Scripte: R1-DVD-Audiokommentar BTTF II - www.Zurueck-in-die-Zukunft.com

Im Nachfolgenden findest Du ein Transkript des Audiokommentares zur "Back To The Future: Part II" von Bob Gale und Neil Canton, der sich nur auf den Code-1-DVDs befindet! Das Transkript ist eine Kollektivarbeit einiger Mitglieder des Forums auf BTTF.com für alle internationalen Fans, die diesen Audiokommentar nicht anhören können. Das Script ist auf Englisch (so wie der Audiokommentar). Eventuell wird es in ferner Zukunft auch eine deutsche Übersetzung geben. Momentan ist mir eine Übersetzung aus Zeitgründen leider nicht möglich. Dennoch viel Spaß beim Lesen!

Chapter 1: "Back From The Future" - Transcribed by "FusionFlux"

[MARTY RETURNS TO 1985 AND ENCOUNTERS HIS FAMILY AND JENNIFER]

Bob Gale: Hi, this is Bob Gale, back again for Part II.

Neil Canton: This is Neil Canton, back again with Bob for Part II.

Bob Gale: You're probably sick and tired of listening to us talk, but that's why they put an "off" button on your DVD player.

Bob Gale: I should tell you a story about Back to the Future II and III. When it came time for us to make both movies, Bob and I and Neil all had deals to make Part II but we didn't have a deal for Part III, even though Michael J. Fox and Christopher Lloyd got raises for doing Part III, and so we decided, well, if the actors were gonna get a raise, we should get a raise, too, doing a third movie instead of just a second.

Bob Gale: Traditionally, when you do another sequel, you get a little more money. So, our agent went to Universal and said, "we want a raise for these guys," and Universal said, "No, no, we're not giving these guys a raise. Their deal for Part III is gonna be the same deal that they got for Part II." Well, our agent told us - told Bob, actually - first time in his career, Jack Rapke (our agent) said, "I'm gonna advise you not to show up for work on the first day of shooting until we work this out." We were on a location scout when Bob got this phone call and he said, "Just stop working", so Bob called off the location scout and went back and Jack notified Universal that Zemeckis was not going to report for work until there was a deal for Part III.

Bob Gale: Well, Bob got a phone call from Lew Wasserman, the chairman of the board at MCA, who one never hears from - that scared the bejeezus out of Bob, 'cause of course Wasserman had gotten his start working for the Chicago rackets and there were many legends in Hollywood of Lou's connection with some less-than-saintly characters, shall we say. Our attorney called Bob and said, "You better show up for work." Of course, Bob showed up for work - we all did - and we all took the deal for Part III. It was the same deal for Part III that we had for Part II, and that was the end of it. Lew was all sweetness and nice after that, but don't mess with Lew Wasserman, is the moral of that story. We didn't even know we were messing with him.

Chapter 2: "Main Titles" - Transcribed by "i kno it's not to scale"

[BLUE SKY/CLOUD SHOTS APPEAR ON SCREEN]

Bob Gale: This footage that you're looking at here, this aerial is actually some stuff that ILM [Industrial Light & Magic] created for the Clint Eastwood movie "Firefox" (1982) and it's just perfect. As has been previously explained, we ended up having to re-cast the part of Jennifer with Elisabeth Shue so the opening scene that you just saw was a re-do of the version from Part I with a couple of shots the same - the close-ups of Christopher Lloyd and the take-off of the DeLorean were from Part I.

Chapter 3: "Hill Valley, 2015" - Transcribed by "i kno it's not to scale"

[DELOREAN TRAVELS TO 2015 AND ARRIVES IN THE MIDDLE OF AIR TRAFFIC]

Bob Gale: This is some absolutely outstanding work from ILM here. And they would re-use the cars. There was a police car and a taxi cab that you just saw there, the Saab-based taxi cab and the future police car that you see later in the movie - all cabs and all police cars look the same anyways, so they re-used those cars and we got extra production value out of them.

Bob Gale: This, of course, was shot on the process stage with background plates going on there that - Well, is this blue screen, do you remember Neil or were these real plates? These must have been "poor man's" [shots] actually.

Neil Canton: Yeah, I think so, it was "poor man's". We had them on a truck.

[NOTE: The term "poor man's" in general refers to something that is an imitation or cheaper version of a real or authentic thing. The term is sometimes used in an insulting way. For example, if a director made a low-budget BTTF rip-off, you might say it's a "poor man's BTTF." In the realm of filmmaking, "poor man's" is short for "poor man's process photography", a technique designed to create the illusion that a static vehicle is moving through an environment. Lights (fake headlights, street lights, etc.), sound effects, fake road signs and fake rain shown outside the car help establish the setting and environment. Crew members are often right outside the car on the stage, helping create different illusions.]

Bob Gale: [explaining how the "poor man's" process shots were achieved] We had some lights going by, some electricians out there with some lights and they would spin them around to give the illusion of motion there.

[DOC PUTS JENNIFER TO SLEEP]

Bob Gale: We've already explained why Jennifer was dead weight in the sequels. We just had to hit the nail right on the head because there was nothing that we could do with Jennifer in the sequel except have her be unconscious the whole time. So there it is.

[DOC EXITS THE SKYWAY AND HEADS TOWARDS HILL VALLEY]

Bob Gale: And those are pretty much the same Kiwanis Club and Lions Club signs on the "Welcome to Hill Valley" sign that you saw in the '50s in Part I.

[DOC LANDS THE DELOREAN IN AN ALLEY IN THE MIDDLE OF HILL VALLEY]

Bob Gale: This is a combination of miniatures and of a real fiberglass DeLorean that we built and we hung on wires, suspended from a crane and lowered down. So the first shot that you saw there was a miniature and this shot was the fiberglass DeLorean.

[MARTY GETS OUT OF THE DELOREAN AND TAKES A LOOK AROUND 2015]

Bob Gale: Since we have already established Mr. Fusion we have Fusion Industries and there's all the discarded laserdiscs - all the video fans love seeing that stuff there. We were a little off on our future prediction there.

Bob Gale: Now this gag here with Christopher Lloyd taking off the makeup - two reasons for this, three actually. It's funny. But Chris was wearing wrinkle makeup to make him look older 'cause there was a thirty-year difference from his age in Part I, and we didn't want to put him in makeup everyday. So we figured, let's have him rip the makeup off his face and he doesn't have to be in makeup anymore. The other reason is that he's gonna end up having this relationship with Clara in Part III and have kids and if he's 65 or 70 years old, we're thinking, gee, what kind of a future is he gonna have, what kind of a family life is he gonna have. He's not gonna live past 75 or 80, so let's write this dialogue about a rejuvenation clinic and adding 40 years to his life so we know that he's gonna be around for a long time and be a good dad to his future kids.

[MARTY PUTS ON THE SELF-LACING SHOES]

Bob Gale: Those shots of the self-lacing shoes were done on a fake piece of asphalt, It had wires underneath it, and the special effects guys just gave the wires a good, firm yank and ta-da - self-lacing shoes. We had more wires behind the jacket and special effects guys hiding on the ground to do that stuff.

[DOC AND MARTY CARRY JENNIFER FROM THE DELOREAN]

Bob Gale: Among the other trash that is discarded here in the alley are silicone implants there, those are actually silicone breast implants [both laugh]. Don't ask and we won't have to answer that one.

Bob Gale: The idea of playing this scene in an alley was to make a big deal out of the revealing of the future.

[CAMERA ZOOMS IN ON THE COPY OF USA TODAY]

Bob Gale: It would be worth it if you freeze-framed this or hopefully in the still gallery we'll have these USA Today newspapers. We have some fun future news stories in there. One of them that we completely messed up on is "Queen Diana Set to Visit the United States". Who could have predicted that? [Princess Diana died in 1997] USA Today was very co-operative in giving us permission to use the newspaper.

Neil Canton: It almost didn't arrive in time

Bob Gale: That's right. They had a regional press that they printed, right in LA and I guess it was the day of.

Neil Canton: The day of, and when we came to work it still hadn't shown up.

Bob Gale: That's right, I completely forgot about that.

