'Back to the Future' almost had no future at all
One studio’s rejection is another studio’s greatest science-fiction film of all time. Today, Michael J. Fox and Christopher Lloyd are pop culture icons, riding down memory lane in a time-traveling DeLorean. But there very nearly was a timeline when Back to the Future didn’t exist, as the script had initially been rejected dozens upon dozens of times.
Released in 1985, Back to the Future stands the test of time almost four decades later, thanks to direction by Robert Zemeckis and a script by Zemeckis and Bob Gale. Except when the duo tried getting their creation off the ground, no one wanted to see it through – not even Disney. Why? How did they finally succeed?
Back to the Future co-writer and producer Gale spoke with CNN‘s Geek Out, discussion the journey the script alone took to become a film. When asked, “How difficult was it to get this script produced?” Gale revealed, “The script was rejected over 40 times by every major studio and by some more than once. We’d go back when they changed management.” The pair had actually written two scripts and it was their second one that they sent to everyone, only to be turned away.
As to why, Gale said, “It was always one of two things. It was ‘Well, this is time travel, and those movies don’t make any money.’ We got that a lot. We also got, ‘There’s a lot of sweetness to this. It’s too nice, we want something raunchier like Porky’s. Why don’t you take it to Disney?'”
Except, the Magic Kingdom took issue with the Back to the Future script too.
Gale and Zemeckis had actually been directed to Disney so many times, they decided, “what the hell, let’s take it to Disney.” He continued, “This was before Michael Eisner went in and reinvented it.” That meant “This was the last vestiges of the old Disney family regime.”
“We went in to meet with an executive and he says, ‘Are you guys nuts? Are you insane? We can’t make a movie like this. You’ve got the kid and the mother in his car! It’s incest — this is Disney. It’s too dirty for us!'”
Then came one interested party: Steven Spielberg, with whom they had made some other films already, all of them deemed “flops,” said Gale. Spielberg was willing. But this time, Zemeckis and Gale were hesitant; if this movie failed, they believed, they would “probably never work in this town again, because we’ll be the guys whose movies get made because of their friend, Steven Spielberg.”
The tables turned significantly when Zemeckis made Romancing the Stone (1984), making him the popular guy in town who everyone wanted to help whenever he wanted to make another film. Zemeckis still wanted to make Back to the Future and he and Gale decided they would give the script to the man who had actually wanted it before this newfound fame: Spielberg.
Sid Sheinberg, head of Universal at the time, was in charge of some important decisions for the film. Back to the Future‘s script underwent a few more changes; Doc Brown was originally called Professor Brown and he had a chimpanzee. But the deal was set and it turns out rejection is no indication of anything’s ultimate value.
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