EDITOR’S NOTE: Back to the Future Part II was on USA Up All Night on January 16, 1998.

According to Wikipedia: “Director Robert Zemeckis said that initially, a sequel was not planned for the first film, but its huge box office success led to the conception of a second installment. He later agreed to do a sequel, but only if Michael J. Fox and Christopher Lloyd returned as well.”

That’s BS. The sequel was set up at the end of the first movie!

Most of the original cast agreed to return, but a major stumbling block arose when negotiating Crispin Glover’s fee to come back as George McFly. When it became clear that he would not return, the role was rewritten so that George is dead in 1985, and reused footage and an actor in make-up would fill in. We’ll get back to that.

It took two years to build the set, and this film and the third movie were shot at the same time (or at least worked on simultaneously).

Doc Brown (Christopher Lloyd) comes back to get Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) and his girlfriend Jennifer (Elisabeth Shue) in an attempt to fix the future. If Marty Jr. (also Fox) is allowed to be part of a crime with Griff Tannen (Thomas F. Wilson), things will go wrong for the entire family. The problem is that as they fix this, Bigg (also Wilson) steals a sports almanac and becomes Donald Trump, taking over the world, killing Marty’s father, George, and marrying his mom, Lorraine (Lea Thimpson).

This gets dark. Super dark. But just when it seems like everything has worked out back in 1955 — everything is repeated — the DeLorean disappears. It looks like all is lost when, in one of my favorite scenes, Joe Flaherty appears as a Western Union man, having had a telegram for decades to give to Marty at this exact moment. Marty goes back to see Doc Brown, having just left, all to set up the last movie.

Back to Glover.

According to an interview with Howard Stern, the highest offer he got was for $125,000, less than half of what the other returning cast members were paid. The actor felt that the movie’s message was incorrect. The characters were successful at the end of the film because of money, not love.

Zemeckis went beyond using old scenes to shoot new footage of actor Jeffrey Weissman, who wore prosthetics including a false chin, nose, and cheekbones. Weissman would tell Glover that the molds that were created from his face to make the aging prosthetics in the first film were reused to make the prosthetics for Weissman. Glover filed a lawsuit against the producers as they neither owned his likeness nor had permission to use it. Today, thanks to Glover, Screen Actors Guild collective bargaining agreements stipulate that producers and actors are prohibited from using such methods to reproduce the likeness of other actors. The precedent he set is being upheld in the digital aagee as well

Glover wasn’t the only actor not to return. Claudia Wells, who played Marty’s girlfriend Jennifer, was dealing with her mother’s cancer. She was replaced by Elisabeth Shue and even erased from past footage shown in the film.