Source: Entertainment Weekly

While protagonist Scott Howard was transforming into a fur-spangled, bipedal canine in Teen Wolf, Michael J. Fox, the star who played him, says that behind the scenes he was turning into… something else.

Fox revisits his time shooting the 1985 supernatural comedy in Future Boy, his new memoir about the making of Back to the Future, released on Tuesday. Teen Wolf released in theaters just a month after Robert Zemeckis’ time-traveling classic, and was unfortunately eclipsed by it. Back to the Future went on to spend three months at the top of the box office, retiring in December as the highest grossing film of the year. But throughout Future Boy, Fox speaks kindly of all his films, even the one that made him feel “like a whore.”

“It was already obvious to me that Teen Wolf, filmed a few months prior, was not my magnum opus,” Fox jokes. “One day on the set of that film, the prop guy made me take a few photos holding a chocolate bar so they could show the confectioner who supplied the candy that we had actually used their product in the movie. Covered in yak hair, I told him that I felt like a whore doing this. The prop guy said, ‘Well, you are a whore.'”

By no means did Teen Wolf flop. Co-written by prolific Marvel scribe Jeph Loeb and costarring James Hampton, Jerry Levine, and Melrose Place alum Doug Savant, Teen Wolf grossed an estimated $80 million against its meager $4 million budget.

Taking a look behind the scenes, however, Fox identifies the “whore” exchange as emblematic of the “especially stark [comparison] to the crew surrounding me on Back to the Future.”

Future had a $19 million budget, was helmed by the auteur behind the previous year’s smash hit Romancing the Stone, and was produced by none other than Steven Spielberg. Teen Wolf’s success was a feather in Fox’s cap, but according to the actor himself, “the success of [Back to the Future] changed everything.”

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So why did Fox sign on to Teen Wolf in the first place?

Fox writes in Future Boy that while still wrapped up in the grueling weekly production of his sitcom Family Ties, his agent “seized the moment and sent me the script for a quick, low-­budget movie called Teen Wolf. They were ready to start filming, and the five-­week shoot could easily slide into the production hiatus at Family Ties.”

Not only would Teen Wolf be Fox’s first lead role in a film (“albeit a hackneyed one that required me to wear twenty-five pounds of yak hair”), he reasoned that “the wolf thing had worked for Michael Landon in I Was a Teenage Werewolf.”

In a case of life nearly imitating art, there exists a Back to the Future-esque alternate timeline in which Fox was offered the role in Future long before Teen Wolf came knocking — causing him to turn down Wolf.

When Fox joined the cast of Back to the Future in the lead role of Marty McFly, the film was already six weeks into production with a different star. Whatever Zemeckis and Spielberg’s reasons for parting ways with their ostensible first choice, Eric Stoltz, were theirs. Fox was just happy to get the part. But he learned the full story after production on the Fox version of Future began.

“They had already shot for over a month. Unfortunately, the dailies were disappointing. Eric was an immensely talented actor, but the creative team felt that he just wasn’t the right fit for Marty McFly,” Fox writes. So Zemeckis and Spielberg went back to Fox, urging Family Ties creator Gary David Goldberg to lend him to them after he’d originally “removed me from consideration” to avoid possible scheduling conflicts.

In the end, the success of Back to the Future and Teen Wolf transformed Fox’s life, and spawned twin franchises — three Future films, a short film, and an animated series; and MTV’s Teen Wolf series, which reimagined the film as a brooding teen romantasy and helped launch the careers of Tyler Posey, Dylan O’Brien, and Tyler Hoechlin.

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