[MARTY WALKS DOWN THE ALLEY AND ONTO A MAIN STREET IN DOWNTOWN HILL VALLEY, NEAR COURTHOUSE SQUARE]

Bob Gale: Now theoretically, in the supplements, we'll show you the evolution of this shot from how it was originally filmed and what little there was in the sky and so forth to what it finally became. We found future cars from every movie that we could laying around on various back lots. There's a car from "Blade Runner" (1982), I don't remember what some of the other cars were. This is a clever gag with the flying red car coming down there. As the camera passes behind Michael's body, we have substituted the Mustang that is actually driveable. There was a bit that we cut out showing that car landing on the Texaco station but we ended up cutting it out because we had already seen flying cars and we didn't have to see it again. And notice there on the street - it says "No Landing" - we figured that in the future that they would have new road signs and new street signs so that must be a "no landing" zone. We still had Hare Krishnas in the future, though, if you noticed them previously going by there. Roger Rabbit joke there, you see the antique Roger Rabbit there next to Michael.

Chapter 4: "Marty Junior?" - Transcribed by "QXR37"

[MARTY WALKS INTO THE CAFE '80s WHILE MICHAEL JACKSON'S 'BEAT IT' PLAYS IN THE BACKGROUND]

Bob Gale: Michael Jackson was a big fan of the first Back to the Future, so he was very co-operative and generous in letting us use his - re-create his - likeness and use his music in this.

[SIMULATED MICHAEL JACKSON CHARACTER IS SHOWN ON A TELEVISION SCREEN SPEAKING TO A CUSTOMER]

Bob Gale: This is a riff on "Max Headroom" (1987), which was a popular show in the 1980s. We actually filmed that with an actor in makeup, and the woman that supervised that - [video playback design supervisor] Larina Adamson - had been one of the producers or video directors on "Max Headroom", so we definitely got it right. The guy that played Michael Jackson, I can't remember his name but he was a -- remember him?

[NOTE: Larina Adamson is not credited on IMDB for "Max Headroom", but she is credited for "Back to the Future Part II".]

Neil Canton: Yeah, I don't remember his name, but he was...

Bob Gale: He was a little strange. He was so obsessed with Michael Jackson that he actually had plastic surgery to make himself look like Michael Jackson.

Neil Canton: So I guess by now he's probably had seven nose jobs.

Bob Gale: [chuckles]

[MARTY TALKS TO BIFF, WHO MISTAKENLY THINKS HE IS MARTY JUNIOR]

Bob Gale: There was a little bit that we cut out here with Marty trying to pay for the Pepsi with the 50-dollar bill that Doc gave him earlier. The reason that we cut things out of all these movies was really, for the most part, just for time. But our vision of the future was that people would pay for things using their thumbprint. And this is actually a test technology that's being used in Ohio right now in Kroger supermarkets, and we figured that if this was how people were gonna pay for things, using their thumbprint as an ID, there'd be a new crime where people would cut off other people's thumbs [both laugh]. And there was a headline in the paper about "Thumb Bandits Strike Again" and that was the idea there. So we really spent a lot of time trying to figure out what the future would be like and how it would be consistent.

[BIFF ARGUES WITH GRIFF]

Bob Gale: The amount of time that Tom Wilson had to spend in old-age makeup was, I dunno, about four or five hours [a day]. It was tremendous. And we always ended up having to shoot the old side first...I can't quite remember what the reason for that was...

Neil Canton: Oh, because it was easier to take it off than to put it on.

Bob Gale: That's right, there it is.

[MARTY WALKS TOWARDS VIDEO GAME]

Bob Gale: The kid in the green hat there is Elijah Wood, in I think his motion picture debut, so you "Lord of the Rings" fans...

Neil Canton: ...there he is.

Bob Gale: "Wild Gunman" was a Nintendo video game for the Nintendo home unit - it was not really an arcade game - we turned it into an arcade game for this movie to set up Marty's prowess with the gun that's paid off in Back to the Future Part III.

[GRIFF ENTERS THE CAFE '80s AND APPROACHES MARTY JUNIOR.]

Bob Gale: The video monitors there are playing television shows from the 1980s...all of them Universal shows, of course.

[MARTY HIDES BEHIND THE COUNTER AS GRIFF AND MARTY JUNIOR CONFRONT EACH OTHER]

Bob Gale: These wonderful moving camera shots with the two Michael J. Fox's - this is this great motion-control Vista Glide system that ILM developed for this movie that allowed us to do things like that. [Marty Jr. is thrown over the counter, Marty props him up] Now this is one of the most effective shots coming up here, where Marty takes the hat off of Marty Jr. That's a third actor's arm there that did that - leaves the frame for just one frame or two and comes right back in - and it's just seamless.

Chapter 5: "Batter Up!" - Transcribed by "QXR37"

[CHICKEN MUSIC PLAYS]

Bob Gale: Very over-the-top music cue there, but we needed to make a big deal out of the chicken moment. If we had known we were gonna do a sequel like this when we did the first one, we probably would have used this chicken gag somewhere in Part I. But we didn't, so we had to create it - as we explained on the other track - for this movie.

[MARTY SEES A GIRL WITH A HOVERBOARD]

Bob Gale: Now we've said it before, but I'm gonna say it again: kids, hoverboards are not real. Even though you'll find that interview with Bob Zemeckis in the supplements here [on the behind-the-scenes documentary included on the DVDs]. where he says that they are...

Neil Canton: It was just a joke.

Bob Gale: ...it was just a joke! And Mattel was so pissed off at us for the amount of calls and letters that they got from kids wanting to know when these hoverboards were gonna come on the market. And we got our own tons of letters from kids asking about these hoverboards.

[BIFF'S GANG MEMBERS GET ON THEIR OWN HOVERBOARDS, AND THE CHASE SCENE BEGINS]

Bob Gale: These hoverboard sequences were made from various different kinds of special effects. [On] some of them the boards were attached to the actor's legs and the actors were suspended, [on] some of them the boards were on wires suspended and we had ILM take the wires out, [on] some of them were complete animations. The idea was that Bob would try to mix up how we did these different shots, so that just when you think you've figured out how we were doing this, you'd see a shot that couldn't have been done that way.

[MARTY RIDES THE HOVERBOARD ACROSS THE COURTHOUSE SQUARE LAKE, BUT GETS STUCK IN THE MIDDLE]

Bob Gale: We even had a couple of these shots where the hoverboard was on a pole over the water and we put a mirror on the pole to reflect the water against it so it would be as if you were looking through it - an old magician's trick.

[GRIFF GRABS HIS PIT BULL HOVERBOARD AND HIS GANG CONNECTS THEIR BOARDS TO GRIFF'S]

Bob Gale: This was shot with a device called a "prism" that allowed you to put a camera lens practically on the ground.

Bob Gale: Animated hoverboard there...

Bob Gale: The bat is a Kirk Gibson Jr bat. Kirk Gibson had recently won the [1988] world Series with a home run off of [Oakland Athletics relief pitcher] Dennis Eckersly for the [Los Angeles] Dodgers, so he was on everybody's mind at the time. I don't know that, other than fanatic baseball fans and Dodgers fans, anybody remembers Kirk Gibson at all today.

[GRIFF AND HIS GANG ARE PROPELLED INTO THE COURTHOUSE BUILDING, THROUGH THE PLATE-GLASS WINDOWS]

Bob Gale: That shot there where the girl hit the pillar, she was actually injured fairly seriously. It was Cheryl Wheeler-Dixon, a stuntwoman, and something went wrong with the timing on that shot. They had rehearsed it - the effects guys and the stuntpeople had rehearsed that over and over again - but something went wrong, and she was in the hospital for a couple of weeks because of her injuries.

Chapter 6: "The Almanac" - Transcribed by "QXR37"

[MARTY'S JACKET FINISHES DRYING]

Bob Gale: Our vision of the future is a very user-friendly future, as I think we explained on the other commentary. We wanted the future to be a nice future for people to look forward to going to the future, instead of being messed-up like you see in so many movies. So we figured, we'll have the future look great, and the people in it just have some serious problems.

[MARTY WATCHES THE RECAP OF THE CHICAGO CUBS WINNING THE WORLD SERIES]

Bob Gale: I think we can safely believe that the Cubs will never win the World Series, this of course is science...

