Coreyography: A Memoir (14 page)

He looked down at his pants. “These
are
jeans.”

“Oh,” I said, skeptical. “Is it okay if they get dirty?”

“Sure!”

That’s around the time I noticed he had brought along Emmanuel Lewis. Everything seemed to be working just as I had planned—I was being introduced to his other underage friends. I was becoming, finally, a part of Michael Jackson’s inner circle.

*   *   *

In the final
weeks of filming, Jeff Cohen showed up to set in this ridiculous ensemble; a Hawaiian shirt and that hat with the giant clapping hands, inside of which was a little piece of paper. On it was written: “Maui or Bust.”

Everybody knew that Richard Donner had a vacation home in Hawaii. Everyone also knew that he was positively desperate to be in it. Dick was a kind, sweet, and caring man. He loved us like his own. But after nearly six months of filming with a cast of rambunctious kids, we were starting to drive him a little nuts. For much of those final weeks, he stomped around set, exhausted, repeating the same refrain: “Oh, God, I can’t wait for this to be over. I can’t wait to get away from these brats. I just want to get to Maui. I can’t wait until I never have to see these kids again!” Of course, we all knew that Dick was only joking. Sort of.

When Spielberg saw Jeff’s little note, however, he got a great idea for a practical joke. What if, after finally escaping all these kids and boarding a plane bound for Maui, Dick walked through the doors to his vacation home to find the entire
Goonies
cast waiting patiently in the middle of his living room? A memo was quickly circulated (to everyone, of course, except Dick), outlining plans for what would become one of the most talked-about wrap parties in Hollywood, as well as one of the most elaborate jokes in the history of filmmaking. Each of us was given two tickets; enough for ourselves and a guest.

Boobie was the one who stayed with me in Astoria (she’s actually in the final sequence of the film, when the Goonies wash up on the beaches of Oregon), and my grandfather usually drove me to set during the time we spent filming in L.A. My mother, however, was not about to let one of them wind up with a free vacation. My grandparents had done all the work, but my mother wanted the reward. She was supposed to swing by and pick me up on the morning of the flight. She was supposed to be there by 7:30.

She wasn’t. This wasn’t exactly surprising. She was always late; I was generally the last one picked up at school, used to being stranded there, in fact, for hours. But this was different. We could not miss that plane.

At 8:00
A.M.
, I begged my grandparents to go inside and call her. It was another thirty minutes before I caught sight of her BMW careening around the corner, kicking up a cloud of dust before screeching to a halt at the curb. Our plane was scheduled to take off in less than an hour.

“Get in the car, Corey.” I opened the passenger door, but what I saw stopped me cold. She was pale as a ghost. Mascara was tracked down her cheeks. Her eyes were only half open. I had never seen her like this.

“Mom, we’re not going to make it. We’re going to miss the plane.”

“It’s fine! Just get in the fucking car!”

I got in, slumped in my seat, and crossed my arms against my chest. “You didn’t even have to come,” I said under my breath. “This was supposed to be for
me.
”

She slammed on the gas and we jerked forward. “Stop being so fucking dramatic.”

How we made it to the airport in one piece I do not know.

When we got to the airport, I left my mom at the curb. She hollered after me to “hold the plane,” but as I ran through the main terminal, I realized I had only flown on small commuter planes; I had never been to an airport the size of LAX. I had no idea how to read the giant board—arriving flights, departing flights, boarding times, and tickets and gates. That’s when I realized they were paging me over the loudspeaker: “Corey Feldman, please report to gate 23. Your party is waiting.”

Someone must have pointed me toward the gate, but I made it just in time to watch the plane pull back from the jet bridge. It was like a scene from a bad Lifetime movie; I pressed my face against the glass, tears streaming down my cheeks, and watched that plane take off with all the Goonies on board. Everyone except me.

There is video footage somewhere out there (which I would actually love to see), of Richard Donner walking in his home and being bombarded by the kids in the cast. He was, of course, a good sport about the whole thing. But, after threatening to kill Steven Spielberg, he had looked around and said, “Wait a minute. Where’s that Mouth kid?”

