Is this something you experienced in your screenwriting and specifically for Back to the Future?

Absolutely.

It's both in screenwriting and making the movie.

Bob Zemeckis refers to it as your self-destructive phase um uh you write you write it and one of the things one of the rules that we had was that um Bob would we talk through every scene together and I talk about this in the book we talk through every scene excuse me um We talked through every scene in the script.

I'd write it down in legal paper.

I typed, Bob did not.

So I'd take our notes.

If someone has that great idea, they have the great log line, would you recommend they follow what you and Bob did in talking through scenes, in doing the note card method on the bulletin board? Is that the best way to start a story?

So you might as well put out something quality and take your time doing it.

Exactly.

So, okay.

All right.

It took longer than we expected, but you hold in your hands and you look at it and you see all the stuff that's in there and that extra time, it really allowed me to find more really interesting stuff there's stuff in here that i didn't even know existed there's stuff in here that i believe forgot about and in the process of getting this thing uh put together i went to a couple of the uber fans that i know and i gave them um uh an early version of this and i said please read this and tell me where i went wrong tell me there are where i where I have mistakes.

So one of the things that is in there reproduced for the very first time is the driver's license that Marty has in 1985.

Now, I pulled an image of the driver's license off of the internet like anybody else can do, but that's not the right one.

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we thought,

we thought that this would come out for the 40th anniversary, but yeah, it wasn't going to be good enough.

It wasn't going to be finished.

There were some hiccups with the book company and, you know, to their credit, they wanted this to be the best possible book that it could be in this, in this format.

And finally, you know, I kept saying, when am I going to see some more sample pages and, and, and, mock-ups and finally they said you know what um the guy who's the guy who's the designer on this is not he doesn't get it we want to bring in a whole new designer um he's going to start all over again and the book's going to get pushed back uh till next till 2026 and And I said, well, okay, if you're going to do it in 2026, release it on October 21st, because that's Back to the Future Day.

It's apropos.

But they and the designer, a guy named Josh Baker, had worked at Cash, and that's where they got him from.

And that

I figured.

Yeah, we shot...

We certainly shot, you know, obviously the stuff when Michael J.

Fox is up on the catwalk looking down at himself, which would be good.

Obviously, we had...

We had to redo that.

We couldn't just figure out a way to put the footage in there.

Oh, yeah, yeah.