Inside the Eric Stoltz Version of Back to the Future

Back to the Future not only boast one of the best Blockbuster scripts ever written but many consider it a perfect movie Back to the Future is a perfect movie which is why it's so shocking to learn that we almost got a very different movie that wouldn't have even featured the film's iconic DeLorean or Michael J Fox as Marty McFly so let's dive in and take a look at what could have been the original version of Back to the Future writer Bob Gail came up with the idea for Back to the Future after finding his father's High School yearbook while visiting his parents and I find out that my father had been the president of his graduating class I didn't know this and I'm looking at him and thinking about the president of my graduating class who was a guy have nothing to do with and I thought would I have been friends with him if I had gone to high school or would I have just hated his guts after taking the idea back to his writing partner Robert zamus known together as the two Bobs zamus lit up and mentioned how his mother's High School stories were often contradictory you smoke too from here the ideas began to snowball as the pair would go on to write the script lucky for us this version of the script wouldn't get greenlit at a fear that it would bomb at the box office since the most successful comedies at the time were runchy films like Animal House and porkys while back to the future was seen as two tame by comparison however had this version of the script been green LD and made it would have been radically different from the movie we know and love it's hard to imagine the time machine and Back to the Future as being anything other than a DeLorean but originally it wasn't even a car instead it was built out of a refrigerator that would emit a beam of light that would send its subject back in time and while this version of The Time Machine was also powered by plutonium it needed a Little Help from Coca-Cola to work Additionally the thrilling sequence at the start of the film that sees Marty travel back in time in the DeLorean while being chased by Libyan terrorists occurs in Doc Brown's lab in the original script which sees him shot by government agents from the nuclear Regulatory Commission the climax of the film also would have taken place at a nuclear testing site where Doc and Marty harnessed the awesome power of an atomic bomb to get the required energy to send Marty Back to the Future which would have seen him step inside the leadline time machine refrigerator if that sounds somewhat familiar it's because Spielberg very likely repurposed the idea for Kingdom of the Crystal Skull don't forget he was the executive producer on Back to the Future and helped to get it made eventually the refrigerator would be changed to a car for a couple of reasons first Spielberg worried that children would climb into fridges and then get trapped inside trying to replicate the scene from the film and that's because at the time many fridges still had latches on them that would hold the door shut making it possible to open from the inside and two a Time Chamber is very static and zamus wanted it to be able to move Bob said you know what wouldn't it make more sense for this to be mobile next thing I knew a week later they gave me some re revised pages and they had turned the time machine into a DeLorean they settled on the DeLorean because it basically looked like a spaceship especially to someone in the 1950s opening the door to the gag with Peabody and his family thinking it was an actual UFO yet before production began Universal product placement Department tried to get the filmmakers to change the car to a Mustang as Ford was willing to pay them $75,000 if they made the switch prompting writer Bob Gail to say Doc Brown doesn't drive a Mustang as a quick side note while we're on the topic of product placement it's kind of ironic how the drinks Marty tries to order in this scene give me a tab tab I can't give you a tab unless you order something right give me a Pepsi free you want a Pepsi pal you're going to pay for it R is BN to the guy behind the counter as they probably are to Modern audiences as Pepsi free and tab no longer exist additionally Pepsi one of the sponsors of the film was against Marty mentioning tab which was a drink produced by their competitor Coca-Cola however the filmmakers like the joke so much they refused to remove it now getting back to the original version of the film where Doc Brown is known as Professor Brown and doesn't have a dog named Einstein but instead has a chimpanzee named shm additionally to fund his scientific experiments he and Marty pirate movies obviously it goes without saying that the studio didn't like that the script promoted bootlegging films leading to that plot device eventually being scrapped some of the biggest differences however occur at the very end as we witness how Professor Brown and Marty altered the future one of the most iconic scenes from the original film is Marty realizing his dream of performing at the high school dance by performing Johnny Be Good while Chuck Barry listens over the phone thereby inventing rock and roll in the original version the dancing by the students is so overzealous that an elderly Teacher Calls the cops to report a riot on his way out Marty tells the band to never play that song again as he doesn't want to mess with history thinking rock and roll will happen on its own except it doesn't and when Marty goes back to the future he learns that Mambo is the most popular genre of music with rock and roll having never been invented not only that but the entire world is different thanks to Professor Brown's inventions as everything has a retrofuturistic aesthetic there are flying cars robot