Back To The Future

How did two Bobs, fresh off back-to-back flops, the studio's second choice sitcom star, and a script that changed more than Marty's future, er, present, become one of the most beloved movies of all time? Plus, Sid Sheinberg's terrible title ideas, the origins of "nuking the fridge," and how Crispin Glover girded SAG for the AI battle of the 2020s. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Chris Winterbauer?

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• 0:31Lizzie Bassett?

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• 1:15Lizzie Bassett?

  will the most powerful reality contestant in TV history be able to keep the family happy? And if they're overthrown by the mob, who will step up and become the new Don? Let the games begin. Watch The Mob, now streaming on Hulu and Hulu on Disney+ for bundle subscribers. Terms apply.

• 1:55Lizzie Bassett?

  Hello, dear listeners, and welcome back to What Went Wrong, your favorite podcast full stop that just so happens to be about movies and how it's nearly impossible to make one, let alone a good one, let alone a classic in its genre beloved by many, many millions of people that I think had a famously terrible production, maybe not terrible, a troubled production. I am one of your hosts, Lizzie, here as always with Chris Winterbauer. And Chris, what do you have for us today?

• 2:27Chris Winterbauer?

  We're going back, Lizzie. We're going back 40 years. It's the 40th anniversary. Forty years to Back to the Future. And if Back to the Future were made today, it would send us back to 1995. So if that doesn't make you feel old, I don't know what does. But we are covering Robert Zemeckis's Back to the Future, released 40 years ago. As you said, Lizzie, a beloved film by many. I'm assuming you had seen Back to the Future before. What were your thoughts upon first watching it or rewatching it for the podcast?

• 2:59Lizzie Bassett?

  I had seen Back to the Future before, not that many times, to be honest. This is one that I didn't really grow up with. I just think my family, this was like not a big movie in our house. And I'm sacrificing myself on the pyre here right at the top. I am, I am somewhat underwhelmed by this movie.

• 3:15Chris Winterbauer?

  Oh, no. Get in the DeLorean. Go back. Go back.

• 3:19Lizzie Bassett?

  Let me just, actually, well, okay, the first time I watched it, I was pretty underwhelmed by it. I don't know if it's because the hype around it was so high and people love this movie so much. And all you hear is like Marty McFly this, Marty McFly that. And I watched it and I was like, that's it? You know, as Peggy Lee said, is that all there is? But I actually enjoyed it a lot more upon rewatching it for the podcast. Obviously, I know there's a very famous little switcheroo that happens that I'm excited to learn more about in terms of the casting in this movie. And I was thinking a lot about that as I was watching it in terms of like, what was it about Michael J. Fox that, you know, made him really perfect for this? And he is. And I think it's one of those things where like, everybody else

• 4:04Lizzie Bassett?

  Around him is way more fun to watch, but that's like, that's his job. That's like, that's what that character is. He's the straight man to everybody else. And he does a really, really wonderful job in this, I think. My biggest takeaway from this viewing is that I loved Doc Brown. I think this doesn't work without him and how much he's winking, including sometimes directly into the camera. And I just thought Christopher Lloyd was an absolute joy. So that's my take on Back to the Future. It's, it's fine.

• 4:39Chris Winterbauer?

  Back to the Future, it's fine. Use that as your pull quote for the 40th anniversary release. I, I similarly didn't watch this a ton growing up. Within the science fiction genre, I was more of a Star Wars hound than a Back to the Future. Although I-

• 4:53Lizzie Bassett?

  Us too, Star Trek.

• 4:54Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, I watched the trilogy and I, I really enjoyed these movies. I want to save some of my thoughts because they actually mirror the thoughts of a couple of people involved in the film. And I had a really interesting time researching this project. This is a movie that's a fantastic example of how iterative the filmmaking process is. And there are so many versions of this movie that almost were, and versions of this movie that nearly led to its demise. And so it's a great example of what I love most about this podcast, which is instances in which the making of the movie mirrors in many ways the themes of the movie itself.

• 5:35Chris Winterbauer?

  And I think there is, I know there is a trove, treasure trove of information on this film online. There are fan communities and subreddits and documentaries and books. And there is so much. I hope that I have found a couple of things that will be new to even the most diehard-

• 5:53Lizzie Bassett?

  Whoa.

• 5:54Chris Winterbauer?

  Fan out there, maybe one thing only, but I'm excited to talk about it. And I hope that if you guys enjoy this episode and if you like the movie, you will dive into the resources that we used for this podcast, because they are all fantastic and incredibly well researched. And we hope that this will serve as a jumping off point to dive deeper into the world of Back to the Future.

• 6:17Lizzie Bassett?

  I want to amend part of my earlier statement, Chris, before you dive into all of this, because I just realized, sort of as you were talking about this and the themes of the movie being, you know, sort of almost like a butterfly effect thing that you're talking about. And I realized in that moment, this movie was maybe one of the first times that we've actually sort of seen the idea of the butterfly effect in kind of a comedic way. And I think that we've seen it so many times since across movies and TV that maybe by the time I saw this, I was a little bit, it didn't feel so novel or clever to me. It just felt like, yeah, obviously, like, you know, the thing about them disappearing from the picture, we've literally seen that across, you know, tons of TV shows and movies. But I think

• 6:59Lizzie Bassett?

  it didn't register for me that that probably came from this. So I should give Back to the Future a little bit more credit.

• 7:06Chris Winterbauer?

  Fair enough. All right. The details. Back to the Future is a science fiction comedy film directed by Robert Zemeckis. It was written by the two Bobs, as we'll call them, Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale, produced by Bob Gale and Neil Canton, under the Amblin Pictures banner, and distributed by Universal Pictures. And I should mention, very much ushered into existence or midwifed by Steven Spielberg. We will get to his involvement. It was released on July 3, 1985, and the film stars Michael J. Fox as Marty McFly, Christopher Lloyd as Dr. Emmett Brown, or Doc, Leah Thompson, MVP, as Lorraine Baines.

• 7:49Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, really?

• 7:51Chris Winterbauer?

  I love Leah Thompson. Crispin Glover as George McFly, Thomas F. Wilson as Biff Tannen, and many more. And as always, because I forgot on one of our recent films to read it, the IMDb logline reads, "Marty McFly, a 17-year-old high school student, is accidentally sent 30 years into the past in a time-traveling DeLorean invented by his close friend, the maverick scientist Doc Brown."

• 8:17Chris Winterbauer?

  Pretty good. Sources for today's episode include, but are not limited to, "We Don't Need Roads," the making of Back to the Future by Cassine Gaines, the making of Back to the Future: The Documentary, "Lucky Man: A Memoir" by Michael J. Fox, Back to the Future: The Ultimate Visual History, written and compiled by Michael Castren with Randall Adamaniuk, along with interviews, articles from the trades, et cetera, and many more. And I really do recommend all of these books and the documentary. They're so fun. And the visual history in particular contains so many wonderful scans of storyboards, concept art, memos. We'll get to a couple of them. It is a really, really well archived visual history of the movie.

• 9:01Chris Winterbauer?

  So, Lizzie, how did a couple of USC grads, fresh off a pair of flops, the studio's second choice sitcom actor, and a script that went through more rewrites than Doc Brown did "Plutonium", become arguably the most beloved time travel movie of all time outside of The House of Lizzie Bassett? And to find out, we're gonna need to travel back in time to 1971, when we were not born. Now, Lizzie, one of the many rules of time travel, as we've learned, especially since Back to the Future, is that the main character tends to wind up in two places at the same time.

• 9:41Lizzie Bassett?

  Right.

• 9:41Chris Winterbauer?

  So, one of the rules is, don't contact yourself. That could be bad. Or your grandfather, or your mom, she might want to sleep with you. So, it's only fitting that this episode begins with a young man named Bob meeting another young man named Bob. The year was 1971, and Chicago-born Robert "Bob" Zemeckis was a transfer student at the USC School of Cinematic Arts. And he was feeling a little out of place. Because, Lizzie, Bob Zemeckis was a popcorn guy. He liked James Bond and Clint Eastwood. Wasn't really into the French New Wave. Turns out, one of his classmates felt the same way. Bob Gale was one of the only other undergrads in a mostly grad class. Now, Gale was a Missouri transplant,

• 10:23Chris Winterbauer?

  and he'd come to Hollywood with the childhood dream of working for Walt Disney. He and Zemeckis were outsiders with a shared vision of what a movie should be, and it's a vision I think you'll appreciate. A movie, above all else, should be entertaining.

• 10:36Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, A+.

• 10:38Chris Winterbauer?

  A+, five stars for the Bobs. If it proved thought provoking upon deeper reflection, that would be an added bonus. Sure, icing on the cake. Yeah. Now, they lucked out in that they were not the exact same person. Zemeckis wanted to direct, Gale wanted to write. They worked on each other's student films together and they graduated with an extremely commercial spec script that they were ready to take to the town. It was called Bordello of Blood and it was a movie about vampiric sex workers. Oh.

• 11:08Chris Winterbauer?

  They realized it might be a tough sell and they decided to try to break into television instead. Now, it should be mentioned Bordello of Blood would get made into a movie nearly 25 years later, although it was completely rewritten and the Bobs were not involved. I believe it was done under the Tales from the Crypt banner and starred Dennis Miller. Was it called Bordello of Blood? It was. Great. Bordello of Blood. Great name. I remember seeing it in the video store. I have not watched it. So Bob Zemeckis had heard a mythical story, a fantastical, apocryphal story going around Hollywood. This was the story of how a young man named Steven Spielberg got his start in the biz. He just walked onto the Universal lot and hung around so long that somebody assumed he worked there and they offered him a directing job. Now, this is not true. No.

• 11:54Chris Winterbauer?

  But Bob said, "Maybe?" And he walked onto the Universal lot and started hanging out. He did not get offered a directing job. Did he get escorted out by armed personnel? No, he was a tall white man. He was fine. Oh, he was fine. He should probably be here. He did get some hot gossip. Kolchak, the Night Stalker, which was a spiritual precursor to The X-Files that only went a season, was getting canceled. So longtime writers from the show were jumping ship and Zemeckis saw an opportunity. So he went back to Bob Gale and he said, "We gotta write a treatment for Kolchak, the Night Stalker." He wrote it. They took it to Universal and Universal bought it from the guy that had

• 12:37Chris Winterbauer?

  just snuck onto their lot. The Bobs were in. God damn it. This, you can't do that anymore. I wish you could. Yeah. So Zemeckis and Gale write a couple more scripts for the Universal Television Division for shows like McLeod and Get Christie Love. These are both procedurals at the end of the day. They're police crime dramas. One is starring Dennis Weaver and the other one starred Teresa Graves and was actually pretty revolutionary because it was the second black female lead in a non-stereotypical role for a US weekly series. So Universal decides, these guys are talented. Let's lock them down. They offer the Bobs a seven-year contract to write for the studio's NBC TV programming.

• 13:19Chris Winterbauer?

  So they would be shuffled across whatever shows Universal needed to fill. Each would get an annual salary of $50,000, which may not sound like a lot in today's dollars. No, in the 70s, that is a lot. Mid 1970s, the median household income was just over $11,000. And if you simply adjust for inflation, this is roughly equivalent to a $350,000 salary each today. Fantastic. For seven years. But the Bobs said, no, thanks. Whoa. Because they didn't want to make television, Lizzie. They wanted to make movies. And the Bobs knew that there was one thing more valuable than money. What's that? Ownership? Time. Time.

• 14:07Chris Winterbauer?

  And it turns out, they were in the right place at the right time. Now, Bob Zemeckis did meet the mythical hero of the Steven Spielberg origin story, Steven Spielberg, in 1974, at a screening of The Sugarland Express, which was his first theatrical feature. But everything changed in 1975. Lizzie, Steven Spielberg, 1975, summer, give it to me. What do we got? What do we got? Dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, jaws. Jaws. That was the theme song.

• 14:40Chris Winterbauer?

  I wish. That would be so good. So in the summer of 1975, Steven Spielberg's Jaws debuts to record box office numbers. We don't need to go into this now. We have an episode that covers the film. But it would be the highest grossing film of all time for a couple of years until Star Wars. And it proved a very simple formula. Action, adventure, high-concept hook, big-time marketing, wide release. The summer blockbuster was born.

• 15:06Chris Winterbauer?

  That's when The Bobs and Steven almost killed it. So around this time, Zemeckis and Gale took a spec script called Tank to John Milius. Now, Milius would go on to be nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay for his work on Apocalypse Now, which he co-wrote with Francis Ford Coppola. But at this point in time, he's most famous for writing Jeremiah Johnson, the first two Dirty Harry films, and he'd made his directorial debut with Dillinger in 1973. They met him through USC, and they were hoping that Milius would produce it. I cannot figure out what this movie was about. I'm assuming it's military-themed in some way.

