We Don't Need Roads

A behind-the-scenes look at the making of the iconic Back to the Future trilogy—the perfect movie gift for fans of the franchise, actors, writers, and filmmakers who contributed to this beloved pop culture phenomenon. 

Long before Marty McFly and Doc Brown traveled through time in a flying DeLorean, director Robert Zemeckis, and his friend and writing partner Bob Gale, worked tirelessly to break into the industry with a hit. During their journey to realize their dream, they encountered unprecedented challenges and regularly took the difficult way out.

For the first time ever, the story of how these two young filmmakers struck lightning is being told by those who witnessed it. We Don’t Need Roads draws from over 500 hours of interviews, including original interviews with Zemeckis, Gale, Christopher Lloyd, Lea Thompson, Huey Lewis, and over fifty others who contributed to one of the most popular and profitable film trilogies of all time. The book includes a 16-page color photo insert with behind-the-scenes pictures, concept art, and more.

With a focus not only on the movies, but also the lasting impact of the franchise and its fandom, We Don’t Need Roads is the ultimate read for anyone who has ever wanted to ride a Hoverboard, hang from the top of a clock tower, travel through the space-time continuum, or find out what really happened to Eric Stoltz after the first six weeks of filming. So, why don’t you make like a tree and get outta here—and start reading! We Don’t Need Roads is your density.
 
“What fun! Deeply researched and engagingly written...the book Back to the Future fans have been craving for decades. Geekily enthusiastic and chock full of never-before-heard tales of what went on both on and off the screen, We Don't Need Roads is a book worthy of the beloved trilogy itself.”—Brian Jay Jones, author of the national bestseller Jim Henson: The Biography

“A very compelling and enjoyable history of our trilogy. For me, reading it was like going back in time. And—Great Scott—there were even a few anecdotes that I'd never heard!”—Bob Gale, co-creator, co-producer, and co-writer of the Back to the Future trilogy

"Caseen Gaines has written a very compelling and enjoyable history of our trilogy. For me, reading it was like going back in time. And - Great Scott - there were even a few anecdotes that I'd never heard!" - Bob Gale, co-creator, co-producer, and co-writer of the Back to the Future trilogy

"The most enlightening and informative book I've read since Grays Sports Almanac. Every true fan of the Holy Trilogy should own a copy... It's your density."
-Ernest Cline, DeLorean owner/Author of Ready Player One

"We Don't Need Roads is the truly fascinating story of how one of America's greatest movie franchises came to be. Caseen Gaines' in-depth research and unprecedented look at Robert Zemeckis' series proves that the journey to make a perfect movie is anything but perfect. It's a must read for any true Back to the Future lover and anyone who wants to peek behind the curtain to see how films get made." - Adam F. Goldberg, creator of ABC's The Goldbergs

"Read this book, then watch the movie for the umpteenth time. You'll appreciate Back to the Future all the more thanks to Caseen Gaines' muscular reporting and conversational writing style." - Michael Davis, New York Times bestselling author of Street Gang: The Complete History of Sesame Street

"What fun! Deeply researched and engagingly written, Caseen Gaines' We Don't Need Roads is the book Back to the Future fans have been craving for decades. Geekily enthusiastic and chock full of never-before-heard tales of what went on both on and off the screen, We Don't Need Roads is a book worthy of the beloved trilogy itself." - Brian Jay Jones, New York Times bestselling author of Jim Henson: The Biography

“Impressively exhaustive...[We Don't Need Roads is] an enthusiastic and thorough oral history.” —NPR

“A must-read for Future fans, media studies students, aspiring filmmakers, and time-travel buffs.” —Library Journal

"An incredibly revealing look at a film series that helped change Hollywood...if you love movies, you should pick this book up." —io9.com

"Even if you are a hardcore fan, this book can at times feel like a revelation; like hitting-one’s-head-on-the-edge-of-a-toilet-and-suddenly-understanding-flux-capacitors revelations." —Film School Rejects

"Even the most knowledgeable Future fans will find much to learn from this intricately detailed and exhaustively researched book. But it's not just the depth of Gaines's knowledge and the scope of his interviews that impresses; he clearly adores these films and understands their importance to popular cinema, and that love and understanding shines through the text." - Jason Bailey, author of Pulp Fiction: The Complete Story of Quentin Tarantino's Masterpiece

