We Don't Need Roads: The Making of the Back to the Future Trilogy (5 page)

However oblivious the editors were to Zemeckis’s discontent with Stoltz, there were others who saw red flags. “I kind of sensed for about three weeks prior to the fact that they weren’t happy and were looking for a solution,” cinematographer Dean Cundey says. “While I heard a couple of rumors, there was nothing concrete for any of us in the circle to go by just watching on the set. Bob would want something that would make you say, ‘Yeah, that’s pretty funny,’ and Eric would say, ‘Well, no, I don’t think I can do that.’”

Back to the Future
is hard to pin down in terms of genre, with significant comedic, science fiction, fantasy, and even musical elements. While there are moments of romance and pathos, the film would certainly not be considered by many to be a hard-hitting emotional drama. But that fact might have been lost on its original lead actor. From the first day of shooting, the director had to put in extra effort to try and coax out of Stoltz the comedic performance that he and Gale had imagined would be there during the writing process.

“Eric didn’t get it,” Clyde E. Bryan says. “Eric did not understand the physical, pratfall type of humor that Bob was looking for, that Steven called ‘Daffy Duck humor.’ Eric didn’t like that. It wasn’t part of his style, for sure, so it was this constant tug-of-war—‘This is what I want,’ ‘I don’t get it,’ ‘Why should I fall down when I’m putting my pants on?’ Eric is a fine actor. I’ve worked with him before and since then, but he’s a very method actor, which doesn’t really work for Bob’s style of shooting.”

Almost half a decade earlier, in 1981, Eric Stoltz moved to New York after dropping out of the University of Southern
California. He studied with Stella Adler, Peggy Feury, and William Taylor, respected and revered acting teachers, before returning to Los Angeles the following year. Consistent with Adler’s preferred approach to the craft, he devoted himself to the “method,” a process by which a performer uses a number of techniques to embody the thoughts and feelings of the character he or she is portraying, in order to achieve a more realistic performance. Stoltz learned to parse a script and look for subtext, skills that may have been put to limited use in his earlier film roles, but lessons that paid dividends and led to his excellence in
Mask
. That movie may have caused him to get the role of Marty, but it was obvious from day one, at least to Lea Thompson, who played Marty’s mother, Lorraine Baines McFly, that Stoltz’s approach may have been all wrong for the lighter fare that the Bobs were going for.

“The story is really kind of intense if you think about it,” she says. “If you break down the script as a fine actor, you get confused by that stuff. They needed an actor to keep those balls up in the air so people would just stay with the story and not think about the darker aspects of it. I remember after the read-through, everyone was like, ‘That was so great,’ and he brought up the point that it’s really kind of strange and sad that all the people Marty loves remember a past he didn’t live. He remembers a completely different past. I don’t remember how he said it, but I was like, ‘Don’t do that! Don’t say that, Eric!’ He just wasn’t the right fit for the part.”

The ill fit of his acting chops might have been something the actor was actually aware of. Several in the crew believed he was frustrated working on the project, as there was little similarity between Marty McFly and the actor portraying him. At one point, Stoltz purportedly said in the makeup chair before shooting that he didn’t understand why he was in the film, because he
wasn’t a comedian and didn’t think he was funny. He fancied himself as more of a trained and serious actor. The response from the makeup artist was simple: “You’re an actor? Well, then act, dammit.”

But that’s not to say that he wasn’t trying. Stoltz did all he could to get into character and excel in the role. After shooting, he frequently met with Paul Hanson, a guitar instructor at Hollywood’s Musicians Institute hired by Bones Howe, the film’s music supervisor, to learn how to finger-sync on the guitar for the “Johnny B. Goode” number at the Enchantment Under the Sea dance. “He was staying at the Universal Sheraton, and I would go up to his room,” Hanson says. “Then he would come over to my house in North Hollywood. He was a really cool guy. He was a fellow
Star Trek
Trekkie like me. I taught him for maybe a month or so—maybe not that long, but it seemed like that—a couple of times a week.” The actor wasn’t a musician and had difficulty working his way around the electric instrument, but after a few weeks he became passably proficient. The actor also spent many hours working with Bob Schmelzer, his skateboarding coach. He was much better on a skateboard, so much so that Schmelzer, who was also hired to be one of Stoltz’s doubles on the film, thought the actor added a touch of punk edginess to the movie whenever he rode through a scene on four wheels. Stoltz was comfortable and confident on a skateboard, having known how to ride before taking the
Future
gig, which made those moments among the best he experienced during his time working on the movie.

