‘Future Boy,’ the actor’s memoir about making the sci-fi classic, is out now.
As cinema legend has it, six weeks into the Back to the Future shoot, Eric Stoltz was abruptly replaced as Marty McFly by Michael J. Fox. It’s a fated moment in Hollywood history that Fox talks more about in his new memoir, Future Boy: Back to the Future and My Journey Through the Space-Time Continuum, which he co-wrote with Nelle Fortenberry.
In a chat with Entertainment Weekly that also includes book excerpts, Fox and Fortenberry described the way the studio initially tried to cover up the Fox-Stoltz swap, which was more amicable than the story we all thought we knew. But of course, even before the internet, things got messy. Fox revealed that at the time of the shoot, he didn’t really think about it. “I don’t think the public were aware of it until we were doing it. I was rushed on it, six weeks in, and I had no kind of time to talk about it.”
Fortenberry added more context: “They managed to keep the fact that Eric had left the movie and Michael was coming on the movie a secret until Michael started.
