Michael J. Fox’s Future Boy is an incredible and intimate behind-the-scenes look into his experiences filming Back to the Future while simultaneously shooting Family Ties. I picked this up entirely by chance—it was a Valentine’s “blind date with a book” at the public library, and I felt incredibly lucky to have scored it by randomly choosing a gift-wrapped pink package off the shelf labelled ‘memoir.’ For one, it had been on my reading list ever since it came out in October 2025. For another, Back to the Future is one of my favorite movies of all time—one I have watched countless times and still revisit once or twice a year. Finally, with July 2025 marking the film’s 40th anniversary, my fiancée and son just went to see it back on the big screen, with my son being the exact age I was when I first saw it forty years ago.
Fox does an incredible job recounting his journey from the very beginning. He tracks his start learning guitar, working his way through the local theater scene in Vancouver, receiving his early training in Burnaby, and eventually getting cast in Leo and Me. He even shares a childhood family trip to Los Angeles that included a few fascinating, spoiler-free interactions that—in hindsight—feel entirely like kismet. The real meat of the book begins when he is cast as Alex P. Keaton on Family Ties (did you know the “P” was completely improvised?) and begins to truly master the beats and execution of live audience comedy.
When Eric Stoltz was let go from Back to the Future after several months of shooting, the production found its true star in Fox, who single-handedly shifted the entire dynamic of the film. (Because they had to reshoot months of work, the crew could only reuse a handful of wide shots featuring Stoltz’s body double). Fox wasn’t trying to emulate Stoltz; in fact, he never watched a single frame of the prior footage. Where Stoltz had played the script like a tragedy—approaching the teen stuck in the past with trepidation, fear, and sadness—Fox brought the comedy “buttons” he had perfected on Family Ties. He infused that energy into his first interaction with Lorraine falling off the bed, the hope chest pants joke, and his iconic slide across the DeLorean’s hood. He even improvised some of the movie’s most memorable lines (“Flux Capacitor… fluxing…”) and shaped his own wardrobe (those Nikes were his personal, worn-out shoes, forcing Nike to rapidly clone the discontinued model for the rest of production).
Ultimately, Future Boy is a stellar book about Fox’s life, the grind of filmmaking, and the sheer power of fate. It is awe-inspiring to see how many chaotic elements came together perfectly to create a flawless movie. I was blown away by it when I was five years old, and I am just as captured by it now.
Written with support from Nelle Fortenberry, Fox’s book offers a brilliant peek under the hood of a cultural touchstone. Every page contains a piece of trivia that practically begged me to tap whoever was sitting next to me to share it. It belongs to that rare class of art—alongside the work of Bowie, Lynch, Anderson, Gondry, the Coens, Pynchon, Stoppard, Wallace, Kubrick, Reznor, and Yorke—that makes you deeply grateful to be alive at the exact time it exists. Anyone who gets it truly gets it, and Fox wrote this book specifically for us. You can feel it in every single word.
Garrett Zecker 