A word about rejection. Auditions, most struggling actors will tell you, suck. You get a few pages of a script and read it over and over in hopes of picking up some clue to the character, some insight that will give you an edge in translating written words into a living, breathing, engaging, and profound approximation of human behavior. If you can do this better than any of the other actors in competition for the role, you get to eat; if you can't, you don't. At least, you delude yourself into thinking it's that simple. It's not.
You also have to be careful that you're not too skinny, fat, tall, short, blond, redheaded, dark, light, loud, quiet, young, or old, and that there isn't something about you that reminds the director of his or her girlfriend, boyfriend, father, mother, priest, therapist, or despised stepchild. You want to be familiar enough with the material to look up from the page every now and then, but for God's sake don't memorize it; you'll appear arrogant, like you already have the job. Above all else, no matter how badly you need work, no matter how hungry you are, how exhausted you've become from playing duck-the-landlord, never, ever show desperation. For me, that first rule of auditioning was getting harder and harder to pull off.
Back when I was the new kid in town, I didn't have to carry the burden of expectation with me into an interview. That is, the producer/director/casting director had no idea what to expect of me, no preconceived notion of who I was. So, I could do a halfway decent job with the material, dazzle them with a little small talk on either side of the reading, and be considered a fresh casting choice—new and different.
But by now I'd been on the scene for three years. I was a known quantity in every casting office in town, and I was all out of small talk. I began to long for the benign indifference of Robert Redford flossing his molars. That was like a standing ovation compared to some of the experiences I'd been having lately. Some were so humiliating they were almost comical, like the ad executive who screamed at me during a commercial audition. It seems I had not folded the stick of Wrigley's into my mouth as diagrammed on the instruction sheet posted in the waiting room, but instead had the audacity to jam it in sideways in a single indelicate motion. And I called myself an actor. Next!
The rejection can be so matter-of-fact, so impersonal, that there's a danger you'll get numbed by it. I still felt the pain, but it had less to do with what these strangers thought of me than what I was perilously close to thinking about myself. For so long, my actions had been instinctive, in confident defiance of the world around me. Without that faith in myself, I'd truly be lost. But until then, there was still a chance. Of course, more than anything, what I needed now, badly, was someone in a position to help me, who also shared in that faith.
Luckily, I was about to find that person, although—as he would recount to me many times later—it wasn't exactly faith-at-first-sight.
Paramount Studios, Hollywood—1982
“You gotta stop hocking me about this kid,” writer/producer Gary David Goldberg pleaded with Judith Wiener, the casting director of his new sitcom pilot. “He's just not our guy.” Gary was convinced that in the month since Matthew Broderick, his first choice for the teenage-son role, declined, not one of the hundreds of young actors to audition was an acceptable alternative. Judith insisted Gary was making a big mistake by refusing to take another look at the very first actor she'd brought in to read. “Gary, you're forgetting how good he was. What's the harm of bringing him in for a callback?”
Goldberg bristled at having his instincts called into question. And why shouldn't he? They had served him well. A Brooklyn kid, high school all-city basketball star turned Berkeley dropout, Gary and his future wife, Diana, spent the late 1960s and early 1970s as counterculture nomads. With their black lab Ubu, they wandered the world, for a time living in a cave in Greece before a newborn daughter forced them to settle down and try adulthood. In his San Diego apartment watching a Bob Newhart rerun one day while Diana job hunted, Gary had a gut feeling he could write a Newhart script. So he did. He sent it off to the producers and in no time, the bearded former Berkeley radical was a rising star among MTM's stable of comedy writers.
Now, just a few short years since relying on food stamps to feed his family, Gary Goldberg was producing his own TV show. Grant Tinker, his old MTM boss and now the head of NBC, had a hunch that Gary and Diana's experience as ex-hippies raising a family made a great premise for a series. The young writer poured his heart into the pilot script, and he wasn't going to screw it up with bad casting. Judith was really driving him nuts though, so he agreed to see her candidate one more time, but not without a final protest. “It's a waste of time, Judith. There's no way I'm going to change my mind on this. I'm a grown man. I know what I want and I know what I don't want. And I'm telling you, I don't want Michael Fox playing Alex Keaton.”
