I found this fascinating.
“For Lea Thompson, the news of Stoltz’s dismissal was bittersweet. “It was hard for me because I was really good friends with Eric,” she says. “Eric is such a different actor and he could be very difficult. It was a time when we were emerging from the seventies. All the young actors wanted to be like De Niro and Pacino, which was good in a lot of ways. Now a lot of young actors are just like businessmen. It was a different time. But it was not the right movie to behave like that. Eric had such an intensity. He saw drama in things. He wasn’t really a comedian, and they needed a comedian. He’s super-funny in real life, but he didn’t approach his work like that, and they really needed somebody who had those chops.”
However, as disappointed as she was to hear that he was being removed from the project, the news did come as a small relief, especially considering her own minor indiscretions at the time of filming. “My boyfriend at the time was Dennis Quaid, and he was overseas making a movie,” she says. “We hadn’t seen each other in a while and I really wanted to see him. I was not supposed to go away, but I had a week or two off, so I slipped away against the rules after I was explicitly told not to leave town. I was in Munich. That was a long time ago, so I called my answering machine just to check in and it was like ‘Beep! This is Steven Spielberg. Beep! This is Frank Marshall. Beep! This is Bob Zemeckis. Beep!’ and I was like, ‘Oh my god, I’m getting fired! Oh, my god! Oh, my god! Oh, my god, they found out that I ran out of town and I’m in trouble!’ I was trying to get a plane ticket until I finally talked to Neil and he told me what happened.
“I was just super-relieved it wasn’t me,” she continues, still laughing about it after almost three decades. “I disobeyed the rules. They wouldn’t remember that because I never told them I was out of town.”
Some of the actors who worked most closely with Stoltz had a feeling that something was off-kilter within a week of the announcement. Tom Wilson remembers there being an off atmosphere and uncomfortable buzz around the set in the first few days of 1985. Christopher Lloyd also had a sense that things were not clicking the way they should have been. “I felt for Eric. He was a really good actor,” he says. “Although he was doing the part well, he was not bringing that element of comedy to the screen.”
As surprising as the announcement was, some on the crew had sensed that a big change was forthcoming once shooting resumed after the Christmas holiday. “There were signs, especially the last week or so,” Cundey says. “When we would set up a shot and we would shoot Chris Lloyd’s angle, but we wouldn’t do the reverse on Marty. I’d say, ‘Don’t we need the angle?’ and Bob would say, ‘No, no, no, let’s not worry about that.’ It didn’t take long for me to see that we were saving our energy for what would come next.”