Mask actor began filming as Marty in Back to the Future but was dumped | UK | News

It looks like Back to the Future, the classic ’80s time-travel adventure about serendipitous interventions, chance encounters, and changing destinies, could be very different. Now back in theaters to celebrate its 40th anniversary, the film sees Marty McFly (Michael J Fox) travel from 1985 to 1955 in his DeLorean time machine and – Scott the Great! – disrupts the moment when his parents were to meet and fall in love, which threatens to erase Marty from history altogether.

His scientist friend Dr. With the help of Emmett “Doc” Brown (Christopher Lloyd), Marty must make his young parents fall in love and then return to 1985 by harnessing the power of a history-making lightning storm.

But if the timelines had aligned differently, if just one of the decisions behind the film had turned out differently, Back to the Future could have featured a time-traveling refrigerator powered by Coca-Cola and its chimpanzee sidekick; all the details were in the first drafts of the script.

A completely different actor could have been cast in the lead role.

Eric Stoltz was cast and filmed for six weeks before director Robert Zemeckis fired him and turned back the clock in terms of film production and re-shot it with Michael J Fox.

Doc doesn’t need to think in four dimensions to understand that if these timelines had been aligned differently, Back to the Future would not have ended up being what it was: lightning striking a clock tower in a bottle.

This is a film that not only captures but defines a certain 80s movie magic.

If the secret to time travel is the Doctor’s “flux capacitor”, the secret to Back to the Future’s overall brilliance is the combination of elements that become instant cultural touchstones.

The pairing of Fox and Lloyd as Marty and the Doctor. DeLorean. Sultry chords from Huey Lewis’ theme song, The Power of Love.

Lines that can be quoted endlessly (“Roads? Where are we going, we don’t need roads!”). The town bully, Biff Tannen (Thomas F Wilson), gets his comeuppance with a truckload of manure. And composer Alan Silvestri’s nostalgia-inducing score is a rare soundtrack that can truly transport you back in time, alongside Star Wars, Superman and Indiana Jones. I immediately went back to my childhood.

“If we took out one of those elements, we wouldn’t be having this conversation in 40 years,” says Bob Gale, who co-created and wrote the film with Zemeckis.

The massive success of Back to the Future led to two more films, creating one of the best 1.21 gigawatt trilogies of the purest form of Hollywood entertainment. Each of the three films will be released next week in a 40th anniversary 4K steelbook collector’s edition.

The story of Back to the Future begins the same moment the movie ends: with a fate-altering storm. The year was 1980, and Gale visited her parents after their basement was flooded. His father had rescued some items, including a 1940 school yearbook. Flipping through the book, Gale was surprised to see that his own father was a teenager.

“I discovered that my father was president of his graduating class,” Gale says. “This was completely unknown to me. I was looking at this picture of my father, looking so neat and trim, and I wondered if we would be friends if I were in his class. Finally I said, ‘No, I probably wouldn’t!’ I said. It was also the moment when I said: ‘This is a really good idea for a movie; ‘A child can go to high school with his father.’”

Indeed, the ultimate story is about Marty’s idiot father, George McFly (Crispin Glover). It is Marty who travels to the past and accidentally invents skateboarding and rock’n’roll. However, it is George whose future changes when he stands up to Biff and follows Marty’s advice. “You can achieve anything if you put your mind to it,” Marty told him in 1955; It was advice his father would echo to him 30 years later.

Back to the Future didn’t hit 88 miles per hour right away. He stopped. An early script was rejected all over Hollywood. “Studios are saying, ‘Time travel movies don’t make money!'” Gale said. “he says.

Disney backed out for another reason: Lorraine (Lea Thompson), the 1955 version of Marty’s mother, is attracted to Marty without realizing he is her future son.

“Disney rejected it because it was about incest!” says Gale, laughing.

The breakthrough came after Zemeckis scored a blockbuster hit with Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner’s adventure film Romancing the Stone.

Zemeckis suddenly became a sought-after director. It was time for Back to the Future. It was at this point that they decided to put the time machine in a DeLorean. As the wildly insane Doc says in the movie, “The way I see it, if you’re going to build a time machine in a car, why not do it with some style?”

It’s hard to believe that Back to the Future would have captured moviegoers’ imaginations so quickly without the DeLorean. Or that everyone would remember the DeLorean cars and gullwing doors if it hadn’t appeared in Back to the Future.

