I was 14 when I first watched Back to the Future and it was the first movie I saw in a cinema. I can still recall the visceral thrill of watching it in a packed Luton cinema and the sound of the audience exploding into cheers when the DeLorean first passes 88mph hurtling Michael J Fox back into 1955. Back to the Future, which spawned two sequels, became one of the most beloved movies in cinema history.
Released in December 1985, it propelled Fox towards superstardom, gave Huey Lewis a worldwide hit with The Power of Love and became the highest grossing film of the year. It was even quoted by President Reagan in his State of the Union speech the next year where he said: “Where we’re going, we don’t need roads.”
It is hard to believe that anyone might be unfamiliar with the film, but in case it has somehow passed you by, it’s the story of teenager Marty McFly in what was then present-day 1985, who is sent back to 1955 in a time-travelling DeLorean built by the wild-haired scientist Doc Brown, played by Christopher Lloyd. While trapped in 1955 Marty accidentally prevents his parents meeting, which threatens his existence, so he is forced to find a way to ensure his parents do meet and date, and then must successfully return back to the future.
When they created the movie Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale were still young Turks in their late twenties. Back to the Future changed their lives. Zemeckis went on to direct Forrest Gump, Who Framed Roger Rabbit and Cast Away. Gale has continued to revisit the Back to the Future universe, working on an animated series, video shorts and a computer game inspired by the movie.
In the years since its original release it has been embraced by a generation for whom the 1980s are as much ancient history as the 1950s. “It doesn’t matter when you were born or what culture you were raised in. At a certain point, you realise that your parents were once children. That’s what we tapped into. That’s why it keeps resonating,” Gale says from his home in LA.
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Gale and Zemeckis have turned down all offers from film studios to reboot Back to the Future. “It lives in its time and it is what it is,” Zemeckis says. It was only when Zemeckis and his wife, Leslie, saw a production of The Producers on Broadway in 2005 and Leslie suggested a musical based on their movie that the pair began to seriously contemplate going back to Back to the Future.
The great appeal of a musical was that since it was an entirely different medium there was no pressure to try to live up to the movie. “The musical was a way to retell the story of Back to the Future with a whole new set of tools,” explains Gale, who set to work on writing the book for the stage show. “These characters have been a part of me since they were created — they’re like my children . . . the really important thing you get to do in a musical is have songs. They are a way to get deeper into a character, which you cannot do in a movie.” It must have been a challenge, I say to Zemeckis, to source a DeLorean today. “It was hard, but it is magnificent. The stage illusions that happen live on stage are really fantastic.”
Back to the Future — The Musical premiered in February last year in Manchester. Reviews were rapturous, but the run was cancelled shortly afterwards when lockdown came in. Later this month it opens in the West End.
How the film came to be made is a story of accident and fate. In 1980 Gale, then a 29-year-old screenwriter, was in his parents’ home in St Louis flicking through an old school yearbook. He saw a photograph of his father from 40 years earlier. Gale and his father had attended the same school and it got Gale thinking. “What if I’d been in school with him, would I have even been friends with him? And that’s when the proverbial bolt of lightning struck,” Gale recalls.
Gale shared his idea with his film-making partner Zemeckis. The pair had met in 1971 as teenagers at the University of Southern California. Zemeckis was equally enthused and the pair started writing the script. “It was very intensive work. We were talking over every line of dialogue, every single beat,” says Zemeckis.
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The story featured a time machine which in an early draft was a refurbished refrigerator, but during the writing process Zemeckis saw a news item about the trial of carmaker John DeLorean, which inspired him to change the time machine to a DeLorean car.
Gale and Zemeckis completed the script, but when they pitched their film it was roundly rejected. “It was the 1980s and it was decided that our movie was not raunchy enough, it was too sweet,” Gale says. Zemeckis calculates their script was rejected 40 times. “But there was one guy who loved the script — and his name was Steven Spielberg.”
Zemeckis had befriended Spielberg while at college. “Steven showed up to show a movie and I wrangled him at the end of the class,” Zemeckis says. “I said, ‘Hey, I have a student film, do you want to see it?’ And he graciously said, ‘Sure, yeah, I’ll look at it.’ We set up a screen room at Universal and he was quite impressed by it and we stayed in touch.”
Zemeckis and Gale found themselves in a social circle that included names now legendary in cinema. “One night we went over to Martin Scorsese’s house to watch an old movie,” Gale says. “Steven was there, he was making Close Encounters, George Lucas was there and he was making Star Wars, and Scorsese was making Taxi Driver.”
Spielberg’s support, together with the success Zemeckis had with directing Romancing the Stone, meant that Gale and Zemeckis were finally able to make their sweet time-travel movie.
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I ask Zemeckis if he is worried that the pandemic might have hastened the demise of the movie-watching experience. “There’s a scene in Jaws where the shark is attacking the boat,” he says, “and the boat is starting to sink and Roy Scheider is stepping into the water, but it’s a puddle of water and it’s on the boat — and the audience screams in terror because he’s putting his foot in water but it’s nowhere near the shark. You would never know that watching that movie in isolation.”
The one place where those communal moments of joy and terror can still be found is on the live stage and that, for Zemeckis and Gale, is another reason they are so enthused by their musical.
Zemeckis tells me he still has a hoverboard and a pair of self-tying trainers from filming. “It’s the dream of every creative person to create something that has such a powerful impact and this kind of an afterlife,” Gale says. “I never want to take it for granted — it means so much to so many people.”
Back to the Future — The Musical plays at the Adelphi Theatre, London WC2, from Aug 20
