We Don't Need Roads: The Making of the Back to the Future Trilogy (20 page)

The two spoke at length, with Glover occasionally having hyperemotional moments. Weissman commiserated as best he could, and was asked by Glover if he minded sharing any horror stories he had from the shoot. Dean Cundey’s “Crispin without the trouble”? Check. Robert Zemeckis shouting, “Crispin!” while shooting the Enchantment Under the Sea dance? No problem. Steven Spielberg’s “million dollars”? Right away. Lea Thompson’s cold shoulder? You bet. Without Weissman’s knowledge, Glover recounted the telephone conversation to his attorney, who, on October 15, 1990, after
Back to the Future Part III
’s release, filed suit for the misappropriation of Crispin Glover’s likeness. The actor maintained that since Weissman was put in prosthetics to look like Glover, and was instructed to mimic his voice and mannerisms, the producers violated his intellectual property and right to
publicity. Furthermore, the actor alleged that this was done maliciously because of sour grapes over the failed negotiations. The comments made to Weissman on set were sprinkled throughout the suit as evidence of the
Future
team’s ill feelings toward Glover. The actor was targeting Universal Studios, Amblin Entertainment, and U-Drive Productions, a one-off entity created by Amblin for the film in case of situations just like this, to prevent lawsuits going after money or assets for more than one film.

The defendants weren’t buying Glover’s version of events. They maintained that they had negotiated with the actor in good faith, and besides, George was their character. Unless the actor was making a case that he
was
the character, Zemeckis and company were at no fault for bringing George back for the sequels with a different actor. “He had no grounds, as we had already vetted everything through Universal’s lawyers,” Gale says. “They confirmed we were entitled to recast the role with another actor and use footage of Crispin from
Part I
in
Part II
.” But the case would never be argued in front of a judge. In July 1991, the two parties settled out of court for an undisclosed amount, allegedly in the neighborhood of $500,000. “The insurance company, who would have been responsible for bearing the cost of the lawsuit, decided it was cheaper to pay off Crispin than to pay lawyers and have to go to court, so Crispin took the money and dropped the lawsuit,” Gale continues. When adding in the amount he earned from the filmmakers using the footage of him from the first film, Glover likely received the same amount of money he would have made had he participated in the sequels. Perhaps more significantly, Glover has also claimed that as a result of this suit, a rule was instituted within the Screen Actors Guild that movie studios can’t re-create an actor’s likeness with technical means without that actor’s approval. However, some within SAG doubt
this rule actually exists, and Glover has never publicly cited the specific rule. Regardless, it all proves that “Crispin without the trouble” can still lead to plenty of trouble.

While the lawsuit was ongoing, and even after its conclusion, Jeffrey Weissman struggled to parlay his major motion picture credit into more high-profile jobs. He was essentially blacklisted after being perceived as a mole and participant in Glover’s lawsuit. He managed to get hired on an episode of
Murder, She Wrote
, but was fired and told that he was cast in error. The casting director said she didn’t realize that he was “unable” to be hired. Decades later, Weissman, who has continued to work as an actor since the film’s release, can see both sides of the situation and has made his peace with his
Back to the Future
experience. “It was disappointing to me that my agents didn’t negotiate well,” he says. “At the time, Universal and all the studios seemed to be run by attorneys, bean counters, and various other rude people, and I didn’t have the great agent I had when I did the Clint Eastwood film
Pale Rider
. I was sad that I was sharing the screen with Lea and Michael, costarring, and I was getting a couple thousand dollars. The studio kept me in the dark until the eleventh hour. I don’t know that they would have given me fifty thousand a week if I’d asked for it, but I wish my agent had gone for it. They only settled for a little bit better than what I got on the Eastwood film four years before, which was not all that much.

“I don’t think I am bitter that Crispin made more money than I did,” he continues. “But I was a little bitter that he didn’t at least call me and thank me. I don’t want to be full of regrets, but it took a while to get over the shitty thing that Universal did. The studio knew they were doing wrong. Spielberg knew he was doing wrong. The producers knew they were doing wrong. But
they were also forced into it by Crispin handcuffing them during negotiations.”

