The guitar that Marty McFly famously played at the Enchantment Under the Sea Dance in Back to the Future has been missing for decades, and hopefully it won’t take a DeLorean and a flux capacitor to find it.  

Gibson — the guitar brand behind the iconic cherry red ES-345 Michael J. Fox wielded in the movie — announced that it’s on the hunt for the guitar, with the company sharing a callout Tuesday asking for anyone who may have details on its location to reach out with tips. “Have You Seen This Guitar?” Gibson’s poster reads, accompanied by a still from the movie of Fox playing the instrument. The search — and if all goes the way Gibson would like, the re-discovery — will be featured in an upcoming documentary the company is producing called Lost to the Future. 

Gibson posted a video Tuesday with Back to the Future stars Michael J. Fox, Lea Thompson and Christopher Lloyd — along with Huey Lewis, who cameoed in the film and whose “The Power of Love” was famously featured in the movie — all calling on the public to send information to their website, or to call the 800-line Gibson has set up. 

“We need your help, we’re trying to find the guitar I played in Back to the Future,” Fox said in the video. “It’s somewhere lost in the space-time continuum, or it’s in some teamster’s garage.” 

The company initiated the search and documentary this year to tie the efforts to Back to the Future’s 40th anniversary, and Gibson is also featuring an interview with Michael J. Fox on Oct. 21 (“Back to the Future Day”) and will release custom guitars modeled after the original Gibson they’re searching for, Gibson said. 

“We’ve been looking into leads and rumors for a long time, and as you can imagine, we’re talking 40 years ago, so memories fade,” Lost to the Future director Doc Crotzer tells The Hollywood Reporter. “We weren’t in the era of digital trails, or of receipts and things like that. There are conflicting reports too. You can find about as many different rumors as you can people.” 

Indeed, there are several different stories about what happened to the guitar. The Back to the Future team first rented the instrument from Norman’s Rare Guitars, a famous guitar shop in Los Angeles, when they were filming the first movie. They’d returned the guitar after they finished shooting, and per Crotzer and Mark Agnesi — Gibson’s director of brand experience and Norman’s former GM from 2009 to 2019, that’s where their trail currently goes cold. 

Crotzer first asked Agnesi about the guitar around a decade ago when Agnesi was still working at Norm’s, and several years ago, after Crotzer first spoke with Back to the Future co-creator Bob Gale, he’d approached Agnesi again at Gibson. Agnesi and Crotzer list off several rumors, like that the guitar was headed to auction in the ‘80s but never made it there for a sale. 

A likely scenario, they say, is that someone simply bought it from Norm’s and the origins of the sale have been lost. Norman’s owner, Norman Harris, has given several interviews in the past, suggesting he sold it to a friend, who eventually sold it to a woman who came back to his store years later and offered $1 million to sell it back. But Harris had also suggested in the past that it’d been sold to someone in Japan. Needless to say, so far Gibson and Crotzer haven’t tracked the guitar yet. Aside from the public inquiry, Crotzer says the film is taking them through prop houses and guitar shops as well. 

“I knew that guitar came from Norm’s, the first day on the job, I was looking in cases,” Agnesi says. “Every time I’d go to storage to Norm’s warehouse, I was checking ES-cases to see if he still had it. I’ve been looking since 2009, 15 years of looking for this thing. It’s cool we’re going to let the world know we’re looking for it and everyone gets to join in.”

Gale tells THR that he “never gave it that much thought” on what happened to the guitar before he was told it was missing in around 2019, but that since then he’s become more invested in tracking it down. 

“It’s like we want to put it on milk cartons, ‘have you seen me,’” Gale says with a slight chuckle, describing the search efforts. “We rented the guitar again for Part 2, but I’ve learned that guitar might not have been the one we used in the first film. So the question is, what happened to the original?”

Back to the Future’s high school dance scene is one of the most memorable guitar scenes in the history of the film business, as Marty McFly unintentionally inspires the creation of Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode” by performing the song with the band on stage, eventually losing the crowd as his performance devolves into a Van Halen-style guitar solo. Artists, including John Mayer and Coldplay’s Chris Martin, have called that scene in the movie instrumental in inspiring them to pursue music. 

The scene almost never happened, as Robert Zemeckis contemplated going straight from the kiss to the scene at the clock tower, but it stayed in after testing at a preview when the audience reacted positively to it. 

“We had no idea it would be part of the film’s legacy, the Johnny B. Goode scene is the only scene in the entire movie which doesn’t really advance the character or plot. We were basically doing what they do in India, where we stopped the movie for a musical number,” Gale says. “It’s been amazing over the years to discover how important that particular scene was to people. It inspired so many people to pick up a guitar and be a rock and roller.”

Gibson says the guitar in the movie was likely a 1960 or 1961 ES-345 (Its use in the film was a historical inaccuracy, given most of the movie was supposed to take place in 1955 and the 345 didn’t hit shelves until three years later). An early ‘60s 345 on its own could already fetch $25,000 to $50,000 given how sought-after vintage Gibsons are, but its place as one of film’s most iconic guitars makes it priceless. 

Gibson and the doc team don’t have the guitar’s serial number, which would be the easiest way to identify a specific instrument. Luckily, they say, the guitar has a key identifier that makes it stand out. Usually, the ES-345 models would have a split parallelogram inlay going completely down the fretboard, but on the guitar in the movie, the 12th fret had a single sold bar marker on  it instead, a rare anomaly that would make the guitar more unmistakable. 

“That’s the smoking gun if we’re being honest,” Agnesi says. “It’s that inlay on the 12th fret that’s really going to let us know that we found it.”

Overall, the team feels confident their search will be successful, even if the search has to go well outside the country. Agnesi has a “Japan theory” for the guitar’s whereabouts, given a vintage guitar boom that hit the country in the ‘80s. He said Gibson’s international teams in Japan, China and Europe will help spread the word as well. 

As for what they’ll do if they actually do find it? That’s still to be determined, though Crotzer said, “there’s something poetic about the idea of reuniting this guitar with Michael J. Fox, whether it’s for an hour, or forever.”

“My hope would be whoever has this guitar is enough of a fan of the movies to allow that to happen. There are a lot of possible scenarios. Does the person who has it want to be found? Do they want to, say, lend us the guitar?”

Agnesi says he’d like to get the guitar in a place it can be showcased for “as many people to have a chance to see it as possible.” 

“If that means Gibson buys it for their collection and puts it in the vault, I am absolutely 100 percent ready to start talking with anybody who comes forward who might have the guitar about potentially buying it,” Agnesi says. 

Still, as Gale says, the focus remains on finding the guitar right now. 

“At this point, we just kind of want to know it’s in good hands and is being well taken care of,” he says. “Everything else you figure out after that, but let’s solve that mystery first.”