We Don't Need Roads: The Making of the Back to the Future Trilogy (22 page)

Inside, the rest of her team knew something had gone awry. “When we landed, we had to keep our eyes closed, because of the raining breakaway glass,” Gary Morgan says. “I was way in the corner, right next to the camera where Cheryl should’ve been. I opened my eyes and I said, ‘Where’s Cheryl?’ and somebody pointed outside. I got up and Cheryl was laying on the concrete and the pool of blood by her head was getting bigger. I thought she was dead. It was quite a moment, because you prepare for the worst in any stunt, but it just went wrong and nobody expected it to.”

When Wheeler woke up, she had three distinct thoughts. She was aware that she was alive, and was thankful for it. She also realized she couldn’t move and feared she was paralyzed. Then she wiggled her toes. She wasn’t paralyzed. She realized she had been immobilized. When she landed, the stuntwoman’s face had slammed against the concrete. She had a concussion, for starters, and everything was crushed on her face between her nose and left ear. “The medics were right there,” Morgan says. “They had ambulances, and the minute they rolled her over, she started talking, but she was out cold. She had no idea what she was saying, and sweet Cheryl was just going, ‘What did I do wrong? Was that my fault? Did I do something wrong?’”

As the medics on set tended to the stuntwoman, everyone else remained stunned. There was the inherent urge to do something, but there was really nothing anyone on the crew could do. “The rest of the actors and I ended up not even working that day,” Darlene Vogel says. “We couldn’t believe it. They had to shut down production that day and afterwards.”

Wheeler was rushed to the hospital, and the rest of her crew pretended to be her family to get access to see her. “If you had fallen backwards, and the back of your head hit the concrete, you’d be dead,” her doctor told her. “Or you’d wish you were dead, because you’d be a vegetable. I’ve seen people that fall backwards eight feet off a ladder on the back of their head and it crushes like an eggshell.” In addition to her body position when she landed, her harness, which had been specially designed for Michael J. Fox, saved her life.

“It was done very old-school, the way the stunt was set up,” she says. “It should’ve been done completely differently, and there should’ve been pads underneath us outside the clock tower. They had safety people below us, in case something went wrong. An
extra took a picture of one of them directly underneath me after I hit the pillar. I still have it to this day. Glass was raining down and she was ducking her head. I was right above her, and she was running and ducking. The glass was two stories high, and so who was going to be able to help me? If I did fall, what was she going to do? I was going to kill her if I landed on her, so she just got out of the way and I hit the concrete.

“It was a big issue in the stunt industry, because Max Kleven and Walter Scott were old-school guys,” she continues. “They were real well-known in their early careers. Walter was a cowboy. He was great on a horse, but as far as rigging and a stunt of this magnitude, he was out of his league. He really had to depend on the effects guys. We couldn’t figure out why we couldn’t put crash pads below, outside the clock tower. Max just said, ‘No, we want the lead up. We want the audience to see a big overview master shot, and we can’t see crash pads in the shot.’ It was one thing after another, and it was just one of those things that went real foul. Everything that could go wrong did go wrong. That was the end of this job for me. I did come back down three or four weeks later. They were still shooting. They had gotten another girl to replace me.”

Following the incident, Lisa McCullough came to visit her in the hospital. She reiterated the feelings she’d had about the stunt all along—she may have even used the words “I told them so”—and expressed her condolences for what had happened. Greg Tippie came to visit too. He sat at Wheeler’s bedside, saw her badly bruised and broken body, and said, “God, Cheryl, I’m so sorry. I should have listened to you.”

“Greg, if you had been behind that pillar, you would have heard me smack it,” she said. It was uncomfortable to talk, but she had learned her lesson about staying silent. “You would have
seen
me smack it. You would have seen me dangling there and you wouldn’t have pressed that button.”

“I know. You’re right, but who could have known you were going to hit that pillar?”

