We Don't Need Roads: The Making of the Back to the Future Trilogy (6 page)

However, as disappointed as she was to hear that he was being removed from the project, the news did come as a small
relief, especially considering her own minor indiscretions at the time of filming. “My boyfriend at the time was Dennis Quaid, and he was overseas making a movie,” she says. “We hadn’t seen each other in a while and I really wanted to see him. I was not supposed to go away, but I had a week or two off, so I slipped away against the rules after I was explicitly told not to leave town. I was in Munich. That was a long time ago, so I called my answering machine just to check in, and it was like, ‘Beep! This is Steven Spielberg. Beep! This is Frank Marshall. Beep! This is Bob Zemeckis. Beep!’ and I was like, ‘Oh, my god, I’m getting fired! Oh, my god! Oh, my god! Oh, my god, they found out that I ran out of town and I’m in trouble!’ I was trying to get a plane ticket until I finally talked to Neil and he told me what happened.”

“I was just super-relieved it wasn’t me,” she continues, still laughing about it after almost three decades. “I disobeyed the rules. They wouldn’t remember that because I never told them I was out of town.”

Some of the actors who worked most closely with Stoltz had a feeling that something was off-kilter within a week of the announcement. Tom Wilson remembers there being an odd atmosphere and uncomfortable buzz around the set in the first few days of 1985. Christopher Lloyd also had a sense that things were not clicking the way they should have been. “I felt for Eric. He was a really good actor,” he says. “Although he was doing the part well, he was not bringing that element of comedy to the screen.”

As surprising as the announcement was, some on the crew had sensed that a big change was forthcoming once shooting resumed after the Christmas holiday. “There were signs, especially the last week or so,” Cundey says. “When we would set up a shot and we would shoot Chris Lloyd’s angle, but we wouldn’t do the reverse on Marty. I’d say, ‘Don’t we need the angle?” and
Bob would say, ‘No, no, no, let’s not worry about that.’ It didn’t take long for me to see that we were saving our energy for what would come next.”

“I got a phone call from one of the producers—I don’t remember if it was Bob Gale or Neil—basically saying, ‘Larry, don’t change the set from 1955,’” production designer Larry Paull says. “They said they weren’t done with it, there may be some changes, and they couldn’t go into it any further, but I was to stop what I was doing.”

The formal announcement came during the late-night “lunch break,” around 10:30
P.M
. After Zemeckis dismissed Stoltz from the set, the cast and crew were assembled. The full production team of the director, Bob Gale, Neil Canton, Kathleen Kennedy, Frank Marshall, and Steven Spielberg were present, an unusual show of force that tipped everyone off that something serious was imminent.

“We have an announcement,” Zemeckis said into his bullhorn. “It’s probably going to be shocking—kind of good news, bad news.” The crowd was starting to grow uneasy, he could tell. “I’ll give you the bad news. We’re going to have to reshoot most of the movie because we’ve changed the cast and there’s going to be a new Marty: Michael J. Fox.”

The director saw the reactions. They weren’t gleeful, per se, but they didn’t seem to be as angry or worried as he had feared. Someone from the crowd shouted, “That’s certainly not the bad news!”

“Okay, well, then that’s the good news. I guess the other good news is that we’re going to continue on.” He paused. “So it’s only good news and good news.”

With only a half hour designated for break, things quickly returned to as close to business as usual as they could be after
Zemeckis’s megaphone address. However, while Zemeckis and company had planned a surprise for their crew, an unexpected surprise was still in store for one member of the inner circle. After the announcement, Neil Canton’s pager went off. He went to the nearest pay phone and dialed. “Hurry home.” It was his wife. He did as instructed, excusing himself, racing out of the mall parking lot, and heading westbound on California Route 60. The next time he would return to work, he would not only have a new leading man, but also a baby daughter.

Eric Stoltz’s name remained on the production report for the following day, but with no call time or code letters written in to indicate that he was requested to report on set. When the next week began, two strokes of Wite-Out were applied to the call sheet, eliminating
Marty
and
Eric Stoltz
from the top of the cast list. Michael J. Fox would be reporting for duty that Tuesday to the mall, exactly where Eric Stoltz had left off. There could be no greater sign that things were going to continue as seamlessly as possible than that.