We did, eventually, make it to Maui. I had called Steven’s office, explained that my mom had been late picking me up and that we had missed the plane. The folks at Amblin were wonderful; they managed to get us on a later flight. But we had missed the big surprise. I never forgave her for that.

CHAPTER 9

The first cut of
The Goonies
was considerably longer than the standard two hours. That was only part of the problem. Immediately after Dick screened it, he realized he was going to have to re-record almost every line of dialogue in the movie. With seven kids running through every scene, yelling, ad libbing, and hamming it up for the camera, the soundtrack sounded like a muddy, slow-moving wall of sound. It was a tedious process, having each of us come in and create an individual audio track, and it lasted for something like seven weeks, an unheard of amount of time for ADR.

It was during those weeks in Studio City, sometime in the winter of 1984, that I got a call to audition for a new film based on a novella by Stephen King.
The Body
was a coming-of-age story about four young boys who, in the summer of 1959, set out from their hometown of Castle Rock to locate the body of a local boy who’d gone missing that spring. I was reading for the role of Teddy Duchamp.

I walked into a giant casting call—there must have been hundreds upon hundreds of kids there—but Rob Reiner would later tell a reporter from the
Daily Telegraph
that I was the only one who could make Teddy’s pain seem believable. Rob Reiner saw the pain in my eyes. I got the job.

*   *   *

So, I was
back in Oregon.

This time we were filming in the tiny town of Brownsville, about thirty miles north of Eugene, in order to take advantage of the rainy, overcast climate of the Pacific Northwest; the producers had envisioned making a dark and grainy film. What they got were three-straight months of blistering sun and cloudless skies. We touched down in Oregon in the middle of a record-breaking heat wave. (Several weeks into filming, all four of us started suffering from blistering sunburns, especially on the backs of our bare necks; we had all cropped our hair in short styles reminiscent of the 1950s. Every five minutes or so, members of the crew would douse us in washcloths soaked in Sea Breeze; it’s an astringent, but it’s known for its cooling effect.) It was a long, hot summer, but it would be one of the best of my life.

I no longer remember, however, why my mother volunteered to act as my on-set guardian. It was a ridiculous arrangement; she certainly wasn’t mentally or physically up for it. Which is probably why, three or four days into rehearsals, she left without any real explanation. In her place she hired another set-sitter, but this time she chose a local woman, someone neither she nor I had ever laid eyes on, let alone worked with before. Lucky for me, Kathy was lovely. She had a son, Pete, who was about my age, busy working on a play for a local theater. I imagine that’s why Kathy took the job at all; in order to learn about the industry from the inside out.

*   *   *

None of us
could have known that the picture we were making would become an instant classic, a model from which many other coming-of-age films were made. At the time, Rob Reiner was still an up-and-coming director—he’d only made two movies,
This is Spinal Tap
and
The Sure Thing
—and this was a small, independent production. We didn’t even know if anyone would actually see it. (Which turned out to be a well-founded concern: halfway through filming, the studio found itself on the verge of folding. Short on cash and in danger of having to shut down his entire production, Rob threw together a rough-cut and shipped it off to Columbia Pictures. Columbia came on board and bankrolled the rest of the film, but only after Rob agreed to change the title. That’s when
The Body
became, instead,
Stand by Me
.)

The first few weeks in Oregon were devoted to a series of acting exercises. One was called “Mirror,” where two actors sit directly across from each other and attempt to mimic their partner’s movements, expressions, and gestures. Another was an exercise in escalating volume; one actor would say some bit of dialogue, the other would repeat that a little louder; the first would say it again a little louder than that, and so on. These are all traditional games employed in acting workshops across the country; graduates of professional schools, the Stella Adlers of the world, would have recognized them at once. For me, they were totally alien. I had met with acting coaches from time to time, mostly to help prepare readings, but I had never been to a proper class. I would have been intimidated, but with my mother out of the picture, feeling weightless and free, I was perfectly happy to go along with whatever Rob wanted. I would have happily stood on my head had he asked.

The goal of these games, of course, is to create a kind of camaraderie among the actors. We were, after all, pretending to be four boys who had grown up together in a small town; it was important that we knew one another’s characters inside and out, so that if someone came up with a bit of dialogue or some gesture on the fly, the rest of us would intuitively know the correct way to respond. By the time we began shooting, we felt secure with one another, if not entirely sure of ourselves.

