The book "We Don't Need Roads" sheds a lot of light on this, and gets it from interviews with principals involved in production, rather than gossip rags. They were honestly trying to make the film with Stolz, and it appears the claim Zemeckis wasn't giving Stolz direction just isn't true:
"However oblivious the editors were to Zemeckis’s discontent with Stoltz, there were others who saw red flags. “I kind of sensed for about three weeks prior to the fact that they weren’t happy and were looking for a solution,” cinematographer Dean Cundey says. “While I heard a couple of rumors, there was nothing concrete for any of us in the circle to go by just watching on the set. Bob would want something that would make you say, ‘Yeah, that’s pretty funny,’ and Eric would say, ‘Well, no, I don’t think I can do that.’”
and ...
"From the first day of shooting, the director had to put in extra effort to try and coax out of Stoltz the comedic performance that he and Gale had imagined would be there during the writing process."
Sheinberg wasn't totally committed to Stolz. He liked Stolz, and preferred casting him to C. Thomas Howell (who others thought was funny in screen tests). However, he promised that if Stolz didn't work out they could recast and reshoot.
This movie wasn't considered to be a shot in the dark spec effort. Zemeckis had just directed FOX's ONLY hit the previous year, Romancing the Stone. Steven Spielberg. who had liked the project for years, had Amblin on board for production. Everyone loved the script. They all expected the film to hit as long as they got it right, so they were committed to that.
While they were working with Stolz, they had been told Fox was off limits, period. So they had no idea at the time they'd be able to get him. And they wouldn't have if Spielberg couldn't have played on friendship, in desperation to recast.
reply
share
Cognoscente (2463)
3 years ago
In the publicist's visual history book, Sheinberg denied telling Gale that he would let them start over again if they weren't happy. Sheinberg claimed that it wouldn't have made sense for himself to consider that the actor who he was rooting for could be wrong for the role. He also said that Spielberg had enough power at the time that if he thought that Eric was miscast then he could have easily put his foot down before filming began.
In 2003, Crispin Glover did an interview for Zap2it where he explained why Eric won the role: "I did all of the screen tests with all the people that went up for the role, for Marty McFly. I could tell that there was a way that they were going for the character, kind of light comedy. I don't know exactly how to describe it. There was a certain type of people they were bringing in and Eric Stoltz came in and the scenes were playing better when he was playing it, but it wasn't quite as light or comic. But he was a better actor than the other people that were coming in. What happened was there were probably personal aesthetic contradictions going on at the time with the director. But, I think because they were initially going for this comedic thing, they were becoming concerned, and so they weren't happy about that."
It's funny how there was a disparity between the reflections from the cast and crew members. Lloyd and Crispin talked about how they were surprised that Stoltz was fired. In an interview for Slice of SciFi, Crispin had this to say about whether it was common knowledge during shooting that Stoltz was miscast: "It was not known, and it was surprising."
In Tom Wilson's memoir, The Masked Man, he said it was only during the final week that the mood on the set started to feel off. He thought that it was himself who was the problem. Joel Silver, a business partner of Zemeckis, told Empire magazine (December `93) that it was only during the final week of filming that they realized that the film was terrible.
reply
share