Everything about Back To The Future totally explained
Back to the Future is a
1985 Academy Award-winning
science fiction–
comedy film directed by
Robert Zemeckis and produced by
Steven Spielberg. Zemeckis wrote the story, along with
Bob Gale. It stars
Michael J. Fox as teenager
Marty McFly and
Christopher Lloyd as scientist
Dr. Emmett L. Brown.
The film's basic storyline involves the
premise of
time travel being used to breach the
generation gap. In a
De Lorean time machine invented by Dr. Brown, Marty accidentally travels back to the year
1955 when his parents were teenagers. Having interfered with their first meeting, Marty must ensure that his young parents
fall in love so that he'll be born. Furthermore, the Dr. Brown of 1955 must find a way to return Marty to
1985 without the
plutonium necessary to fuel the journey.
Due to the film's success, three spin-off projects were made.
CBS TV aired an
animated series, and
Harvey Comics released a handful of similarly styled comic books, although their stories were original and not merely duplicates of the films. In
1991,
Universal Studios Theme Parks opened a simulator ride based on the series called . The ride closed on
March 30,
2007 in Orlando, FL, and
September 3,
2007 in Hollywood, California. The ride remains open at
Universal Studios Japan.
Plot
Marty McFly (Fox) is a 17-year-old living in
Hill Valley,
California. On the morning of
October 25,
1985, his eccentric friend, scientist Dr. Emmett "Doc" Brown (Lloyd), calls him, asking to meet at 1:15 a.m. After school that day, a solicitor approaches Marty and his girlfriend
Jennifer (
Claudia Wells), asking for donations to preserve the town's clock tower which hasn't run since it was struck by lightning thirty years before. Upon arriving home, Marty finds the family car wrecked in the driveway. Inside the house, he finds his weak-willed father
George (
Crispin Glover) being bullied by his supervisor
Biff Tannen (
Thomas F. Wilson), who had borrowed and wrecked the car. At dinner that night, Marty's mother
Lorraine (
Lea Thompson) recounts how she and George first met when her father hit George with his car as George was crossing the street.
That night, Marty meets Doc as planned in the parking lot of
Twin Pines Mall. Doc presents a
Delorean which he's modified into a
time machine. As Marty
videotapes, Doc then explains that the car travels to a programmed date and time upon reaching eighty-eight
miles per hour using
plutonium in a nuclear reaction to generate the 1.21
gigawatts of power it requires. Demonstrating how to program the machine, Doc enters in
November 5,
1955 as the target date, explaining that it was the day he conceived the idea of the flux capacitor; the device which "makes time travel possible". Before Doc can depart for his planned trip into the future, a pair of
Libyan
terrorists, from whom he stole the plutonium, arrive in a
Volkswagen van and ruthlessly shoot him down. Marty jumps into the De Lorean and is pursued by the Libyans until he drives at eighty-eight miles per hour and is instantaneously transported back to 1955.
The car
stalls shortly thereafter; therefore Marty hides it and makes his way into town on foot, finding that the
town square now reflects the
popular culture of the
1950s. He runs into his own father, then a teenager, being tyrannized just as he was in 1985 by Biff, who was then the school
bully. Marty follows George; as he's about to be hit by Lorraine's father's car, Marty saves his father by taking the hit himself, resulting in Lorraine becoming
infatuated with Marty instead of George. Marty is disturbed by her sexual advances, which contrast sharply with her
prudish attitude in 1985, and leaves her home to track down the Doc of 1955. After managing to convince the scientist that he's from the future, Marty shows Doc his videotape. After Doc hears his older self mention the power requirements of the De Lorean, he tells Marty that aside from plutonium, which is unobtainable, the only possible source of that much power is a bolt of
lightning, which is unpredictable. Marty realizes that the lightning strike at the clock tower will occur the following Saturday; at this, Doc concocts a way to harness the bolt's power.
However, Doc deduces that Marty has prevented his parents from meeting. Since Marty won't exist unless his parents fall in love, he finds that Marty is in danger of being erased from time. After several failed attempts at playing matchmaker, Marty eventually works out a plan to have George appear to rescue Lorraine from his (Marty's) own advances on the night of a school dance. When Biff shows up unexpectedly and attacks Lorraine, George manages to defend her in fact by knocking Biff out with a single punch. Lorraine and George return to the dance floor, where they kiss for the first time, ensuring Marty's existence. Doc, meanwhile, has used cables to connect the clock tower's antenna to two lamp posts, which he plans to have Marty drive under in the De Lorean, now sporting a
lightning rod, at eighty-eight miles per hour the moment the lightning strikes.
