The Masked Man: A Memoir And Fantasy Of Hollywood

by Tom Wilson

  An endless barrage of small arms fire erupted from the semi-automatic pistols of the local cops. BANGBANGBANGBANG they unloaded their magazines into the head of this beast, until it was weakened but still wild, and the cops stared at each other, amazed at the thickness of a skull that deflects bullets, and a memory that won't allow it to calm down or talk things over.

  My point?

  The lumbering giant, good natured but tired of the grand and damaging circus? Me.

  "Hey! You were in that Back In The Future, huh? Whoo!! Hey, let me ask you…Are they gonna make another one of those things! Whoo!"

  "Excuse me," I say, backing away from the public urinal.

  "You were that dude in Back In The Future! Butt!"

  "Biff."

  "Yeah, Biff! Are you him?"

  "Yes, I am."

  "No, you're not."

  "Hey, what's Michael J. Fox like?"

  The elephant trumpets wildly in the hail of small arms fire, and trust me, this elephant won't go down.

  I didn't know it would be like this. They didn't tell me they were filming an iconic tornado, impossible to control and blowing gravel and candy wrappers across the big top as I run around bashing into tent poles and trying to protect the kids on my back. They didn't even tell me they were making a third one right after the second, the first time that any Hollywood production made consecutive sequels, and I was contractually obligated to be in it no matter how big the tornado was getting. They did tell me that they hated Crispin Glover, though. They hated him, and wrote scenes where they planned to hang him upside down for days at a time just for kicks. In their idea of the future, scientists figure out ways to take pressure off an injured spine by hanging difficult actors upside down for days on end. Turns out, in the future, George McFly has a bad back. Imagine that. Soon after that, Crispin decided not to do it.

  "What do they think they're doing?" Crispin shrieked to me over the phone during the savage negotiations between our agents and the studio. Since neither of us was in the car at the end of the first movie, the movie maker's position was that neither Crispin nor I helped the Back To The Future movies in any way, and when they open the car door in the future, neither of us even have to be there, and even Claudia Wells, the actress who played Marty's girlfriend didn't even have to be there, because she magically turned into the actress Elizabeth Shue, and what's more, the first movie didn't even make any money anyway.

  I'm not kidding.

  "What is their problem?!" Crispin moaned, loathing them with every breath, but unable to write a scene himself where he could hang them upside down on purpose.

  "Hey, Crispin," I said, calmly pretending to be a voice of reason, "Why don't we just do this thing, have some fun, do something interesting, and move on?!"

  "The movie made hundreds of millions of dollars!" Crispin cried, getting more agitated over the crackling phone line.

  "We can do some interesting things together in this movie," I said, not knowing that we actually didn't have a scene together in it, since they didn't let us read the script, in case they had to dump us overboard, only to hire the "Elizabeth Shue" versions of both of us.

  "They made millions!!" he screamed.

  "I know that, but Crispin, listen--"

  "(*! (&%#$$#^&@#$%&!!" He wailed into the receiver. I mean, there was some cussing in there, but it really sounded like he was saying the stuff I just typed.

  Then there was a period of silence for several moments.

  I assumed that our conversation meant that Crispin wasn't going to do the movies, but I decided to do them, without knowing that they were going to use a few shots of him from the first movie without his permission anyway, and that he would sue them and settle out of court for more money than I made, even though I had to act in the things for a year and a half.

  Nobody had a clue that the first Back To The Future movie would be successful at all, but once the sequels got going, everybody on the shoot knew that they were working on a classic piece of Hollywood history that would be seen by generations of movie fans, so as soon as they turned on the lights and cameras, people on the set started stealing stuff like crazy. Futuristic doo-dads vanished from prop trucks, hats and space trinkets disappeared between shots of important scenes, and things only got worse as the shoot dragged longer.

  "Please be ever so careful with this shirt, Tom," a costumer said to me.

  "Of course I will," I replied, "but didn't you have dozens of these custom made? I remember going to the shirt guy with the tape measure and the pins in his mouth, right?"

  "We have two left. Please be ever so careful. Unfortunately, the rest have been stolen."