“The 30th anniversary of the Back to the Future trilogy is the perfect time for a book celebrating and examining the greatest comedy science fiction time travel trilogy ever made. With over five hundred hours of interviews with key cast and crew members, Caseen Gaines’ book is a delightful way to travel back to the future and relive those wonderful times with Marty McFly, his family, friends, and enemies – not to mention the inimitable Doc Brown. Strap into your DeLorean and get ready for the ride of your life!” - Marc Scott Zicree, author of The Twilight Zone Companion

"We Don’t Need Roads is essential for any Back To the Future fan. Not only does Caseen Gaines offer up a meticulously crafted and entertaining account of one of the most beloved time-traveling franchises in movie history, but he uses his access to take an incisive look behind-the-scenes of Hollywood filmmaking. A must read for all pop culture aficionados."
Larry Landsman, author of Planet of the Apes Revisited

Caseen Gaines is a popular culture historian. He is the author of Inside Pee-wee's Playhouse: The Untold, Unauthorized, and Unpredictable Story of a Pop Phenomenon, which received the 2012 Independent Publisher's Book Award - Silver Medal in the Popular Culture / Leisure category, as well as A Christmas Story: Behind the Scenes of a Holiday Classic. Caseen also directs theater and teaches high school English in New Jersey, where he lives. He aspires to be a Renaissance Man and fears being a jack of all trades.

NJ Advance/Landov

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

Thursday, January 23, 2014

Murphy’s Law—noun: The theory that, moments before an interview with Robert Zemeckis, one’s audio recorder will malfunction.

At nine months into the research phase for this book, I knew I had put off calling Robert Zemeckis as long as I could. I was nervous about speaking with the creative brain behind some of my favorite films like Forrest Gump, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, and, of course, that epic time-travel trilogy. There were a million things I wanted to query him about, most of them having to do with the project I was working on. It wasn’t so much that I was starstruck by the prospect of speaking with him, but when you have a chance to chat with a visionary whose work you respect and admire, it has a way of putting you on edge.

Or, at least, that’s what I attribute my feelings to in hindsight. More likely it was because I had tangible evidence of the benefit of having Robert Zemeckis—or Bob Z, as he’s known to friends, colleagues, and Back to the Future aficionados—on board for this book. A few weeks earlier, when I reached out to Christopher Lloyd’s manager, he asked me if Zemeckis was on board. A line was drawn in the sand: The day I spoke to the director would be the day an interview would be scheduled with the Doc.

Challenge accepted. I hung up the phone with Lloyd’s rep and retrieved the index card with Zemeckis’s agent’s phone number written on it, a three-by-five piece of card stock that had been haunting me ever since I’d scribbled on it four months earlier. Without jumping through too many hoops, I got a hold of Zemeckis’s assistant, who promptly scheduled a half-hour interview for us, with only one request: “We respectfully ask that you contain the time to the thirty minutes which we have allotted.” No big deal, I thought, until a week later when it was six minutes before our scheduled interview and the software I use to record Skype calls on my computer stopped working.

It was 12:24 P.M. Pacific Standard Time. I was based on the East Coast, but had grown accustomed to working my day around what I reductively referred to as “Los Angeles Time.” Each second became more and more important. There was no way I was going to call Bob Z late. Bob G—Bob Gale, cowriter and coproducer of Back to the Future and its subsequent sequels—had told me that Zemeckis rarely does interviews on his past work. His rep’s words raced through my head, an LED sign outside the New York Stock Exchange. Slowly at first, and then faster and faster, with the print getting larger and larger—THIRTY MINUTES WHICH WE HAVE ALLOTTED. THIRTY MINUTES WHICH WE HAVE ALLOTTED. THIRTY MINUTES. THIRTY MINUTES. MINUTES. MINUTES.

