A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Future

by Michael J. Fox

  WHAT I APPRECIATE MOST ABOUT THE LAWS OF PHYSICS is their indifference to my feelings about them. Compliance is not optional. Their absolutism is much more tangible than strict mathematics, where proof requires countless squiggles on a blackboard. A lesson in physics can be as simple as standing under a falling brick…or pissing in the wind…or attempting to stuff ten pounds of shit into a five-pound bag.

  There were plenty of times, when I was young, that I would unwittingly test the limits of these governing laws of universal behavior. And there were other times when I would confirm their authority without even being aware that I was doing so. Take, for example, my days as an undersized youth hockey player; game after game, I’d throw my sixty-pound frame in the path of much bigger players, only to dissolve into a pile of goo on the ice surface. Eventually, I discovered that setting myself correctly in the path of an onrushing opponent and angling my shoulder at the precise midpoint of his jersey would flip that bad boy right onto his ass. I didn’t understand that I was harnessing the power of physics. I had no concept of fulcrums, weight transference, centers of gravity, or actions having equal and opposite reactions. I broke it down this way: The bigger they are, the harder they fall.

  In time, my appreciation for physics became more nuanced. “The only reason for time is so that everything doesn’t happen at once.” As a teenager, I didn’t know to attribute the above quote to everyone’s favorite long-haired genius, Albert Einstein. I picked it up from someone else and passed it off as my own, usually as a lame explanation for my tardiness for school, or dinner, or whatever. I thought it was funny. My father, an army lifer who kept a precise, military clock, wasn’t as amused (although he might have been impressed if either of us knew I was quoting Einstein). Einstein, of course, had a lot to say about the laws of physics as they concern all matters temporal, theorizing at one point that “…the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.” This may be the only context in which Albert and I might be mentioned in the same sentence: time travel. Like it says on the movie poster: “He was never in time for his classes…He wasn’t in time for dinner…Then one day…he wasn’t in his time at all.”

  For many people, Marty McFly embodies a possibility about which the world’s greatest physicists have only hinted. I am constantly bombarded with questions regarding the space-time continuum, string theory, and flux capacitors. Believe me, I am not being coy when I respond with complete and utter ignorance: It was a movie, folks. And, by the way, there’s no such thing as a hoverboard either (more about that later). I will say this, though. Back to the Future did provide me with an opportunity to, if not defy the limits set forth by the laws of physics, then to stretch them well beyond what I would ever have thought possible. There were many times during our whirlwind shooting schedule when the lines of reality began to blur, and I could have sworn I was actually in two places at once.

  I took on the role of Marty McFly in January of 1985. Director Bob Zemeckis and his crew had already been shooting with another actor for five weeks when they decided a change was necessary. Steven Spielberg, the film’s executive producer, approached his good friend, Family Ties creator Gary David Goldberg, and inquired about my availability to take over the role. This wasn’t the first time Steven had considered me to play Marty. Before production on Back to the Future even began, he had approached Gary about my availability. But with a whole season of shooting ahead, Gary reluctantly concluded that it would be impossible to release me. I knew nothing of the request.

  Now, months later, with only half a season of Ties remaining, my TV boss allowed that it might be possible and called me into his office to tell me about the offer. I jumped at the opportunity. Although Gary was happy for me, he did offer this gentle warning: “You realize you’re not going to miss an hour of work on the show. You’ll be here every day and in every scene as usual. The movie you can shoot at nights and on weekends, or whenever you’re not here. It’s up to you.”

  Young, ambitious, and convinced of my own invincibility, I laughed in the face of eighteen-and twenty-hour work days, undaunted at the prospect of shuttling from Paramount Studios to Universal Studios to location, and back to Paramount again.

  Cut to three weeks in, and I had been reduced to a state of functioning dementia. As promised, I would go in and rehearse Family Ties all day, be picked up by a teamster with a bag of fast food (or maybe just a milkshake) to be consumed during the twenty-minute drive through Cahuenga Pass to the film studio, where I’d work until 2:00 or 3:00 A.M., at which point the same teamster would drive me to my apartment and, sometimes literally, carry me into bed. Four or five hours later that same morning, a different driver (the union protected them from submitting to the same schedule I was on) would come into my apartment, turn on the shower, arouse me from my coma, and deliver me back to the TV show.

