Back to the Future Part II wasn't really supposed to exist as its own film. The original Back to the Future's "TO BE CONTINUED" tag was actually a post-hoc addition for home video, not a plan, after studio head Sid Sheinberg demanded a sequel. The pitch that eventually became two movies went from Bob Gale and Robert Zemeckis, through Spielberg, to Sid Sheinberg, who greenlit the whole thing on the spot.

From the film's vision of the future 2015, to its pre-CGI ingenuity, and a purpose-built motion-control rig called the VistaGlide that let Michael J. Fox play multiple characters in the same unbroken shot, Back to the Future Part II's ingenious visual effects work was good enough to earn it an Oscar nomination.

But we need to talk about George McFly. The character was originally written as dead in the darker alternate-1985 timeline, after negotiations with Crispin Glover fell apart over money and a real creative disagreement about where the character's arc was headed. What happened next was the production used face moulds taken from Glover during the first film to build facial prosthetics for his replacement, Jeffrey Weissman. It led to an infamous lawsuit over the reconstruction of his likeness without consent, that would have ramifications in Hollywood for decades to come...

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Hi, everyone, I'm Em, and welcome to Verbal Diorama, episode 356, Back to the Future Part Two. This is the podcast that's all about the history and legacy of movies you know and movies you don't. And obviously, the time continuum has been disrupted, creating this new temporal event sequence resulting in this alternate reality.

Duh. Welcome to Verbal Diorama, whether you're a brand-new listener, whether you're a regular returning listener, thank you so much for being here, and thank you for choosing to listen to this podcast. I'm so happy to have you here for the history and legacy of Back to the Future Part Two. If you are a regular returning listener, thank you so much for continuing to listen and support this podcast.

Interestingly, you do kind of have to go back because- One of the things I love to do in September is something called Sequel-tember. I've done it a few times actually, and Sequel-tember has returned with, this time around, some of the biggest sequels of all time. And up first is a sequel to an episode from back in episode 250.

Let's run through the cast of this movie. We have Michael J. Fox as Marty McFly, Marty McFly Jr., and Marlene McFly; Christopher Lloyd as Dr. Emmett Brown; Lea Thompson as Lorraine Baines McFly; Thomas F. Wilson as Biff Tannen, Griff Tannen, and the voice of Gertrude Tannen; Elizabeth Shue as Jennifer Parker; Weissman as George McFly, with archive footage of Crispin Glover, gonna come back to him; and James Tolkan as Mr.

The flying car and we have to do something about your kids at the end of Back to the Future was a joke and nothing more than that. They had no intention of writing a sequel. When Back to the Future took off and became a smash hit, holding the top spot at the box office for 11 out of 12 weeks, Universal Studio head Sid Sheinberg immediately wanted a sequel.

Zemeckis and Gale were reluctant. They were happy with one and done, but Sheinberg wasn't. He told them that Universal would make a sequel with or without their involvement. and Gale said they'd do it as long as Michael J. Fox and Christopher Lloyd had deals in place to return because they'd only signed contracts for one Back to the Future movie, so they'd have to sign on for more.

Sid Sheinberg would have to wait for this newly minted sequel, though, because Robert Zemeckis went off to make Who Framed Roger Rabbit and planned to return to Hill Valley after that. It meant Bob Gale picking up a lot of the first draft script writing in his absence, and the jokey ending of Back to the Future left him in a bit of a pickle because they had specifically put Jennifer in the DeLorean at the end of the first movie.

Had they known they were doing a sequel, Jennifer would never have been in the car with Marty and Doc at the end because what would they actually do with Jennifer

It was an incredibly clever prospect that would also push the boundaries of the capability of the technology at the time.

Then they envisaged What became parts two and three as one film with a new third act with Marty and Doc in the Wild West. They talked about the first act being Marty's story and the final one being Doc's, and giving Doc a love interest. Bob Gale decided to take a week to rewrite the Old West material and not worry about length and just tell the story as it needed to be told.

How about we take this very long sequel and make two sequels out of it? Instead of doing one movie for $55 million, let's do two movies for $70 million." Now, Sid Sheinberg green-lit the two movies and filming them back to back on the spot, not just because of the budget, but also to minimalize continuity errors, which mattered enormously given how many overlapping timelines the stories involved.

This decision actually led to the Screen Actors Guild requiring all future actors' contracts to include what has become known as the Salkind clause, which stipulates that single productions cannot be split into multiple installments without prior contractual agreement.

The Salkinds would also attempt to make Superman and Superman II back to back. That didn't quite work out. There are previous episodes of this podcast that go into that, episode 152 on Superman and episode 231 on all of the Superman sequels, including the Richard Donner cut of Superman II. but back to Zemeckis and Gale because having decided their film would indeed start in the future, they faced the monumental task of shaping the future of Hill Valley.

He didn't like that money equaled happiness. When he was asked to return for a sequel that prominently featured George McFly, Glover reportedly wanted an increase in salary and script approval. Allegedly, a large increase, although Glover would refute Bob Gale's claim that it was the same remuneration package of Michael J.

