We Don't Need Roads: The Making of the Back to the Future Trilogy (7 page)

“Michael came on and there was just a different sort of chemistry and feeling amongst most of the crew,” Dean Cundey says. “He was this very boyish character that Doc Brown could relate to. Eric was somehow older and more restrained.”

“Everyone felt a new sense of energy because of Michael,” Neil Canton says. “Like, ‘Oh, wow, this movie’s better. It’s funnier. He’s such a much more likable character.’ I think everybody kind of felt that way.”

“There are films where you realize that it’s just not working,” Cundey adds. “
Back to the Future
was one of those films where, when the change was made to Michael, the film came to life.”

Although she was happy production wasn’t stopping, Lea Thompson initially found herself less than enthused about Fox’s
arrival. The twenty-three-year-old actress had been working for several years, accumulating credits in more than a half dozen high-profile films like
Jaws 3-D
,
All the Right Moves
, and
Red Dawn
. While she was relatively new in the business, having only been acting professionally since she reached adulthood, she knew that making films was serious work—and she struggled to see how Michael J. Fox would live up to the challenge. “I was really snotty then,” she says. “I was like, ‘Oh, my god, a sitcom actor?’ I was so snotty about it. After I actually did a sitcom, I realized it was the hardest thing in the world.”

But despite her early skepticism, Thompson was soon won over by her new costar. Fox was not only an asset to what materialized on-screen, but he also elevated the mood of the set. “Michael was a real prince, and it was always really fun to work with him,” she continues. “He just had a way of getting a laugh when they needed a laugh. I’ve only worked with a couple actors like that—him and Walter Matthau. I just always enjoyed his kind of old-fashioned, Buster Keaton, fall-off-a-chair, crack-your-voice technique, which was impeccable.”

“Michael was very outgoing and very happy to be there,” Bob Gale says. “I remember him introducing himself to the crew, and being very friendly and gregarious. As I recall, Eric took his meals in his trailer, but Michael ate with the company.”

J. J. Cohen, who played Skinhead, a member of Biff’s gang, recalls the second pass at shooting the “I’m your density” scene in Lou’s Café highlighting a significant difference in the acting styles of the two men to have played Marty. During the Stoltz shoot, the actor punched Biff at the conclusion of that scene as if he really meant to hurt him, perhaps another moment that Tom Wilson filed away in his brain when plotting his revenge for the actor’s unrelenting method technique. However, when Fox
played the part, he added a facial reaction and slight shake of his hand to suggest that the punch had hurt before running out the door. It’s a small difference, but one that illustrates why the Bobs were lucky to have had an ally in Steven Spielberg and why the decision to replace Stoltz was so important. Marty is a reactive character, and if Fox was better at playing those moments, Sid Sheinberg was right in investing the extra cash to get the best man for the job.

“The main difference I saw between the two actors was that when Michael did a scene with Chris, he was very funny,” production designer Larry Paull says. “He was able to hold on to his end. When Eric did a scene with Chris, it became Doc Brown’s scene. That was the difference.”

“A lot of times, you need to cast people to fix your story problems just by them being who they are,” Lea Thompson says. “If the story problem is that the character does all these terrible things, but you need the audience to like them, you have to find someone really likable so people don’t notice that. That’s what Michael did. He fixed the problems we were having just by being funny. He kept a lightness to the story that was important.”

Although Fox’s arrival was primarily greeted with enthusiasm, the cast and crew were aware of the sacrifices they too would be making. On the day of the announcement, those outside of the production team believed themselves to be halfway through the shooting schedule. It had become routine for people to ask each other about what gigs they had lined up for when the shoot was over. Little did they know, the film wouldn’t be wrapped until late April, months beyond the industry average. Additionally, Fox’s
Family Ties
schedule ensured that twilight and weekend shoots would become the norm, an extra burden for all to bear.