But much to the production team’s disappointment, there was some collateral damage that came with the Stoltz decision. It’s hard to imagine anyone unhappier to hear about Stoltz’s ousting than Melora Hardin, who was cast as Jennifer Parker, Marty’s girlfriend. Hardin, now best known for playing Jan Levinson on NBC’s American version of
The Office
, had yet to shoot a frame of footage for
Future
before she found herself on the losing side of a lesson in causality. The Bobs realized that her height—five foot five—might appear awkward to the audience next to Fox, who is an inch shorter. Initially, they thought they might have been overthinking the matter. What’s an inch? Plenty of guys had girlfriends who were taller than them. But just to be sure, they decided to poll the crew. As it turned out, women felt
strongly that Jennifer shouldn’t tower over her boyfriend in physical stature, which was enough to convince them to recast.

Months before Bob Z made that announcement in the mall parking lot, Hardin, who had starred in the forgettable 1977–1978 NBC series
Thunder
, and had guest roles in a number of unforgettable shows such as
The Love Boat
,
Diff’rent Strokes
, and
Little House on the Prairie
, was brought in to audition for
Back to the Future
. A callback followed, which included a “chemistry read,” a process by which two actors are put together to see how well they interact and look together on-screen. With Stoltz already hired, Hardin and two or three other finalists took turns reading short excerpts from the script—known in the industry as “sides”—doing their best to show that they had what it took to play the part of Marty’s love interest.

While hardly new to the acting world, the young actress, who had just celebrated her eighteenth birthday a few weeks earlier, felt that this audition was special. Hardin was ecstatic when she learned she would be sharing the silver screen with Stoltz. In the weeks following her hiring, production began. When Stoltz and Crispin Glover were filming the scene in Hill Valley High cafeteria where Marty first tries to convince George to ask Lorraine to the Enchantment Under the Sea dance, Hardin was called to the set. Photographs were taken of her that were later to be developed into a pocket-size print for Marty to carry around in his wallet. “I remember being at the school where they were filming,” she says. “I said hello to everybody. Everyone was like, ‘We’re so happy to have you on the set! We’re so happy you’re in the movie!’ They were very warm and sweet, and meanwhile it was all falling apart and I didn’t even know it.”

The state of things became apparent when she received a large bouquet of flowers and a conference call at home with both
Bobs on the line. “They called me together and said that they were so sorry,” she says. “It had nothing to do with me, but that they had to recast Eric. I was just too tall for Michael J. Fox, but they had loved me and promised we would work together again in the future.” The actress burst into tears, prompting her newly former bosses to console her over the phone. “It was one of the hardest things I ever had to do,” Bob Gale says. “I have no problem firing someone for cause, but having to let her go because she was three inches too tall was a very tough conversation.”

“Bob Gale and I have had lunch a couple times over the years—just recently, in fact—and talked more about it,” Hardin says. “I can only imagine how horrible that was on their end of it. It’s hard to do those things. But they would have had to have Michael J. Fox standing on a box every time he shared a scene with me. That would have been a little weird.”

The Jennifer Parker vacancy caused by the second casting shake-up led the production team to offer the role to eighteen-year-old Claudia Wells—for the second time. In the summer of 1984, during the initial casting of the role, Wells was offered the part; however, a funny thing happened on the way to Hill Valley. ABC picked up
Off the Rack,
a pilot she appeared in starring Ed Asner and Eileen Brennan, as a midseason replacement with a six-episode order. The network demanded she give her full attention to the series, which precluded her from appearing in the film. Much like with Michael J. Fox, Stoltz’s bad luck created her good fortune. By the time the casting debacle occurred,
Off the Rack
was not renewed, and Wells was available again. She gladly accepted the role, playing alongside a new lead actor who, for the record, is her same height.

