He was thrown to the wolves.
Michael J. Fox felt “like a whore” on the set of “Teen Wolf,” the movie he shot right before “Back to the Future” but was released one month after the Robert Zemeckis-directed time-travel hit.
“It was already obvious to me that ‘Teen Wolf,’ filmed a few months prior, was not my magnum opus,” Fox, 64, joked in his newly released memoir, “Future Boy,” per Entertainment Weekly.
Unlike “Back to the Future,” the “Family Ties” alum was forced to participate in blatant product placement for the 1985 werewolf comedy.
“One day on the set of that film, the prop guy made me take a few photos holding a chocolate bar so they could show the confectioner who supplied the candy that we had actually used their product in the movie,” Fox explained.
“Covered in yak hair, I told him that I felt like a whore doing this,” he added. “The prop guy said, ‘Well, you are a whore.’”
Despite getting eclipsed by the release of “Back to the Future” weeks earlier, “Teen Wolf” still went on to debut at No. 2 its opening weekend.
Directed by Rod Daniel and starring Fox (Scott Howard), James Hampton (Harold Howard) and Susan Ursitti (Lisa Marconi), it reportedly grossed $80 million against a modest $4 million budget.
However, the success of “Teen Wolf” still paled in comparison to that of “Back to the Future,” which had a budget of $19 million and was produced by industry legend Steven Spielberg.
As for why Fox decided to sign on to “Teen Wolf,” he explained in “Future Boy” that it fit into his hectic “Family Ties” schedule.
Fox wrote that his agent “seized the moment and sent me the script for a quick, low-budget movie called ‘Teen Wolf’” and that “they were ready to start filming, and the five-week shoot could easily slide into the production hiatus at ‘Family Ties.’”
The film also marked Fox’s first lead role, even though, as he wrote in his memoir, it was “a hackneyed one that required me to wear twenty-five pounds of yak hair.”
“The wolf thing had worked for Michael Landon in ‘I Was a Teenage Werewolf,’” Fox, who was later diagnosed with early-onset Parkinson’s disease in 1991, added.
Elsewhere in “Future Boy,” which was released on Tuesday, the “Spin City” alum discussed replacing Eric Stoltz as Marty McFly in “Back to the Future” six weeks into the movie’s production.
While Fox was Zemeckis and Spielberg’s original choice for the lead role, he was forced to turn it down due to his already grueling “Family Ties” schedule, which he was still starring in as Alex P. Keaton.
Fox was ultimately called back, however, because Zemeckis and Spielberg weren’t thrilled with the way Stoltz was portraying Marty McFly.
“They had already shot for over a month,” he explained. “Unfortunately, the dailies were disappointing. Eric was an immensely talented actor, but the creative team felt that he just wasn’t the right fit for Marty McFly.”
More than 40 years later, Fox penned Stoltz, 64, a letter to discuss the “Back to the Future” swap for his memoir.
He noted in the letter that “If your answer is ‘piss off and leave me alone’…that works, too,” and Fox revealed that he received a humorous answer from the “Pulp Fiction” actor.
“[Stoltz’s] beautifully written reply began, ‘Piss off and leave me alone!’” Fox recalled. “Thankfully, this was followed by ‘I jest…’”
“Eric was thoughtful about my outreach,” the “Teen Wolf” star added, “and although he respectfully declined to participate in the book, he seemed open to the idea of getting together.”
The pair have since struck up a “friendly correspondence,” which Fox described as a “reminder that some of the best parts of our future can come from the past.”