• 15:38Lizzie Bassett?

  Gotta be. It's called Tank, and it's involving John Milius. Yeah.

• 15:41Chris Winterbauer?

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

• 15:44Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 15:45Chris Winterbauer?

  That's probably what the movie is.

• 15:46Lizzie Bassett?

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

• 15:55Chris Winterbauer?

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

• 15:58Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 15:59Chris Winterbauer?

  Totally John Milius. "I didn't watch my buddy die face down in the mud." Yes, John Milius. So, Milius did not like Tank, but he did like The Bobs's writing. So as Zemeckis later said, Milius asked them, "Have you guys got any other ideas for any movies? And we came up with this outrageous concept about hysteria on the home front in the days following Pearl Harbor. Lizzie, any idea where we're going? A movie that takes place during 1941?"

• 16:28Lizzie Bassett?

  1941?

• 16:30Chris Winterbauer?

  Bingo! This idea became 1941, an amalgamation of three real events. A Japanese submarine that was sighted off the coast of Santa Barbara in February of 1942, which led to the Great Los Angeles Air Raid, in which flat cannons were fired in the air at basically nothing, and the zoot suit riots of 1943. So Milius agrees to produce this. They take the script to Steven Spielberg. While they were skeet shooting, John Milius and Steven Spielberg loved to go skeet shooting. Also, little aside, Quentin Tarantino, first time he met Spielberg, skeet shooting with John Milius and Steven Spielberg.

• 17:01Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow, we gotta go skeet shooting with John Milius.

• 17:03Chris Winterbauer?

  I feel like we're gonna die.

• 17:05Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, for sure.

• 17:06Chris Winterbauer?

  Spielberg liked the set pieces, but he did tell Empire that the script he was given was not a comedy at first. They then tried to make it into a comedy, which may explain the confusion upon its release.

• 17:15Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 17:16Chris Winterbauer?

  We will cover this film. 1941 was Steven Spielberg's first certified big time flopper TM. The studio tinkered and forced the running time down and what should have been The Bobs' first big blockbuster fizzled at the box office. The Bobs had turned down seven years of security for a movie The New York Times called "As Much Fun As A 40 Pound Wrist Watch." Not quite. The Bobs were smart, Lizzie, and they had greater ambitions than providing Steven Spielberg scripts. They had lined up 1978's "I Wanna Hold Your Hand" for Universal, and they followed that up with 1980's "Used Cars" for Columbia. Have you ever seen "I Wanna Hold Your Hand" or "Used Cars"?

• 17:56Lizzie Bassett?

  No.

• 17:58Chris Winterbauer?

  Neither were particularly popular upon their release, but I watched them through the podcast, and they're very informative as to how we get to Back to the Future. "I Wanna Hold Your Hand" is basically an American graffiti ripoff. Ripoff is ungenerous. It's about six teenagers from New Jersey who run off to try to see the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show. Tickets be damned. One thing that's really interesting about "I Wanna Hold Your Hand," it's very funny, it's very charming, and they take like a Ben-Hur approach of never showing the Beatles in the way that you never see Jesus.

• 18:30Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, yeah, you can't.

• 18:31Chris Winterbauer?

  Which is very fun. You do see them in archival footage, and they do voice reenactments, etc. One thing that's really interesting, so first of all, the movie stars, amongst other people, Wendy Jo Sperber, who plays Marty's sister in Back to the Future.

• 18:44Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, okay.

• 18:44Chris Winterbauer?

  She's so funny in "I Wanna Hold Your Hand."

• 18:47Lizzie Bassett?

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

• 18:51Chris Winterbauer?

  Yes, and she's hilarious, and she's in love with Paul, and she's trying to get him by all means possible. And one thing that I think is interesting, not that this is some sort of feminist movie, but the female characters are, I think, written very well and given a lot to do. It's almost like a bridesmaid-style humor with them. There's one scene where one of the young women has gotten into the Beatles' hotel room, and she's just like ogling all of their things, and then like borderline making love to one of their guitars, and then she realizes that their food has been left out, and she just throws the guitar on the floor and starts licking their cups. And it's just like, it's so over the top, but it is pretty funny. And so then Used Cars feels like this 180 from I Want to Hold Your Hand. Used Cars stars a young Kurt Russell, who is very, very charming in the movie, as this smarmy used car salesman,

• 19:36Chris Winterbauer?

  who's attempting to kind of weaken at Bernie's, his dead boss's car shop. Basically, he's trying to raise a bunch of money so he can become a politician. It's very convoluted. Sounds like he would absolutely crush that. He's great. In my opinion, the movie's pretty juvenile, and it's actually pretty mean spirited. This is a hard R black comedy. It feels much more National Lampoon. There is excessive nudity. There's just an extended sequence of this woman nude on national television, and we're just cutting to different homes where all the little boys are like, "Dad, look, bare tits." And the dads are staring, and the wives are getting angry. It just feels very much like an unusual departure. Well, they were trying something else. They were. No, they were. They were trying to prove we could do both of these things.

• 20:21Chris Winterbauer?

  And this is very much the era of Animal House, so I think it makes sense. But what I want to point out is, the two films, in terms of theme, very much represent, I think, two halves of Back to the Future. You have a nostalgic look at the America of the past, and you have a very cynical look at the corrupt America, the decaying America of the present. Yes. From the perspective of the filmmakers. So both films were marginally better received critically than 1941. I think especially I Want to Hold Your Hand. And Used Cars has become a cult classic. But they couldn't find their audience. As Bob Gale later said, "It wasn't that hand and Used Cars weren't well received. We had dynamite sneak previews for both. We simply never had audiences show up on opening day." End quote.

• 21:06Chris Winterbauer?

  But, Lizzie, sometimes an audience of one is enough.

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• 21:53Chris Winterbauer?

  Now, we've talked a little bit about Frank Price at Columbia. Like the Bobs, he had gotten his start in television at Universal. But he had taken that salaried job that they had passed. So he had been in TV for 17 years when he took the leap to move into features and he became the president of Columbia Pictures. Maybe it was his lack of experience in film, maybe he was just risk tolerant, maybe he was trying to make up for lost time, but he became known for taking big swings on movies that other people wouldn't necessarily greenlight. So a little bit of a maybe Alan Ladd Jr. streak to him. Kramer vs. Kramer, Tootsie, Gandhi, The Karate Kid, Ghostbusters, if you remember. So in 1980, Frank Price is two years into his role at Columbia. He has fallen in love with used cars.

• 22:38Chris Winterbauer?

  He greenlit it. And he calls up the Bobs and he asks them the question every writer and director in Hollywood wants to hear. What's next? Now, Lizzie, you went to college. You went to college out of state, I believe, too.

• 22:51Lizzie Bassett?

  I did, yes, indeed.

• 22:53Chris Winterbauer?

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

• 23:03Lizzie Bassett?

  Of course, yes.

• 23:05Chris Winterbauer?

  Kind of feels like you're stepping straight back into the past. At least, I've felt that way.

• 23:09Lizzie Bassett?

  Going back to my twin bed.

• 23:11Chris Winterbauer?

  Right, yes.

• 23:13Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 23:13Chris Winterbauer?

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

• 23:20Lizzie Bassett?

  The closet that my daughter actually lives in right now, yes.

• 23:23Chris Winterbauer?

  Exactly. I'm very much guessing that this is what writer Bob Gale felt when he went back to St. Louis, Missouri in the summer of 1980. He'd gone to the same high school as his dad, something I did, and found himself thumbing through his old man's yearbook and he realized, my dad was class president? He'd had no idea that his dad was class president of his high school. And Bob Gale had hated his class president. And then he wondered, would I have hated my dad? If we'd gone to high school together, would we have been friends? And I will say, this is the number one question that men everywhere think about all the time. Would I have been friends with my dad? We were the same age? Male listeners? Please let us know. This is something I think about constantly.

• 24:01Lizzie Bassett?

  Has never crossed my mind.

• 24:03Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, you're more secure than we are. It was an oddly pure, in my opinion, universal thought. As he later said, quote, "All of us have that revelation when we understand that our parents were young once too. That's a big moment. Then there is this message that we all have control over our destinies. I thought we could dramatize those two things," end quote. And Bob Zemeckis had a really sweet angle to punch it up a notch, Lizzie, as he later said, "What if your mom went to the same high school? What if it turned out that she was the school slut?"

• 24:34Lizzie Bassett?

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

• 24:37Chris Winterbauer?

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

• 24:44Lizzie Bassett?

  Bit of a no but.

• 24:46Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, yeah, no but. So Gail and Zemeckis had been toying with a time travel movie for years, but they had yet to come up with a good hook. And all of a sudden, this is a good hook. What if you went back and you got to go to high school with your parents? It's a fun idea. On paper, their timing couldn't have been better. So, Lizzie, at the beginning, you kind of mentioned, was this movie seminal in some way to the time travel genre? And I think that in a number of ways, it is, that we'll get to. But in terms of timing, it actually, I think, two movies greased the wheels for it in a big way. And let's talk briefly about the history of time travel movies. So, time travel on film through the mid 1950s was really more of a wish fulfillment fantasy subgenre than it was science fiction.

• 25:28Chris Winterbauer?

  So, right, you're traveling back in time through dreams, you're traveling back in time because you get knocked on the head, magical villages, genies, clothing, descendants swapping places with their ancestors, lots of fantastical devices. In fact, do you know which book most time travel movies technically were based on between 1901 and 1955? And it's kind of time travel because you're only observing the past.

• 25:56Lizzie Bassett?

  A Christmas Carol.

• 25:57Chris Winterbauer?

  A Christmas Carol. The majority of time travel movies.

• 26:01Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, well, it makes sense. It's A Wonderful Life. Yeah.

• 26:04Chris Winterbauer?

  It's, yeah, exactly. Scrooge, there were a number of different names. And then there were a number. Of movies based on the Mark Twain novel, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, in which a mechanic is hit on the head, transported back to King Arthur's reign. And there's a bunch of Looney Tunes cartoons based on that. So 1950s Hollywood embraces the atomic age and all of the anxieties that come with it. Right? We're embracing science. You can split the atom, you can travel to space. And this is when we start getting our first sci fi based time travel films. They're oftentimes low budget, B movie fare, World Without End, Terror from the Year 5000, Beyond the Time Barrier, and of course, we finally get an adaptation of H.G. Wells's The Time Machine,

• 26:45Chris Winterbauer?

  which had been written in 1895. The movie comes, George Powell directs it in 1960. I think the most important film in this run is actually Chris Marker's photo montage, La Jeté, which I'm not sure if you've seen it, Lizzie, but I have not. Have you seen 12 Monkeys? Yes. Yeah, so Terry Gilliam's 12 Monkeys is based on Chris Marker's La Jeté. It's one of the first stable time loop movies where in trying to go change the past, you ensure that the future that you've come from happens. So the loop is the character has witnessed his own death, spoiler alert, and he completes the circle through the movie. It's really, La Jeté is incredible. It's so beautiful. It's only 28 minutes long. It's technically a photo montage,

• 27:27Chris Winterbauer?

  so it's sound and music, and then it's still images for the most part that you're looking at. We get the first run of blockbuster time travel movies, I would say, with Planet of the Apes and its sequels. So that's 1968 to 72, kind of, sort of 2001, a space odyssey with the, you know, light travel at the end. But there weren't many recent examples of time travel when the Bobs take their idea and pitch it at Columbia. You have Superman, 1978. He kind of does time travel at the end of the movie. But Frank Price is intrigued, I think, because, again, it's more of a teen movie than necessarily a time travel movie at this point in time. So they're suggesting he's going back to high school to spend time in high school.

• 28:10Chris Winterbauer?

  And we have a lot of successful teen movies coming out around this time. And I think that something like Animal House would be an example. Yeah. American Graffiti had come years earlier, but you're about to start going into the big national lampoon run, Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Anywho, by the fall of 1980, they have a two-step deal with Columbia. Basically, you'll get paid for a first draft and you'll get paid for a rewrite. And then we'll decide if we're going to green light your movie. And the movie has a really great name. And it sounds like a turd going through time because it's called Professor Brown Visits the Future, which is my favorite name. The movie was really, really hard to write.

• 28:52Chris Winterbauer?

  So they, they used this index card method to keep track of all the causally linked elements of the film between the future and the past. You know, Marty inventing rock and roll, although in the very first draft, I believe he actually uninvents rock and roll accidentally. I'm sure we'll talk about that scene later. That's one of the few in the movie that does not age super well. There's a couple of funny things about that. There's some smart decisions that they make and then there are a couple of funny ones that are, I think inadvertently ironic in what they're presenting. They have Marty inventing skateboarding. The first draft takes them about five months to write. Columbia gives them some notes to do a second draft that takes about six weeks. And I'd like to spend just a quick moment on this draft because this is where maybe I can provide a little insight that doesn't already exist online. So there's a lot about Back to the Future online, including five drafts that I could find of the scripts.

