We Don't Need Roads: The Making of the Back to the Future Trilogy (4 page)

Zemeckis didn’t want to give any of his fair-weather Hollywood friends who had rejected
Future
over the preceding years the courtesy of producing his picture. The answer, then, was to go back to the only person who had believed in the project from the start—Steven Spielberg. He had recently entered the record books with
E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial
, which had banked $359 million to surpass
Star Wars
as the highest-grossing film of all time. Although his stature in the industry had risen dramatically since he’d first read the Bobs’
Future
script, the producer still wanted in.
Back to the Future
became the first project set up at Amblin Entertainment that Steven Spielberg would not direct himself—a testament to the trust the mentor had in his mentee.

After joining the
Back to the Future
team, the executive producer pitched the project to Universal, where the Amblin offices were located. Serendipitously, Frank Price was now president after having left Columbia in 1983. Spielberg held a grudge against the executive for passing on
E.T.
when he was still at his previous movie company, and stated that if Universal wanted to be a part of
Back to the Future
, Price would have to be involved as minimally as possible. “Frank Price never had an intimate relationship with Steven,” Sid Sheinberg says. “He was very much under the influence of a fellow by the name of Marvin Antonowsky who came from the world of research. The problem with the world of research is that sometimes you come to the wrong conclusions.” In a highly unusual move, Sheinberg appointed himself to chief executive in charge of looking out for the studio’s investment in the film. After four years of rejections, the Bobs finally got the green light they had been hoping for.

With the ball finally rolling, a production team had to be rounded out. With Spielberg came Frank Marshall and his former assistant Kathleen Kennedy, two producers who, in 1981, cofounded Amblin after they achieved success with
Raiders of the Lost Ark
. Although the Bobs had a relationship with Spielberg, it was clear that this was a project that would have interested the Amblin Trio even if it had arrived at their offices unsolicited. “I thought the screenplay was terrific,” Frank Marshall says. “I couldn’t understand why no one wanted to make it. It’s one of the best scripts I’d ever read.”

Frank Marshall suggested Neil Canton join the team, whom he had previously worked with on 1972’s
What’s Up, Doc?
“He had this script and asked me if I would read it,” Canton says. “I read it, loved it, called him the next day, and told him. It made me laugh. I was moved by it. The idea of a time-travel story was
something that I totally was in love with.” Later that day, Canton, Zemeckis, and Gale met for lunch in Burbank. The three hit it off and the production team was complete.

After four years of tinkering with the script, which was still in its second draft, Zemeckis and company officially started preproduction. The director invited some of the
Romancing the Stone
crew to join him, including Dean Cundey, Clyde E. Bryan, and composer Alan Silvestri. However exciting it was that things were under way, there were still some matters to deal with regarding the script. Sid Sheinberg wanted the name of Marty’s mother to be changed from Eileen to the first name of his wife, actress Lorraine Gary, who appeared in both Spielberg’s
1941
and
Jaws
. He was also adamant that Professor Brown be nicknamed “Doc” instead, as it was shorter and more accessible. Of utmost importance was that Shemp, the scientist’s pet primate, had to go. “Sid
hated
that,” Gale says. “He told us he’d looked it up and that movies with chimps never made money. I challenged him, pointing out Clint Eastwood and
Every Which Way But Loose
, but Sid retorted that the simian was an orangutan, not a chimp. So we gave Doc a dog instead. Probably a good idea—everybody likes dogs.” Rewrites resumed, with Sheinberg’s changes, along with many others, materializing in a third draft, which was completed that July.

But just as it seemed like everything had finally fallen into place, things started to get complicated. With Michael J. Fox unavailable to play Marty, casting directors Jane Feinberg, Mike Fenton, and Judy Taylor met with what felt like an unremitting list of newly established actors and potential stars-to-be, including Johnny Depp, fresh off of a substantial role in 1984’s
A Nightmare on Elm Street
, and Brat Pack member John Cusack. George Newbern, who is perhaps best known for his role in
Father of the Bride
(1991) and its sequel released four years later, flew in from
Chicago to audition. Charlie Sheen, who had made a stellar debut in 1984’s
Red Dawn,
also read for the role. Canadian pop star Corey Hart was given the opportunity to screen-test, but declined. Perhaps as a public sign of regret over his decision and an attempt to associate himself with the franchise, the singer’s official website still trumpets that the casting triumvirate wanted to meet with him, even though he was completely uninterested in the role at the time. None of these actors were ever seriously considered; they were just a few of the many to circle through the revolving door of the casting office, only to be quickly sent out the other end.

