Back in Time

- It's just such an endlessly-entertaining myth,

and it has a little bit of modernized aesthetic to it.

But it really is just satisfying on the level of "Jack and the Beanstalk"

or Ulysses fighting a cyclops or something.

It's just sort of a bunch of neat shit to happen to a kid.

Ray Bradbury once said that

coming up with an idea is like trying to behead the Medusa.

If you face the problem straight-on, you get turned to stone.

But if you let it just kind of sneak in by the corner of your eye,

you might just snag it.

We never had any idea

that "Back to the Future" would be considered a quote-unquote classic.

- It just was sort of one of those that melted into the beauty and perfection.

Just... It was that magic something.

- This is gonna sound like hyperbole, and I don't mean it to.

But it's almost a perfect movie.

- It's a flawless film. It's perfect.

You can't change a thing... Can't improve a thing on it. It's perfect.

- It's a masterpiece. There's really nothing like it.

This tone that they did,

the comedy, the suspense, the drama...

You just care about the characters.

It really is kind of unparalleled.

It was beautifully cast.

It was beautifully directed, beautifully written.

- The writing and the acting was so good,

and the editing was so good, and the timing was so good.

Every thread that Bob Gale laid down to be picked up later got picked up.

- They really cared for that film so much,

and it's just so very, very well-written,

well-produced, well-acted,

and, of course, they picked the right song.

- You got a booming soundtrack by Huey Lewis and the News, okay?

You got a DeLorean for crying out loud,

and you have these very defined, quirky yet compelling characters.

Stir it all together in the soup. Look what you got.

It really is, for me,

inarguably the greatest time-travel movie ever put on film.

- Bob Zemeckis and I had always wanted to do a time-travel movie

for years and years, since the '70s,

and we'd never really been able to figure out what the hook for it was.

We had tentatively titled it "Professor Brown Visits the Future."

And that was pretty much all we had.

- Who knows if they've got cotton underwear in the future?

I'm allergic to all synthetics.

- We were never able to really come up with anything every time we kicked it around

until, uh, I was visiting my parents in St. Louis, Missouri

over the summer of 1980,

came across my father's high school yearbook.

My father had gone to the same high school that I'd went to,

and I discovered he was the president of his graduating class.

And I had no idea of this,

and I'm looking at this picture of my dad looking very straight and serious.

"President Mark Gale."

And I'm thinking about the president of my graduating class.

He was kind of a jerk.

And I thought to myself, "Gee, was my dad one of these ra-ra, school spirit guys"

"that I couldn't stand?"

"If I had gone to high school with my dad, would I have been friends with him?"

Which one is your pop?

That's him.

Okay. Okay, you guys.

Very funny.

You guys are being real mature.

Maybe you were adopted.

- so when I came back to California after that,

I'm telling Bob about this,

and he's loving it, and he's thinking to himself,

"Yeah." Says, "What if your mom went to the same high school?

"What if it turned out she was, like, the school slut?"

Do you mind if I sit here?

No, fine. No, good.

- it just started going, and going, and going.

And pretty soon, we had the germ of this idea

about a kid who goes back in time

and ends up in high school with his parents.

George, buddy,

remember that girl I introduced you to, Lorraine?

- We eventually worked the thing up into a pitch.

We were at Columbia Pictures, because we'd just made a movie called "Used Cars."

Good morning!

- I'd produced their film "Used Cars"

Over at Columbia with them.

I really believed in them so much.

Bob Zemeckis brought me a USC short film he had made

just before I went off to direct "Jaws" in 1974.

It was called "Field of Honor."

Stop, or I'll shoot!

And I saw that movie,

And I said, "Oh, my goodness, this guy is a great filmmaker."

And I came back from "Jaws," came back from that experience,

and we began hanging around, and we were friends.

Bob Gale, Bob Zemeckis, we used to go shooting skeet and trap with John Milius.

And we were sort of... It was Milius, and me, and Gale, and Zemeckis,

And that was the team for a long time.

- Frank Price, the head of the studio, loved "Used Cars."

And he told us when we had our next idea, please... he wanted to hear it first.

So we went in, and we pitched Frank, and Frank got in immediately,

And Columbia hired us to write "Back to the Future."