  Studies have shown that intense sleep deprivation can have disastrous effects on the body, trigger hallucinations, and in extreme cases, cause temporary insanity. I experienced confusion as to what set I was on at any given time, which characters I was interacting with, what wardrobe I was wearing, and basically who I was in the first place. More than once, I referred to Steven Keaton as Doc Brown and panicked before entering the kitchen set on show night when I realized I wasn’t wearing my orange, down-filled vest. The filming schedule redefined for me what is possible and impossible. Luckily, for roughly two hours or so, Back to the Future did the same thing for moviegoers.

  No matter how fantastic a movie’s premise is, there are always a special few who buy in and accept the craziest shit at face value, like the hoverboard. I’ve fielded more questions about hoverboards than any other aspect of the trilogy. Otherwise sane people were convinced that these devices actually existed, especially after Bob Zemeckis made tongue-in-cheek comments to the press about parent groups preventing toy manufacturers from putting them on the market (this resulted in hundreds of kids calling Mattel, demanding hoverboards for Christmas). Believe me, if someone had actually devised and manufactured a flying skateboard capable of propelling a surfer on an invisible wave of air, he didn’t let me in on the secret. It could have spared me from hours of dangling like a flesh-and-blood Pinocchio. Alternately strapped into every manner of harness, hinged leg brace, and flying apparatus the most sadistic special-effects engineers could devise, my foot stapled to that pink piece of plastic, I spent hours attached to metal cables, swinging from sixty-foot cranes, back and forth across the Courthouse Square set.

  During the filming of this sequence, Tracy was pregnant with our son, Sam. I carried a beeper at all times (this was pre-cell phone), for the sole purpose of alerting me in the event of incipient labor (or in the lexicon of physics, the fetus reaching critical mass). Thank God it never beeped when I was “hoverboarding” because there wouldn’t have been a damn thing I could have done about it.

  When describing me, Tracy often refers to a well-known concept of physics: “inertia.” As Newton avers in his first law: An object that is not moving will not move until a force acts upon it. An object that is moving will not change its velocity until a net force acts upon it. In other words, depending on what’s happening in my life at any given moment, I can either be the laziest human being on the planet, or the busiest. I’m perfectly content to do absolutely nothing until I’m catalyzed by some person or project, and then I go nonstop until some countervailing force acts upon me, and I revert back to static mode.

  Now that I think of it, Newton could just as easily have had Parkinson’s disease in mind. It has me in constant motion until such time as we can (and will) discover a force to arrest its velocity. In a metaphysical sense, though, I’ve often made the argument that PD itself was the force that arrested the sometimes aimless expenditure of kinetic energy I engaged in as a younger man. My formula: I couldn’t be still until I could no longer be still.

  Even a high school dropout is smart enough to know that he can’t break Newton’s first law. But m
aybe I found a way to tweak it a bit.

  Political Science

  Political Science deals with the various political, social, and cultural arrangements through which people govern their lives.

  MY INTEREST IN POLITICS DATES BACK TO JUNIOR HIGH, when I was a volunteer vote-counter for the Liberal Party of British Columbia (turned out I didn’t have to count that high). Whether through osmosis, intellectual curiosity, or a sense of civic responsibility, my son, Sam, now in college, has developed his own fascination with the political process. Like many people his age, Sam was energized by the last presidential election and got involved in the campaign. So it made sense for the two of us to be exactly where we were on the morning of January 20, 2009: freezing our asses off on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., while Barack Hussein Obama took the oath of office as the forty-fourth president of the United States. Broader politics aside, the occasion had particular importance for me, as the incoming president had promised to overturn Bush-era restrictions on stem cell research, against which I had campaigned so vigorously during the ’06 midterm election.

