We Don't Need Roads: The Making of the Back to the Future Trilogy (19 page)

“It’s bending! The forklift’s bending!” The back end of the effects vehicle was in the air, its front still on the ground. The effects team wasn’t using a machine with a proper gauge to suspend the car in midair. The man inside the forklift looked out his window and spit out a huge wad of chewing tobacco.

“I know it’s fucking bending.” Instead of stopping, he kept lifting, risking damage not only to his machinery, but to the custom car that had taken several months to design and construct. When he finally stopped, the back end was almost six feet in the air, with its nose facing downward, like a roller-coaster car before the first big drop. Audible disbelief started to crackle among the crew.

“Holy shit.”

“How do we even get it down?”

“Bob. Where’s Bob? Someone get Bob.”

“Let me see it.” Zemeckis was making his way to the scene of the incident, while crew members urgently walked ahead of him, like siblings trying to warn their older brother that Dad is on the way. Then he saw it. “How much fucking money did we spend on this car?”

“It was a long night,” Tim Flattery says. “I’d never seen him ever blow up about anything. We were shooting nights all week and it was the last shot. All of sudden, this is his problem. He turned the corner and sees this car all hung up in the air. It was horrible.”

The crew managed to get the car down, but now a second option was needed to get the car to function properly for the shoot. In the haste of the moment, it was difficult to see who made the decision, but it was clear that one had been made. Someone grabbed a hammer and knocked out the bottom of the car. Since the forklift could no longer be threaded underneath the vehicle, it was chained to the car’s chassis, its main frame, which covered the entire rear half of the vehicle. The shot as originally conceived was now impossible, as only the front of the car would now be suitable for filming. The rest of the car was now covered in the chains required to allow it to safely and smoothly be lifted from the ground and back down again. With the sun setting at a rapid rate, there was a chance that the entire setup might go to waste. There was a test run of the newly modified arrangement, and despite the crew members’ crisis of confidence in the jerry-rigging of the vehicle, all went well. The three actors got into the car, the operator lifted it up, the director called the shot into action, and the crane lowered. Before the end of the night, they got the shot, even if it wasn’t exactly to Zemeckis’s liking.

“As a concept designer and somebody who’s seeing these things through to completion, your job is to give the director his vision,” Flattery says. “Whether it’s the shot or the aesthetic, that’s what you’re hired for. If something goes wrong and he’s had this vision all the way through preproduction, you feel terrible. You feel like you let him down. That was a great learning experience for me as far as how I went about my construction from then on in movies, and how I went about testing processes. I now maintain constant communication with directors as far as, ‘What exactly are you planning on doing on the day with this?’ Then I can have everything ready.”

While
Back to the Future
was an unknown quantity while the cast and crew were filming years earlier, this time they all were aware of the expectations—and felt the pressure on a daily basis. “It was much harder,” Neil Canton says. “First of all, wherever you went, people said, ‘What movie are you working on?’ You’d tell them it was
Back to the Future Part II
or
Part III
and they’d go, ‘Oh, wow, we love
Back to the Future
. What happens to Doc? What happens to Marty?’ There was much more pressure on us to make something that would be as good. We all felt it. Bob obviously felt it, because he was the director of a movie, a very successful movie. We always felt like we had to do a little bit more so that we could bring some kind of freshness or originality to
II
and
III
. We shot more, and it was hard on the actors. I know Chris was worried about whether he could get back into the place where Doc Brown was in the first movie. Could he do that again? Could he duplicate that performance? Michael was worried about that too.

“We had so many of the same crew people back, and they all felt it,” he continues. “We started to wonder, if you did something right to left on the first movie, should we do it in the left to
right in this movie? You started to question everything. Our original intention was never to do a sequel. I don’t want to say it wasn’t fun, because making a movie is always fun, but it became fun plus work. The expectation added the feeling of work. We didn’t want to let anyone down, but at the end of the day, you have to assume that we know what’s best.”

