Robert Zemeckis has rarely directed movies.
 After the failure of his first two films, and the Spielberg-directed bomb 1941 in 1979 (for which Zemeckis and Gale had written the screenplay), the pair gained a reputation for writing "scripts that everyone thought were great [but] somehow didn't translate into movies people wanted to see
On November 5, 2004, Zemeckis received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for his work in Motion Picture at 6925 Hollywood Blvd

