(Credit: Paul Hudson)
By the end of the 1980s, Michael J Fox was one of the biggest stars of his generation, and it had been clear for a while that he was heading that way.
He’d first gained attention as a cast member on the hit sitcom Family Ties, and it goes without saying his profile rose exponentially when Robert Zemeckis finally got his wish and cast Fox as Marty McFly in Back to the Future after the infamous Eric Stoltz experiment clearly wasn’t going to work.
When the decade drew to a close, and Family Ties wrapped up its run on the airwaves, Fox already had an entire Back to the Future trilogy under his belt in addition to headlining the box office goldmine Teen Wolf, the massively profitable The Secret of My Success, and Brian De Palma’s acclaimed flop Casualties of War.
As the 1990s dawned, Fox would have been able to confidently proclaim that he’d made it, but he was so convinced that he had the necessary intangibles to reach the industry summit that he already knew he was going to make it long before Family Ties had even aired its first episode in September 1982.
Fox’s feature debut came when he was only 18 years old, and he was nowhere near the top of the call sheet on Disney’s 1980 comedy Midnight Madness. A listless adventure about an all-night scavenger hunt hardly announced the youngster as a talent worth keeping an eye on, but the misery of his offscreen situation convinced him that he was going to fare better than any of his co-stars.
“I remember sitting around with all these actors, and I remember thinking, ‘Why is this going to work for me and not for them?’” he wondered to Variety. “It’s not that I wished them unhappiness or bad luck; I wished them all the success in the world. But I knew I was going to make it. God knows why.”
By his own admission, Fox was “living on the margins” and had “no money, no connections” and had been reduced to “literally dumpster diving for food.” And yet, on the set of his very first movie, he was struck by the realisation that out of everyone involved in Midnight Madness, he was going to be the one who made something of themselves.
No offence intended towards the rest of the ensemble, but he was right. Thanks to the enduring appeal of Back to the Future, there are multiple generations of moviegoers who know exactly who Michael J Fox is, and that’s going to be the case for a long time to come, but can the same be said of his Midnight Madness colleagues Debra Clinger, Eddie Deezen, Brad Welkin, or Stephen Furst?
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