A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Future

by Michael J. Fox

  This was wrongheaded on a number of levels. For starters, college is a lot more demanding than high school—not that the demands of high school were all that familiar to me, given that I had made little effort to meet them. The other flaw in my pronouncement was that it made an easy assumption about who was footing the bill. My perception, rooted in my Canadian working-class background, was that behind each of these partying coeds were a beneficent and indulging American mom and pop, happily forking over cash to the university, who in turn would feed and water the kid for however long it took for the prefrontal cortex and amygdala to assume their proper weights in the balance of influence.

  Floating my “four more years of high school” theory would provoke an earful in response. Did I have any idea what kinds of loans these guys were carrying? I had to admit, I didn’t. Much of the expense of their formal education was front-loaded, whereas with my experiential education, I was, in effect, running a tab; especially dangerous, as I’ll point out shortly, when you can’t do basic math. So, we all felt the weight of expectation. Still, I felt more comfortable not to be carrying all that debt before I had even decided what was worth going into debt for.

  Despite being an indifferent high school student, I always enjoyed reading, and was familiar with the story of Sisyphus. I pictured the Maine-iacs, with their student loans, as each having to push a large rock up a mountain. I began to understand that the rock was not the debt, but their course load. The debt was the mountain. Me, I was just dancing on the edge of a cliff.

  So each of us, whether they off to college or me off to Hollywood, could be described as full of bluster and bravado, high expectations and low reservations. What separated us, perhaps, was that I lacked a blueprint.

  As an exercise, I recently picked up a course catalogue from Hunter College, part of the City University of New York. Reading through the curriculum, I recognized how my life experiences could fit into a prescribed outline for an undergraduate education: the one I had supposedly missed out on. Laying out a series of typical college courses, as described in the catalogue, can help make a case that I have, to some extent, fulfilled the requirements for each particular course while having absolutely no idea I was doing it.

  I might have skipped class, but I didn’t miss any lessons.

  PART II

  Economics

  Economics is the social science that deals with how best to use scarce resources to satisfy unlimited human needs and wants. Economics students become problem solvers. They learn to analyze a situation, figure out what is important, and determine what can be abstracted away.

  IN A PURELY ACADEMIC SENSE, MOST OF WHAT I KNOW about economics I learned from Alex P. Keaton. My years of playing the archconservative, Milton Friedman–loving young capitalist gave me a passing familiarity with terms like “supply and demand,” “gross national product,” and “trickle-down economics.” But with no personal fascination with the world of finance and market trends beyond my desire, as an actor, to be believable in the role, I often had to be careful not to hold the Wall Street Journal stock page upside down in front of the camera. Still, the years between my moving to the States and finally landing my role on Family Ties had provided me with an intense schooling in the basic laws of economics.

  Fundamental concepts like “supply and demand” take on a whole new meaning when you, as an actor, are the “supply,” and as hard as you might try, you find it impossible to drum up any “demand.” And “trickle-down” was just another way of saying “You’re pissing your money away before it even gets to you.” Moreover, the mathematical absolutes I complained to my mother about earlier were now no longer just random numbers on a page, but specific bits of information relevant to my life, the mastery over which was crucial to my immediate survival. Simply put, I had to learn to meet the bottom line; to analyze a situation, figure out what was important, and determine what could be abstracted away.

  The dimensions and amenities of my first Los Angeles apartment would strike the average dorm-dwelling college student as familiar: a seventeen-by-twelve-foot studio, with a microscopic bathroom—toilet, shower, no tub, and a bathroom sink. This was the apartment’s only sink, and the basin was so tiny I’d have to take my dirty dishes with me into the shower. It wasn’t uncommon for me to wash my hair with Palmolive and my dishes with Head & Shoulders. A closet doubled as the kitchen. But for $225 a month, with a six-month lease, I was in California, independent, and insanely happy.

  An inventory of my worldly possessions as an eighteen-year-old on my own in Los Angeles: one duffel bag full of clothing (i.e., dirty laundry), one hot plate, some mismatched kitchenware, toiletries, blanket, bedsheets, and a wind-up alarm clock. Oh, and then there was the furniture: one mattress and one folding canvas director’s chair.

  I worked consistently at first, bit parts and guest spots in episodes of TV programs like Family and Lou Grant, and soon I landed a job as a regular on Palmerstown, U.S.A., a CBS midseason pickup with an order for eight one-hour episodes. Then came more episodic TV work (Trapper John, M.D., Here’s Boomer); a few commercials (McDonald’s, Tilex Foaming Tub and Tile Cleaner); and a sort-of film, the schlock cinema classic Class of 1984. All in all, my first two-and-a-half years in Los Angeles had amounted to a reasonably successful run.

  So why then, in less than three years, was I perilously near starvation? You could say that I was naïve, but then again, flat-out stupid would cover it. I had no patience for numbers and therefore no facility for keeping track of my debts and expenditures. I had not yet even begun to understand how to best use scarce resources to satisfy unlimited human needs and wants.