From his vantage point, Bob Gale also sees Weissman as a victim, but only as one hoisted by his own petard. “Jeffrey and his agent were given the ground rules from the start,” Gale says. “We told him this job was not going to make him a star, he would not be doing any publicity, and he couldn’t promote himself because we didn’t want to call attention to the fact that Crispin wasn’t in the sequels. We also told Jeffrey that under no circumstances should he ever talk with Crispin, so we were all incensed with him when we learned that he did, and even more so when we learned that his statements were cited in the lawsuit. Jeffrey often portrays himself as a victim, but we paid him more money than he’d ever made before—two thousand five hundred dollars a week, which is not a bad salary for an actor in a smaller role, especially in 1989 dollars. Then he knowingly violated our conditions by talking with Crispin, just to satisfy his own ego. Thus, he made himself into a pariah, because no one wants to hire an actor who creates problems. I guess portraying George McFly causes actors to make bad decisions.”

The discomfort Weissman felt on set and the subsequent lawsuit stemming from his condemnation of how he was treated during the filming process were not the only hiccups Universal and Amblin had to encounter as a result of
Back to the Future Part II
. As George McFly hung upside down in Marty’s future home, shooting was under way on what would be one of the most memorable sequences in the franchise—not only for fans, but also for the team of stunt performers dressed in futuristic costumes who were swinging in the sky from a variety of cables, metal frames, and faux gravity-defying flotation devices.

Monday, November 20, 1989

P
art II
hadn’t even been released yet and already there were phone calls. Scott Ross, the general manager of ILM, had arrived at work with a number of messages waiting for him in his office. He looked through the stack of pink “while you were out” notes that were placed neatly in a pile on his desk. Without exception, each message was about
Back to the Future
and, more specifically, about hoverboards. The curious thing was, as he looked through the names of the people who had tried to reach him, none belonged to people he knew. He was confused, partially because he couldn’t understand how these messages had gotten to him, and partly because he couldn’t understand why so many people were calling about hoverboards. Before he had a chance to piece together what was going on, his line rang.

“Hello, I wanted to know where I could purchase a hoverboard for my son.” It was a woman who sounded like she was calling from the Southwest. Then it clicked. The preceding Friday night, NBC had aired a three-hour special event starting at
8:00
P
.
M
.
,
Back to the Future
, followed by a half-hour sneak peek at the making of
Part II
. Leslie Nielsen, from the
Naked Gun
film series, hosted the program. There were sit-downs with cast and crew, along with behind-the-scenes footage of the upcoming film, which was just days away from release. During one interview, after the hoverboards were shown, Robert Zemeckis explained without the slightest hint of humor that the devices were real and had been kept off toy shelves because of concerned parents groups feeling they were too dangerous. The director was kidding, of course, but not everyone watching at home got the joke.

“I don’t think you understand. They’re visual effects. They don’t—”

“Oh, no, we understand that, but my kid wants one. I was wondering if they were dangerous.”

“They’re not dangerous because they aren’t real.”

“But I saw them on television and the director said they were.” Scott Ross didn’t know it at the time, but this was just the beginning of the correspondence he, and several others involved with the film, would field about the movie. The occasional question would be asked about other futuristic devices in the film, but the number one thing that people wanted to know about was the levitating device that Marty used throughout the picture.

The response wasn’t so much irritating as it was flattering. Zemeckis and company had felt the omnipotent presence of the audience throughout production. Now, for the first time, the public was weighing in on the filmmakers’ follow-up, even before the picture was out. There couldn’t have been a better sign that the reception to
Part II
might be just as strong as it was for the first film. “When you set out to make a movie, you’re just making the movie,” Neil Canton says. “You love it, you give everything you have to it, but it’s just a movie. When the movie becomes a
phenomenon, it’s kind of overwhelming in a way. All of a sudden people are asking questions and want to know things you never really stopped to think about. Of course hoverboards didn’t exist, but we made it seem like it was the coolest thing going and people just totally bought into it. Parents would write letters asking where they could get one for their child for Christmas. You go,
Wait a second. I understand that a young child may think that it’s a real thing, but how could a parent think that also?
At one point Bob Gale prepared a list of answers to the most-asked questions that we would get, so we could just send that answer. It was very overwhelming for all of us.”