Before Marty can leave, Doc finds a letter in his coat pocket that Marty had written, warning him about his future assassination. Doc rips up the letter without reading it, anticipating the dangers of learning about his future. Marty adjusts the time machine to take him back to 1985 ten minutes earlier than he left, giving him time to prevent the shooting. Upon his arrival, however, the car stalls and Marty arrives at the mall too late to save Doc. When Marty reaches him, Doc is very much alive and opens his
radiation suit to reveal a
bulletproof vest while showing Marty the letter he'd written in 1955, taped back together. When asked about it and his belief in not knowing about one's future, Doc replies, "I figured, what the hell?"
The next morning, Marty finds his family has been changed for the better. Most notably, Lorraine is no longer prudish, and George has become self-confident. Biff has become a rather servile car-cleaning agent. Just as Jennifer and Marty reunite, Doc arrives from the year
2015, appearing frantic about a problem relating the couple's future children. Marty and Jennifer climb aboard the De Lorean; when after Marty points out there isn't enough road wherein to reach 88 miles per hour, Doc responds, "Where we're going, we don't need roads." The car then lifts off into the sky and disappears.
Production
Script
The inspiration for the film largely stems from
Bob Gale, who discovered his father's high school yearbook and wondered whether he'd have been friends with his father as a teenager. His father was class president and pretty much the "big guy on campus," while Bob was on the other end of the social barometer—more of a nerd. Gale and
Robert Zemeckis originally wrote the script in September
1980 but struggled to find the time to make it. Steven Spielberg read it when Gale first had the idea and asked Zemeckis a number of years later what had happened to it. The year 1955 was chosen because it fell within the era that
teenage culture was born.
Zemeckis pitched the idea to several companies.
Disney turned it down because they thought that a story involving a mother falling in love with her son was too risqué, even if in a twist of time travel.
Steven Spielberg replied in a memo thanking him for the wonderful "joke memo" and told him everyone got a kick out of it. Sheinberg, too proud to admit he was serious, let the title stand.
In the original script, Marty's rock 'n roll performance caused a riot at the dance that had to be broken up by police. This, combined with Marty accidentally making the Professor (Doc) aware of the "secret ingredient" that made the time machine work (
Coca-Cola) caused history to change. When Marty got back to 1985, he found that it was now the
1950s conception of the future, with air-cars and other electronic devices, all invented by Doc Brown and running on Coca-Cola. Marty also discovers that rock and roll was never invented (the most popular musical style was the
mambo), and he dedicates himself to starting the delayed cultural revolution. Meanwhile, his dad opens a scrapbook containing newspaper clippings from the day after the 1955 dance and sees his son in the picture of the riot. The time machine isn't built around a
De Lorean DMC-12, and the power source for Marty's trip back to 1985 comes from atomic testing, rather than a lightning strike.
Doc Brown's "man hanging off a clock face"-themed clock reprises the famous scene in
Harold Lloyd's
Safety Last! (1923). The fact that
Christopher Lloyd and Harold Lloyd have the same last name, however, is merely a coincidence.
Pronunciation of "gigawatt"
In the film's script the word "
gigawatt" is spelled and pronounced "jigowatt" . The metric prefix "
giga-" is now part of everyday speech due to its use in computing and is now most often pronounced with a hard
g, even though the official (
NIST) pronunciation is the soft
g. However, in the 1980s, the soft
g was the most common pronunciation of the prefix. Bob Gale and Robert Zemeckis had been doing research for the film, during which they talked to someone who pronounced the word with a soft
g. This note is explained when Bob Gale is giving a commentary of the film on the special edition DVD during the scene where Doc explains the plan to send Marty back to the future.
Casting and filming
As
Back to the Future's producers scouted locations on a residential street in
Pasadena,
Michael J. Fox was elsewhere on that street, filming his first starring feature role,
Teen Wolf. The producers became interested in having Fox play
Marty McFly, but Fox initially had to turn down the part because of his increasing involvement in the
sitcom Family Ties. Another of the show's stars,
Meredith Baxter-Birney, was pregnant at the time, and thus the show's producers were looking to Fox's character (
Alex Keaton) to "carry the show."
