We Don't Need Roads: The Making of the Back to the Future Trilogy (14 page)

“That is absolute bullshit,” Sheinberg says. “I don’t know why they say that. It is true that I was, I don’t want to say ‘hostile,’ but I didn’t think that
Back to the Future
made any sense as the title. Of course, with the wisdom of hindsight, it was the perfect title exactly because it made no sense. But no, I never in a sober moment advocated
Spaceman from Pluto
as the title.”

While the San Jose screening was a special event, it may have paled in comparison to the impact of screening the movie for the cast and crew after the final cut was locked. The false start with Eric Stoltz created an emotional roller coaster for many involved, and after a seemingly incessant shoot, which caused Zemeckis to dub his picture “the film that wouldn’t wrap,” the experience of watching the finished movie was a collectively cathartic and exciting one. “I’ve been to a lot of premieres, and sometimes you just get polite applause,” Marc McClure, who plays Marty’s brother Dave McFly, says. “This was real applause because I don’t think anybody working on that film realized how it was going to turn out. Nobody understood how they were going to put this story together. Everybody got on their feet, cheering and screaming and yelling. It was a very honest reaction. It wasn’t a Hollywood clap.”

“I was excited because Dennis Quaid was there, and I’d always had a crush on him,” Claudia Wells says. “I think I was more nervous than anything else because I was going to be on a big screen, and that was my very first movie. I went with my best friend, Patrick Labyorteaux, who was the kid actor on
Little House on the Prairie
. I was squeezing him so tight because I was so nervous. The biggest surprise to me was when they show the
clock tower flyer with my handwriting on it. I thought,
Oh, my goodness, my handwriting is filling up the entire screen.
To me, for some reason, that was more exciting than my face. The assistant director or script supervisor had come up to me with a piece of paper while we were filming and said, ‘Write this down,’ so I wrote, ‘I love you. 555-4823.’ I didn’t ask her why. I didn’t realize that what I jotted down was going to be the draft that they showed on-screen.”

“I was pretty impressed,” Christopher Lloyd says. “It was just such a great story, so well written. Bob Zemeckis did such a superb job of directing it. Seeing it all come together, and the life and excitement of it—I still get off on it. If I am channel-surfing and I come to
Back to the Future
, I am very likely to watch the entire film. I still find it fun to watch.”

However, for all the revelry that was to be had, the film was not perfect. Moviemaking is about compromising, and due to the tight turnaround time from the end of shooting to when the completed print was due, there were some visual effects shots that the team at ILM didn’t have time to get right. “When the DeLorean goes back to contemporary time after getting struck by the bolt of lightning, we had to do that really quickly,” Wes Takahashi says. “I always felt that we didn’t have enough time in the optical process to match the look from the hand-animated flames to the real flames. If you look at it closely, there is way too much diffusion in the animated flames. These days there’s all sorts of dynamic digital programming that can create realistic-looking fire, but it took a long time to get there.”

“There was one kind of casualty, in that we had such a short time for some of the visual effects and Bob was never happy with some of them,” Harry Keramidas says. “One in particular is when Marty sees through his hand when he’s playing guitar. Bob never
really liked that effect. It isn’t very good. We were still trying to get that right, and finally just had to cut in what their final version was at the last moment. We didn’t have any more time to work on it. It never really looked good to me. Nobody cared much except Bob or me, who actually knew what it was supposed to be like.”

Before the movie sped into cinemas, Zemeckis and company were feeling confident about their chances of not only making more than just a small profit—something their first two films together failed to do—but even seeing the movie become a hit. Perhaps it was because of the volcanic response at the San Jose screening and the breaking of the Hitchcock curse. Maybe it was a subconscious feeling that unlike
I Wanna Hold Your Hand
and
Used Cars
, their latest film was more commercially viable. Or possibly there was another reason: “I vividly remember shooting with Michael J. Fox at Whittier High School, the night exterior stuff for the dance,” Bob Gale says. “Word got out that he was in the movie, and we had a ton of local kids show up to watch us shoot. There was probably a ratio of girls to boys of at least two to one. They were standing seven-deep to get a glimpse of Michael. This never happened when we were shooting with Eric. Bob Z and I were amazed. We’d had no idea Michael J. Fox was such a big star—it was from
Family Ties
, of course—and that’s when we thought maybe this time people would show up to see our movie.”

