued to work with his editors on the final cut and reshoots, the bottom was falling out beneath him. He was pegged to direct another film for Fox, the science fiction/
fantasy film
Cocoon
, but after the producers of that project received a tip that
Romancing the Stone
was anticipated to perform poorly in theaters, Zemeckis was fired. It was clear: Zemeckis’s chances were running out. He needed a hit or he would be denied any further opportunities to direct another motion picture for a major studio.

Then, despite the forecast, the sky opened up.
Romancing the Stone
was released in theaters on March 30, 1984, earning a respectable $5.1 million in its opening weekend. The following week it performed even better. Contrary to industry expectations, the movie was not only a financial success, but it was Fox’s only hit of the year. By the time the film ended its theatrical run, it had grossed over $76.5 million domestically, nearly four times what
Rhinestone
brought in. Almost instantaneously, Zemeckis became a director in demand, with
Back to the Future
becoming a hot property by extension. The Bobs were back and it was no longer a question of whether or not their time-travel movie would see the light of day. The only question was which studio would be financing it.