  According to polling, most Americans favor federally funded stem cell research, so from a political perspective, why did we have to fight so hard for it to go forward? The answer is both basic and complex. George Bush’s policy itself wasn’t on the ballot; the voter had to discern for him-or herself how a given candidate felt about the research restrictions and whether or not they would vote to overturn them. As citizens, we all have beliefs, ethical concerns, fears, wants, and needs, in an order of importance known only to us. So the candidate and his pollsters endeavor to calculate which issues, as part of the larger matrix, we are willing to abandon or put aside. If you’re liberal to moderate, you probably favor stem cell research, and on your list of the ten issues most important to you, put it at eight. If you’re conservative and anti–stem cell research, you may have it in your top three. In the spirit of divide and conquer, a canny, uncommitted pol, with no strong personal commitment to one side or the other, realizes that the issue is more of a hot button for the conservative side, and pushes it to win the right.

  I wanted to remind people that we were not dealing in the abstract. This issue affects them as well as one hundred million other Americans, for whom it rises to the level of life or death. One thing I absolutely was not saying is that those on the other side of the issue have any less compassion, empathy, or concern for the sick and suffering. Many who oppose embryonic stem cell research feel just as strongly that theirs is a truly compassionate position.

  Politicians, however, by exploiting medical research as a “wedge issue,” held the future hostage. So it was heartening to engage so many Americans in a conversation and empower them to make an informed decision, one way or the other. As it turned out, fifteen out of seventeen of the pro–stem cell candidates that I campaigned for in 2006 won their races. And just maybe, Obama’s position on this research was at least a small factor in his 2008 presidential win.

  TV talking heads proclaim every election cycle that pollster data predict apathy among college-age voters. Young voters have heard over and over again that the “youth vote” will not turn out. As with wedge issues, this is yet another method employed to discourage participation in the political process by those who may disrupt the status quo—convincing them that their vote is meaningless.

  It wasn’t until late in the 2008 contest that pundits realized polling firms calling landlines weren’t reaching young people—who for the most part used only cell phones.

  It all comes down to the individual: to you. What do you want? Those who would try to convince you that your vote won’t make a difference are right only if you don’t exercise it. Don’t just weigh in on the big stuff—presidential, congressional, and gubernatorial elections. Show up at the local level too: mayor, city council, dog catcher. Democracy is a big muscle. Flex it and put it to work.

  I’ve lived in the States for thirty years now, but it was only a decade ago that I became a U.S. citizen. As a father, I needed to have a say in shaping the country my children were born in. By giving each of us a vote, our country holds out the opportunity, as well as the responsibility, to create the future we deserve.

  Geography

  Courses include human geography, physical geography, earth systems science, environmental studies, and geology. Students develop an awareness of earth phenomena and the role these play in people’s lives.

  “WHEREVER YOU GO, THERE YOU ARE.”

  My father used to say that all the time, and I easily dismissed it as Dadspeak, something I was meant to nod at in apparent agreement, so as not to provoke him to expound upon it further. Years later, it made a great deal of sense to me. However, I have now added a slight variation to that aphorism: “Wherever you go, there it is.” The succinct summation of both of these thoughts is that wherever you travel, you have to adapt to your new surroundings. They won’t adapt to you.

  Back in 1987, shooting the Vietnam drama Casualties of War with Sean Penn and director Brian DePalma, I had the privilege of witnessing how a particular part of the planet—in this case the Southeast Asian island of Phuket, Thailand—resisted the attempts of a big budget Hollywood crew to transform it into anything other than what nature, climate, geology, botany, and biology intended it to be. In fact, all the crew was trying to do was make the place into another version of itself. Let me explain.

