'Back to the Future' Villain Biff Tannen Is Based on Donald Trump
If you sat down to watch "Back to the Future II" on Wednesday in celebration of Back to the Future Day, you may have noticed some eerie similarities between the alternate-1985 universe version of Biff Tannen (Thomas F. Wilson) and a certain Republican presidential candidate with a penchant for self-promoting and building giant hotels and casinos. And it turns out that that's no accident: The writer of the flick has just confirmed that Tannen is, in fact, based on Donald Trump.
In an interview with The Daily Beast, "Back to the Future" series screenwriter Bob Gale was asked about some of the parallels of modern day Trump and the 1985 version of Biff in "BTTF2." Gale revealed that not only did he and his fellow filmmakers agree with those parallels, but that Trump was actually inspiring them at the time they were working on the flicks in the '80s.
The Daily Beast reports:
"We thought about it when we made the movie! Are you kidding?" he says. "You watch Part II again and there's a scene where Marty confronts Biff in his office and there's a huge portrait of Biff on the wall behind Biff, and there's one moment where Biff kind of stands up and he takes exactly the same pose as the portrait? Yeah."
Of course, in the movie, Biff uses the profits from his 27-story casino (the Trump Plaza Hotel, completed in 1984, is 37 floors, by the way) to help shake up the Republican Party, before eventually assuming political power himself, helping transform Hill Valley, California, into a lawless, dystopian wasteland, where hooliganism reigns, dissent is quashed, and wherein Biff encourages every citizen to call him "America's greatest living folk hero."
"Yeah," says Gale. "That's what we were thinking about."
Despite Gale and co.'s grim predictions for life under Biff Tannen's thumb, the writer says he's actually pretty optimistic about the non-fictional future, and said that he and director Robert Zemeckis hoped fans of the trilogy found a good message.
"These movies are about personal responsibility," Gale told The Daily Beast. "You need to be responsible for your own future, and if you do the right thing now, it'll have positive results in the future. ... 'Your future is exactly what you make of it,' as Doc Brown would say."
[via: The Daily Beast]