The Slums of Brentwood—1982
If my first journey into the “forest” back in the spring of 1979 was like a Grimm brothers’ fairy tale, by the spring of 1982, when I auditioned for Gary Goldberg, the scenario was just plain grim—no happily-ever-after in sight.
Now and then, I'd receive a residual check for an old commercial or TV episode—usually small amounts that passed first through the hands of my agent and managers, taxes paid up front, so the figure I actually netted would be pitifully small. Diane, while still nominally my girlfriend, had returned to Vancouver, this time staying there to find a full-time job. She liked California, but why live the life of the starving artist if she didn't have to? Whether or not I was an artist at all was debatable, as I had no opportunity to develop my craft and no offers to do so. The starving part fit, though. My diet had been reduced to cans and boxes with declarative, generic labels—like TUNA or MACARONI.
What few possessions I owned, like my furniture, I began to liquidate. Over a period of months, I sold off my sectional sofa section by section. The buyer was another young actor living in my building. Adding insult to indigence was the incremental nature of the transaction, emphasizing, as it did, the inverse trajectories of our respective careers.
My parents, and even Coady, God bless him, would send a few dollars when they had it to spare. Lately, however, my friends and family in Canada were urging me to quit and come home. Along with the last check my father sent to me, he included a particularly eloquent letter, which I no longer have, but the gist of it was this: In the three years since we'd first traveled together to Los Angeles, he was proud of what I'd accomplished and I had every reason to be, too. Given my present situation, though, he suggested that it might be wise to pull the curtain, at least for now. There would be no shame in returning to Canada and rethinking my options.
Options? These were my options as I saw them: My brother would no doubt be good enough to hire me as a laborer on one of the construction sites he supervised. Given my size and experience, that would amount to picking up nails until a clerking job opened up. Coady could find work for me at the railroad, probably on the night shift patrolling the yards with a flashlight, chasing bums out of boxcars. Or maybe I'd make a less-than-triumphant return to the cold storage plant where my mother worked. Then there was my debt to the IRS to consider. If I ran out on that, it'd be good-bye to the United States forever.
My folks had one thing figured correctly: whether it would be an ignominious slouch homeward or a miraculous reversal of fortune, something had to give, and soon. I was down to days.
Paramount Studios, Hollywood—1982
Judith Wiener met me in the reception area. It was empty, the door to the inner office closed. The callback had surprised me. It had been, what—a month since I first read for Family Ties? I tried to affect an air of confidence, though I'm sure I reeked of desperation. Judith prepped me. “You'll be meeting the same people: three of the writers and Gary Goldberg, the creator/producer. Everybody thought your first audition was great.” This was a fudge. It was true, I'd find out, that the other writers had been as vocal as Judith in their support for my casting, but Gary remained skeptical.
“
One suggestion . . . Do what you can to make the character a little more lovable.”
Lovable? The guy was a know-it-all, tie-wearing, Nixon-worshipping teenager who valued money above all else. You'd think they would have addressed the whole “lovable” thing in the writing.
“You got it,” I promised. I had to land this job. Whatever happened in the next ten minutes was going to decide my fate one way or the other.
Judith showed me in. Gary recited a rambling monologue about what made Alex tick. I nodded. And then I read. Right away I could feel I was in the zone. The laughter was huge, and it wasn't just “writers laughing at their own jokes” laughter, they were laughing at what I was bringing to it.
Gary offered a few brief notes and I went through it again. Now I was feeling, if not cockiness, then something akin to joy. I even ad-libbed a little—sometimes a risky play, but I was scoring with every single line. After I finished, the laughter rolled on, but it had a different quality now; something I'd later understand to be relief. Gary David Goldberg, a dark, bearded, thick-set bear of a man, leaned back in his leather chair and tried in vain to cover his delight with a mask of mock outrage.
