How 'Back to the Future' Almost Didn't Get Made

There's a great scene in the Tim Burton film Ed Wood, in which the main character meets his idol, Orson Welles, in a bar, and realizes that even the legendary director struggles to get his movies made. The meeting never happened in real life, but the scene makes an important point: making a movie, any movie, is incredibly difficult.

In the case of Back to the Future, which celebrates its 30th anniversary this summer, there were many obstacles, which is bewildering considering it seems like a slam dunk in retrospect. A number of people knew the movie would be a hit from reading the script, including Steven Spielberg, who was very eager to get it made. So how did this sure thing, or as close to a sure thing in Hollywood, get rejected over 40 times before Universal finally pulled the trigger? Why did director Robert Zemeckis and screenwriter Bob Gale initially resist Spielberg's help? And how did the film avoid getting shut down after its first male lead, Eric Stoltz, was let go? All good questions, and in honor of the anniversary, we got the answers.

Wasted Time

Like the movie itself, the saga of bringing Back to the Future to life had a lot of frantic attempts to make up for lost time, and turn bad timing around, and funny enough, time is often a theme in Robert Zemeckis's movies (Forrest Gump, Cast Away). Yet when Zemeckis and Gale first came together, the timing couldn't have been better. They met at USC's film school, around 1971, the time of the fabled "USC Mafia," where the filmmakers of the future like George Lucas, John Milius (screenwriter of Apocalypse Now), Randal Kleiser (Grease), and John Carpenter (Halloween) were all learning their trade.

Zemeckis came from Chicago's South Side, Gale from St. Louis, and it was creative kismet from the beginning. Where film students of the time were worshipping the French New Wave, the two Bobs grew up loving big Hollywood entertainment like The Great Escape, as well as lowbrow fare like the Three Stooges and Jerry Lewis movies.

Zemeckis and Gale started writing together in their senior year. Zemeckis was also getting a lot of attention for Field of Honor, his darkly comic student film about an escaped mental patient who's driven nuts by society, and ends up going on a shooting spree. One fellow up-and-coming filmmaker impressed with Honor was Steven Spielberg, who was still several years away from becoming one of the biggest directors in the world with Jaws.

The two Bobs first broke into the business writing for low-rated TV shows like Kolchak: The Night Stalker and Get Christie Love!. Then Universal offered them a seven-year deal writing for television, which would have earned Zemeckis and Gale $50,000 a year. "It was so much money that Bob and I couldn't conceive of it really," Gale tells Esquire. "We were eating at McDonald's, living day to day. But we looked at each other and said, 'You know, we really don't want to write television.' We met some of these TV writers and they were all really burned out. One TV writer we knew was just so cynical and bitter about everything, he told us, 'The only reason I do this is so I can afford to live on my boat.' We were doing this because we really wanted to make good movies.

"Thankfully, neither me or Bob had any serious responsibilities," Gale continues. "We weren't married, we didn't have any house payments, we weren't addicted to any dangerous, expensive substances, so it was pretty easy to turn it down at that point in our lives."

Soon the team would get their break. Spielberg became a mentor to Zemeckis, and would produce his directorial debut I Wanna Hold Your Hand for Universal. Zemeckis and Gale had also written a big, sprawling World War II comedy, 1941, which Spielberg decided would be his next movie following Close Encounters. The two Bobs were making the movies they wanted to make, and I Wanna Hold Your Hand had gotten strong test scores before its release. What could go wrong? Plenty as it turned out. Released in the summer of 1978, I Wanna Hold Your Hand did no business, and then 1941, which came out the following year, was an embarrassing flop for Spielberg, and his career took a big hit from it before he came back with Raiders of the Lost Ark.

By 1980, Zemeckis and Gale managed to survive the wreckage of 1941, and were ready to unleash Used Cars, an outrageous comedy that again Spielberg produced, and it also received incredible test scores, the second highest in Columbia's history. Unfortunately, history repeated itself again when nobody came to see it in the theaters. "That was really devastating," Gale says.

"You Built a Time Machine?!"

It was during this period of disaster that the inspiration for Back to the Future struck. In August 1980, Gale was back in St. Louis during the promotional tour of Used Cars, visiting his family. "Used Cars had a strange release," Gale remembers. "They released it in half of the country in the middle of July, and the other half in the middle of August."

Gale started flipping through his father's high school yearbook, and he saw that his father was the president of his graduating class. "I thought about my father in the context of my graduating class, and I wondered whether I would have been friends with my dad in high school, because I was definitely not the rah-rah politico type that would have been the president of anything."

Once Zemeckis and Gale started riffing on the idea, the story for Back to the Future started taking form, and they pitched it to Columbia that September. The two Bobs were still welcome at Columbia because the head of the studio, Frank Price, loved Used Cars, and he wanted whatever they came up with next.

