Since everybody's talking about it...
And I mean everybody, like it's the biggest bit of news that dropped this week that didn't come out of Chile. Even my morning DJs were discussing it.
Eric Stoltz as Marty McFly.
I'd known he had been cast, shot, and fired before, but hadn't realized it was five weeks into shooting.
FIVE WEEKS. In those days, that was pretty much anywhere from 1/3 to 1/2 of the average principal photography schedule for an effects film. How do you get that far into a project - millions upon millions of dollars, thousands upon thousands of worker hours - before you realize that it's just not happening and you have to start over?
I haven't hunted down the footage, figuring I need to leave something for me to look forward to besides the films themselves when I get the Blu-ray pack on Christmas (hint hint hint). Maybe it's just atrocious. But even if it is "so, so wrong" as one of the DJs put it while talking to their weekly film critic, that seems to me more a reaction to seeing stuff we're familiar with featuring Michael J. Fox suddenly turned on its head with a different actor.
I've heard people say that the movies wouldn't have done as well if Stoltz hadn't been let go, but really... maybe they wouldn't have made quite so much money, since it's hard to overstate how massive Fox's Family Ties following was at the time, but would it really have been that *different*, that *bad* of a movie? It's not like Stoltz is a nobody - he's had a full, busy career all along, and is still going with Caprica and a new career as a director (he directed the 10/12 episode of Glee, the day all of this news really started to break... coincidence?). Arguments that the movie would have failed with him seem strange - maybe it would have been the break he needed to go from "reliable, journeyman actor with some amount of name recognition" to "high profile teen heart throb". Obviously, we'll never know, because it's impossible to judge the existing footage that will be shown on the Blu-rays as their own piece of work - they can only be seen in light of having seen it all with Fox many times over the course of 25 years, so naturally it will seem "so, so wrong", regardless of any questions of quality.
But I'm still hung up on this five weeks nonsense. Zemeckis, I don't know about - I don't love him as a director, even though I love many of his movies, so I can't speak to his eye for casting. But Spielberg as a producer... I wouldn't expect him to be the kind of guy who could let things go that long, to let a "failure" get to the point of being that expensive. I just don't see how you shoot almost half a movie with someone before realizing that you have to scrap everything you've shot (and seriously, there's maybe five minutes total in that movie that Marty isn't in a shot) and start over.
Eric Stoltz as Marty McFly.
I'd known he had been cast, shot, and fired before, but hadn't realized it was five weeks into shooting.
FIVE WEEKS. In those days, that was pretty much anywhere from 1/3 to 1/2 of the average principal photography schedule for an effects film. How do you get that far into a project - millions upon millions of dollars, thousands upon thousands of worker hours - before you realize that it's just not happening and you have to start over?
I haven't hunted down the footage, figuring I need to leave something for me to look forward to besides the films themselves when I get the Blu-ray pack on Christmas (hint hint hint). Maybe it's just atrocious. But even if it is "so, so wrong" as one of the DJs put it while talking to their weekly film critic, that seems to me more a reaction to seeing stuff we're familiar with featuring Michael J. Fox suddenly turned on its head with a different actor.
I've heard people say that the movies wouldn't have done as well if Stoltz hadn't been let go, but really... maybe they wouldn't have made quite so much money, since it's hard to overstate how massive Fox's Family Ties following was at the time, but would it really have been that *different*, that *bad* of a movie? It's not like Stoltz is a nobody - he's had a full, busy career all along, and is still going with Caprica and a new career as a director (he directed the 10/12 episode of Glee, the day all of this news really started to break... coincidence?). Arguments that the movie would have failed with him seem strange - maybe it would have been the break he needed to go from "reliable, journeyman actor with some amount of name recognition" to "high profile teen heart throb". Obviously, we'll never know, because it's impossible to judge the existing footage that will be shown on the Blu-rays as their own piece of work - they can only be seen in light of having seen it all with Fox many times over the course of 25 years, so naturally it will seem "so, so wrong", regardless of any questions of quality.
But I'm still hung up on this five weeks nonsense. Zemeckis, I don't know about - I don't love him as a director, even though I love many of his movies, so I can't speak to his eye for casting. But Spielberg as a producer... I wouldn't expect him to be the kind of guy who could let things go that long, to let a "failure" get to the point of being that expensive. I just don't see how you shoot almost half a movie with someone before realizing that you have to scrap everything you've shot (and seriously, there's maybe five minutes total in that movie that Marty isn't in a shot) and start over.