Neil Canton: [laughing] Even in the future.

Bob Gale: ...even in the future. And of course Miami's baseball team is not the Gators, it's the [Florida] Marlins, and who knows if by 2015 that baseball team will even exist anymore. Terry, by the way, is wearing two ties -- again, our jokes about ties.

[MARTY BROWSING IN THE ANTIQUE STORE]

Bob Gale: This is just to set up the fact that that book has a dust jacket. One of the things that no one really pays attention to is the fact that a book of 50 years of sports statistics, with that many sports in it, would be about 50 times thicker than that book really is. But say it's movie logic vs. real logic...

Neil Canton: ...and it's small print. [laughs]

Bob Gale: [laughs] We needed to be able to have him fit that in his pocket, so there it is, and we never got any letters asking how that was possible.

[DOC EXPLAINS THAT HE LEFT EINSTEIN IN A SUSPENDED-ANIMATION KENNEL]

Bob Gale: Einstein -- we got so many letters after the first movie came out where kids were writing in, wanting to know what happened to Einstein - is Einstein OK? - so it was absolutely crucial that we bring Einstein back for the sequel. Different dog playing the part.

Neil Canton: We couldn't make a deal with the other one.

Bob Gale: [laughs]

[THE USA TODAY HEADLINES CHANGE TO REFLECT CHANGES MADE TO FUTURE EVENTS, AND DOC CHECKS OUT THE ARREST SCENE WITH HIS BINOCULARS]

Bob Gale: There you can see some of the interesting headlines there for the future.

Bob Gale: Some of those displays that are going on in the binoculars there, we don't know what they're supposed to mean - that was one of our dictums for the future: put some graphics and things in the future that nobody'll understand what they are. One of the other things that was interesting about designing the future...Rick Carter, our production designer, he was a terrible speller. I'd go in the back lot and look at the preliminary versions of the signs he was putting up, and invariably there was at least one or two signs that had words that were misspelled, and Rick never noticed 'em, to the extent that I bought Rick a dictionary for his birthday. Well, we had some signs in Japanese, again with the idea that the Japanese influence in the future would be profound. So I said to Rick one day when I was looking at these signs, 'Are those signs, is the Japanese characters in there spelled properly?' And Rick assured me that they were, that he had someone in the art department that knew Japanese, or went to someone that knew Japanese, and those signs actually made sense. Well about three weeks later, there was a group of people from the Japanese tour visiting Universal, and I was introduced to these people, and one of them came over and said, pointed out one of the signs that was in Japanese, and he said, 'That sign doesn't make any sense.' So [laughs] I gave Rick a real hard time about that.

[DOC AND MARTY HIDE AROUND THE CORNER FROM WHERE THE COPS FIND JENNIFER]

Bob Gale: 'Surf Vietnam', by the way, that's that billboard behind them there, if you didn't get a chance to pay attention to that...an homage to "Apocalypse Now" (1979), I guess.

[DOC EXPLAINS THE HEAVY STUFF THAT COULD HAPPEN IF 1985 JENNIFER RUNS INTO 2015 JENNIFER]

Bob Gale: Writing this kind of dialogue, and knowing that it was Christopher Lloyd that was gonna be saying it, gave me the complete confidence to write the most ridiculous and long-winded speeches possible, 'cause I knew that Chris would just nail this stuff. He would study this, and as a theater-trained actor, always was prepared, always knew his lines.

Chapter 7: "The Future McFlys" - Transcribed by "QXR37"

[POLICE CAR FLIES OVER HILLDALE]

Bob Gale: This police car was designed specifically for this movie. This was shot...where was this?

Neil Canton: El Monte?

Bob Gale: El Monte, I think it was...yeah, El Monte, West Covina, someplace way out there...Baldwin Park, that's where it was. Halfway through the filming, the guy who was in charge of this location tried to screw us and up the location fee...I don't remember whether we ended up having to pay it or not.

Neil Canton: I don't remember.

[INSIDE THE MCFLY HOME]

Bob Gale: And of course the interior is a set that we built at Universal, on one of the stages. We figured that in the future, just like today, people would have technology and it wouldn't work properly, just like most people's televisions aren't tuned to their color properly, this future window would be messed up and the McFlys would never have gotten around to repairing it. That was not an optical, by the way; it was actually shot that way with the video projection on the set.

[MARLENE COMES DOWNSTAIRS AS 1985 JENNIFER WATCHES FROM INSIDE THE CLOSET]

Bob Gale: Remember how shy Michael was when he had to film in drag for the first day?

Neil Canton: Absolutely.

Bob Gale: He didn't want anyone on the set that didn't have to be there, but he got over it.

[GEORGE AND LORRAINE ARRIVE TO THE MCFLY HOME]

Bob Gale: That's Jeffrey Weissman is the actor who plays George McFly in the sequels. You've already heard on the other commentaries and the documentaries, Crispin didn't want to come back, and so we wrote him out.

[LORRAINE EXPLAINS HOW MARTY'S REACTION TO BEING CALLED 'CHICKEN' LED TO HIS ACCIDENT AND RUINED HIS LIFE]

Bob Gale: Now again, here's exposition hell, as I talked about in the last movie, where we just had to have somebody show up and spit out all this exposition. This of course was a pretty crazy thing we were doing at the time, because we were setting exposition in this movie that isn't going to be paid off until Part III, which isn't gonna come out for six months. We were hoping that people would remember six months of exposition. You, of course, can just put the third disc in and see the payoff right away.

Bob Gale: It's always the same electronic voice for the jacket, and everything, we just figured that there'd be one guy that made a living doing that, or all computers would talk the same.

[TAXI DROPS OFF BIFF IN HILLDALE NEAR THE MCFLY HOME, THEN FLIES AWAY]

Bob Gale: And again, that shot there, we used Biff's body to disguise the matte line to change from the real car to the miniature car that flies away. And no, we can't explain why Bob put that cockatoo on the cab driver's shoulder there...it was just something he decided to do; I think he saw it in some other movie.

[MARTY JUNIOR WATCHES TV]

Bob Gale: Notice the breast implant commercial in the upper right-hand corner there. We had a good time with those.

[2015 MARTY ARRIVES HOME]

Bob Gale: There's that same electronic voice again.

[VOICE SAYS, 'LITHIUM MODE OFF']

Bob Gale: Now there's one of those things - he's adjusting - the lithium mode is on, what does that mean? We don't know.

Neil Canton: We don't know.

[AUTOMATIC DOGWALKER DEVICE IS SHOWN ON THE STREET OUTSIDE THE MCFLY HOME]

Bob Gale: That's a great gag, the automatic dogwalker there. And that was just a very well-trained dog with a very hard-wired unit that...the thing with the lights on it weighed virtually nothing, the dog just walked and that thing balanced.

[BIFF GETS INTO THE DELOREAN AND FLIES AWAY]

Bob Gale: Excellent work by ILM there. Michael Lantieri - our special effects man, mechanical effects man [he is credited as "special effects supervisor"] - moving all those garbage cans around on wires, and ILM matched the movement of the car to hit it.

[MCFLY FAMILY SITS DOWN FOR A PIZZA DINNER]

Bob Gale: This is a pretty intricate shot that took us two or three days to do, and in the deleted scenes you'll see the long version of this scene. We ended up shortening it because it just didn't work as playing all on a master. It was a great showoff shot, to show that we could put all three Michael J. Fox's in the scene, and Ken Ralston, our visual effects supervisor from ILM, nearly had a heart attack when he found out that we cut up this elaborate shot that took him and his team months to do, but that's show biz.

Chapter 8: "Chicken" - Transcribed by "QXR37"

[2015 MARTY GREETS NEEDLES ON THE PHONE]

Bob Gale: That's Flea from Red Hot Chili Peppers there. He was not as well-known as he is now when we shot this, but he just had a great maniacal look to him. And again, this is a character that we're setting up here in Part II who you're not gonna see again until the end of Part III, so we came up with this hopefully memorable name, Needles, and strange-lookin' guy, in hopes that you would remember him six months later. I think it's that Alfred E. Neuman front tooth thing that gives him this memorable look.

[2015 MARTY SCANS CARD, NEEDLES HANGS UP]

Bob Gale: Again, we didn't try to explain exactly what scam these guys were pulling here - you knew that they were doing something illegal - and just go with it.

