We Don't Need Roads: The Making of the Back to the Future Trilogy (2 page)

Sunday, December 30, 1984

F
ilming had only been under way for less than a month, but already something wasn’t quite right. On what should have been his day off, Robert Zemeckis made his way into the double-wide trailer that would remain parked behind the Amblin Entertainment compound for the next several months. Since all the editing rooms inside the studio offices were delegated to other projects, Steven Spielberg had arranged for coeditors Arthur Schmidt and Harry Keramidas to make the temporary structure their permanent workspace as they pieced together
Back to the Future
, Universal Pictures’ film scheduled for release Memorial Day weekend.

The director made his way through the bullpen, which normally would have been buzzing with assistants and apprentices filing film trims and outtakes into the large cardboard boxes that lined the wall. But because it was a weekend, it was a virtual ghost town, with the exception of the two other living souls in the building, Schmidt and Keramidas. The editors were tucked away in the former’s makeshift office, seated in front of a modestly sized monitor. Next to them sat a chair—the most comfortable chair in the office—that remained empty except during these
visits from Zemeckis. Increasingly, these meetings had become fairly commonplace by this point in the shooting schedule, weeks after their November 26 start date. The production team expected principal photography to wrap after about twenty-two weeks of filming, meaning there would be fewer than three months between the last shot being captured and
Future
’s late May release date. As if the timeline weren’t tight enough to begin with, there were several optical effects that would have to be added in postproduction by George Lucas’s Industrial Light & Magic (ILM), further constricting the schedule.

To expedite the process, Zemeckis would come into the cutting room at the end of his shooting days and on weekends to look at scenes in the process of being put together. Zemeckis grew to trust his editors, especially Artie, who had been nominated for an Academy Award a few years prior for his work on
Coal Miner’s Daughter
, another Universal release. His meticulous editing skills led him to be hired after a serendipitous meeting a few months earlier. “I was working on a film at Paramount called
Firstborn
, and we had two young teenage boys in the movie,” he says, likely referring to Christopher Collet and Robert Downey, Jr. “Bob was looking everywhere for somebody to play Marty. He called up the director, Michael Apted, and asked if he could see some film of the two boys. Michael didn’t want to let the film out of the cutting room because he was still shooting, and I was close-cutting it as we went along, so he asked Bob to come look at the film on the editing machine with just me.”

Zemeckis went over with his producers Bob Gale and Neil Canton to watch the three or four scenes Artie had prepared in advance. The editor ran the film, which, afterward, was met by silence. It seemingly grew louder by the second, until the visitors heard it broken by their host.

“What do you think?”

“I don’t think either one of those boys is right for Marty McFly,” Zemeckis said. “But I really like the way those scenes were edited.” Schmidt’s face filled with color, embarrassed that he may have been perceived as fishing for a compliment when he was merely trying to speed up the session and get back to work. He thanked the director for the kind words and the group went on their way. The seemingly inconsequential meeting took on new importance when, about three weeks later, Bob Z called for the editor to come over to his office at Universal for an interview. Schmidt went and was hired.

A second sit-down between Zemeckis and Schmidt soon followed. When there was a lull in the conversation, the editor asked who was cast in the role of Marty, since neither of the young actors they had scouted that fateful day was a match. “So far we haven’t decided,” Bob Z said. “The guy that I really want is . . .” He walked over to the coffee table in his office and picked up a teen magazine, which he opened to a page with a large photograph of a young heartthrob on it. “That’s the guy that I really want to have to play Marty,” he said, pointing at the picture. “But he’s not available because he’s doing his TV show.”

