‘Back to the Future’ Writer: Biff Is Donald Trump
The similarities between the megalomaniacal billionaire hotel-casino owner with hair the texture of cotton candy, a penchant for surgically enhanced arm candy and outsize ambitions that appears in Back to the Future Part II and the one presently appearing on the presidential campaign trail?
Not so coincidental after all!
Back to the Future Part II screenwriter Bob Gale confirmed in an interview with the Daily Beast that Donald Trump was the inspiration for the character he and director Robert Zemeckis created back in 1989.
“We thought about it when we made the movie! Are you kidding?” Gale told the Daily Beast. “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.”
In the movie, Biff Tannen – Hill Valley’s number-one citizen, America’s greatest living folk hero and Marty McFly’s arch nemesis – resides in a palatial penthouse atop a casino, which bears a striking resemblance to the Trump Plaza Hotel, which opened its doors five years before the film premiered.
“Yeah,” Gale said. “That’s what we were thinking about.”
The only thing Gale and Zemeckis seemed to have gotten wrong was Biff’s signature insult — it’s “butthead” not “loser.” Still, pretty close, and as Gale noted, “We don’t have Jaws 19, but we have Sharknado 3.”