When they sat down and started telling the story of Back to the Future to Price, he got it immediately. "I remember Zemeckis wanted to keep going on and on, telling him more scenes, and I kept shoving him in the side with my elbow, like, 'Shut up, he's gonna say yes, let's not talk ourselves out of a development deal.'"

Disney rejected 'Back to the Future' saying it was 'a movie about incest.'

But when the two Bobs got it all down on paper, Columbia's reaction was lukewarm, and the studio put the movie in turnaround. Then Zemeckis and Gale pitched the project anywhere they could, and it was passed over more than 40 times. Studios thought it was too sweet, too nice, a Disney movie essentially, and it didn't fit at a time when the biggest comedies were R-rated raunch like Porky's. So Zemeckis and Gale did in fact take Back to the Future to Disney, where one of the company's top executives told them, "Are you guys out of your minds? You can't make a movie like this here. This is Disney, and you're giving us a movie about incest! The kid with his mother in the car, that's horrible!"

Indeed, one of the biggest challenges of the Back to the Future script was working in a subplot about potential incest between Marty and his mother. Zemeckis and Gale certainly knew that they were painting themselves into a corner. "We pushed that thing as far as we could go," Gale says. "We kept the audience on edge, but we did not cross that line. We realized the person who had to say this wasn't right was Marty's mother, where she pulls away and says, 'This is wrong, it's like kissing my brother or something.' What nobody picks up on is what was she doing with her brother that she would make that comparison? But we said, 'That's fine, the audience will believe that, they want to, because they don't want it to happen.'"

Another excuse Zemeckis and Gale heard when they were taking the screenplay around was, "It's time travel, there's never been a big time-travel movie hit, it's not gonna make any money."

The Spielberg Touch

Still, the budding filmmakers had a big ace in the hole with Spielberg. He was a fan of the script from the word go, but Zemeckis told him, "Look, we're afraid that if we do this picture with you and it tanks, nobody will give us another job because we'll be those two guys that only get jobs because their buddy Steve signs on."

Zemeckis had to prove he was his own director, and he finally got his shot with Romancing the Stone, a success in early 1984. Michael Douglas had been a fan of Used Cars, and as Zemeckis recalled in the Directors Guild of America's magazine, the star insisted to the powers that be, "I want this guy's style, this guy's energy, in my movie." After Stone, Zemeckis went back to Spielberg anyways, because he was the one person who believed in Back to the Future from the beginning. Where Back to the Future was dismissed by many as a Disney story, with the incredible success of E.T., Spielberg was now the new Disney, and he immediately set up Zemeckis's project at his new production company, Amblin.

'The whole movie is a ticking clock.' —Composer Alan Silvestri

From the beginning, Zemeckis and Gale had a strong script that laid out all the necessary pieces. "It was just so tight," Zemeckis told writer Jeffrey Ressner. "Everything is set up, everything is paid off. Every line of dialogue, every beat, every cut, every shot is doing what movies are supposed to do, which is propelling the plot or establishing character. There's not a single extraneous frame."

Alan Silvestri, the composer for Back to the Future, put it this way to me: "The whole movie is a ticking clock, that's what's driving the action. Even though we can go where we want in time, we can never waste time in this movie."

Zemeckis would also direct Back to the Future in a straightforward manner. There are only 30 or so special effects shots in the entire picture. "Bob is a big believer in never stop the movie to show off," Gale says.

Car and Casting Problems

The DeLorean, one of the most important and beloved elements of Back to the Future, was an idea Zemeckis came up with to solve a production problem. At first, Doc Brown had invented a time chamber that he took around on the back of a pickup truck. Zemeckis thought, "How are we going to do this? There are a lot of logistics in moving this thing around." Then it finally dawned on him: "Let's put it in the car and make it mobile."

The DeLorean was a hilarious sight gag because of its dated look, and John DeLorean had recently been busted for cocaine, giving the car an outlaw status. (As it turns out, DeLorean was a fan of Back to the Future, and he sent a thank-you note to Zemeckis and Gale for immortalizing his vehicle on film.)

Yet before production began, someone from Universal's product placement department tried to meddle, telling Gale that if they changed the car to a Mustang, Ford would pay them $75,000. Gale's response? "Doc Brown doesn't drive a fucking Mustang!" (This classic response has been printed up on t-shirts that you can buy at DeLorean car shows.)

But much to their chagrin, Gale and Zemeckis realized that like the shark in Jaws, the DeLorean was not a cooperative piece of machinery. "As cool as it looks on film, it's by no means a performance car," Gale says. "It broke down a lot, and little things on the car would break during a scene, and we'd have to wait for the FX guys to repair it."