Because there was no precedent for taking more than a month’s worth of footage and scrapping the lion’s share of it, a unique set of opportunities and challenges were put forth for the crew. Steven Spielberg loved the majority of what Zemeckis had accomplished when he watched the rough edit, so when reshoots began, there was a simple mandate that came down from his office—keep on doing what you’ve been doing. This was easier said than done, especially with a lead actor who operates as in-the-moment during shooting as Christopher Lloyd does. After all, how do you heed Spielberg’s advice if you perform differently each time the director calls a scene into action? “I was really taken aback and very concerned after Eric was fired that I wouldn’t be able to do it again,” Christopher Lloyd says. “I put everything into being Doc Brown for six weeks, and I was very worried I wouldn’t be able to live up to my own performance, so to speak.”

Of course, his concerns were for naught. Doc Brown was fully realized on the page in Zemeckis and Gale’s script, but the character truly came alive in Christopher Lloyd’s hands. The actor was instrumental in crafting the mad scientist’s look—a hybridization of composer Leopold Stokowski and Albert Einstein—and his commitment to his performance resulted in some of the most memorable moments in the film. “Chris was amazing,” Bob Gale says. “He never did a take exactly the same way, so we’d have all of these different variations on the line readings, and they were all wonderful. It was a good problem to have in the editing room.”

“I am sort of the kind of actor who is always worried that I didn’t do it well enough, each take,” Lloyd says. “I am always second-guessing myself. I tend to do that, but watching
Back to the Future
, I am much better than I thought I was when I did it.”

For the crew, revisiting the old material provided them with an opportunity to make small improvements and further elevate the storytelling. According to Cundey, filming with Fox became a bit of a puzzle, with him and Zemeckis matching shots with Marty in them with salvageable close-ups of other actors from the Stoltz era. “We would go back and re-create the scene with the advantage of not having to shoot every angle again, because they didn’t need it,” Cundey says. However, there is much debate as to whether or not his statement is accurate. The Bobs have consistently maintained that the entire film was reshot, perhaps with the exception of some second-unit photography, which would have included establishing shots, footage that included stuntmen, close-ups of the time machine, and other cutaways. According to Arthur Schmidt and Harry Keramidas, absolutely no footage from the Stoltz era was used. However, Tom Wilson concurs that some shots were only done once, primarily because he remembers that Michael J. Fox never punched him in the face when Biff gets decked by Marty in Lou’s Café after George tells Lorraine that he’s her density. The fist coming toward the camera, Wilson is positive, belongs to Stoltz. In examining the scene, it is obvious that the largely obscured actor who punches Wilson is several inches taller than Fox. Perhaps it’s just a stunt double, but it might also be a ghost from
Back to the Future
’s past.

There were also some modifications made while the film was in transition to accommodate the new budgetary limitations and the physical differences between Stoltz and Fox. For instance, the Bobs had written a scene to open the movie in which Marty sets off a fire alarm to get out of serving detention so he can go to audition with his band. The classroom set had yet to be built at the time of the casting change, so as a cost-saving measure, they devised a different concept for the beginning of the movie. Additionally, one of the
last sequences Stoltz shot was with Crispin Glover, as George McFly is hanging laundry. Marty takes his duffel bag filled with clothing, hangs it from a clothesline in the backyard, and teaches his father to punch by practicing on the suspended sack. The scene was supposed to end with George hitting the bag in a goofy way, breaking the hanging mechanism and a window in the process, thus foreshadowing the left-handed punch Biff receives later in the film outside the Enchantment Under the Sea dance.

“We never got that far into it, but when Michael came into our world, we had to reinvent some of the things that we had shot,” Kevin Pike says. “But the clothesline and everything that we had put together at the location in Pasadena was still there. For all of us, it was a no-brainer. We were just going to do the same thing over.”

When it came time to shoot the scene with Fox, the props department resupplied a bag. The special effects team rigged it from the attachment on the clothesline, and the cast and crew got into place. The actors took to their marks and Zemeckis called action. Then Zemeckis ordered the scene stopped. A call was made from a nearby pay phone to Pike.