Character actor Wesley Mann remembers feeling a similar degree of pressure while making his
Future
debut in the film. He appeared in a small yet unforgettable role, a character whom the film’s end credits refer to as “CPR Kid,” the movie’s novelization calls “Lester,” but most fans of the franchise know best as “Wallet Guy.” In the 1955 segment of
Part II
, right before George decks Biff outside the Enchantment Under the Sea dance, Zemeckis was trying to avoid making another compromise with a complicated camera move. “The first shot of that day was a complicated computer-crane shot that starts in the principal’s office when he throws the sports almanac in the trash bin,” Mann says. “It cranes up to see the car arrive and the altercation with Biff outside the window. That took about three hours to get set up. It was subtle, but there was certainly an air of being watched by the front office. People were wondering if we were going to get this shot. During the shoot, Michael made some allusion to the difference between the two movies. He said, ‘We made the first on time. I don’t know if we’ll make it on the second.’”

Reenacting the Enchantment Under the Sea dance was a unique experience. “When we re-created that scene for
Part II
, I remember it feeling like a sort of time warp,” Bob Gale says. “As if I could walk out of our set on Stage 12, which we dressed like the first time we shot it, and find myself in the parking lot of the Hollywood Methodist Church in 1985, where we filmed the dance for
Part I
.” The producer’s sentiment was felt by a number
of those who were present for the filming of the scene for both films. But in addition to feelings of déjà vu, there were also inherent complications that came from trying to re-create the scene in all of its details. The props and costumes from the first film either had to be uncovered from a storage facility or refabricated. Lea Thompson’s pink dress had gone missing, but luckily the actress had an extra one she had held on to after filming the first film. While it was easy to resolve the case of the disappearing costume, each small gaffe added to the pressure that everyone was actively trying his or her best to ignore.

As much as “business as usual” was the mandate for the shoot, for Harry Waters, Jr., filming between
Future
and
Part II
couldn’t have been more dissimilar. “Bob and the producers were not as accessible during
Part II
because they were having anxiety shooting two movies at the same time,” he says. “I remember we were filming the day of the Oscars, and the cinematographer and editor were nominated for
Roger Rabbit.
The entire crew and cast and extras all stopped to watch the awards. When the editor won, there was that moment of, ‘Yes, all the people that work on this movie are winners and are going to be an important part of this industry.’ Then it was back to work. We felt we couldn’t be too crazy while shooting because the powers that be were pretty driven right now. They had a lot on their plate, so it was, ‘Show up, do your work, and stop playing around with the extras.’”

Jeffrey Weissman’s tenure at the dance was also uncomfortable, but it really was no more so than the rest of his time filming
Part II
. Depending on which side of the argument you choose to listen to, there are a lot of ways to describe Weissman: character actor, imitator, savior, willing conspirator, victim, or scab. He was over the moon about appearing in the sequel, but his enthusiasm subsided when he arrived on set for his first day. “It was
odd,” he says. “I got really strange reactions from people.” Because Weissman had been outfitted in facial appliances made from the molds of Crispin Glover’s face and not his own, the result was someone who looked mildly disfigured and certainly unnatural. During a break while filming his screen test weeks earlier, Weissman ran into some actors who were shooting
Dick Tracy
for Disney at Universal. Although several of those actors were in heavy character makeup, Weissman was stared at as if he were the oddity. After he came out of his trailer on the first day the two worked together, Michael J. Fox gave a hard look at Glover’s replacement, chuckled to himself, and made a now-prophetic declaration: “Oh, Crispin ain’t going to like this.”

On some level, Glover’s absence may have been welcomed by the Bobs, who didn’t have to concern themselves with the actor’s curious behavior throughout production on the sequel, but that didn’t mean the presence of the original George wasn’t felt every day on set. “I think Crispin was weighing on everyone’s mind while filming,” Weissman says. “While shooting the Enchantment Under the Sea stuff, when Robert Zemeckis would call, ‘Action,’ he would sometimes shout out, ‘Lea!’ and sometimes he’d shout out, ‘Crispin!’ but never ‘Jeffrey.’ I never felt welcomed. I felt like a scab.”

“I was kind of annoyed that Jeffrey Weissman was doing those scenes with me, to be perfectly honest,” Thompson says. “That was a little hard for me, just because Crispin was so fantastic. He was a genius in
Back to the Future
, so it was hard that he wasn’t there. It gave a real bittersweet feeling to revisiting those scenes. In life, there’s always the bad with the good, even with something as great as
Back to the Future
. Crispin didn’t do
Part II
and
III
and Eric was fired in the first one, so there’s kind of a bad feeling along with all the great feelings of making these
great movies. There’s always a little thorn in your side. Those two things were it for me.”

