Repost - The Long, Troubled Future History of Back to the Future Part IV

October 21, 2015 - the day the internet will never let you forget.

This is the day that Marty McFly and Doc Brown travel to in Back to the Future part II. Befitting that landmark, there are plenty of screenings and BTTF celebrations, many of them listed here. By the time you read this, there's a good chance you've already reached your limit on BTTF content.

Too bad! I'll never let a good opportunity to recycle content pass without observance. About two years ago, I wrote a piece for Film School Rejects, detailing "The Long Troubled Future History of Back to the Future Part IV." It was a look into the future where production of a long-anticipated sequel went so bad that a mysterious key player went back in time to prevent it.

Read the whole piece over at Film School Rejects.

The Long, Troubled Future History of Back to the Future Part IV

November 12, 1955 - a seminal date for film fans, as that's the date of the famous Hill Valley lightning storm in Back to the Future.  It's the night that Marty McFly invents rock-and-roll at the Enchantment Under the Sea Dance after getting his parents together and before using the Delorean to go back home to 1985.

It's also the date that Old Biff returns to when he delivers a sports almanac from the future to his younger self, and act that is responsible for an alternate 1985 that Marty and Doc have to undo in Back to the Future Part II.

So to celebrate that monumental day, I've written a piece over at Film School Rejects called "The Long, Troubled Future History of Back to the Future Part IV."  Yes, it's a look at the production history of the future sequel, 2015's most anticipated tentpole - Back to the Future Part IV.

Also, I neglected to plug this last week, but I had another piece up there recently called "Must There Be a Wonder Woman Movie?"

First ten pages - High concept comedy

So what do you do when you’re writing a High Concept Comedy script that requires you to lay a little pipe before getting to the hook? Let’s say you’ve got a brilliant hook like “teenager goes back in time and has to get his parents to fall in love” but there’s just no way you’re going to be able to set that up in ten pages. How do you get fickle readers to keep reading?

Remember: Tone. Genre. Craft.

Look at Back to the Future. Remember the first image in that film? It’s a ticking clock. From the first line of the screenplay, we’re aware of time as an element. Even before Marty enters Dock’s workshop, the camera has panned across the room. It passes a few expository newspapers, all while showing off Doc Brown’s Rube Goldberg-like device for getting canned dog food. That tells us something about Doc. Then Marty enters and through his phone conversation with Doc, we get a decent sense of their dynamic. This is important because they don’t really interact again until about 15 minutes into the film, when Doc makes his first on-screen appearance.

There are plenty of things to learn from Back to the Future, but with a film like this, the important thing is to set up the dominos that will eventually be knocked down. For this film in particular, that includes details like Principal Strickland mentioning Marty’s father was a “slacker.” He also says, “No McFly has ever amounted to anything in the history of Hill Valley.” To that, Marty says “Well history is gonna change.”(THEME ALERT.)

Every subsequent scene contains details that are important. Marty’s band fails a tryout, and then he wavers about sending his demo in. Even with his girlfriend’s encouragement, he’s scared to take a chance. (CHARACTER TRAIT ALERT.)  As the two kiss in front of the Clock Tower, a woman comes over to solicit donations for the Clock Tower, which was struck by lightning 30 years ago (EXPOSITION ALERT.) Marty goes home to find his father being bullied by Biff…. (IMPORTANT SUBPLOT ALERT) and amid other details, his mother tells the story of how she and Marty’s dad first fell in love. (PAY ATTENTION – IMPORTANT BACKSTORY.)

There’s a lot of exposition there, but there are just enough hints of the script’s themes that most readers would probably have faith that this is all leading somewhere. We’ve got a teenager, a crazy inventor, lots of references to time and history, and Marty’s entire world established in about ten minutes, give or take. If you were to show those pages to someone with no prior knowledge of the film, it wouldn’t be a surprise if most of them guessed that Marty would somehow end up back in time and witness a few of the past events he’s been told about.

Most of the time in high concept comedy, your lead character HAS to jump off the page in the first few scenes. The character – not the plot – is really what carries the film. The hook is just a means to explore that character.

Liar Liar – a lawyer who lies as easily as most people breathe is forced to tell the truth for an entire day.

Bruce Almighty – An egotistical news reporter is given all of God’s powers and learns ultimate power isn’t as easy as it seems.

Groundhog Day – A jaded and selfish weatherman is trapped in a loop that forces him to live out the same day over and over again.

If you change the defining traits of those lead characters, the entire theme and story changes, even if the situation they are trapped in remains the same.

 So in high concept comedy, I’d say you can never forget this rule: Define your characters early and often

12-Step Screenwriting: Week 8 - Coda

It's time for another episode of the Bitter Script Reader YouTube series!