housekeepers and everything's powered by Coca-Cola and the reason the Bobs wrote this retrofuturistic ending was because before Bob G found his father's yearbook and came up with the story of a kid going back in time to meet his parents he and zamus already had a time travel movie idea they wanted to make but couldn't quite crack and that idea was inspired by the fact that predictions about the future are always wrong and they thought it would be cool to do a movie where you change the past and the present would end up looking like how the future was predicted to look from when they were kids so this ending was the result of that initial idea that's also where the character of Doc Brown originated from too as he was part of it so the back to the future we know and love is a Fusion of those two time travel movie ideas anyway back to the original ending because of Marty going to the Past Professor Brown decides not to invent the time machine and because of this he's never shot and killed by the government agents from the nuclear Regulatory Commission Now I know what you're thinking if Brown never invents a time machine then how does Marty travel back in time in the first place isn't that a paradox and wouldn't there now be two Marty's once Marty returns from the ' 50s the script explains this away by saying that when Marty returned from the past the version of him in the80s simply disappeared into an interdimensional dimensional Time Warp oh how convenient and while in the original ending Marty finds his family much better off financially thanks to his dad's renewed confidence which motivated him to become a successful sci-fi author in this version he would have become a professional boxer and heavyweight champion of the world after knocking out Biff who now works as a family security guard and for fans who have complained for decades that George and Lorraine should have recognized Marty following his exploits in 1955 even though that was 30 years prior and he only showed up for like a week of their lives this version of the film ends with George pulling at a newspaper clipping showing Marty on stage at George's High School dance which caused a riot as George looks at the picture of Marty he shakes his head and says Nah couldn't be while the spine of the story is the same many of these differences likely would have prevented the film from becoming the instant classic it became leading me to see a situation where Back to the Future would have probably been a modest hit and something we look back on now is that weird 80s movie that not everyone's seen with a time traveling refrigerator and a pet monkey however even after all these changes were made to give us the film we know and love one can help but wonder if it would have been as successful without Michael J Fox as Marty McFly Back to the Future yes Eric stal is your boy in that movie what an embodied performance you mean Michael J fox and while Michael J fox was always the filmmaker's first choice for Marty at the time he was committed to shooting Family Ties and the show's executive producer Gary David Goldberg wouldn't let Fox leave the show for several episodes to shoot Back to the Future as Goldberg worried Fox's absence would hurt the show's ratings likewise Universal who was producing Back to the Future wouldn't delay the start of production to wait until Michael J fox was free unable to get Fox the filmmakers began auditioning every young actor in town from Ben Stiller AR lately I've come to conclusion I don't know anything about my parents to John CER you don't mind if we uh we park for a few minutes until finally narrowing it down to see Thomas Howell and Eric stoz the filmmakers preferred Howell you you don't mind if we park for a few minutes do you however Sid shinberg who was running the studio at the time preferred staltz after seeing him in mask and was so confident in stultz that he told the filmmakers that if stolz didn't work out they could reshoot the film talk about famous last words unfortunately stolz was largely a dramatic method actor and viewed Back to the Future as a tragedy since Marty is essentially a stranger to his own life when he returns home with memories of an entire life and timeline that no longer exists and nobody else remembers and when you think about stultz isn't wrong Marty never gets to experience the better upbringing he had by changing history everyone else in the family experiences it and everyone has memories of it except for him st's view of the script extended to his portrayal of Marty as well leading him to play the character far more Sullen and D as a side note I've always wondered how much stoltz's casting had to do with crisen Glover being cast as his father since staltz actually looks like he could be a son unlike Michael J fox speaking of the rest of the cast sto's method acting also rubbed many of the them the wrong way he had a really interesting process it kind of he likes to create uh friction I think um he liked to be called by his character name all the time he wouldn't answer if he said Eric he wouldn't answer you you had to call him by his character name which a lot of people find hard in the scene in the cafeteria where he's pushing me and Strickland comes up he was pushing me so hard with his whole method thing the method was very strong toward me right you know so cuz you're the you're the antagonist of course I mean he was driving the heels of his hands hard into my collar bones and uh and I'm talking between takes you know early takes hey uh hey uh Marty quote unquote you're just really I mean it's it's a it's a movie you're going to break my collarbone man and he pretends he really doesn't hear me because I'm not in the scene with him at that point and take two bam into my collar