This was, as it turned out, the least of anyone's problems. Five weeks into the shoot, it was clear to everyone that Back to the Future's leading man, Eric Stoltz, just wasn't working out. Zemeckis and Gale had wanted Michael J. Fox from the start, but Sid Sheinberg, then head of Universal, was bullish on Stoltz, who had just put in a moving performance in the film Mask. Sheinberg was so certain that Stoltz was the guy, he even told Zemeckis and Gale in a moment of bravura that if he didn't work out, they could reshoot the movie with somebody else. They held Sheinberg to his word, and Zemeckis personally delivered the bad news to Stoltz. As the director recalled in Tom Shone's book Blockbuster, it was "the hardest meeting I've ever had in my life and it was all my fault. I broke his heart."

Michael J. Fox Comes Aboard

Replacing Stoltz reportedly cost Back to the Future $4 million in scrapped footage, and the production had to move fast to finish on time. Stoltz was let go in early 1985, and the rest of the shoot would have to fit around Michael J. Fox's Family Ties schedule. But Fox loved the script, he knew he could nail the role, and he told Zemeckis and Gale, "Sleep? I'm only 22, what do I need sleep for?"

As Fox recalled in his memoir, Lucky Man, he could play a character like Marty McFly in his sleep, "[and] that very nearly turned out to be the case." For the next three and a half months, his schedule usually went something like this: "A teamster driver would pick me up at 9:30 a.m. and take me to Paramount, where I would spend the day rehearsing that week's show, culminating in a run-through at approximately 5:00 p.m. each afternoon. Then at 6, another teamster driver would pick me up and shuttle me to Universal Studios or whatever far-flung location we were based that evening, where I would work on [Back to the Future] until just before sunrise. At that point, I'd climb into the back of a production van with a pillow and a blanket, and yet another driver would take me home again—sometimes literally carrying me into my apartment and dropping me into my bed. I'd catch two or three hours sleep before teamster driver number one would reappear at my apartment, let himself in with a key I'd provided, brew a pot of coffee, turn on the shower, and then rouse me to start the whole process all over again."

Once Fox came aboard, the atmosphere on the Back to the Future changed, and it was pretty clear to everybody involved that the movie was going to be a winner. Fox had great chemistry with Christopher Lloyd, and as Gale says, "A good actor makes everybody else look better. Michael had this magical quality, his comedic ability, and he gave the actors more to work with."

While it's hard to imagine another actor playing Doc Brown, John Lithgow and Jeff Goldblum were considered for the role as well. Doc Brown's wild, stark white hairdo was Lloyd's invention, because he wanted to look like a cross between Albert Einstein and the famed conductor Leopold Stokowski.

Speaking of music, once production wrapped on Back to the Future, one of the last pieces of the puzzle was Alan Silvestri's wonderful score, which has gone on to become a classic in its own right. Silvestri and Zemeckis first worked together on Romancing the Stone, and the direction to the composer was simple and direct: "Al, it's gotta be big."

Silvestri realized there was a fascinating paradox within the movie. Back to the Future takes places in a small-town panorama, "but it had all of these big themes," he says. "It was a story about great friendship, great challenges, and heroism, so the score, almost counterintuitively, played against the images with a big orchestral score.

"I needed to have some kind of heroic theme," Silvestri continues, "something identifiable that even a few notes would conjure the rest of it, and something constructed where there was a payoff within the theme itself."

Back to the Future was originally going to open in August 1985, but after two sneak previews that went through the roof, Sid Sheinberg knew that the movie would dominate the summer, and he moved the release date up to July 3, which caused another mad dash to finish post-production on time. (In fact, Back to the Future was in theaters nine weeks after the movie wrapped.)

"Where We're Going, We Don't Need Roads"

Back to the Future came in at the top of the box office opening weekend, and made even more money its second week. It was the top money maker of 1985, beating out Rambo, Rocky IV, Cocoon, The Breakfast Club, and another Amblin favorite, The Goonies. Altogether, the Back to the Future trilogy has made close to a billion dollars worldwide—not bad for a film that struggled to find takes when it was conceived.

Spending years trying to get a movie off the ground can be maddening, and while Zemeckis and Gale certainly had their moments of despair, we can thank them for never losing faith in Back to the Future.

"The stories in Hollywood of movies that took years to get made are legion," Gale says. "Sometimes it's because the moviegoing climate changes, or you have different elements attached to the material that makes it more bankable. When Bob and I were at USC, John Huston came down and screened The Man Who Would Be King. He told us he'd been trying to get that movie made since the '40s with Clark Gable and James Cagney. I thought, 'My God, the amount of focus and resolution you'd have to have to not let go of something over that amount of time.' You hear these stories, and you hope it doesn't happen to you, but on Back to the Future, all the planets ended up aligning after a lot of adversity."