This is the eighth chapter of a 12-part series designed to guide and motivate a writer to complete a screenplay within three months.  Recognizing that I had an opportunity to reach a new audience via YouTube, I decided to start with the basics.

This week's video deals with writing the coda of your story, the final grace notes after the main problem has been resolved.



As you can see, this is back-to-basics information, but hopefully some of you will take up the challenge of completing a screenplay alongside the weekly lessons in this series.  I've done my best to minimize the jargon here.  So while at some point we'll be talking things like Act Breaks and Climaxes, but I won't ask you to commit things like "Fun & Games" to memory.


As always, it really helps me out to see some engagement with these videos, so please click through to the YouTube page, subscribe and leave a few comments there.  Feel free to embed these on your blogs, and if you find the tips useful, tweet about them or put the videos on your Facebook page.

What are you finding useful about these videos?  What else would you like to see from future series?

12-Step Screenwriting: Week 7 - Climax

It's time for another episode of the Bitter Script Reader YouTube series!

This is the seventh chapter of a 12-part series designed to guide and motivate a writer to complete a screenplay within three months.  Recognizing that I had an opportunity to reach a new audience via YouTube, I decided to start with the basics.

This week's video deals with writing the climax of the third act.



As you can see, this is back-to-basics information, but hopefully some of you will take up the challenge of completing a screenplay alongside the weekly lessons in this series.  I've done my best to minimize the jargon here.  So while at some point we'll be talking things like Act Breaks and Climaxes, but I won't ask you to commit things like "Fun & Games" to memory.


As always, it really helps me out to see some engagement with these videos, so please click through to the YouTube page, subscribe and leave a few comments there.  Feel free to embed these on your blogs, and if you find the tips useful, tweet about them or put the videos on your Facebook page.

What are you finding useful about these videos?  What else would you like to see from future series?

12-Step Screenwriting: Week 6 - Third Act Turning Point

It's time for another episode of the Bitter Script Reader YouTube series!

This is the sixth chapter of a 12-part series designed to guide and motivate a writer to complete a screenplay within three months.  Recognizing that I had an opportunity to reach a new audience via YouTube, I decided to start with the basics.

This week's video deals with writing the climax of the second point, also know as the "All is Lost" moment.



As you can see, this is back-to-basics information, but hopefully some of you will take up the challenge of completing a screenplay alongside the weekly lessons in this series.  I've done my best to minimize the jargon here.  So while at some point we'll be talking things like Act Breaks and Climaxes, but I won't ask you to commit things like "Fun & Games" to memory.


As always, it really helps me out to see some engagement with these videos, so please click through to the YouTube page, subscribe and leave a few comments there.  Feel free to embed these on your blogs, and if you find the tips useful, tweet about them or put the videos on your Facebook page.

Help me out here guys.  What are you finding useful about these videos?  What else would you like to see from future series?

12-Step Screenwriting: Week 2 - Three-Act Structure

It's time for another episode of the Bitter Script Reader YouTube series!

This is the second chapter of a 12-part series designed to guide and motivate a writer to complete a screenplay within three months.  Recognizing that I had an opportunity to reach a new audience via YouTube, I decided to start with the basics.

This week's video covers the basics of the three-act structure, something every writer should know.



As you can see, this is back-to-basics information, but hopefully some of you will take up the challenge of completing a screenplay alongside the weekly lessons in this series.  I've done my best to minimize the jargon here.  So while at some point we'll be talking things like Act Breaks and Climaxes, but I won't ask you to commit things like "Fun & Games" to memory.


As always, it really helps me out to see some engagement with these videos, so please click through to the YouTube page, Subscribe and leave a few comments there.  Feel free to embed these on your blogs, and if you find the tips useful, tweet about them or put the videos on your Facebook page.

I hope that in three months time, a lot of you will be reporting back with completed screenplays.

12-Step Screenwriting: Week One - Idea, Concept and Story

I'm pleased to introduce the first regular episode of the Bitter Script Reader YouTube series!

This is the first chapter of a 12-part series designed to guide and motivate a writer to complete a screenplay within three months.  Recognizing that I had an opportunity to reach a new audience via YouTube, I decided to start with the basics.

This week's video covers the difference between idea, concept and story.  You wouldn't believe how those simple distinctions seem to elude many new writers.  You shouldn't start writing a script until you can say that what you're working on is a story.



As you can see, this is back-to-basics information, but hopefully some of you will take up the challenge of completing a screenplay alongside the weekly lessons in this series.  I've done my best to minimize the jargon here.  So later on we'll be talking things like Act Breaks and Climaxes, but I won't ask you to commit things like "Fun & Games" to memory.

