Fox recalls juggling lead roles in TV, film

Michael J. Fox’s unbelievable achievement ranks right up there with putting Humpty Dumpty together again. But the actor and activist is no fairy tale character.

In his memoir Future Boy, his fifth book, Fox recounts rehearsing and taping episodes of the TV sensation Family Ties in 1985.

Enter the time-travel adventure film Back to the Future, destined to become a blockbuster phenomenon.

Producer Steven Spielberg was trying to make Back to the Future, and was near the end of six weeks of filming when his team realized Eric Stoltz, the leading man playing Marty, had to be replaced.

They looked around quickly and got wind of Fox; Spielberg realized in no time he was just right for the part of Marty McFly.

But Fox was pledged to Family Ties, and reckoned he couldn’t do it. So as a workaround, they decided to shoot the movie when Fox could: at night.

For three months, day after day, Fox worked as Alex P. Keaton on Family Ties during the day at a Paramount sound stage, then rushed over to the back lot of Universal Studios to make Back to the Future from 7:30 p.m. to 2 a.m. every night, navigating two landmark roles at the same time. Theoretically, he had four hours sleep a night.

In one scene from Back to the Future, Marty finds himself in his underwear in his mother’s bedroom, 30 years in the past, where she seems to be flirting with him. The crew is relieved; Fox nails the scene far better than Stoltz.

Future Boy is a series of poignant, energetic and bountiful slices of life by a veteran performer of television and film who, in 1991 at age 29, was told he had Parkinson’s disease, a movement disorder that worsens over time.

Fox was born in 1961 in Edmonton. He was 18 when he moved to Los Angeles in 1979 from his modest family home, with the clothes on his back and little else.

“For decades young dreamers arrived in Hollywood who never made it out. They destroyed themselves in the pursuit. For every one of me there were a hundred others whose stories did not end well,” Fox writes. “Once I was ensconced in my shitbox apartment in the slums of Beverly Hills, it became obvious I was not equipped to make decisions in my best interest.”

Between the meagre acting jobs Fox landed, he’d smoke too much and drink with abandon. “By the time I auditioned for Family Ties, nearly three years after arriving in Hollywood and six months after running out of money, I was desperate,” he writes. “I spent my days dodging the landlord and digging through restaurant dumpsters for sustenance.”

After a lengthy and successful career, Fox stopped acting in 2020. His co-author Nelle Fortenberry has worked with him for 30 years as a creative partner.

In addition to receiving an honorary Academy Award in 2022 and a Presidential Medal of Freedom in January, Fox also was made an officer of the Order of Canada in 2011.

Despite his critical and commerical success in Hollywood, what Fox will forever be thanked for has little to do with entertainment, but everything to do with saving lives. In 2000, Fox started the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research. With his enthusiastic help, it has raised over US$2.5 billion, a powerful force in the search for a cure for Parkinson’s.

Barry Craig is a retired journalist.