  I met a lot of people while working on the Back To The Future sequels, but I don't remember making eye contact with any of them, since they were always staring at Michael J. Fox and trying to use me as bait to get his attention.

  "Tom! Tom!!" the person I'd never met would say excitedly, high stepping over electrical wires across the set toward me, while staring with unblinking eyes at Michael, seven feet in the opposite direction.

  "Hi," I said. Yeah, I just went with hi. I don't know them at all.

  "Man, Tom, I haven't seen you since the days of (insert an unknown location I've never visited here)!"

  "Great!" I said. Again, I went with just the "great."

  "So, come on, dude!" they said, coming closer to me and grabbing my shoulder, massaging and turning me so they can position themselves at an angle to keep pretending to know me while keeping enough distance in case Michael turns our way and I'm blocking their view, "How you doin'?"

  "Fine," I say, "I'm doing fine." They still haven't looked me in the eye.

  "Well, I'll tell you what, bro, we have to get together, because--"

  He stops mid-sentence because Michael J. Fox has turned and said something to someone near him that meets the criteria:

  a) easily overheard in the "next to Tom" position

  b) within the realm of possibility for working up a fake laugh and grabbing the moment.

  Michael J. Fox looks around for a Production Assistant and says "Jenna? This Diet Pepsi is kind of warm. Would you get me a cold one?"

  The person is four feet away from me in an instant, actually using their hand on my shoulder as a lever to catapult themselves into his line of sight. "Oh yeah! Warm Diet Pepsi!" they explode, "I've had that happen before! You know, like…anybody ever heard of refrigeration?" They've walked the rest of the way to him, dumping me and taking a shot at hanging on for dear life in Michael's line of vision, because maybe he'll get into the inner circle if Michael thinks "Jeez, this dork is a friend of Tom's. I can't blow him off right away."

  I've seen it work plenty of times, even spun into an extra bonus round of a few sentences with the director Bob Zemeckis. Then a huddle of personal assistants and security guys talking into their cufflinks make a ring around Bob and Michael so they can "talk about the scene," and the only thing that can get through the wall is a cold Diet Pepsi. The hanger-on then chuckles to nobody in particular and heads back to me, biding their time for a shot at round two.

  "Hey, great talking to you, Tom!" they say, staring at the Diet Pepsi swigging super-star.

  "Yeah."

  "We've got to get back in touch!"

  "Okay. Bye," I say, squinting away as the sun sets on the golden hills that border the studio lot.

  Hard to believe, but not one of them has called to get together. They're usually too busy telling other people who also hate them about that time they were on the set, hanging out with "Michael J!"

  Congratulations, Sparky, but guess what? "J" isn't even his real middle initial.

  Eric Stoltz was ancient history, fired during the first movie, Crispin Glover was dumped out a secret trap door under the stage, Michael Fox had become a superstar with famous friends dropping onto the set and security guys mumbling into walkie-talkies, and every time I left anything on a chair, it got ripped off within moments, so much like my experiences on the
first Back To The Future, during the second one I still felt it was me who was "what's wrong with this picture." Without a collection of houses, or knowledge of the menu at restaurants with lots of consonants and an umlaut in their names, I was left to go through six and seven hour makeup sessions to play old guys, and drive my Datsun home.

  There were many scenes in the sequel that had me acting opposite myself in the same scene, an eighty year old man speaking to a younger version of me, each played by me, in the same shot. The technical people had complicated ways to describe the process, but I called them "Patty Duke" shots, since they reminded me of the old Patty Duke T.V. show, where Patty Duke played both Patty, and her own immigrant cousin, Kathy, the major difference between them being Kathy's hair barrette and vague British dialect. The theme song spelled it out for us kids: "Kathy adores the minuet, the Ballet Russe, and crepe Suzette, but Patty loves to rock and roll, a hot dog makes her lose control, what a wild duet!" Though it was the same person, and nobody knew what the minuet or crepe Suzette was, Kathy was prettier so we liked her.