• 29:37Chris Winterbauer?

  There's the first draft dated February 2nd, 1981. There is a, quote, revised first draft. That's October 31st, 1984. I think that's technically actually a third draft or like a second and a half draft. There's then what's called the third draft, November 7th, 1984. The fourth draft, December 10th, 1984. And the revised fourth draft, April 16th, 1985. Everything from 1984 or five that I just mentioned came either during pre-production or production on the film. So what's missing from here is the second draft that they took to Columbia in the spring of 1981. You can't find this online, but they had it at the Writers Guild Library. And so I went there and I read it and it's really interesting. And it was a lot of fun to go to the Writers Guild Library.

• 30:22Chris Winterbauer?

  It's in Los Angeles and you don't have to be a member to go. So you guys can make an appointment and you can go and you can read scripts. That's so cool. So I'd like to tell you a few things about this draft and we'll talk more about the differences as we go through the movie and the making of it. So like in the first draft, Marty and Doc are running a bootleg VHS pirating business. That is how they are funding Doc's continued endeavors and Marty, his kind of day to day life. It begins with Marty pirating a copy of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Fun little reference to Steven Spielberg. Marty does not wear a vest. He wears a silver porch jacket. He does play the guitar. He practices Chuck Berry. Professor Emmett Brown owns a chimp named Shemp.

• 31:06Chris Winterbauer?

  There is no dog named Einstein. There is not a DeLorean. The time machine is described as, quote, "a morass of equipment of 1940s and 50s vintage that looks like something out of Amazing Stories or Weird Science comics. A series of lenses is the final end to the maze, indicating that a ray of some sort is to be beamed down on whatever. It looks like it might be a time machine." End quote. Biff Tannen was a security guard in the first draft. He's a police officer in the second draft. He is more bullying Marty and not George in this draft. The Libyan terrorists are Agents Reese and Foley from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. And there are a bunch of other differences that are a little more minor, including a

• 31:51Chris Winterbauer?

  raunchier tone. Marty bootlegs a porn film in the first draft and then in the second draft, he gives Biff Tannen a copy of Star Wars for his niece that Marty reveals to be Deep Throat. The way that his mother comes on to him is much more graphic. Oh, no. And the entire film is built around nuclear tests as a plot device that will eventually send Marty back to the future. So they establish that Marty's watching a lecture on nuclear testing and a video on nuclear testing at school and the teacher's freaked out about how bad the future is going to be. And then at the end of the film, Marty and Doc leave the town, they leave Hill Valley to go to Nevada to utilize the power of a nuclear test to activate the time machine to send Marty back to the future. So you leave the town, there's no clock tower, there's no lightning.

• 32:35Chris Winterbauer?

  And I think the biggest difference I felt, aside from any superficial, you know, factual difference or character difference. Is that regret really permeates this version of the story? Professor Brown regrets the family fortune that he wasted. George McFly regrets the fighter that he never became. He had a dream of becoming a boxer that he never realized. Mary Ellen, Marty's mom, regrets the husband that she's lost. His brother Dave seems to regret the childhood that got cut short by having his kids young. The teacher, Mr. Arkey, regrets the loss of this bright, shiny future for humanity that he'd been promised. And there's this real sense of generations looking past one another. Marty looking past his parents, were they ever really alive? And then when he gets back to the 50s, there's a Saturday Evening Post headline that says,

• 33:20Chris Winterbauer?

  quote, "What's wrong with the younger generation?" End quote. It's a darker toned movie. And I actually do think Back to the Future is much darker than people think.

• 33:29Lizzie Bassett?

  Uh, yeah, I mean, there's one particular plotline that is very dark.

• 33:34Chris Winterbauer?

  Yes. And the Bobs, again, want to emphasize, we're writing this in the midst of a very weak economy and a very strong scrutiny of the American dream. So unemployment heading into 1981 hovered around 7.5%. Inflation had spiked at the end of the 1970s. It had hit 11% in June of 79. So in the spring of 81, they sent Back to the Future into the studio. With two commercial strikes against them, they needed a hit. They needed a summer blockbuster, but time lizzie had passed them by. Because Columbia did not give Bobs the green light. They gave them the boot. According to Bob Gale, the studio told them, well, it's a really nice, sweet story, but we're kind of looking for raunchier comedies these days.

• 34:17Chris Winterbauer?

  No, thanks, we're going to pass on this.

• 34:20Lizzie Bassett?

  Hmm.

• 34:21Chris Winterbauer?

  So they took it around town to rival studios. The response was largely the same. The American economy took a nosedive. We went into a recession. Unemployment hit 10%. The Bobs hired a new agent. A year later, he sent it back around town. And Universal executive Ned Tannen sent back a note, quote, "We didn't like it the first time. Pass." End quote.

• 34:45Lizzie Bassett?

  Yikes.

• 34:46Chris Winterbauer?

  Bob Gale said that they received over 40 rejections.

• 34:50Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow. It's so interesting that the like recession, loss of jobs, sort of like everything being down, then translates into like. Nah, we want it to be like, you know, more boobs, more boobs. Which I mean, listen, I understand. I see how the red string connects the dots. I wonder, I mean, are we headed into?

• 35:12Chris Winterbauer?

  It was not escapism in quite the same way that I think the studios wanted. It felt a little bit more reflective of the mood at the time, like you're saying.

• 35:20Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, yeah. Well, and also if the whole thing is like, which you still get a little bit of, but if the whole thing is looking back and being like, what have our kids become? Like, where is our future headed? And this sort of fear of the future at every turn, like, you don't really want that. If you're where we are now, I think we're all a little afraid about the future.

• 35:41Chris Winterbauer?

  I agree. So the Bobs took the script to Steven Spielberg. And to be clear, they probably took it to him earlier in this process. He was proving that he was big time flopper proof and recession proof, Lizzie, with 1981's Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark, which was making boatloads of money. So as he later put it, the Bobs actually wanted him not to produce the movie, but just to gut check the script. I think they were feeling really disoriented that nobody seemed to like this idea. Here's what Spielberg said. They told him, nobody gets this. Maybe we're crazy. Will you read this and let us know what you think? And I read it and it was a very unusual story. And yet it was based on a lot of old fashioned principles of family, coming of age, getting your first car, all the dreams and desires that you have for your own life, the dreams

• 36:26Chris Winterbauer?

  and desires that your parents might have, but didn't succeed in realizing. And it was about the generation gap. And that was all done through this amazing object lesson, which was an accidental trip to the past. So Spielberg really seems to have understood the project and he offered to produce the movie, but the Bobs were hesitant because they didn't want to burden Spielberg with another box office bomb. Basically, Zemeckis said to him, if I can't make a movie without Spielberg attached to it, I will never have any success in this industry. And if I make another movie that you have midwifed into existence and it bombs, my career is over, which Spielberg basically agreed with.

• 37:03Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, I mean, that's true.

• 37:05Chris Winterbauer?

  So they took the script to Disney because most of the studios were saying it's just not raunchy enough for us. But it was way too raunchy for Disney. The incestuous running gag of Marty being hit on by his mom was brutal. And the description is far more graphic in that second draft than it is in the final film. She launches herself onto Marty, puts his hands on her breasts and basically goes to town on him. It still ends in the same way where she pulls back, she says, this is wrong. It's like, you're my father or my brother, which I think is a good save. But the script couldn't find a home. Too hot, too cold, not quite right. And Zemeckis had another theory, which is he and Gale were unproven. And they were trying to do something in a semi unproven genre.

• 37:48Chris Winterbauer?

  They were kind of mixing the wish fulfillment nostalgia of the fantasy time travel with the hard science fiction of the more sci fi time travel.

• 37:56Lizzie Bassett?

  And also, correct me if I'm wrong, but this doesn't sound like a super cheap movie on the page either.

• 38:02Chris Winterbauer?

  Especially not this draft because they end up doing a nuclear explosion in order to send the time machine back in time. So the final film would end up being smaller. So he and Bob Gale nearly got another movie going, like this 20 set gangster movie, but the studio pulled the plug. And Zemeckis is really depressed at this point. And he says, look, I just need to direct the next good script that comes across my desk. And he lucks out because the next script that comes across his desk is Romancing the Stone.

• 38:30Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, there you go.

• 38:31Chris Winterbauer?

  Michael Douglas, Kathleen Turner, Danny DeVito, kind of a rip off of Indiana Jones with like a fun female perspective. I love Romancing the Stone.

• 38:40Lizzie Bassett?

  I do too.

• 38:40Chris Winterbauer?

  It's so fun. So Michael Douglas hired Zemeckis, I think both because he was a Spielberg protege and because Douglas had liked used cars. And you can definitely see some of Kurt Russell's character in Michael Douglas's character in Romancing the Stone.

• 38:53Lizzie Bassett?

  They have the same hair to a certain extent.

• 38:55Chris Winterbauer?

  Yes, yes, yes. So Zemeckis knows that if he pulls off Stone, he can get the green light on this dream project he's been working on for a while. But the dream project turns out to have been Cocoon.

• 39:06Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh.

• 39:06Chris Winterbauer?

  So I guess he was also developing Cocoon at the same time. So he directs Romancing the Stone, 20th Century Fox, which produced Romancing the Stone, sees a rough Cut of it and they hate it. So they fire Zemeckis from Cocoon and bring in Ron Howard, which then frees Zemeckis up to go back out with Back to the Future.

• 39:26Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow. Okay.

• 39:27Chris Winterbauer?

  So then Romancing the Stone comes out, defies studio expectations.

• 39:31Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, it was a hit.

• 39:32Chris Winterbauer?

  Make 75 million at the box office against a $10 million budget. And all of a sudden, Bob Zemeckis is a hit filmmaker.

• 39:38Lizzie Bassett?

  Great.

• 39:39Chris Winterbauer?

  So they go back to Spielberg. They set up Back to the Future under Amblin. It's going to be the first Amblin film not directed by Spielberg. And this is a very powerful combo, Bob Zemeckis and Steven Spielberg. But Universal, which will distribute the film, has a couple of conditions, Lizzie. Studio head Sid Sheinberg, who had been the first person to give Steven Spielberg his first shot, has some notes. Number one, Marty cannot be a video pirate bootlegging pornos in this movie.

• 40:04Lizzie Bassett?

  Check. Got it.

• 40:05Chris Winterbauer?

  Good note.

• 40:06Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 40:06Chris Winterbauer?

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

• 40:13Lizzie Bassett?

  No, no, no.

• 40:14Chris Winterbauer?

  Nope, can't do that. Also Coca-Cola owns rival studio Columbia. We're not going to give Coca-Cola free marketing. Get them out of here.

• 40:20Lizzie Bassett?

  That's right. Call up Joan Crawford on the board of Pepsi.

• 40:23Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. Number three, and you're going to love this one, is a very smart note. Professor Brown, Prof, isn't catchy. Marty should call him Doc.

• 40:32Lizzie Bassett?

  I do love that note. They're right.

• 40:34Chris Winterbauer?

  Good note, Sid. Number four, get rid of the chimp. Movies with chimps don't make money. To which Zemeckis apparently tried to counter, what about every which way but loose and any which way you can with Clint Eastwood, to which Sid Sheinberg apparently said, that sir was an orangutan.

• 40:51Lizzie Bassett?

  True. Also, that chimp will rip your face off. You don't need it in there. Get it out of there.

• 40:55Chris Winterbauer?

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

• 41:07Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, she's great.

• 41:08Chris Winterbauer?

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

• 41:18Chris Winterbauer?

  Here we go.

• 41:19Lizzie Bassett?

  I am reminded of actually tonight, Chris, this very eve, I am going to one of my good friend's houses to watch another movie we've covered in which they gave them, I believe, less than a year to finish. And that is of course, New Moon. And I think we learned on that one, it's generally not a great idea.

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• 42:17Chris Winterbauer?

  Time was against them, but they knew who they wanted for their Marty. Producer Kathleen Kennedy has said that from the beginning, everybody wanted Michael J. Fox.

• 42:26Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh.

• 42:27Chris Winterbauer?

  But he wasn't available.

• 42:29Lizzie Bassett?

  I didn't realize that he was the first. So, oh, hold on.

• 42:33Chris Winterbauer?

  Please.

• 42:33Lizzie Bassett?

  Walk me a little bit through, because I don't know a lot about Michael J. Fox. This is pretty much my only reference point for him. I thought this was like his big breakout.

• 42:42Chris Winterbauer?

  It was.

• 42:43Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay.

• 42:43Chris Winterbauer?