[FUJITSU INTERCEPTS 2015 MARTY'S CALL AND FIRES HIM]

Bob Gale: Again, our future Japanese influence here...I made a big mistake calling this guy Mr. Fujitsu...we thought that the Fujitsu company was named after a guy, I did, and it's not; it's some amalgamation, it'd be like calling somebody Mr. General Motors. So it became kind of the laughingstock of Japan, but I never took Japanese, so what can I tell you.

[2015 MARTY PLAYS THE GUITAR]

Bob Gale: He's playing "Power Of Love" here.

Bob Gale: [referring to fish mounted on wall] That marlin on the wall there may be the same marlin that was in Doc's lab in Back to the Future Part I.

[BIFF RETURNS IN THE DELOREAN]

Bob Gale: Now, there are those that say that by going into the future at the beginning of the movie, Marty and Jennifer would have erased their own future from ever happening, because if they leave 1985 to go in the future, how did they grow up to become old? But we decided that the future would be extrapolated from the past, and that they would in fact come back and go on to be in the future. That's a good excuse at any rate - if we didn't use that excuse we wouldn't have a movie here.

[DOC AND MARTY PUT JENNIFER INTO THE DELOREAN AND THEY FLY AWAY]

Bob Gale: Biff's heart attack is of course explained in the other supplemental material, so I won't tell the same story again. Do notice the bumper sticker when he fades out of existence in the deleted scenes, it says "I brake for birds".

Chapter 9: "Past Imperfect" - Transcribed by "QXR37"

[DOC AND MARTY ARRIVE BACK IN 1985, BUT THEY DON'T REALIZE IT'S AN ALTERNATE 1985]

Bob Gale: Great gag here, with the airplane coming in...showing the difference in Hill Valley in the future, that jets are now coming in because of Biff's casino, no doubt.

[DELOREAN LANDS ON STREET]

Bob Gale: Beautiful work by ILM here, and in the supplements hopefully you'll see the making of this shot. A miniature comes down, passes the lamppost, it becomes a real car, and the dog gets out, all in one shot.

[DOC AND MARTY LEAVE JENNIFER ON 'HER' PORCH]

Bob Gale: Poor Jennifer, every time she becomes conscious, she becomes unconscious.

Neil Canton: We actually shot this scene Part II and then the scene in Part III where Marty comes back to wake her up at the end of the movie, all in the same day so we didn't have to go back to this location for Part III.

Bob Gale: It was the only part of Part III that we did while we were shooting Part II.

Neil Canton: Right.

Bob Gale: That was actually the location we scouted when we got the phone call to come back.

Neil Canton: To come back, that's exactly right.

[DOC AND MARTY ARRIVE AT 'MARTY'S' HOUSE]

Bob Gale: The reason that we picked Arleta, and that particular house, is for that high-tension tower in the background -- we thought that that was a very memorable image, and spoke miles about the socioeconomic condition of the McFlys.

[MARTY ENTERS 'HIS' ROOM THROUGH THE WINDOW]

Bob Gale: And more of [supervising sound editor] Chuck Campbell's off-camera dogs barking in the background there.

Bob Gale: Michael Jackson poster in the background there.

[MARTY RUNS OUT OF THE HOUSE AND DOWN THE STREET]

Bob Gale: If you notice, in that wide shot of the street, every house on that street had a "For Sale" sign on it. There's many more "For Sale" signs right there.

[MARTY PASSES OUTLINES OF BODIES ON STREET]

Bob Gale: This is such a great gag -- just put those chalk outlines there. Not seeing a dead body is more effective than it would be if you actually saw one.

Bob Gale: And this is back in Whittier - that's a side of Whittier High School. In the supplements and deleted scenes, you'll see a bigger shot of the school burned out. But we decided we didn't need it, and ILM never actually finished that shot.

[MARTY PICKS UP A NEWSPAPER TO CHECK THE DATE, AND IS CONFRONTED BY A GUN-TOTING MR. STRICKLAND]

Bob Gale: And this is a play back to the first movie -- always look at a newspaper to find out what year you're in.

Bob Gale: Everybody that we asked to come back for the sequel was just delighted to be back again.

Bob Gale: All the stunt guys doin' the drive-by shooting there. I think one of them was [stunt coordinator] Walter Scott's brother, Ben Scott, who goes on to double Tom Wilson in Back to the Future Part III.

[MARTY WALKS TOWARDS WHAT WAS COURTHOUSE SQUARE AND BUMPS INTO RED THE BUM]

Bob Gale: That is the same bum that was on the bench - the raisin [California Raisins advertisement] bench - in Back to the Future Part I. "Red" - Michael J. Fox gave him that name as an ad-lib.

[SHOT OF BIFF'S PLEASURE PALACE]

Bob Gale: Fine work from ILM. We had one or two motorcycle gangs here, real motorcycle gangs. This was a nightmare to shoot, just because it was so noisy, and it was so ugly. Even though it was the back lot, we really did feel filthy after shooting.

Neil Canton: Yes -- we felt like we had gone into hell .

Bob Gale: Our assistant director never thought he'd get a chance to be tellin' a motorcycle gang what to do, but they were very co-operative.

[MARTY APPROACHES THE FRONT STEPS TO BIFF'S PLEASURE PALACE]

Bob Gale: [Video playback design supervisor] Larina Adamson and Steve Starkey, our associate producer, worked together to put this "Life of Biff" documentary together. It's pretty damn funny, really. Now, you'll notice here that Buford looks very different in this image than he does in Part III, and that's 'cause we hadn't really figured out what he was gonna look like yet, so that was our best guess, and we guessed wrong. So if we were doing this again, or gonna somehow make a redo of the scene, we would have changed that, but we'll leave it the way it was, 'cause we don't like to do that. Bob [Zemeckis] doesn't believe in that, and neither do I. Notice, by the way, that on the steps of the casino there, it says "Smoking Required". I don't know if you'll see that following this, or if it just happened a little bit ago, but good gag.

[BIFF'S GANG GRABS MARTY AND TAKES HIM INSIDE]

Bob Gale: Those are the same three guys that were in Biff's gang in the '50s [J.J. Cohen, Casey Siemaszko and Billy Zane as Skinhead, 3-D and Match, respectively].

Chapter 10: "My Father" - Transcribed by "Riverside Drive"

[LORRAINE AT BEDSIDE WITH MARTY]

Bob Gale: That blackout there [at the end of Scene 9, when Marty was knocked out by Biff's gang] was actually at the end of a reel, on a reel change. In many theaters, the projectionists thought that the end of the reel was where it was black, so that dialogue over the black - "The easy way" - a lot of you never heard that if you saw it in the theater because the projectionists cut that off. That's a lesson that we learned: never end a reel with black.

Bob Gale: Tammy Faye Baker, the disgraced televangelist, was the model for this incarnation of Lorraine. And Lea Thompson said that her agent once told her that there are only three good parts that a woman ever has - a virgin, a mother, or a whore. She got to play a virgin and a mother in Part I, and now in Part II she got to play a whore, so between these movies she covered the gamut completely.

[LORRAINE AND MARTY RUSH OUT TO CONFRONT BIFF IN "LIVING ROOM" AREA]

Bob Gale: Tom Wilson is *so* good in this movie - so good in all of them - but this version, this incarnation of Biff that he created is like a force of nature; he's so evil, and so intense. Again, it's a testament to the creativity of [makeup designer] Ken Chase, for being able to figure out how to take certain elements of makeup and change Biff from George's supervisor that we see at the beginning of Part I to the more fey version that we see at the end of Part I and the beginning of Part II, into the "Vegas Biff" that we see here.

Bob Gale: The art department had a field day, making this a testament to total bad taste: animal-print rug there, and the velvet black-light paintings. This was a huge set; the most expensive one in the movie.

Neil Canton: Really quite big.

Bob Gale: Two stories...big enough that we could get that stage crane in here, and Bob and [director of cinematography] Dean [Cundey] could work out these elaborate camera moves.

[BIFF LEAVES; MARTY AND LORRAINE ARE ALONE]

Bob Gale: Lea's makeup too -- just a completely different look than she had in either of her versions in Back to the Future Part I - added to, of course, by her amazing ability as an actress, to make you absolutely believe that she's an alcoholic.

