Trailer
Plot summary
Marty McFly, a teenager who plays guitar in a band, spends his time with Doc Brown, an eccentric inventor who has fitted a DeLorean with time-travel equipment. When Marty drives the car out of a mall parking lot at eighty-eight miles per hour, he lands in 1955, and the machine has no plutonium left for a return trip. In that year his father George is being pushed around by Biff Tannen and his mother Lorraine is still a teenager. Marty keeps George from being hit by a car, the accident that once brought his parents together, and Lorraine turns her attention to Marty instead. Doc, who does not know him yet, has to help Marty set the past right.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Back to the Future (1985)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Director Robert Zemeckis fired Eric Stoltz from Back to the Future on January 10, 1985; Zemeckis called it the hardest meeting of his life, said it was all his fault, and admitted he had broken Stoltz's heart.
- Michael J. Fox was the first choice to play Marty McFly, but Family Ties producer Gary David Goldberg, worried that Fox's absence would hurt the sitcom while co-star Meredith Baxter was on maternity leave, refused to give him the script.
- Sidney Sheinberg wanted the title changed to "Space Man from Pluto" because he believed Back to the Future would not resonate with audiences; Spielberg answered with a memo treating the idea as a joke, and Gale and Zemeckis had no way to reject it without angering him.
- Michael J. Fox shot Family Ties during the day and Back to the Future at night and on weekends, sometimes not getting home until the early morning, and the teamster drivers dropping him off often had to carry him to bed.
- Melora Hardin was cast as Marty's girlfriend Jennifer Parker on a two-film contract, but after the crew were polled about her being taller than Michael J. Fox, the female crew voted against it and she was replaced by Claudia Wells.
- Huey Lewis met with Gale, Spielberg and Zemeckis, who wanted his band to be Marty's favorite; he did not want to write film songs, especially one called "Back to the Future", but agreed to submit the next song he wrote, which was "The Power of Love".
- The lightning bolt that strikes the clock tower was cut to twenty frames after Zemeckis picked out a single frame shaped like an "S"; the bolt was drawn in black ink on white paper, with diffusion and glow added by the optical department.
- Released on VHS on May 22, 1986 at $79.95, Back to the Future became the first film to sell 450,000 units at that price point and was also the most-rented cassette of the year.