By 12:29, I was stuck with no choice but to use my plan B. I took out my cell phone, deleted a few apps to ensure I had a surplus of memory, and called Zemeckis from my computer, silently praying the microphone on my handheld device was catching everything. I had consolidated all of my questions into six or seven bullet points of topics, deciding it might be easier to let the colloquy unfold naturally, while making sure I got what I needed within the confines of his schedule. And everything did work. Not only was the director a pleasure to speak with, but he was also refreshingly direct about his thoughts on the films and his contributions to cinema in general. Of the many takeaways from our conversation, the most substantial was his continuing pride and astonishment with the enduring legacy of a story that he and Gale had created more than three decades earlier, which wouldn’t have seen the light of day were it not for their tenacity and unwavering commitment to their project.

Set up a Google alert for the words “Back to the Future” and a day won’t go by without a headline from someplace in the world using the title, often without having any connection to the film. Like Jaws a decade earlier, Future set a new precedent for how to create a winning summer blockbuster. As Bob Gale likes to remind aspiring screenwriters, the three things that matter most in a story are characters, characters, and characters. For all of its special and visual effects, the true success of the film lies with Zemeckis and Gale’s airtight script, and the distinctive characters that were brought to life by their talented cast. For the thirty years that followed the first film’s release, the trilogy has continued to capture the imagination of a generation who, in turn, passed these movies on to their children like beloved family heirlooms.

I’m just young enough to have missed the film’s theatrical run, but thanks to one of my aunts—who had what seemed like hundreds of VHS tapes when I was growing up—I had the fortunate and, for many Future fans, rare experience of being introduced to Hill Valley’s inhabitants for the first time in a triple feature. It was a school day, but I had a slight fever and was sent home by the school nurse. With both of my parents at work, my Aunt Stacey, who worked nights, picked me up. “I think you’ll enjoy these,” she said as I sat on her couch under a blanket with some chicken soup beside me. I doubt she had any idea just how much I would. She put the first film in the VCR as I studied the cardboard sleeve of the box. The design, with that guy I recognized from TV with one foot in this strange vehicle and fire running between his legs, seemed magical. I couldn’t stop studying it, looking for clues about what was going to unfold over the next few hours. I knew I was in store for a movie unlike anything I had seen before. As the end credits for the first and second installments started, I raced to switch the cassettes, trying my best to continue the story as quickly as possible. When the words “THE END” appeared on the screen in the last moments of Part III, I decided to let the credits roll in their entirety. By the time my mother came to pick me up, my fever was all but forgotten. I couldn’t wait to go to school the next day and tell my friends about Marty McFly, his friend Doc Brown, and the wild adventures I had spent close to six hours watching them get into.

I have always been an avid reader of behind-the-scenes books about my favorite films and television shows, as they went into greater detail than the standard promotional “making of” shows that would occasionally pop up on television in the late 1980s and early 1990s. As the thirtieth anniversary of Back to the Future approached, I couldn’t believe that a comprehensive book on the making of one of the most culturally significant movies of the past three decades had yet to be written. My goal was to change that, not only by chronicling the filmmaking process, but also by showing how these three films left an indelible stamp on the United States and many other countries around the world.

When I set out to write this book, it was important for me to speak with as many people who were associated with Back to the Future as possible. The trilogy has been well documented for the past thirty years, in magazines, fan clubs, featurettes on VHS, DVD, and Blu-ray, and countless websites like BacktotheFuture .com, the digital hub for all things about the franchise. As one person put it to me, “What else can you say about a movie that has been written about continuously for the past thirty years?” But even with that abundance of information available, the mythology always felt somewhat incomplete to me. Too few people had retold the same stories too many times. A lot of the behind-the-scenes tales have become so commonplace, whether or not you know them has become a pseudo litmus test among the diehards to determine how big a fan of the film a new member of their tribe is. And I had a feeling that these stories may have been missing some of their original verve.

Throughout the researching process, I found that my suspicions were true. Many of the anecdotes that have been repeated over the years had been scrubbed clean, condensed to omit significant details, and/or told with minimal context. While interviewing my subjects, I encouraged them to push beyond their stock stories and really remember the past. Or, perhaps more appropriately, the Future. And they did. I could feel people discovering things they had long since forgotten, often with startling accuracy. It’s difficult for someone to remember everything they did last week, let alone three decades ago, but the more people I spoke to, the more stories were corroborated, and a comprehensive picture of what it was like to be a part of the team that made cinematic history became clearer.

