If you have ever felt that Back to the Future Part II spent rather a lot of time hiding behind the scenery of the first film, Bob Gale has a treat for you. The co-writer has posted an early, “alternate” draft of the sequel on his website, to promote his book Back to the Future: The Complete Screenplay, and Reactor has been through it. In this version, Marty does not go back to 1955 at all. He goes to 1967.
The plot engine is the same: Biff gets hold of the sports almanac and Marty has to stop him rewriting the future. What changes is everything around it. In 1967 Marty is arrested as a suspected draft dodger after he cannot produce any identification. He is bailed out by his mother, now a Vietnam War protester, and becomes something of a symbol for the resistance. The bail money, unfortunately, was meant for the romantic weekend away on which Marty would have been conceived, so he ends up threatening his own existence again and has to rekindle his parents’ romance. It is an odd sort of franchise where that counts as a running theme.
The 1960s Doc Brown is a professor in Hill Valley. With Mr. Fusion damaged on arrival, he dreams up a way to get the DeLorean home with a power-line surge over a canyon, an idea Reactor says came to him after taking some LSD. Which raises the question of what the 1985 Doc’s excuse is. The plan does not quite work because the car has two people in it, so Marty and Doc start throwing parts overboard. A car door and the almanac land on the Peabody farm, where the door eventually becomes a museum exhibit, and old Mr. Peabody, the man who once shot at a time machine in his barn, gets to watch them come home in the middle of a speech.
There are smaller pleasures too. The 2015 sequence has McDonald’s restaurants that still employ waiters, implies the penny has been discontinued, and has Marty passing an advert for Godzilla 2015 rather than Jaws 19. Biff’s alternate 1985 puts Mr. Strickland in the Senate, Goldie Wilson turns up as Marty’s public defender, and Huey Lewis and the News perform as holograms.
It is easy to see why the finished film went back to 1955 instead. Returning to the first film’s big night let Zemeckis and Gale play their cleverest trick, with Marty creeping around the edges of scenes we already knew, and it saved them building a whole new decade. But the 1967 version has a political edge the series never quite had again, and a Doc on acid is the kind of idea Hollywood stopped writing down after about 1989. Somewhere in an alternate Hill Valley, it is the one everybody remembers.
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