I also won't pull the Writers Boot Camp stunt of introducing a lot of vocabulary that isn't common to the business.  The good news is that since I'm not charging for any of this, I don't have to go to ridiculous lengths to make it seem like the basics of screenwriting can only be understood by unlocking a Sphinx-like riddle.

As always, it really helps me out to see some engagement with these videos, so please click through to the YouTube page, Subscribe and leave a few comments there.  Feel free to embed these on your blogs, and if you find the tips useful, tweet about them or put the videos on your Facebook page.

I hope that in three months time, a lot of you will be reporting back with completed screenplays.

Friday Free-for-All: Biff Tannen

The Back to the Future Blu-Ray set has re-ignited interest in the trilogy and one of the more interesting things to pop up on the web as a result is the entire video biography of Biff Tannen from the alternate 1985. You might recognize this from the scene in Back to the Future part II when Marty finds himself out in front of the Biff Tannen Museum.



And as a bonus, here's a video from a stand-up routine performed by Biff's portrayer, Thomas F. Wilson. It's a short song that answers all the questions he regularly gets about Back to the Future.

Using time travel - lessons from J.J. Abrams' Star Trek

In two earlier posts this week, we've covered the most basic approaches to time travel, so why not confuse the hell out of everyone and try to explain the notion of alternate timelines?

Back to the Future part II dealt with an alternate timeline in the form of Biff's distorted future (though technically all of BTTF, save for the opening of the first movie in 1985, happens in timelines that get altered by Marty's actions in the past.) The notion here is that there's one timeline and it is completely mutable. In changing things, you're really creating an altered timeline rather than an alternate timeline, despite the language Doc uses in Part II.

A truly alternate timeline would likely exist parallel to the "real" timeline. Thus, if you do something like going back to 1963 and saving JFK, you would have no impact on the history you just left. Instead, your changes would cause a new timeline to branch off from the old one, effectively creating an entirely new universe without wiping out the old one. I mention this because it can be a great way around the "paradox problem" one might encounter when writing time travel movies.

According to writers Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman, this is the approach they took to time travel in last summer's Star Trek. Star Trek is also novel because it's a time-travel movie set entirely in an alternate timeline, with the characters themselves not becoming aware of that fact until at least midway through the script. In other words, it's a time travel movie told from the point of view of the people who have been impacted by changes the others faced. Supposed that the assertive George McFly we meet at the end of the first Back to the Future learned that he was actually supposed to be a wimpy nerd married to an overweight alcoholic and you'll get a sense of what I'm trying to explain.

Star Trek's approach is smart because it found a way to honor over 40 years of existing canon without making it a flat-out reboot that erases everything to start fresh. The film starts when a Romulan ship from the future ends up in the early 23rd century. This triggers a battle with the Starfleet vessel Kelvin, which in turn causes Jim Kirk's mother to go into labor early. Not only that, in the course of the battle, Jim Kirk's father George Kirk ends up sacrificing himself and the ship to save the rest of the crew. This is significant because in the original timeline where this encounter didn't take place, Jim Kirk was born weeks later in Iowa, and his father George lived to see him become captain of the Enterprise 30 years later.

Thus, Trek history has been altered at the moment of Kirk's birth and everything that happens after this is an alternate timeline. This is confirmed later, when a now-adult Kirk is stranded on an ice planet and encounters a version of Spock from 130 years in the future - a Spock played by Leonard Nimoy, the actor who carried the role through the earlier incarnations of the series. This was smart on the part of the writers because not only does it allow them to say to fans, "That history you loved still happened. We're honoring it, not ignoring it," but it also makes clear that this new history that has emerged is going to be significantly different from that which is documented in the original series and movies.

To drive home the point, the planet Vulcan - a significant element in the original series timeline - is destroyed in the course of the film. Even though the film ends with all the classic characters in their familiar positions, it's clear that none of their fates will be the same as in the first series. Kirk could be killed in the next movie, if the creators saw fit.

The writers have said that the way they see it, the "original timeline" that the Nimoy Spock left still exists and marches on parallel to the new one. I'd argue that nothing shown in the film itself specifically supports that notion, but there's nothing that either disproves that either I suppose. Since it's unlikely we'll ever revisit the original, prime timeline again, it's probably a moot point.

I mention all this because it shows there's a way to use time travel without relying on the paradoxes, as Back to the Future does. Here, the time travel is a way of achieving and "in-the-box" reboot and giving all the characters a clean slate. So keep in mind that if you want to use time travel, you don't need to rely on the old "we have to put the future back exactly the way it was meant to be" chestnut. In Star Trek, the mission isn't really to restore the original timeline - it's to stop the Romulan Nero before he does further damage to this one.

