We Don't Need Roads: The Making of the Back to the Future Trilogy - Softcover

Gaines, Caseen

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0142181536 ISBN 13: 9780142181539

Publisher: Plume, 2015

Synopsis

A behind-the-scenes look at the making of the iconic Back to the Future trilogy

Long before Marty McFly and Doc Brown traveled through time in a flying DeLorean, director Robert Zemeckis, and his friend and writing partner Bob Gale, worked tirelessly to break into the industry with a hit. During their journey to realize their dream, they encountered unprecedented challenges and regularly took the difficult way out.

For the first time ever, the story of how these two young filmmakers struck lightning is being told by those who witnessed it. We Don’t Need Roads draws from over 500 hours of interviews, including original interviews with Zemeckis, Gale, Christopher Lloyd, Lea Thompson, Huey Lewis, and over fifty others who contributed to one of the most popular and profitable film trilogies of all time. The book includes a 16-page color photo insert with behind-the-scenes pictures, concept art, and more.

With a focus not only on the movies, but also the lasting impact of the franchise and its fandom, We Don’t Need Roads is the ultimate read for anyone who has ever wanted to ride a Hoverboard, hang from the top of a clock tower, travel through the space-time continuum, or find out what really happened to Eric Stoltz after the first six weeks of filming. So, why don’t you make like a tree and get outta here – and start reading! We Don’t Need Roads is your density.
 
"What fun! Deeply researched and engagingly written ... the book Back to the Future fans have been craving for decades. Geekily enthusiastic and chock full of never-before-heard tales of what went on both on and off the screen, We Don't Need Roads is a book worthy of the beloved trilogy itself." – Brian Jay Jones, author of the national bestseller Jim Henson: The Biography

"A very compelling and enjoyable history of our trilogy. For me, reading it was like going back in time. And - Great Scott - there were even a few anecdotes that I'd never heard!" 
– Bob Gale, co-creator, co-producer, and co-writer of the Back to the Future trilogy

About this title

About the Author

Caseen Gaines is a popular culture historian. He is the author of Inside Pee-wee's Playhouse: The Untold, Unauthorized, and Unpredictable Story of a Pop Phenomenon, which received the 2012 Independent Publisher's Book Award - Silver Medal in the Popular Culture / Leisure category, as well as A Christmas Story: Behind the Scenes of a Holiday Classic. Caseen also directs theater and teaches high school English in New Jersey, where he lives. He aspires to be a Renaissance Man and fears being a jack of all trades.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

NJ Advance/Landov

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

Thursday, January 23, 2014

Murphy’s Law—noun: The theory that, moments before an interview with Robert Zemeckis, one’s audio recorder will malfunction.

At nine months into the research phase for this book, I knew I had put off calling Robert Zemeckis as long as I could. I was nervous about speaking with the creative brain behind some of my favorite films like Forrest Gump, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, and, of course, that epic time-travel trilogy. There were a million things I wanted to query him about, most of them having to do with the project I was working on. It wasn’t so much that I was starstruck by the prospect of speaking with him, but when you have a chance to chat with a visionary whose work you respect and admire, it has a way of putting you on edge.

Or, at least, that’s what I attribute my feelings to in hindsight. More likely it was because I had tangible evidence of the benefit of having Robert Zemeckis—or Bob Z, as he’s known to friends, colleagues, and Back to the Future aficionados—on board for this book. A few weeks earlier, when I reached out to Christopher Lloyd’s manager, he asked me if Zemeckis was on board. A line was drawn in the sand: The day I spoke to the director would be the day an interview would be scheduled with the Doc.

Challenge accepted. I hung up the phone with Lloyd’s rep and retrieved the index card with Zemeckis’s agent’s phone number written on it, a three-by-five piece of card stock that had been haunting me ever since I’d scribbled on it four months earlier. Without jumping through too many hoops, I got a hold of Zemeckis’s assistant, who promptly scheduled a half-hour interview for us, with only one request: “We respectfully ask that you contain the time to the thirty minutes which we have allotted.” No big deal, I thought, until a week later when it was six minutes before our scheduled interview and the software I use to record Skype calls on my computer stopped working.