But as the movie neared its theatrical debut, the Bobs’ ace in the hole was nowhere to be found. Gary David Goldberg came up with the idea of sending his sitcom family to London to visit Oxford University, which resulted in
Family Ties Vacation
, a made-for-TV movie that was scheduled to air at the end of September, right before the beginning of the show’s fourth season. Much to the frustration of the suits at Universal, Michael J. Fox was overseas when
Future
opened, and thus unable to make the usual
sit-downs with Johnny Carson or David Letterman. As per their deal,
Family Ties
was coming first, and the financial stakeholders in the film were hoping that they weren’t going to regret making that concession when the weekend’s numbers were released.

For his first several months working on the film, Fox continued to prove his physical mettle as a young twentysomething—
Family Ties
by day,
Back to the Future
by night—while trying not to lose his footing as the hamster wheel maintained its grueling pace. While on the set of his television series, he once went searching for his JVC camcorder he thought he had misplaced, only to remember that that was a prop he needed for the movie, not the sitcom. As an actor who primarily worked on television, he didn’t bother to memorize his movie lines in advance, which occasionally led to spontaneous ad-libs—like, “Rock and roll,” one of the first lines Marty speaks in the film—but also led to a sense of delirium. He didn’t know if he was coming or going half the time, and certainly had no clue whether or not what he was doing in front of the camera was working. When the film opened and Fox’s agent attended a Los Angeles screening, he phoned his client right away. The actor was apologetic, acknowledging that he hadn’t worked his hardest and promising to do a better job next time. Then he stopped speaking long enough to hear why he had been called. The picture, the agent said, was fantastic and was going to be the biggest movie of the summer.

Of course, Michael J. Fox’s agent was only partially correct; in 1985, Zemeckis’s film wasn’t only the highest-grossing film of the summer; it was the highest-grossing film of the year worldwide. On September 29,
Back to the Future
ended a run of twelve nonconsecutive weeks atop the box office charts in America and surpassed
Rambo: First Blood Part II
to become the top-earning film of the year in the United States. By this time, critics had
unanimously rallied behind the film, the soundtrack had gone Gold, and there was even Oscar buzz.

Universal Pictures never expected
Future
to be the unstoppable juggernaut that it was at the multiplexes throughout the summer of 1985, but then again, no one did. By the time its theatrical run ended,
Back to the Future
had earned $210.6 million in the United States. Internationally, the film performed almost as well. Before the end of the year, the movie arrived in well over a dozen countries, including Italy, France, West Germany, and the United Kingdom. In Japan,
Future
became the sixth-highest-grossing film in the country’s history. All told, an additional $170.5 million was earned overseas. Only two other films made more money internationally that year—
Out of Africa
and
Rocky IV
, which earned $179.1 million and $172.6 million, respectively. Critics and audiences alike applauded the movie, with Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert giving the movie two thumbs up, while journalists from major publications such as the
New York Times
and
People
praised the story, direction, and performances. There were the occasional detractors (such as Sheila Benson of the
Los Angeles Times
, who found the film to be “big, cartoonish, and empty,” with a premise “underdeveloped and overproduced”), but they were few and far between. Fourteen years after they’d met, the Bobs finally had a bona fide hit together. “Every week we had the same ‘I can’t believe it’ conversation,” Bob Gale says. “We were displaced from the number one spot by
National Lampoon’s European Vacation
for one weekend, but then we returned to the top spot the weekend after and had that conversation once again. Actually, we still have that conversation as we marvel over the film’s longevity and how it continues to capture the public imagination.”