“There’s a problem.”

“What could the problem be? All you have to do is hang the bag.” Then it hit him. Fox couldn’t reach the clothesline, as the height was set for Eric Stoltz. Because the mechanism was already set up to the top, and the bottom was cemented into the ground, the special effects team took a few inches from the middle of each post and welded the ends back together. As far as growing pains go, this was an easy problem to resolve.

With the movie on the right track, those financially invested in the film began taking the necessary steps to make up for the losses incurred during the first several weeks of shooting between
November 1984 and the beginning of January 1985. The decision to release Stoltz from his duties came at a $3.5 million price tag and a release date pushed even further back from July 15 to August 16. Since Zemeckis and company had taken their eggs and put them in the Michael J. Fox basket, all hands were required to help carry the extra weight. The publicity team did their part by operating with a three-pronged defense. The first step was to keep any bloodhounds in the media far away while the transition from Actor A to Actor B took place. An interoffice memo was sent from production manager Dennis Jones on the day that Stoltz was let go, advising all involved with the production to direct any questions about the casting change to either David Forbes, the publicity representative for Amblin, or Kimberley Coy, the unit publicist, to avoid improper dissemination of information and fueling of what he referred to as “the gossip mill.” All complied and, subsequently, the chattering class was kept at bay. Mostly.

“Hollywood did think we were a movie in trouble,” Bob Gale says. “We’re glad we didn’t have to deal with the Internet and shows like
E! Entertainment
suggesting that the movie might turn out to be a train wreck.”

“It was news at the time,” says film critic Leonard Maltin, who worked for
Entertainment Tonight
between 1982 and 2010. “It got a lot of attention, and then once the film came out and it was so good and so successful, it was discussed that much more.”

The second challenge was for the studio to simultaneously champion Stoltz’s role in
Mask
, which was still two months away from being released, while tactfully explaining his departure from
Future
to all who asked. Luckily for Universal,
Mask
seemed in no way deterred by “the gossip mill,” even with director Peter Bogdanovich getting involved in a very public squabble with the
studio over edits made to the movie before its release. There were the occasional questions about Zemeckis’s film that came up in interviews with Stoltz, but he consistently maintained that his departure was due to creative differences and that he and the filmmakers were on amicable terms, a position he has more or less stuck with for the decades following the film’s release.

The final step was to contour
Future
’s promotional strategy for its new release date in the late summer, a time of year when people tend to stop visiting movie theaters in exchange for taking one more vacation before Labor Day. The difficult date, coupled with its newly expanded budget, created an even greater challenge for Universal to make a return on its investment. The Amblin publicity team did their part by opening conversations with Drew Struzan, the highly sought-after artist who designed the iconic illustrated posters for the
Star Wars
trilogy, along with those for dozens of other films. Struzan had a long-standing working relationship with the Amblin Trio—Steven Spielberg, Kathleen Kennedy, and Frank Marshall—and the three felt that a one-sheet featuring his arresting artwork might just generate the interest they would need to get the attention of the public. The artist agreed to lend his unique touch to the film’s promotional campaign, to the delight of not only the executive producers, but also longtime Struzan fan Robert Zemeckis.

By the time production wrapped at the end of Michael J. Fox’s first evening shoot, the double-duty schedule that would be followed for the next several weeks had been set. By 4:35
A.M.
, the crew was dismantling their equipment in the mall parking lot. The sun would be coming up soon, and since the shopping center was still fully operational during the day, it wouldn’t be long before employees started filing into the mall to prepare for the day’s business. Michael J. Fox was already tucked away in
bed, hours away from being woken up and driven to the
Family Ties
set. As much as Christopher Lloyd was sorry to see Eric Stoltz go, the veteran actor became even more alive with Fox at his side. The two quickly realized they had a shared bond, not only in their shared love for the Bobs’ story and screenplay, but also in their mutual frustration with their other costar—the stainless-steel beast on four wheels that required a small army to keep it functioning for the duration of the film shoot.