  It was theatrically. So he had had two theatrical releases before this film, Midnight Madness and Class of 84, neither of which was a hit. But he was minting it on television. The 23-year-old boy wonder was most famous for his role as Alex P. Keaton, a young Republican whose embrace of Reaganomics confuses his hippie baby boomer parents on the hit series Family Ties.

• 43:06Lizzie Bassett?

  That's right. Okay.

• 43:08Chris Winterbauer?

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

• 43:17Lizzie Bassett?

  Right.

• 43:18Chris Winterbauer?

  So there are some similar themes to Back to the Future. Now, I want to be clear. Family Ties was popular, but the show wouldn't shoot up the charts until after Fox was in Back to the Future. So I believe it was the 84, 85 season. So this is while they're casting it. Fox is blowing up. It shoots up to become the fifth highest rated primetime television show. It has a Nielsen rating of 22.1, which means 22.1% of all households with a TV are tuned into that show.

• 43:51Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow.

• 43:51Chris Winterbauer?

  I think it would become the second highest rated show behind The Cosby Show the following year. And Michael J. Fox is, I think universally beloved, is kind of the show's MVP. He's the standout of this television show.

• 44:05Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, I don't know anybody else on that show. That's the only one I know.

• 44:08Chris Winterbauer?

  Meredith Baxter, his father is played by Michael Gross, who's maybe best known, at least to folks in my generation, as survivalist Burt Gummer in the Tremors franchise. And his younger sister is played by Justine Bateman, filmmaker, actress, and older sibling of Jason Bateman. So Spielberg calls up Family Ties creator Gary Goldberg. He's a friend of Spielberg's, and he's apparently Spielberg's neighbor. And he asks him, hey, look, we've got this script. It's called Back to the Future. Bob Zemeckis is directing it. Can you share it with Michael J. Fox? We think he'd be perfect. Gary's like, yeah, let me read it. And Gary reads it, and he thinks, this script's amazing. There is no way I am going to give this to the lead of my television show.

• 44:50Lizzie Bassett?

  Whoa.

• 44:51Chris Winterbauer?

  So he decides not to show it to Fox. He doesn't want him to be distracted by some time travel nonsense. And Fox is under contract to make Family Ties. So casting begins because Michael J. Fox is not available.

• 45:04Lizzie Bassett?

  That is shitey.

• 45:07Chris Winterbauer?

  Every young actor in Hollywood, according to producer Frank Marshall, wanted to play Marty McFly. You can see many of these auditions online. Let's discuss a few visions of the future that almost were. Johnny Depp.

• 45:21Lizzie Bassett?

  It would have a very different energy.

• 45:23Chris Winterbauer?

  John Cusack.

• 45:24Lizzie Bassett?

  OK, would have been great.

• 45:26Chris Winterbauer?

  Charlie Sheen and John Cryer.

• 45:29Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, yeah, sure.

• 45:31Chris Winterbauer?

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

• 45:35Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 45:36Chris Winterbauer?

  He plays Brian McKenzie, her fiance, love interest.

• 45:39Lizzie Bassett?

  OK.

• 45:40Chris Winterbauer?

  Ben Stiller.

• 45:42Lizzie Bassett?

  OK.

• 45:43Chris Winterbauer?

  Very young Ben Stiller.

• 45:45Lizzie Bassett?

  I mean, yes, would have been great. Again, very different energy, a darker energy, I think.

• 45:49Chris Winterbauer?

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

• 45:55Lizzie Bassett?

  That is the one, yes.

• 45:57Chris Winterbauer?

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

• 46:08Lizzie Bassett?

  OK, also would have been great.

• 46:09Chris Winterbauer?

  Downey Jr., I think, could have been fun. Zemeckis didn't like either of them for Marty. He later did hire Schmidt as the editor for Back to the Future. So that was a very fruitful visit. So the consensus pick out of this whole list was C. Thomas Howell. And he was breaking out. If you remember Ponyboy Curtis in The Outsiders, that was his kind of big breakout role.

• 46:29Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay.

• 46:29Chris Winterbauer?

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

• 46:35Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 46:36Chris Winterbauer?

  -with Swayze and Charlie Sheen. He's very cute.

• 46:38Lizzie Bassett?

  Very, very cute, yes.

• 46:39Chris Winterbauer?

  He's very cute, but still a little nerdy, and he does have a good, fun comedic energy. John Cryer seems kind of similar to me in his energy.

• 46:47Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, C. Thomas Howell has more of like, yeah, he's got, he's got that energy where it's like, girls would probably still have posters of him, you know?

• 46:55Chris Winterbauer?

  I agree.

• 46:56Lizzie Bassett?

  No disrespect to John Cryer.

• 46:58Chris Winterbauer?

  No, John Cryer, very handsome man, no disrespect at all. But he'd been kind of typecast with the ducky, you know, sort of thing.

• 47:03Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 47:04Chris Winterbauer?

  Most important to our story, Zemeckis and Gale and others felt that C. Thomas Howell actually had the funniest audition. And I want to emphasize that fact because this movie is surprisingly dark. The movie is very light on its feet, but the vision of the future, or the present, is bleak at the beginning of the film.

• 47:22Lizzie Bassett?

  And at the end.

• 47:24Chris Winterbauer?

  Alcoholism, regret, social and moral decay. And the vision of the past, although aesthetically attractive, is also rough. You have extreme bullying, harassment, misogyny, racism, segregation, attempted rape.

• 47:37Lizzie Bassett?

  Sexual assault, yeah.

• 47:39Chris Winterbauer?

  By the way, attempted rape, which in the second, first or second draft, I can't remember, Mary Ellen says specifically, Biff Tannen, so Biff tries to rape her twice.

• 47:49Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, God.

• 47:49Chris Winterbauer?

  And she actually out loud says, geez, I just needed a ride home, I'm paraphrasing, and this guy tries to rape me. And they kind of just, you know, play it off and they keep going.

• 47:58Lizzie Bassett?

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

• 48:07Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, that was the weird thing about the very end of the movie. It's like either an extreme power play or just some trauma repression at the end of the film. So the movie has a breezy quality in its finished execution, but I think that's really a consequence of the way in which the movie's shot and the way the performances are given.

• 48:25Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 48:26Chris Winterbauer?

  Because the subject matter itself could be really heavy.

• 48:28Lizzie Bassett?

  I think there's a couple of performances that give it enough zaniness that it doesn't feel super dark. And to me, those are Doc Brown, Crispin Glover as George McFly, and to a certain extent, resident rapist Biff Tannen as well.

• 48:43Chris Winterbauer?

  Tom Wilson, yes.

• 48:44Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, who I also absolutely love on Freaks and Geeks. He is so good as the gym teacher.

• 48:49Chris Winterbauer?

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

• 48:52Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, he's great in this. He's great.

• 48:54Chris Winterbauer?

  So Sid Sheinberg did not agree with C. Thomas Howell as Marty McFly. Actor Eric Stoltz had just shot Mask for Universal opposite Cher. Have you seen Mask, Lizzy?

• 49:06Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, that's a very serious movie.

• 49:09Chris Winterbauer?

  It is. It's a very heavy movie. And Eric Stoltz is fantastic in that movie. And so Sheinberg was certain Mask had not been released, but he had seen The Dailies, maybe, I don't know if he'd seen A Rough Cut by this point. He was convinced Stoltz is a star, and Stoltz is very handsome. I think Stoltz is more handsome than Michael J. Fox. He's like a classic, more of a classic movie star cutout. He's, I think, eight inches taller than Michael J. Fox. So Mask was a critical and commercial success. And if you guys haven't seen it, Stoltz plays Rocky Dennis, a boy with cranio-diaphyseal dysplasia, also called lionitis. And undercutting Sheinberg's logic, though, is the fact that you never actually see Stoltz's face in Mask. He's wearing such extensive prosthetic makeup

• 49:52Chris Winterbauer?

  that the movie would actually win the Academy Award for Best Makeup. So Sheinberg didn't mince words, though, when he made his choice known. He said it boiled down to chicken salad, Stoltz, versus chicken shit, Howell.

• 50:07Lizzie Bassett?

  Jeez.

• 50:08Chris Winterbauer?

  Little brutal.

• 50:09Lizzie Bassett?

  What the hell?

• 50:11Chris Winterbauer?

  Now, this is where things get a little tricky on the recollections of what happened next. Bob Gale has said that Sid Sheinberg was so confident in Stoltz that he explicitly said, "If it didn't work out, we could shoot the movie with somebody else." Scheinberg disputes this claim, although not entirely.

• 50:28Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, I'm sure he does.

• 50:29Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, he says, "If I was fighting for Eric, I wouldn't concede the fact he might be wrong for it." I believe that. But Steven Spielberg and Robert Zemeckis are two of the strongest, most successful directors, producers, writers in the world. If they thought it was such a terrible idea, they could have just said no. But Zemeckis has said he didn't have time to fight Scheinberg. The movie had a ticking clock.

• 50:49Lizzie Bassett?

  Right.

• 50:49Chris Winterbauer?

  It needed to be released in May. And the production start had been pushed back twice to allow more time to find their Marty. So Zemeckis said, "Being a young and hungry filmmaker and maybe having a bit of an inflated ego, he thought, 'I can make this work.'" My guess is that the difference between Howell and Stoltz was not as big for Zemeckis and Spielberg as the difference between, for example, Fox, who was not available.

• 51:13Lizzie Bassett?

  Right.

• 51:14Chris Winterbauer?

  And those two actors. And so they thought, "Okay, if Sid's gonna make our lives really difficult, let's just go with Stoltz. He's a good actor. You know, we can keep the production on time."

• 51:22Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, can I ask, what was it about Stoltz that they were concerned about? Is it that it was a heavier, not quite as fun?

• 51:28Chris Winterbauer?

  Yes.

• 51:28Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay.

• 51:28Chris Winterbauer?

  It was the humor.

• 51:29Lizzie Bassett?

  Which, that makes sense.

• 51:30Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, it seems like from the beginning, the concern was the humor. Now, some people online have pushed conspiracy theories that Spielberg and Zemeckis cast Stoltz just to keep the production on track with the intention of firing him later.

• 51:44Lizzie Bassett?

  There's no way.

• 51:44Chris Winterbauer?

  And taking Scheinberg up. I don't buy it. And they shoot so much of this movie with him, it just doesn't pass the smell test.

• 51:50Lizzie Bassett?

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

• 52:00Chris Winterbauer?

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

• 52:10Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay.

• 52:10Chris Winterbauer?

  We'll discuss.

• 52:11Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay.

• 52:12Chris Winterbauer?

  So, meanwhile, Michael J. Fox was developing quite the case of FOMO. And I would like to play you a clip, Lizzie, of how Michael J. Fox finally found out about Back to the Future.

• 52:25Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, my God. Poor Michael.

• 52:26Speaker 03

  I was shooting Teen Wolf and we were in Pasadena and we're shooting and I got all the stuff on my face, all the wolf drag, rubber and hair and I'm feeling miserable and I can't eat and to make matters worse, just down the road, there was a scouting crew there for another film and we found out that it was for this new Spielberg produced film called Back in the Future. Then I heard that Chris Ben Glover was in it and I knew Chris Ben from other things and I'd worked with him before and I thought, man, Chris Ben Glover's in this Steven Spielberg movie and I'm like, Teen Wolf.

• 52:59Chris Winterbauer?

  Poor Michael J. Fox.

• 53:02Lizzie Bassett?

  Honestly, he is the most likable, like he just seems like the sweetest, kindest, you want to be in a room with him, which comes through on the screen as well. I love him.

• 53:12Chris Winterbauer?

  I agree. Now, hiring Eric Stoltz had some unexpected silver linings. First of all, that's really how we get Leah Thompson, I think. So while checking out Stoltz, Zemeckis caught sight of Leah Thompson in a Cameron Crowe, Penn starring, high school comedy, not Fast Times at Ridgemont High, The Wildlife, which starred Chris Penn, not Sean, but he saw Leah Thompson in that. And Leah Thompson had also starred opposite C. Thomas Howell in Red Dawn. She'd kind of starred opposite all of these guys. She was a mainstay in these teen films at the time. She donned an old lady wig and at her last audition, Steven Spielberg was actually the one who was operating the camera as Bob Zemeckis auditioned her, which was pretty cool.

• 53:54Lizzie Bassett?

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

• 53:57Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 53:58Lizzie Bassett?

  And how it's insane. At first I was like, oh, it looks pretty good. And then I thought about it and I was like, is she 80? Is she 80 years old?

• 54:07Chris Winterbauer?

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

• 54:12Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, they make him look ancient too. Yeah, I guess. I guess.

• 54:14Chris Winterbauer?

  Like she has like a sclerotic liver and yeah, I think she's supposed to be 47 in this movie.

• 54:19Lizzie Bassett?

  Forty seven? No, they've made her like minimum 75.

• 54:22Chris Winterbauer?

  Jowls.

• 54:23Lizzie Bassett?

