2015: The Year of BTTF
In March of that year, my blog was created. I used it as an opportunity to lessen the word-counts of my autobiography, Wong Jing’s autobiography and my novels (i.e. the pop culture trivia). There are agents who place significance on blogs as a barometer for potential book sales. Winning a blog award would give me credibility but not exactly mainstream attention like a YouTube channel or a print column. I never did win the U.K. blog awards, but I never cared since my blog was just a way to build a readership that was big enough for a literary agent to perceive me as someone who is worth advertising. After writing several articles about heavy metal bands, I posted articles about Eric Stoltz in Back to the Future. These were titled Testimonies, Jury and Verdict. I reposted them (and deleted the original posts) in September because I wanted them to get more attention.
The initial design of my blog was basically like a rabbit hole where you scrolled down to see older articles. This method worked when I had so few articles, because it was a way for people to be exposed to everything. In September, I chose a design that resembles Instagram with its square trinity approach. Considering that I had written three articles about BTTF, this was most ideal. With 2015 being the 30th anniversary of the movie’s release, I reposted them when the publicity of the first book had died down. September was a perfect month to repost them because it was a month before the release of the second book.
In July, there was much publicity surrounding the Eric Stoltz chapter of the first 2015 book about the making of Back to the Future i.e. We Don’t Need Roads. I capitalized on the Twitter trending by tweeting my articles before the release date - July 3. Because I had four articles (the fourth was about the movie originally being a drama), I made sure that enough time went by between tweeting each article. Understanding how people can search for tweets, I pinned the Testimonies article while tweeting various statements from each of the other articles for those who missed the linked tweets.
This would end up being my downfall because my blog was later taken offline. I thought that maybe it was a broadband problem but other websites worked just fine. I then thought that there may have been a problem with too much traffic. Finally, I realized that I ticked off some pretty powerful people. I complained to an American friend of mine named Ryan (who I met on the FetLife site). She is based in California, and told me that she wasn’t surprised about Spielberg being a douchebag. She has friends who have shared stories about how they don’t like him after meeting him. The next morning, my blog went back online. Although the Caseen Gaines book was supposed to be a fan project, it was actually authorized by the Universal studio. As such, they didn’t want their book sales to be hurt by my attempts at exposing the truth. Their attempt at bringing me down was counteracted by my friend’s injunction.
Fast-forward to 2021, there was a similar experience in April. It used to be easy to find my Symmetry article on Google. All you had to do was type “Stoltz Symmetry”…and voila! I tried different combinations and it still didn’t work. It looked like someone connected to Universal and/or Amblin didn’t want information leaking out. I complained about this on Facebook, and the article’s Google presence was restored to its rightful status. The most intriguing part of October in 2015 for me was a YouTube video which indirectly referenced my articles. The video was an advertisement for a book titled Back to the Future: The Ultimate Visual History. The people being interviewed were Bob Gale (the main screenwriter) and Michael Klastorin (the publicist for the sequels). Gale tried to save his own skin by saying that an eye witness testimony is the most unreliable testimony according to any cop or attorney, because people constantly rewrite memories to look good.
They say a picture speaks a thousand words, and that a picture contains more evidence than words ever could. Ironically, it was only in 2017 that my blog had photos outside of my article about Back to Shanghai i.e. this is the subtitle of a time travel movie called God of Gamblers III. The reason for the change was that people had yet to do specific photo comparisons of Eric Stoltz and Michael J. Fox, so I bought the visual history book by Michael Klastorin to show what the internet was missing out on. Also, it became obvious that people happened upon my site after undergoing a Google Image search where the images that were clicked on were article covers. Back to what I said before about pictures telling stories, it’s because of my ambitious attempt to show every single photo of Stoltz that people realize that he shot almost the entire movie (regardless of whether you’ve heard Thomas F. Wilson’s similar claim or not). Fittingly, so many YouTubers have taken my composites when they create videos.
In June of 2015, I wrote an article about narrative structures for my blog. For a few years, the article was one of my most overlooked articles since it was unique for comparing the structures of the Stoltz and Fox versions of BTTF. Whenever anyone writes an article about the movie’s structure, it’s always about Chekhov’s Gun i.e. how you have a set-up followed by a pay-off.
In the summer of 2015, I tweeted Billy Zane enough times (with different questions) to get the impression that he doesn’t want to talk about his experiences with Eric during the making of BTTF. In fact, he has never done an interview where he talked about working with Eric. Back to Twitter, Billy didn’t acknowledge my existence. Before you assume that Mr. Zane was too busy, he had made a concentrated effort to respond to tweets that came before and after mine. It wasn’t a surprise, because it was impossible to find an interview where he talks about Eric. Before you start thinking about him having signed a confidentiality agreement, there were other cast members who were comfortable with talking about Eric’s involvement (such as Casey Siemaszko saying that Eric’s firing sucked because he is a nice guy).
There’s a behind-the-scenes photograph depicting Eric and the bullies during the skateboard scene. J.J. Cohen and Billy are looking at Eric with disdain. Tom Wilson is laughing because of Billy saying something that has made Eric look angry. The photo makes me uncomfortable. Like I said, a picture speaks a thousand words. Sometimes it’s what you don’t say that gives it all away. For example, Billy Zane posted a throwback photo of the Memphis Belle cast where he tagged everyone except Stoltz. If that’s not a tell-tale sign of a grudge then I don’t know what is. It would make Billy look bad if he wrote a memoir where he didn’t talk about working with Eric at all.
Overall, Stoltz was the It guy of 2015 because of the two BTTF books. More of his films aired on U.K. TV than ever before. Even the Sky Two channel aired reruns of his Caprica TV series. In spite of this, his acting career didn’t warrant new opportunities like Bryan Cranston achieving his second wind on the back of Breaking Bad. On New Year’s eve of 2015, I began wondering why I didn’t get any responses from all the board members of the Directors Guild of America. In the summer, I sent the same e-mail on different weeks so that I couldn’t be accused of sending spam. I described the unfair firing of Eric Stoltz as though it was a blind item (a news story which avoids legal hassle by keeping identities anonymous). I didn’t even disclose the year, let alone the title of the movie, since I wanted to know how the guild deals with unfair dismissal. Spielberg is a national board member, therefore he probably sussed out what I was hinting at.
On a British message board about appliances, I had read a BTTF anecdote about the December of 30 years prior. An Englishman recalled working in a cinema, and he remembered that all British media let it be known that Fox was Eric’s replacement. When I did a search on the Newspapers website, every American newspaper in 1985 had referenced Eric’s firing. Not just articles, but film reviews. While he wasn’t exactly a laughing stock, there was hardly much in the way of sympathy or objective reasoning that postulated the possibility of unfair dismissal. What’s fascinating is that the people behind BTTF actually convinced Universal that it would be a good way to get publicity for Mask. Of course, it was a horrendous tactic since not only did Eric fail to be an Oscar contender but he was deprived of leading Top Gun and co-leading Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.
One more thing that I would like to say about 2015 is that it appears that there were attempts to cash in on BTTF, namely a TV reboot of The Flash and a Disney movie called Tomorrowland: A World Beyond. What happened is that Zemeckis and Gale didn’t want their movie to be remade, so other storytellers in other mediums went out of their way to incorporate elements into their stories without making it obvious. When it began airing on October 7 2014, it wasn’t obvious that The Flash would be a time travel story. The makers had almost got away with it had it not been for the characters referencing the movie in the fourteenth episode, Fallout, which aired on February 17.
