Lucky Man (12 page)

The cast genuinely liked being with one another, and all were in good spirits as we landed at Gatwick, many of us with family in tow. Plans to explore, shop, and sightsee were soon crushed, however, by the logistical reality of shooting a TV movie on a tight schedule in a foreign country. Making matters worse was the material—a contrived story and slapdash script—not up to the show's usual standard.

The writers were apologetic. They'd burnt themselves out over the course of the previous season, rising to the challenge of pleasing an audience suddenly doubled in size and churning out one outstanding episode after another. They'd also had to deal that season with Meredith Baxter Birney's pregnancy. Expecting twins, she was put on bed rest, which meant Gary and the staff would have to write around her for several episodes and then write her out of several more. On top of that, we had to shut down for a month right in the middle of our season.

Another complication that season was entirely my fault and was, in fact, the reason I was now being terrorized by the telephone at such an ungodly hour.

“Hello,” I croaked. In the half-second, transatlantic delay before my caller's words reached me, I peered through slitted eyes at my disaster area of a hotel room. Assessing the damage wasn't difficult because all of the lights were burning. This indicated I hadn't fallen asleep so much as passed out. It would appear the party had ended here. Guinness bottles littered the suite. Plates of half-eaten room service desserts were scattered throughout, some spilled on the floor. On the nightstand next to the telephone was a shoe. Had it been on the near side of the nightstand, I'd be doing a Maxwell Smart imitation.

“Michael, it's Pete . . . Peter Benedek . . .” (Pause.) “Your lawyer?” (Pete would become an agent the following year. I'd be his first client.)

“Pete? You're in London?” My brain was on fire. The pain was so excruciating I felt nauseous.

“No.
You're
in London. I'm in Los Angeles.”

“Right . . . I just woke up,” I muttered. “I think it's really late here.”

The evening had started out in low-key fashion over dinner at Tony Roma's with Mom and Dad, who'd been in London for the last week or so. Accompanying me to work every day, they even did a walk-through in one of the scenes. From the first days of
Family Ties
, they loved to come see me on the set at Paramount Studios. Perched in the otherwise empty audience bleachers for hours at a time, the two of them would intently watch me rehearse as if unable to believe what they were seeing. Gary told me that Dad would pull him aside at least once per visit and ask, “How's he doing, Gary, all right? Do you need me to talk to him about anything?”

“He's okay, Bill,” Gary would laugh. “He's fine, believe me. He's doing great, no complaints.”

Still a little dubious, Dad would say, “Well, fine . . . but just let me know.”

At dinner we'd shared a couple bottles of wine and, a little tipsy, made our way back to the hotel. I walked them to their suite and said good night. I would have been better off if I'd just turned down the hallway to my own room and climbed into bed. Instead, I'd hooked up with a Cockney musician friend I knew from Los Angeles, and we set out on an extended pub crawl. (This was London, after all.) Exactly what transpired after that, I'm not entirely sure. I was partying fairly heavily in those days, in what had become a moveable celebration of my great good fortune. Though looking back on it now, there was a determined, even slightly desperate edge to my celebrating, as if the party could end at any moment.

The fact is, my life these past three years couldn't have been much sweeter. The first couple years of
Ties
had been pure bliss—a job I loved that gave me the perfect opportunity to develop my craft. Then, with the ratings explosion came a near guarantee of financial stability. By the end of the season, just prior to leaving for England, I closed on my first house: a three-bedroom bungalow with swimming pool, tucked into the hills of Laurel Canyon. It hadn't been much of a negotiation. To protect his bargaining leverage, my accountant (a new one) had warned me not to look too eager while house hunting. I didn't help matters when, immediately upon entering the living room, I threw the keys to my new 300ZX in the middle of the floor and shouted, “This is it. This baby is
mine
.” Heady stuff.

The monster in the cupboard had long since been vanquished, if not the impulse that had given it life in the first place: the denial of a more practical reality outside my own dreamscape. During those first years in California, the paperwork tiger growling in the cabinet above my kitchen sink served as a stand-in for my parents, teachers, and the others with their cautionary admonitions that I couldn't “get away with it,” that there would be a day of reckoning.

