This year sees the release of the highly anticipated Jaws 19, coinciding with the 40th anniversary of Steven Spielberg's original masterpiece. So what better time to revisit on of the greatest movies of all time, Jaws!

 

Wait, I already did that one.

 

Huh.

 

...

 

Oh, hey, it's the 30th anniversary of Back to the Future.

 

 

Which also happens to be the 60th anniversary of Calvin Klein's invention of Rock n' Roll. To honor this beloved saga of incest, Pepsi products, and unfortunately placed manure, I present my biggest factoid post ever. When this baby hits 88 trivia bits...you're gonna see some serious s***.

 

 

Back to the Future

 

-The idea for Back to the Future came from co-writer/producer Bob Gale wondering if he would have been friends with his father in high school.

 

-Writer/director Robert Zemeckis wanted to make Back to the Future before Romancing the Stone, but his first two movies were flops, and Hollywood was unsure about his prospects as a filmmaker. The script was rejected 40 times, with many studios finding the comedy not risque enough to compete with the lucrative raunchy high school comedies of the time, while Disney was not keen on making a movie about a mother unkowingly having the hots for her son. When Romancing the Stone ended up being a huge hit, Zemeckis ignored all the offers from studios coming his way and went straight to Steven Spielberg, the only producer who had faith in him from the beginning.

 

-Marty McFly was originally written as suicidal, and it almost made it into the movie before Bob Gale and Zemeckis decided it clash with the plot's general zaniness.

 

-The time machine was originally a refrigerator, but Zemeckis was afraid kids would lock themselves in fridges after seeing the movie. A DeLorean was eventually picked because the vertical doors allowed them to do the flying saucer in the barn gag.

 

-Executive Producer Sidney Sheinberg is responsible for “Proffesor Brown” becoming “Doc Brown,” but he's also tried to change the title to “Spaceman From Pluto,” for some reason. Spielberg more or less shamed him into dropping the issue making it seem like he thought the suggestion was a joke.

 

-When asked why Marty hangs out with Doc Brown in the first place, Bob Gale explained that Doc gave Marty a part-time job after he snuck into his lab and was impressed by his crazy inventions.

 

-Biff Tanen is named after Ned Tanen, a studio executive who had given Zemeckis and Bob Gale grief on a previous film.

 

-"It's like I'm kissing my brother” was added to make the Oedipus stuff a little less...disturbing.
Doc Brown and Marty were originally gonna sell bootleg videos to fund the time machine, but Universal didn't want to encourage piracy.

 

-Einstein was originally meant to be a chimpanzee.

 

-Christopher Lloyd was offered the role of Doc Brown after John Lithgow, Duddley Moore, Jeff Goldblum, and James Woods were considered. He initially turned it down, but was convinced to change his mind by his wife.

 

-Michael J. Fox was always the first choice to play Marty, but he was committed to Family Ties at the time. This resulted in the role going to Eric Stoltz, who actually got around to shooting four weeks of the production before Zemeckis realized he wasn't right for the part, playing everything a little too straight and dramatic for what was essentially a comedy. In probably the most famous instance of mid-shoot recasting, Stoltz was willingly let go from the production, while Fox found an opening in his schedule and was brought in. The reshoots of scenes already done with Stoltz added $3 million to the budget, and Fox found himself doing Family Ties at day and Back to the Future at night.

 

-Meanwhile, Thomas F. Wilson was cast as Biff because the original actor, J. J. Cohen, wasn't tall enough to be an imposing threat to Eric Stoltz's Marty. He stayed on when Eric Stoltz left.

 

-Before that, Tim Robbins was considered for the role of Biff. Don't worry, he got to do a movie with Lea Thompson later...

 

-Marty's parents were cast based on what their ages in 1955, so Michael J. Fox is three years older than the actor playing his father (Crisper Glover) and 10 days younger than his mother (Lea Thompson).

 

-Johnny Depp had auditioned for the role of Marty, but according to Bob Gale, “he must have not been all that memorable.”

 

-The set for Hill Valley is the same used for Kingston Falls in Gremlins.

 

-The talent show judge who tells Marty his song is “too loud” is played by Huey Lewis, the artist who wrote

 

-A man in a dog costume serves as a stand-in when Einstein is traveling through time for the first time.

 

-Doc Brown hunches because the 6'11” Christopher Lloyd needed to even his height with the 5'5” Michael J. Fox.

 

-Crispin Glover was apparently so nervous during production that he ended up just mouthing many of lines, which had to be dubbed later.

 

-Glover's suggestions for his character were often very strange. At one point, he wanted 1985 George McFly to have Eraserhead hair.

 

-The scenes set in 1955 were filmed first, as it was easier to make the sets looks nice for the 1950s before trashing them for the 1980s.

 

-Doc Brown's amplifier has a CRM114 label, as a reference to Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove.
Biff calling everyone a butthead was improvised by Thomas F. Wilson.

 

 

-Michael J. Fox received Grade-A lessons on how to fake-play the guitar realistically, while his singing was dubbed in by Mark Campbell. He was already a pretty good skateboarder, but still required some help from stunt doubles to pull off some more advanced stuff.

