The Oscar-winning 1985 movie Robert Zemeckis was fired from: “They got nervous”
Does Robert Zemeckis get the credit he deserves after the directing career he’s had over a six decade period during which he’s been responsible for some of the most entertaining films of all time? Well, almost certainly not, but let’s start to redress that balance here shall we?
Because let’s get one thing out of the way immediately, had Zemeckis done nothing else in his movie-making life other than make Back to the Future, then that would have been enough. Because that is basically a perfect movie, it has everything, and it’s actually somehow getting even better with every passing year since it was first released in 1985.
But it very nearly didn’t happen at all – or rather it almost didn’t happen in the way it panned out, because Zemeckis would have been busy that year on a completely different movie, had he not been unceremoniously fired from it. At the time, Zemeckis had just made Romancing the Stone with Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner, but the movie hadn’t been fully edited before the director moved on to his next project, the ‘old people get made young again by aliens’ sci-fi Cocoon.
Unfortunately for Zemeckis, initial feedback on what he’d put together on Romancing the Stone was not good at all. Studio execs weren’t impressed by the first cut, and were convinced the movie would be a huge flop on release. Zemeckis told Variety some years later: “It wasn’t really like we had a big screening or anything. It was just the main creative executive. We were just kind of looking at it and realized we needed to shore up a lot of Kathleen’s [storyline]… We went back and shot that stuff and it helped her character a lot.”
It was too little too late however. Believing that Zemeckis could tank Cocoon if he were left to direct it, the producers pulled him from the project. Zemeckis explained: “They got nervous, so they fired me.”
But they weren’t expecting what happened next. Romancing the Stone became a massive hit on release at the end of 1984, bringing in over $100m on a budget of just $10m and winning the Golden Globe award for ‘Best Comedy’. Realising their error, the studio tried to bring Zemeckis back on to Cocoon, an offer that he ‘politely declined’ and they went with Ron Howard instead.
To say things worked out for the best for all parties concerned would be an understatement however. Cocoon was an international success under Howard’s direction, earning eight times its production spend at the box office and winning two Oscars.
Meanwhile Zemeckis, freed up from having to direct the other movie, was able to concentrate on the film he really wanted to make, the one about a young teenager, his madcap scientist friend and their silver DeLorean, that he and his writing partner Bob Gale had wanted to bring to life since 1980.
Back to the Future would instantly become one of the biggest films of the decade, earning $400m at the box office, winning an Oscar nomination for ‘Best Screenplay’ and making a global superstar out of Michael J Fox. It also spawned two sequels which were released back to back in 1989 and 1990, finishing off one of the best loved trilogies of all time.
