Slashing The Seats

When Hollywood Gets It Right…

Hollywood studios are renowned for relentless tinkering, middle managers and yes men sticking their oar in and befuddling a perfectly good script with Star Cameos, Product Placement and Giant Mechanical Spiders, usually resulting in a hopeless chud-fest that leaves the cinema crowd vomiting their bile all over the internet. It’s ruined careers – Joel Schumacher take a bow – and in some cases even bought studios to their knees – we’re looking at you Heaven’s Gate.

But just occasionally, it can be a good thing.

Over the next few weeks we’ll be taking you through some truly great movies, and showing you how totally crappy they’d have been if a few faceless suits hadn’t rocked up, treated the writers like shit and the director like a moron, and totally changed everything!

First up, a faultless 80s classic that got out alive: Back To The Future.

When Bob’s Gale and Zemeckis first came up with BTTF, it was roundly trounced by the studios. Now, admittedly any movie with borderline incest as a major plot point is going to be a hard sell, but with the relentlessly upbeat attitude, and fantastically tight dialogue that constantly drives an intricate plot, it’s a sure-fire winner right?

Well, maybe after 15 rewrites it is, but the first couple of drafts?

For starters there’s Marty, a cocky, consumerist kid who doesn’t give a damn about the people around him – in short, he’s a dick. And Doc Brown? Well, here he’s Professor Brown, a failure of a man, filled with self-hatred and running a bootleg video operation from his garage.

Together they flog dodgy Beta grot in a hideous, run-down and boarded up Hill Valley not a million miles from Biff’s alternate 1985 that popped up in part 2. Meanwhile the world outside is teetering at 2 minutes to midnight, permanently on the brink of destruction -and Marty for one is actively looking forward to it!

“You know what I think about atomic bombs – I’d kinda like to see one”

There’s no denying the cheery optimism of the script is there?

Not to mention the relentless product placement that runs through the whole thing. In the final version, the Flux Capacitor – with a little help from one point twenty one gigawatts of electricity – powers the DeLorean through time. In this draft? Coke. Nope, not that kind. Even for depressed screenwriters penning an Ibsen-esque version of a ruined future, drug-powered time travel may be too much to swallow -we’re talking good old fashioned Coca Cola.

You see, according to our hero, Coca-Cola’s recipe is ‘The most closely guarded secret in the world’. We kind of suspect that’s because it’s full of deadly chemicals, rather than harbouring dimension-cracking science secrets, but hey- we’re not writing a blockbuster! In fact such is it’s power that 50’s Professor Brown uses it to create a series of fizzy-pop powered sci-fi technologies and rescue the future!

Of course, all the flying cars and robot houses of the future come at a price: No Rock N’ Roll. This time round apparently Marty’s performance – at the ‘Springtime In Paris’ rhythmic courtship ritual – is so godawful it effectively kills off new music. You can have your flying car, but it will only pick up Nat “King” Cole on the radio – sounds like a gip to us.

In fact, there’s only one thing in this script that was worth keeping – instead of a bolt of lightning returning us to the 80’s, here it’s the most ass-kicking method imaginable: an atomic bomb test, meaning Marty gets his wish after all.

So, imagine a world with no meddling Studio Suits. In that alternate timeline, Back To The Future is a depressing, rock n roll killing -and perhaps more tellingly, DeLorean-less - downbeat post-modern nightmare.

Is that really a price you’d be willing to pay for artistic freedom?

Tweet This!