Frank Marshall and Kathleen Kennedy called Eric Stoltz’s agents. Wilson, who played bully Biff Tannen, while Neil Canton was responsible for talking to Christopher Lloyd and Lea Thompson. Bob Gale spoke with Crispin Glover, who was cast as George McFly, and Thomas F. 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. 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. On January 10, in the column for Stoltz, Jones wrote the letter F in black ballpoint. 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. He then proceeded to go in front of the cameras for his final time, presumably to feed lines to Christopher Lloyd, who played his costar Dr. The lead actor arrived on set at 5:30 p.m. 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. Doomsday came just forty-eight hours later. 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. 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 next day, production moved to the Puente Hills Mall, the large shopping center in the 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. 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 waited on the sidelines. He looks ahead, eyes focused, throws the car into gear, and. Ultimately, he slams his head into the center of the steering wheel in exasperation, the car starts, and he prepares to drive. He keeps turning the key, trying to coax the vehicle into motion. He feels the simultaneous frustration and disappointment that his perceived destiny, his future, isn’t within reach as he originally thought. He slams on the gas, but nothing happens. Marty is at the white starting line getting ready to take off in his vehicular time machine. That evening, Stoltz shot a scene in the sequence before lightning strikes the clock tower. Few people knew it at the time, but the actor was soon to be given severance and sent on his way. Just hours earlier, Zemeckis got the approval to move forward with transitioning away from one lead actor to the other. 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. Perhaps he was remembering the evening of January 7, when art imitated life and Stoltz and Marty’s experiences finally became one. 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. Meanwhile, production kept moving along with the original McFly. Great Scott! Watch the Honest Trailer for Back to the Future In this exclusive excerpt from Caseen Gaines’s new book, We Don’t Need Roads: The Making of the Back to the Future Trilogy, the people behind the film reveal what those odd few weeks on set were like. Sheinberg agreed, but the transition couldn’t take place right away - Stoltz was forced to labor on, unaware his days as Marty were numbered. They came to the studio head Sid Sheinberg with a proposition: Let them fire Stoltz, and replace him with Fox, whom they had wanted all along. Only a few weeks into filming, director Robert Zemeckis and writer Bob Gale realized something was wrong: Stoltz was a fine dramatic actor, but he wasn’t bringing the screwball energy the film needed. That honor went to Eric Stoltz, at the time an up-and-coming young method actor with significant buzz. Fox was not the first actor cast as Marty McFly. We’re repromoting it for Back to the Future Day.Īs any true Back to the Future fan knows, Michael J. This excerpt was originally published on June 26, 2015.

Biff back to the future actor