The erotic first draft of ‘Back to the Future’
No movie is safe from having a fair bit of plot holes.
Even though a film could be perfect from beginning to end, there are bound to be moments in The Godfather that will look more than a little bit awkward. It shouldn’t matter when it all comes back to how the movie made you feel, but the last thing that anyone would expect in one of the coolest movies of the 1980s is a duo like Marty McFly and Doc Brown in Back to the Future.
Despite the movie being a classic, there’s always been some sort of question around why one of the best scientific minds of the time is somehow palling around with a random kid in high school. It’s not like he’s a professor or anything; he’s only a humble scientist trying to invent time travel, and yet one of the only people that he actively talks to in the movie is a kid who is obsessed with rock and roll and rides a hoverboard.
Granted, it’s not like they don’t have anything in common, either. McFly’s fascination in Brown’s gigantic guitar amp would have been prime fodder for any kid that wanted to play loud rock and roll, but even looking at that is a touch creepy. I mean, fans might have been a lot more guarded from stuff like this back in the day, but having someone who’s anywhere between 40 and 80 in the movie insisting on getting the help of a teenage kid and having him come over to his house reads much differently now.
Then again, the erotic parts of the movie might have been much different than that implies. McFly might have been fine helping Brown get his time travel Delorian off the ground, but the original version of the script was about Brown falling on some hard times and getting money by using McFly as his dealer.
Yes, in the original script, Brown would have been a version of Walter White decades before Bryan Cranston got to it, but it was a lot more erotic than the blue crystal meth of Heisenberg. The first draft had Brown making, shall we say, ‘stimulating’ snacks for his high school market, but even when that was shot down as being too graphic, McFly was initially working with Brown by selling dirty movies to his fellow students.
It may have helped bring some grit to the movie, but it’s not like Back to the Future needed that much edge to it. It’s one of the most feel-good movies of the era, so to have all of the heart sucked out of it by saying that McFly is a kid selling porn movies on the side would have been a step too far for a lot of kids who wanted to see the movie with the kid playing ‘Johnny B Goode’.
That’s not to say that the idea didn’t have merit. It was understood that Brown was known for doing some shady things since he was the one who got murdered by a van full of people at the start of the movie, but the pornographic material might have helped clear up the reason why he was more than a little bit dangerous.
At the same time, the script that we ended up getting was never going to work if it had any fluff thrown in there. Back to the Future was the kind of lightning-in-a-bottle idea that only comes every few years, but had it still had the erotic window dressing around it, there’s no chance it would have been given the approval from Mom back in the 1980s.
