When told that his co-star had been let go, the actor playing Doc Brown reportedly said: 'Who's Eric?' Stoltz had been referred to as 'Marty' throughout the production, and it transpired that Lloyd believed that was his real name. Christopher Lloyd didn't know Stoltz's name All the young actors wanted to be like De Niro and Pacino, which was good in a lot of ways.'ĥ. It was a time when we were emerging from the Seventies. As co-star Lea Thompson puts it in Gaines's book: 'Eric is such a different actor and he could be very difficult. Although Stoltz had learnt to play guitar and was a pretty good skateboarder, he just couldn't do physical comedy – the 'Daffy Duck humour', as Spielberg called it.

So filming began with Eric Stoltz, and the director quickly realised he was woefully miscast. Michael J Fox was Zemeckis's first choice to play Marty McFly, but Fox, then starring in the sitcom Family Ties, couldn't make room in his TV schedule. Steven Spielberg reportedly nixed this idea, worried that kids would copy Marty and become trapped inside the family refrigerator. In an early version of the script, the time-travel device was driven towards an atomic blast while strapped to a fridge, with Marty McFly climbing inside to escape the blast. But Back to the Future almost did it first. The movie equivalent of TV's jumping the shark, the phrase was coined after Indiana Jones shielded himself from a nuclear bomb by hiding in a fridge, and has now become shorthand for a ridiculous, logic-defying plot device.

Imdb back to the future 3