Since he was initially approached to design the futuristic elements back in the conceptual stages of the sequel, John Bell continued working on the hoverboards once
Paradox
was officially green-lighted. He took some of his initial sketches to the ILM model shop to turn them into fully realized models. Compared to what materialized on-screen, those early models had a lot more embellishment. They were larger, shaped more like a wakeboard or snowboard, and some even had engines. “From those early stages it just kept getting whittled down, because they knew they were going to have to make a lot of them for the film and they didn’t want to blow a lot of money reproducing intricate designs,” Bell says. “That’s how things got so streamlined. I composed newer drawings for Bob to see, and that’s when the hard decisions were made.”

As production neared, the designs that would be realized on-screen started to take shape. Griff’s “Pit Bull” board was colored an intimidating black and red, adorned with an illustration of a growling dog with a choke collar. The sides were jagged to evoke the look of bite marks, and the front had two large fangs jutting out from it. It was established early on that the main board
Marty uses would be pink, as it was to be originally owned by a young girl and, presumably, toy companies would continue to use gendered hues even well into the future. Initially it was thought that Swatch, the Swiss watch company, would have their name on the boards, but at the last minute it came down from on high that a switch was being made to Mattel, the recognizable company behind Barbie. Nothing fundamentally changed with the design; the company was sent a copy of the sketch with their logo on it and signed off almost instantly.

When it came time to construct the boards, some were built out of wood, while those that would endure less wear and tear were made out of Styrofoam. In order to sell the illusion of their functionality, Zemeckis, along with Ken Ralston and Michael Lantieri, followed a principle that every magician knows: Always keep them guessing. “You had to come up with different methods of cinematic magic to make it look like these boards were hovering,” Steve Starkey says. “And so every trick that anybody could come up with was used. It was the most challenging part of the shoot.” In watching any of the hoverboard sequences, especially the extended ones like the chase in the Hill Valley square and the tunnel where Biff is trying to reclaim the sports almanac, one can see that a mixture of techniques were used. In some cases, the effects that appear amazing on-screen were really quite low-tech. Thin metal wire legs were placed right in the middle of the underside of some Styrofoam props, so that when Michael J. Fox threw them down, they would wobble as if levitating. In shots where one end of the board was out of frame, the other side was sometimes held by a crew member until Fox grabbed it and tucked it under his arm. When the actors’ feet were obscured, they were often shot from the waist up and put on actual skateboards. Sometimes they were pulled on a large dolly. Large sheets of plywood would
be added to the ground in order to create additional height in comparison with the rest of what was in the frame.

Of course, there were other, more complicated effects. The actors were also suspended on wires and flown, part of what created the realistic look that deceived so many in the viewing audience. Prior to
Part II
, ILM would have manually rotoscoped the wires out of the scene, a process by which each frame is drawn over by an animator in order to hide the effects mechanisms. For
Part II
, Doug Smythe and Les Dittert at ILM created a way to expedite and improve upon this process digitally. Someone at the effects house would find a wire in a shot and identify it for a computerized system in a few frames, and then the machine would take over and find the wire in each shot. Digitally, the colors in the frame on either side of the wire would be smudged together to effectively paint over each unwanted piece of apparatus. As a finishing touch, the film grain in the treated area would be replicated in order to create consistency across the shot. The process was innovative by 1989 standards, and four years later, Smythe and Dittert were presented with a special Academy Award for Scientific and Technical Achievement for developing the technology, along with their colleagues Mark Leather and George H. Joblove at ILM.

Unlike what would be done today if the film were made, computers helped to remove some of the mechanical elements from shots, but didn’t assist in the actual illusion of hovering. The more challenging shots to capture visually were often performed in front of a green screen and then optically created in postproduction. “We were faced with how to make the hoverboards practically,” Dean Cundey says. “It was done in a realistic-seeming way. Nowadays, computers allow us to stretch reality past what the audience can understand as being real. It becomes the fantastical. What we were trying to accomplish was something that seemed fantastical, but
would be accepted as real. There was something about hoverboards that wasn’t so unbelievable. We thought everybody would love to have one, or at least all the skateboarders.”

