67Back to the Future (1985)

The script that launched a time-travel franchise (if not an entire sub-genre) might never have been made: Bob Gale and Robert Zemeckis’ script was rejected over 40 times, Gale told Empire magazine. The germ of the idea, Gale said, came on a visit home to Missouri, when he was thumbing through his father’s high school yearbook, saw that he was class president, and wondered, “If I had gone to high school with my dad, would I have been friends with him?” Zemeckis, in the same interview, said of the script: “It was a very, very painful and elaborate screenplay to write. Bob and I were adamant about making it extremely tight and setting everything up and tying up all the loose ends – where the science within the suspension of disbelief all made sense. You can travel through time but not through space. A lot of time-travel stories violate that concept.”