To say that "Back to the Future" has stood the test of time is an understatement. The movie just celebrated its 30th anniversary and fans were more than excited to show their support for Marty McFly traveling to the future to save his children.
But how did it all begin anyway?
Neil Canton, Dean Cundey and Bob Gale sat down with Spinoff Online's Scott Huver to talk about how "Back to the Future" came to be. Gale, who did the script for the movie, said that it was in 1980 when he and Bob Zemeckis got the idea for "Back to the Future." They had tossed around the idea of a time-travel movie years but didn't figure out the right hook until Gale was spending time in St. Louis promoting for another film.
He had been staying with his parents and was poking around in their basement when he found his dad's high school yearbook. The two generations of Gales had gone to the same high school but Bob had not seen his dad's yearbook before. Flipping through its pages, he was surprised to discover that the older Gale was the president of his graduating class. This led him to think about his own high school class, remembering the guys he couldn't stand. He asked himself: "If I had gone to school with my dad, what would I have thought of him," which quickly turned into "what would it be like to go to school with your dad."
Gale took this idea back with him to California and discussed it with Zemeckis. They then pitched it to Columbia Pictures president Frank Price, who loved it. However, after seeing the first and second draft for the movie, the studio concluded it was too sweet, wanting something raunchier.
Well, if you had something sweet, where do you go? Disney, of course! Gale and Zemeckis talked to executives over at Walt Disney but Michael Eisner also had a problem with the script, calling it a movie about incest.
The two went from studio to studio, receiving rejection after rejection, but it wasn't until after "Romancing the Stone" that Zemeckis got popular enough to be allowed to make any movie he wanted.
Fortunately, he wanted to make "Back to the Future."
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