Chapter 11: "An Alternate 1985" - Transcribed by "QXR37"

[MARTY ENTERS THE CEMETERY AND LOOKS FOR GEORGE'S GRAVE, THEN RUNS INTO DOC]

Bob Gale: This was filmed in Wilmington [California - south of Los Angeles, near Long Beach], I think that's...it was a Chevron refinery, if I remember correctly. There's all kinds of refineries there, and they were very co-operative, very happy to let us shoot there. They actually had a little park area with a duck pond right next to this refinery, kind of a way to show how environmentally conscious they were. All the while, the air just smelled vile - all these oil fumes...I think we had to take two or three showers after we got finished shooting here, 'cause the tar in the air just stuck to your skin and clothes, it was just awful. But, the perfect location for us to shoot this.

Bob Gale: Wind machines going...

Neil Canton: It's very difficult to shoot, we did the whole scene in one night...

Bob Gale: ...because we didn't want to come back.

[DOC AND MARTY INSIDE DOC'S LAB]

Bob Gale: Doc's lab, of course, recreated for Part II. All the plans for the original sets were on file in the art department at Universal, so Rick Carter just pulled them out, and Margie Stone McShirley, who was an art director in Part II, was a set designer in Part I, so she certainly remembered where all the bodies were buried and helped find a lot of this stuff.

[DOC EXPLAINS TO MARTY, AND WE THE VIEWERS, HOW THE ALTERNATE 1985 WAS CREATED AND HOW IT CAN BE FIXED]

Bob Gale: This is one of many many theories of time travel that Doc is expounding here, and the blackboard was essential into making this understandable to a general audience...maybe even understandable to us, and the actors!

[DOC SHOWS THE BIFF GAMBLING NEWSPAPER STORY TO MARTY]

Bob Gale: This headline, of course, has to be in 1958, because Biff couldn't legally gamble until he was 21 years old.

Bob Gale: Notice Doc Brown's shirt here by the way, which you saw him wear earlier [in Part II] - in Back to the Future Part III, the material from that shirt becomes Doc's bandana. And this was a material design that Joanna Johnston, our wardrobe designer on the sequels, created herself -- no, she didn't create it herself - she found it in some magazine, and I think we ended up paying way more than we should have to get permission to make a shirt out of that fabric/

Bob Gale: There's another newspaper article in that Doc Brown one, that says "Nixon To Seek Fifth Term"...fitting what kind of a nightmare we could have, let's have Nixon still be president.

Chapter 12: "About That Book" - Transcribed by "QXR37"

[BIFF IS GETTING INTIMATE WITH SEVERAL LADIES IN HIS HOT TUB WHEN MARTY ENTERS]

Bob Gale: That's a scene from "Fistful of Dollars" (1964)...

Neil Canton: ...pays off in Part III.

Bob Gale: Pays off in Part III, with the bulletproof vest gag. Not only pays off in Part III with the bulletproof vest gag, but it shows that Marty is very familiar with Clint Eastwood, and...

Neil Canton: Which is a good thing.

Bob Gale: [laughs] ...the wardrobe that Clint is wearing becomes the wardrobe that Marty takes for himself in the third movie.

Bob Gale: Classic western shot there, through the legs of the hero. I remember we had a makeup problem shooting Biff in the hot tub - the heat from the hot tub was such that it caused weird things to happen to the makeup.

[BIFF LEADS MARTY INTO HIS OFFICE]

Bob Gale: The painting of Biff back there was modeled on one that we saw of Donald Trump. And again, Biff's exquisite tastes in furnishings there continues in his private office.

Bob Gale: Jumping ahead in what happened during the release of this movie, I was not happy with the decision Universal made about how the picture was to be marketed. I felt very strongly that the movie should be marketed as Part II of the three-part Back to the Future trilogy, but the powers-that-be at Universal wanted to say that Back to the Future Part II was a complete movie on its own, which it's not. And I think audiences were upset because the movie doesn't end and it has so many dangling threads that are waiting for Part III to be resolved. The movie opened huge on Thanksgiving weekend 1989, but it fell off very, very rapidly, and I think part of that was the word-of-mouth was not as good on Part II as it was on Part I, because people thought the ending was a gyp - the movie doesn't end. I felt very strongly we should let people know that going in so they wouldn't be upset, but the head of the studio said no, he felt very strongly that the movie should be advertised as complete on its own, and I think we paid the price.

[BIFF RUNS INTO THE STAIRWELL, CHASING AFTER MARTY WHILE WIELDING HIS GUN]

Bob Gale: This location was a parking structure over the movie theaters, right Neil?

Neil Canton: Yeah.

Bob Gale: Interesting sets; two different sets of staircases. It was great that we had that to make that work.

[BIFF CONFRONTS MARTY ON THE ROOF]

Bob Gale: And this, of course, is another set that we built on Stage 12 - that's a site back there with some real lights in the background. And when Michael looks down, it's of course an ILM piece of miniature combined with artwork.

[MARTY JUMPS OFF THE ROOF, ONTO THE DELOREAN HOVERING BELOW]

Bob Gale: Two shots there; he jumped on some air bags. (DeLorean rises) And this'll give you a sense of how big our stage was, 'cause we actually had a crane there...we had the DeLorean on wires to do this indoors. That's stage 12 in Universal, the biggest stage they have.

[THE DELOREAN FLIES OVER THE ROOF]

Bob Gale: And of course, ILM takes over here.

[THE DELOREAN FLIES PAST BIFF'S PLEASURE PALACE]

Neil Canton: And here.

Bob Gale: [chuckles]

Chapter 13: "Back to 1955" - Transcribed by "QXR37"

[DOC AND MARTY INSIDE THE DELOREAN]

Neil Canton: Now we're back on our gimbal set onstage.

Bob Gale: Where we had the DeLorean mounted on this very elaborate gimbal - half a DeLorean I should say - and we were able to make it move in any direction necessary to give the sense of flying. We didn't have to do that on the first one of course, because the car always stayed on the road.

[MARTY: '...WHAT ABOUT EINSTEIN, WE CAN'T JUST LEAVE 'EM HERE!']

That shot that you just saw - that insert of the time displays where they're not working properly - Jan. 1 1885 was on the time displays, and of course that shows you what date Doc Brown is gonna accidentally end up going to towards the end of the picture.

[DELOREAN DESCENDS TO THE GROUND NEAR LYON ESTATES IN 1955]

Bob Gale: Now this is an indoor set, again, on stage 12, that we built after we tore down the roof.

Bob Gale: We made sure that everything took place on this set at night, for the very obvious reason that since we were shooting in a set indoors, there was no way that we could make it look like anything if it was during the daytime. So the idea that Biff showed up in 1955 early in the morning on that day - and that Doc and Marty come at dawn - is all just to make production easier.

[DOC GIVES MARTY A WALKIE-TALKIE BEFORE MARTY LEAVES TO WALK TOWARDS HILL VALLEY]

Bob Gale: Of course, those great Radio Shack walkie-talkies that Doc just gave Marty have incredible range in this movie. Kids, don't try this at home; they don't have that kind of range in real life.

Neil Canton: [about the wide shot of Doc running back and forth on road as he talks to Marty] This'll give you an idea of how large Stage 12 is, just by looking at the road.

Bob Gale: What [production designer] Rick Carter did was he made the set forced perspective, so the road back there is forced narrower than it really is to make it look like it goes back much further.

[MARTY WATCHES AS BIFF LEAVES HIS HOUSE AND THEN FOLLOWS HIM DOWN THE STREET]

Bob Gale: This is the back lot at Universal, I think it's on [the] "Leave it to Beaver" street.

Neil Canton: That's right. They were actually filming, I think, an episode of "Leave it to Beaver" when we -- the new "Leave it to Beaver"...

Bob Gale: The feature...the feature? Was "Leave it to Beaver" a -- they had a new "Leave it to Beaver", that's right.

Neil Canton: They were actually filming that the day we were up here.

Bob Gale: We never really explore Biff's family in a great amount of detail here, but the idea that he lives with this horrible grandmother was just some crazy idea Bob and I came up with. We found some actress with this horrible voice that sounded like fingernails on a chalkboard.

