The original plot for ‘Back to the Future Part II’
Few films have defined a decade quite like Robert Zemeckis’ time-travelling sci-fi Back to the Future. The Michael J. Fox-fronted blockbuster pulled in a box office number of over $380million, which made it the highest-grossing film in 1985. The success of the feature was so expansive that two sequels were even made in 1989 and 1990.
Following on from the original, Back to the Future Part II saw the return of Fox as the iconic Marty McFly, alongside Christopher Lloyd as Doc Brown, Lea Thompson as Lorraine Baines, and Thomas F. Wilson as Biff Tannen. With double the budget of the first effort, returning director Zemeckis had ambitious plans for the sequel.
The movie carries on immediately from where Back to the Future left off, finding Marty and his girlfriend affronted by Doc as he begs them to come back to the future with him. The trio travel forward 30 years to 2015, where they must deal with the effects of Biff’s theft of the time machine. In the final act, Marty travels back to 1955, as he did in the first film, to reset the timeline. It was received about as positively as any sequel to a beloved family favourite can be, earning generally positive reviews and another $300m at the box office.
However, Zemeckis’ co-screenwriter Bob Gale has revealed that Marty’s return to the 1950s wasn’t initially part of the plot for the film. During an interview with Closer, Gale revealed the original story idea for the project, which would have seen Marty venturing to the 1960s rather than the 1950s. He shared: “In the first pass, instead of going back into the first movie in the third act of Part II, we had them going to 1967 or ’68, and there’s a new danger because of what Marty does in the ’60s.”
In the original plot, Marty’s mother, Lorraine, was to be part of the decade’s hippie movement, which would cause problems for Marty’s timeline. Gale explained: “Lorraine is a flower child and ends up going to jail, and the question is whether Marty is going to actually be conceived. So we were re-creating a lot more elements of the story of the first movie. We thought it would be fun seeing Doc Brown smoking dope, and there was a whole bunch of great ’60s stuff.”
Despite the cool imagery that could have been born out of a time-travelling trip to the 1960s, Zemeckis and Gale decided to ditch the idea: “Zemeckis read this and liked it, but he then got the idea that since we have a time machine, we can do something nobody has ever done before and actually have our main character go back into the events of the first movie. So you get the first movie from a different point of view.”
Though fans certainly would have loved to have seen the McFlys adorned in flower crowns and flowing outfits, Zemeckis’ idea ventured into new territory with its point of view while also calling back to the first film. It was modern while also playing on the nostalgia of audiences, reminding them just how much they loved the original, a tactic which has kept Back to the Future in the hearts of cinephiles to this day – it’s an integral part of the modern wave of 1980s nostalgia. And as Gale concluded, it was “such a brilliant idea that the Avengers did it, too”.