  My agent, Bob, earned the standard 10 percent of my paycheck off the top, and for holding my hand, my managers, Sue and Bernie, took another 20 percent. Halfway through the first season of Palmerstown, my lease was up, and needing more space, I found a slightly larger but equally no-frills one-bedroom apartment in nearby Brentwood. The rent was almost double what I had been paying, $425, but in addition to a bathtub, this place boasted an actual kitchen sink.

  There was a cupboard above the kitchen sink—ostensibly for dishes, it was where I kept my monster, those mathematical “absolutes” coming back to bite me on the ass. I developed a habit of collecting all my bills and threatening missives from creditors into a loose, disorganized bundle and jamming them into that cupboard above the kitchen sink: a growing paper monster. Not wanting to think about it, never mind actually look at it, I’d open the cupboard, feed it more red ink, then quickly slam the door shut. Out of sight, out of mind: a closet full of daunting, implacable absolutes.

  I was earning SAG scale, the rock-bottom minimum rate, which barely covered the basics—apartment, clothing, car rental, food—plus business expenses (all those percentages). Then there was the government. I had overlooked a subtlety in my check stubs during that first year in L.A.: my employers hadn’t been deducting state or federal taxes from my payments, and it never occurred to me that I should be putting any money aside for that purpose.

  When I received my first tax bill from the IRS, I made a panicky call to my managers, and they recommended an accountant. This guy laid out an orderly method for applying present and future earnings toward paying off back taxes, for which services he would deduct from all present and future earnings 5 percent off the top. This brought my total up-front fees to a staggering 35 percent.

  If I earned four thousand dollars in a month—which seemed like a lot of money in a teenager’s wallet—I would picture the many things I could do with that four grand. But by the time the check passed through the gauntlet of my financial obligations, I barely had enough left over for leftovers.

  Regrettably, I hadn’t spent enough time in math class to appreciate the power of those percentage deductions—and if I had ever sat down to actually do the math, it would’ve looked something like this:

  $4,000 pay day

  – 1,400 35% fees

  – 1,200 taxes

  – 425 rent


  – 300 car payment, insurance, gas

  – 100 utilities

  – 150 audition clothes, headshots, publicity, etc.

  – 450 food: allowance of only $15 a day

  * * *

  = (25)

  For those of you who haven’t passed Econ 1 yet, the parentheses mean that I was twenty-five dollars in the hole at the end of the month. And that’s without any extravagances like movie tickets or beer.

  My CPA’s blueprint for financial recovery never made it off the drawing board. Unable to work during a prolonged SAG strike in 1980, I was nearly broke going into the second and final season of Palmerstown. After the series was cancelled, there were a few jobs, but I barely earned enough to live on—and nowhere near enough to begin seriously paying down my debts. While most out-of-work actors can supplement their incomes by boxing groceries or waiting tables, my alien status made this impossible. The only way I could work legally in the U.S. was as an actor. I was in a bind.

  Now and then, I’d receive a residual check for an old commercial or TV episode—usually small amounts that passed first through the hands of my agent and managers, taxes paid up front, so the figure I actually netted would be pitifully small. This is what they mean by “the life of the starving artist.” Whether or not I was an artist at all was debatable, as I had no opportunity to develop my craft and no offers to do so. The starving part fit, though. My diet had been reduced to cans and boxes with declarative, generic labels like TUNA or MACARONI.

  What few possessions I owned, like my furniture, I began to liquidate. Over a period of months, I sold off my sectional sofa, section by section. The buyer was another young actor living in my building. Adding insult to indigence was the incremental nature of the transaction, emphasizing, as it did, the inverse trajectories of our respective careers.

  Given my situation, it might have been wise to pull the curtain. There would be no shame in returning to Canada and rethinking my options. But there was my debt to the IRS to consider. If I ran out on that, it’d be good-bye to the United States forever.

  My telephone service had been cut off, so I had given my agent the number of the phone booth at a nearby Pioneer Chicken. I had taken to using it as my ersatz office. In the unlikely event that I received any offers, my agent could reach me there. Most often though, I used it to check in with him. But something began to happen. Without thinking about it in exactly these terms, I started to get my head around the idea of supply and demand. The business in which I was trying to succeed was one that offered huge reversals of fortune, if only you could convince someone to hire you. It all came down to this: make one last urgent push at commercial acceptance, or tread desperately in a sea of red ink.

  So I worked harder than ever before on my auditions and paid more attention to my appearance. Most of my baby fat was gone by now, not through any dieting regimen, just good old-fashioned starvation. After casting calls, I’d use precious quarters to press my agent to follow up with casting directors. In short, I worked my ass off to earn the privilege of working my ass off…or at least working it out of debt. And it paid off. At the absolute fifty-ninth second of the fifty-ninth minute of the eleventh hour, I was cast as Alex Keaton on Family Ties. There I was, at the very same pay phone outside the chicken shack on San Vicente, negotiating my new contract.