- They pitched me "Back to the Future,"

and I liked... I've always liked science-fiction.

So this was old home week.

I grew up on science-fiction.

- As a writer, you aspire to write something like this.

When you sit down,

you want everything to be the "Back to the Future" screenplay.

You want everything set up perfectly paid off.

You want every character to be complex, three-dimensional, compelling.

- I think it's the best thing that I've ever written. Along with Bob, of course.

But even... It's...

You probably have one of those in you in a lifetime.

- Columbia had been extremely successful

between 1978, when I went there,

and this is now 1982.

"Blue Lagoon" turned out a huge hit.

"Kramer" was a huge hit. We had "Tootsie," "Karate Kid."

So Coca-Cola bought Columbia,

and that was a huge revolution.

And there were some problems of fit, though, once Coke was there,

because Coke prided itself on its marketing.

And I thought we did very good marketing.

They started interfering with our marketing.

We couldn't get an agreement on how to run the movie operation,

So that's when I left behind a lot of projects.

- " Back to the Future" breaks as many rules as it follows.

I mean, it...

Marty McFly is a flawless protagonist.

He doesn't learn a damn thing.

He has no unconscious wish that he needs to fulfill

except maybe if you count the idea that he wishes his parents were cooler,

which is a selfish, dumb thing to wish for.

And it's not like he learns a lesson through any of it.

He's just this willing hero that charges across this threshold

and mucks things up a little bit.

He's really nervous that his mom is gonna,

you know, give him a HJ in the parking lot.

- Oh, you mean like how you're supposed to act on a first date.

It's so richly satisfying

for a movie where the guy that you're in the shoes of doesn't...

he doesn't have an arc.

And that's one of many things about that movie that's like,

oh, this, strictly speaking, according to Robert McKee or a screenwriting class,

it shouldn't be as satisfying as it is.

- I mean, it's definitely not a perfect movie.

There might even be one or two shots in it

that are a little bit, a hair out of focus.

You know, so it's not a perfect movie.

But the screenplay is really good.

I mean, that's really something that they should study in film school.

- I know people who have been to USC film school,

and certain teachers use the script of "Back to the Future"

as the perfect script.

It rides this

razor's edge between an absurd amount of exposition...

- Good evening. I'm Dr. Emmett Brown.

I'm standing in a parking lot at Twin Pines Mall.

It's Saturday morning, October 26, 1985, 1:18 a.m.

And this is temporal experiment number one.

...and total immersification.

It's just bursting at the seams with pipe.

- The molecular structure of both Einstein and the car are completely intact.

Where the hell are they?

- The appropriate question is when the hell are they?

- You're being told so many facts for the first quarter of that movie

simply so that the Sudoku can complete itself.

- This readout tells you where you're going.

This one tells you where you are.

This one tells you where you were.

- And that's a rule being broken.

It's not supposed to, uh, be fair to do that to an audience.

- I'm gonna make you flying-saucer shaped pancakes.

- Oh, there's no need to do that, Beth. Regular pancakes are fine.

"Ch, my god! What is happening?"

"Rick and Morty" was

Justin Roiland's frustrated, punk rock tantrum

that he was throwing after finishing working on someone else's show.

He was spending a year

having no control over the content he was expected to invest in.

And he came off of that job, and he just made,

in his opinion, the most kind of sacrilegious thing he could do.

For him, the equivalent of Mickey Mouse Pluto.

But who cares about Mickey Mouse and Pluto in this generation?

I don't know if the writers know more than they're telling... than is clear in the movie

about how this teenage guitarist ended up hanging outwith this bankrupt scientist.

- Today, if we tried to make that movie,

people would start wondering, "Gee, is Doc Brown, like, a child molester or something?"

But back in the day, nobody ever thought about that.

- The infectious character of Marty McFly,

and his positivity, and his high spirits.

The crazy Doc Brown.

That two-hander between McFly and Brown,

That's like Laurel and Hardy.

That's like Abbott and Costello.

I mean, those guys will go down in history

as the best two for one since Hope and Crosby.

So Zemeckis and Gale really found lightning in a bottle.

And lightning in a bottle, you know, tends to stick around for a long time.

- We took it around to every studio in town,

and they would all say, "it's very nice. It's very sweet."

"Why don't you guys take it to Disney?"