Back to the Future
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| Back to the Future | |
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 Back to the Future film poster |
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| Directed by | Robert Zemeckis |
| Produced by | Bob Gale Steven Spielberg Neil Canton Kathleen Kennedy Frank Marshall Johnny Colla (uncredited) Geoffrey Power (uncredited) |
| Written by | Robert Zemeckis Bob Gale |
| Starring | Michael J. Fox Christopher Lloyd Lea Thompson Crispin Glover Thomas F. Wilson |
| Music by | Alan Silvestri |
| Cinematography | Dean Cundey |
| Editing by | Harry Keramidas Arthur Schmidt |
| Distributed by | Universal Pictures |
| Release date(s) | July 3, 1985 |
| Running time | 116 minutes |
| Country |  United States |
| Language | English |
| Budget | US$19,000,000 |
| Gross revenue | US$381,109,762 (worldwide) |
| Followed by | Back to the Future Part II |
| Allmovie profile | |
| IMDb profile | |
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 will 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, Back to the Future: The 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 Back to the Future: The Ride. 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.
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[edit] 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 has not 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 has 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 is 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 is 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 will not 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 had written in 1955, taped back together.
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 is not 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.
[edit] Production
[edit] Script
The inspiration for the film largely stems from Bob Gale, who discovered his father's high school yearbook and wondered whether he would 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. [1] 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.[2] 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.[2] All other companies said it was not risqué enough, compared to other teen comedies at the time (such as Porky's, Fast Times at Ridgemont High and Revenge of the Nerds).
Sid Sheinberg, the head of Universal Studios, made many changes to the movie. "Professor Brown" was changed to "Doc Brown" and his chimp Shemp to a dog named Einstein. Marty's mother had previously been Meg, then Eileen, but Sheinberg insisted that she be named Lorraine after his wife Lorraine Gary.[2] Sheinberg also did not like the title, insisting that no one would see a movie with "future" in the title<su