  Within months, I no longer had the problem of not having enough money. In my early twenties, in the L.A. of the early eighties, flush with the success of a hit television series, I now had a new problem (if you could call it that)…a raging amygdala and an American Express Gold Card.

  Comparative Literature

  Comparative literature courses are designed for students who are interested in a broad view of literature and in the diversity of literary cultures, literary movements, and genres.

  MY LOVE OF READING ALMOST COST ME MY CAREER.

  I had been in Los Angeles for six months and was halfway through the first season of Palmerstown. Returning to L.A. after a trip home for Christmas, I was detained by U.S. immigration agents, who inquired whether I was entering their country for work or pleasure. My employer had applied for the work permit that I, as a Canadian citizen, needed to work in the States, and though approved, the actual visa had not yet come through. Nervous about not having the document in hand, I asked the production staff what I should say to officials. “Keep it simple,” they advised. “Don’t go into a big song and dance about the paperwork. Tell them that you’re just coming down to visit.”

  Those advising me didn’t count on the tenacity of the men and women who guard the border. Nor could they have known that, while a fairly decent actor, I was a pathetic liar. And they soon found out that I was a total idiot. A tip to anyone who finds him-or herself in a similar predicament: INS won’t believe you’re going on vacation if (A) you’re traveling on a one-way ticket; (B) you’re carrying a suitcase full of dirty laundry; and (C) you are in possession of any scrap of evidence that you, in fact, reside in the foreign city you claim to be “just visiting.” In my case, that scrap of evidence was my Beverly Hills library card.

  One redeeming element of that story is that I had a library card. Being a starving actor, I couldn’t afford to buy books, but I couldn’t afford not to read books. If I were to peruse the library records of my reading preferences of that time, however, I’d probably cringe. I read mostly for entertainment, not edification, and if I happened upon a great piece of literature, it would have been through accident rather than intention. Even years later, when I bought my books instead of borrowing them, I was still a sucker for pulp fiction. A few months after we started dating, Tracy and I went on our first vacation together. On day one, each of us carried a book down to the beach. Tracy, I discovered, was reading The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy. I had Stephen King. I can’t remember which of his books it was, but I do know it was one of the heavier ones (two or three pounds at least).

  In terms of “comparative” literature, one might ask, “What are we comparing it to?” Me, personally, I most often compare books to their film adaptations. It’s an interesting exercise. Here’s a quick list of five that come to mind, as well as my own humble assessment as to whether the material was best served by the author or the filmmaker. Simply put, which was better, the book or the movie?

  1. THE GODFATHER Francis Ford Coppola, 1972

  Based on the book by Mario Puzo, 1969

  While Mario Puzo’s florid pulp epic, rendered with verve and velocity, is the kind of thing I might busy myself with on vacation while Tracy rereads The Agony and the Ecstasy, it doesn’t measure up to the Francis Ford Coppola masterpiece it inspired. Characters that are clichéd on the page mesmerize on the screen thanks to the artistry of Brando, Pacino, Duvall, and Cazale.

  2. JAWS Steven Spielberg, 1975

  Based on the book by Peter Benchley, 1974

  The novel was a page-turner, but Steven Spielberg’s breakthrough film was a stomach-turner (and I mean that in a good way). It’s one thing to read about a Great White devouring Captain Quint. It’s a whole different kettle of fish to watch the thing munch on Robert Shaw. In fairness to Peter Benchley, I also prefer John Huston’s retelling of Moby Dick over Melville’s novel.

  3. MOBY DICK John Huston, 1956

  Based on the book by Herman Melville, 1851

  Seriously, go back and read the thing…it takes forever just to get on the boat.

  4. FIGHT CLUB David Fincher, 1999

  Based on the book by Chuck Palahniuk, 1996

  The first rule of Fight Club: You do not talk about Fight Club. I will say this, though. Great book. Great movie. Technical draw.

  5. 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY Stanley Kubrick, 1968

  Book by Arthur C. Clarke, 1968

  This is a tricky one. Clarke’s book was actually published after the release of Kubrick’s film, and each man worked on his version concurrent with the other. Visually, the film was stunning and the atmospherics were sensational. But I have to admit, only after
reading Clarke’s book was I able to discern a plot. Edge to Arthur C. Clarke. Interesting note: just recently, I learned from my son, Sam, that “HAL,” the name given to the film’s mutinous computer, is a play on a familiar acronym. “H-A-L” are the three letters that precede IBM in the alphabet.

  WHILE THIS IS fun to do, the list of page-to-screen adaptations is a long one, and you probably have your own favorites. When comparing the positive and negative qualities of books and movies, keep in mind the storytelling advantages of each medium. The novelist has the benefit of exposition, interior dialogue, and imagination unlimited by production costs. And the director can employ dynamic visuals and harness the visceral power of the actors’ performances.

  I know firsthand the difficulties inherent in turning a popular book into a successful movie—witness Bright Lights, Big City.

  On second thought…read the book.

  Physics

  Physics is the study of the basic interactions that govern the behavior of the universe as we know it. As such, a knowledge of physics is necessary for the proper understanding of any science.