The power of — a doc.
Michael J. Fox famously rocked out on guitar to Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode” in an iconic scene from “Back to the Future.”
But now it’s more like “Johnny B. Gone”: The instrument Fox’s Marty McFly played at the Enchantment Under the Sea high school dance has been missing for nearly 40 years.
Now, as the 1985 blockbuster turns 40 on July 3, the search for the cherry red Gibson ES-345 guitar is being tracked in an upcoming documentary, “Lost to the Future.”
Gibson Guitars, Universal Home Entertainment and filmmaker Doc Crotzer have teamed up for the search for the long-lost axe.
The hunt was launched on Tuesday with a video featuring Fox and his “fellow “Back to the Future” cast members including Lea Thompson, Christopher Lloyd, Harry Waters Jr. and Huey Lewis.
“I always wanted to be a rock ‘n’ roll guitarist, that’s all I wanted to do,” Fox, 63, told People about the scene in which he performs the Penguins’ 1954 hit “Earth Angel” in addition to Berry’s 1958 classic. “It’s always been a passion of mine, rock ‘n’ roll, and particularly the guitar. There’s just something about it, like you are wringing the magic and the music out of it.”
In turn, Fox’s big guitar moment inspired Crotzer.
“‘Back to the Future’ made me want to make movies as a kid, and made me want to pick up a guitar,” he told Billboard. “I went on with my [filmmaking] career, but I had always wondered what happened to that guitar. Over the last however many years so many props from the movie have surfaced … but [the guitar] had never surfaced.”
Gibson’s director of brand experience Mark Agnesi — who previously worked at Norm’s Rare Guitars, the Tarzana, California shop from where the instrument was rented — was also inspired to play from the “Back to the Future” scene.
“I’ve been searching for this thing for 16 years now,” he told Billboard. “I started searching everywhere. Norm’s has this big warehouse of guitars and occasionally I’d go in and look for certain things, and every time I’m in there I was always looking around for [the ‘Back to the Future’ guitar], but to no avail.”
The guitar was apparently sold, then sold back to Norm’s and then resold again.
“Back then there was no digital record of that stuff; it was all hand-written receipts and stuff,” said Agnesi. “We know it was returned to Norm’s. At that time in the mid ‘80s there was a Japanese vintage guitar boom; charter buses of Japanese tourists were pulling up and buying everything in sight. So it could be someone has it in Japan. We don’t know. The possibilities of where it could be are endless.”
While the guitar’s serial number is unknown, it has a unique feature, according to Agnesi: the solid inlay on the 12th fret, unlike the split ones that were standard on the ES-345 at the time.
“That anomaly is the smoking gun we’re looking for, thank God,” he said. “That will not be on any other guitar … That’s how we’ll know we’ve found the guitar we’re looking for.”
Anyone with leads on the guitar’s whereabouts can call 1-888-345-1955 or send a message via www.LostToTheFuture.com.
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