  She's got jowls, her like, she's puffy. She has like, you know, a 75 year old old lady hair.

• 54:29Chris Winterbauer?

  Hagsploitation, right? Like they're doing hagsploitation with her at the end.

• 54:33Lizzie Bassett?

  So.

• 54:34Chris Winterbauer?

  What's funny is if you look at the screen tests of her, like with just the wig and less old age makeup, I actually think she looks more like a more convincing 47, but-

• 54:42Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, it's not that big a difference.

• 54:45Chris Winterbauer?

  The problem is, Michael J. Fox is older than her in real life, and so I think they really wanted to exaggerate. They wanted to make sure that they didn't feel like they were younger than Michael J. Fox. She also beat out Jennifer Jason Leigh for this role, who was apparently the second choice, and I think also would have been really good.

• 55:01Lizzie Bassett?

  Would have been great. I had loved Jennifer Jason Leigh.

• 55:03Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. Now, Crispin Glover, as you mentioned, who's three years younger than Michael J. Fox, had just started to break out. He'd been in My Tutor, Friday the 13th, The Final Chapter. He played an unstable high school student in Teachers. He had auditioned for a different movie, didn't nab the part, director liked him, introduces him to Steven Spielberg, Spielberg introduces him to Zemeckis, brings him in, he auditions, but apparently he didn't audition for the older father part. He didn't realize he was going to be playing Marty McFly's father until he started filming.

• 55:31Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow.

• 55:32Chris Winterbauer?

  Very interesting. So then Tom Wilson also might have had Eric Stoltz to thank for his casting. He was inexperienced, fresh off, you know, first guest bookings on TV, and he was going up against some bigger actors, although most of them would be bigger later. Billy Zane, who, did you recognize Billy Zane in the film?

• 55:50Lizzie Bassett?

  I sure did. He appears as Biff's henchman right behind him.

• 55:53Chris Winterbauer?

  Yep. Tim, Human Giant, Tim Robbins-

• 55:56Lizzie Bassett?

  Enormous man.

• 55:57Chris Winterbauer?

  Also auditioned for Biff. Peter DeLuise, who would go on to be opposite Johnny Depp in 21 Jump Street a couple of years later.

• 56:04Lizzie Bassett?

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

• 56:10Chris Winterbauer?

  I agree. J.J. Cohen says he was the original choice, and some sources say that he was, but he was dropped because he wasn't tall enough to tower over the six-foot-tall Eric Stoltz. And so Tom Wilson, who was actually auditioning for a different movie, I think the casting director saw him and just yanked him in and said, "You're auditioning for this!" And that's how he landed this role.

• 56:30Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, he looks perfect. He's so, he's so big, you know, such a sort of meathead-looking guy.

• 56:36Chris Winterbauer?

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

• 56:52Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, of course, yes. Could it be Jeff Goldblum?

• 56:55Chris Winterbauer?

  Jeff Goldblum. Jeff Goldblum was also considered, he's 14 years younger than Christopher Lloyd, and Christopher Lloyd was shooting a movie in Mexico City, I think that's 1986's Miracles. He gets a call from his agent, "I've got this great script for you. It's called Back to the Future." And Lloyd says, "I'm not interested. I'm gonna go do theater, I'm gonna be a real actor." And he'd just done a bunch of sci-fi. He'd done The Adventures of Buckaroo Bonsai Across the Eighth Dimension and Star-Tech 3: The Search for Spock. But a friend says, "Hey, look, just read the script, you never know." So he reads the script, he thinks, "Oh, you know, maybe." And then he goes and meets with Bob Zemeckis, and he left the meeting, and he thought, "If this man is involved in this project, it's something I should do." And he's very adamantly in.

• 57:31Lizzie Bassett?

  Aww.

• 57:32Chris Winterbauer?

  So then we have a very small role, but there's a very fun actor that almost got this part. So Jennifer Park, this is Susie in earlier drafts, this is Marty's girlfriend. Keira Sedgwick auditioned, but Claudia Wells, who does play the role eventually, was offered the part. But then ABC decided to pick up a pilot that she'd shot, so she had to drop it. In comes 17-year-old Melora Harden, aka Jan Levinson.

• 58:00Lizzie Bassett?

  From The Office, yeah.

• 58:02Chris Winterbauer?

  From The Office, and many more, including Transparent. It was life-changing, until it wasn't. All right, October of 1982, Lizzie, let's go back in time for one quick second to the invention of the DeLorean. The DeLorean car had been created in the late 1970s, early 1980s, and John DeLorean's dream of bringing the world a car that would last forever died when he was caught on videotape in a sting operation agreeing to bankroll drug trafficking.

• 58:28Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 58:29Chris Winterbauer?

  He was eventually, he was acquitted. Insane. Yeah. He was acquitted, but his company declared bankruptcy. They made one model of car, the DeLorean. Also, wasn't it notoriously a piece of shit? Yeah, I did read one online commenter say this is a car for someone who doesn't need a car. And I read that it needed a lot of time at the DMC, DeLorean Quality Control Center, before it could get shipped to an actual dealership. Although I did read that the motor itself is a known Peugeot, Renault, Volvo motor that was decently reliable. Would love to hear if anybody out there in our audience has ever driven a DeLorean. Please, send us a message or head to our Patreon and you can join for free and comment on

• 59:12Chris Winterbauer?

  this episode. All to say that the car was obscure. I believe less than 10,000 actual DeLoreans were ever manufactured. So, concept artist Ron Bob, an alum of used cars, was a little surprised when Steven Spielberg asked him, "How would you make a DeLorean into a time machine?" So, originally, Lizzie, Marty ends up in a lead-lined refrigerator next to a nuclear detonation. The nuke powers the focusing machine of the time machine, which sends him and the refrigerator back to the future. During pre-production, the Bobs realized they need something more mobile than, you know, something that you put on the back of a truck. By the way, Spielberg would steal that ending for the beginning of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull 20 years later. A classic film that we all loved.

• 59:57Chris Winterbauer?

  We do. Nuking the fridge almost happened back in 1985. Spielberg was apparently also worried that kids would see the film and start crawling into refrigerators to try to time travel, which I think is actually a very thoughtful and smart bit of foresight. Yeah, because you can't get out. You can't. They automatically latched at this point in time. This is a big departure from established time travel lore, Lizzie. And this is, I think, where Zemeckis and Gale do add a lot to the time travel canon, which is like, well, as this time machine, you remain fixed in place and then you travel through time. And they're saying, no, you actually have to get enough speed that you can travel through time, although you're technically doing it in the same place. But it's a moving time machine, which is relatively new outside of space travel. Why a DeLorean? A few reasons. They thought it was funny that like the car of the

• 1:00:41Chris Winterbauer?

  future that failed would be the car of the future in this movie. They loved the golf wing doors because it made it look like a UFO.

• 1:00:48Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:48Chris Winterbauer?

  They thought it was cool. Basically, John DeLorean was seen as kind of this badass in the media, even though he was a total nut. And so they thought it gave the movie some credibility and it had a cool look.

• 1:00:58Lizzie Bassett?

  I would also think it was a bit easier to shoot, right? Because of the way that the door lifts up, you're not dealing.

• 1:01:03Chris Winterbauer?

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

• 1:01:07Lizzie Bassett?

  Sure.

• 1:01:08Chris Winterbauer?

  So they give it this kind of grimy, jerry-rigged feel. And SFX supervisor Kevin Pike goes to Glendale, land of the car dealerships. He buys three models from a shuttered DeLorean dealership. They have the A car, the hero car, the B car, that's just the exterior for driving shots, and then the C car where they just like slice it up and they use it for rear projection, blue screen, towing shots, like whatever they need. And the finals result, I think, pulls very liberally from the Millennium Falcon, in my mind, although there's also references to George Powell's, the time machine, the red, yellow, and green LEDs that display when they're going and where they're coming from. And again, guys, check out Back to the Future: The Ultimate Visual History for more on the design. Now, Lizzie, in October of 1984, Sid Sheinberg sends the Bobs an important memo.

• 1:01:54Chris Winterbauer?

  "Although I believe that the present draft is terrific and I marvel at the improvements that have been made from the Columbia version, I continue to believe the title leaves much to desire, meaning Back to the Future. There are a number of reasons why I find this title less than wonderful, but my primary concern is that it appears to make the picture a genre picture. I think that the script deserves a better title than this. Now that I have buttered you up, I would like to suggest the title 'Spaceman from Pluto.'" End quote.

• 1:02:19Lizzie Bassett?

  No.

• 1:02:19Chris Winterbauer?

  That is a real quote. Sid Sheinberg subsequently denied that he ever sent that memo, but there is a copy of the memo in The Ultimate Visual History.

• 1:02:26Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, no.

• 1:02:27Chris Winterbauer?

  And the Bobs didn't know what to do and freaked out. So Steven Spielberg sent Sid Sheinberg a memo back and said, "Thank you so much for the humorous memo. It really lifted our spirits." Steven Spielberg. And that's how they got the name Back to the Future to stick.

• 1:02:40Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow.

• 1:02:41Chris Winterbauer?

  Which is just such a good strategy. So Sid Sheinberg admitted later, he just didn't understand the title. They're trying to get back to the present, not the future. But he was adamant about something else, and that is the budget. So this movie was going to be expensive, but Sheinberg was not going to let it be a dollar more than needed. So instead of shooting on location, they're going to confine the film to the Universal Backlot. So much of the film, Lizzie, is on the Universal Backlot. You guys can go see it. It kind of looks like that. Totally. They cut an ending in which Marty returns to a 1985 that's very futuristic. So in the original, like, first and second drafts, the future has been changed by Marty's influence and all of Doc's inventions exist. And they go to this beautiful futuristic city and Marty's like, this is the most beautiful city I've ever seen. What is it? And Doc says, it's Cleveland.

• 1:03:26Chris Winterbauer?

  And it actually is a pretty funny joke. Sid Sheinberg says, you got to cut 5 million from this budget. Like, I am not giving you a dime more. And that's when the Bobs realize they got to drop the bomb, literally. So the third act of the film involves a nuclear explosion. They can't afford it. So they say, what if we just drop a bomb in the middle of Hill Valley? And we just like nuke the town? And they think, well, we'd kill everybody, so we probably can't do that. It's not any cheaper. Yeah, maybe don't do that. And that's when lightning struck for the second time. So in the third act of their debut film, I Want to Hold Your Hand, one of the characters is trying to stop the Beatles broadcast on the roof of the Ed Sullivan Theater with an axe when he gets struck by lightning. And they think, what if we use lightning? And they realize we could put a clock on the courthouse, strike it with lightning,

• 1:04:10Chris Winterbauer?

  and power the DeLorean that way. And it became the homage to the silent film Safety Last. Lizzie, I'm sure you've seen the image of silent film actor Harold Lloyd hanging off a giant clock face over a busy street. Yes. So they would do their version with Christopher Lloyd hanging off of a giant clock face. No relationship between the two, but definitely a fun connection.

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• 1:05:45Chris Winterbauer?

  Principal photography begins November 26, 1984. They're going to shoot for 66 days. On Bushnell Avenue in South Pasadena, that's where they're starting. Walking distance from my house. I walk down the street almost every single day. Crispin Glover was over an hour late, so they filmed his Peeping Tom tree fall with stunt doubles. They're going to then go to the Universal back lot. They're going to do location work in Los Angeles, including City of Industry. And they're going to release the film Memorial Day 1985. Everybody's really excited. Melora Harden's got this really big crush on Eric Stoltz. Everybody's jazzed. But from the beginning, Lizzie, something was off. And it wasn't just Crispin Glover's hair, which he'd cut himself without permission from the production. Leah Thompson has said that she noticed that something was off from the first read through.

• 1:06:29Chris Winterbauer?

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

• 1:06:37Speaker 05

  After the first read through of Back to the Future, everybody's sitting around going, "Ha, ha, ha, isn't that great?" You know, because it really was a great script. And they said, "Eric, what do you think?" And Eric said, "I think it's a tragedy, really." Silence.

• 1:06:50Speaker 05

  Tumblewees.

• 1:06:52Speaker 05

  And they said, why do you think it's a tragedy? And he said, and rightly so, he said, my entire family remembers a past and I, Marty, remember a completely different past. It was a very sad thought to think that you would remember something, all kinds of memories that no one else remembered. He was right, but wasn't the time to bring that up. He should have done that over cocktails with just me and a few close friends. So things just kind of went awry, you know?

• 1:07:28Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay, so I will say, I had that exact thought at the end of watching Back to the Future, that like how alienating and strange it would be for Marty, for Marty's entire childhood essentially to no longer exist and to only have existed for him, because they don't really discuss this, but like, his parents' entire trajectory has changed, their attitudes toward life has changed. It's almost certain that Marty's, the way that he was raised, the adventures they would have gone on would be completely different and would, their interactions would have been gone. He basically does not have the parents that he grew up with, which in the movie is positioned as a very good thing and, you know, for a lot of reasons, they're happier and everything and all that. But I don't disagree with him.