Forty years later, the movie and the car are indelibly linked.

When Back to the Future was greenlit, Steven Spielberg, who had been a staunch supporter of the project from the beginning, served as executive producer. While the story belongs to Gale and Zemeckis, it’s also pure Spielberg fodder; Part of the childhood-shaping hit series of the ’80s directed or produced by Spielberg, in which fantasy events come to suburban America. ET, Poltergeist, Gremlins, Goonies.

When it came to casting the role of Marty McFly, the first choice was Michael J. Fox.

However, Fox was unavailable due to commitments on the sitcom Family Ties. Universal Studios boss Sid Sheinberg chose Eric Stoltz, whom Sheinberg saw as Hollywood’s brightest new star.

“We took a step back,” Gale recalls. “But in a moment of exasperation and overconfidence, Sheinberg said: ‘I’m so confident that Eric Stoltz will be great as Marty McFly, if not, come back to me with a different actor and you can start all over again.’

“Of course Sid never thought we’d take him up on this…”

Stoltz approached the subject with method acting.

He insisted that everyone call him Marty and distanced himself from the rest of the cast, creating an uneasy atmosphere. Stoltz also took this role very seriously.

Six weeks into shooting, Zemeckis knew something was wrong with the performance. “Bob described it as ‘a black hole in the middle of the movie,'” Gale recalls. “Eric wasn’t giving us the comedy the character needed.”

They decided to replace Stoltz and reshoot their scenes. Stoltz took the news well but later called his firing “devastating.” This time, the producer of Family Ties gave permission to Michael J Fox to produce the film; provided the actor prioritizes Family Ties and Back to the Future is planned around his sitcom commitments.

As a result, Fox would film Family Ties during the day and Back to the Future at night. “We had a very tired Michael J Fox!” Gale says.

He adds: “It’s funny how much the film industry has changed. Today, there is no actor’s lawyer, no studio lawyer, no commercial relations department and no insurance company to allow an actor to do a TV series and a movie at the same time!”

Fox, of course, was perfect for Marty – the embodiment of ’80s street cool, dressed in flamboyant ’50s style – and as likable as any actor in Hollywood history.

Marty McFly’s peak moment comes when, after successfully bringing his family together at the school dance and averting the space-time continuum disaster, he performs a rendition of Chuck Berry’s Johnny B. Goode.

But even that scene, one of the greatest musical scenes ever filmed, almost didn’t make it. Gale recalls that Zemeckis suggested cutting the Johnny B Goode sequence to make the film tighter. “Our editor, Arthur Schmidt, said: ‘Bob, that’s a good scene! At least preview the screenings and see what the audience thinks of it. They might really like it.’ And they did… They thoroughly enjoyed it.”

In the movie, Marty’s playing inspires Chuck Berry when Chuck’s cousin Marvin makes a quick call (“You know that new sound you’re looking for? Listen to this!”).

But he truly inspired many musicians; Especially Coldplay’s Chris Martin, who said the Johnny B Goode stage made him want to be in a band.

Back to the Future became the highest-grossing film of 1985 when it was released on July 3, 1985, and remains a cultural phenomenon to this day.

Part of the fun is how dense the film is with pop culture references and echoes of two time periods. Forty years later there are still few details to discover.

In the final scene, the Doctor returns to whisk Marty into the future.

“It’s your kids, Marty! Something has to be done about your kids!” It wasn’t intended as a setup for a sequel; Just a great punchline.

But when the studio requested a sequel, Gale and Zemeckis realized they had painted themselves into a corner; They needed to come up with a story to send Marty and the Doctor to a 2015 that seemed futuristic at the time.

Part II arrived in 1989, followed by Part III in 1990, which concluded the story in the Old West.

Back to the Future remains mercifully untouched by any other sequels, remakes, or reboots. There was talk of Episode IV in the 1990s, but Spielberg prevented the studio from making an episode without Gale and Zemeckis’ approval. “He told us, ‘If you don’t want Back to the Future anymore, there won’t be Back to the Future anymore,’” says Gale.

Instead, they created Back to the Future: The Musical, which was released in 2020 and is currently running in the West End; It’s a show that feels like re-experiencing the first movie.

Back to the Future may be ’80s movie magic, but it’s also timeless.