It was 12:24 P.M. Pacific Standard Time. I was based on the East Coast, but had grown accustomed to working my day around what I reductively referred to as “Los Angeles Time.” Each second became more and more important. There was no way I was going to call Bob Z late. Bob G—Bob Gale, cowriter and coproducer of Back to the Future and its subsequent sequels—had told me that Zemeckis rarely does interviews on his past work. His rep’s words raced through my head, an LED sign outside the New York Stock Exchange. Slowly at first, and then faster and faster, with the print getting larger and larger—THIRTY MINUTES WHICH WE HAVE ALLOTTED. THIRTY MINUTES WHICH WE HAVE ALLOTTED. THIRTY MINUTES. THIRTY MINUTES. MINUTES. MINUTES.

By 12:29, I was stuck with no choice but to use my plan B. I took out my cell phone, deleted a few apps to ensure I had a surplus of memory, and called Zemeckis from my computer, silently praying the microphone on my handheld device was catching everything. I had consolidated all of my questions into six or seven bullet points of topics, deciding it might be easier to let the colloquy unfold naturally, while making sure I got what I needed within the confines of his schedule. And everything did work. Not only was the director a pleasure to speak with, but he was also refreshingly direct about his thoughts on the films and his contributions to cinema in general. Of the many takeaways from our conversation, the most substantial was his continuing pride and astonishment with the enduring legacy of a story that he and Gale had created more than three decades earlier, which wouldn’t have seen the light of day were it not for their tenacity and unwavering commitment to their project.

Set up a Google alert for the words “Back to the Future” and a day won’t go by without a headline from someplace in the world using the title, often without having any connection to the film. Like Jaws a decade earlier, Future set a new precedent for how to create a winning summer blockbuster. As Bob Gale likes to remind aspiring screenwriters, the three things that matter most in a story are characters, characters, and characters. For all of its special and visual effects, the true success of the film lies with Zemeckis and Gale’s airtight script, and the distinctive characters that were brought to life by their talented cast. For the thirty years that followed the first film’s release, the trilogy has continued to capture the imagination of a generation who, in turn, passed these movies on to their children like beloved family heirlooms.

I’m just young enough to have missed the film’s theatrical run, but thanks to one of my aunts—who had what seemed like hundreds of VHS tapes when I was growing up—I had the fortunate and, for many Future fans, rare experience of being introduced to Hill Valley’s inhabitants for the first time in a triple feature. It was a school day, but I had a slight fever and was sent home by the school nurse. With both of my parents at work, my Aunt Stacey, who worked nights, picked me up. “I think you’ll enjoy these,” she said as I sat on her couch under a blanket with some chicken soup beside me. I doubt she had any idea just how much I would. She put the first film in the VCR as I studied the cardboard sleeve of the box. The design, with that guy I recognized from TV with one foot in this strange vehicle and fire running between his legs, seemed magical. I couldn’t stop studying it, looking for clues about what was going to unfold over the next few hours. I knew I was in store for a movie unlike anything I had seen before. As the end credits for the first and second installments started, I raced to switch the cassettes, trying my best to continue the story as quickly as possible. When the words “THE END” appeared on the screen in the last moments of Part III, I decided to let the credits roll in their entirety. By the time my mother came to pick me up, my fever was all but forgotten. I couldn’t wait to go to school the next day and tell my friends about Marty McFly, his friend Doc Brown, and the wild adventures I had spent close to six hours watching them get into.

I have always been an avid reader of behind-the-scenes books about my favorite films and television shows, as they went into greater detail than the standard promotional “making of” shows that would occasionally pop up on television in the late 1980s and early 1990s. As the thirtieth anniversary of Back to the Future approached, I couldn’t believe that a comprehensive book on the making of one of the most culturally significant movies of the past three decades had yet to be written. My goal was to change that, not only by chronicling the filmmaking process, but also by showing how these three films left an indelible stamp on the United States and many other countries around the world.