• 1:08:13Lizzie Bassett?

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

• 1:08:27Chris Winterbauer?

  I agree with you. And there's a scene in the second draft, right at the end of the film, that's kind of this unusual moment of quiet, where Marty's still stuck in 19, it's 1952 in that draft, because they're writing it in, you know, 81, 82. And he's standing inside this 50s tract house that's been assembled in a fake neighborhood in the middle of a desert that's about to be exploded by a nuclear blast. And if you guys remember from the old videos of nuclear tests, they would build these paper towns that would be demolished and they would videotape them to see what would happen. And he's sitting there and howdy doody is playing on the television and the table is set and it's very idyllic. And it's this nuclear dream, this nuclear life, this nuclear family that's about to be obliterated.

• 1:09:12Chris Winterbauer?

  So he can return to a time in which not only does this dream no longer exist, but as you mentioned, all of his memories no longer exist either. And he kind of smiles in this very poignant way and says to himself, "The fabulous 50s." And then he climbs into the, you know, the refrigerator and the nuke goes off and he gets sent back to the future. And then, you know, they played off for humor at the end, but it is this kind of poignant moment that I think points to a deeper sadness. And I can very much see Stoltz in that version of the movie.

• 1:09:43Lizzie Bassett?

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

• 1:09:59Chris Winterbauer?

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

• 1:10:03Lizzie Bassett?

  Which is fine. It's great.

• 1:10:04Chris Winterbauer?

  A hundred percent.

• 1:10:05Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, I understand not wanting to do it.

• 1:10:07Chris Winterbauer?

  So Thompson would go on to say that Stoltz was also kind of doing a form of method acting. He would only respond to you if you called him Marty, not Eric. He grew out his fingernails because that's what real guitar players do. And his method acting rubbed some of the cast the wrong way. Sometimes literally, when he was shoving Biff, Tom Wilson, he shoved him so hard after Tom Wilson had told him to stop, that he left bruises. And he would question Zemeckis on his motivation, you know, in very simple things like, "I don't think my character would cross the street this way." And Zemeckis is saying, "Well, I need you to cross the street this way because I need you to come around this car for the camera." Right? There's not a real motivation behind it. But Stoltz just seemed to be on a, in a different movie.

• 1:10:47Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:47Chris Winterbauer?

  In many ways than the rest of the cast and crew. Cinematographer Dean Cundy has recalled that there was this awkward disconnect between Stoltz's desire to ground the character and Zemeckis's desire to provide the most entertaining movie possible.

• 1:10:59Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:00Chris Winterbauer?

  The character looked different, too. They dyed his hair black. You guys can see him online. See, and again, he's very cute, but they wanted him to be this, you know, teen idol. He looked kind of... Like a greaser. He's got either a black turtleneck or a black jacket. He's got black hair and he has a darker, heavier feel to him. So after 28 shooting days, which is nearly halfway through production, and I've read varying reports on how much was filmed with him. I've read 40%, I've read more than 50%.

• 1:11:25Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, my God, that's so much.

• 1:11:27Chris Winterbauer?

  The point is, the production was three days behind schedule, which isn't that big a deal. The problem is, Zemeckis went and viewed what they'd cut so far, and he called producer Neil Canton. Quote, "Bob told me there was good news and bad news. The good news was that Chris Lloyd is really good, and Tom's really good, and Leah and Crispin are really good. The bad news is there's a big hole in the middle of it all. Stoltz wasn't working." And again, it's not that he was, I think, bad. It's that the movie wasn't fun.

• 1:11:56Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:56Chris Winterbauer?

  So Zemeckis sat down with Spielberg. They watched a 45-minute assembly, and they both agreed Eric Stoltz had to be replaced. Now Spielberg very smartly said, "Don't tell the studio. We don't want to shut down production. Just keep filming, and I will send the script one more time to Family Ties creator Gary Goldberg." I think they realized they needed a comedic heavy hitter. They needed somebody with the comic timing of a sitcom.

• 1:12:21Lizzie Bassett?

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

• 1:12:29Chris Winterbauer?

  Yes.

• 1:12:29Lizzie Bassett?

  And it's one of the hardest things to do, which is that he has to be as funny as everyone else around him without having the ability to be this wacky, zany character. And I think that's the hardest job. And he does it the same way that Jason Bateman does it on Arrested Development. And neither of those two shows work without that one person.

• 1:12:52Chris Winterbauer?

  So they send the script to Goldberg, and he says, "Okay, I'll share it with Fox if you agree that if he does this, you have to work around his Family Ties schedule. We are not changing our schedule." And it seems like maybe the reason Goldberg would share it now and not earlier is that, A, they were closer to wrapping the season.

• 1:13:10Lizzie Bassett?

  Also, Michael J. Fox knows about it now.

• 1:13:12Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. B, Michael J. Fox's co-star Meredith Baxter had returned from maternity leave, and so he was no longer carrying the show as much as he had been in her absence. So on January 3, 1985, Goldberg gave the script to Fox and told him, "You have one night to read this. You have one night to decide if you want to do it. If you do it, it's on top of your work here, meaning it is during nights and weekends, and shooting starts next week." Fox looked at the title, then smiled at Goldberg and said, "I love it."

• 1:13:41Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh.

• 1:13:42Chris Winterbauer?

  He didn't read it. He was in. So, the Bobs and Spielberg went to Scheinberg and laid it all out. The change was gonna cost at least three and a half million dollars. They would need to honor Stoltz's contract and pay him out. They would need to shoot all of his footage again with Fox from the first five weeks. To be clear, there are probably shots they wouldn't need to reshoot that don't involve Stoltz's character, including coverage of other actors, establishing shots, etc., although he's in most of the movie.

• 1:14:11Lizzie Bassett?

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

• 1:14:15Chris Winterbauer?

  It's debated. There's one shot of the punch on Biff where some people have said that that is Stoltz's hand. Zemeckis himself has said the only way they could know is if they went and checked the film negative and it would damage the film and they're not gonna do it. So, the release date would need to push to August. It had actually already pushed from May to June to July just because of production delays. And Bob Gale has said that they showed it to Scheinberg. They showed him the footage to convince him, but Sid Scheinberg has said that that's not true. He said, "It didn't take me one minute. They wanted me to go down and look at film and I said, 'You guys must be crazy. You think I'm going to take the two of you on? Life is too short. If you guys feel the way you do, make the change. I think if I would've said, 'Continue making the movie you don't think is working,' then I would've been an idiot for sure,' end quote." I buy that. Scheinberg's

• 1:15:00Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:01Chris Winterbauer?

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

• 1:15:04Lizzie Bassett?

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

• 1:15:10Chris Winterbauer?

  And he has said, "You know, I don't regret pushing for Stoltz. I still think he would've been good. They disagreed. We'll never know." So, I can see both sides. By January 7th, the decision was final. Zemeckis had permission to move forward with Fox. He'd already started preparing for the role. He'd been practicing guitar, skateboarding, and they broke it to the cast. So, Leah Thompson had actually, against the production's rules, left to visit her boyfriend Dennis Quaid over the holidays in Germany, and she came back to wherever she was staying and she had a voicemail that was like, "It's Gobis Bob Gale. You gotta call me right now!" And she thought she was getting fired because she had left the production.

• 1:15:43Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, no.

• 1:15:44Chris Winterbauer?

  But it was because they were letting go of Eric Stoltz, and she was very upset. She liked Eric. She liked working with him. And apparently, since she said that she was very snotty at the time, she was very upset that all of a sudden she was gonna be acting across a, quote, "sitcom actor." But she later said that acting in a sitcom is the hardest thing that she's ever done.

• 1:16:00Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:01Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. Christopher Lloyd was also upset. For his own mental health reasons, he poured everything into Doc Brown for six weeks and he was gonna have to reshoot almost all of it.

• 1:16:10Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:11Chris Winterbauer?

  But of course, no one was more devastated than Eric Stoltz. He was fired on January 10th, 1985. He has been pestered to no end. If you guys are that interested, you can listen to him talking about it online. I think he's been very gracious about it. I'm sure it was brutal for all parties involved. He's a great actor, I hope and I believe he found peace in his career in the years after Back to the Future. And I really think we need to stop doing the what if of, you know what I mean? Of him and leave him alone as much as possible. Now, his exit had some unexpected ripples, Lizzie, mostly because Michael J. Fox is so damn short. And Melora Harden is very tall, if you've ever seen The Office.

• 1:16:48Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, yeah, she is.

• 1:16:49Chris Winterbauer?

  And she towered over him. The filmmaking team polled the crew, and apparently it was actually the female crew members who felt most strongly that Marty's girlfriend shouldn't be taller than him. And according to Harden, it was two female executives who ultimately made the decision. So the Bobs sent her flowers. They told her that she's lovely and it had nothing to do with her. And she would actually apparently later channel the energy that she felt of those two female executives into her performance as Jan Levinson on The Office, like the need to perform masculinity as a woman in a male-dominated workspace. So Claudia Wells, whose pilot had been picked up but then not renewed, was now available and brought back into the film as Jennifer Park.

• 1:17:29Chris Winterbauer?

  So, Michael J. Fox steps into Back to the Future on January 15th, 1985. And to pull it off, he'd virtually have to be in two places at the same time. So he would shoot family ties all day, then he was driven to City of Industry. He'd get there at 6:30, go through hair and makeup wardrobe, shoot for a few hours, head home, nap, and do it again.

• 1:17:50Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, my god.

• 1:17:51Chris Winterbauer?

  As he said in his memoir, quote, "I'd climb into the back of a production van with a pillow and blanket, and yet another Teamster driver would take me home again, sometimes literally carrying me into my apartment and dropping me onto my bed." And he actually gave the Teamster drivers keys to his apartments so they could like come in and wake him up and make sure that he was getting back to set.

• 1:18:08Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, god.

• 1:18:09Chris Winterbauer?

  He had no idea if his performance- Was even usable. He started forgetting what he was shooting. Bob would ask him about scenes from the day prior, and he couldn't remember what they'd done. One day on Family Ties, he had a panic attack because he was desperately trying to find Marty's video camera on the prop table until he remembered he wasn't on Back to the Future. He was on Family Ties. He was operating on roughly three hours of sleep a night, and he thought that he was terrible. Quote, "I was practically unconscious because I was so tired." And he wasn't the only one. The crew was also working almost exclusively nights to accommodate his schedule. And they were reshooting scenes they'd already done, where the new version's gonna be as good as what they'd already shot. But Lizzie, their spirits were oddly high

• 1:18:53Chris Winterbauer?

  because Michael J. Fox is very funny. Yeah, he is. And he's not just funny on camera. He's funny in person, too. So everybody had this infectious energy that was stemming from Fox and his ability to react to everything. And I think that's what you talk about with Bateman. It's that Fox gives a very funny but grounded reaction to all of the zaniness that's happening around him. He's both above it and experiencing it at the same time. Now, this also led to some other great changes. He was too short to wear Stoltz's costume, eight inches between them. So they changed him into an orange puffer vest when they ditched the austere black turtleneck. He was also dwarfed by Tom Wilson and Christopher Lloyd, which made the physical comedy way funnier. Yeah. He was literally more of an underdog. If you guys want to read about just the crazy day-to-day

• 1:19:38Chris Winterbauer?

  schedule, you can read an entire breakdown of every week of filming in the ultimate visual history of Back to the Future. I'm not gonna do a taxonomy of that. Production wraps on April 26, 1985. They'd been filming for six months, Lizzie, and they would need to do their first test screening in three weeks.

• 1:19:59Chris Winterbauer?

  This is a nightmare. Editors Arthur Schmidt and Harry Karamitis worked around the clock. Back to the Future tested in San Jose in mid-May of 1985, supposed to release in August. The audience is restless. They were apparently talking, bored, unengaged. Harry Karamitis was so upset by their reaction after working so hard on this cut that he said, "If those teen boys don't shut up, I'm gonna go and knock one of them out." So Arthur Schmidt had to send him into another room so that he wouldn't go and beat up the audience that they were trying to test the movie with. The DeLorean shows up and the audience locks in. Bob Gale has said that it was actually when Biff starts bullying George in the past, in the same way that he did in the present, that the audience kind of clues into what the movie is. The VFX weren't done.

• 1:20:43Chris Winterbauer?

  ILM was obviously going to be working until the last minute. The music wasn't done. Alan Silvestri would be working till the last minute, but the story was captivating.

• 1:20:50Lizzie Bassett?

  But was the power of love in it yet?

