Back to the Future co-writer and producer Bob Gale brings the classic into the present
This year’s Kansas City FilmFest is going back in time with the man who made time travel in a DeLorean conceivable.
In honor of the 30th anniversary of Back to the Future, co-screenwriter and producer Bob Gale is presenting a new Digital Cinema Package 2K version of the film at 7 p.m. Saturday, April 18, at Cinemark Palace on the Plaza, as part of the Kansas City FilmFest (April 16-19).
“Having supervised the post-production as well, this DCP looks better than the movie ever looked in the theater,” Gale tells The Pitch. (After the film, Gale will take part in a Q&A with the audience.)
For anyone trapped in a malfunctioning time machine for the last three decades, Back to the Future stars Michael J. Fox as Marty McFly, a high school student who accidentally journeys back to the week when his parents fell in love and who must play matchmaker.
Gale and Robert Zemeckis picked up an Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay for the script, and the collaborators also worked on two sequels as well as ***I Wanna Hold Your Hand and Used Cars. They wrote the scripts for Trespass and Steven Spielberg’s 1941, as well.
Since then, Gale has expanded his output to include graphic novels, including the No Man’s Land Batman series (“How cool is it that my father threw away my comic books when I was 13, and now they’re paying me for it?”), and he’s developing a stage musical for Back to the Future with Zemeckis and soundtrack composer Alan Silvestri.
Over the phone from Los Angeles, Gale demonstrated some of the courage that one might expect from the Dark Knight or Marty McFly. Unfamiliar with The Pitch, he said, “I’ll fly blind and trust you.”
The Pitch: What’s unique about Back to the Future is that main character Marty McFly has no idea what his journey is going to be like. He just happens to stumble into the wrong DeLorean.
Gale: That’s a very good observation, and, in fact, it’s the key to something we did in the movie. One of the pet peeves intrinsic to time-travel stories is that when people travel back in time and try to change things, it always backfires. There’s countless episodes of The Twilight Zone, well, not countless, there’s about five of them — and, of course, Ray Bradbury’s classic Sound of Thunder — [in which] people as a time traveler do something inadvertently or that they think is going to make things better, and it ends up making things worse.
Back to the Future is, I think, where Marty returns to a world that’s a little bit better than the one that he left. He didn’t intend to go back in time. He didn’t intend to do anything. He’s just a poor kid who winds up in the same place at the wrong time. All he wants to do is go home. When he’s trying to get his parents back together, it’s only with the explanation that when he returns to 1985, it’s going to be the exact same 1985 that he left. But because he gave his father [Crispin Glover] good advice, and his father takes it, and his father rises to the occasion and successfully becomes a man, Marty’s actions have made a better world, but that’s not what he intended.
After the jump, Gale discusses the legacy of Back to the Future.
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Looking back, you’ll hear people say, “Oh, they don’t make movies like Back to the Future now, but the truth is that they didn’t make movies like that then, either.
[Laughs.] You are absolutely right about that. It took us three and a half years from when we turned in the first draft to when we finally got into production. There were 42, 44 rejections all over town [Los Angeles], sometimes from the same studio more than once. It was a real struggle back then. And can you imagine trying to get that thing made today? I don’t think that anybody would pull the trigger on it now.
Back to the Future doesn’t squarely fit into any one genre, which I think is one of its strengths. Back when we had Blockbuster stores, they didn’t know what section to put the movie in. Is it a comedy? Is it an adventure story? Is it science fiction? Is it a family movie? It’s all of those things.
Today, they’d say, “What is this relationship between Doc [Brown, played by Christopher Lloyd] and Marty? Are people going to think that there’s some weirdness here?” The anti-smoking crowd would tell you that you can’t have Lorraine [Marty’s mom, played by Lea Thompson] light that cigarette up in the car even though it’s a clear anti-smoking message. They don’t want you to even see people smoking a cigarette in the movie. They would say that if our hero is skitching [hanging from a moving car while riding a skateboard], kids are going to do that. And then they’ll get hurt, and they’ll sue us. All this over protective stuff. “Are you encouraging people to drive their cars 88 miles an hour?”
There’s an article in The Atlantic, and it’s hitting on these exact things that you’re talking about, which is the ’80s was the last time that Hollywood was making movies with kids in them where the kids were acting like real kids and doing dangerous things. Back to the Future is an example. The Goonies is another example of kids doing some seriously irresponsible stuff. But kids like that stuff because it rang true.