The conventional wisdom was that time-travel movies were destined to bomb at the box office, but Zemeckis and company
proved that there were still innovative science fiction stories to tell. And that was only the first convention the
Future
team upended. While it has since become commonplace for actors to bounce back and forth between television and films, in 1985 that was not so.
Back to the Future
broke new ground by not only illustrating the ease with which a sitcom actor could cross over, but how insanely profitable that transition could be for all parties involved. “It was interesting how Zemeckis and Spielberg and Bob Gale pulled it off,” Courtney Gains, who played Dixon, says. “Their decision to cast Michael J. Fox was completely outside the box. That wasn’t how you were supposed to do it. But obviously it worked and you got to see Fox is a really excellent comedic actor.”

“Those of us who went to law school remember the phrase ‘
res ipsa loquitur
,’ which means ‘the thing speaks for itself,’” Sid Sheinberg says. “People who saw
Back to the Future
realized that it was like somebody had invented a precision Swiss watch and had it made with wonderful components. Michael J. Fox, Chris Lloyd, they were really perfectly cast. Bob had made a superb picture.”

As dollars, marks, pounds, and yen poured in from all parts of the world, Zemeckis and company were additionally pleased to find their movie bestowed with honors from those within the international film community. In Italy, the movie won Best Foreign Producer (Steven Spielberg) and Best Foreign Screenplay at the David di Donatello Awards. In Germany,
Future
was honored with a Goldene Leinwand (Golden Screen) for having sold more than three million box office tickets in its first eighteen months of release. In Japan, the movie won the award for Best Foreign Language Film by the Japanese Academy. In the United Kingdom, the movie was nominated for five BAFTAs, awarded by the British Academy of Film and Television Awards.

Stateside, the support from the industry was similarly strong. There were six nominations and three wins at the Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror Films’ Saturn Awards; a nomination for Best Casting in a Feature Film—Comedy category from the Casting Society of America; a Grammy nomination for Best Album of an Original Score Written for a Motion Picture or Television Special; and a nomination for Best Screenplay by the Writers Guild of America. The movie struck out four times at the Golden Globes, and at the Academy Awards fared only slightly better, winning an Oscar for Best Sound Effects Editing, while losing in three other categories (Best Original Screenplay, Best Sound Mixing, and Best Original Song—“The Power of Love”).

“We were nominated for a Golden Globe that we didn’t win, and we were nominated for an Oscar that we didn’t win, for the song,” Huey Lewis says. “Which was really kind of a crime. I think Lionel Richie got the Oscar for ‘Say You, Say Me’ because he had done USA for Africa that year. It was basically a political thing. When we went to the Oscars, I sat down, and Marvin Hamlisch was in front of me. He turned around, and he said, ‘Uh-oh.’ I said, ‘What is it?’ and he said, ‘Lionel’s on the aisle.’”

Their imperfect record at awards shows was disappointing, sure, but the best prize of all came when, on February 4, 1986, President Ronald Reagan name-checked and quoted directly from the movie—
where we’re going, we don’t need roads
—in his State of the Union address. Overnight, a sequel became inevitable. “We all bought Universal stock, a hundred shares each. We thought we were going to get rich because the movie was doing well,” Frank Marshall says. “The studio was supporting the idea of a sequel because the movie had been so successful, but it was kind of up to Bob and Bob. Steven said to them, ‘If you
think you can do it, great, but if you want to leave it where it is, it’s fantastic.’”

“It’s in the nature of this business that as soon as one has the inkling that something is going to work, he or she immediately begins to think of a sequel or a prequel,” Sid Sheinberg says. “That’s not an act of any great brilliance or originality. I’m sure everyone connected with the picture began to think about where else we could go once they saw the first one.”

Zemeckis was open to the conversation, but far from eager to move back to Hill Valley. His reluctance wasn’t because of the difficulties encountered while making the first film. Bringing
Future
to the screen was hard work, but both Bobs were unspeakably proud of how the film turned out and was received. Although it was stipulated in their initial agreement that no sequel or remake could be made without the studio discussing it with the Bobs first, essentially giving the two creators veto power over any future installments with their characters, Zemeckis once again felt the pressure from Sid Sheinberg’s office. In Bob Z’s mind, Universal’s stance was very clear: “You could either be part of this or not, but we’re making a sequel anyway.”