“Judith,” he bellowed, “why didn't anybody tell me about this kid?”
ROLE REVERSAL
NBC Studios, Burbank, California—March 1982
The casting of Family Ties, as with any TV pilot episode, would never be a done deal until the prospective cast members—the producers’ final choices—had “gone to the network.” The Keaton family, as selected by Gary Goldberg, consisted of Michael Gross and Meredith Baxter Birney as the hippie parents, and myself, Justine Bateman, and Tina Yothers as the yuppie-era kids. This roster could not be officially locked in, however, until the NBC brass—specifically Brandon Tartikoff, the new wunderkind head of programming—gave the official seal of approval. Given Gary's desire to cast me in the role—he now had the unmistakable zeal of a convert—I naïvely viewed this last round of auditions as a formality. I was not only positive that I would be cast, but was even looking past the fact that this was only a pilot, its future as an actual series not yet assured. No, this was my ticket out of impoverished oblivion, that foothold I'd always managed to find that would lead me to higher ground.
It's a SAG requirement that, even before a performer “goes to network” on a series, a contract be negotiated and in place, effective immediately upon network casting approval. So, as I saw it, I already had a six-year deal.
Bob Gersh, B & S, and I had hammered out the details that morning on a conference call. What made the scene particularly memorable was where I stood, quite literally, during this conversation. Pacific Bell had long since cut off service to my apartment, and as I spelled out my contract demands—modest by today's standards, but inconceivably lucrative given my financial straits—I was standing at a pay phone outside of a Pioneer Chicken franchise. While my agent was talking about a seven-figure salary should the series go six years, I stared at the menu through the restaurant's window, wishing I had $1.99 to buy the buffalo wing–mashed potato combo.
There was plenty of laughter during my audition before the Armani-suited NBC executives in Burbank, although I couldn't help noticing that Gary's was the loudest—certainly much more enthusiastic than Brandon Tartikoff's. Brandon asked me to fill him in on my prior television experience, and I figured I should list my appearances on NBC programs—an unbelievably dumb idea. At that time, NBC was in a hopeless ratings slump, and my litany of the network's bombs did nothing to endear me to Brandon; it only made him wince. Thankfully, Gary came to my rescue, generating a gigantic laugh with his shout from the back of the room—“Get to the hits, Fox, get to the hits.”
As I left the NBC offices, I had an inkling of the power struggle under way, but only later would I understand the big picture. I was back in the same limbo I'd been in for the last month, only now Gary had taken over Judith's role as president of the Michael J. Fox Fan Club, and Brandon was the adamant skeptic. He was absolutely against giving me the role of Alex Keaton.
“We weren't bothered by (Fox's) comedy skills,” he wrote later in his book, The Last Great Ride, “but by his height. How could someone that short have Michael Gross and Meredith Baxter Birney as his parents?”
He laid out his case to Gary: “It always annoyed me as a kid watching Father Knows Best that Bud Anderson was so much shorter than his parents. To me, that undercut the credibility of the whole show. Let's not make that same mistake here.”
Unbeknownst to me, the argument raged on, right up to the day we began rehearsal for the Family Ties pilot. Gary Goldberg stood his ground. “Goldberg is not a person who changes his mind easily,” Brandon wrote, “so I relented. ‘Go ahead if you insist.’”
Throughout the eight days of rehearsal, I experienced a dizzying mix of feelings; day by day I developed a strong affinity for the character and the material, discovering and flexing comedic muscles I never knew I had. At the same time, with victory in my grasp, I felt terror at the thought it might slip away. Although oblivious of Gary and Brandon's tug-of-war, I understood that until the moment we began rolling videotape, it would be a relatively simple matter for me to be fired and replaced. This had already happened to a guest actor on the fourth day. We broke for lunch and when we came back, someone else was reading her lines. My overriding emotion, though, was relief and joy at being given this opportunity. And as I rode the bus down Sunset Boulevard toward the studio each morning, I felt like the luckiest guy on the planet.
