Apple has landed the rights to a feature-length documentary about actor and activist Michael J. Fox. As reported by Variety, the documentary is currently in production in New York, Los Angeles, and Vancouver and is directed by Davis Guggenheim who is best known for directing An Inconvenient Truth, Waiting for Superman, and He Named Me Malala. The documentary is produced by Guggenheim’s Concordia Studio with Guggenheim, Annetta Marion, Will Cohen, and Jonathan King producing. Laurene Powell Jobs, Jonathan Silberg, Nicole Stott, and Fox’s long-time producing partner Nelle Fortenberry will executive produce.
The documentary will follow Fox’s career, his struggles with celebrity, and his diagnosis at age 29 with Parkinson’s disease as well as the impact the diagnosis had on both his personal and professional life. The documentary will include documentary, archival, and scripted elements. The film is described as recounting “the improbably tale of an undersized kid from a Canadian army base who rose to the heights of stardom in 1980s Hollywood. The account of Fox’s public life, full of nostalgic thrills and cinematic gloss, will unspool alongside his never-before-seen private journey, including the years that followed his diagnosis at twenty-nine with Parkinson’s disease. Intimate and honest, and produced with unprecedented access to Fox and his family, the film will chronicle Fox’s personal and professional triumphs and travails and will explore what happens when an incurable optimist confronts an incurable disease.”
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Fox rose to fame in the 1980s, starring in the iconic television series Family Ties as well as beloved films such as the Back to the Future series, Teen Wolf, and Bright Lights, Big City. He later starred in television’s Spin City and has made appearances on The Good Wife and Designated Survivor. Fox announced his Parkinson’s diagnosis back in 1998 and announced his retirement from acting in 2020, 30 years after his initial diagnosis and 20 years beyond the estimate his doctor had once given him for how long he’d be able to keep working.
“I’m kind of a freak. It’s weird that I’ve done as well as I have for as long as I have,” Fox told AARP in 2021. “People often think of Parkinson’s as a visual thing, but the visuals of it are nothing. On any given day, my hands could be barely shaking, or they could be …” He flailed his hands around. “It’s what you can’t see—the lack of an inner gyroscope, of a sense of balance, of peripheral perception. I mean, I’m sailing a ship on stormy seas on the brightest of days.”
The untitled Michael J. Fox documentary does not yet have a release date.