  We had a series of nighttime jungle-combat scenes to film. Understandably, the difficulty of running camera-dolly tracks through the rain forest, along with a plethora of other practical issues, made it impossible for our crew to work in the actual jungle. So, Brian and his technicians went to plan B. The idea was to approximate a jungle in a large barren area that once was wooded, but had long since been dedicated to some kind of gravel mining—a quarry of sorts. They picked a parcel of land on the edge of a series of cliffs. Into these cliffs they had dug a network of tunnels, or half tunnels, exposed to Brian’s cameras. The bonus was that Brian could get frighteningly atmospheric shots of Viet Cong crawling, weapons ready, through the tunnels beneath the jungle floor, then pan up slowly to find American GIs patrolling unawares. To create this illusion, set decorators brought in hundreds of potted trees and plants and dug a small pond, all covering approximately an acre or so. Shortly after the new greenscape was in place, Brian and cast were able to rehearse scenes to be shot a few weeks later.

  What happened next provided a lesson in “wherever you go, there it is.” The surrounding flora and fauna quickly responded to our changes to the environment by reclaiming it. They subsumed it, overtook it. As if it were nothing more than a giant petri dish, the seasonal rains and sweltering humidity acted upon the “set,” fomenting a riot of uncontained growth. Birds filled the canopy. Snakes moved in after them. Plants that only a few weeks before had been mere vestigial shoots poking their way through the forest floor now grew tendrils several meters long, which crept atop the soil to assert death grips around newly transplanted palm trees, entangling the feet of clumsy actors who had rehearsed in the exact same place only a few days before. Night scenes necessitated large, carbon-powered arc lamps and other Hollywood lighting equipment. This attracted swarms of insects, whose size, shape, and violent dispositions were so unearthly that only the most dedicated entomologist would have dared to capture them for identification.

  At one point, I remember struggling to absorb a piece of acting direction from Brian, a large and imposing man of concentrated seriousness. He seemed bothered by my distraction as he laid out his interpretation of my character’s present dilemma. “I’m sorry, Brian,” I apologized. “I’m paying attention. It’s just that there’s a Volkswagen crawling up your arm.” At that, the unflappable DePalma flapped, waving his arms to shake loose the scarab-like creature. I’m still half-surprised that it didn’t carry him away. The new sets served the filmmaker’s purposes, and I’m sure conditions were far better than they would have been in a pre-existing jungle, but the rapidity and
enthusiasm with which the surrounding ecosystem replicated itself on this formerly barren patch of Thailand was a humbling reminder of the power of nature and the purity of place. Wherever you go, there it is.

  Just as you can’t change the essential nature of a place, don’t count on the place to change the essential nature of you. It may be tempting, at some point in life, to seek a fresh start or even establish a new identity by uprooting from one location and transplanting physically to another. This is what pop psychologists and people in recovery refer to as “doing a geographic.”

  But for young people, who are defined by a sense of rootlessness, new places and new experiences can be savored for their own sake. In my early twenties, my hope was not that travel be transformative, but simply that it be fun. The first time I ventured to Mexico, for example, did not involve the exploration of Mayan ruins or the study of the people and their culture. My most striking memory was falling shirtless over a cliff in Cabo. As I tumbled through the cactus and over the rocky outcroppings, I struggled for control. I wasn’t worried about being injured. I was worried about spilling my beer. I landed with a thud at the bottom of a small arroyo. Exhilarated that I still had a full bottle of Tecate, I was at first unaware of the six-inch slash on my right shoulder. Typical ignorant gringo that I was, I wanted no part of the local hospital, trusting instead the advice of the crew on our chartered fishing boat the next day, who advised me to douse the wound in tequila and let it cauterize in the Mexican sun. See, I might not have gone to college, but I didn’t miss Spring Break. That’s not travel, though, that’s an incursion.

  From childhood road trips across Canada in the family Pontiac to my most recent adventures in Bhutan, high in the Himalayas (more about this later), travel has always been a big part of my life. Even when my trips are predicated on business and not pleasure, on location shoots like that one in Thailand, or publicity junkets in Europe and Asia to promote new movies and television projects, I always take the time to appreciate where I am for what it is. I seek out the excitement of the strange and not the comfort of the familiar. I’m not trying to lose myself, or even find myself, for that matter. My goal is just to enjoy myself, learn something, and gain an appreciation for the amazing complexity of this planet and the people who live on it.