An interview with Bob Gale (Back to the Future)

Once again, I would like to thank the great people at the Arclight and Gordon Meyer of Hollywood’s Master Storytellers for making this possible.
An interview with Bob Gale (Oct. 24, 2003) by Karie Bible
What were your early influences growing up and what made you fall in love with movies?
Disney movies when I was a little kid made a huge impression on me.  I think Peter Pan was probably the first movie I ever saw.  Of course the coupling of a live action cartoon with the idea of being able to fly is every kid’s fantasy.  We obviously didn’t have videos back then, but they had these records and picture books.  Disney made these records and picture books that had excerpts from the soundtrack.  I used to listen to the record and look at the picture books everyday.  That was a huge influence.  I became a big Walt Disney fan.  I watched the Sunday night show religiously and I couldn’t wait to see what was going to be at the very end.  They would always have a little preview of what the next Disney film was.  I couldn’t wait for those.  When I got a little bit older, the movie The Great Escape had a big impression on me.  It was the first movie I ever saw twice.  My father ridiculed the idea that I would have any reason to go see a movie a second time.  He’d say, “What, do you think it’s going to turn out different if you go see it again?”  George Pal’s The Time Machine was a big deal.  The Twilight Zone on television was something I watched all the time.  I couldn’t get enough of that.  Through The Twilight Zone, I discovered Ray Bradbury and more science fiction and comic books.  All that stuff added up together did a pretty good job of warping my mind. 
When did you decide to go to film school?
I started making movies as a hobby in high school, but I grew up in St. Louis, Mississouri so the idea of going to Hollywood to be a filmmaker was not…..well, on career day that didn’t come up.  So I went to Tulane University my freshman year to engineering school because I was a sputnik kid.  Everything was math and science.  I was good at math and science.  I liked it.  What do you do if you are good at math and science?  You go to engineering school.  I hated it.  There was a kid in my dorm who was also a hobby filmmaker.  He said, “You know there are film schools in California.”  I said “Really!  I never heard of such a thing!”  He gave me the best advice anybody ever gave me.  He said if you make your hobby you career, you’ll be good at it and you’ll wake up every morning and enjoy it.  So I wrote away to USC and UCLA and NYU and got their catalogs for the film schools.  Filmmaking sounded a lot more interesting than organic chemistry.  I told my parents that this is what I wanted to do, and they thought I was insane.  It was at a real college and I could get a real degree.  That was really important to my parents.  I got into USC and that’s where I met Bob Zmeckis and we both had the arrogant idea that out of film school we would both go into professional Hollywood filmmaking, and we kind of did. 
What was your transition from film school to working in Hollywood?
Bob (Zemeciks) and I first took jobs as production assistants on different movies.  That was no fun at all.  While we were still in film school, we thought that we should go out and make a feature.  I had this idea for a horror movie about a whorehouse full of vampires called Bordello of Blood.  I actually started writing the script while we were still in school and finished it that summer.  So we thought, “Let’s run around and see if we can get anyone to finance this and we’ll go off and make it.”  We came close, but it never happened.  Then Bob started hanging around Universal Studios.  He heard the famous story about how Spielberg hung around Universal Studios and took over an office and somebody thought he was a director and gave him a job directing.  It’s a good story but not exactly true.  We believed it.  So he (Zemeckis) was hanging around observing on a TV show called “McCloud” and one night he calls me up and says, “Hey Bob, we’ve got to write a McCloud episode.  They’re down a script for the season and if we can bang one out real quick…..”  I said, “What’s McCloud?  I’d never even seen the show.”  So he swiped a bunch of scripts from the production office and we read them and watched the show when it was on Sunday night and in about 12 days we banged out a 2 hour McCloud episode, which Universal optioned.  It didn’t end up getting made because Dennis Weaver got upset that 2 guys who had never written anything were going to write for his show.  He felt that it couldn’t be any good because we didn’t have any credits. It was kind of crummy that he sabotaged it.  We wrote 2 other TV things at Universal and using this theory that what we should be writing for were the shows that were at the bottom of the ratings that nobody else wanted to write for because they would have demand for scripts.  They would pick up a whole season of a series back then as opposed to six episodes at a time, which is what they do now so the network might be on the hook for a whole season of a show that they already knew they were going to cancel.  Then the good writers don’t want to write for those shows because there are no re-runs and no residuals.  That was where we saw a vacuum and we sold a nine page story outline for Kolchak the Nightstalker.  We didn’t have an agent.  We were just doing this on our own.  They offered us a seven year contract to write television.  We didn’t want to write television and that wasn’t what we were in the business to do.  So we busted in the office Hal Barber and Matthew Robbins who had also gone to USC and they had written Sugarland Express for Spielberg and they were either writing or about to start writing Mcarthur at Universal.  These were the guys that we wanted to be and they helped us.  They introduced us to their attorney who helped us get an agent and that’s what gave us a good kick into the feature world. 
Tell me about your entrance into the feature world.
