Birthdays for Tom Cruise (1962) and Julian Assange (1971)

Anniversary of:
• the Battle of Gettysburg (1863)
• Karl Benz driving the first automobile (1886)
• the premiere of Back to the Future (BTTF) (1985)

FACTS ABOUT BTTF

• Marty’s surname was, originally, not McFly, but McDermott.
• The famous clocktower climax to the movie wasn’t part of the script. Instead, Marty and Doc would visit a nuclear test site in Nevada and a nuclear explosion would send the DeLorean back to the future. This was changed because the whole sequence would have proved too expensive.
• The final scene originally didn’t play out how it does in the film, with Doc turning back up at Marty’s house and taking him and Jennifer on another adventure. It originally ended with George looking at a 1955 newspaper with a picture of Marty playing Johnny B. Goode on stage, and saying, “It can’t be. But it is…”
• In first drafts, Doc Brown had a pet chimp called Shemp. This was changed to a pet dog called Einstein at the request of the Head of Universal – Sid Sheinberg. Sheingberg told Zemeckis and Gale, “no film with a chimp ever made money.” When Gale responded by saying, “what about Every Which Way But Loose?” Sheinberg said, “that’s an orangutan, not a chimp.”