While he clearly sensed that the actor wasn’t gelling despite his efforts, Zemeckis tried to make the best of it. Directing, he feels, is a series of compromises. If you’re shooting on location, you hope you have well-spaced cumulus clouds against a clear
backdrop of cornflower blue, but if you don’t, you make your peace with the sky you get. You try your best to remain on schedule, but if not, you move as quickly as you can and try and catch up at a later date. If an actor isn’t meeting your standards, try harder to get him to, and then, if all else fails, hope the next shot is better, add some more notes to your legal pad, and press on. But as the director watched the rough cut on the day before New Year’s Eve, 1984, he knew keeping Eric Stoltz in
Back to the Future
was a compromise he could not make.

“What do you think we should do, Artie?”

“If you really think this is a big problem, then you should get these scenes in front of our producers as soon as possible, tomorrow, on Monday, and if they agree with you, then you should show the scenes to Steven. If Steven agrees, get the scenes in front of the executives at Universal.” Artie looked at his number two, who was peering over the list of shots Zemeckis wanted the editors to trim or use alternate takes of. Zemeckis was not only unhappy with Stoltz’s performance, but also the cut-together footage, which he thought was not ready to be shared with anyone else.

“We don’t have any time to make any of your changes, so I’ll take complete responsibility for the way those scenes are edited,” Schmidt continued. “You can tell the producers and Steven and the studio heads that it’s not your edit, but we just wanted to get these things in front of everybody because of Eric’s performance.”

Bob Z sat for a moment, and then got up and left the room, passing all of the cardboard boxes that housed what would soon be mostly unusable footage. He thought about it the whole way home. At this moment, Robert Zemeckis and Marty McFly had two significant things in common—they both were chiefly responsible for fixing the future, and they both needed some assistance and support in doing so. He picked up the phone and called his
producers, telling both Bob Gale and Neil Canton the same thing: “Good news, bad news. The good news is that everybody else in the movie is really, really wonderful, the bad news being that Eric is kind of lost in the movie. He doesn’t have the everyman quality that we had all been hoping for.”

The following day, the two producers joined Zemeckis in watching the footage. They too saw the hole in the screen. The next step was to bring the cut to Steven Spielberg and ask for his support in raising their concerns and request to recast to Sid Sheinberg. The director took the footage to the screening room at Amblin and watched it with his executive producer. When it was over, Zemeckis asked if he was crazy for seeing what he saw. The answer was an emphatic no. Spielberg could write a long list of positive attributes about what he had just watched, but Eric Stoltz’s performance would not have been on it.

Zemeckis may not have been eager initially to have Spielberg on his
Future
team during the pitching phase, but with this problem on his hands, Bob Z was glad to have his old adviser still standing beside him. Spielberg screened the footage for his partners Kathleen Kennedy and Frank Marshall, who quickly joined the bandwagon of Zemeckis supporters. “I thought it was a brave conversation for Bob to have at a point when there was still something that we could do,” Marshall says. “We were really young. It’d be terrifying now, but it presented itself as a challenge. What do we do? How do we fix this? That’s what producers do. Our job is to help directors get their vision up on the screen, whether they have a different vision than they originally had or not. Our challenge was, how do we do this? Can we actually pull this off?”

With all of the producers in tow, Spielberg counseled Zemeckis and his producers to line up a replacement as soon as
possible. No matter what they did, they had to keep moving forward on the filming schedule so the studio wouldn’t smell blood in the water and pull the plug altogether. While the problem was clear, the solution was more opaque. The search for Marty McFly had been arduous from the beginning, and there was no indication that trying to line up a replacement actor—especially while operating secretly—would yield any greater success. With their backs against the wall, Steven Spielberg offered to make a Hail Mary pass. He shut his office door behind him, sat behind his desk, and made another call on the film’s behalf to his friend Gary David Goldberg over at
Family
Ties
.