Coming up, Gale discusses making typically unlikable characters likable.
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Actually all the films you’ve written and produced wouldn’t go over well in a pitch meeting. With Used Cars, for example, you have a likable major character die in the first 10 minutes, and you ask the viewers to identify with a crooked car salesman.
It’s pretty insane, isn’t it? I think that what the audience responds to — and this is my theory, which is how I’ve always approached it — is that when you present the character who is committed to whatever it is he’s doing, even if it’s doing something terrible [the audience responds].
We like Rudy Russo [Kurt Russell] in Used Cars because he says, “Hi, I’m Rudy Russo. I want to become a corrupt politician. It’s my dream. I really want to do that.” The audience says, “I get that.” I don’t know if we need people like him in politics. But at least as Deborah Harmon says in the movie, “You’re at least honest about your dishonesty.” We like Darth Vader because he’s really good at what he does, and he really wants to do it. [laughs.]
The movies you’ve written are loaded with Missouri references. For example, in Used Cars, you have the Chiefs beating the Broncos and a sly reference to the St. Louis Fire Department. Was it tough to fit local nods into your movies?
It’s not hard at all. If you’re sitting in those catbird seats, that’s what you want to do. There are some jokes in Back to the Future that are all about my suburb in St. Louis. The only people that get these things are kids I went to high school with. It was great when I went back to my high school reunion. Mr. Strickland [the principal, played by James Tolkan] was based on a disciplinarian in my high school who always said, “Let me give you a nickel’s worth of free advice.” Everybody who went to my high school in University City got it.
After the jump, Gale discusses the change from Eric Stoltz to Michael J. Fox.
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You’ll be conducting a screenwriting workshop. Is that correct?
What I do is, I speak in writing classes. I’ve done several out here [in Los Angeles]. I’ve done one at Yale. Everybody’s an aspiring screenwriter or has a novel that they want to write or something. People say that they find this stuff valuable.
I remember what it was like sitting on the other side and having somebody — even if he’d just get one good writing tip or piece of good advice, it’s well worthwhile. Ray Bradbury was one of my literary heroes, and when I first started going to USC — this would have been September 1970 — Ray Bradbury spoke on campus and said something there that I quote all the time, which is trying to get an idea is like trying to behead the Medusa. If you face the problem straight on, you turn to stone. But if you sneak up on it sideways, you might must nail it.
The Sunday before I talked with you, John Oliver referred to going 88 miles per hour on Last Week Tonight. How does it feel to have a movie that people still refer to 30 years later?
It’s great. Every filmmaker dreams of creating something that just keeps on going like the Energizer Bunny. Today, parents who were kids when they saw it, they’re showing it to their kids. And their kids, as Marty McFly would say, are “loving it.” Who knew?
The thing is, if we had not convinced Universal [Studios] to let us restart shooting with Michael J. Fox instead of Eric Stolz, you and I wouldn’t be talking right now.
That’s how tenuous things are, and that’s what the movie’s about. You make a decision now, and it changes everything 30 years later. That sure crystalizes it. You say that to anybody, and they say, “Yeah, I guess that’s right. I can’t imagine Eric Stolz playing Marty McFly.”
The experience of watching five weeks of cut footage with Eric Stolz playing Marty McFly is painful to this day. … When you see a movie, and you can’t imagine anybody else in the role, that means the planets really lined up.
Obviously, he has recovered.
Oh, yeah. He’s had a decent career. We don’t bear him any ill will. It was our mistake. The irony is that because we put Eric Stolz in the movie, that is what made it possible for us to do it with Michael J. Fox.
We wanted Michael J. Fox from the beginning, and his TV schedule was such that the producer of Family Ties, Gary [David] Goldberg, said, “Guys, look. This is a great script. Michael’s going to love it, and I’m not going to let him read it because he’ll hate me when I tell him he can’t do it.”
Several months later, when Family Ties was more than halfway through their season, and we were in our crisis with who are we going to get to replace Eric Stolz, we went back to Gary Goldberg and we were desperate. And being the great guy that he was, he said, “If Michael wants to do this, and you guys are willing to shoot around our schedule, I will say yes.”
Putting Eric Stolz in our movie got us Michael J. Fox. It’s crazy.
A new Digital Cinema Package 2K version of Back to the Future screens at 7 p.m. Saturday, April 18, at Cinemark Palace on the Plaza