  The "Patty Duke" days on the set began in the middle of the previous night. I hopped into the makeup chair at Four A.M. for the glue and latex and wigs of eighty year old Biff, finally ready hours later when the other actors and crew showed up for breakfast. I memorized both parts of the scene, delivering only the old man's side of the scene in the morning, acting elderly bitterness while silently imagining myself saying the young guy's lines, leaving myself the proper amount of time to act opposite myself later in the day. Then everybody went to a catered lunch and I went into the makeup trailer for an hour long makeup removal session, pulling rubber from my reddened face, burned by caustic glue not even remotely designed to be used on human skin. Then they made me up as a young guy and I acted the other half of the scene, wearing a tiny wireless earpiece to listen to the lines that I'd delivered in the morning, as well as the voice of the director on a microphone, whispering at me "Move closer to the car, closer to the car! Now put your arm up. Right arm, now!" while I was acting as young Biff.

  After many days of this, the skin on my neck was blistering with third degree chemical burns, and the makeup artists were covering blisters with gauze, then painting glue on top of the gauze, and rubber pieces onto this wounded foundation.

  "Where is Tom?" the walkie-talkie endlessly crackled, putting the weight of the big budget Hollywood movie onto my neck blisters. Bob Zemeckis, the director whose director's chair on the set read "Robert Zemeckis, Guardian of the Imagination," rushed to the makeup trailer to roll some heads and get me out there.

  "I want him on the set now!" Bob fumed to Kenny Myers, one of the premier makeup artists in the industry.

  "Bob, we can only do it so fast!"

  "Do it faster!"

  "Bob, he's burned! There are third degree burns all over the place! We're just-- "

  "I don't care! You're gonna have to burn him!" Bob said.

  "What?"

  "I don't care! Burn him and get him out here!"

  Kenny climbed back into the trailer, grimacing. "We'd better get you out there," he said.

  "Oh, Kenny," I said, cradling my throbbing face in warm towels, "I think I'll take my time today."

  "You sure? He's pretty mad."

  "What's he going to do? Hang me upside down?"

  The last time I'd had a gunbelt around my waist it was made of plastic and the six shooter held a long strip of red caps with maroon bumps of gunpowder that popped weakly with a tiny puff of smoke every sixth click or so. I was six years old, watching Sally Starr on our black and white T.V., the cowgirl cartoon show host in Philadelphia who played Popeye cartoons in a spangly outfit to the kids of Philadelphia, New Jersey, and parts of Delaware if they had a good antenna.

  The gun they handed to me on the Back To The Future, Part Three set was heavy steel and resting in a black leather gunbelt studded with silver bullets and a sculpted cobra on the leather cradle that I called the "Pocket thing" before the real men on the set reminded me that it's called a holster. Sure, holster, I knew that, I just hadn't seen Sally Starr for a while, so I forgot. It was a man's gun and a real cowboy holster and belt, so I had to call on every bit of acting skill to fool the audience, the movie crew, the director and other actors into believing that I am a man, and a cowboy at that. I got a lot of help with that from an old veteran of westerns named Arvo Ojala, the slowest, fastest man in the world.

  Arvo Ojala had to be in his late seventies when I met him, shuffling his cowboy boots over the dusty roads cut through the western town the movie company carved into the Sierra foothills in Sonora, California, the location for Back To The Future, Part Three.

  Blue jeans hung limply on his slight frame and a western shirt with mother of pearl snaps for buttons completed the outfit. Boots, hat, gun, pearly snaps - it all said "I am a cowboy, partner." Arvo had been shot dead by every actor who'd ever worn a cowboy hat, working in western movies for decades and even got killed in the opening credits of "Gunsmoke", shot down in the middle of the street by Marshall Matt Dillon every week for over twenty years.

  "You remember the man who gets shot in the chest by Jim Arness in Gunsmoke?" he asked me, seconds after we met, with a voice reedy with age.

  "Um, I think I do," I said, almost holding his arm to keep him from blowing away.

  "That was me."

  "Oh!"