bones all in all stl's filmed for a total of 6 weeks and during that time time the filmmakers weren't exactly happy with his performance but felt there was possibly enough good bits here and there that they'd be able to Cobble something usable together during editing which was actually happening concurrently with filming due to the movie's condensed production schedule after director Bob zameka screened 40 minutes of edited footage he began to panic as he realized they had a major problem he just said I don't think we're getting the laughs that I was hoping we we we would get Z mechason writer Bob Gail feeling strongly that this was not the movie they set out to make held Studio head said shinberg to his word and worked out a deal with Family Ties that would allow Michael J fox to film both that show and Back to the Future concurrently as long as Family Ties took priority I'd work at Family Ties from 10: to to about 5: and then go over to the set and and get there probably about 6 and start shooting and work on night till about 4: or 5 in the morning and then go back and get literally get driven home and carried in the house and dropped in bed and woke get up in the morning and put in the shower and I mean it was just crazy and in a weird bit of irony Not only would stults be replaced but by re-shooting the entire film with Fox life would imitate art a stults getting fired from the film would reflect a tragedy he saw the film as with this cast memb is getting to redo the entire film with a new Marty just like their characters do in the movie after history is changed a stls wouldn't be around to experience it just like Marty wa this is heavy the recasting of Marty also gave the two Bobs an idea after seeing the footage of stals blend in a little too easily in his black jacket in 1955's Hill Valley seeing how this film was supposed to be a comedy The Bobs felt that it would be funnier if Marty's wardrobe really stuck out and so they gave him his famous orange puffer vest which to summon in 1955 looked exactly like a what's with the life preserver one casualty of sto's recasting that is seldom discussed is the fact that the actress that played his girlfriend Jennifer was replaced too originally Jennifer was played by mour Harden who eventually shot to fame years later as Jan levenson Gould in the US version of the office just Jen levenson no Gould no however a few producers ERS worried that malora who was shorter than stoz but taller than Fox not only wouldn't look right standing next to Fox but feared audiences might not buy it either the female Executives thought it emasculated their lead character for him to have a girlfriend that's taller than he is the men could care less they were like who cares malora would be replaced by Claudia Wells which ironically wouldn't be the last time the role of Jennifer was recast just like it's hard to imagine any other actor playing Marty McFly the same can be said of Christopher Lloyd as Doc Brown John litho coming off back-to-back supporting actor Oscar nods was an early favorite but he was in high demand at the time and unavailable the only other actor seriously considered was Jeff Goldblum and if Christopher Lloyd wasn't convinced by his then wife to read the script after he allegedly threw it in the trash Goldblum may have been our Doc Brown however considering Goldblum is more than a decade younger than Lloyd it's likely his interpretation would have been wildly different possibly something more contemporary and closer to his portrayal of scientist Seth brundle in the fly which he would star in a year after Back to the Future came out plus it was Lloyd who suggested Doc Brown should have wild white hair similar to Albert Einstein ironically Christopher Lloyd Jeff Goldblum and John litho all starred together in the adventures of buck Ru Bonsai across the eighth Dimension a year before it's interesting to consider that what to many is a perfect movie only got that way due to considerable delays Studio demands budget cuts and several recastings for example the original climax with the atomic bomb was only Rewritten because it would have been way too expensive to shoot forcing The Bobs to rethink the ending as they looked up at the courthouse they realized they could use a bolt of lightning for the 21 and slap a clock on set courthouse and change it to a clock tower which was a fitting touch for a movie literally about time likewise Studio head s shinberg who had pushed so hard for stals is responsible for several other changes in the script like Marty's mom being renamed to Lorraine after Sid's real life wife changing Professor Brown's name to Doc the changing of Doc's pet monkey to a pet dog and the changing of the ending from a retrofuturistic one to the one we know and love we criticize Studio interference a lot on this channel but as is the case in Back to the Future sometimes it's a good thing although not all the time and one day we get this memo and it says I've come up with the perfect title for this movie space man from Pluto and here are some changes in the script that you can make to reflect the title and so Bob and I went to Stephen and we said holy what do we do and he turned to his assistant and he said let's send Sid a memo de Sid thank you for your most humorous memo of November 14th we all got a big laugh out of it keep them coming we knew that Sid embarrassed to admit that he was serious and we never heard about it again thanks for watching everybody and don't forget to like And subscribe to bullets and Blockbusters for more great content

Channel: Bullets & Blockbusters

Views: 295,999

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Id: Am4JRnVQeh4

Length: 14min 56sec (896 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 30 2023