[MARTY DUCKS BEHIND A CAR IN DOWNTOWN HILL VALLEY AS HE FOLLOWS BIFF]

Bob Gale: And here, coming back to the 1955 street - as Bob Zemeckis mentions on the other commentary - we only dressed this one side of the street for 1955, so everything here is shot favoring this side of the street. This was actually the first shot of the movie - we filmed the 1955 stuff first, this was the first day of shooting. And we used that Vista Glide camera with this thing with old Biff and young Biff. And Terry there is played by Charlie Fleischer, who did the voice of Roger Rabbit [in "Who Framed Roger Rabbit"]. I think Bob had a good relationship with Charlie on Roger Rabbit, and Charlie really wanted to be in a movie and be himself instead of be a cartoon character.

[LORRAINE TAKES HER DRESS OUT OF ITS BOX AND SHOWS IT TO HER FRIEND BABS]

Bob Gale: We were only able to get one of Lorraine's two friends to come back here, Lisa Freeman [as "Babs"] I think is her name. But it's great to get the peripheral players to come back...it gives you a complete sense of being right back in the first movie.

[BIFF WALKS OVER TO LORRAINE AND TRIES TO COERCE HER INTO GOING TO THE DANCE WITH HIM]

Bob Gale: Yes, we had a tie-in with Zale's [jewelry store] there. Zale's appears on a bus bench in Back to the Future one.

Bob Gale: The Realty Office has an ad for fallout shelters there - kind of fudging the period a little bit because fallout shelters really weren't popular until the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, but it was such a wonderful piece of period something that we had to do it.

Chapter 14: "Biff's Lucky Day" - Transcribed by "QXR37"

[2015 BIFF ENCOUNTERS 1955 BIFF IN 1955 BIFF'S CAR]

Bob Gale: One of the ideas that [production designer] Larry Paul had in the first movie about creating the '50s that he's absolutely right about - he said we should absolutely make sure that the cars, only about 10% of the cars are from 1955. All the cars in any given time period, you wouldn't have more than 10% of the cars be of the year that it is, so we had a lot of older cars...gives you a sense of past even in the past.

[THE TWO BIFFS ARE INSIDE BIFF'S GARAGE]

Neil Canton: And here we're back on the stage again.

Bob Gale: This was a challenge to shoot this. Of course, it turned out very fortuitous for us that this car that we'd already established as Biff's car had this split windshield, it made it obvious where we were gonna put the matte line. Bob [Zemeckis] was very clever about how he shot this, in terms of the book pass; he saves the great book pass for the very end.

[1955 BIFF TOSSES ALMANAC INTO 2015 BIFF'S LAP]

Bob Gale: That's a bit of animation there, looks a little bit shoddy today.

Neil Canton: But back then it was pretty great.

[2015 BIFF TURNS ON THE CAR RADIO AND FINDS THE SPORTS SCORES ON THE DIAL]

Bob Gale: Now this account of the football game is actually accurate - this is a football game that took place on this date in 1955, and was won in the fourth quarter. I don't know that it was won in the last minute of the fourth quarter, but I actually went to the library and researched football scores, because if there's one thing you don't want to cheat on, it's sports statistics. There's somebody that knows every sports statistic somewhere, and UCLA won that game. Somebody asked me, why did I use UCLA when I'm a USC student, but that's why, it's accurate.

[2015 BIFF PASSES THE ALMANAC TO 1955 BIFF]

Bob Gale: There it is, that beautiful shot where we had the almanac on a motorized armature that moved perfectly from one side of the frame to the other, that was tied to the movement of the camera so that that book always moved across the frame exactly the same way. And it was all about just getting Tom Wilson to have his hand on the book at the right moment.

[MARTY IS ON THE RADIO WITH DOC, WHO IS STILL AT LYON ESTATES]

Bob Gale: (on Doc outside behind Lyon Estates sign in daylight with sky behind him) What did we do there, is that a plate that we have back there? Or did we actually...

Neil Canton: ...yeah, I think it was a plate. Oh no actually, I think it was second unit.

Bob Gale: Second unit, that's right.

Neil Canton: We sent them back there.

Bob Gale: We sent them all the way back there just for that one shot.

[YOUNG BIFF GETS IN HIS CAR AND BACKS OUT OF THE GARAGE WITH MARTY HIDDEN INSIDE]

Bob Gale: Bob [is] of course a great fan of Alfred Hitchcock, so the sports almanac, being the Hitchcock "McGuffin", is always just out of reach.

[NOTE: McGuffin is "a term for a plot-enabling device, i.e. a device or plot element in a movie that is deliberately placed to catch the viewer's attention and/or drive the logic of the plot, but which actually serves no further purpose - it won't pop up again later, it won't explain the ending, it won't actually do anything except possibly distract you while you try to figure out its significance. More specifically, it is usually a mysterious package or superweapon or something that everyone in the story is chasing." (from the open-source Wikipedia encyclopedia)]

[DOC RIDES INTO BIFF'S DRIVEWAY ON A BIKE]

Bob Gale: Chris Lloyd, as wobbly as he looks on this bicycle, is just doing that for this part; he's actually a very accomplished bike rider.

Neil Canton: He's ridden his bike across country.

Bob Gale: Many times... there were times we'd try to locate him for post-production looping, and his agent would say, 'well, he's bicycling across the country and I don't know where he is.'

[BIFF'S CAR ENTERS THE TUNNEL]

Bob Gale: This tunnel is in Griffith Park, and [production designer] Rick Carter created a forced-perspective backing to make that tunnel look two or three times longer than it really is. It really shines, of course, in the hoverboard chase sequence coming up later in the picture. The song playing on the radio is "Papa Loves Mambo", Perry Como. And at one time we thought we would use that song in place of "Mister Sandman" in the first movie when Marty appears in 1955 for the first time, but we decided "Mister Sandman" was more effective.

[1985 DOC ENCOUNTERS 1955 DOC AT COURTHOUSE SQUARE, WHO IS SETTING UP THE 'WEATHER EXPERIMENT']

Bob Gale: And this scene was shot the Friday night of the first week of shooting. We had to get all this 1955 stuff finished so that the art department could tear down the '50s and turn the back lot into Biff's hellacious 1985 - 1985-A, as it's referred to in the movie.

Bob Gale: Chris was very nervous about doing this scene, as I remember, because he was worried that he wouldn't be able to - this was the first scene he shot in Back to the Future Part II, he was very worried that he wasn't going to be able to match his energy and his performance from Part I, but he was worrying for no reason at all, because he absolutely did it.

Chapter 15: "Back to the Dance" - Transcribed by "QXR37"

[BIFF ARRIVES AT THE HIGH SCHOOL FOR THE DANCE AND PARKS HIS CAR]

Bob Gale: Here we are back at Whittier High School.

Neil Canton: They were kind enough to let us return.

Bob Gale: Back to the Future Part II was actually shot under the working title "Paradox". And we did that to try to lessen the amount of interest and publicity that people would have knowing that 'Oh, Back to the Future Part II"...

[SHOT OF CRISPIN GLOVER, AS GEORGE, ON THE DANCE FLOOR]

Bob Gale: This is a shot from Part I. I don't remember if it was an actual shot that was in the movie or something from a take that we didn't use.

Neil Canton: Yeah, I don't remember.

[MARTY WALKS ONTO DANCE FLOOR]

Neil Canton: We're back in the church now, in Highland, in Hollywood.

Bob Gale: This was, I think, for all the crew that had done Part I - which was quite a lot of us - it was about as close as to time travel as any of us were ever gonna experience. Because I remember being back in this gym, and having everything exactly the way it was for the first movie, and feeling like I'd walk out the door and it would be 1985 again. I think everybody felt that way.

Neil Canton: Yeah, I think we even had all the equipment parked in the same places, the catering truck and everything.

Bob Gale: [laughs] What was good about having the same electrical crew is they actually remembered where they put lights, and it's really quite seamless, it looks exactly the same from Part 1

[MARTY RUNS OUTSIDE]

Neil Canton: And this is back at Whittier High.

