When you create a perfect film, you want to protect it. When Bob Gale co-wrote Back to the Future with director Robert Zemeckis, they knew they had something special. But they never envisioned that the film would become such a classic.
Gale and Zemeckis had long talked about the possibilities of time travel narratives, drawing inspiration from Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol and H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine as filtered through the 1960 film by George Pal. “We loved all the imagery of Raymond Loewy and Norman Bel Geddes — the 1939 World’s Fair, the Futurama exhibit there, all that Art Deco Modernism. We thought that was the future we were promised when we were little kids. What happened to it? Wouldn’t it be cool if you could tell a story where you had a character go to that future? It was called ‘Professor Brown Visits The Future.’ But we were never really able to make anything out of it.
“This was back in like 1975-76. Every once in a while, we’d pull it out of the drawer and kick it around. Well, in 1980, I was visiting my parents in St. Louis. Our basement had flooded. My dad hands me this box full of stuff that he salvaged. He said, ‘Go through this and see if there’s anything worth keeping.’ And in there was his high school yearbook. I’d never seen it before, and I went to the same high school my dad did. So I thought, oh, this would be kind of cool. What was my high school like in 1940?
Screenwriter and producer Bob Gale (Photo: Ryan Hartford)
“And lo and behold, my dad had been president of his graduating class. Something I had no idea about! I’m looking at this picture of my dad, and I’m thinking about the president of my graduating class, who was one of these rah-rah, sosh guys I would have never had anything to do with. And so I wondered, if I’d gone to high school with my dad, was that who he was? Would I have even been friends with him?’ And bingo, that’s when the proverbial bolt of lightning struck me. There’s our time travel movie: The kid goes back in time and ends up in high school with his own father.”
It’s hard to believe now, but the concept was a tough sell for a couple of young screenwriters.“The script had been rejected constantly,” recalls Gale. “We’d gotten over 40 rejections. People told us time travel movies don’t make any money — which was a true statement in 1981-82.”
But even executives who rejected it recognized the sentimental core of the story. “They kept telling us, ‘Take it to Disney!’ It was like a Hail Mary. We thought, ‘Maybe they’re right. Maybe this belongs at Disney. They said, ‘No, we’re not making a movie about incest.’”
Eventually, Steven Spielberg, whom Gale and Zemeckis had worked with on 1941, greenlit Back to the Future with his Amblin Entertainment, and the $19 million film went on to gross $398 million. It is widely considered among the best of the classic ’80s sci-fi blockbusters, and spawned two sequels, both of which are also excellent.
Unlike many of the films of the era, Back to the Future has never had a legacy sequel or reboot. That’s because Gale and Zemeckis consider the trilogy perfect as it is. But what the film does have that its peers lack is a hit Broadway musical adaptation.
Gale says they decided to adapt the material for the stage because “Nobody was going to confuse us making a theatrical musical, a completely different medium, with a reboot of the movie.”
Thanks to the original contract with Universal, Gale and Zemeckis retained the rights to make theatrical works based on Back to the Future. “We controlled it. We decided how it was going to get done, who was going to do it. And the most important thing is that, if we saw it going south, if we thought it was going to be crap, we could push the red button and no more! It was done. Because this wasn’t a case where the world was beating a path to our door, clamoring for Back to the Future: The Musical. Not in the slightest. And when we announced it, there were a shitload of people who said, ‘Oh, this is the worst idea ever! You’re going to ruin Back to the Future!’”
Back to the Future spawned a pair of radio hits, “Back In Time” and “The Power of Love” by Huey Lewis and the News, and included memorable ’50s music like “Johnny B. Goode” and “Earth Angel.” Composer Alan Silvestri, a frequent Zemeckis collaborator, and lyricist Glen Ballard were tapped to flesh out the musical. “We had just a wonderful working relationship. Nobody ever lost their temper,” says Gale. “Glen wrote this fantastic song that Doc Brown has in act two called ‘For the Dreamers,’ which may be the very best song in the show. And it’s just Doc Brown singing about who he is in his life.”
The part of Goldie Wilson, the young Black man Marty meets in 1955 who become Mayor of Hill Valley in 1985, was expanded for the stage. “This was one of the things that we learned from the movie,” says Gale. “He was such a popular character, even though in the movie, he’s only in in it for like six minutes or so. He’s got a terrific number that brings the house down every night.”
Just like in 1985, those who doubted the power of Back to the Future: The Musical were quickly proven wrong. “We played 18 months on Broadway. We’re almost gonna make it to five years in London. We’re about to start our second year in Tokyo. We’re opening in Hamburg on March 22nd. We have the U.S. tour, which will run for two years. And we’re going to start a U.K. tour in the fall.”
Back to the Future: The Musical won’t need roads when it flies into the Orpheum Theatre March 3-8.