Back to the Future Day: The Script Where Everything Pays Off

October 21 is Back to the Future Day. In Back to the Future Part II, released in November 1989, Doc Brown and Marty McFly land in Hill Valley at about 4:29 p.m. on Wednesday, October 21, 2015. When the real date arrived, Universal re-released the trilogy, and theaters ran screenings of all three films.

The holiday celebrates a sequel’s guess about the future. The film worth celebrating is the original, released on July 3, 1985, and written by Bob Gale and Robert Zemeckis. It earned an Academy Award nomination for its screenplay, and it’s built like a watch.

I love a twisty plot set up with small hints, and this script is the best model I know for how to plant them. Nearly every detail in the first twenty minutes comes back later with a job to do.

Why did Back to the Future Part II pick October 21, 2015?

Because Doc Brown typed it into the time circuits.

Part II opens where the first film ends, with Doc returning from the future to warn Marty about his kids. They fly forward thirty years, to a date chosen for the plot and nothing else. The film was released in 1989, and for twenty-six years October 21, 2015, sat in the future as a target.

Hoax images with a different date on the time circuits circulated online for years, and fans kept celebrating early. When the real day arrived in 2015, it became a full event. Universal released a new trilogy set on October 20, with a featurette in which Christopher Lloyd, as Doc Brown, explained how the real 2015 differed from the film’s. For one day the internet was full of side-by-side comparisons of the movie’s predictions against the world people were living in.

The fan holiday stuck. Other films have had dates on screen. This one had a date a whole generation could count down to.

What did Back to the Future Part II get right about 2015?

More than you’d expect for a comedy.

The film’s 2015 has flat-panel televisions on the wall, video calls, and drones. All three arrived on schedule. Hoverboards and self-lacing sneakers show up too, and so does a holographic shark advertising Jaws 19. Nobody’s made that sequel.

It also has the Chicago Cubs winning the World Series. The real Cubs missed by one year and won in 2016.

None of that was the point. Gale and Zemeckis built their 2015 as a joke about 1980s fashion and consumer gadgets, and the guesses that came true are a bonus. The future in any story is a mirror for the present the writers lived in, and Part II’s 2015 is a 1989 idea of excess. Neon jackets and a café themed on the 1980s tell you more about the year the film was made than about the year it pretends to show.

Where did Bob Gale get the idea for Back to the Future?

From his father’s high school yearbook.

Gale was paging through his father’s high school yearbook and found out his dad had been class president. The discovery raised a question he couldn’t shake: would he have been friends with his own father if they’d been in high school together?

Look at what that question already contains. A son meets his parents as teenagers. He finds out they were different people from the ones he knows. The past turns out to be stranger than the family stories. Every major scene in the film grows from that single premise, and the time machine exists only to deliver it. Strip out the DeLorean and the story still works as a son watching his parents fall in love. People who don’t care about science fiction at all love the film for that reason alone.

The lesson for a writer is about where good premises come from. Gale didn’t start with time travel and look for a story. He started with an emotional question anybody could feel and found the device that let him ask it. The device is the least important part.

Why was the Back to the Future script rejected more than forty times?

Studios couldn’t see it.

Gale and Zemeckis pitched Columbia Pictures in September 1980 and started a draft late that year. The first draft was done on February 21, 1981, and the second on April 7. Columbia passed on the second draft and put the project into turnaround. The script then went out to studio after studio, and the answer kept coming back no. It happened more than forty times, and some studios said no twice. Disney turned it down because Marty’s teenage mother falls for him, and the studio thought that was too risqué for a family film.

The writers’ track record didn’t help. Their earlier films had flopped with critics or at the box office.

Then Zemeckis directed Romancing the Stone, and it was a hit in 1984. Suddenly he had clout of his own. He came back to Back to the Future, Steven Spielberg came aboard as a producer, and Universal made it. A third draft was finished by July 1984.

The script hadn’t changed its core. The writers’ standing changed. Every writer sitting on a rejected manuscript should know that’s how the business works.

How do setups and payoffs work in Back to the Future?

Almost everything in the first act gets used again.

Early in 1985, a woman collecting for the clock tower hands Marty a flyer. Its headline says the clock tower was struck by lightning and stopped at 10:04. Marty’s girlfriend writes a note on the back, and he shoves it in his pocket. In 1955, that crumpled flyer becomes the only way Doc can know exactly when and where lightning will strike, and it’s how he plans to send Marty home.

