A very nearly perfect analysis marred by the desire to weld a call to action onto what should be a historical treatise. It's unfortunate that the author (couldn't see who - something I hate about Medium) didn't delve a little deeper into the history of Back to the Future. Zemeckis and Gale were tarnished wunderkinds at the time; they were the screenwriters on the universally-reviled "1941" but hey, that was a Spielberg so at least they had good friends. And the version they shopped around, the version of BttF that everybody hated, the version they couldn't get made, had Marty and Doc working at a video rental store and bootlegging porn in the back room. It wasn't a DeLorean, it was a refrigerator. And it ran on New Coke. Which, of course, didn't exist in 1955. So Doc had to drag Marty and the fridge in the back of a pickup truck out to the Nevada Test Site where an open-air nuclear detonation would provide the 1.21 gigawatts of energy necessary to get Marty back to the future - which was much more 2015 than 1985 as 1955-doc had given Coke the new recipe so that he could partner with them to provide a Jetsons-like utopian economy due to unlimited cheap energy. http://www.scifiscripts.com/scripts/back_to_the_future_original_draft.html Zemeckis wanted John Lithgow and Eric Stoltz as pervy video store operators who save the world through a peculiar combination of armageddon and New Coke. I mean, they wanted to out-Repo Man Repo Man. Yeah, BttF is '80s as fuck. The "tape" analogy is a good one, too - analog and digital. It was an era where we saw computers, we messed with computers, but computers weren't yet an integral part of our lives and we didn't fully understand what they did. They were bloopy bleepy things of spinning reels and vocoded voices that largely existed to cause mayhem. Real advancements were still physical - faster cars, more efficient microwave ovens, better blenders. I mean, this is the Cuisinart era. That thing was fuckin' revolutionary and it's nothing but a weird blender. We got a Discman that year - the first. Effectively, the same as a record player... except you could take it in the car. But o, children gather 'round and imagine if no one you knew had ever seen a compact disc before. I mean - rainbows'n'shit! For most people, it was legitimately their first experience with polycarbonate. But then the author gets mired in the same tawdry "where's my flying car" whinge: And for this he points to ABC vs. Aereo... oddly enough, a ruling that says other companies can't use fair use to profit off of broadcast. It says exactly fuckall about timeshifting and everything about crass corporate profiteering. Which, really, is the true harbinger of BttF. It featured more product placement than any movie before (or any movie for years after). Even Bob Gale is a little ashamed of it in the commentary. California Raisins paid $4m towards that film and all they got was a placard on a bus bench (the raisin council demanded - and got - their money back). And yes, JVC vs Sony... but Aiwa was always partly owned by Sony. And yes, it's ironic and appropriate that Universal, the respondent vs. Sony, was the distributor of BttF. After all, BttF is structurally about George McFly. Bob Gale and Robert Zemeckis freely admit this. But when Crispin Glover pointed it out as a reason why he needed more money for BttF Part II, Zemeckis fired his ass and used a look-alike. Glover sued, Spielberg & Zemeckis settled out of court and the Screen Actors' Guild changed their bylaws so nobody could ever do that again. Crispin Glover still played Golem in Zemeckis' Beowulf. The takeaway is not "Let’s stop checklisting and complaining and start opening things up and bolting them together again" it's "when did we give up ownership so easily?" (hint: halfway to 1985) sidenote to thenewgreen: I know almost as much about Back to the Future as I do about Red Dawn.George resumes his own unfinished business. He attaches a suction cup to his forehead which is connected to a pen-like device by a wire, and waves the “pen” over a blank check---handwriting appears, accompanied by electronic beeps. It says, “Pay to the order of the Coca Cola Company.”
Instead, be disappointed that the momentum of the cassette era has slowed, stopped, and even been rolled back; be disappointed that tech and media companies alike work with judges and law enforcement to take our machines and our culture back out of our own hands.
What's your opinion of 1941? I haven't seen it in a long time, but when I was a kid I used to watch it on repeat. It was one of the few VHSs we owned, and I don't remember ever getting bored of it. That said, I don't know how I would feel watching it as an adult, and I'm not sure I even want to, because sometimes it's better to let childhood nostalgia remain so.