[MARTY FOLLOWS BIFF AND HIS GANG OUTSIDE THE SCHOOL BUILDING]

Bob Gale: Bob [Zemeckis] and I spent a lot of time studying the first movie in order to work out the logistics of this so that the sequence of where the characters were would fit perfectly in with Part I. There's actually a guy that wrote an article in the science fiction magazine, Starlog, after Part II came out, and he went back studying Part I, and he claimed that he could see in the shadows the Marty from Part II observing Marty from Part I, in Part I. That's not true, of course, but you can find what you're looking for if you look hard enough.

[STRICKLAND CONFRONTS BIFF AND CONFISCATES 'OH LÀLÀ', WHICH PART II MARTY MISTAKENLY BELIEVES IS THE SPORTS ALMANAC]

Bob Gale: Mr. Strickland's hairpiece there is not the best. And obviously these scenes were all written and designed around the existing location. As a writer, you can't really make something like this up, you look around and you explore the location and figure out how things can take place, and use what you have to the best possible advantage.

[PART II MARTY CAREFULLY WALKS PAST THE CAR WHERE PART I MARTY AND LORRAINE ARE GETTING INTIMATE, AND FOLLOWS STRICKLAND TOWARDS HIS OFFICE ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE HILL VALLEY HIGH SCHOOL CAMPUS]

Bob Gale: Now this is a set at Universal, but we did take part of the set and move it out to Whittier later at the end of the scene, when Marty goes to the window and sees the Packard outside and George facing Biff, that was actually shot at Whittier with a couple of walls from the set that we brought out there.

Neil Canton: Right, I think we built a platform to put it on so...

Bob Gale: ...so that he could look down on it.

Neil Canton: ...he could look down.

Bob Gale: Right.

Neil Canton: I remember we shot this on a Friday night, and we didn't get Michael 'til about nine, ten o'clock at night. There was some grumbling on the set amongst the crew about two or three in the morning about why we were on a soundstage on a Friday, you know...

Bob Gale: ...on a Friday night.

Neil Canton: ...Friday night.

Bob Gale: After making the first movie and dealing with Michael doing "Family Ties" at the same time, we all swore that we would never do that again. But four years later, we were doing exactly the same thing again!

Neil Canton: There's some lesson in that, I'm not sure what it is, but there is...

Bob Gale: [laughs] Michael did not have to spend as many hours workin' on "Family Ties" while we were doing the sequel as he did on the first one. I seem to remember that his rehearsals earlier in the week were maybe an hour or two, if that. I think maybe on Mondays they didn't even rehearse. All the actors on that show knew their parts so well that either they didn't need to rehearse, or they just said, 'Hey, you want me to show up for the taping? I ain't comin' in on Monday.'

[MARTY RETRIEVES THE MAGAZINE FROM THE TRASH CAN, ONLY TO BE SHOCKED THAT IT'S 'OH LÀLÀ', RATHER THAN THE SPORTS ALMANAC]

Bob Gale: There's that elaborate payoff with that dust jacket.

[MARTY THROWS MAGAZINE IN TRASH, WITH CAR THAT GEORGE IS APPROACHING VISIBLE THROUGH WINDOW]

Bob Gale: Here we are, this is the set at Whittier.

[MARTY REALIZES BIFF IS AT THE CAR WITH LORRAINE, ABOUT TO CONFRONT GEORGE, AND HE RUNS OUTSIDE]

Bob Gale: And of course with having a different actor playing George McFly here...it was very important to keep him out of focus - only show him from the back - so that in these scenes you would absolutely believe it was George McFly from the first movie.

[GEORGE HITS BIFF AND KNOCKS HIM OUT]

Bob Gale: I think all these shots were re-created for Part II, including Biff getting decked.

Neil Canton: They were.

[SHOT OF GEORGE HELPING LORRAINE TO HER FEET OUTSIDE THE CAR]

Bob Gale: Actually, that shot there may be -- yeah, that's from the first movie, that's Crispin Glover there.

[WALLET GUY UTTERS THE IMMORTAL LINE, 'WHAT'S CPR?']

Bob Gale: No kids, that's *not* what CPR is. [both laugh]

[MARTY RADIOS DOC TO TELL HIM THAT HE HAS THE ALMANAC]

Bob Gale: Now the bucket there is very prominent in frame, because we're gonna need that later on.

[SHOT OF THE DELOREAN TIME CIRCUITS MALFUNCTIONING]

Bob Gale: There's that 1885 again, setting up where Doc is gonna end up. In the original version of the script, we had Farmer Peabody return -- we had established that he'd been put in a mental ward for observation for muttering about seeing flying saucers, and he was released, and of course as soon as he was released what did he see but the DeLorean flying away. And he had a shotgun with him and fired at the DeLorean, and that's how the DeLorean got messed up. And I can't exactly remember why we ended up not doing that, it may have been that the actor was unavailable, or it may have been one of those things where we decided that the least amount of work we had to do on that set, the better of we were gonna be.

[PART II MARTY REALIZES THAT PART I MARTY IS NOW A TARGET OF BIFF'S GANG, WHO WANT TO GET THE ALMANAC BACK]

Bob Gale: The Johnny B. Goode sequence is a combination of material that we shot at the gymnasium in Hollywood, and then we had to build the gym set on stage to do the business with Marty crawling across the catwalk above, because there was no catwalk in the real gymnasium.

[PART II MARTY WATCHES PART I MARTY PLAY THE GUITAR ONSTAGE]

Bob Gale: All the guys from Marvin Berry and the Starlighters came back, they were happy to be back

[PART II MARTY ENTERS THE STAGE FROM THE SIDE AND IS SEEN IN SHOTS RIGHT NEXT TO PART I MARTY]

Bob Gale: This was our set, built onstage.

Bob Gale: And some of this was done with the Vista Glide camera, and some of it was done with blue screen, and this, I believe, was blue screen.

Neil Canton: I think we shot...some of this stuff while the Academy Awards were on, and a couple of the guys from ILM I remember coming by the stage, 'cause they had won Oscars.

Bob Gale: Right. For [Who Framed] Roger Rabbit.

Neil Canton: Yeah, for Roger Rabbit. So everyone on the crew got to hold the Oscar.

Bob Gale: [laughs] Yeah that's right, actually, [BTTF and Who Framed Roger Rabbit directory of cinematography] Dean [Cundey] was nominated...

Neil Canton: Right.

Bob Gale: So he wasn't there.

Neil Canton: So I think Ray Stella...

Bob Gale: Ray Stella, our camera operator, took over.

Neil Canton: I think Dean came by to visit after, but I don't think we could talk him into working that night.

Bob Gale: [laughs] Dean didn't win, so...[both laugh]...the work might not have been good, if he was upset about that.

Neil Canton: The guys from ILM did, so..

[THE TWO MARTYS ARE SEEN ON STAGE AFTER BIFF'S GANG IS TAKEN OUT]

Bob Gale: We got that matte line, of course, hidden with the blue streamers there. (referring to shot of Marty letting go of sandbag rope behind streamers with younger Marty onstage to the left of the shot)

[PART II MARTY EXITS THE BUILDING AND PART I MARTY ENCOUNTERS GEORGE AND LORRAINE NEAR THE EXIT]

Bob Gale: Now where did we do this, this was a set, right? To be able to pull this off?

Neil Canton: Yes.

Bob Gale: Or did we do this at the church?

Neil Canton: I think we built this little section.

Chapter 16: "Get That Book!" - Transcribed by "QXR37"

[BIFF CONFRONTS PART II MARTY OUTSIDE THE SCHOOL, WHILE PART I MARTY, LORRAINE AND GEORGE ARE INSIDE, ONLY ABOUT 10 FEET AWAY]

Bob Gale: Again, here, the focus is thrown out in the background just as Jeffrey Weissman shows up so that you can't see that it's not Crispin Glover. Now you can.

[PART I MARTY RUNS OUTSIDE HITTING PART II MARTY IN THE FACE WITH THE DOOR]

Bob Gale: Masterpiece of timing there.

Bob Gale: Someone's selling reproductions of that Gray's Sports Almanac on eBay all the time.