Thursday, January 3, 1985

I
t took Michael J. Fox less than an hour to hang up the phone, get dressed, leave his house, fly down the highway, and get to NBC Studios in Burbank. He had made the drive to Gary David Goldberg’s office dozens of times before, but there was something about the urgency and vagueness of the producer’s call that made Fox sure this was not going to be a usual visit. He arrived feeling as if he had been called down to the principal’s office, and worried he had inadvertently done something worthy of reprimand. Goldberg was already behind his desk. He skipped the pleasantries, further putting Fox on edge. The television producer had a lot of respect for his star and shot straight with him. Goldberg told Fox about
Back to the Future
, how the film’s production team had wanted him from the start, and how Goldberg had kept the script from him. While much of this was new information for Fox, the producer was surprised to know the actor was already familiar with the movie and had wanted to be involved since the film’s preproduction stages.

Back in mid-August, when Meredith Baxter was put on bed rest as her due date neared,
Family Ties
went on a brief hiatus so
her character wouldn’t be absent for half of the season. During this time off, Fox was offered, and accepted, the lead role in
Teen Wolf
, a campy teen horror-comedy produced by an independent film studio that promised the actor the three things he was most in want of—a decent paycheck, a starring role, and a four-week shooting schedule. While filming in Pasadena, Fox saw a crew scouting the location where the
Teen Wolf
team had temporarily set up shop. The actor struck up a conversation with the visitors, who said they were working on a new movie,
Back to the Future
, which Steven Spielberg was involved with. The actor was immediately self-conscious of his situation, burdened by afflictive prosthetic makeup, running around the street like an animal in this low-budget piece-of-trash movie that was almost destined to be a flop, while Crispin Glover, whom Fox had recently worked with on an episode of
Family Ties
, was going to be appearing in a $14 million Spielberg picture. Fox thought he was at least as good an actor as Glover was. Why wasn’t he offered a chance to audition for the film?

But now it all made sense. The television producer took the script out of an oversize manila envelope safely guarded in his desk drawer. When Spielberg approached Goldberg about Fox for the second time, things were different on both ends. “We assured him we would adjust our shooting schedule around that of
Family Ties
,” Bob Gale says. The actor in demand now had a little more flexibility in his series’ shooting schedule, since Meredith Baxter had given birth to her twins and returned to
Family Ties
full-time. Additionally, the sitcom would soon be ending its production for the season, not beginning it, as was the case when the filmmakers were initially looking to cast. Spielberg quickly forwarded a revised copy of the script to the television studio and asked that the actor read it that night.

Fox took the script and considered its title quizzically. Given the erratic situation surrounding
Family Ties
in the summer of 1984, the actor couldn’t blame the show’s creator for seeking to protect his property. Goldberg asked Fox to read it overnight and report back the next day if he was interested. If so, it would mean working eighteen-hour days between both projects, sometimes even longer. Weekends would be dedicated almost entirely to shooting the film, at least until the TV show wrapped for the season close to four months later. And by the way, he would have to start next week.

The actor grabbed the thick stack of pages and made a makeshift scale out of the palm of his hand, bending his forearm at the elbow to assess the weight. It was much heftier than any of his sitcom scripts. He got ready to leave his boss’s office, but stopped to let the producer know a decision had already been made, without the script even being read. Michael J. Fox was in. The
Future
production team had cleared their most important hurdle to date. Now they were going in for the kill.

Thanks to a 4:30
P
.
M
.
call time on Wednesday, January 2, the producers had time to see the Great and Powerful Wizard of Universal, Sid Sheinberg. Not only would letting Eric Stoltz go be an expensive venture, as they would have to pay him his already-agreed-upon salary and there would be overages due to essentially starting over, but it would also further derail the film’s release date. Initially Sheinberg hoped to have the movie in theaters by Memorial Day, but he had already acquiesced and scheduled the film for a mid-July release. A casting change of this magnitude would derail the release of the movie by at least another month. While Sheinberg had given his blessing that they could replace Stoltz if it didn’t work out, everyone involved knew it was a bold request, even for someone with as much capital in Hollywood to
spend as Steven Spielberg. Replacing an actor midstream wasn’t completely without precedence—Harvey Keitel was replaced with Martin Sheen after Francis Ford Coppola was unhappy with the first week of photography on
Apocalypse Now
—but never with so much footage, money, and time that would go to waste. “We went to Sid Sheinberg and put our cards on the table,” Bob Gale says. “After he saw the footage, he reluctantly agreed.”

