Crispin Glover, who played Marty’s nerdy father George McFly in Back to the Future, had a difficult relationship with the hugely popular time travel movie. He brought a lawsuit against the producers for using a prosthetic mask based on his likeness on another actor in the sequels.
But this wasn’t the only dispute that Glover had with the filmmakers and producers of Back to the Future. He also had strong opinions on the ending, which sees Marty return to 1985 to find his family financially successful. In a 2012 interview with The AV Club; “I had a conversation with Robert Zemeckis about it and I said, ‘I think if the characters have money [in the updated timeline], if our characters are rich, it’s a bad message. That reward should not be in there.'”
Glover continued; “I think there would be a better message if, instead of the son character (Marty) pumping his fist in the air or whatever, jumping up in the air because he has a new truck [in the new timeline], if instead the reward was that the mother and father characters are in love with each other.”
Glover continued; “And that there’s the potential that money comes in. I think [equating their new riches with moral success] is a bad message. And this is aligned to those things in film that I’m saying serve the interests of a corporate element.”
Glover directed two movies in 2005-2007 and then spent six years touring around the US with them until he recouped the cost of making them. He still acts, but his projects are fairly few and far between, seeming to fund his other creative projects such as writing books.
The lawsuit that Glover brought against the Back to the Future producers ended up being a landmark case that has had a knock-on effect to the current trend of using deceased actors in movies eg. Peter Cushing in Rogue One and Harold Ramis in Ghostbusters: Afterlife.
Check out our guide to the best 80s movies.