Where to watch Back to the Future Part II (1989)

Trivia & production notes

• Bob Gale wrote most of the first draft alone while director Robert Zemeckis was busy directing Who Framed Roger Rabbit.
• The original plan for the film's final act set it in 1967 with Lorraine as a flower child and George as a Berkeley professor, but time paradox complications led them to return to 1955 instead.
• Crispin Glover's salary negotiations became a major obstacle, and when he declined to return, the script was rewritten to have George McFly already dead in the 1985 scenes.
• Screenwriter Bob Gale based the character of 1985 Biff on Donald Trump.
• Production designer Rick Carter spent months designing Hill Valley's 2015 appearance and deliberately avoided the smoke-and-chrome aesthetic of Blade Runner.
• Michael J. Fox filmed the final season of Family Ties while simultaneously shooting Part II, requiring makeup aging effects that took over four hours to apply.
• Robert Zemeckis slept only a few hours per day while supervising both Part II and Part III simultaneously, flying between Burbank and other California locations.
• The film was shot back-to-back with Part III to take advantage of an extended break Fox had from Family Ties and to keep production costs down.
• Industrial Light & Magic used the VistaGlide motion control camera system for the first time to create dynamic scenes where Michael J. Fox played three characters interacting with each other.
• The holographic shark in the Jaws 19 scene was left unaltered from ILM's first digital test because effects supervisor Ken Ralston appreciated that it looked imperfect.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article Back to the Future Part II, available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Rewritten for StreamShack; errors are ours — tell us about them.