• 1:20:52Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, yeah. The very last shot in the movie with the flying car was in black and white, but the audience didn't care. They went nuts for it. It apparently scored a 96, higher than any other Universal film had gotten. The team cut seven minutes from the movie. They screened it for the Universal executives. It was the moment of truth, right? Had the Bobs and Spielberg been right to replace Eric Stoltz? Sid Sheinberg loved it so much, he pulled in the release date by a month to July 4th.

• 1:21:21Lizzie Bassett?

  Sid, don't do that.

• 1:21:23Chris Winterbauer?

  ILM had to boogie. Now, I want to call out FX supervisor Ken Ralston. He was about a month into his work on Cocoon of all films when he read Back to the Future and agreed to do the film's 30 or so VFX shots. Why did he want to do it, Lizzie? Because there was a nuclear explosion at the end, which of course got cut by the time he actually got to do the movie. So in the end, he pulled a Marty McFly. He worked on Cocoon during the day and Back to the Future at night, often working 24 hours at a stretch. Now, there's a lot online about the lightning bolt, about the way they did the DeLorean disappearing. I'll leave those because they are handled much better visually, but there are two shots that apparently didn't meet his standards that still bother him. The flying car at the end, which bothers him because the trees don't cast shadows

• 1:22:09Chris Winterbauer?

  on it, that's a one-fifth model. And Marty looking at his disappearing hand. Apparently, they shot that on such a wide-angle lens that when they used a properly-sized hand, it looked enormous relative to him. So that is a one-third scale hand that they're using in the foreground that's disappearing, which I find very funny. Alan Silvestri had three weeks to record his score for the test screening. And then, of course, Huey Lewis and the News provided two original songs, The Power of Love and Back in Time. But they had a lot more time, because, Lizzie, I don't know if you noticed this, Huey Lewis has a cameo.

• 1:22:40Lizzie Bassett?

  Of course, I noticed Huey Lewis has a cameo.

• 1:22:43Chris Winterbauer?

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

• 1:22:46Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 1:22:47Chris Winterbauer?

  An uncredited Mark Campbell sings Johnny Be Good at the end, and Tim May performed the guitar solo. And very briefly, Lizzie, let's talk about it. I can't tell if this is just the Bobs thinking, wouldn't it be funny if Marty went back in time and invented rock and roll? Or if it's them actually doing something a little bit more thought out and saying, wow, this is just like Elvis, who was so influenced by Chuck Berry's music. And then he took that sound and popularized it with white audiences. I have no idea. I think it could be interpreted both ways, but I can't figure it out.

• 1:23:18Lizzie Bassett?

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

• 1:23:23Chris Winterbauer?

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

• 1:23:30Lizzie Bassett?

  Go ahead and cut that out.

• 1:23:31Chris Winterbauer?

  There's a scene that was actually shot where Marty fears that like, you know, what if I go through with this with my mom? And then in the future, I'm gay? And then like, if they're trying to set up a joke where Doc's like, why wouldn't you want to be happy? And he just doesn't understand what Marty's saying. But I think they smartly cut that.

• 1:23:46Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:46Chris Winterbauer?

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

• 1:23:56Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:56Chris Winterbauer?

  I think is a very smart way of just showing, hey, there has been progress, by the way. It's not just that we're just going to do this revisionist history of the past. There has been progress to the 1980s. Things have gotten better for some people, even if they haven't for the McFlies. So, everybody seemed to smell, Lizzie, that a hit was coming, including the producers of Teen Wolf, who decided, our movie's not great. We're gonna push it to after the release of Back to the Future and see if we can ride on the coattails of this movie. And Universal, I will say, in a classy move, took out an ad in Variety thanking each post-production member by name for their tireless work on the film. An unexpected move.

• 1:24:43Chris Winterbauer?

  So Back to the Future opened wide on July 3rd, 1985. Michael J. Fox got a call from his agent. He was out of town at the time of the release, and he immediately apologized for his performance. And his agent said, "Shut, shut, shut up, Marty. Shut your mouth." Shut your mouth. Back to the Future is going to be the biggest movie of the summer. But of course, Lizzie, he was wrong. It was going to be the biggest movie of the year. Wow. So reviews were generally positive. The New York Times and Jean Siskel were really positive on it, although the LA Times kind of took it to the woodshed, saying, "It's big, cartoonish and empty, with an interesting premise that is underdeveloped and overproduced." Now Sid Heinberg's decision to pull in the release date was very smart. It gave Back to the Future a lot more screenings, upwards of 100,000 during the peak of movie attendance season, July.

• 1:25:28Chris Winterbauer?

  It also made it clear that the studio believed in the movie and wasn't dumping it in August. So he wanted to get away from that perception of the late summer movie being a dump. It made $17.3 million its opening weekend, and then it did not drop. 10.6 its second weekend, 10.3 its third, 9.5 its fourth, 8.4 its fifth, 8.1 its sixth, 7.2 its seventh, 6.9 its eighth, which is when Teen Wolf came out and somehow made 6.1 on just Fox's name alone. It was the number one movie at the box office for 11 of its first 12 weeks in theaters. Amazing. This movie raked it in. It won one Oscar, Best Effects, Sound Effects Editing.

• 1:26:13Chris Winterbauer?

  It was nominated for three more, Best Sound, Best Original Song, Power of Love, which became Huey Lewis and the News's first international hit. What beat that for Best Original Song? Ooh, Lionel Richie, "Say You Say Me." From what movie? White Nights. No, sorry, wrong. Wrong. Wrong. We'll fix that. Sequels would follow, although they were not planned. The title card, "To Be Continued", did not appear in the original film. That was added in 1986. It was written and conceived as a standalone movie. Back to the Future would become a career-defining trilogy for many involved in the production, although not all. And I want to focus on one actor, Lizzie, who you mentioned,

• 1:26:57Chris Winterbauer?

  the surprisingly handsome Crispin Glover.

• 1:27:01Chris Winterbauer?

  Crispin Glover was famously, or infamously, not invited for Back to the Future's Part Two and Part Three. I didn't mention this earlier, but on the first film, there have been some reports, although this is not universally stated, that Glover may not quite have fit in, not dissimilar to Stoltz, a little bit more of a method acting approach. He's very exaggerated in his performance, and it seems to have in particular rubbed Bob Gale the wrong way. There seems to be a real beef between the two of them, and Gale has kind of said the hardest thing was getting him to act like a completely normal person for the final scenes of the movie.

• 1:27:37Lizzie Bassett?

  I like that he's not, I mean, I love that he's Crispin Glover. Yeah, he's a total weirdo.

• 1:27:42Chris Winterbauer?

  Exactly, and it's fun, and there's a real contrast to Marty, who's so secure with himself. Salary issues and creative differences are both cited as to why he didn't return. Now, I think we do know he was offered a substantially lower fee than Leah Thompson on the subsequent films, about half is what I've read. I also had read one report that he had asked for a million dollars on the second film, and they just said, absolutely no way. I did not find a direct quote from him, you know what I mean, or anybody else on that. Now, the creative differences that Glover had with Zemeckis were also about money. Glover has said that he fought Zemeckis over the ending of the film. Here's what Glover had to say. "I said to Robert Zemeckis that I thought it was not a good idea for our characters

• 1:28:25Chris Winterbauer?

  to have a monetary reward, because it basically makes the moral of the film be that money equals happiness. What I was arguing for was that the characters should be in love, and that the love should be the reward. Zemeckis got really mad at me when I said this." So, actor Jeffrey Weisman was hired to play George McFly in Back to the Future Part Two, and when Glover saw the following film, he found himself staring at himself. Lizzie, have you ever seen Jeffrey Weisman as George McFly?

• 1:28:55Lizzie Bassett?

  No.

• 1:28:56Chris Winterbauer?

  Let me show you a photograph of what they did. So, this on the left will be Crispin Glover, and on the right will be Jeffrey Weisman in Back to the Future Part Two.

• 1:29:07Lizzie Bassett?

  What? Wow. Is that prosthetic makeup on him?

• 1:29:13Chris Winterbauer?

  Very good.

• 1:29:15Lizzie Bassett?

  What it looks like is, it looks like if someone were to make like a papier-mache jigsaw-style puppet of Crispin Glover.

• 1:29:24Lizzie Bassett?

  That is what that looks like.

• 1:29:26Chris Winterbauer?

  Would you like to play a game?

• 1:29:27Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, it's like Saw.

• 1:29:30Chris Winterbauer?

  Audiences thought it was Glover. It was like he was in two places at the same time, which was, of course, impossible. As you correctly assume, Lizzie, the filmmakers had used a face mold of Glover's face that had been made during the production of the first film to assist with the old age makeup. And they had used it to make prosthetics for relatively unknown and impersonation actor Jeffrey Weisman to wear. They also did use, I believe, some footage from the first film in certain shots in Back to the Future Part Two of Glover as well. Now, Weisman has said that he was even unaware of the extent to which he was replacing Glover. And he has said, and one source I read, said that he thought he was just a photo double,

• 1:30:13Chris Winterbauer?

  meaning his body, like, you know, over the shoulder shots, like him, you know, wide shots, nothing of the face. So Glover sued Universal and Amblin. And his reasoning was they did not own his likeness and did not have permission to utilize it. Universal countered that they owned George McFly, the character, and his continuing story. Now, the case was settled out of court, but has rippled across time. I'm guessing they settled it because it would be cheaper to settle and pay it off, and they probably didn't want two of their biggest directors getting tied up in depositions and a lawsuit that might spiral out of control. If you guys have noticed, you know, the Baldoni-Lively case, for example, has consumed the careers of both of them.

• 1:30:56Chris Winterbauer?

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

• 1:31:11Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:12Chris Winterbauer?

  Two technologies that Robert Zemeckis has very much embraced. In particular, I believe, the use of deep fakes to de-age actors, most recently what he did with Tom Hanks and Robin Wright, amongst other actors, in his film Here.

• 1:31:26Lizzie Bassett?

  I have a secret.

• 1:31:28Chris Winterbauer?

  Go ahead.

• 1:31:28Lizzie Bassett?

  I think I don't like Robert Zemeckis.

• 1:31:32Chris Winterbauer?

  OK, no, that's an interesting point. So what's interesting about Zemeckis is I do think that he has, or at least with Gail, there was heart to his stories. And in Back to the Future, I think they did a pretty good job of straddling the fun and clever scientific elements of time travel and technology and the heart of what they were going for with realizing your parents are people and they have regrets as well. Across his career, it feels like Zemeckis has become more and more invested in the technological aspects of storytelling and divested in the emotional aspects of storytelling. And so I've just become less and less interested in his movies.

• 1:32:09Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, and I also think that there is, even with something like Forrest Gump, there is nostalgia at the expense of actual emotional depth, I would say. And I think that that is the same thing in Back to the Future, although I think you're right that Back to the Future has more of it. Like, to me, these movies, I don't know, it's almost like there's a surface level to these movies that I think it makes it seem like the pond is deeper than it is, if that makes sense. That's kind of the way that these come across to me. I don't know. I mean, I, what do you think, Chris?

• 1:32:51Chris Winterbauer?

  I've been thinking about this a lot because when I first watched this again for the podcast, my just gut reaction was, wow, these are two filmmakers who maybe really do think that the past was better. But then the more I read about the movie and the time in which it was written and the way it evolved, I actually don't think that's the case. And there's a lot that's been said about how they specifically wanted to create a version of the 1950s that isn't what existed and that impacted the production design and the costume design. And it was very much designed to look like a vision of the 50s that we see at the movies. So it was supposed to be removed a little bit from reality. And even the vision of the 19, the mid 1980s that they've created, I mean, this was the morning in America.

• 1:33:36Chris Winterbauer?

  A moment. This wasn't the recession of the late 1970s and early 1980s. So to me, the movie feels very localized to the McFlies. And I think that it really succeeds on those terms. It succeeds less in as a broader commentary on where America is now, because so much progress was made between 1955 and 1985. But as a meditation on one family wondering, where did where did things go wrong? Where did my parents go wrong? When did they stop being alive? I think the movie works really, really well on those terms. Because I do think that those terms are really universal. And the fear that the next generation, that my kids will not do as well as me,

• 1:34:20Chris Winterbauer?

  for example, or that my kids will not respect me or or or love me, or that I failed them or let them down. I think those are all really universally relatable emotions. And just to bring it back to Zemeckis, I feel that he has moved away from these core universally relatable emotional concepts and toward technology as the engine for entertainment. And so the reason I think Back to the Future works is because the emotion powers the entertainment, and it's wildly entertaining movie. And then later in his career, I think he's leaning more on technology to provide that entertainment. And it just doesn't just doesn't do it for me.

• 1:34:57Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, I agree with that. I'm looking back at Robert Zemeckis's filmography, and I think that maybe one of my favorite movies he's made, which I'm probably gonna sound dumb for saying this, but Cast Away.

• 1:35:10Chris Winterbauer?

