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Cognoscente's Replies
I agree. Too many writers and fanboys like to put emphasis on Eric's method acting being the problem, but the movie was nearly finished before he was fired. If he was such a nightmare to deal with, he would have been let go much earlier on.
Funny thing is...Eric and Tom got their method gimmick from Sean Penn. Bronson Pinchot had this to say about Tom going all method during the making of Risky Business: "He had spent some formative time with Sean Penn. Tom had picked up this knack of calling everyone by their character names, because that would probably make your performance better, and I don’t agree with that. I think that acting is acting, and the rest of the time, you should be you, but he called us all by our character names."
He was funny as the mime in Cameron Crowe's Singles, and he was touching in The Waterdance.
I wouldn't say his firing was an entirely unanimous decision on his part. In 1994, he told the L.A. Times: “Zemeckis told me I was giving a good performance in a film he didn’t want to make – contemplative and thoughtful instead of comedic. I felt I could have done the part had he pointed me in that direction.”
A Robert Zemeckis quote that can be found in Robert J. Emery's The Directors: Take Two and Tom Shone's Blockbuster: “It was the hardest meeting I’ve ever had in my life and it was all my fault. I broke his heart.”
Karen I. Stern recalled conversing with the deceased continuity supervisor, Nancy Hansen, during the editing of Parent Trap: Hawaiian Honeymoon in 1989: “After his fateful meeting with Zemeckis towards the end of the seventh week, Eric slammed his dressing room door then quickly drove away.”
James Tolkan (who played Strickland) even quoted him as saying: “Well, they can't fire me now!”
According to Bob Gale in a 1994 book called The Cutting Room Floor, Kathleen Kennedy was the person who approached the Family Ties producer about the possibility of MJF starring in BTTF. Gary Goldberg was one of Kathleen's college friends.
Speaking of Mask, it always gets cited as the reason why he was cast in BTTF, but it's hard to imagine the producers not taking The Wild Life into consideration. In that movie, he played the role of the straight man. Also, Lea Thompson was cast in BTTF because of The Wild Life.
He was surprisingly zany in Cameron Crowe's Say Anything. It's too bad that most casting directors couldn't overlook the stigma of Eric being fired from BTTF for being too serious.
Joel Silver, a friend of Robert Zemeckis, had confirmed this in an interview for the December '93 issue of Empire. When Joel justified firing Lori Petty from Demolition Man, he said: "It’s a lot cheaper than shooting the whole movie like they did in Back to the Future. Eric Stoltz was the lead but, the last week, they realized it was terrible and reshot the whole movie with Michael J. Fox."
Crispin Glover said last year for Anthem magazine: "We had gotten close to being done when they replaced the lead actor. I was almost done and just had a little bit more to shoot."
I'm surprised that it took Thomas F. Wilson's interview with Chris Hardwick to be the floodgate for a whole new level of gossip, because there is an issue of Starlog (August '85) where the writer said: "The movie starring Eric Stoltz was nearly complete."
Mark Hamill didn't have clout before Star Wars.
Tom Cruise didn't have marquee value before Risky Business.
Ralph Macchio wasn't a household name before The Karate Kid.
My point is...Back to the Future is better than all those movies, so Stoltz had that in his favor.