Well, I
had
gotten away with it, there
had been
no day of reckoning. I had made believers out of all of them. Nana would be smiling her beautiful lopsided smile. And yet . . .

Pete again, “Mike, we just saw the movie. It was fantastic . . . amazing. It's gonna be huge.”

“Great, Pete,” I muttered. “That's cool . . . What movie?”

“Your movie.
Back to the Future
.”

“
Back to the Future
. Right.” So that's why Peter was calling. He'd just come out of an industry screening of the movie, which was scheduled for release the following week. Now my mind was tracking backwards.

With a pregnant Meredith out of commission for much of the fall of 1984, I had decided to keep busy and so accepted an offer to star in
Teen Wolf
, a low-budget independent feature. Looking back, I have no idea what I was thinking. (It worked for Michael Landon?) One day on location, I entertained some lunchtime visitors to the set, receiving them in full wolf-boy mode. Several layers of form-fitted rubber foam, studded with yak hair and affixed to my face with airplane glue, made it impossible to eat properly, so I sipped my milkshake lunch through a straw. I begged my friends for reassurance that this choice of role wasn't a surefire career killer, and with kind hearts and straight faces, they lied, “Don't worry about it. It'll be great.”

We were filming that day in old Pasadena, on a street lined on both sides with attractive split-level Arts-and-Crafts-style homes and shaded by oak trees so mature that their root systems buckle the sidewalks. The effect, at once exotic and familiar, made this area a favorite with filmmakers; and not surprisingly, while we exploited the neighborhood ambience for our little epic, an advance team from another production company was scouting the location.

“They're with a new Spielberg movie,
Back from the Future
or something like that,” the assistant director told me later. “It's supposed to go in late October.”

“Who's in it?” I inquired.

“Nobody I know,” he answered. “Except for Crispin Glover.”

Ouch
. I knew Crispin too—an intense, eccentric, and brilliant young actor I'd worked with before—and while it was unusual for me to feel competitive with my peers, it did sting a little to know that crazy Crispin was gearing up to do a Spielberg film while I, layered in latex, toiled away on a B-grade, high school werewolf comedy. At least, I thought, fully surrendering now to my more covetous instincts, he hadn't landed the lead role. That, I had learned, went to an equally intense, equally brilliant, and only somewhat less eccentric actor named Eric Stoltz.

Oh well, even if
Teen Wolf
wound up destroying my feature film career before it even started, I still had
Family Ties
. We returned to work in November, Meredith having delivered her twins, then broke for the holidays and came back the first week in January of 1985. This was the home stretch, the back nine of our twenty-two-show order. A return to business as usual, or so I thought.

A day or two after our Christmas break, Gary summoned me to his office for a meeting—there was something very important he needed to discuss with me. He walked me up to his second-story office adjacent to the NBC soundstage where he was producing the pilot for a new series. A bank of picture windows overlooked the set—perfect for surveying his ever-expanding empire. Gary walked around to the business side of his desk, opened a drawer, and pulled out a manila envelope from which he extracted a script. It was thick, too thick to be a script for
Family Ties
, or any other sitcom for that matter.

“I have a confession to make,” Gary began. “Just before the start of the season, Steven sent me a copy of this script.” Steven Spielberg and Gary were good friends and whenever Gary said “Steven,” I knew he meant Spielberg.

“He's producing it and Bob Zemeckis, the guy who did
Romancing the Stone
, is directing. Steven and Bob really wanted you for the lead role. They came to me asking if there was any way I could let you out of the show. I didn't mention it to you then, because it was just impossible and I didn't want to disappoint you. I hope you understand.”

I did, actually. With
Family Ties
on the threshold of breakout success, Gary would have been insane to jeopardize the show by risking the loss of what had by now become its main character. This was all starting to sound vaguely familiar though, and suddenly I remembered why.

“This is that
Future
thing, right?” I asked. “Eric Stoltz is doing that. I thought they started shooting a couple of months ago.”

