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 k
nows 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.
Immediately after the confrontation with Pressman comes my big emotional breakdown. I remember thinking, This is it! This is my moment! I’ve really got to deliver. I was going to have to cry on cue. I thought of every bad thing that had ever happened to me, all the times my mother had told me she hated me or that she wanted me dead, but I still had to wet my eyes with a little spit. I still had to let someone on the production team blow menthol vapor in my eyes until I could produce my own tears. So in the end, it looked like I was crying, but I wasn’t.
Weeks later, as I sat there watching River crying by the campfire, tears and snot streaming down his face, I realized just how much I had dropped the ball. River had really pulled it out and I hadn’t. I was so disappointed in myself.
People don’t often realize just how difficult it is, especially for a child, to dredge up all those emotions. Because when the scene is over, they don’t just go away. There are plenty of people who’ve spent a hell of a lot of time and money in psychotherapy, learning how to move beyond old injuries or resentments. As an actor, though, you’re trying to mine your past for memories, to bring all those old fears and hurts to the surface and use them in a scene. But when it’s over, you don’t know what to do with all those feelings, so you end up stuffing them down even further and walking around feeling pretty miserable for the next day or two.
I was miserable for weeks. I was completely convinced that everyone’s work far surpassed mine. I was just shattered that River had managed real tears. It wasn’t until years later that I learned the truth.
“They blew that menthol stuff in my eyes, too, man,” he once told me, when we got together for a meal in L.A.
“What?”
“Yeah, someone came over and blew in my eyes until I started to cry.”
“But it looked so real. So believable.” I was stunned.
“Well, the emotions were real,” he said. “But I still needed some help with the tears.”
* * *
Wil Wheaton once explained—in an interview with NPR—what he thought was the key to Stand by Me’s success:
Rob Reiner found four young boys who basically were the characters we played. I was awkward and nerdy and shy and uncomfortable in my own skin and really, really sensitive; River was cool and really smart and passionate and even at that age kind of like a father figure to some of us; Jerry was one of the funniest people I had ever seen in my life, either before or since; and Corey was unbelievably angry and in an incredible amount of pain and had an absolutely terrible relationship with his parents.
Wil was right. In a classic case of life imitating art, or of art imitating life, we were the characters we played during those sweltering three months in Oregon in the summer of 1985, the year that I turned fourteen. It was a summer of firsts for all of us—first kisses and first beers; back at the hotel, River and I smoked marijuana for the first time, and he lost his virginity that year—but all around us was the sense of an ending. Just as it did for Chris, Gordie, Vern, and Teddy, that summer marked the end of our innocence.
I had already known River Phoenix for a few years by the time we began filming together. Every kid in this business—any kid who’s ever been through the riggers of the Hollywood audition process—remembers the hours upon hours spent in waiting rooms at studios and production offices all over town. As for the Phoenix clan—River, Rain, Joaquin, Liberty, and Summer—they always traveled together, packed inside a giant van. So whenever River and I showed up at the same cattle call, we’d usually wind up playing with his brother and sisters or tossing a football around in the parking lot. River was always positive, always up for fun. When we met up in Oregon to work on Stand by Me, we immediately went looking for trouble.
One day, River and I were hanging out with a member of the crew, an assistant to the sound engineer, when we spotted a bong perched high up on a shelf in the closet. River pointed, and we both giggled.
“What is that thing?” I whispered.
“It’s for smoking weed.”
“What does it … do?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “My parents smoke it all the time, but I’ve never tried it.”
“Me either. Maybe we should try it together.”
I still can’t believe we managed to convince that guy from the sound department to let us smoke (though we did pester him, aggressively, with lots of promises and pledges not to “tell anyone”), but he did eventually pull down the bong, pack the bowl, and gave us each our first hit. We coughed like crazy, shouted, “Thanks, dude,” and took off down the carpeted hallways of the hotel. We giggled and laughed, hamming it up for each other, acting as though we were high, until finally I turned to River. “I don’t feel anything.”
He blinked. “I don’t, either.”
“I thought that was the whole point?”
* * *
Of all the boys in the cast, River and I spent the most time together. Wil was a bit of a brainiac; he had something called a computer, a completely alien invention to us at the time. Jerry, meanwhile, was a full two years younger than the rest of us. That’s a huge age gap among a group of fourteen- and fifteen-year-olds. He might as well have been an infant. (Though I do remember sneaking down with him to the indoor pool at the hotel one night and submerging all of the patio furniture. This, of course, was hilarious.)
Around that time, the parents among us—Wil’s, Jerry’s, and River’s, that is; my mother was long gone by then—had had about enough of the mischief, the late nights trolling the hotel hallways, and my generally rowdy behavior. Suddenly, Jerry
was spending nearly all of his time with his parents. Wil went back to his computer. And River’s family rented an old farmhouse twenty miles outside of town. For much of the remainder of that summer, I would be left to my own devices.
* * *
By then, River and I had long since discovered a sort of nightclub on the outskirts of town, set up specifically for underage teens. It was located inside an old, abandoned warehouse; local kids would congregate along the cement ramp outside until the doors opened sometime around 8:00 P.M. It would still have been light outside at that hour, the sky just starting to swirl into the faintest hints of pink and violet and blue. I walked up to the kids on the ramp, alone, and said hello.
“We’re drinking!” one of the local boys yelled, holding up a forty-ounce bottle of beer. “Come drink with us!”
I had never had a drink before; I’m not even entirely sure if River and I had yet had the experience with the sound assistant’s bong. “That’s okay,” I said. “I don’t drink. It’s not really my thing.”
Then I saw a girl, seated halfway down the ramp, swinging her feet beneath her. She was kind of a goth character, with jet-black hair, black lipstick, black fingernails, and a face full of stark white makeup. But underneath all of that, she was beautiful. I knew right then, I would do whatever she wanted.
“You should drink with us,” she said.
I held up my hands, palms up, to show her that they were empty. “I don’t have any beer.”
Several of the kids then pointed down the road, in the direction of the local (unscrupulously run) liquor store, and explained how I might give some older patron some money and allow him to procure me a forty-ouncer. It was surprisingly simple. When I came back, I sat down next to the goth queen, twisted off the cap, and took a sip. It tasted terrible. I screwed up my face in disgust.
“Just rip it back,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
She raised the bottle to her beautiful black lips and took several long, deep swallows.
Coreyography: A Memoir Page 11