How to Write Back to the Future

How to Write Back to the Future

by L.A. Zvirbulis

1 – The Inspiration. Go home to visit your parents. Snoop through their old stuff. Find your Dad’s high school yearbook and ask fun questions like, “Would I be friends with my Dad if we were the same age at the same time?” Good question. Good movie idea. Thanks, Dad.

2 – The Genre. The easiest way for a teenager to meet his parents as teenagers is to go back in time. Voila! A time travel movie with some comedy and cool special effects and maybe some incest if we are lucky. Now what?

3 – The Complications. What’s the worst that could happen? If you meet your parents before they are your parents – well, you may accidentally prevent them from becoming your parents, thus endangering your own existence. Whoopsies. And just to clear something up, make sure that Marty never “has the hots” for his Mom. It’s his teenage Mom that has the hots for her son! Get it right, comedians. And I’d rather sit in a car with my yet to be born teenage son than that bully Biff any day. Also, please remember you can name villains in your movie after people you don’t like in real life.

4 – The Fun Stuff. Skateboarding and Rock & Roll, baby. Have Marty invent things that eventually become popular but maybe let’s not be too culturally inappropriate (sorry, Chuck Berry). Where do you put the two most fun scenes? The midpoint and just before the climax (the climax being Marty actually going “Back to the Future”). Then you have to show that Marty knows how to skateboard and play the guitar in the 1980s, so add a couple set-up scenes. Wow, we have four scenes already!

5 – The Device. A refrigerator. No. A car. A cool car. A DeLorean. Yeah. Super cool. You can make stuff up like “the flux capacitor is what makes time travel possible” because you’re the writer and don’t have to explain it beyond that. Also make up some rules, like plutonium, 1.21 jigawatts, and 88 miles per hour.  Make it leave flames in its tire tracks and fly at the end. Yeah.

6 – The Doc. Once we have Marty, his parents, and the time machine, now we need someone who can actually operate said time machine that is an adult in both time periods. Someone Marty can go to for help that isn’t family. Super convenient if the inventor of the time machine is also friends with modern Marty, and just so happens to have thought of the flux capacitor the day this strange Future Boy shows up in the past. That’s why Doc is so much older than Marty, people. It’s not weird. It’s efficient screenwriting.

7 – The Jokes. Even sci-fi period-piece family films need some comedy. Keep the jokes in the same “game”. For those of you who haven’t started Improv 201 yet, the game is the one weird, hopefully funny thing in a scene that gets played over and over again. In this case, it is generational differences. The future President used to be a B-List actor. Asking for a Pepsi Free is an insult when a tab wasn’t a Tab and the only drink without sugar was coffee. Saying “Daddy-O” is an easy way to cover up for accidentally calling your new teenage friend Dad. There are so many jokes in the “generational differences” game, so just keep ‘em coming, like reruns.

8 – The Title. You know exactly what happens from the title. Marty gets Back to the Future. It’s perfect and nobody cares that it gives away the ending. And while a studio exec might suggest the title “Spaceman From Pluto” by reminding us that Marty’s Dad is actually the protagonist who changed his life after being visited by an alien, stick to your wits. How can you go “Back” to the “Future”? Makes you think. Makes you spend money to go back to see the movie again.

9 – The Ending. Write what you will, but things will change when filming starts. The studio doesn’t care that you wrote the best ending of all time – a DeLorean driving into the mushroom cloud of an atomic bomb test site. It makes sense for the time period. It’s gonna look great on film. It’s going to be incredibly expensive. So when money must be saved, writers gotta change. Use some place you have for free, like the backlot of the studio that you’re already using. Perfect. Take an ending from a movie you wrote previously that no one really saw. Awesome. Put the inventor of time travel inside of a clock and then let a fortunately timed lightning strike be the hand of God that saves everything. Great.

10 – The Heart. Back to the Future is a movie about a teenager who learns how to like his parents. It answers the original inspiring question “Would I be friends with my Dad if we were the same age at the same time?” Yes. But only after fixing his life for him. Thanks, Dad, and you’re welcome.

*L.A. Zvirbulis did not write Back to the Future. Bob Gale and Robert Zemeckis did.