Without the presence of social media, and with the diligence of the team at Universal, news of the incident remained sparse. Word spread among those in the stunt industry, but most in the mainstream media and general public were none the wiser. In 1983, Steven Spielberg and director John Landis caught all sorts of hell when a stunt went wrong while filming
The Twilight Zone: The Movie
. Two elementary-school-aged actors, who were hired and paid under the table despite a California law that prohibits child performers from working at night and near explosives, were fatally injured along with actor Vic Morrow. News spread like wildfire and a lengthy trial ensued between 1986 and 1987. Universal did not want Wheeler’s incident to receive even a fraction of that attention. They did all they could to suppress a leak of the information, and until her lawsuit was filed, they were successful.

Cheryl Wheeler didn’t want to sue Universal, and she too didn’t want news of the incident to get out. She was new to the business and wanted to work again, but more important, she had liked working on
Paradox
. She enjoyed the rest of the stunt performers and, save for the day of her drop, had nothing but respect for Max Kleven and Walter Scott. Although she didn’t work with Robert Zemeckis directly—most of the hoverboard stunt work that she was involved with was shot second-unit—she thought he was a visionary and full of positive energy. He visited the set from time to time while they were working, and like magic, his presence made everyone work a little bit harder and remember the importance of what they were doing. They weren’t curing diseases or sending men to the moon—they knew
that—but they were making a sequel to a movie that meant something to many millions of people around the world. Those people were counting on them to give them another experience that they would enjoy and cherish, and that meant something.

But she did sue. She felt she had no choice. Over the course of the next several months, she endured three reconstructive surgeries to repair her arm and face. Her doctor waited a year before the final operation, a particularly arduous one on her jaw, which required that she have three pints of her own blood drawn in advance of her surgery. She filled out a workers’ compensation claim and was given $13,000 for her accident, barely enough to make a small dent in the mountain of bills she had acquired while recuperating and unable to take another job. At the time of her incident, the stuntwoman was at the top of her game, earning a quarter of a million dollars annually from the various projects she was able to pick up over the course of the year. Now her career was being sold back to her at a drastically reduced rate. “I was like, ‘That’s crazy,’” she says. “‘You can’t just expect me to take workman’s comp for something that wasn’t my fault. Not only did I not do anything wrong, but I argued about how it was being set up.’” She tried to negotiate, but to no avail. Then she lawyered up. “He just said, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, you do not want me to get her on the stand,’” she says. “‘Trust me, she is a sympathetic person and you may end up losing a lot of money.’ I wasn’t asking for a lot. I was asking for what I lost while I was in recovery.” The movie studio settled out of court, and within a year the stuntwoman returned to work. Not terribly demanding gigs, but easy ones like riding in the passenger seat of a stunt car. She knew they were “charity jobs” she was being offered by friends and associates who were eager to see her return to normalcy. Instead of feeling sad for what she had lost, she was happy
for what she still had. Within a few years, she did return to more rigorous stunts, a career she is happy to still have as a part of her life decades after it was almost ripped away from her. She even worked with Walter Scott again on other projects, but their relationship was forever changed. She asked questions now, not only of him, but also of other stunt coordinators on other projects. “Trust me” were words she no longer accepted.

The hoverboard incident was a horrifying experience, but one the stuntwoman doesn’t necessarily regret going through. As a component of her rehabilitation, she worked closely with Lindsey Duncan, a nutritionist whom she married in 1999. She has continued to work and is a motivational speaker who regularly talks about her experiences. “I was at the apex of my career,” she says. “When you’re in this business, you really do believe that the world revolves around you. A lot of people in Hollywood are like that. It’s a funny mentality, but when you’re on a big film like that, it just consumes you. It’s exciting and there are a lot of big stars. You feel important that you’re doubling a lead person.

“Then, all of a sudden, you wake up with your face crushed in and everything that you depend on—your job—is crushed,” she continues. “It was a huge wake-up call for me spiritually, or emotionally, or mentally, however you want to look at it. I knew I had to find some meaning for this. Everybody has their type of tragedy, whether it’s a car wreck or cancer; we all have been dealt these blows. If we don’t get it sooner, we’re going to get it later. Life is just that good and that bad.”