  Arvo was the slowest person I've ever been around, as far as walking and talking goes, and the fastest person that anyone has ever seen with a single action Colt Peacemaker. He was hired as a quick draw expert to teach me the ways of the heavy .45 caliber cannon, but when he got to the set he moved so slowly in every other way that it became my job to teach him the ways of "Hey, Arvo, you'd better get out of the way or that truck is going to run you over."

  Arvo shuffled in front of me toward a clearing in the trees to demonstrate how to load, draw, cock, and shoot a gun like a deadly outlaw in a lightning flash of thundering death. He had his own holster rig slung low around his hips, and helped me clasp my belt low enough that the gun rested right next to my twitching hand. "Now," he said, "This is kinda what we're looking for." His thin hands gestured around his waist, the skin on them splotched and thin as rice paper. He took a few tentative steps away from me, so ginger that I extended my hand again to steady him.

  "Fire in the hole!" he shouted, though I could barely hear him from three feet away.

  I turned to bellow toward the crew. "FIRE IN THE--"

  BLAMBLAMBLAM! ! ! An explosion rocked the entire set. The gun was out and spitting flames out the barrel before my brain could register any movement at all. The concussion echoed off the Sierra peaks behind us, and it got everybody's attention, as Arvo gently spun the gun, placing it carefully back in the holster as if nothing had happened.

  "Now look here," he said, completely in character for a man his age, pulling the gun out and holding it out to me with a bit of a shake in his arm as if it were too heavy for him.

  "I shot three times," he said, clicking open the spinning chambers and tilting it backwards as three smoking cartridges plinked onto the ground.

  "What do you mean?" I said, "It sounded like one bang."

  "Nope. Three," he said, showing me the gun again, "My right thumb cocks the hammer for the first shot, then I cock it with the back of my left thumb for the second shot, and use my pinky for the third."

  "That's amazing, Arvo," I said, staring in shock at the slowest, fastest man in the west, "Are you going to teach me that?"

  "Yup. Sure will," he said, "After all, you don't look so dumb."

  "That's the coolest thing I've ever seen."

  "You know, I was the guy who got killed by Marshall Matt Dillon in the opening credits of Gunsmoke."

  "Yes, you mentioned that."

  "Taught Kevin Costner to shoot for "Silverado," he mumbled, "It was a two gun rig. Much harder to work one of those."

  "I think I'll just work on the one," I said.

  "He's th
e fastest actor I've ever worked with."

  "Well, I'll try to be just as fast."

  "He worked a two gun rig. With that kind of gun rig, you're dealing with--"

  "Hey Arvo, look out for that truck."

  "Oh."

  It was the third big budget Hollywood blockbuster that I had a big part in, but I was still showing up to work with my lines memorized, ready to work at pretending to be mean to Marty and then go home, but Universal Studios is a big company that uses movies to promote their theme parks - tourist destinations that scream in every flashing light and fuzzy costumed teenager "See?! We're almost as good as Disneyland!!" The studio opened in 1950 and quickly figured out how to pack tourists onto rolling trams and charge them money to be pulled around abandoned movie sets. It was forty years after that when they built "Universal Studios, Florida," a hopeful poke in the eye to the Disney empire, that mouse eared dynasty that so dominates central Florida that humming "Zipadee do dah" might get you some sort of pro wrestling head butt from a native Floridian.

  Universal chartered their own jet for the trip from Los Angeles to Orlando, packing it with an amazing mob of celebrities, including those of low magnitude like me to promote Back To The Future. Jimmy Stewart and his wife Gloria topped the list, but Mr. and Mrs. Charlton Heston were onboard next to them, as well as Ernest and Tovah Borgnine, Anthony Perkins and Janet Leigh representing the "Psycho" contingency, and a planeload of other actors spanning the history of Universal Studios.

  "Hello!" I said to Ernest Borgnine.

  "Hey, fella! How are you doin'?" he replied, looking to his wife and shrugging. If the plane went down - and I thought it might, since we already had the cast of an entire seventies disaster movie onboard - I had no hope of a decent obituary, and my family would have to read the front pages of national newspapers; "Stewart, Heston, Borgnine, Perkins, Leigh die in plane crash. 57 others.