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Eric Stoltz's Marty McFly Gets Dissected in Back to the Future Reissue

️@wired
️Tue Oct 12 2010

For five weeks in the early ’80s, actor Eric Stoltz played skateboarding teenager Marty McFly in Back to the Future before being famously replaced by Michael J. Fox. Previously unseen footage from the Back to the Future: 25th Anniversary Trilogy shows the Caprica actor who was bounced from the ’80s sci-fi movie.

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Director Robert Zemeckis and producer Steve Spielberg discuss Stoltz’s aborted attempt at sci-fi comedy in the video clip above, a bonus feature included on the Back to the Future: 25th Anniversary Trilogy, which teleports to the present day on Blu-ray and DVD come Oct. 26.

Stoltz, who now plays Cylon creator Daniel Graystone in Battlestar Galactica prequel Caprica, briefly appears in the previously unseen Back to the Future footage above as McFly. Stoltz was “a magnificent actor, but his comedy sensibilities were very different,” Zemeckis explains. “And he and I were never able to make that work.”

“[Zemeckis] said, ‘I don’t think we’re getting the laughs that I was hoping we would get,'” says Spielberg. “And I realized he was absolutely correct.”

It was a “horrific decision” to have to make, says Zemeckis, but the pressure was on. Ironically enough, Back to the Future was given a mandate to wrap by a particular date. Zemeckis convinced the studio to let him go back and reshoot five weeks of footage with Fox, and the rest is sci-fi film history.