Michael J. Fox finally landed the coveted leading role and is now telling the full truth about the “Back to the Future” shoot for the first time.
Who knows how film history would judge “Back to the Future” today if Eric Stoltz hadn’t been replaced in the lead role after six weeks of filming. Eventually, Michael J. Fox landed the role of Marty McFly and shaped the character over several films. His casting also changed the idea of what the film would ultimately be.
Now the actor, who has been suffering from Parkinson’s since 1991, tells his version of the story. In his new memoir, Future Boy: Back to the Future and My Journey Through the Space-Time Continuum, which Fox co-wrote with Nelle Fortenberry, he sets out to set some things straight. After all, there has been talk of a chaos shoot for decades.
In a conversation with “Entertainment Weekly” Fox and Fortenberry tried to shed some light on the dark chest of rumors. So Fox was more or less pressured to get involved in “Back to the Future”.
Secrecy was the order of the day
Fortenberry made it clear that the studio initially tried to keep the matter secret – and that it managed to do so until Fox started filming. However, as soon as it became public, major difficulties on the set were reported behind closed doors. “The film was described as ‘problematic,'” said the longtime Fox companion. “I think a lot of people in the industry thought, ‘Oh, this must be a disaster. This movie is just a mess.”
According to his own statements, the matter was not easy for Michael J. Fox, after all, his co-stars Christopher Lloyd and Lea Thompson had already been filming scenes with Stoltz for weeks. “So they already had material in the box where they could work with one [anderen] Actors had played. I had no contact with it. I had no idea what was happening, but I just jumped in and did it.”
“Back to the Future”: A question of the right tone
And what was the reason why Eric Stoltz wasn’t allowed to continue with “Back to the Future”? As Michael J. Fox makes clear in his book, it was ultimately a matter of tone. So Stoltz played Marty McFly with much more directness and depth – literally dead serious. Something that obviously didn’t fit the idea of the film.
Fox: “Eric had taken a different approach. It was a little more Shakespearean, a little more tragedy. And I gave it everything I could, but the sorrow was just alien to me. So I played what I had.”
As the now 64-year-old actor writes in his autobiography, director Zemeckis, screenwriter Bob Gale and producer Steven Spielberg simply let filming continue while they prepared everything for the change in the background. Stoltz had no idea that he was about to leave. According to Fox, Spielberg insisted on secrecy because he feared that otherwise the “Back to the Future” project would fail completely. The film studio Universal also wanted a seamless transition and wanted to avoid a stop to filming.
The fact that a heated rivalry between the two young actors was subsequently rumored in Hollywood had nothing in common with reality, as Fox explained in the interview. “What was going on didn’t make us enemies or fated rivals. We were simply two dedicated actors who had put equal amounts of energy into the same role. It turned out we had a lot more in common than just our role as Marty.”
When Eric Stotz got the role in “Back to the Future” in 1984, he was no longer an unknown quantity. Only recently he had drawn attention to himself as a severely deformed teenager in “The Mask” (with Cher). At the time, the mime was considered sensitive, introverted and artistically ambitious; his method acting impressed the Hollywood scene. Later he also played more broken characters, but mostly in supporting roles. He was denied the big leap into the film Olympus.
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As has long been known, the original script was anything but slapstick for the material, which is why Stoltz was certainly not the wrong choice for Marty McFly, who is portrayed in the script as a vulnerable, insecure teenager. The sober truth, however, is that Michael J. Fox was also a preferred candidate early on, but was blocked by filming on the series “Family Ties”.
The end result, however, was that Fox played a sitcom during the day and “Back to the Future” at night. A Herculean task that may have had a decisive influence on his performance in the film.