Back to the Future Writer Reveals Exactly What Changed When Michael J. Fox Replaced the Original Star
The history of Back to the Future has been well documented for decades, especially with the role of Marty McFly being originally played by Eric Stoltz rather than Michael J. Fox. Photos and videos have popped up over the years that showed a glimpse of this “alternate universe,” but we’ll never really know how different the movie might have been. A new book about the making of the original movie, Back to the Future: The Complete Screenplay by Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale, not only recounts the production of the film but also reveals fresh details about what was changed about the movie itself when the change was made.
Speaking in an interview with io9, Gale opened up about how they used the time between Stoltz being fired and Fox taking the part of Marty McFly to decide what needed improving or could be changed, among them, Marty’s signature look with his orange jacket. Gale said that a lot of the changes were “totally serendipitous,” such as the jacket itself, which only came to him when he saw someone walking down the street wearing one. According to Gale, the recasting of Eric Stoltz as Marty McFly was “an amazing luxury” largely because it meant they could look at everything they’d shot and decide where it could be improved since it was all being reshot anyway. That included an opening sequence that was different, plus an elaborate prank by Marty that was removed completely from the film.
Back to the Future Writer Reveals Scrapped Ideas from Eric Stoltz Version
Regarding the wardrobe change, Gale revealed that the original plan for Marty was going to be wearing a regular jacket that would make him blend in with the 1950s far more easily, but as he puts it, the idea simply wasn’t funny enough. “We realized we’d made a big mistake by doing that, and so we had a second chance and rectified that,” he said. The fish-out-of-water gags in the original Back to the Future remain some of its funniest moments, so Gale is right; to imagine a version of the film without them feels like a lesser movie.
Gale went on to reveal that initially the film had an “elaborate sequence where Marty was given detention for taking a phone call from Doc Brown” which culminated in Marty setting off the fire alarm at school to get out of detention and make it to his band’s failed audition. None of that scene had been shot yet because the set was actually still being constructed, which, once again, became a serendipitous change since the studio told them to not build anything they didn’t have to after the casting change was going to affect the budget.
“So what we did was we looked at that sequence and said, you know what? Way back when we started this, we didn’t see Doc’s lab in 1985,” Gale recalled. “There is that little excerpt in the book that shows Doc has an RV, and it’s just tooling around, so that was an early version of that, and we said: ‘We’ve already got the lab. All we got to do is dress it for 1985 and put this dog food machine in there, and that will be the way that we start the movie.’”
As fans know, the opening of Back to the Future instead sets up a slew of details that will come into play across the movie, like the headlines about Doc Brown’s family history, the theft of the plutonium by the Libyans, but also his hairbrained inventions. Once again, it’s tough to imagine the start of the movie being different than what it is.
He added, “So many of these things work out; that turned out to be a much, much better way to start this movie