Just days after the big announcement, on the evening of Tuesday, January 15, Michael J. Fox made his way to the set to
shoot his first scene. The actor had already spent the greater portion of the day at the television studio. When he was done, a driver picked him up and took him to City of Industry. He arrived at 6:30
P.M.
, was put into hair, makeup, and wardrobe, and made his way to the parking lot at 7:15
P.M
. He was expected to shoot for three hours, spend fifteen minutes changing back into his street clothes, get picked up to be taken back home, and catch a short nap on a pile of blankets in the back of a station wagon with a teamster behind the wheel. He would make it to bed a little after 1:00
A.M
., continue sleeping for five or six hours, and then be picked up to go back to Paramount Studios on Melrose Avenue to begin the process all over again the next day. Although Fox’s marathon workdays have since become the material of cinematic lore, at the time, burning the candle at both ends didn’t faze the actor in the slightest. As he told the Bobs when he first met them after accepting the role, he relied on his youth and enthusiasm to compensate for his lack of a good night’s sleep.

With the bright movie lights illuminating the Puente Hills Mall parking lot on that January evening, Christopher Lloyd and his new costar engaged in some awkwardly pleasant small talk. Meanwhile, special effects supervisor Kevin Pike’s team began laying the foundation for the forthcoming bit of cinematic magic that the two would participate in. Dean Cundey prepared for the shot, while Bob Gale and Neil Canton conferred with Robert Zemeckis. From a bird’s-eye view, the producers appeared to be nonplussed, but both were excited over Fox’s arrival and relieved that their unconventional maneuver to save their film was going according to plan.

With the lot properly lit and the camera and its operators in place, the producers took a step away from their director. The effects team ignited a mixture of gasoline and pyrotechnic fluid,
which had been tested beforehand to ensure it wouldn’t destroy the parking lot asphalt. On the blacktop, two adjacent straight lines went ablaze near where the talent would be standing. The actors took to their marks, got set, and when they were ready to go, second assistant cameraman Steve Tate stepped in front of the camera lens and snapped the clapper board. Bob Z gave the word—“Action!”—through his megaphone. Gale and Canton watched closely. Less than a minute into Fox’s first shot, those on set could almost feel a weight ascending from everyone’s shoulders.
We might just pull this thing off after all . . .

Zemeckis had gotten used to making compromises, both small and large, in the preceding thirty-four days of shooting. Firing Stoltz was simultaneously a humbling and courageous decision, requiring him to navigate through the channels to rally support behind him, from his editors up to the studio head himself. It was an amazing show of leadership for the thirty-three-year-old director, at a time in his career when he was still considering himself lucky just to have work. Even if it was an intimidating decision to make, when he saw Michael J. Fox turn to face the camera and ask Christopher Lloyd the now-famous rhetorical question—
You’re telling me you built a time machine . . . out of a DeLorean?
—the director knew that he had been vindicated. The hole in the middle of the screen had been plugged.

It was a decision that was applauded by both cast and crew. “Bob is really good at seeing the way a project should go and trying to get it to go down that road, as opposed to another director who might be afraid of getting fired himself, just going along and letting the bad actor sort of drive everything,” Dean Cundey says. “Bob has that confidence in knowing what the movie needs and to be able to request it. I think that’s one of his great qualities, especially with the
Back to the Future
circumstance—the
fact that he was just convinced that the decision should be made, and then guided it to that decision.”

From the first moments on set, it became clear that Michael J. Fox was perfect for the role for a variety of reasons, both tangible and intangible. Perhaps it was that Marty suddenly became eight inches shorter. With him and the six-foot-one Doc no longer virtually seeing eye-to-eye, there was a greater visual reminder to the audience that their hero was, in fact, a teenager attempting to navigate through an imposing world—both in 1985 and, especially, in 1955. It could also have been the quick and quiet costume change, a substantial departure from the character’s original pseudo-militant black turtleneck jacket to a goofier and brighter layered ensemble comprised of a patterned, casual buttoned shirt, a denim jacket, and an orange puffy vest that people of the past understandably kept mistaking as a life preserver.
Back to the Future
stopped becoming just another film project, and with a new leading man in the DeLorean’s driver’s seat, it started to feel more like something special.