Fox that Glover had asked for. $1 million has been bandied about. Glover would allege that he was offered less than half what Lea Thompson and Thomas F. Wilson were offered, and that the low offer was punishment for questioning the first movie's materialistic ending. Anyway, they were basically at a stalemate, Zemeckis and Gale refusing to pay more, Glover refusing to accept less, and so Crispin Glover wouldn't return and assumed the part of George McFly would simply be recast.

Since he was now four years older than he was previously, locking him in for one continuous filming stretch made more sense than waiting and rematching his appearance later. Marty would also be slightly different personality-wise, easily provoked by someone calling him chicken, and that stemmed from Zemeckis and Gale realizing that they needed to give Marty an arc and a problem he needed to solve, which became his hot-headedness.

Another hint that they never planned a sequel originally, because they gave George the arc in that movie. There was nothing that Sid Sheinberg could do about Robert Zemeckis's availability though. He remained annoyed that Roger Rabbit's extended post-production schedule was delaying the start of filming of Back to the Future Part 2.

Carter faced the challenge of imagining Hill Valley 30 years in the future, and he deliberately steered away from the genre's dominant visual language. Carter wanted a different tone from other futuristic movies like Blade Runner, aiming to get past the smoke and chrome aesthetic that had become the default shorthand for movie futures.

He worried about the risk of making predictions that would look foolish in hindsight, and later admitted the future set scenes were his least favorite part of making the trilogy because he's generally not fond of films that try to forecast what's coming. I mean, they did get the Donald Trump allegory spot on.

In the first film, the town square of the '50s has a beautiful grassy park. In the '80s, they paved it over for a carpark. And now in the future, they've realized they need green space, and so they have a park and a pond with 75 shops underneath because the courthouse is now the courthouse mall.

A 60 foot by 80 foot piece of the square was excavated, filled with more than 80,000 gallons of water, and surrounded by a diverse variety of tropical foliage. Costume designer Joanna Johnston replaced Deborah Lynn Scott from the first movie and initially found the futuristic prospect terrifying.

ILM built a 1/15 scale remote controlled miniature with folding wheels for many of the flying sequences. For close-ups and cockpit shots, a DeLorean body shell was mounted on a moving practical rig. A separate fiberglass DeLorean was built for landing shots, lifted and lowered on hydraulics to create the illusion of the car settling on the ground.

He was already a skilled skater from stunt work on the first film, although he did struggle to remember how to ride one at first. For surfaces a skateboard couldn't handle, the crew simply laid down plywood tracks for him to ride across. For actual floating shots, actors were rigged in harnesses, boards were rigged with piano wire, and in some setups, rare earth magnets created the hovering illusion, with any visible rigging painted out afterwards by ILM.

The bounce shots where a board hits the ground were achieved through old school puppeteering, a puppeteer lowering the board onto wires in front of a blue screen, and that footage was composited into the final scene. Zemeckis leaned into the mythology afterwards with a tongue-in-cheek making of segment claiming hoverboards were real, but withheld from the public over safety concerns.

Zemeckis wasn't, wasn't interested in a sequel that simply got the band back together and having them go on another adventure and call it the sequel of Back to the Future, because we know Doc Brown has invented a viable method of time travel. They wanted to do something that had never been done in a sequel before, to go back into the first movie and re-witness scenes from that film from a completely different perspective, including seeing things from different angles.

Frames from the movie were enlarged for the production team to recreate the look of the first movie in minute detail. Whittier High School again doubled for Hill Valley High, and the gymnasium of the First United Methodist Church in Hollywood hosted its second Enchantment Under the Sea dance, looking exactly like the first with many of the same dancers returning Luckily, the majority of the crew returned to work on the sequel too, and many of them remembered key details.

And there's a door frame or something in between the two of them, a straight vertical line where they can put the film split. But with the Vista Glide, Zemeckis was able to move that split back and forth within the scene so characters could walk around themselves or even pass objects to each other. The actor having filmed one side of the scene would then get redressed as the other character.

A small receiver was placed in their ear to enable them to hear and react to the dialogue of their other character while the second side was put to film. And that's how the then 47-year-old Marty McFly, played by Michael J. Fox in prosthetics, can sit at the table and enjoy a dinner with his teenage children, Marty Jr, played by Michael J.

But then an earthquake happened. One night they locked up the stage, and they put guards around it so that nothing was disturbed, and the San Andreas fault made itself known. Luckily, it was only a small earthquake, so they were still able to shoot the scenes they hadn't yet done, and it ended up being seamless in the final product Back to the Future Part Two was one of ILM's most groundbreaking projects at the time, being one of the effects house's first forays into digital compositing.

Eagle-eyed viewers will also see baby Elijah Wood credited as Video Game Boy number two. The Wild Gunman arcade machine was made for the movie, but it was a real Nintendo title, not available in arcades but available to buy on the NES or N-E-S as most of the world call it. Basically, that little Nintendo box that we all had when we were kids.