With Wheeler in recovery, the production continued on. Reshooting that scene was never a serious consideration, and as a result, the stuntwoman’s body can clearly be seen descending toward the ground outside of the clock tower in the finished film as the glass is falling. Despite the accident, the production team
was proud of the hoverboard sequences in the film, and when filming wrapped on August 1, 1989, they had a strong feeling that they had overcome the pressure they all felt and had made a pretty enjoyable picture. The only unknown was whether or not the audience would agree. There was little doubt that
Part II
would have a strong opening weekend—goodwill from the first film and a strong marketing campaign guaranteed that—but the Bobs didn’t just want their movie to turn a profit. For them, it was more important that their fans, the ones who were in the back of their minds every day of writing and shooting the picture, felt good about their return trip to Hill Valley and remained enthusiastic about seeing the conclusion of the story the next summer.

As with the first movie, once the cameras stopped rolling on
Part II
, there was little time to celebrate. There was only a short hiatus before work had to begin on
Three
, the working title for the next chapter in the Marty and Doc story. As
Back to the Future Part II
’s theatrical release neared, Zemeckis and company’s excitement was more measured. With filming already significantly under way on the final film in the series, there wasn’t the same sense of finality as there was in the summer of 1985.

The test screenings for
Part II
went well, but there wasn’t the same overwhelming enthusiasm that had been present in the theater during the first movie’s previews. The initial response about the hoverboards on the television special was reassuring, but not as conclusive as screaming test audiences and a rush to release from Sid Sheinberg. Universal spent a lot of money promoting the sequel, including partnering with Pizza Hut for a number of television spots, but their efforts were unnecessary. Rival studios conceded defeat early on, making
Part II
the only major motion picture to debut over the Thanksgiving holiday weekend. In its first two days of release, before the official
weekend box office receipts were tallied, the movie made more than $22.3 million. Over the next three, $27.8 million more was accumulated. Even without counting those two early-release days, the sequel’s haul was the fourth-best opening weekend of the year, behind
Batman
,
Ghostbusters II
, and
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
.

Yet still, money couldn’t buy the filmmakers complete satisfaction. For starters, the reviews were generally positive, but not overwhelmingly so. While Roger Ebert kept his thumb pointed to the sky, Gene Siskel turned his upside down. For other critics, as well as several audience members, the film’s final scene, which showed Marty returning right after the famous clock tower lightning strike in 1955, was a disappointment. “What I remember most is feeling cheated at the end that we weren’t getting a resolution, but a cliff-hanger,” Leonard Maltin says. “I had just invested two hours in a story that I didn’t enjoy and wasn’t even rewarded with a resolution.” In recent years, it has become somewhat commonplace for films to spread out their story into two installments.
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
,
The Hunger Games: Mockingjay
, and
The
Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn
were all split in half, with the ending of the first left unresolved. Director Peter Jackson spread out
The Hobbit
over an unprecedented three films. Yet in 1989, audiences were not mentally prepared for a third installment when they walked into cinemas, a decision Universal made that Bob Gale believes cost the filmmakers some of the capital they had earned with their fans, and maybe even some capital at the box office.

“I had a big fight with Tom Pollock, who was the studio chief, about the marketing of
Part II
,” Gale says. “I absolutely wanted the audience to know before they bought their ticket that this was part two of three. Pollock wanted the audience to think
that
Part II
was complete in itself, even though he knew full well it wasn’t, and he couldn’t have been more wrong. I remember being disappointed with the ending of
The Empire Strikes Back
—Han Solo in carbon-freeze was a bummer. I had no idea that there was going to be a third one, not beforehand, nor even afterward, much less when it would be released.” In order to soften the blow of the second installment’s ending, Gale took a page from Alexander and Ilya Salkind’s playbook, who had shot 1973’s
The Three Musketeers
and its sequel consecutively, and insisted that a trailer for
Back to the Future Part III
appear at the end of the movie. But still, for some, the damage was done. “I lost my fight with Pollock and we lost a lot of goodwill with the audience.”