“I had an inkling that it wasn’t comfortable for her,” Weissman says. “It couldn’t have been good for her, kissing a man in a mask. I was given their screen test to watch, to see Crispin’s work and get down young George’s mannerisms and everything. In it, you can tell that the two of them had worked hard with each other. They had spent a lot of hours together working on that relationship, and I think she probably was very fond of Crispin. When she found out he wasn’t coming back, I am sure it made things uncomfortable.”

Weissman’s instincts were correct. Throughout production on
Back to the Future
, Lea Thompson and Crispin Glover had grown quite close to each other. Although she acknowledges he was a handful on the set, the two got on famously. They used to have long conversations in their trailers about everything and nothing. He captivated her. At one point, Glover invited the actress over to his apartment to work on their characters for the revised version of 1985 at the end of the movie. When she walked in, she found the walls painted all black, with barely any furniture in the living room. The focal point was a stainless-steel medical examination table. Instead of running lines, he invited her to paint a volcano on canvas with him. Much to his satisfaction, she went with it. For her, it wasn’t a big deal; when in Crispin’s world, do as Crispin does.

Weissman understood that he wasn’t going to replace the actor in her eyes, and he also wasn’t making any attempts to. All he hoped for was to be treated as an actor doing a job, a colleague, and not an unwanted consolation prize. “Lea never called me by name,” he says. “When we were in the makeup chair in the morning, she rarely addressed me. After the shoot, she brought her
mother up to Universal to see the tour. I went to speak to her and she introduced me as ‘the actor who played Crispin.’ She didn’t remember my name.”

The rebuke from some on the set might have hurt Weissman’s ego, but his greatest pain came from the demands of playing George McFly in the scene in Marty’s future home. In the reduced role of the character, Bob Gale constructed a plot device whereby George threw out his back on the golf course, and as a result was suspended upside down in a futuristic back brace. The special effect would hopefully disorient the viewing public and make it harder to realize that it wasn’t the original actor on-screen, especially with the old-age makeup required. In order to help with his comfort, a special rig was built so the actor could take breaks between takes, since the crew was unable, or unwilling, to disconnect and reattach Weissman throughout the day. It helped, but the actor, who was not as used to long shooting days as some of the other actors might have been, developed agonizing pain in his back and, consequently, had many sleepless nights. With a 4:00
A
.
M
.
makeup call time and shooting days that ended close to midnight, the actor found himself getting even less sleep than Michael J. Fox doing double duty with
Family Ties
, and without any of the pats on the back for his efforts.

Weissman recalls that on one occasion when Spielberg was visiting the set, the executive producer noticed the actor, with his legs up in the air and back resting against a large horizontal surface. “He walked up to me and said, ‘So, Crispin, I see you got your million dollars after all,’” Weissman says. “It wasn’t until then that I realized I was saving production nine hundred eighty thousand dollars.” However, not everyone agrees that this actually happened. “Jeffrey has told the ‘Steven Spielberg million dollars’ story many times, but I’m not sure it’s true,” Bob Gale says. “Steven was
never part of the negotiations for Crispin, and I’m not sure he was aware of any of the actual numbers discussed. Jeffrey has often exaggerated things, and this may be such a story.”

Several months after
Back to the Future Part II
was released in theaters, Weissman received an unsolicited telephone call from Glover. It was a conversation the replacement actor was simultaneously looking forward to, to make sure there were no hard feelings, and dreading, because he feared there might be. Glover never mentioned his replacement’s performance. Instead, he went on what Weissman describes as a “whiny diatribe,” ranting about his frustration with the way things shook out with the sequel, and his unhappiness with Zemeckis and company, who, in his view, created the problem. “Crispin explained to me how cruel Universal had been to him on the first film,” Weissman says. “He said the producers made him cry in front of extras and abused him. Crispin said he was told that he would be paid twice scale, with no negotiation power, to use clips of him from the first movie.”