The actor’s account of his big Hollywood break – and how it almost never happened
M
ichael J Fox has already eked out four books of Hollywood memoir, so the justification for a fifth – written with longtime collaborator Nelle Fortenberry – ought to be good. It is: the subject of these 176 pages is a three-month period in 1985 when Fox was simultaneously shooting his breakout sitcom role in Family Ties and the career-defining American classic, Back to the Future.
That’s two more-than-full-time jobs for one little guy, necessitating that the then 23-year-old actor work 20-hour days, six days a week. This schedule was only possible because the mid-1980s was a time before showbiz labour laws caught up with basic human decency. These days, we’re told, a standard contract “demands two weeks of buffer time on either side of a job”, while Fox didn’t even get an hour.
How did he do it? This book tells us, drawing on the memories of colleagues and friends to fill in details where Fox’s own sleep-deprived brain falls short. The material might have seemed stretched thin to fill even this relatively slim volume, were it not for the fact Fox was also a singularly unlikely – and therefore fascinating – movie star prospect. Working-class, 5ft 4in and Canadian; that this short king ever made it so big is a natural-law-defying miracle, on a par with time travel itself.