As I learned working on my previous two books, there is rarely a person who works on a film who hasn’t accumulated an interesting anecdote or two. To that end, I was fortunate that so many people found it worth their time to spare a few minutes for me. In addition to Robert Zemeckis, Bob Gale, and Christopher Lloyd, whose manager came through on his promise, more than fifty additional people from all facets of production, including actors, producers, members of the camera crew, editors, graphic artists, costumers, and those involved with special and visual effects, signed on to make this project the largest Back to the Future reunion ever assembled. I also spoke with some people who didn’t work on the movies, but who are experts on the trilogy’s impact, including movie critics, documentarians, and fans who have gone beyond the call of duty to keep the embers glowing for their favorite franchise.

In writing this book, I relied heavily on more than five hundred hours of interviews I conducted over a twenty-one-month period. All of the quotes that appear in the pages that follow come from those conversations. Some of the quotes have been corrected for clarity, which was done extremely judiciously and with significant care for each interview subject. In scenes where conversations are reconstructed, the dialogue comes either from the account of one person or the synthesis of more than one person’s recollection of events. All of the information included has either been corroborated against other sources or reflects what had likely happened based on my appraisal of the validity of each speaker and the veracity of their memory. The result is a reconstructed time capsule of the making of the Back to the Future trilogy, by those who were there to have experienced it.

As my interview process progressed, I began to realize that this project isn’t simply about the making of one film trilogy, but is also about how some of the titans in the movie industry came into being. Even readers who are only casual fans of the films will find interesting pieces of information about the movie business, from the perspective of some of Hollywood’s best. At your leisure, look at the list of credits that Future alumni amassed prior to and since working on the films. While you may not recognize every person’s name, virtually everyone I spoke with worked on other movies that have received a substantial bit of attention over the years, such as Avatar, Blade Runner, Fight Club, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Star Wars: The Force Awakens, the original Superman franchise, and Titanic, to name just a few. They are incredibly talented visionaries, some of whom were already veterans when filming began in 1984, and others who were just getting started in the business. Regardless of their previous experience, they worked together to make a truly timeless film about time travel.

What follows is an amalgamation of their truth—a profile not only of a film series but, as I was reminded when I spent a half hour on memory lane with Zemeckis, of the beautifully normal and ordinary people whose creativity and passion produced an extraordinary trilogy. Some of the decisions they made were unconventional, yet they paid off, despite the odds. The trilogy has forever changed the landscape of cinema by redefining what a summer blockbuster could be, who could star in one, and under what improbable circumstances a trio of films could have a major impact around the world. You may not believe Back to the Future is the most important film trilogy of all time now, but after reading this book I bet you will.

So buckle up, because if my calculations are correct, when this baby hits eighty-eight miles per hour, you’re going to see some serious shit.

1. THINK, MCFLY, THINK

Sunday, December 30, 1984

Filming had only been under way for less than a month, but already something wasn’t quite right. On what should have been his day off, Robert Zemeckis made his way into the double-wide trailer that would remain parked behind the Amblin Entertainment compound for the next several months. Since all the editing rooms inside the studio offices were delegated to other projects, Steven Spielberg had arranged for coeditors Arthur Schmidt and Harry Keramidas to make the temporary structure their permanent workspace as they pieced together Back to the Future, Universal Pictures’ film scheduled for release Memorial Day weekend.

The director made his way through the bullpen, which normally would have been buzzing with assistants and apprentices filing film trims and outtakes into the large cardboard boxes that lined the wall. But because it was a weekend, it was a virtual ghost town, with the exception of the two other living souls in the building, Schmidt and Keramidas. The editors were tucked away in the former’s makeshift office, seated in front of a modestly sized monitor. Next to them sat a chair—the most comfortable chair in the office—that remained empty except during these visits from Zemeckis. Increasingly, these meetings had become fairly commonplace by this point in the shooting schedule, weeks after their November 26 start date. The production team expected principal photography to wrap after about twenty-two weeks of filming, meaning there would be fewer than three months between the last shot being captured and Future’s late May release date. As if the timeline weren’t tight enough to begin with, there were several optical effects that would have to be added in postproduction by George Lucas’s Industrial Light & Magic (ILM), further constricting the schedule.