C. Thomas Howell and Eric Stoltz ascended to the top of the casting directors’ list of Marty choices. By the time of his audition, Howell had accumulated a string of successful roles in hit films helmed by Hollywood royalty like Steven Spielberg (
E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial
) and Francis Ford Coppola (
The Outsiders
). The Bobs preferred him, believing he gave the strongest screen test of everyone who auditioned, an opinion generally shared with the casting directors and members of the film crew. “I remember C. Thomas Howell’s audition really well because, if I had been in charge, I would have picked him,” Clyde E. Bryan, first assistant cameraman, says. “He was the only one that made that character seem real to me. There were three or four different tests for Marty, but the only two I remember were Eric Stoltz, mostly because of his piercing blue eyes, and the fact that the hair and makeup department dyed his hair, and C. Thomas Howell, who I thought was hilarious in the part. Based on C. Thomas Howell’s screen test, he was the right choice.”

Eric Stoltz had become a protégé of writer Cameron Crowe after appearing in 1982’s
Fast Times at Ridgemont High
and accumulated several other films on his résumé, including the
writer’s 1984 follow-up
The Wild Life
. Ironically, none of his high school comedies were responsible for him being on the McFly short list. What attracted the attention of the suits at Universal was Stoltz’s star turn as Rocky Dennis, a teenager living with a skull deformity, in Peter Bogdonavich’s
Mask
, another Universal picture. Although the film had yet to be released at the time
Future
was casting, studio head Sid Sheinberg had seen the picture and anticipated its success by a mile. While his foresight was not always correct, in this instance he accurately predicted what was to come. When
Mask
was released in March 1985, it opened to commercial and critical acclaim. Stoltz’s performance was applauded in the press as being emotionally visceral despite the actor being concealed in heavy facial appliances. The actor would go on to be nominated for a Golden Globe for his performance, but for now he was a soon-to-be-discovered secret, a star whom Sheinberg hoped would remain in Universal’s solar system for a long time to come.

Because of his history with Spielberg, Sid Sheinberg had taken a special interest in
Back to the Future
and the Marty McFly casting deliberations. He communicated the choice between the two finalists as deciding between “chicken salad,” Stoltz, and “chicken shit,” Howell. Sheinberg registered his official vote for the former, which, in the end, proved to be the only vote that mattered. Zemeckis had final say on casting, sure, but with that Memorial Day mandate from the studio hanging over his head, each calendar page tossed in the garbage while casting deliberations continued came at a high cost. Not only that, but disagreeing with the studio head was probably not the best foot to get off on. Sheinberg was so positive that Eric Stoltz would be right for the role that he told the Bobs that if it didn’t work out, he would allow them to replace their leading man. The matter was settled. Stoltz was offered and quickly accepted the role.

Filming began and continued for four weeks. As Christmas approached, production didn’t stop completely. Gale and Canton took advantage of the holiday hiatus, and cameras rolled inside Whittier High School, the location used as the fictional Hill Valley High, while the students were on break. But the winter did put a small freeze on the schedule, which the director used to his advantage. He tasked the editors with putting together a very rough cut of all the footage shot to date, which the three of them would screen prior to the year’s end. It wasn’t until that Sunday in late December, when Bob Z and his two editors were staring pensively at a monitor, that the problem that had been bubbling under the surface reached a full boil. Before that moment, the director knew there would be reshoots. Days earlier, he had provided Artie Schmidt and Harry Keramidas, who was brought on board shortly after filming began when it became apparent that editing would be more time-consuming than originally thought, with notebook pages of shots he suspected would have to be revisited. Zemeckis would be paying special attention to those sequences while watching this comprehensive, yet rough, edit of about an hour’s worth of footage—a month’s worth of fruits from their collective labor. Although Bob Z had been upholding his end of the bargain, coming into the trailer during lunch breaks and after shooting to check on the scenes that were being cut on a daily basis, he sensed that the film might not be gelling as a whole the way he had hoped.