Artie didn’t know it at the time, but the search for the perfect Marty McFly was an arduous endeavor. When Universal Pictures green-lighted the film, the Bobs immediately set out to fill the pivotal role of
Future
’s protagonist. Although he wasn’t in their minds as they wrote the screenplay, once it was finished, they both felt strongly that Michael J. Fox would make the perfect leading man. Today it seems that Fox was born to play Marty, but that was not the case when casting was under way in mid-1984. Yes, the Canadian actor was the linchpin of the popular television sitcom
Family Ties
, but to date he had only appeared in two major
motion pictures—Disney’s 1980 flop
Midnight Madness
and the moderately successful 1982 film
Class of 1984
, a film with a subtitle that foreshadowed the actor’s eventual career-defining role: “We are the future . . . and nothing can stop us!”

In the late summer of 1984, even before the request was made to Michael Apted that resulted in Schmidt’s hiring, Steven Spielberg called his friend,
Family Ties
producer Gary David Goldberg, to ask that Fox read the script and consider screen-testing for the role. Spielberg and Goldberg had met in 1979, after Kathleen Kennedy, who was the former’s assistant and the latter’s old friend from college, introduced the two. While Spielberg was in London filming
Raiders of the Lost Ark
, Goldberg was flown overseas to join him, as the two were collaborating on a screenplay that was ultimately unmade called
Reel to Reel
, a semiautobiographical musical about a first-time director making a science fiction film. By the time
Future
was in preproduction, the two were not only friends, but also neighbors—they both owned beach houses within close proximity of each other in Malibu—and professional allies. Spielberg was one of the first people to see a rough cut of the
Family Ties
pilot back in 1982, and without any puffery, he told his friend that the show was guaranteed to be a hit and that his precocious actor playing the teenage son Alex was going to be a major star. When Zemeckis made it clear that Fox topped his short list of actors for Marty, Spielberg volunteered to give Goldberg a call directly, bypassing the traditional route of phoning an agent to broker a deal.

After a cursory perusal of the screenplay, the television titan decided that Fox wasn’t going to be given the pages. Goldberg loved what he read and saw the potential for the film to be a success—but that threatened to derail all he had established with his sitcom. The show was experiencing a meteoric rise in
the Nielsen ratings, from forty-ninth place in its first season into the top five within a three-year span, thanks in large part to
The Cosby Show
providing a strong lead-in. When Meredith Baxter, who played matriarch Elyse Keaton on the show, was pregnant with twins, the show’s scripts were modified to rely more heavily on Fox’s character. The twenty-three-year-old actor, who still had a boyish face and youthful demeanor, became a star, true to Spielberg’s prediction, which led to increased attention for the show and teen magazine spreads like the one Zemeckis had on display in his office. Goldberg was confident that Fox would be interested in working on the film, thus distracting him and threatening the show’s popularity. He wanted to help his friend, but Michael J. Fox, he said, was off-limits. The search for Marty McFly would have to continue.

So it did. As disappointed as the Bobs were with Fox’s lack of availability, they were determined to press on and find the best second choice possible. Nothing about getting
Back to the Future
off the ground had been easy to that point, and as far as they were concerned, this was just the latest setback that they needed to overcome in the same way they always took on their problems—together.

The two had met on the first day of their Cinema 290 class in the fall semester of 1971 at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts. A fast friendship soon followed. “We were among a handful of undergraduates in a mostly graduate class,” Gale says. “We quickly discovered we had similar tastes in film. Bob was the only person I’d ever met who, like me, owned the soundtrack to
The Great Escape
.”

They soon realized that, while the majority of their classmates were absorbed with the idea of creating highbrow cinema, they were more interested in making movies that average joes
would want to see. More often than not, their free time was spent catching a showing of
Dirty Harry
or the latest
James Bond
flick, not discussing the leitmotifs throughout Akira Kurosawa’s career. Movies, they believed, should be entertaining to the general public first and foremost; the added benefit would come when a person reflected on what they had just watched, and realized that there was more than they initially thought had met their eye. Zemeckis had aspirations of being a film director, while Gale dreamed of being a writer, and they decided to develop their common love for moviemaking as a team. Before graduation, they collaborated on each other’s student films, including 1972’s
The Lift
and 1973’s
A Field of Honor
, as well as a screenplay for a horror movie Gale conceived about vampiric prostitutes,
Bordello of Blood
, which, little did they know at the time, would be turned into a movie more than two decades later with a completely rewritten screenplay by A. L. Katz and Gilbert Adler.

