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In case you've been asleep in the backseat of a DeLorean for a year, it's "Back to the Future Day" i.e., the future date that Marty McFly and Jennifer and Doc Brown travel to in BTTF 2. The past month in particular has been an orgiastic display of marketing; seemingly every company that was represented in the movie's future brand-scape—and there were a lot—has tried to capitalize on the occasion, from Pepsi to USA Today. (And plenty of other companies as well.) But all that nostalgia is forgetting one thing: the entire franchise almost didn't happen.
Okay, so maybe that's a bit of an overstatement, but director Robert Zemeckis, screenwriter Bob Gale, and executive producer Steven Spielberg did not have an easy go of it. They had to scrap their original Marty McFly—Eric Stoltz—halfway through the shoot. Michael J. Fox had to pull off the role of Marty despite filming full-time on Family Ties. Hell, Universal Pictures' Sid Sheinberg hated the title Back to the Future and wanted to rename it Space Man From Pluto. Those, and dozens of other tidbits, show up in Back to the Future: The Ultimate Visual History, an exhaustive behind-the-scenes look at the filming of the trilogy, published yesterday by HarperCollins. We combed through the book to find some of our favorite nuggets from the shoots, particularly that for Back to the Future 2. You know that BTTF 2 trivia you were looking for? Well, listen to this!
...And by "listen to this," we of course mean "read the captions accompanying the above gallery of book art." What, you don't speak Marvin Berry?
