Future Boy

I love Back to the Future. It’s a classic for so many reasons and I’m glad Fleet enjoys watching it too. I am also a Michael J. Fox fan so I’m not sure why I walked by Future Boy so many times at our local bookstore before picking it up. Published in 2025, the book is a 159-page snapshot of Fox’s chaotic life in 1985 as he filmed Back to the Future and Family Ties simultaneously.

Books like this are excellent reads because the author (in this case authors plural as Fox wrote it with Nelle Fortenberry) narrows the scope rather than telling too big of a story at once. Peter Ames Carlin did something similar with Tonight in Jungleland  as that narrative focuses solely on the creation of Bruce Springsteen’s seminal album Born to Run.

It’s clear that Fox still loves Back to the Future which makes sense considering it propelled his career to the next level by making him a television/movie star rather than just a television star. He blatantly conveys his feeling about the film at the end of the Prologue: “This is for all the people who love Back to the Future as much as I do.” He knows what a big deal that movie was and still is for the public. “We didn’t realize it then, but this movie was going to be some serious shit.” In 2026, it still holds up.

The two central “conflicts” of this book are: 1) Eric Stoltz was the original actor who played Marty and put in six weeks of filming as the character. 2) When Fox replaced Stoltz, he and the crew had to literally work both day and night because Fox was filming his hit show Family Ties at the same time. A bulk of the conversation about Stoltz is ensuring that the reader does not think he’s a bad guy or a bad actor – he just wasn’t Marty. But since the crew had already done a lot of filming with Stoltz, it all had to be redone with Fox which was a logistical and financial nightmare. “It would never work today…now a movie project demands two weeks of buffer time on either side of a job.”

Fox talks about how one of the main differences between his and Stoltz’s take on Marty was that Stoltz played him darker and Fox thought of Marty as a comedic character, and the movie in general, as a comedy. I can’t imagine it any other way! On another note, it was interesting to read about the small details that go into making movies such as “filmmakers are always in the battle with the sun.” Even with all of the ups and down and schedule shifts, it’s not surprising that Back to the Future was the highest grossing film in 1985 or that it spent almost three months at number one. No roads needs.

Quotes:

“This movie was everything to me.”

“That was all I needed – just one teacher who believed in me.”

“As an actor, choices made on the fly become associated with your character for life.”

“The thrill of working with Christopher Lloyd is that he pulls the reactions out of you – you can’t help but respond.”

“[Marty] literally saves the world with his guitar.”

Fun Facts:

Marty’s Nike shoes were Fox’s – they went with those because his wardrobe shoes were left at a different location on the day of filming and the tight schedule didn’t allow time to retrieve them.

The “P” in his Family Ties character’s name was an “unvetted ad-lib.” I wonder if Fox using “J” in his actual name has anything to do with that.

In the original script, the time machine was a refrigerator instead of a DeLorean.

This piece of information isn’t necessarily fun, but it is fascinating: the red-wine Gibson ES-345 guitar Marty played in Back to the Future is somehow missing.

The script was rejected 42 times because people thought “time travel movies didn’t make any money.” According to Fox, that was true until 1985.

Side Note:

I’m glad writer/producer Bob Gale acknowledges that some might have thought the friendship between Doc Brown and Marty was weird. As much as I like Doc (Christopher Lloyd is beyond hilarious), I always wondered why the viewer did not get any backstory on why those two were friends. “Marty McFly is the type of teenager who wants to hang out with someone like that. To him, Doc Brown is the coolest guy in Hill Valley.” No argument here.