Alex Keaton was never meant to be Family Ties’ featured character. The original plan was for the sitcom to revolve around the experience of the parents, especially its only established star, Meredith Baxter Birney. It was just a quirk of fate that the story told in the pilot episode happened to be centered on Alex's desire to date the daughter of a wealthy Republican country club family. The writers clearly enjoyed the character they'd created as much as I enjoyed playing him. From the moment I ad-libbed the initial “P” during a scene when Alex answered the phone, as in “Alex P. Keaton here,” the writing staff and I became de facto partners, together creating a benevolent monster.
The night we taped the pilot was an unqualified triumph. The audience's appreciation was deafening, and it was obvious and especially gratifying, given my recent tribulations, that I was being singled out for my performance. During my curtain call, a slow trot out to the duct-tape line that marked the edge of the proscenium, the audience's applause meant more to me than anyone could realize. I felt as though they were aware of my full history—the years, months, and desperate days—leading up to that moment, and this was a salute: “Way to go, Mike, you gritty little son of a bitch. You made it.”
NBC loved the pilot, ordering thirteen episodes for the fall season and also singling me out—but not for approval. Brandon took one more run at Gary in an attempt to have me fired. But Gary, now more than ever, would not be swayed. “Brandon, I'm telling you, this guy is amazing.”
“Maybe,” Brandon countered. “But I'm telling you, this is not the kind of face you'll ever see on a lunchbox.”
Gary was dumbfounded that this should be the criteria for selecting an actor. “Look, all I know is this,” he said finally in exasperation. “I send the kid out with two jokes, and he brings me back five laughs.” And those, gratefully, were the closing salvos in Brandon's Dump Fox campaign. The war was over, and Gary David Goldberg had prevailed.
I heard about these exchanges, not from Gary, as you might expect, but from Brandon himself. It is a credit to his humility and famously self-effacing sense of humor that he spoke publicly about them three years later, at the height of my success in Back to the Future, as if to point out what a fool he'd been. By that time, Brandon and I were good friends, regularly meeting to have lunch and pick each other's brains about the state of television comedy. It was at one of these luncheons when I presented him with a custom-made lunchbox I'd commissioned, emblazoned with my smiling and by now very famous face. There was a
n inscription: “To Brandon: This is for you to put your crow in. Love and Kisses, Michael J. Fox.”
In 1997, Brandon lost the battle with brain cancer he had been secretly waging for over a decade. In his brief but brilliant career, Brandon brought a contemporary sense of humanity to television, inspiring innovations in programming that still resonate today. I'm proud that, however reluctant he may have been at first, he allowed me to come along for the ride. And I am flattered that right up until the last day of his life, he kept my lunchbox on a shelf behind his office desk.
Diane was in the studio the fateful night of the pilot taping. Although we hadn't formally let go of the relationship, by now she was settling into her new/old life in Vancouver. She had come down to L.A. during the week of rehearsal, accompanied me to the post-show celebration, and was at my side as one well-wisher after another—from the families of cast members and writers to network executives, to members of the crew—approached me with congratulations and compliments. My adrenaline was running so high, I couldn't imagine ever finding an outlet to release it. Diane had an idea though, and we quickly said good-bye to everybody and returned to the apartment.
We lay on the floor at the foot of the bed, tangled in bedsheets and passing between us a bottle of champagne I had boosted from the wrap party. By now it was 4:00 A.M. and the mood was bittersweet.
Although we had only begun seeing each other in the months prior to my moving to Los Angeles, I had known Diane since the first week of junior high. Part of the Andy Hill crowd, she was one of the pretty, smart, athletic girls I could never imagine having any interest in me. Now, looking into her brown eyes that night, I could see that she understood the impact of the evening's events and the direction that they would soon take me. Sweetly, generously, she said as much that night.
“This is what you've always wanted and I'm happy for you,” she began. “Your life is going to be so different from now on, and I'm not going to be a part of it. I just want you to know that I understand—it's okay. This is not the kind of life I'm looking for. But you have to promise me you'll be careful. I'll be very upset if anything bad happens to you.”
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