When I set out to write this book, it was important for me to speak with as many people who were associated with Back to the Future as possible. The trilogy has been well documented for the past thirty years, in magazines, fan clubs, featurettes on VHS, DVD, and Blu-ray, and countless websites like BacktotheFuture .com, the digital hub for all things about the franchise. As one person put it to me, “What else can you say about a movie that has been written about continuously for the past thirty years?” But even with that abundance of information available, the mythology always felt somewhat incomplete to me. Too few people had retold the same stories too many times. A lot of the behind-the-scenes tales have become so commonplace, whether or not you know them has become a pseudo litmus test among the diehards to determine how big a fan of the film a new member of their tribe is. And I had a feeling that these stories may have been missing some of their original verve.

Throughout the researching process, I found that my suspicions were true. Many of the anecdotes that have been repeated over the years had been scrubbed clean, condensed to omit significant details, and/or told with minimal context. While interviewing my subjects, I encouraged them to push beyond their stock stories and really remember the past. Or, perhaps more appropriately, the Future. And they did. I could feel people discovering things they had long since forgotten, often with startling accuracy. It’s difficult for someone to remember everything they did last week, let alone three decades ago, but the more people I spoke to, the more stories were corroborated, and a comprehensive picture of what it was like to be a part of the team that made cinematic history became clearer.

As I learned working on my previous two books, there is rarely a person who works on a film who hasn’t accumulated an interesting anecdote or two. To that end, I was fortunate that so many people found it worth their time to spare a few minutes for me. In addition to Robert Zemeckis, Bob Gale, and Christopher Lloyd, whose manager came through on his promise, more than fifty additional people from all facets of production, including actors, producers, members of the camera crew, editors, graphic artists, costumers, and those involved with special and visual effects, signed on to make this project the largest Back to the Future reunion ever assembled. I also spoke with some people who didn’t work on the movies, but who are experts on the trilogy’s impact, including movie critics, documentarians, and fans who have gone beyond the call of duty to keep the embers glowing for their favorite franchise.

In writing this book, I relied heavily on more than five hundred hours of interviews I conducted over a twenty-one-month period. All of the quotes that appear in the pages that follow come from those conversations. Some of the quotes have been corrected for clarity, which was done extremely judiciously and with significant care for each interview subject. In scenes where conversations are reconstructed, the dialogue comes either from the account of one person or the synthesis of more than one person’s recollection of events. All of the information included has either been corroborated against other sources or reflects what had likely happened based on my appraisal of the validity of each speaker and the veracity of their memory. The result is a reconstructed time capsule of the making of the Back to the Future trilogy, by those who were there to have experienced it.

As my interview process progressed, I began to realize that this project isn’t simply about the making of one film trilogy, but is also about how some of the titans in the movie industry came into being. Even readers who are only casual fans of the films will find interesting pieces of information about the movie business, from the perspective of some of Hollywood’s best. At your leisure, look at the list of credits that Future alumni amassed prior to and since working on the films. While you may not recognize every person’s name, virtually everyone I spoke with worked on other movies that have received a substantial bit of attention over the years, such as Avatar, Blade Runner, Fight Club, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Star Wars: The Force Awakens, the original Superman franchise, and Titanic, to name just a few. They are incredibly talented visionaries, some of whom were already veterans when filming began in 1984, and others who were just getting started in the business. Regardless of their previous experience, they worked together to make a truly timeless film about time travel.

What follows is an amalgamation of their truth—a profile not only of a film series but, as I was reminded when I spent a half hour on memory lane with Zemeckis, of the beautifully normal and ordinary people whose creativity and passion produced an extraordinary trilogy. Some of the decisions they made were unconventional, yet they paid off, despite the odds. The trilogy has forever changed the landscape of cinema by redefining what a summer blockbuster could be, who could star in one, and under what improbable circumstances a trio of films could have a major impact around the world. You may not believe Back to the Future is the most important film trilogy of all time now, but after reading this book I bet you will.

So buckle up, because if my calculations are correct, when this baby hits eighty-eight miles per hour, you’re going to see some serious shit.

1. THINK, MCFLY, THINK

Sunday, December 30, 1984

Filming 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...

Edition details

• Publisher: Plume
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 0142181536
• ISBN 13: 9780142181539
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 288