  Cast Away is great.

• 1:35:11Lizzie Bassett?

  It's great. And I feel like he didn't have the same like pizzazz to rely on for Cast Away. And it's fantastic. It's entertaining. And the whole thing is it's entertaining with just a volleyball. But also got to shout out What Lies Beneath and Death Becomes Her. So it turns out I do like Robert Zemeckis because I fucking love those.

• 1:35:30Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, he's a great director. Don't get me wrong. I just find that as he gets more invested in technological advances, I tend to get less invested in his movies.

• 1:35:37Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, it's the later films. It's like Polar Express Forward, where it starts to kind of. I'm sorry, David's yelling at us via text. Contact, yes, although Contact was.

• 1:35:46Chris Winterbauer?

  I don't really like Contact.

• 1:35:47Lizzie Bassett?

  Contact was a bit of a director switcher, Ruski, though, David. And I don't think that was Zemeckis the whole time, as you may remember from our episodes about Mad Max Fury Road. Last thing really quickly about the Crispin Glover thing, because I don't think we had talked about it that much. That's fucked up. I think that that is fucked up. I will come out and say I am fully on Team Crispin Glover for that one. I think that-

• 1:36:07Chris Winterbauer?

  Me too.

• 1:36:08Lizzie Bassett?

  Replace, replace the character. Kill the character. Like, you want to do another movie and you want to, you know, not use him? That's fine. That's your prerogative. That's totally fine. Kill him. Kill the character. Have him just all of a sudden be a dick, divorce the mom, whatever you want. Great. Like, do something or just replace him. They do that all the time where all of a sudden it's a different actor playing the dad and the same name. That's fine, too. Like, you can make it work. Don't literally remake that man's face on another man and have that person try to imitate the performance of Crispin Glover, who like, like you said, that's Crispin Glover. That's the way that he acts and looks and behaves. It's kind of his shtick. It's very strange to have someone like redo that.

• 1:36:53Chris Winterbauer?

  I agree. For what it's worth, he and Robert Zemeckis worked together on, again, on Beowulf, so it seems like they patched things up at some point. It does seem like there's a-

• 1:37:02Lizzie Bassett?

  That movie's terrible.

• 1:37:05Chris Winterbauer?

  It does seem like there's an existing rift between him and Bob Gale in particular, and it seems like that's where more of the rift was.

• 1:37:10Lizzie Bassett?

  Hmm.

• 1:37:10Chris Winterbauer?

  To begin with, there are some secondhand quotes of Spielberg that I'm not going to read because I could not get them firsthand about some things he said about the process. If you guys are interested, you can look up more about this online, but I agree, it's disrespectful to a performer to attempt to trick the audience into thinking they've continued to exist in this world when they have not, and they are no longer participating creatively or economically in the film.

• 1:37:37Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:39Chris Winterbauer?

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

• 1:37:52Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh.

• 1:37:52Chris Winterbauer?

  And I want to get to it in one second. I think, as I was thinking about it, I think a filmmaker's greatest tool, and we talked about this with Sam Raimi on Evil Dead, is the ability to manipulate time, right? Sam Raimi saw that his father had cut together- A video film of a birthday party in which the candles were blown out before the children arrived at the party. And it blew his mind that you could rearrange, you could time travel with movies. And that's what movies allow us to do. They allow us to time travel. We can also travel through space and you can compress time, expand it. You can rearrange it. You can trick the audience into thinking they've got it worked out and show them that the whole thing's backward. You can just totally butcher it like Tenet.

• 1:38:34Lizzie Bassett?

  I agree.

• 1:38:35Chris Winterbauer?

  You can make them feel things that are really hard to feel in real life. Maybe because they're happening too slow to notice, or they took place a long time ago, or they're happening too far away to worry about. Now, the Carl Sagan quote reads, "Physicists propose that two alternate histories, two equally valid realities, could exist side by side, the one you know and the one in which you don't exist. Time itself may have many potential dimensions, despite the fact that we are condemned to experience only one of them." One of my favorite aspects of making this podcast is that you see in your mind's eye, or at least I do, I feel like I do when I, when I research it,

• 1:39:16Chris Winterbauer?

  all of the different versions of the movie that nearly existed, or could have existed, or maybe even should have existed. All those other universes, as Carl Sagan were to put it, that we will never be privy to. In the case of Back to the Future, I think we got the greatest timeline. I think of all of the universes to bear witness to this movie and we got the best possible one.

• 1:39:54Chris Winterbauer?

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

• 1:39:57Lizzie Bassett?

  That was great.

• 1:39:58Chris Winterbauer?

  We'll get to the rest of the trilogy. Is there anything that you felt went right? I must ask you.

• 1:40:02Lizzie Bassett?

  There's a lot that went right. I have to go with the obvious one here, which is Michael J. Fox. He seems like a delight on and off screen. And I think the only way that you pull off something like this, where you're running on three hours of sleep and you're able to somehow energize not only your own performance, but the people around you, is that you are a genuinely good and light person. And I do think it sounds like, from everything you've told me, because I've always wondered, you know, why was Eric Stoltz fired? What was it about his performance that wasn't working? I understand where they're coming from because this is the movie they were making. And without Michael J. Fox at the center of this movie, I don't think it works.

• 1:40:47Lizzie Bassett?

  I don't think it has, because there isn't a ton of depth underneath it. I don't think he brings so much to this role, but in a way that's still light and fun that doesn't make you, I don't know. It both does and doesn't make you question everything. I just think he's wonderful. I think that we're lucky to have him. And I don't really need to know what the Eric Stoltz version would have been, because I think Michael J. Fox is fantastic. So I think what went right is Michael J. Fox. I love that story about him not even reading and just saying, yes, I'm going to do this. So, yeah.

• 1:41:25Chris Winterbauer?

  Despite how hard I've been on Bob's mechas in his recent films, I would love to give mine to the Bobs. And specifically their ability to iterate. I think, so this movie has been referred to by many people as a perfect movie, structurally perfect movie. Everything that's planted is paid off, et cetera.

• 1:41:45Lizzie Bassett?

  Right.

• 1:41:46Chris Winterbauer?

  I'm, I won't dispute that. It is a very tightly paced, extremely cleverly constructed movie.

• 1:41:53Lizzie Bassett?

  Agree.

• 1:41:54Chris Winterbauer?

  It was not always that. And so many of the most classic elements of the story were consequences of desperate changes that were needed to facilitate budget cuts or to get the scripts to the right place tonally. And this movie was rewritten again and again and again during pre-production, during production, during the edit itself. And I think it's a great example of how film is never a medium in which the thing arrives fully formed.

• 1:42:32Chris Winterbauer?

  The script is never done. The edit is never finished. And the only reason the movie is done at the end of the day is because Sid Sheinberg says it's time to put it in theaters. And I have a deep respect and admiration for anybody who has the ability to rewrite something as endlessly as The Bobs did and as cleverly as they did. And to continue to see that it could improve across every version of this script. And I encourage you guys to read the different versions online and go to the Writers Guild Library because you can see very important realizations that they have. You know, an obvious one is Marty does not disrupt the flow of his parents' relationship until the midpoint in the earlier drafts.

• 1:43:14Chris Winterbauer?

  And so the movie really lacks an engine from the end of act one, when he travels back in time, until the midpoint. And you can tell they smartly realized that at some point and they, you know, pulled it in. Sid Sheinberg's feedback that you should use a dog, I actually think is a very smart

• 1:43:28Lizzie Bassett?

  It is.

• 1:43:29Chris Winterbauer?

  decision because it makes you care about, holy shit, what happened to this dog? Not that you wouldn't care about a chip.

• 1:43:34Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, honestly, I don't care about the chip as much. I was so mad when he put that dog in the car at the beginning.

• 1:43:39Chris Winterbauer?

  Exactly.

• 1:43:40Lizzie Bassett?

  Even though I know the dog's gonna be fine. I was like, how dare you?

• 1:43:44Chris Winterbauer?

  So my what went right goes to rewriting. And The Bobs did a great job of that on this film.

• 1:43:50Lizzie Bassett?

  I think that's a great what went right. I was honestly very surprised when you told me how many times this movie had been rewritten early on because in previous episodes, that's generally been a harbinger of potential disaster. And so it does take a lot of perseverance and I think maybe self-awareness to be able to say, we're gonna rewrite this, but we're gonna make it better. And that's really cool.

• 1:44:15Chris Winterbauer?

  All right, Lizzie, what do we have coming next week for the fine folks at home?

• 1:44:20Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, we have a fantastic picture starring Katharine Hepburn, which sounds like just an absolute shit show to make, and I can't wait. This was one of my favorite movies when I was little. It is The African Queen, starring Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn. And as our researcher Jesse pointed out, it is bound to be a depressing watch, given how many times he calls beautiful 44-year-old Katharine Hepburn, old gal.

• 1:44:48Chris Winterbauer?

  It's either her or the boat. I'm not sure who he's referring to. Talking her. That's right. Guys, if you are enjoying this podcast, there are five easy ways to support us. Number one, tell a family member or friend. Give this thing a listen. Number two, leave us a rating and review on whatever podcatcher you are enjoying the show on. Number three, hit subscribe on said podcatcher so our episodes show up automatically every week. Number four, you actually can no longer come to our live show because we sold out both nights. But that being said, we've gotten some interest from folks who are not in New York, so we are going to livestream our first live show from the Caveat Theater in Manhattan.

• 1:45:33Chris Winterbauer?

  We're gonna do it on our second night. So if you would like to see our first live show from afar, head to patreon.com/whatwentwrongpodcast and join our $5 tier. We are going to be coming at you live over Patreon on Thursday, October 9th. The show will start at 9:30 PM Eastern Standard Time. That's 9:30 PM Eastern Standard Time on October 9th. Head to patreon.com/whatwentwrongpodcast. While you're there, you can sign up for free if you're not interested in the livestream and get some musings, updates, and corrections from me. You can sign up for a dollar to vote on films that we will cover in the future. We just ran a great Halloween poll.

• 1:46:16Chris Winterbauer?

  You can join for $5, get access to our livestream and all of our bonus content, as well as an ad-free RSS feed. And for $50, you can get a shout out from Marty McFly, "Straight From The Universe", in which he was played by Chris Winterbauer. Doc, Doc, Doc, wait. Are you telling me these people are paying for a podcast? No, Marty. For $50, you could live on for the rest of time, or as long as Apple's servers continue to host this show. Great stuff. Angelina Renee Cook, Polly Ho Yen, Evan Downey, Jose Salto, Kevin McCoy. Come on, Marty, say the names. Say them with me, Marty. All right, Doc.

• 1:47:01Chris Winterbauer?

  Sheesh. Nathan Centino, Jory Hillpiper, SlipNuts9, K Cabana, James McAvoy, Cameron Smith.

• 1:47:13Chris Winterbauer?

  Suzanne Johnson, Ben Schindelman, Scary Carrie, The Provost Family. It's serious, Doc, it's serious! Yaelin and Miguel, The Broken Glass Kids. David Friskelanti, Adam Moffat. Film it yourself, Doc, film it yourself! Chris Saka, Kate Ellington, MZodia, CGraceB, Jan Master Marino, Christopher Ellner, Blaze Ambrose, Jerome Wilkinson, World Juror, Lance Stater, your kids are gonna love it Lance! Nate the Knife, Lena, Half Grey Hound, Brittany Morris, Darren and Dale Conkling,

• 1:47:58Chris Winterbauer?

  Jake Killen, Matthew Jacobson, where are we gonna get plutonium? Grace Potter, Ellen Singleton, JJ Rapido, Scott Gerwin, Sadie, just Sadie, Brian Donahue, Adrian Pengkorea, Chris Liel, Kathleen Olson, Brooke, Leah Bowman, Steve Winterbauer, that's my... If I meet my dad, when he was my age, are we gonna be friends, Doc? Don Schibell, Rosemary Southward, Wendy Olgeschlager McCoy, Tom Kristen, Jason Frankel, Somon Chinani, Michael McGrath, Lonrelad, Lydia Howes. I don't know anything about this podcasting, Doc, but it seems crazy to me.

• 1:48:44Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, I think we can all agree that we dodged a bullet in that I didn't exist when Back to the Future was made, so there was not even a theoretical chance that I could have ever starred in it. And with that, guys, we conclude our coverage of Back to the Future. Until next time, it's me and the old hag signing off!

• 1:49:03Chris Winterbauer?

  Bye!

• 1:49:11Speaker 06

  Go to patreon.com/whatwentwrongpodcast to support What Went Wrong and check out our website at whatwentwrongpod.com. What Went Wrong is a Sad Boom podcast, presented by Lizzie Bassett and Chris Winterbauer. Editing and music by David Bowman. Research for this episode provided by Jesse Winterbauer, with additional editing from Karen Krupso.