Bringing McFly’s Gibson back from the past, er, future By: Jen Zoratti Posted: 2:00 AM CDT Tuesday, Jun. 10, 2025

The cherry-red Gibson ES-345 Michael J. Fox plays as Marty McFly in the 1985 film Back to the Future is, to use an overused word, iconic.

It’s also been missing for decades. And now, in honour of the movie’s 40th anniversary, Gibson wants to find it.

The guitar brand has launched a worldwide missing-guitar campaign complete with a tip submission website and 1-800 line to assist with the search, which will be featured in a forthcoming documentary called Lost to the Future.

Gibson also released a buzzy teaser video last week featuring Back to the Future stars Fox, Lea Thompson, Christopher Lloyd and Huey Lewis — who had a cameo in the film — asking the public for their help.

“We’re trying to find the guitar I played in Back to the Future,” Fox says in the video. “It’s somewhere lost in the space-time continuum, or it’s in some Teamster’s garage.”

“This is a global search that we’re inviting fans to embark on with us. We’re taking this to the back alleys of London and the pawn shops of Brazil, the prop houses of L.A. to the streets of Winnipeg,” Gibson’s media director Todd Harapiak tells the Free Press. Harapiak, as it happens, is from Winnipeg. “Who knows where this guitar is?”

It’s a guitar that’s long captured the imagination of filmmaker Doc Crotzer, who is directing Lost to the Future. He even has photographic evidence of himself as a little kid recreating that famous scene of Marty McFly performing Chuck Berry’s Johnny B. Goode at the Enchantment Under the Sea dance, sliding across the floor.

“(The idea) traces back to when we each first saw the movie, honestly, and it inspired each of us, like so many other kids of our generation, to pick up guitars, to get into rock ’n’ roll,” says Crotzer, whose 1983 birth year puts him squarely in that demographic.

“The through line of the documentary, of course, is the search for this instrument. But the heart of the documentary is what the movie and that scene and that guitar means for an entire generation of people who were inspired by it in so many different ways.”

Mark Agnesi, Gibson’s director of brand experience, has been looking for that guitar for 16 years, fascinated by the lore and mystery surrounding it.

How the story goes: Back to the Future director Robert Zemeckis realized the guitar was missing when it was needed for 1989’s Back to the Future: Part II and it’s been lost ever since.

“My story with it starts in 2009 when I became the general manager of Norman’s Rare Guitars in Los Angeles,” Agnesi says. “Norm rented them the guitar for the movie.

“And obviously that guitar is the reason why I play guitar. That scene is the whole reason that has sent me on this journey.”

Agnesi figures Marty McFly’s guitar would be a late 1960 or 1961 model. They do not have the serial number for it, which makes things a bit more challenging, because there are hundreds of red 345s from that era floating around.

But this one has a distinguishing feature.

“Gibson ES-345s have what we call split parallelogram inlays — two parallelograms with a little piece of wood in between there. All of them have this,” Agnesi explains.

All of them except the cherry-red Gibson ES-345 in question.

“If you look at the 12th fret, you will notice there is a solid parallelogram that’s not supposed to be there,” Agnesi says. “That’s the smoking gun.”

Since the tip site went up last week, Gibson has seen about 100 people per hour either signing up to stay updated or submitting tips, which the team will now have to sort through and vet. They fully expect to be sent on some wild goose chases, but that’s part of the fun, too.

Any tip is a good tip, Agnesi says.

“Did you see it in the ’90s? Did you see it at a store? Did you see it at an auction? Did you see it on the wall somewhere? Do you know somebody who has it? Like any kind of tip that we can get to piece together what happened from 1985 and the chain of command all the way to where it is now.”

The hopeful outcome is that they find it and are able to display it somewhere so that other fans can enjoy it. They also hope to reunite it with Fox.

“We don’t expect whoever has it to just hand it over to us,” Crotzer says. “But there’s something poetic, whether it’s for an hour or forever, about reuniting the guitar with Michael J. Fox, especially in the documentary when you hear how he talks about that guitar and how special it was to him.”

When all three men talk about meeting Fox, they are instantly transformed into ’80s kids again. “Yeah, the whole ‘don’t meet your heroes’ saying? Does not apply,” Crotzer says.

“One of the things that I really hope that we can accomplish with this, too, is I want Michael J. Fox to get his due as a guitar hero,” Agnesi says. “He’s a lot of people’s guitar hero, and because he wasn’t in a band, he’s always overlooked. But Michael J. Fox needs to get his proper due as the guitar hero that he is.”

And if they don’t find the guitar?

“Oh, we’re going to find it,” Agnesi says. “I don’t know where, but we’re going to find it.”

jen.zoratti@freepress.mb.ca