and Doc. "
Marty would be this kid who was attracted...
...to this crackpotscientist who was building
inventions in this garage down the street.
But wejust felt to build a whole back story
would take too long.
Wejustsort of did it
by trying to blast through it with the fact that...
...obviously they know each other
because they're so familiar.
When I was a kid,
people had moved next door to us.
The guy was a retired professional photographer.
Not retired, he wasjust much older,
and he had all this great darkroom equipment.
I was eightyears old,
and I'd neverseen any of this kind ofstuff before.
So this guy was like a magician to me...
...and me and my brothers would go over there
and watch him develop film.
We developed a relationship with him.
He wasjustsomebody that was
kind ofin my head as the type of thing.
Plus, in a smaller town, if everybody tells you
there's a guy who's dangerous, a crackpot...
...well, every kid's gonna want to find out
who that guy is and get to know him.
And every single movie story can be found
in episodes of Leave It to Beaver.
So for all you screenwriters out there...
...ifyou're struggling with a problem
in yourscreenplay, watch Leave It to Beaver.
You'll find the way to fix the script
in thatseries.
As you took the script around town,
and kept getting rejections...
...did you, at any point, go back
to the drawing board and revise the script?
What happened was that Spielberg
wanted to do it right after Used Cars.
He was the only guy who gotit.
But we had made two movies
that he executive produced that flopped.
-Plus 1941 which we took....
-We took the blame. Yeah.
His only money-losing movie
up to thatpoint was the one that we wrote.
I said to Steven, "If we make this movie,
and it doesn't work...
"... we'll probably never be able to work again. "
And he said, "You're right. "
Wejustputit on the shelf.
We actually even had one meeting on the movie
with a studio executive, who I won't name...
...who was so excited aboutit.
We sat down in his office and he went,
"Yeah, yeah, yeah. "
We're telling him what we want to do,
and we thoughtit was a really good meeting.
And he said, "So what's Steven's involvement?"
And we said, "Well, nothing. " He said, "Oh. "
And the meeting was over
and we knew that that was it.
So then after Romancing the Stone,
now everybody wanted to make it.
Bob and I felt
that the only upstanding thing to do...
...was to bring it to the only guy
who had original faith in it...
...not based on our box-office track record.
So we broughtit back to Steven.
Then he had become famous
with E.T. and everything.
So it was like this perfect fit,
because he was becoming this...
-... fantasy brand name...
-Master of fantasy and family entertainment.
That was one of the big objections to the script...
...is everybody told us thatit was too sweet.
It was too nice.
Everybody was looking
for R-rated, raunchy comedies.
Except Disney, who said it was too dirty.
Remember that?
Because of the thing with his mother,
they said, "No, no. "
That was before the Eisner-Katzenberg days.
That was the old Disney.
They said, "No, we can't make this. "
It wasn't raunchy enough for moststudios,
and too dirty for Disney.
So we were stuck.
How did you go about coming up
with the mechanics of the time travel?
Well, the mechanics of time travel....
The fact that everybody says, "Why 88 miles
an hour? What's so special about that?"
It's easy to remember. That's all.
There's no special significance to that.
The whole idea of what the time machine
should look like....
We decided way early on that...
...if there was going to be
a working time machine...
...one of the problems we had to solve
writing-wise, was "Where did it come from?"
First we said,
"Well, it could come from the government.
"The government could be working on it. "
We thought aboutit and said,
"No, if they builtit, it wouldn't work. "
Then we