Talk about getting back in time: It’s crazy to think that this year’s July 4 weekend will mark the 40th anniversary of Back to the Future, (now available from Universal Pictures Home Entertainment) one of the biggest-ever movies about time travel long before our present century picked up the theme and ran with it in blockbusters like Avengers: Endgame.
Defining an entire generation’s worth of fun and forward-looking pop culture tropes while elevating Family Ties star Michael J. Fox from early-1980s NBC sitcom mainstay to mega-celebrity status, Back to the Future seems like an inevitable movie in hindsight. Directed by Oscar winner Robert Zemeckis from an insanely inventive screenplay co-written by Zemeckis and Bob Gale, it pretty much nailed the decade’s unique zeitgeist, blending humor and hopefulness with just the right dash of relatable teenage anxiety.
The crazy reason why Disney turned down Back to the Future
At the time, though, bringing Back to the Future out of its original time travel concept and through to the film’s eventual blockbuster completion was anything but inevitable. Against the backdrop of an early-‘80s movie comedy landscape that favored raunchier R-rated flicks, studios found myriad reasons to pass on the lighthearted sci-fi comedy screenplay pitch that Zemeckis and Gale had created.
After being turned away more than 40 times — often with an admonition that the BTTF story just felt too innocent and sweet for its trippy science fiction subject matter — Gale and Zemeckis decided they’d take their ostensibly family-friendly film treatment straight to Disney… the place, of course, where family films get made. But, as Gale reflected to Esquire for a 2015 lookback article as BTTF turned 30, Disney panned the movie with perhaps the harshest (and maybe most hilarious) criticism of all.
Taking offense to the movie’s famous midpoint storyline that throws Marty back to the 1950s and dares to give Lorraine (Lea Thompson), his eventual mother, a bad case of the high school hots for him, Gale said a Disney executive balked at an obviously funny romantic near-miss that looked, at least on paper, just a touch incestuous.
The movie’s offending moment comes as Marty tries to divert Lorraine’s libidinous advances inside a car at the fateful 1955 installment of Hill Valley’s Enchantment Under the Sea dance — a moment where Lorraine almost plants a big ol’ smooch on her future son before (thankfully!) sensing that something about the whole situation feels just a little bit… strange.
“‘’Are you guys out of your minds?’” Gale recalled of one top Disney executive’s rejection rant. “‘You can’t make a movie like this here. This is Disney, and you’re giving us a movie about incest! The kid with his mother in the car, that’s horrible!’”
Gale told Esquire that he and Zemeckis were fully aware that the movie’s almost-romantic storyline between Marty and his teenaged mother was threading a delicate thematic needle in a PG-rated comedy. But, he added, they found the perfect way to gracefully resolve the McFly family members’ almost-affair without altering its larger implications for Marty’s stuck-in-the-past predicament.
“We pushed that thing as far as we could go,” Gale admitted. “We kept the audience on edge, but we did not cross that line. We realized the person who had to say this wasn’t right was Marty’s mother, where she pulls away and says, ‘This is wrong, it’s like kissing my brother or something.’ What nobody picks up on is what was she doing with her brother that she would make that comparison? But we said, ‘That’s fine, the audience will believe that, they want to, because they don’t want it to happen.’”
With Marty’s literal fate in the balance, fans indeed had good reason —at least for once — to root against two teenagers locking lips on the big screen. And as everyone now knows, Back to the Future finally did find its way into theaters, after Universal Pictures picked up the project with strong support from co-executive producer Steven Spielberg.
Celebrate the 40th anniversary of Back to the Future’s July 3, 1985 release at Universal Pictures Home Entertainment, where the entire BTTF trilogy is available on both disc and on-demand.