We wrote a script on spec about some guys who got their hands on a Sherman tank from a VFW Hall and used it to hold the Standard Oil Building in Chicago for ransom.  The idea was that we had this low budget movie idea that we were trying to get made and we wrote a script that was like a big studio picture and one of the people that we gave it to was John Millius who was also a USC alumni.  The good thing about going to USC is that you can knock on the door of anybody who went there and say, “Hey I went to USC…can we talk?”  So John read this script and after he read it he called us into his office and said, “Boys this script demonstrates a great sense of social irresponsibility, and I admire that.”  He had just made The Wind and the Lion at MGM.  That was a great movie with Sean Connery, Candice Bergen and Brian Keith as Teddy Roosevelt.  It was a great movie!  MGM was really bullish on the movie and John had a four picture deal….two pictures that he would write and direct for himself and two pictures that he would produce.  He said, “I got this deal and I want to hire you guys to write something because that’s how I got started.  Francis Ford Coppola hired me to write Apocalypse Now and I want to pass it on.  So if you guys have any ideas…..”  We said, “Yeah, we came across this really interesting historical incident in the early part of WWII.  There was this false alarm air raid over Los Angeles and for five or six hours in the middle of the night anti-aircraft guns shot all night up at the sky…at nothing.  We think there’s a comedy here.”  John actually knew a little bit about it because he had written and researched a script about General Joseph Stillwell who had been stationed in California at that time of the war and this is the movie that became 1941.  So he hired us to write this and that was the first movie that we got paid real money to write.  We were young and stupid and ignorant about what you should do or what you shouldn’t do.  So we started writing all this crazy stuff about into the script….a ferris wheel rolling down Santa Monica Pier and a dogfight that took place on Hollywood Blvd. and a tank battle and all this stuff….not thinking how is anybody going to afford to make the movie with this kind of stuff in it.  John starts telling his friend Steven Spielberg about these two crazy guys out of USC that have written this script for him and he starts telling him about it.  Steven’s eyes were bugging out and he said, “I’ve got to read this script John, I’ve got to read this script.”  So Steven read it and he just got totally caught up in the insane exuberance of it all and he said, “I want to direct this, I’ve got to direct this.”  John said, “Well I want to direct it too, but ok Steven.”  The movie got set up and Steven said, “I want to make Close Encounters first and then I want to do this.”  So while we were doing rewrites of 1941 for Steven, we also pitched another idea about kids trying to crash a Beatles concert on the Ed Sullivan show in 1964.  Warner Bros. thought it would make a great movie, except there was one little problem….if they couldn’t get the rights to the Beatles music, there is no movie.  Rather than hiring us to write it, they said, “We need to see if we can make a deal to get the Beatles music, because we don’t want to pay you guys to write this unless we know we can make that deal.”  It took them nine months to make the deal, but they made the deal and we actually got the phone call while we were down in Mobile, Alabama with Steven.  They said, “The Beatles music deal is done. Come on back and write this script.”  So this was in around 1976 and we wrote the script that became I Wanna Hold Your Hand for Warner Bros. and Steven wanted to read it, because he was interested in anything we were doing, and he said to Bob Zemeckis, “Bob should direct this movie.”  Bob said, “Yeah I know Steven, but Warner Bros. has this policy against first time directors,” which they did at that time.  Steven said, “Well I’ll get on board as Executive Producer and see if we can change that.”  Warner Bros. wouldn’t budge on that.  They had gotten burned on a few first time director movies and they decided they weren’t going to do this.  Steven got the movie out of Warner Bros. and set up at Universal where they were happy to let Bob direct the movie.  The fall of 1977 we went into production on I Wanna Hold Your Hand. 
Back To The Future, tell me how that idea started.
We had always talked about trying to figure out how to do a time travel movie.  All we ever had was a title called Professor Brown Visits the Future.  We never knew what it was going to be about.  After we made Used Cars, I went back to my hometown in the suburb of St. Louis to visit my parents and I found my father’s high school year book, and I was thumbing through it and discovered my father was the president of his graduating class.  I thought about the president of my graduating class who was somebody I had nothing to do with.  I was on the student committee to abolish student government.  I was had no respect for any of these people who wanted to be the school politicians.  So it occurred to me, “Would I have been friends with my father if I had known him in high school?”  Then I thought what if you could go back in time and go to high school with your father.  What would that be like?  So I came back to California and I said, “Bob…think about this…..”  Then he said, “Yeah wouldn’t it be cool if you found out your mother said that she was a nun and turned out to be the school slut or something?”  We started cooking on this idea and realized that we had something here.  Columbia, who had made USED CARS, though that movie didn’t do well at the box office, they liked the movie very much and they liked us.  They said, “When you guys have a new idea we want to be the first ones to hear it.”  So we worked out this idea and went into Frank Price’s office and stated pitching the story.  It was the shortest pitch meeting we ever had because I could see that Frank got the idea right away.  The kid goes back in time, goes to high school with his parents and his mom falls in love with him instead of his dad.  He was sold at that point.  We had all this other stuff worked out.  