To many fans, few movies are as perfect as Back to the Future. From the first frame to the last, writer-director Robert Zemeckis and his co-writer Bob Gale crafted a Swiss watch of a time travel adventure that’s propulsive and filled with pertinent information, and all of it pays off masterfully. That’s why, in 1985, the film was a massive success, two sequels came soon after, and we’re still talking about it today.
Gale himself doesn’t disagree that the screenplay he and Zemeckis crafted is close to perfect. However, over the years, he did realize one thing. When Gale and Zemeckis wrote Back to the Future, they didn’t think about a sequel. Sure, it teed one up, but they didn’t even think about what that could be. “Zemeckis has always said, ‘If I knew we were going to do a second movie, I wouldn’t have put Jennifer in the car,'” Gale said.
However, she did get in the car, it did get those sequels, and speaking to io9 about his new book (which you can read much, much more about here), Gale said that there is one small thing he might change about the original film if he could pop in his own DeLorean and tell himself what happened in Back to the Future Part II and Back to the Future Part III.
“People say to me, ‘Okay, if you were going to redo Back to the Future 1 knowing what’s in Back to the Future 2 and 3, what would you do differently?’ And the only thing that I could ever answer is, in 1955, for Biff to call Marty a chicken, [Marty] say, ‘ Nobody calls me chicken’ and set that up in the first movie,” Gale said. “Because when we went to do Part Two, we said Marty needs to have some kind of a character flaw. We see in the first movie that he’s a little bit of a hothead. He’s ready to kind of go at Biff even though he’s too small to be doing that. So we said let’s use that aspect of his personality and make more of a meal out of that and have him respond when anybody calls him a chicken.”
But, of course, that’s not in the first movie. It’s only in the sequels. Which means it’s not one of the stories Gale recounts in his new book, Back to the Future: The Complete Screenplay. Gale talks about a lot of other things in the book, though. It’s one of the first screenplay books to reproduce the screenplay at its actual size, with colored page revisions, along with commentary from the co-writer himself. And, while the new book would have been great at any time, Gale thinks releasing it today makes it better than ever.
“This book is better today than it would have been if it had been made five years after a movie came out because certain things that we would take for granted back then you can’t do that anymore,” he said. What’s an example? “People today, they don’t know what Tab and Pepsi Free are,” Gale said. “So the book has ads and pictures of what those soft drinks look like, so now you can say, ‘Okay, that helps me understand this a lot.'”
But, because the movie is all but perfect, it doesn’t really need too much explanation.
Back to the Future: The Complete Screenplay by Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale will be released on October 20 from Insight Editions. It comes not only in a regular edition, but also in a limited edition, which you can read more about here, as well as a collector’s edition, which is detailed here.
Want more io9 news? Check out the best movies and TV shows to stream this month and all the upcoming sci-fi, fantasy, and horror books that should be on your radar.