Doesn't it say who the author is in the footer? I'm seeing the name Tim Carmody associated with this piece. I wouldn't mind seeing that version of BttF as an homage piece or just for the hell of it, seems wildly entertaining but much worse than what ended up being made. I remember hearing about the raisin fiasco and finding it funny. Pointing out blatant product placement in older movies can be fun. How do you know this much about Back to the Future?
Not sure how I missed that. I think Medium's need for frames fucks with my reading. Strap in. ____________________________________________________________ I know this much about BttF because it is one of my favorite movies of all time AND perhaps the single most stultifyingly-complex-yet-outwardly-simple movie ever made. It is a screenwriting master class in one film. Consider: By the end of BttF there's an angry Libyan terrorist faction with grenade launchers stalking the suburbs of Los Angeles for a mad scientist that stole their plutonium. It can be assumed that they wanted the scientist to use a bomb against the United States. They've been forcibly removed from the plot by driving into a photomat in a VW bus at something less than 88mph on a weeknight - probably not a fatality and it does nothing to erase the whole Libyan terrorists - grenade launchers - machine guns - Los Angeles-ness of it all. This is 1985. That's a fucking Chuck Norris movie waiting to happen, not a well-spackled loophole. We wouldn't forgive that sort of SNAFU in a Michael Bay movie... yet audiences (including myself!) will respond to that last paragraph with "Oh yeah! Well, sure, Libyans. Whatever. The movie wasn't about the Libyans." This showed up on Reddit yesterday (your link is orders of magnitude better). It's a thousand words basically outlining the plot loophole that fuckin' A George McFly knew Marty was a time traveler. It finishes with a gushing "but it's such a great movie." I've probably seen five or six similar analyses on any number of the loose ends scattered all over BttF and every single one of them ends with a similar (and correct) "but it's such a great movie so who cares?" The amount of goodwill that movie buys, simply by being superlative in structure, is astounding. And it's a time travel movie. Know what movie the geeks drag out when they want to discuss structure in time travel movies? If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough. - Albert Einstein Here's the structure of BttF: Marty goes back in time by accident, saves his father when he shouldn't have, then has to get his parents back together while waiting for his time machine to be fixed. You could write that shit on the back of a matchbook. It's completely simple. It's deceptively simple. ___________________________________________________________________________________________________ Marty Isn't The Hero There are very few films that pull this off: make a movie in which the person you follow around the whole time isn't the one with the arc. Isn't the one the important stuff happens to. Isn't the one you have to root for. It's A Wonderful Life is not about Clarence. The Last King of Scotland is not about the doctor. BttF took a rising television star and turned him into one of the most passive protagonists in film so that the son of that weird dude from Diamonds Are Forever could be heroic. You know the Monomyth? I could drag Marty and George through all 17 stages. Know what? They both go through all 17 stages. But the 17 stages Marty goes through have nothing to do with getting back to 1985 or preventing his own extinction. George, though, - Is set on a different course when he's saved from being hit by a car - Refuses the call to action (Marty) to date Lorraine - Receives supernatural aid in the form of Darth Vader - Crosses the threshold and undergoes trials to get the girl - Meeting with the temptress, Woman as goddess, atonement with the father (that is actually the son) - all that shit in the parking lot with Biff is this stuff for George, not Marty ... I'm getting too writerly. Here, hang on. So you've probably never even noticed that there's a pump-fake climax in which George decks the shit out of Biff but then, for some stupid reason, we have to go back and do Enchantment Under the Sea and Johnny B. Goode. You've probably never noticed because Libyans and awesomeness. It works and, aside from sub-standard SFX and an edit that doesn't hide them, it works really well. From a structural standpoint though it's fuckin' weird. Marty has succeeded. GEORGE HAS THE GIRL. But check this: - Marty won by accident. - And George won in the heat of passion. It doesn't truly count until George demonstrates that yes, he's a different person now. From Marty's perspective? It probably counts fine. He got his folx back together. But from a story perspective, our hero needs to conquer his task, which isn't Marty getting "back to the future" it's George becoming a better man. And that's the deep, lurking structure of Back to the Future. That's the ancient leviathan at the heart of a lively, trite piece of summer entertainment. It's George McFly becoming George Bailey while Marty flits around being Clarence the time-shifting angel so that in the end, he can get his Toyota-truck-shaped wings. It took me, and maybe 20 other screenwriters I was talking with, a good week to really hammer that out. It still makes me sit here agape in a "Childs isn't breathing" sort of way. But Zemeckis new it. And Gale knew it. And Crispin Glover knew it, and called them out when they tried to cheap out on his salary. 