I always thought I was given the easiest role in
Stand by Me
. I was, of course, playing an abused child who, at twelve or thirteen, had already had one hell of a life. Teddy’s father, in fact, had once held Teddy’s ear to the stove, practically burning it off, leaving him physically deformed. That actually sounded like something that could have happened in my house, so it didn’t seem like it would be much of a stretch. It was cathartic, too, to portray some of the insanity I had lived through. During those initial weeks of filming, Rob and I had long talks about Teddy’s nature, about all the reasons he was so angry. “You’ve got to realize,” he once told me, “Teddy’s not a bad kid. It’s not his fault his dad is crazy, but he is. So Teddy is bitter. He’s hurt. All of that has to come across in your character.” I’d like to think that it did.

The campfire scene is probably one of the most famous in the entire movie, even if it wasn’t filmed at a campfire at all (but rather a fake campfire, constructed on a soundstage). It is, however, the scene in which Jerry O’Connell’s character utters the famous line: “If I could only have one food for the rest of my life? That’s easy: Pez. Cherry-flavored Pez. No question about it.” Most of that now iconic dialogue—the debate about whether Goofy was, in fact, a dog; the obsession with the rapidly increasing size of Annette Funicello’s breasts—was not actually in the original script. Rob and Bruce, one of the screenwriters, thought the most authentic way to reference 1950s zeitgeist would be to incorporate it all in casual conversation. Those lines were written in at the very last minute, and we had to learn it all pretty much on the spot.

Immediately following that sequence—after we’ve decided to take turns standing guard against coyotes or wild dogs or,
maybe,
the ghost of Ray Brower—comes Wil Wheaton and River Phoenix’s big emotional scene: River confesses that he did, in fact, steal the milk money, that he wishes he could “go somewhere” where no one knows who he is. I remember sitting back and watching them run through their lines. It would become River’s breakout moment, but he was nervous. We all felt the pressure to perform, to deliver for Rob and the good of the film; but to do that, River was going to have to cry.

The first run-through was sort of stale. Rob spoke to Wil and River privately for a bit; they tried again, but it still wasn’t there. They ran through that scene three, four, maybe five times, and it just wasn’t clicking. Rob decided to close down the set. “Everybody out,” he said. “I want to talk to the actors alone.”

I don’t know what Rob said to River. I’m not in this particular scene—Jerry and I are supposed to be sleeping by the fire—but I cracked an eye open to watch.

River nailed it. I got choked up just watching him. At the same time, I couldn’t help feeling a bit jealous. Because
my
chance to knock everyone’s socks off had come a few weeks earlier, and I was pretty sure I had blown it.

My big scene—there are two of them really—happens in the junkyard, when Milo Pressman chases us out and starts calling my dad a “loonie.”

“Now, when this guy starts talking about your dad,” Rob explained, “it’s
really
got to piss you off.”

I couldn’t connect with that at all. In the movie, my dad’s an asshole. He abused me. He burned my ear off, for Christ’s sake. “Why would I care so much if the junkyard guy calls him a ‘loonie’?” I asked.

“That’s true,” Rob said. “Your dad’s an asshole. But he’s also your father, and you love him. It’s just the way it is. He may be the worst father in the world, but he still puts food on the table. Maybe it’s the only way he knows to show you love, but at least you know he loves you, even in some kind of fucked-up, dysfunctional way. So when this guy starts trash-talking your dad, you have to go through the roof. I don’t care what you say. I don’t care if you come up with your own line. But I need to see that rage.”

I had never really experienced rage before. Fear, yes. Pain, certainly. Anger, even, but not rage. My emotions were mostly rumbling under the surface, sort of a steady simmer; I had never really allowed myself to explode. I didn’t know what rage was supposed to look like. So, I did the only thing I knew to do. I borrowed a line. My first official contribution to a screenplay—“I’m gonna rip your head off and shit down your neck”—was cribbed from a movie called
Doctor Detroit,
in which Dan Aykroyd plays a college professor posing as a pimp.