Their goal was for
Bordello
to become the first feature they would make together. The two continued to refine the script over their first postgraduate summer, but in order to get a foot in the door, they thought they might try their hand at television. Bob Z took to hanging around Universal Studios, having heard the legend that Steven Spielberg had done the same when he was a young wannabe filmmaker with a dream similar to Zemeckis’s. Spielberg, the story goes, hung around the studios so much that he was eventually assumed to have been on contract and was offered a directing gig—a tall tale that makes for great Hollywood lore. While following in his idol’s fabricated footsteps, Zemeckis overheard that the television show
Kolchak: The Night Stalker
was nearing cancellation, and established veteran writers were stepping away from the show. Perhaps, he thought, that could provide an opening for two hungry twentysomethings to
try their hand at getting one of their stories on the air. The duo banged out a nine-page story treatment for an episode over a few weeks, which Universal purchased. It was the first moment of affirmation that their shared dream of being filmmakers just might come true, and that they might prove their skeptical parents wrong when it happened.

Success knocked swiftly twice more. The Bobs wrote an episode for
McCloud
that was optioned—industry jargon for a producer officially reserving the right, for an agreed-upon time, to purchase a script at a later date—and another script for
Get Christie Love!
, a short-lived series perhaps best remembered now as being name-checked in the opening sequence of Quentin Tarantino’s
Reservoir Dogs
. Universal saw potential in the Bobs to be great television writers and offered them a seven-year contract to pen for some of the company’s NBC shows, netting each half of the team $50,000 a year through the length of the agreement. Gale’s father, who, like Zemeckis’s parents, already thought his son was nuts for enrolling at USC with the hopes of becoming a professional filmmaker, was convinced he had raised an idiot when he was told that the Bobs, under the advice of their recently acquired agents and lawyers, were declining the deal.

Instead of relying on that steady paycheck, the two abandoned television and decided instead to concentrate on their big-screen aspirations. They finished another screenplay they wrote on spec named
Tank
and brought it to fellow USC alum John Milius, an uncredited cowriter of the first two
Dirty Harry
films and
Jaws
, who was just a few years away from receiving an Academy Award nomination for his
Apocalypse Now
screenplay. The writer was under contract at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) with a deal to direct two films and produce two others. He was taken with the Bobs’ screenplay, but thought they might have a
better idea. They pitched another story they had been kicking around, a period comedy set in Los Angeles immediately after the start of World War II. By the end of the meeting, Milius agreed to produce the film, based primarily on the strength of their well-developed concept and enthusiasm. After the Bobs expanded their idea into a formal script, Milius pitched the film to Spielberg, who was already well acquainted with Zemeckis. The director bit, and
1941
began its trek to production.

Bob Z’s relationship and friendship with Spielberg began when the former was a student at USC and the latter visited the campus to screen his first film,
The Sugarland Express
. Zemeckis attended the screening, approached Spielberg afterward, and asked if the director would like to see his 1973 student film,
A Field of Honor
, for which Zemeckis had won a Student Academy Award. Within a few days, the two were watching the fourteen-minute short at Spielberg’s office. While Spielberg was still years away from becoming a household name at the time of his visit to USC, the director was already establishing a reputation as someone to watch. Sid Sheinberg, who was vice president of production for Universal’s television division at the time, saw Spielberg’s 1968 student film
Amblin’
, which later inspired the name of the director’s production company, and offered him a long-term directing deal. Although
1941
followed the success of
Jaws
and
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
, it failed to replicate those films’ profitability at the box office. The movie became Spielberg’s first to not recoup its budget in domestic box office gross, though it did return a profit on the studio’s investment with overseas markets factored in.