And in the brief to each company

they were asked to redesign their logos and products as they thought they might look in 30 years' time. Nike's power-lacing shoes were designed by Tinker Hatfield, the actual Nike designer behind the Air Max. The trick to the auto-lacing on screen was simple. The trainers were stuck to a fake floor when Fox put them on, with a crew member underneath pulling the laces tight by hand and switching on the Nike logo.

The same approach was used when his jacket resizes itself. Crew members just out of frame pulled cables to tighten the jacket around him

And not just visually, but also give them different personality sets because they had to sell these were the older versions of these characters. Two years were needed to finish building the sets and writing the scripts before shooting could begin. During filming, the creation of the appearance of the aged characters was a well-guarded secret involving state-of-the-art makeup techniques by makeup artist Ken Chase.

Fox described the process as very time-consuming. He spent in excess of four hours in the makeup chair in preparation of his scenes as old Marty, and found that under two inches of rubber, you're a lot less self-conscious and find a new character. adding a jadedness to the character of 47-year-old Marty McFly.

Linda would've been working as a sex worker to settle her gambling debts, but Wendy Jo Sperber, who played Linda, was pregnant and unable to film, so the Dave scene was ultimately cut so that audiences didn't question where Linda was

Even Steven Spielberg was fooled

And the plan was for her stunt double, Cheryl Wheeler-Dixon, to crash into the glass window 20 feet into the air along with the other stunt people. But due to the alignment of the crane suspending her, Wheeler-Dixon actually crashed into one of the poles instead. She was then dropped 14 feet onto cement instead of the padding, and that take actually ended up in the final cut of Back to the Future Part Two.

No charges were filed as the case was determined to be justifiable homicide.

The soundtrack for Back to the Future Part Two only contains a musical score composed and conducted by Alan Silvestri and performed by the Hollywood Studio Symphony. None of the vocal songs featured throughout the film are included

That was very different to the reception to the original movie, which spent 11 out of its first 12 weeks of release at number one at the box office and staying in the US top 10 for 26 weeks. Part II remained in the top 10 for only eight weeks. There were signs, therefore, that audiences weren't quite so receptive to the return of Marty and Doc.

Weissman has never confirmed or denied this, though. Universal filed a demurrer, arguing that the publicity rights claim should fail because the filmmakers were only trying to perpetuate the George McFly character. As the dispute heated up, Glover and Cary began to have conversations with each other about the future of computer graphic technology and how what was being done to Glover might impact other actors, and that argument was passed along to the judge.

The judge rejected Universal's bid to toss the lawsuit and agreed to let Cary depose director Robert Zemeckis, screenwriter Bob Gale, actor Michael J. Fox, Steven Spielberg, and others. The plaintiff also wanted a complete accounting of the finances of Back to the Future Part II because a demand was being made for a share of the film's profits.

Hiring an actor that is made up to look like a predecessor might not be. The line is blurry to say the least, and now you can create a complete digital likeness of an actor from previous roles. We've seen it before many times. Rogue One always springs to mind whenever I think of a digital likeness of an actor.

The case didn't get there because of the settlement, but maybe the dispute had some psychological impact on those involved. Zemeckis, for example, would go on to direct Forrest Gump, which spliced historical footage to create the illusion that the main character was meeting Presidents John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B.

Back to the Future Part 2 was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects at the 62nd Academy Awards. it lost to The Abyss. It won the Saturn Award for Best Special Effects, and it also won the BAFTA Award for Best Special Visual Effects. And obviously Back to the Future Part 3 released six months later, but I'll save that for a potential future episode that hopefully won't take quite so long.

It commemorated the day which Marty McFly, Emmett Brown, and Jennifer Parker traveled in the DeLorean at the beginning of Back to the Future Part Two. It included screenings of the movies, Nintendo releasing the Nintendo Entertainment System version of Wild Gunman for the Wii U via the virtual console in Europe, the premiere of the Back in Time documentary.

Michael J. Fox, Christopher Lloyd, and Lea Thompson were interviewed about the trilogy.

And Michael J. Fox and Christopher Lloyd appeared in character as Doc Brown and Marty McFly on Jimmy Kimmel Live. Proceeds from many of the events benefited the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson's Research

Imagine a movie in the '80s not only going back 30 years in the past, but also going back to where the previous movie had already been, and seeing those scenes play out in the background of the new scenes . To me, this movie was genius, and still is in so many respects. But I also think the criticisms against it are valid.

But using clips from the first movie clearly shows Glover, and there's really no way they could have worked around it. Back to the Future is time travel and science fiction, but it's also a story about family. The first movie was the realization that your parents were once your age and had their own lives, and this movie is all about the what ifs.

So make good choices, and you won't need to go back in a DeLorean and create an alternative timeline. And whatever you do, don't go back in time to save your future kids. Just let them go to jail. Damn kids. Thank you for listening. As always, I would love to hear your thoughts on Back to the Future Part Two, and thank you for your continued support of this podcast.

Austin Powers is back on this podcast. Yeah, baby

And finally, bye