BACK TO THE FUTURE's continuity was even more crazy than we thought

The Back to the Future pictures were incredibly complicated to shoot, with the endless continuity headaches of a time travel story depicting the same town and its people in three very different eras.

But as Robert Zemeckis prepared to shoot Back to the Future Part II, he faced a couple of very big complications he hadn't anticipated: Claudia Wells, who had played Marty McFly's girlfriend Jennifer in the first film, and Crispin Glover, who had so memorably played Marty's father George McFly, both declined to return for the sequel. Zemeckis managed to nimbly shoot around Glover's absence, with a bit of re-used footage from the first film and a few quick, distant shots of another actor in George McFly makeup. But Wells' absence was going to be more of a problem. After all, at the end of the first movie the sequel is set up with Marty, Doc Brown and Jennifer flying away in the DeLorean to find out what's gone wrong with Marty and Jennifer's future children.

Elizabeth Shue was cast to replace Wells, and for the sequel's opening sequence Zemeckis totally reshot the first film's ending with Shue taking Wells' place. In the clip below we can see both versions of the sequence at the same time, and its almost eerie how closely they match, with every line, every shot and even every stray gesture replicated. It's the kind of crazy perfectionism that made the Back to the Future movies hold together so well. Unfortunately it's the same perfectionism that would ultimately drive Zemeckis to abandon live action filmmaking entirely, so he could focus on motion capture movies where every detail can be adjusted until not a trace of human imperfection (or fun) remains.

(Via I09)

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