Using time travel - lessons from Back to the Future

On Monday we discussed "closed loop" time travel, so today we're going to take a look at a movie series where the characters are able to use time travel to change history: Back to the Future I-III.

Back to the Future plays rather fast and loose with time-travel logic as the series goes on. The first film is built around the premise that Marty McFly travels back in time from 1985 to 1955 and accidentally prevents his parents' first meeting in high school. In doing so, he has a week to fix things and get them together before time gets screwed up beyond repair and he misses his one chance to get back to his own time. Thus, the logic is pretty simple - Marty messed things up, and now he has to put it right. Pretty simple, right?

First, let me say that Back to the Future is one of my favorite movies, but I have a feeling that if it was released today, it would be nitpicked to death, as audiences are a lot savvier about time travel logic 25 years later. For example, in the process of getting his parents back together, Marty ends up creating a situation where his father George not only stands up to school bully Biff, but actually beats him up, and he ends up encouraging his father to take a chance on his own dreams of being a writer. This evolution is a sharp contrast to the way his father was in the original timeline. The 1985 George seen at the start of the film is a complete wimp who is still being bullied by Biff, but when Marty returns to 1985 at the end of the film, George is a successful writer, his parents' marriage is stronger and now Biff cows to George.

So Marty's visit changed some major stuff. Yet amazingly all of these major changes apparently had zero effect on the nights where Marty's parents conceived him and his siblings and despite their fortunes being much better in this new timeline, they still live in the same house. If the movie was held to strict logic, this probably would seem cheesy. However, because writer Bob Gale and director Bob Zemeckis crafted the film with a fun, almost whimsical tone, no one is likely to cry foul.

This fudging works because the script's own approach to time travel has been pretty loose. It helps that when Marty prevents his parents' meeting it's a big moment. It's not a butterfly effect-like set of dominoes like "Marty taking too long to place his order at the diner results in George not getting his food until five minutes later than he was meant to, which means that he leaves the diner later, which means that when he falls out of the tree after peeping into Lorraine's window there is no car to knock him out." Marty makes a BIG mistake, and then makes a BIG fix, so that keeps the audience focused on the broad strokes rather than the tiny details.

I do have to wonder about the fact that all of Marty's memories of growing up belong to a timeline that doesn't exist. Shouldn't the people living in the house be total strangers to him, more or less? What happens when his mother says, "Remember that summer up at Uncle Todd's cabin?" and Marty has no memory of it? And what happened to the Marty that those people knew? We've seen that he leaves this timeline much in the same way that "our" Marty did, but I'm left to wonder about his fate, and his life.

Another thing I find amusing in looking back at the films is how the second film was probably one of the first movies to really play with the idea of an alternate timeline. See, while Marty and Doc are visiting 2015, old Biff steals the time machine and uses it to deliver a sports almanac to himself in 1955. Thus, his younger counterpart has the results of every sporting event until 2000 and is able to put that to use by betting on the outcomes and amassing a significant fortune. Becoming a wealthy industrialist, he ends up corrupting the town and vastly altering the 1985 that Doc and Marty know.

The interesting thing is that the movie actually stops for two or three minutes so that Doc can literally pull out a blackboard and use it to deliver a lecture to Marty (and the audience) on how time travel has resulted in this alternate 1985. If I read that in a script today, I'd probably accuse it of overexplaining things, or talking down to the audience. I assume that at the time, there hadn't been many alternate timeline stories. so the filmmakers felt it necessary. (It's a Wonderful Life is the most obvious example I can think of. Can anyone think of any other major "alternate timeline" movies pre-1989?)

I also have to wonder about why Doc and Marty don't disappear when Biff alters time - and especially why the Delorean doesn't. In the alt-1985, Doc is committed in 1982, before he builds the time machine. Thus, there should be a paradox that results from the time machine not existing to cause all these problems. Wisely, the film avoids raising this issue at all. In the first film a big deal is made about how Marty's changes will cause him to be eventually erased from existence. It's an additional ticking clock. In Part II, Marty and Doc are merely working to set things right to prevent Biff's horrible future from coming to pass.

This is why I recommend that time-travel writers be aware of these little details, but do what they can to keep the audience from thinking on that micro-level. As cool as it is to think on the butterfly effect/chaos theory level of tiny changes producing huge results, if you open that can of worms then you're inviting the audience to nitpick a lot more closely.

Pick a set of time travel rules and stick to them. Then do what you can to keep things from getting too complicated.