“Bob does not like to see his movie in any kind of long form until he’s worked on every scene and has each scene where he wants it,” Keramidas says. “He once said that he gets so depressed on watching the first cut of his movies because he feels like there’s so much more that he needs to get out of it.”

“Movies are like little pieces at a time—little moments that have been put together, and sometimes you can’t get a sense of how
the performance is going until you see some of those moments put together,” Neil Canton says. “Maybe there was a reason Bob went to the editing room when he did. Maybe deep down inside he was worried. Maybe down inside he said,
I want to go see this, because I’m not sure if this is working the way I want it to
, or there was a little voice in his head saying,
Go to the editing room, Bob. Go to the editing room
. Either way, I’m just very, very thankful that he did.”

So, the day before the coruscating sparkling ball was set to drop in Manhattan, Zemeckis was seeking to confirm if the voice in his head was correct. The three watched in silence, with the director analyzing each frame through his large eyeglasses. There were minor aspects of many shots that bothered him. The unrelenting side effect of Zemeckis being a disciple of David Lean, director of picturesque cinematic films including 1957’s
The Bridge on the River Kwai
, 1962’s
Lawrence of Arabia
, and 1965’s
Doctor Zhivago
, was that he believed every frame of a film had to be worthy of being hung on a wall and heralded as a piece of fine art. But attention to detail was the least of his worries in this case. The problem wasn’t the forest, but one specific tree—the largest redwood in sight. Bob Z watched as Eric Stoltz first walked across the 1950s Hill Valley town square in a T-shirt, high-collared black jacket, and dark jeans. He ran across the street, the sky above him overcast. Zemeckis not only was failing the Lean test, but his score was falling faster with each passing second. Everything in the frame was the antithesis of perfection. It was dark, dreary, and devoid of any humor, a mirror reflecting the director’s mood. The confirmation was complete.

“It was very agonizing,” Zemeckis says. “You don’t want to have to admit this horrible truth. There was no moment where it was, ‘Oh, I know what the problem is.’ It was always a gnawing suspicion that just got worse and worse in my mind, and then I finally had to admit to myself that it wasn’t working in the way that it needed to.”

The rough-edit screening continued, with Zemeckis barely making a sound. The three sat in silence once the monitor stopped broadcasting the film, with Bob Z deep in thought. After a few minutes passed, Artie spoke up.

“What do you think?”

The director knew what he thought, but was uncertain as to whether he should say it.

“Well, I don’t think Eric . . .” Zemeckis paused for a minute, and then reconsidered and rephrased his answer. “There’s a hole in the middle of our screen. The lead actor doesn’t work.”

In that moment, it was hard to pinpoint exactly what the implications of Bob Z’s statement were. Was this simply a case of a nitpicking director venting, or did this mean that the picture was destined to be dead on arrival before it had even come to term? Having watched the totality of the shot footage, even more than what Zemeckis had screened, the editors weren’t immediately sure what the problem was. “I had accepted the fact that Eric Stoltz was Marty McFly,” Schmidt says. “What I thought of his performance didn’t seem to make much difference to me at that particular point because I knew that Bob had looked high and low for somebody to play Marty and finally settled on Eric. Who better to know what Marty McFly’s character was supposed to be other than both Bob Zemeckis and Bob Gale?”

While Artie was trying to figure out the why, Harry took to figuring out the where, as in, where he was going to find his next gig when this one went belly-up. Keramidas got the job on
Future
after being recommended by Schmidt, whom he worked with on 1978’s
Jaws II
. The working relationship between the two wasn’t only good, it was great, but it now appeared their professional reunion was to be short-lived. “I was afraid I was going to lose my job,” Keramidas says. “I was having my first big break on a big Hollywood movie with the best script I had ever read,
and probably the best script I ever did read in my whole career in terms of how well it was realized and how much it resonated page to page, scene to scene, and all I could foresee in that moment was a shutdown.”