Pun Salad

Sneaking in one more small read before the end of the year…

Has it really been more than forty years since I first saw Back to the Future at one of the local theaters? Arithmetic doesn't lie, I guess. It's one of my all-time favorite movies. So even though I've cut way back on reading memoirs from show-biz stars, I picked this slim volume (Amazon counts 176 large-type wide-margin pages) from the Portsmouth (NH) Public Library. It is from Marty McFly himself, Michael J. Fox, co-authored by his longtime business associate, Nelle Fortenberry. It reads (understandably, given his advanced Parkinson's) as a as-told-to memoir.

This is Michael's fifth book, and some of those previous ones are memoirs too, but this one concentrates on the movie. He briefly discusses his early life up in Alberta, his decision to move down to California where he became first a bit-part actor, then a TV sitcom star (Family Ties), and then hitting it big when he replaced Eric Stoltz in BttF. (Eric just wasn't working out.) Many pages are spent detailing the hectic times he was working on Family Ties during the day, then going to the movie locations at night, scratching out naps in the limo in between gigs.

Michael is laudatory to practically everyone involved. (I think one of the more inviolate rules of show-biz memoirs is to not disrespect your co-workers.) Even Crispin Glover's notorious weirdness (a major reason he got dropped from the sequels) is treated kindly. (In contrast, Claudia Wells, who played Marty's girlfriend, and was replaced by Elizabeth Shue in the sequels, is barely mentioned at all.)

Michael provides a lot of anecdotes about the good old days, and—honestly-they were not all of gripping interest to me. He goes into a lot of detail on his (anti-?) climactic guitar performance at the end of the movie.

There are a number of f-bombs along the way. And they all seemed gratuitous to me.

There is not a lot of false modesty here. Michael knows what he brought to the production, and knows (accurately) that his input helped transform the movie into the megahit it became. Good for him.