 

-“Gigawatts” is suppose to be pronounced with a hard “G,” but Christopher Lloyd heard the film's science consultant pronounce it “jigawatts,” so it stuck.

 

-The time machine components in the DeLorean made the interior of the car cramped, causing Michael J. Fox to hit his elbow on the time circuits handle every time he shifted gears. You can hear it happening every time he changes shift during the chase in the mall parking lot.

 

-Likewise, Fox didn't mean to keep hitting his head on the DeLorean's door; that thing just became faulty as filming went on.

 

-Billy Zane's first movie, in the immortal role of Matches, that guy in the leather jacket who hangs out with Biff.

 

-Lea Thompson's 1985 makeup took three and a half hours to apply.

 

-The cat statues sitting at the clock tower were originally made for Cat People.

 

-The climax of the film originally took place at a Nevada nuclear testing site, with Doc Brown using a radio dish to gather nuclear energy for the DeLorean, but the studio was unwilling to build another huge set. Instead, the scene was rewritten to take place in the town square, with hints at the significance of the clock tower retroactively placed throughout the movie.

 

-Steven Spielberg went on to borrow both the rejected the ideas of the refrigerator and the nuclear test site for Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

 

-When Marty first heads to the mall to meet up with Doc Brown, it's called “Twin Pines Mall.” After he goes back in time and accidentally runs over a pine tree in the past, it's called “Lone Pine Mall.”

 

-Subtler detail: a piece of ledge under the clock tower is missing in 1985, the same piece Doc Brown knocked off in 1955.

 

-California Raisins paid thousands of dollars to have raisins appear at the Enchantment Under the Sea Dance, hoping the movie would do for raisins what E.T. the Extra Terrestrial did for Reese's Pieces. Yeah. Unfortunately for them, a bowl of raisins looks like a bowl of dirt when filmed, so the filmmakers instead stuck the product placement somewhere else. Specifically, the bench Red the Homeless Guy sleeps on.

 

-“Johnny B. Goode” was almost cut from the movie because it slowed down the pacing of the climax, but the editor was able to convince Zemeckis to keep it in.

 

-The film's release was delayed until August, but the preview screening was so well received that producer Frank Marshall moved it back up to July.

 

-Oddly, there are only 32 effects shots in the whole movie. Industrial Light & Magic worked right up until the last minute to get the movie done.

 

-Composer Alan Silvestri made

as grand as possible just so he could impress Spielberg and convince him he was right for the job. The score doesn't actually begin until the DeLorean is unveiled for the first time.

 

-Ronald Regan was apparently so delighted by the joke about him being the president in the 80s that he asked the projectionist to roll the movie back and play it again. He went on to quote the movie in his 1986 State of the Union address.

 

-A sizable crowd turned out on October 26, 1985 at the mall where they shot the movie to see if Marty would show up.

 

-The top grossing film of 1985.

 

-Thomas F. Wilson always keeps a FAQ card handy wherever he goes so he can hand them out to the fans who constantly approach him about

 

-There was never meant to be a sequel; the cliffhanger at the end of the movie was meant as a joke. But upon the the movie's massive success, the sequel was deemed inevitable, and “TO BE CONTINUED” was added to end of VHS copies.

 

 

Back to the Future: Part II

 

-The film was originally titled “Paradox.”

 

-Bob Gale's script had Marty head back to the 60s where his parents were hippies, but Zemeckis thought the idea was dumb.

 

-Zemekis's least favorite scenes in the trilogy to shoot was the 2015 segment in Part 2, as he was never satisfied with how movies could never accurately predict future technology. So instead, the filmmakers purposely made 2015 wacky and unrealistic, flying cars and all.

 

-You may not have noticed, but Crispen Glover did not return for either sequel, either due to contract disputes or what he refereed to as disagreeing with the film's moral. Actor Jeffery Weissman donned prosthetics to look like Glover for the few scenes that featured George McFly, while the filmmakers conspired to hide the switcheroo whatever way they could, which explains why George McFly is randomly hanging upside down in 2015 and why he's dead in alternate 1985. Glover went on to sue the producers, as they didn’t have permission to use his likeness. The Screen Actors Guild now has rules
for a situation like this.

 

-Claudia Wells, who played Jennfer in the first movie, was unable to return due to her mother's poor health at the time. The recap at the beginning of Part 2 is actually reshot footage with new actress Elisabeth Shue.

 

-The hoverboards were simply planks of wood stuck to the actors' feet. The actors were suspended on cables that were later erased in post production.

 

 

-Of course, it wasn't enough that the film had convincing effects for the hoverboards. Zemeckis tried to convince people that the hoverboards were real and were supposed to be released to the market by Mattel before parental complaints about safety kept it from hitting stores.

This goes beyond doing something for the fun of it; Zemeckis went out of his way to build up the dreams of the children of the world before crushing them himself.

 

Bastard.

 

-The best special effect in the movie, however, was having the actors play several different versions of themselves in the same shot, a trick that becomes more difficult when the camera is still moving dynamically like it does in this movie. The filmmakers developed the vista glide, a motion controlled camera system that allowed them to do multiple passes of a single shot so the different versions of a given actor could be composited together.