But Sheinberg disagrees with the producer’s claim. “It was an easy decision,” he says. “What would you do if you had a project that had two people making it, Bob and Steven, that you had a very high regard for? They never really said, ‘We think it’s bad.’ They were saying, ‘It’s not funny. It’s not working the way we see it.’ It didn’t take me one minute. They wanted me to go down and look at film, and I said, ‘You guys must be crazy. You think I’m going to take the two of you on? Life is too short. If you guys feel the way you do, make the change.’ I think if I would have said, ‘Continue making the movie that you don’t think is working,’ then I would have been an idiot for sure.”

While Zemeckis is quick to acknowledge that casting Stoltz was his error, Sid Sheinberg feels culpable for the casting decision. “I was responsible for Eric being hired, but I don’t consider that to be a character flaw,” Sheinberg says. “It’s just that my perception of the role originally was to use actors as prototypes. I saw the role as Jimmy Stewart, which is one kind of a comedy. They saw the role, ‘they’ being Bob and Steven, as Bob Hope. With the wisdom of hindsight, they were right. Of course, we don’t know what would have happened if Eric Stoltz had ended up completing the picture. It may have also been successful.”

Secretly, steps were taken to make the transition as smooth as possible. Fox met with the production team and was caught up to speed on his character. Marty McFly, a guitar-playing teenager, seemed like a part right up the actor’s alley. He already
knew his way around the instrument, and although he wasn’t the best rider in the world, he owned a skateboard and was willing and eager to spend more time on one. Initially he found the story a bit confusing to follow, but he thought the writing was exceptional. Whatever happened with
Teen Wolf
, which had yet to be released, and his two previous films, was irrelevant in his mind from this point on; his film career was going to start on his first day of shooting
Future
.

Meanwhile, production kept moving along with the original McFly. Years later, when Eric Stoltz was asked to reflect on his time working on
Back to the Future
, the actor recounted that it felt like a long winter. Perhaps he was remembering the evening of January 7, when art imitated life and Stoltz and Marty’s experiences finally became one. The cast and crew shot at Griffith Park, a location production manager Dennis Jones hyperbolically noted that, at night, is the coldest spot in the known universe. Just hours earlier, Zemeckis got the approval to move forward with transitioning away from one lead to the other. Few people knew it at the time, but the actor was soon to be given severance and sent on his way. That evening, Stoltz shot a scene in the sequence before lightning strikes the clock tower. Marty is at the white starting line getting ready to take off in his vehicular time machine. He slams on the gas, but nothing happens. He feels the simultaneous frustration and disappointment that his perceived destiny, his future, isn’t within reach as he originally thought. He tries again, but nope. He keeps turning the key, trying to coax the vehicle into motion. Ultimately he slams his head into the center of the steering wheel in exasperation, the car starts, and he prepares to drive. He looks ahead, eyes focused, throws the car into gear, and—

“Cut. Thank you, Marty. We’ll take it from here.” The actor
got out of the car and his stunt double took his spot, presumably to complete the journey while Stoltz was pushed to the sidelines as another McFly took his place.