Bob wanted to keep on telling him more and more and I was like “shut up, he gets it.”  Frank said, “Go, do it….we’ll make a deal and you can write that script.”  So we wrote two drafts of it at Columbia and they didn’t like it because it was too sweet.  It was too soft.  They wanted raunchy back then.  Stripes was a big hit and they wanted R-rated teen comedies.  R-rated teen comedies were a lot milder then than they are now.  They said, “Take it to Disney.”  Finally we took it to Disney.  It was before Eisner and Katzenberg were there.  This is the old Disney.  They said, “Are you guys kidding?  We’re Disney, we can’t do a movie like this…..the scene with the kid and his mother in the car?  That’s incest.  It’s dirty.  It’s taboo.  Every studio turned it down, most of them because it was too sweet and Disney because it was too dirty.  We ended up with about forty-something rejection letters from different studios and different producers that just said, “No.  It’s time travel.  It won’t make any money.”  Time travel was not a box office formula for success, but they didn’t understand that it wasn’t really about time travel…it was a story about a kid and his parents.  While trying to get that one off the ground, we wrote another script for ABC Motion Pictures that got put into pre-production and then they cancelled it because they market researched the concept and decided that nobody would see it.  Bob decided that he was so eager to get back to directing and so frustrated that here were the scripts we were doing and nobody was interested in them.  He said, “I’m going to take the next decent thing that gets offered to me.”  That was Romancing the Stone.  He goes off the makes Romancing the Stone. It’s a big hit and everyone wants to be in business with him.  The one movie he wanted to make was Back To The Future.  The one guy who had read the script and really liked it all along was Steven Spielberg.  We didn’t want to back into business with Steven because Steven was Executive Producer on I Wanna Hold Your Hand, Executive Producer on Used Cars, and director of 1941.  They all were disappointments at the box office and we didn’t want to get the reputation that we were these two guys who only worked because their pal Spielberg gives them a job.  We told Steven and he was cool with that.  He understood.  Once Romancing the Stone was a big hit, Bob (Zemeckis) felt that curse had been broken.  He said, “Let’s bring it back to the one guy that always believed in it, instead of all these fair weather friends that I have, let’s go back to the guy that got the script.”  It was very fortuitous that Steven had just set up Amblin Entertainment at Universal.  He was the new Walt Disney because of E.T.  He said, “Let’s make this the first Amblin movie.”  There we were.  It was 1984.  We got Back To The Future into production.
Were you surprised by the success of Back To The Future?
No, we had no idea that anyone was going to go see the movie.  We were very surprised by the success.  We would have just been happy if the movie made back a dollar after it had made back its cost.  We had no idea.  We were seen as a movie that was in trouble.  We shot the movie for five weeks with Eric Stoltz in the lead and then replaced him because it just wasn’t happening. The first inkling we had that we were doing something right was when we were shooting in Whittier High School with Michael J. Fox over spring break and kids were lined up seven deep to catch a glimpse of him.  He was a big star because of the TV series “Family Ties.”  That had never happened when we were shooting with Eric Stoltz.  We thought, “Wow, they know who this guy is, maybe somebody might actually go see this movie.”  Then when we had the first sneak preview, audiences just went crazy, but we had successful sneak previews on I Wanna Hold Your Hand and on Used Cars—which was the second most successful sneak preview that Columbia had ever had.  They were convinced it was going to be a big hit, but it was marketed badly.  The people that went to see it loved it, but we couldn’t get asses in seats.
After the Back To The Future film, what other things did you focus on after that?
I have a script that I want to direct, and I’ve been trying to get it off the ground for years.  That hasn’t happened.  I wrote a couple of other scripts while Bob went off and did Who Framed Roger Rabbit?.  It wasn’t long before Universal said they wanted a sequel.  Our ground rules were that we had to have Michael J. Fox and Christopher Lloyd.  We didn’t have any idea what the sequel would be. People thought that because of the ending to the first film that we must have known we would do a sequel.  We had no idea.  We asked Leah Thompson (“Lorraine McFly”) and Tom Wilson (“Biff”) and they said, “If you guys are doing it, I’m there.”  We asked Crispin Glover (“George McFly”) and he said, “I want the same deal that Michael J. Fox gets.”  This was coming from his agent.  I told the agent I wouldn’t even entertain that with a response.  I told the agent to go back to Crispin and talk to him and to call me back in a week or two with an acceptable quote.  Two weeks later the agent called me back and they said, “No, this is what he wants.”  That’s why in Back To The Future 2, George McFly is a tombstone. 
Tell me about the recent project you’ve been working on.
I directed feature called Interstate 60.  It’s an independent film that I made up in Canada for about $7 million.  It’s about a young man (played by James Marsden) who ends up taking a road trip on a highway that can’t be found on any map.  I also stars Gary Oldman and Christopher Lloyd.  Kurt Russell and Michael J. Fox did cameos for me.  It also features, Amy Smart, Amy Jo Johnson and Ann Margret.  It’s a weird little road movie.  The world will have to scratch their heads and say, “Why isn’t this guy in jail?” 
*Be sure to catch Bob Gale’s new film Interstate 60 when it screens at the ArcLight as part of the Hollywood’s Master Storytellers series on November 18th at 7:30pm.  There will be a Q&A after the film.  Interstate 60 has received rave reviews at several prominent film festivals.  Don’t miss it!

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