Neil Canton: You know how much is [unintelligible]

Bob Gale: The reproductions aren't that much, but who knows, by the time this comes out on DVD maybe the price will go up. There's nothing in it. [laughs]

[MARTY RUNS UP TO THE ROOF AND RADIOES DOC]

Neil Canton: I don't remember where we shot this.

Bob Gale: I think it was Whittier? Sure looks like it.

[DOC AND MARTY ARE FLYING IN THE DELOREAN AND FOLLOWING BIFF'S CAR ON THE ROAD BELOW]

Bob Gale: All these roads here were in Griffith Park.

[DELOREAN DESCENDS TO ROAD LEVEL BEHIND BIFF'S CAR AND IS HOVERING JUST ABOVE THE ROAD]

Bob Gale: Well, here the DeLorean is being pushed on the side of a car...in the other shot it was hanging down from a crane. Just like in the hoverboard chase, we mixed up how we did some of these shots, to keep you guessing, keep everybody off-center.

[BIFF IS LISTENING TO COLLEGE FOOTBALL SCORES ON THE RADIO]

Bob Gale: Once again all these football scores comin' up are the football scores from the Saturday in 1955. And again, the ridiculousness that every college football score from November 5, 1955, would be in this book...it's pretty silly, but...

Neil Canton: ...but it works. [both laugh]

[NOTE: The date is not November 5th but November 12th - a little slip up there by Bob Gale.]

Bob Gale: Some of this stuff was shot on the process stage.

[SHOT OF MARTY'S FACE AS HE REACHES FOR BOOK]

Bob Gale: Like that.

Bob Gale: This whole sequence here, with this chase in the tunnel and all that, was added later from when the script was originally written. Marty had actually gotten the book away from Biff at the high school, and then Doc took off from the roof of the school and got hit by lightning there. But we decided that we needed a bigger finale, a bigger action sequence, a bigger confrontation between Marty and Biff, and of course the classic, Biff-gets-his-comeuppance-in-manure. So we concocted this, I don't know if it was while we were shooting Back to the Future Part II, or during prep.

Bob Gale: And of course this tunnel lasts forever in this movie.

Bob Gale: What [production designer] Rick [Carter] did with the forced perspective there - to help it out, he put the lights closer and closer together.

[MARTY IS STANDING IN THE MIDDLE OF THE TUNNEL AS BIFF TURNS HIS CAR AROUND AT THE END OF THE TUNNEL]

Bob Gale: In these long shots there, that's just a piece of wood that has the [tunnel walls] painted on there

Bob Gale: It's a wonderful to get away with - with all the high-tech stuff we have goin' on this movie - to get away with something like that that's so low-tech. And what we would do in the (shot of Marty's legs pushing hoverboard forward) couple of shots, Marty's blue jeans change colors there. That's a blue screen shot, and there was nothing we could do to get the blue jeans the right color against the bluescreen except really wash 'em out, so that's why his jeans suddenly have that acid-washed look.

Bob Gale: There's a forced-perspective shot there with the car headlights; it was actually a golf cart that we had way down there to give the same size ratio as what we had with the forced perspective. And it's a gag that we're gonna do again coming up in the scene when the Western Union guy shows up on the road.

Chapter 17: "Back to Normal?" - Transcribed by "QXR37"

[MARTY DESCENDS TO THE GROUND NEAR LYON ESTATES]

Bob Gale: Of course, the hoverboard there is just attached to Michael's foot, and just by holding his foot steady, it gives the illusion that it's hovering.

Neil Canton: We're back on the Stage 12 set.

Bob Gale: Luckily, because it was a set and indoors, we didn't have to use the McBride in this, we just use big Ritter fans...

Neil Canton: ...which are much better for sound...

Bob Gale: ...because they're electric.

Neil Canton: We do make it rain on the stage, and it got pretty wet. We were, I remember, visited by a few executives, because we were on the lot. They didn't have the right attire on. [both laugh]

Bob Gale: I remember Lorraine Gary, [Universal President] Sid Sheinberg's wife, came down to the set with some of Sid's relatives from...

Neil Canton: ...from Russia.

Bob Gale: ...from Russia.

Neil Canton: Yeah, I remember that. That's right.

Bob Gale: And it was interesting; Russia was, of course, then still Communist, still the Soviet Union, but everybody in Russia had seen "Back to the Future" on bootleg video. It was the one time when we were happy to know that bootleg videos were in there in the cause of freedom, [chuckles] allowing Soviet citizens to see our movies.

[THE DELOREAN IS HIT BY LIGHTNING AND DOC DISAPPEARS]

Bob Gale: Now people have tried to read in some significance to the 9's there, the backwards 9's in the sky. Let me explain what that is. The DeLorean, in order to go through time, has to be going 88 miles an hour, so we decided that the DeLorean got spun on its axis around so fast that it hit 88 miles per hour, and so the fire trails were left in a spiral instead of in a straight line, and that's why you see those 9's in the sky. That's not a commercial for Western Auto, or have any other significance than that.

Chapter 18: "A Letter From 1885" - Transcribed by "QXR37"

[IT BEGINS TO RAIN AS MARTY IS IN SHOCK AFTER SEEING DOC DISAPPEAR]

Bob Gale: Now finally it rains, after all the lightning that we had in this movie and the first movie - but no rain [had] brought it in. That previous shot there, with the headlights - that was a golf cart. And this is a real car.

[WESTERN UNION GUY ARRIVES]

Bob Gale: This is Joe Flaherty, playing the part of this Western Union guy. Another veteran of the Zemeckis-Gale repertory company, if you will. We worked with Joe in "Used Cars" (1980), and we met Joe during production of "1941" (1979). Terrific, terrific guy. Very talented. For those of you that remember the old SCTV ["Second City TV" (1976-81)] show, he played Count Floyd all the time, one of my favorite characters.

Bob Gale: We never called Western Union to find out whether they would actually do something like this, but...

Neil Canton: Yeah, we just assumed...

Bob Gale: ...that they would.

Neil Canton: ...they would like it. [both laugh]

Bob Gale: I love his laugh there.

[MARTY SAYS 'THERE'S ONLY ONE MAN WHO CAN HELP ME']

Bob Gale: Great re-introduction to the Doc to have that.

Chapter 19: "Future Shock" - Transcribed by "QXR37"

[DOC SLIDES DOWN THE CABLE FROM THE TOP OF THE CLOCK TOWER DOWN TO THE GROUND TO HELP THE PART I MARTY GO BACK TO THE FUTURE]

Bob Gale: This is all footage from Part I; we weren't gonna re-shoot any of this stuff, and of course there was no reason to. For the purposes of this DVD, we actually went back into the master for the first movie, so that these images would have the best possible quality, looking better on this DVD than they did in the theater, because they were an extra generation away from the negative when we re-reprinted them for the theatrical release.

[MARTY TO DOC: "YOU DID SEND ME BACK TO THE FUTURE, BUT I'M BACK...BACK FROM THE FUTURE"]

Bob Gale: No, we never actually considered calling this movie "Back From the Future"...somebody once asked me that.

[DOC FAINTS ON THE STREET, MARTY TRIES TO REVIVE HIM, AND THE TRAILER FOR THE UPCOMING PART III IS SHOWN ON SCREEN]

Bob Gale: The trailer for Part III that follows here was part of the [Part II] theatrical release. Bob [Zemeckis] and I both felt that this was important to include these images, to let everybody know that not only was Part III coming, but it was coming very, very soon - it was already in the can. We saw this device used at the end of [director] Richard Lester's "The Three Musketeers" (1973) from the seventies, where they had a trailer for "The Four Musketeers" (1974) at the end of it. And we felt that this would be more satisfying than the end of "The Empire Strikes Back", when Han Solo was left in carbon freeze, which [chuckling] certainly upset me as a moviegoer. And this music that Al Silvestri wrote is inspired by Elmer Bernstein's score to "The Comancheros" (1961). Absolutely fabulous score.

[END OF TRAILER FOR PART III]

Bob Gale: All right, so ends...

Neil Canton: That's it.

Bob Gale: ...Part II, and...

Chapter 20: "End Titles" - Transcribed by "QXR37"

[CREDITS START ROLLING]

Neil Canton: See you in Part - we'll be talking to you in Part III.

Bob Gale: [both chuckle] We'll be talking to you in Part III.

TO BE CONCLUDED!

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