“They did,” Gary replied. “But they're not happy with what they've got so far. Eric's great, but they don't think he's the right fit for the role. The more they thought about it, the more they kept going back to their original choice, which was you. It's going to be expensive, but they want to reshoot all of his stuff.”

My head was spinning.

“You'd have to start work this week. But I want you to understand what this would mean. I can't disrupt our
Family Ties
schedule in any way, especially after what we've already gone through with Meredith this season. We're not prepared to write around you, or write you out of a single episode. You'll have to work your regular day on the show, then be picked up and brought to the movie set where you'll probably work until two or three in the morning.”

(It would turn out to be more like five or six.)

“It's gonna be like that for the rest of the season. I've given this a lot of thought, and I don't want to take this opportunity away from you for a second time. If you think you can handle it, then it's fine with me.”

“Yes . . . yeah . . . I think . . . I'm sure I can,” I stammered.

“Well, first things first,” Gary concluded. “The movie's called
Back to the Future
. This is it.”

And with that, he tossed the script across to my side of the desk, where I caught it with nervously fumbling hands.

“Read it. If you like it, we'll see where it goes from there.”

I held the screenplay and then balanced it on the palm of my left hand, weighing it and considering its heft. Looking up at Gary once more, a shit-eating grin now plastered across my face, three words tumbled out of my mouth.

“I love it.”

.   .   .

I had little doubt that this was the feature film project I had been hoping and waiting for since day one, but I did, of course, hurry back to my apartment to sit down and read the thing. The story was fantastic, if a little difficult to follow on the first reading, and the character of Marty McFly—a skateboarding, girl-chasing, high school rock and roll musician—seemed like the kind of guy I could play in my sleep. That very nearly turned out to be the case.

The deal was made. Wardrobe fittings were arranged, as were meetings with Steven, director Bob Zemeckis, and his co-writer and producing partner, Bob Gale. Gary was right; within the week, I'd be picked up from finishing a full day's rehearsal on
Family Ties
and driven out to Pomona, where, at approximately 2:00
A.M.
, I would record my first shot of the picture. Encased in Guess jeans and a life-jackety-looking down vest and gripping a camcorder, I'd straddle one of two flaming tire tracks in an otherwise wet shopping mall parking lot and sputter, “You built a time machine out of a
DeLorean
?”

I called Canada to share the news with my folks. Mom didn't know Steven Spielberg from Cecil B. DeMille.

“That's great, honey,” she said, adding, “just don't let them wear you out.”

For the next three-and-a-half months, the combination of
Back to the Future
and
Family Ties
swallowed me whole. A teamster driver would pick me up at 9:30
A.M.
and take me to Paramount, where I would spend the day rehearsing that week's show, culminating in a run-through at approximately 5:00
P.M.
each afternoon. Then at 6, another teamster driver would pick me up and shuttle me to Universal Studios or whatever far-flung location we were based at that evening, where I would work on the film until just before sunrise. At that point, I'd climb into the back of a production van with a pillow and a blanket, and yet another teamster driver would take me home again—sometimes literally carrying me into my apartment and dropping me onto my bed. I'd catch two or three hours of sleep before teamster driver #1 would reappear at my apartment, let himself in with a key I'd provided, brew a pot of coffee, turn on the shower, and then roust me to start the whole process all over again.

Friday nights, we'd tape
Family Ties
in front of a live studio audience, so I'd start on
Back to the Future
later those evenings. But because I didn't have to work on the show the next day, we could compensate for the delay by working well past sunrise into Saturday morning. Each production operated completely independent of the other. The onus of coordinating between the two fell squarely on my shoulders. Not that there was anything either could have done to relieve my burden; both had schedules that had already been dramatically compressed by unforeseen circumstances—
Family Ties
by Meredith's absence, and
Back to the Future
by recasting its lead character and reshooting all of his scenes. Universal Studios reluctantly agreed to foot the bill to redress their casting misstep, but only on the condition that it not affect their summer release date. Bob Zemeckis had editors working around the clock to piece my reshot coverage into previously filmed scenes, and to assemble all of the new material to meet the deadline. So, in all fairness, it wasn't just me who was under the gun, although I was probably the only one who felt the cold steel of double barrels against the back of my neck.