“Now audiences have become so sophisticated because the effects are so unbelievable,” Scott Ross, the general manager of ILM, says. “We know Godzilla’s not running through the streets and Spider-Man can’t jump from building to building. Because of that, the audience has become aware that they were just done on a computer. Back in the eighties, people really didn’t get that they were visual effects.” Part of the issue, as Ross sees it, is that studios used to go through much greater lengths to conceal the tricks they used in moviemaking.
Michael J. Fox is doing his own singing! Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.
For those at ILM, there was a constant struggle to be recognized for their work publicly. “The studios wound up owning all of the footage, models, and everything else having to do with the movie because they paid us for our services,” he says. “When we did
Who Framed Roger Rabbit
, I desperately wanted the world to know that Industrial Light & Magic really made
Roger Rabbit
happen. There were incredible amounts of work that went into it. Disney was dead-set against it. Particularly back in those days, their public relations department would never allow anybody to do an interview with the visual effects team on any film, because they thought that it would take away from what the film was all about.

“That’s obviously changed, because if we look at the top fifty films of all time, all of them are visual effects or animated films,” he continues. “Sometime in the late nineties, early 2000s, the studios started to get hip to the fact that Tom Hanks and Sylvester Stallone were not really putting people’s butts in the movie theaters; visual effects were. Once they started to realize that, things started to change, at least on the PR side.”

For the actors, the experience of being on a hoverboard was unforgettable—but not unanimously for positive reasons. To the untrained eye, the scene where Griff’s gang is chasing Marty across the Courthouse Square is perfectly executed; however, to those who were on set the day the crash through the clock tower was filmed, it was a terrifying experience due to a near-fatal injury involving Cheryl Wheeler, one of the stuntwomen hired for the movie. On May 9, 1990, Wheeler and her then-husband, Michael Dixon, filed suit against Universal Pictures, Amblin Entertainment, and more than a dozen others who worked on
Part II
, including Steven Spielberg, Robert Zemeckis, and Michael Lantieri, all stemming from a majorly botched stunt that resulted in a number of expensive surgeries to her arm, face, and jaw. For Wheeler, her time in Hill Valley will always mark a defining moment in her career and life, even though there were many days when she wished she could forget all about
Back to the Future
and the prop that so many people covet.

Several months before the incident, preparation for the hoverboard stunts began at Max Kleven’s ranch, a large piece of property that was perfect for a little trial-and-error experimentation. Kleven had worked on stunts on the first
Future
and, afterward, was second-unit director for the scenes shot in the United States for
Roger Rabbit
. Zemeckis was pleased with his direction and invited him to continue serving in that capacity on
Paradox
, freeing up Frank Marshall to devote his attention to
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
. Richie Gaona and Gary Morgan, two stuntmen referred to Kleven through mutual friends, assisted in the trial run. “We did about two or three weeks of testing,” Gaona says. “They would test for a couple of days, send in the video of what we did to see if the director liked it, then we would come back to make some changes.” In the earliest tests, the temporary
hoverboard was just a skateboard with the wheels popped off. The base was screwed into the stuntmen’s shoes, and the performers were put in harnesses that attached at the hips and were connected to a large crane. But the effect didn’t work. It was obvious that the board was attached to their feet and their hover power was coming from a different point in their bodies. The crew tried substituting the skateboard for a long piece of Styrofoam, but the result was the same.

Time for plan B. Wires were attached to the front and back of the immobile skateboard, and a harness was put around the performers’ legs, resting at their hips, with two rings on either side that the wires were fed through, giving the performers full mobility to move their legs and bend their knees to help sell the illusion. “It was at a time when wiring was expensive,” Morgan says. “So they used really thin wire, but they would snap. We’d be hanging from the other wire, the board would come up, hit our belt where the loop was, and we’d just be dangling.” The performers were attached to a large crane, which was moved around in a circle. Although it looked better, there was still something off, and so back to the drawing board they went.

Plan C. No more circular movements. This time, the crane operator pulled back and moved the arm of his machine in a large swinging motion. The move was perfect—the stuntmen looked like they were gliding on air. With the approval of the special effects team and the director’s blessing, the tests were wrapped. Along with Gaona and Morgan, David Rowden and Lisa McCullough were hired as doubles for Biff and Spike, the lone female in Griff’s gang. McCullough was an accomplished stuntwoman and a dead ringer for Darlene Vogel, the actress hired to play the role, making it obvious why she had gotten the gig.