Jon Cryer Shares Story Details on the Crazy Early BACK TO THE FUTURE Script
During the development of the original Back to the Future film, Jon Cyer was one of the many actors who auditioned for the role of Marty McFly. When he auditioned for the role, there was a very different script for the film that they were giving actors to read.
Cryer took to Twitter to share some of the story details from that early script, and there are some huge differences. That early script would have made for an even more insane film! Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale were coming up with some crazy ideas! Hell, to get the time machine to work in this version of the film, they needed a secret ingredient found in Coca-Cola!
Here’s what Cryer revealed:
But the #BackToTheFuture script that I read before my audition was VERY DIFFERENT than what ended up on screen. It opened with Marty McFly playing the Close Encounters theme on his electric guitar while he pirated a VHS cassette of the movie. And the time machine wasn’t a Delorean that had to travel at 88 miles per hour and have 1.21 gigawatts of power but just... well... a time machine that needed nuclear fission and a secret ingredient that turned out to be Coca-Cola (swear to God).
The final sequence didn’t involve a clock tower or a lightning bolt, but instead finds Marty sneaking onto a atom bomb test site with his time machine to be near the nuclear fission that he needs for it to work. The test site is complete with exquisitely detailed suburban houses and mannequins to simulate the effects of an atomic explosion on an American town. He gets the time machine in place, the atom bomb is about to go off, he’s reaching for the Coca-Cola, the countdown is at 10, 9, 8... when he slips and drops the bottle!! It shatters on the ground. He’s all out of Coke!
But, it’s explained that Marty does find one last bottle of Coke in a refrigerator. And you’ll never guess what happens next. Cryer reveals that Marty ends up hiding in a refrigerator where he found the Coke to ride out the nuclear blast that ends up sending him and the time machine home. I’m sure that sounds very familiar to you because the concept of the scene ended up being used Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull! Here’s his description on how the scene plays out:
“He panics (understandably) but then remembers: he’s in the 1950’s and any self respecting American suburban home has a bottle of Coke in the refrigerator! He checks and sure enough, there’s one in there. He pours it in the time machine but then realizes, Oh crap! He has to figure out how to survive an atomic explosion! Again, he panics. But then it dawns on him, there’s a lead-lined box nearby, otherwise known as a refrigerator. He climbs in, closes the door behind him, the bomb goes off, the time machine activates, and he’s simultaneously shot.”
Cryer picked up on the similarities, saying:
Does this sequence sound familiar to anyone? I can hear you all collectively screaming ‘Yes, yes, Jon!! It does! Clearly Spielberg loved the scene and repurposed it decades later for a much-maligned scene in INDIANA JONES AND THE KINGDOM OF THE CRYSTAL SKULL!!’
Back to the Future could have been a wildly different film! Luckily, the creative team managed to steer the story and the elements of that story into what we ended up seeing on the big screen! I wonder if the film would have been the classic that it became if they would have used this early script.