Doc says he came up with time travel on November 5, 1955, after he slipped and hit his head on the sink while hanging a clock. When Marty lands in 1955, it’s November 5, and he meets Doc that very day.

Marty tells his teenage father, “If you put your mind to it, you can accomplish anything.” At the end, George McFly is a published science fiction novelist, and he repeats it to his son.

Marty arrives in 1955 and flattens a young pine tree on a farm. When he returns to 1985, the Twin Pines Mall from the opening scene is the Lone Pine Mall.

Doc is shot by the Libyans in the parking lot in the first act. Marty writes him a warning letter in 1955, and Doc tears it up. At the end Doc sits up wearing a bulletproof vest, holding the taped-together letter.

Even the bully gets one. In the opening 1985, Biff bullies George over a car Biff wrecked himself. In the new 1985, Biff is the man waxing George’s car.

The reader’s experience of each one is the same: a small click of recognition. Each payoff tells the audience the writers were in control the whole time, and audiences trust a story that rewards attention. My guide to foreshadowing has more examples.

Why does the Back to the Future clock tower climax work?

Because the writers stacked every problem onto one minute.

Doc knows the lightning will hit at 10:04 p.m. on November 12, 1955. The DeLorean has to reach 88 miles per hour at the exact moment the bolt hits the cable strung from the tower. A radio forecast earlier that evening says no storm is coming, so the audience has already been told the timing has to be perfect. Then a falling tree limb pulls the cable loose at 9:57, Marty’s car stalls, and Doc ends up hanging from the tower with seconds to spare.

The opening scene in Doc’s lab included a clock with a man hanging from its hands. The audience saw that image more than an hour earlier and forgot it. Every element in the climax was planted. Nothing new arrives at the last minute to save anybody. The sequence holds up after forty years for exactly that reason. The suspense comes from a deadline the audience understands down to the minute, and from watching characters fight a clock that was set in the first act.

The early drafts ended somewhere else. Marty was going to drive the time machine into a nuclear explosion, a sequence estimated at about $1 million and dropped as too expensive. The clock tower was cheaper and better.

What did Back to the Future cut from early drafts?

A refrigerator, a nuclear test and a title.

The time machine in early drafts didn’t move, and at one point it was a refrigerator. Spielberg vetoed it, and Zemeckis worried that kids would copy the film and climb into old refrigerators. The DeLorean replaced it and gave the film its best visual. Doc was Professor Brown. Lorraine was named Meg. Universal’s chief, Sid Sheinberg, didn’t like the title. He wanted to call it Spaceman From Pluto. The filmmakers kept their title.

Then came the casting change. Eric Stoltz played Marty for the first weeks of filming. He was let go on January 10, 1985, and Michael J. Fox started on January 15. The reshoots added about $4 million to a budget that finished at $19 million.

Each of those cuts made the film simpler. A writer revising a draft ought to notice that pattern. The final version is the one where every element does one job well.

What can a novelist learn from the Back to the Future screenplay?

Plant early, and pay off everything you plant.

Novels have more room than screenplays. That room tempts writers to scatter details that never return. Gale and Zemeckis had under two hours. They couldn’t afford a single object, line or image that didn’t come back, and the discipline shows.

A practical test for a manuscript: list every object, odd line or minor character introduced in your first act. Then find where each one comes back. Anything that never returns is either decoration or a broken promise. Anything that returns without being planted is a cheat, and readers feel it even when they can’t name it. My notes on writing a plot twist go through the same logic from the other end.

The film also teaches pace. The first act runs on information the audience doesn’t know it needs, delivered as jokes and small-town color. Nobody feels lectured, because every setup arrives disguised as something else.

How should you mark Back to the Future Day?

Watch the first film with a notepad. Write down every object and every odd line in the first twenty minutes, then tick each one off as it comes back. You’ll run out of unticked items before the credits.

Then watch Part II and enjoy its 2015 for what it is, a 1989 joke about the future. My Back to the Future trilogy review covers all three films, and the site’s list of time travel films puts it in company.

Bob Gale found a yearbook and asked a question about his father. Forty rejections later, the answer became a script where nothing goes to waste. For more dates like this one, see the literature-related holidays calendar, and if your own plot has setups that never pay off, my book coaching service is built for that problem.

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