Production of the film began on
November 26,
1984, with actor
Eric Stoltz portraying Marty McFly, and reportedly shot for more than four weeks, until the return of executive producer Steven Spielberg, who was out of the country at the time. After seeing a rough cut, Spielberg and the writer/directors agreed that Stoltz was a fine actor, but he was unfortunately not right for the part. Stoltz had played it seriously, and they wanted a lighter touch on the character. They returned to the idea of Michael J. Fox, who this time worked out a shooting schedule that wouldn't interfere with his television commitment. Fox spent his days rehearsing and shooting
Family Ties, and then drove to the movie's set to film
Back to The Future all night. The movie's day shots were filmed on weekends. Fox reportedly averaged only an hour or two of sleep each night during production, which was completed on
April 20,
1985, less than three months before the film's release. The Courthouse Square
backlot at
Universal Studios was used for both time periods, with the 1955 scenes filmed first so that the location could be "trashed down" for the 1985 scenes. Two 1950s hits Marty encounters when he arrives in 1955 ("
Mr. Sandman" by
The Chordettes and the
Fess Parker recording of "
The Ballad of Davy Crockett") were not included on the CD release. Neither was the "metal" version of, "
Johnny B. Goode".
The material ostensibly performed by Marty McFly, and by Marvin Berry and the Starlighters, was recorded by Harry Waters, Jr. as Marvin Berry and Mark Campbell as Marty McFly, with the
guitar solo played by Tim May (Campbell and May received a "special thanks" acknowledgment in the film's end credits, with the recording credit going to the fictional characters). Berry's group also plays the song "
Night Train," first recorded by
Jimmy Forrest in
1951.
Reaction
The film opened on
July 3,
1985 and grossed
U.S. $210 million at the U.S. box office, making it the highest grossing American film of 1985. The film was followed by two sequels:
Back to the Future Part II in
1989 and
Back to the Future Part III in
1990, forming a
trilogy. On
December 17,
2002,
Universal Studios Home Entertainment released the film on
DVD and
VHS as part of
Back to the Future: The Complete Trilogy.
Critics
Reviews were generally positive.
Roger Ebert complimented the direction, writing that Zemeckis "shows not only a fine comic touch but also some of the lighthearted humanism of a
Frank Capra." Even the sequences where Marty's mom has the "hots for him" are regarded as "up-beat... without ever becoming uncomfortable." The
BBC applauded the intricacies of the "outstandingly executed" script, remarking that "nobody says anything that doesn't become important to the plot later."
This movie ranked number 28 on
Entertainment Weekly's list of the 50 Best High School Movies. As of December 2006,
Back to the Future had received a very respectable 95% overall rating on
Rotten Tomatoes, with a 98% rating from the users. In 2006,
Back to the Future was voted the 20th greatest film ever made by readers of
Empire.
On December 27, 2007,
Back to the Future was selected for preservation in the United States
National Film Registry by the
Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".
Cultural impact
The series was very popular in the 1980s, even making fans out of celebrities like
Huey Lewis and the News (Lewis appeared in the first film) and
ZZ Top (who appeared in the third film) and
President Ronald Reagan, who referred to the movie in his 1986
State of the Union address when he said, "Never has there been a more exciting time to be alive, a time of rousing wonder and heroic achievement. As they said in the film
Back to the Future, 'Where we're going, we don't need roads.'" In fact, when he first saw the joke about him being president, for example "Ronald Reagan? The actor? Ha! Then who's Vice President,
Jerry Lewis?", he made the projectionist of the theater stop the reel, roll it back, and run it again. He also considered accepting a role in the third film as the 1885 mayor of
Hill Valley but eventually declined..
Series continuity
Sequels were not initially planned. Zemeckis later stated that had sequels been envisioned, the first film wouldn't have ended with Jennifer traveling in the
De Lorean with Marty and Doc, which created logistical problems in plotting the other films. In addition, Zemeckis and Gale state in the DVD commentary that the "To Be Continued..." caption wasn't originally in the film (the filmmakers chose to omit the caption from the 2002 DVD release to remain true to the original theatrical version).
Ultimately, the sequels didn't fare as well at the box office. While the first installment grossed $210 million (making it the biggest-earning movie of 1985),
Back to the Future Part II (Fall
1989) and
Back to the Future Part III (Summer
1990) made roughly $118 million and $88 million, respectively. Part III received generally more favorable reviews than Part II.
Home video release history
Further Information
Get more info on 'Back To The Future'.
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