To expedite the process, Zemeckis would come into the cutting room at the end of his shooting days and on weekends to look at scenes in the process of being put together. Zemeckis grew to trust his editors, especially Artie, who had been nominated for an Academy Award a few years prior for his work on Coal Miner’s Daughter, another Universal release. His meticulous editing skills led him to be hired after a serendipitous meeting a few months earlier. “I was working on a film at Paramount called Firstborn, and we had two young teenage boys in the movie,” he says, likely referring to Christopher Collet and Robert Downey, Jr. “Bob was looking everywhere for somebody to play Marty. He called up the director, Michael Apted, and asked if he could see some film of the two boys. Michael didn’t want to let the film out of the cutting room because he was still shooting, and I was close-cutting it as we went along, so he asked Bob to come look at the film on the editing machine with just me.”

Zemeckis went over with his producers Bob Gale and Neil Canton to watch the three or four scenes Artie had prepared in advance. The editor ran the film, which, afterward, was met by silence. It seemingly grew louder by the second, until the visitors heard it broken by their host.

“What do you think?”

“I don’t think either one of those boys is right for Marty McFly,” Zemeckis said. “But I really like the way those scenes were edited.” Schmidt’s face filled with color, embarrassed that he may have been perceived as fishing for a compliment when he was merely trying to speed up the session and get back to work. He thanked the director for the kind words and the group went on their way. The seemingly inconsequential meeting took on new importance when, about three weeks later, Bob Z called for the editor to come over to his office at Universal for an interview. Schmidt went and was hired.

A second sit-down between Zemeckis and Schmidt soon followed. When there was a lull in the conversation, the editor asked who was cast in the role of Marty, since neither of the young actors they had scouted that fateful day was a match. “So far we haven’t decided,” Bob Z said. “The guy that I really want is . . .” He walked over to the coffee table in his office and picked up a teen magazine, which he opened to a page with a large photograph of a young heartthrob on it. “That’s the guy that I really want to have to play Marty,” he said, pointing at the picture. “But he’s not available because he’s doing his TV show.”

Artie didn’t know it at the time, but the search for the perfect Marty McFly was an arduous endeavor. When Universal Pictures green-lighted the film, the Bobs immediately set out to fill the pivotal role of Future’s protagonist. Although he wasn’t in their minds as they wrote the screenplay, once it was finished, they both felt strongly that Michael J. Fox would make the perfect leading man. Today it seems that Fox was born to play Marty, but that was not the case when casting was under way in mid-1984. Yes, the Canadian actor was the linchpin of the popular television sitcom Family Ties, but to date he had only appeared in two major motion pictures—Disney’s 1980 flop Midnight Madness and the moderately successful 1982 film Class of 1984, a film with a subtitle that foreshadowed the actor’s eventual career-defining role: “We are the future . . . and nothing can stop us!”

In the late summer of 1984, even before the request was made to Michael Apted that resulted in Schmidt’s hiring, Steven Spielberg called his friend, Family Ties producer Gary David Goldberg, to ask that Fox read the script and consider screen-testing for the role. Spielberg and Goldberg had met in 1979, after Kathleen Kennedy, who was the former’s assistant and the latter’s old friend from college, introduced the two. While Spielberg was in London filming Raiders of the Lost Ark, Goldberg was flown overseas to join him, as the two were collaborating on a screenplay that was ultimately unmade called Reel to Reel, a semiautobiographical musical about a first-time director making a science fiction film. By the time Future was in preproduction, the two were not only friends, but also neighbors—they both owned beach houses within close proximity of each other in Malibu—and professional allies. Spielberg was one of the first people to see a rough cut of the Family Ties pilot back in 1982, and without any puffery, he told his friend that the show was guaranteed to be a hit and that his precocious actor playing the teenage son Alex was going to be a major star. When Zemeckis made it clear that Fox topped his short list of actors for Marty, Spielberg volunteered to give Goldberg a call directly, bypassing the traditional route of phoning an agent to broker a deal.

