Back to the Future is an American science fiction adventure comedy film series written by Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale, directed by Zemeckis and produced by Gale and Neil Canton for Steven Spielberg's Amblin Entertainment, and distributed by Universal Pictures. The franchise follows the adventures of a high school student, Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox), an eccentric scientist, Doctor Emmett "Doc" Brown (Christopher Lloyd), and Clara Clayton (Mary Steenburgen), in the third one, who is a schoolteacher, living and working in the schoolhouse outside Hill Valley, as they use a DeLorean time machine to time travel to different periods in the history of Hill Valley, California.