We Don’t Need Roads Reveals the Reality-Bending World of Back to the Future

The Internet has already provided a few handy (and excellent) lists of the essential facts laid out in this book. Over at io9, Charlie Jane Anders did a bang-up job, reveal how, originally, Doc had a pet chimp instead of a dog, that the time machine wasn’t always a DeLorean, and of course, why Eric Stotlz, the original Marty McFly, was replaced by Michael J. Fox after filming had already begun. These tidbits make great bullet points, but absorbing a bunch of information from a wiki or a blog post isn’t the same as reading a lengthy piece of journalism, and ingesting the entire thing is really worth your time. Because Gaines has managed to tell a new story about a cultural phenomenon that is already near and dear to many (all?) of us. You’ll feel excited for Michael J. Fox when he finally lands the role of Marty, and bad for Eric Stolz when he loses the gig. Did Michael J. Fox really play guitar? You bet. Like they are characters in a novel, Gaines allows us to feel for all involved in the creation of the films, from writer Bob Gale, to director Robert Zemeickis, to actors like Claudia Wells and Tom Wilson.
When it comes to long-rumored controversies, Gaines does an excellent, balanced job of drawing out the real story behind the gossip. There’s an air of mystery and scandal over Crispin Glover’s failure to return to the Back to the Future sequels after playing George McFly in the first film that Gaines deftly humanizes. You’ll marvel at Glover’s eccentricity: instead of a planned-rehearsal with Lea Thompson, he once asked her to paint a picture of a volcano with him. You’ll also wonder if he wasn’t a villain, while at the same time feeling sympathy for Jeffrey Weisman, the actor who was hired to “replace” him in Back to the Future Part II.
We Don’t Need Roads also reveals that the question of what’s “real” and what’s fantasy gets muddled when it comes to Back to the Future. The Gibson guitar that Marty plays during the Enchantment Under the Sea Dance was not actually available to the public in 1955.  A persistent schoolyard rumor about the imminent release of  “real” hoverboards can be traced to a deadpan joke from Zemeckis had made a deadpan joke in an early network TV special about Back to the Future Part II; suddenly, a large portion of the public was sure the technology existed. Meanwhile, any even larger segment of the population probably never noticed that, between films, Jennifer went from looking like Claudia Wells to looking like Elisabeth Shue, nor that the guy playing Marty’s dad was no longer Crispin Glover.
We often hear about the magic of moviemaking, but We Don’t Need Roads does more than just illuminate movie magic: Gaines makes us realize the process of creating something enduring is more like alchemy. But maybe a kind of alchemy where there’s like 70 wizards all working together, and a few of them are maybe a little drunk.
Gaines’s book is an engaging read even if you’ve never seen a frame of Back to the Future (I pity you, hypothetical reader). The people in it are compelling, utterly human, and fascinating. Traveling in time to the ’80s to write about a series of films that zig-zags back and forth across decades could not have been any easy task. The original interviews collected here are extensive, and the care in which they are stitched together has turned what could have been a simple reference book into a page-turner. It is more than a collection of nerdy facts about a cool movie series, it’s a sweeping, moving, totally amazing story about something that means so much to so many of us.
In other words, heavy.
(Full disclosure: Ryan Britt’s forthcoming book Luke Skywalker Can’t Read: And Other Geeky Truths will be released by Plume Books, publisher of We Don’t Need Roads.)