After a cursory perusal of the screenplay, the television titan decided that Fox wasn’t going to be given the pages. Goldberg loved what he read and saw the potential for the film to be a success—but that threatened to derail all he had established with his sitcom. The show was experiencing a meteoric rise in the Nielsen ratings, from forty-ninth place in its first season into the top five within a three-year span, thanks in large part to The Cosby Show providing a strong lead-in. When Meredith Baxter, who played matriarch Elyse Keaton on the show, was pregnant with twins, the show’s scripts were modified to rely more heavily on Fox’s character. The twenty-three-year-old actor, who still had a boyish face and youthful demeanor, became a star, true to Spielberg’s prediction, which led to increased attention for the show and teen magazine spreads like the one Zemeckis had on display in his office. Goldberg was confident that Fox would be interested in working on the film, thus distracting him and threatening the show’s popularity. He wanted to help his friend, but Michael J. Fox, he said, was off-limits. The search for Marty McFly would have to continue.

So it did. As disappointed as the Bobs were with Fox’s lack of availability, they were determined to press on and find the best second choice possible. Nothing about getting Back to the Future off the ground had been easy to that point, and as far as they were concerned, this was just the latest setback that they needed to overcome in the same way they always took on their problems—together.

The two had met on the first day of their Cinema 290 class in the fall semester of 1971 at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts. A fast friendship soon followed. “We were among a handful of undergraduates in a mostly graduate class,” Gale says. “We quickly discovered we had similar tastes in film. Bob was the only person I’d ever met who, like me, owned the soundtrack to The Great Escape.”

They soon realized that, while the majority of their classmates were absorbed with the idea of creating highbrow cinema, they were more interested in making movies that average joes would want to see. More often than not, their free time was spent catching a showing of Dirty Harry or the latest James Bond flick, not discussing the leitmotifs throughout Akira Kurosawa’s career. Movies, they believed, should be entertaining to the general public first and foremost; the added benefit would come when a person reflected on what they had just watched, and realized that there was more than they initially thought had met their eye. Zemeckis had aspirations of being a film director, while Gale dreamed of being a writer, and they decided to develop their common love for moviemaking as a team. Before graduation, they collaborated on each other’s student films, including 1972’s The Lift and 1973’s A Field of Honor, as well as a screenplay for a horror movie Gale conceived about vampiric prostitutes, Bordello of Blood, which, little did they know at the time, would be turned into a movie more than two decades later with a completely rewritten screenplay by A. L. Katz and Gilbert Adler.

Their goal was for Bordello to become the first feature they would make together. The two continued to refine the script over their first postgraduate summer, but in order to get a foot in the door, they thought they might try their hand at television. Bob Z took to hanging around Universal Studios, having heard the legend that Steven Spielberg had done the same when he was a young wannabe filmmaker with a dream similar to Zemeckis’s. Spielberg, the story goes, hung around the studios so much that he was eventually assumed to have been on contract and was offered a directing gig—a tall tale that makes for great Hollywood lore. While following in his idol’s fabricated footsteps, Zemeckis overheard that the television show Kolchak: The Night Stalker was nearing cancellation, and established veteran writers were stepping away from the show. Perhaps, he thought, that could provide an opening for two hungry twentysomethings to try their hand at getting one of their stories on the air. The duo banged out a nine-page story treatment for an episode over a few weeks, which Universal purchased. It was the first moment of affirmation that their shared dream of being filmmakers just might come true, and that they might prove their skeptical parents wrong when it happened.

Success knocked swiftly twice more. The Bobs wrote an episode for McCloud that was optioned—industry jargon for a producer officially reserving the right, for an agreed-upon time, to purchase a script at a later date—and another script for Get Christie Love!, a short-lived series perhaps best remembered now as being name-checked in the opening sequence of Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs. Universal saw potential in the Bobs to be great television writers and offered them a seven-year contract to pen for some of the company’s NBC shows, netting each half of the team $50,000 a year through the length of the agreement. Gale’s father, who, like Zemeckis’s parents, already thought his son was nuts for enrolling at USC with the hopes of becoming a professional filmmaker, was convinced he had raised an idiot when he was told that the Bobs, under the