'cuz you know what? BttF isn't BttF without George McFly. It's a trite tromp of tropes with a DeLorean in it. Which is pretty much what BttF II and BttF III are. I love 'em, don't get me wrong. Own the box set. If I wrote something as good as BttF III I'd be insufferably proud of myself. But Back To The Future, the original Huey-Lewis-Dripping Klein Bottle of a narrative, is a masterpiece. Believe it or not, I could go on. I'm already slightly embarrassed for having cooked off an hour on a Saturday night writing all this shit up but it's just that impressive to me. I'll say this: the only other thing I've seen come close to that level of structural beauty/contortion is Madoka Magika, and it's also fucking incredible for all those reasons and more. Besides, that way I get to ping eightbitsamurai so that at least one other person sees this. In an alternate universe somewhere, there are the movies Robert Zemeckis, Stephen Spielberg, Bob Gale, Michael J Fox and Crispin Glover made when Zemeckis and Glover figured out a compromise to keep George McFly at the heart of Back To The Future. And I'll never see them but I'll bet they're outstanding.Doesn't it say who the author is in the footer?
How do you know this much about Back to the Future?
Primer is one of those movies I always hear about when people want to talk about how good their movie taste is, but don't actually know anything about. The whole Libyans thing was always weird to me and something I've never paid much attention to, but the rest of that. Wow, I'm going to have to rewatch BttF. I love the first movie and enjoy II and III a lot, but the first is up there for my favorite movies and I need to see it from the lens you just provided. Might need to watch Madoka Magika too, but I've never really watched any anime. Sidebar: Speaking of Los Angeles-ness, I saw The Terminator in one of the small theaters around here last night, and the atmosphere in that movie makes so much more sense on the big screen.
I can attest to kb's statement. I've only watched Spirited Away before watching Madoka Magica, and I think Madoka Magica is amazing. Makes Inception look like child's play. The first two episodes (only like 40 minutes screen time) seem very puzzling but it's intentionally so. By the third and fourth episode I was hooked.
You don't need to have any appreciation for anime to get Madoka Magika.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puella_Magi_Madoka_Magica#Critical_reception I've been thinking about this. Non-guitarists can watch Eddie Van Halen and go "damn, that dude can play." Guitar players are more likely to point to Steve Vai or Yngwie Malmstein because their technical chops far exceed Van Halen. Fewer people listen to their music, though. Non-motorcyclists can watch the Isle of Man and be impressed. Motorcyclists can watch the Isle of Man and know that even if they disobeyed the speed limit they couldn't get around that track in less than an hour and here the top guys are, churning it in fifteen minutes. If you watch Back to the Future and don't know much about structure, it's a fun film. If you watch Back to the Future and know anything about screenwriting you recognize that you need Yngwie Malmsteen's chops to play that tune. And I gotta tell ya. Watching Madoka from a writer's perspective they do shit that you didn't know was possible. I hit the end of Episode 3 and knew I was watching something masterful. I hit the beginning of Episode 10 and my jaw literally dropped. I'm not that into Anime. I appreciate the art form but I'm not a big fan. "Magical girls" are a shit genre. Watching Madoka Magica unfold is like watching Mary Lou Retton score her Perfect 10 except instead of being a spunky little trained-by-Bela teenager Mary Lou is a 40-year-old roller derby washout. You know that Susan Boyle video, where you're watching and you're going "I fucking hate American Idol, I hate talent shows, this lady is weird looking, why am I doing this HOLY SHIT SHE CAN SING?" As a writer, that's Madoka Magica. For you, it might just be a good anime.Scott Green of Ain't It Cool News commented that the series was "hugely admirable" and he would give it the highest possible recommendation to anyone even slightly interested in anime.
Production I.G's Katsuyuki Motohiro watched Puella Magi Madoka Magica after hearing opinions that it exceeded Neon Genesis Evangelion. Upon viewing the series, he was so amazed that he began analyzing Urobuchi's other works and was then motivated to request Urobuchi to write the crime thriller Psycho-Pass.
