BACK TO THE FUTURE
Still one hell of a time
TO TELL THE story of Back To The Future, we must first go back to the past. It began life in 1975, when Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale were kicking around ideas for a World’s Fair-inspired time-travel movie titled Professor Brown Visits The Future. But it found its heart in 1980, when Gale, flicking through his father’s high-school yearbook, wondered whether he would have been friends with the clean-cut class president had they been contemporaries.
“When you were a kid, did your parents ever tell you all the tough things they did as a kid?” Zemeckis later reflected. “Walking 12 miles to school through the snow? Wouldn’t it be really interesting to go back and see if they really did walk through those blizzards?”
It would take a further five years for their script to make it from that concept to the screen, a process that became well-established movie lore in its own right (from changing the time-travel device from a refrigerator into a car, to the rejections of the script by Columbia and Disney for being respectively not raunchy enough, and not family-friendly enough). But those five years were crucial in chipping away at Back To The Future, turning it from a witty and clever idea into a perfectly wrought piece of pure cinematic art.
Not that the road to completing the film was without its bumps, either — even after Universal had picked up the script from Columbia in exchange for the rights to make Big Trouble as a parody of their own Double Indemnity. With first choice Michael J. Fox unavailable due to his commitments on the sitcom Family Ties, Eric Stoltz was cast as Marty Mcfly. But five weeks into shooting, there was an increasing sense of worry that his dramatic tone was at odds with the comedy sensibilities of those around him — and the decision was taken to let him go, and build the film’s schedule around Fox’s limited availability.
It was a decision that caused Zemeckis no small amount of anguish — and the production both time and money — but it was absolutely the right one. In the hands of anyone else it would have been all too easy for Marty to come across as a smug, Ferris Bueller-esque twerp — but Fox’s natural charm, and his perfect chemistry with Christopher Lloyd, sell the character and his bizarre friendship with a scientist four times his age without question.
Back To the Future is an astonishingly tight piece of filmmaking, with every line of dialogue — and practically every visual moment — acting in service of either character or plot. A wordless opening sequence tells you everything you need to know about Doc Brown, Marty and their relationship; while recurring dialogue motifs bridge the gap between the past and the present. When George
Mcfly awkwardly explains his reasons for not wanting to show anyone his sci-fi stories, a speech that we’ve already heard almost word-for-word from Marty in relation to his rock band 30 years later, it might be an on-the-nose moment, but it’s a beautiful and resonant one. When the teenage Lorraine is shown to be sexually predatory in contrast to her puritanical older self, it’s not hypocrisy — it’s just human nature to rewrite our memories of self as our attitudes change.
It’s one thing, of course, to make a film that’s technically perfect; but another to do so while also attracting mass populist appeal. The stories of Back To The Future’s aftermath and reception are as legendary as its making: how test audiences gave a standing ovation at the final flying Delorean shot (and gave Universal its highest ever testcard rating), and how Ronald Reagan demanded the film be stopped and rewound when his name was referenced (and would later quote it in a State Of The Union address). It became an immediate cultural phenomenon, one of the most beloved genre films of a decade pretty heavily stocked with beloved genre films.
It may be the sequel — never originally planned by the makers despite an ending that would seem to suggest it — that strikes a louder chord nowadays, with its amusing vision of a 2015 that is now in our past tense and terrifying Donald Trump prescience. Indeed, there are many who may not even remember that the first film never actually travels to its own “future”. But it’s the universal theme at its heart that makes the original endure as so much more than just a piece of ’50s-themed nostalgia, and transcend its (admittedly hugely iconic) trappings.
Given that we now live further from the film’s release than it was from the year Marty travels back to, that 1955 setting seems positively prehistoric; but you don’t need to engage with that particular aspect to understand what the film’s saying about how the past informs the present, and how the people we grow up with as our role models were once young and confused just like us. For a film that’s all about time, what truly defines Back To The Future is that its appeal is timeless.
BACK TO THE FUTURE IS OUT NOW ON DVD, BLU-RAY AND DOWNLOAD