The next day, production moved to the Puente Hills Mall, the large shopping center in City of Industry, located in the San Gabriel Valley region of Los Angeles County, which served as the location for the fictional Twin Pines Mall. The cast and crew were scheduled to shoot the scene with the time machine’s first temporal displacement, where Doc sends his dog Einstein one minute into the future. The pageant continued, with the crew continuing to accumulate largely irrelevant footage of Stoltz, unknowingly practicing for Fox’s turn at the take, as unit photographer Ralph Nelson snapped photographs that would remain under lock and key for decades to follow. Doomsday came just forty-eight hours later. The majority of those called to the mall that night had no reason to suspect that this shoot would be any different from the ones that preceded it. The lead actor arrived on set at 5:30
P
.
M
. and headed directly to hair and makeup. He then stepped in front of the cameras for his final time, presumably to feed lines to Christopher Lloyd, who played his costar Dr. Emmett “Doc” Brown. Production manager Dennis Jones filled out a report on each shooting day with codes listed to represent how each actor’s time was spent on that particular day and whether or not he or she was needed back at a subsequent time. On January 10, in the column for Stoltz, Jones wrote the letter
F
in black ballpoint. In this case, it stood for
finished
, but a number of other words could certainly have stood in its place,
fired
among the most gentle.

It was decided beforehand that members of the production team would let the principal cast know about the change slightly in advance of the big announcement to the rest of the crew. Bob Gale spoke with Crispin Glover, who was cast as George McFly,
and Thomas F. Wilson, who played bully Biff Tannen, while Neil Canton was responsible for talking to Christopher Lloyd and Lea Thompson. Frank Marshall and Kathleen Kennedy called Eric Stoltz’s agents. Robert Zemeckis broke the news to Stoltz himself as Spielberg waited in the wings.

Exactly what transpired between the director and his outgoing leading man during their conversation has been kept between the two of them, but Zemeckis acknowledges that the actor took the news hard, as was to be expected. For Canton, the night that he had assumed would be filled with unhappiness got off to a surprisingly lighthearted start when he received a much-needed laugh from his old friend Christopher Lloyd. “I knew Chris because we had worked together on
Buckaroo Bonzai
,” he says. “He was funny. When I told Chris that we were going to be replacing Eric in the film, he looked at me and said, ‘Well, who’s Eric?’ I said, ‘Marty,’ and he said, ‘Oh, I really thought his name
was
Marty.’ To this day, I don’t know if Chris was just pulling my leg.” Canton’s amusement came from the fact that, on set, Stoltz adhered to his method acting instruction and refused to answer to his real name, to the frustration and eye-rolls of many in the crew. Those on the production team didn’t find the actor’s request as grating as the rest on set did. “We almost always called him Marty,” Bob Gale says. “We thought it was silly, but we figured if it helped him do his job, it was harmless. There were a few people on the crew who’d worked on
Mask,
and they called him Rocky, the name of his character in that film.”

While Lloyd may or may not have realized that this was simply Stoltz’s way of staying in character, Tom Wilson was clear that Eric Stoltz was his name and being a pain in the ass was his game. The origin of the frequently awkward and hostile working relationship between Stoltz and Wilson can be traced back to
when the former was required to push the latter while filming the scene in the school cafeteria. According to Wilson, the lead used all his force take after take, unwilling to play pretend. Despite repeated requests from Wilson to take it easy, Stoltz didn’t, forcing the heels of his hands into the supporting actor’s collarbone with increasing strength.

Action! Push. Cut. Again. Action! Push. Cut. Again. Action! Push. Cut. Again. Action!
The result was a perfect shot and a number of bruises on Wilson’s collarbone. A score had been created and the bully of Hill Valley High was seeking to settle it in a few weeks. Wilson, who was appearing in his first major motion picture—he’d had a small role in an indie film called
L.A. Streetfighters
that he was eager to forget—felt he was in no position to complain to the director, but made a mental note to retaliate when they got around to filming the scene when Biff punches Marty outside the Enchantment Under the Sea dance. Wilson would never have his chance to deliver Stoltz’s comeuppance.

For Lea Thompson, the news of Stoltz’s dismissal was bittersweet. “It was hard for me because I was really good friends with Eric,” she says. “Eric is such a different actor, and he could be very difficult. It was a time when we were emerging from the seventies. All the young actors wanted to be like De Niro and Pacino, which was good in a lot of ways. Now a lot of young actors are just like businessmen. It was a different time. But it was not the right movie to behave like that. Eric had such an intensity. He saw drama in things. He wasn’t really a comedian, and they needed a comedian. He’s super-funny in real life, but he didn’t approach his work like that, and they really needed somebody who had those light chops.”