 

-For some shots, such as when 2015 Marty is eating dinner with his two kids, all three played by Michael J. Fox, the shot was split into thirds, with each character occupying their third of the shot. This required perfect set and prop continuity, so everything was glued down so they wouldn't move between shots. Fortunately, an earthquake didn't disturb the set when the crew left it overnight.

 

-Elijah Wood's first movie, in the immortal role of One of Those Kids Who Were Messing With the Wild Gunman Machine in Cafe 80s.

 

-Michael J. Fox had to relearn how to skateboard after five years out of practice.

 

-The antique shop Marty gets the sports almanac from has a Roger Rabbit doll in the window, an obvious nod to Zemeckis's other huge movie of the 80s. We'll get to that one later...

 

-Also in the window is the Jaws NES game developed by LJN, who also developed the games for Roger Rabit and Back to the Future.

 

-The 2015 USA Today is dated October 22^nd, Christopher Lloyd's birthday.

 

-It cost more to spruce up the town square for the 2015 scenes than it would have to just build it from scratch.

 

-The cowboys and trains pattern on Doc Brown's shirt foreshadows the next movie.

 

-Apparently Jaws 19 is directed by Spielberg's son Max Spielberg. The hologram shark was originally meant to look better, but they decided to go with the horribly fake looking animation test version, because it looked funnier.

 

 

-One of the officers who escort Jennifer to the McFly residence is played by Mary Ellen Trainor, Zemeckis's wife at the time.

 

-Carl Sagan praised the movie for its handling of time travel and alternate timelines.

 

-When attending the film's premiere in London, Christopher Lloyd recalls Princess Diana laughing the hardest when Biff gets buried under manure a second time.

 

-Nike has hinted that they are working on shoes with self-tying laces as seen in the movie.

 

-Years before Hollywood started splitting two movies into two parts, Part 2 was deemed too massive and convoluted for one movie, so all the western stuff was split off into a third movie. This meant shooting both sequels at once, which created a very hectic schedule for Zemeckis. On the worst days, he would be in Burbank working on Part 2, then he'd fly down to the set of Part 3, then he would travel back to Burbank, getting very little sleep along the way.

 

-Part 2 is one of Zemeckis's favorite movies that he's made.

 

Back to the Future: Part III

 

-The western setting was inspired by a conversation Zemeckis had with Michael J. Fox during the making of the first movie, in which Fox thought it'd be cool if Marty went to the Old West and did cowboy stuff.

 

-Mary Steenburgen took on the role of Clara Clayton by her kids, who were huge fans of the original movie.

 

-Many of western scenes were shot in Monument Valley, which also served as a filming location for Once Upon A Time in the West, Stagecoach, and National Lampoon's Vacation.

 

-Despite the amount of pressure on the crew to make two movies at once, the actors really enjoyed the more laid back feel of the western setting, and the stunt team enjoyed working with horses and doing cowboy stuff.

 

-This movie reveals that at some point, there are four separate DeLoreans in 1955 at one time: the one hidden in the mine, the one Marty firs traveled back to 1955 with, the one Doc Brown and Marty arrive in to get the sports almanac back, and the one Biff stole so he could give the almanac to his younger self. Heavy stuff, man.

 

-When Marty McFly first mentions Clint Eastwood, he's standing next to posters for Revenge of the Creature and Tarantula, two of Eastwood's first movies. Eastwood himself was asked if it was okay if they used his name in the movie, and was more than happy to give permission.

 

-ZZ Top makes a cameo as the band playing at the Hill Valley Festival. Those guys know how to fiddle.

 

-Thomas F. Wilson learned to do most of his own stunts, which involved learning how to ride a horse and how to throw a lasso.

 

 

-When Mad Dog tries to lynch Marty, the rope was genuinely strangling Michael J. Fox, who passed out for a short time afterward.

 

-This movie features Christopher Lloyd's first onscreen kiss.

 

-Production halted twice: when Michael J Fox's father died, and when his son was born.

 

-The manure wagon that unloads on Mad Dog belongs to “A. Jones,” while the manure truck that buries his descendent in 1955 belongs to “D. Jones.” See, this is why I love these movies.

 

-Several shots during the train climax were actually highly detailed miniatures. Other times, it was a full-sized train that require coordinated technicians and stuntmen. The DeLorean was built to be able to flip off the track at any needed time for safety reasons.

 

 

-A deleted scene saw Marshall Strickland get shot in the back by Mad Dog, but it was deemed too dark for a family movie.

 

-Spielberg likes Part 3 much more than Part 2.

 

-The town built for the movie ended up being destroyed by lightning in 1996. Spooky.

 

-Bob Gale still has the time circuit display and the Mr. Fusion (now turned into a lamp).

 

-When a poll asked each US state which movie shot locally they would want to represent them, Californians picked Back to the Future.

 

-Zemeckis swears that as long as he lives, there will never be another sequel or a remake. Good.

 

Happy Anniversary, Back to the Future, and thanks for reading, fellow travelers of the space-time continuum. Hope your future is a good one, and don't forget to go easy on your son when he burns the carpet.

 

Now make like a tree and get out of here.