The Legal Drama You Didn't See Behind The Scenes Of Back To The Future

Glover's issues with "Back to the Future" started out relatively small. During his 2013 appearance on "The Opie and Anthony Show," he revealed that he questioned a few elements of the script, particularly the ending. While some things did get changed, the actor still had an issue with the message being sent. "I thought it was not a good idea for our characters to have a monetary reward, because it basically makes the moral of the movie that money equals happiness," Glover said. "Love should be the reward."

Notes like this were the beginning of the strain in the relationship between Glover and the producers. But things really ramped up when work began on the sequel. In the same interview, he shared that he initially wanted to be in "Back to the Future Part II." Somewhat ironically, money ended up being a factor in his decision to leave. According to Glover, he was offered less than half of what costars Lea Thompson and Tom Wilson were getting despite having similar sized roles.

During his own interview on the show, Bob Gale went into a bit more detail with Opie and Anthony about what Glover was looking for in his contract. According to the writer and producer, the actor wanted the same deal as Michael J. Fox, which was $2 million, plus script approval. Obviously unwilling to grant those terms to someone without top billing, Gale and Robert Zemeckis moved on thinking that Glover would not be involved. That's why George McFly is dead in the alternate 1985. But two months before filming began, it looked like there might have been a chance for the actor to board the project after all.

"Two months before the movie was supposed to start shooting, Crispin's agent called and said that Crispin thinks he may have made a mistake. I said okay, we're happy to put him in the movie, but it's not going to be a very big role. And the whole idea of having George McFly floating around upside down because he threw out his back? We didn't really want to have George dead in the more positive future because that would be kinda sad. Let's put the guy upside down so if we have to recast him, it'll be hard to recognize if it's really him or not. And if Crispin really does it, then we can hang him upside down."

Ultimately, Crispin Glover did not return for "Back to the Future Part II." But unless you paid extremely close attention or knew about this drama before your first viewing of the movie, there's a good chance that you had no idea.

"Had they only hired another actor, which is kind of what I thought had happened, that would have been totally legal, and I would have been completely fine with it," recounted Glover while speaking to radio personality Sam Roberts in 2014. But with events playing out the way that they did, the actor sued Universal Studios and the producers of "Back to the Future," including Robert Zemeckis, Bob Gale, and Steven Spielberg. Glover's attorney at the time Doug Kari argued that using the George McFly prosthetics on another actor was a violation of the original actor's publicity rights. With computer graphics technology evolving at a rapid pace, Kari and Glover also thought about how this could affect other actors in the future. "What I said to the judge was, 'Things may happen in the future that will make this important,'" Kari said to The Hollywood Reporter in 2015. "We need to draw a line."

An important tool that Kari had at his disposal to draw that line was a conversation he had with Jeffrey Weissman. While the second George McFly didn't comment on the THR piece, Weissman did get rather in depth about the lawsuit and his entire "Back to the Future" experience while speaking to the Hasslein Books Blog:

"When Crispin decided he wanted to sue Universal, the cast and the production team, he contacted me and was very whiney about how badly they treated him on the first film. The producers belittled him and made him cry in front of extras on the first shoot, cut his hair without his approval, and how much he had been "done wrong" because they were going to pay him twice scale for the use of the short clips they used of him from the first film, inserted into my work on the second.

I did see that he was being cheated, especially because they used his likeness (Universal's argument was that they were using "George's likeness"), and after Crispin got his $760,000 out-of-court settlement (before it went to trial), using much of our conversation as fuel for his case, Universal blacklisted me and never used me on a TV show or film again, and Crispin has never taken my calls nor spoken to me since.

I took it very hard that production tried to keep my work a secret, kept me from promoting my work on the films publicly, and I had a nervous breakdown when I heard of the blacklisting by Universal. To top it all, hardcore Back to the Future and Crispin fans have written "hate Jeffrey Weissman" postings in public forums, which are pretty painful. Ahh, showbiz."