Coreyography: A Memoir Read online

  * * *

  E.T. still had a solid six months left of preproduction, so I knew it would be awhile before things got rolling. In the interim, I auditioned for a show called Madame’s Place, a sitcom featuring the bawdy, double-entendre-laced comedy of “Madame,” a lifelike puppet.

  Madame’s Place was unusual in that it was a first-run syndication show, meaning that it was scheduled to air on a lot of different channels (rather than owned—and aired—by only one network), five days a week. The first order was, therefore, enormous, somewhere between fifty and a hundred episodes, way more than the standard thirteen. This would guarantee a steady income, and my family needed the money. But I was worried that I’d be tied down to a silly television show when the call for E.T. eventually came. “Go in on everything,” my mother told me. “Better to get the offer and turn it down than to not get the offer at all.”

  I did get an offer, though it was for less money than I had been making. My mother made me take the part anyway. So, I became Buzzy, Madame’s nosy next-door neighbor.

  Working with Madame—to my surprise and utter delight—was a lot like working with a major Hollywood movie star. Her personality was so big; I could be doing a scene and completely forget that I was talking to a puppet, that she wasn’t actually real. Her puppeteer, Wayland Flowers (who was already famous for his appearances alongside Madame on Hollywood Squares, Laugh-In, and Solid Gold), made her seem larger than life. And Wayland, I quickly realized, was one of the sweetest men I had ever met. On breaks during filming he would invite me back to his dressing room and show me how he operated the sticks to move Madame’s hands and head, how he transformed his own voice to create something entirely new. At home I had a little stuffed monkey with Velcro hands and feet. It reminded me of Madame, so one day I decided to bring it in to show off to my new friend.

  “Can I borrow that?” he asked me.

  A few days later, he brought it back to set, completely restyled to look like one of his puppets, complete with the little sticks to move the monkey’s hands and feet.

  “I gave him an upgrade,” Wayland said when he showed me. “Now he works just like Madame.”

  I was elated. The great Wayland Flowers had made me a puppet. But when I showed it to my mother, she harrumphed.

  “Wayland Flowers is gay,” she told me.

  I didn’t know what that meant, of course, but it wouldn’t really have mattered if I did. Practically no one in the entertainment industry was “out” back in the early ’80s.

  “How do you know he’s gay?” I asked.

  “Trust me,” she said. “I just know.”

  Wayland was the first in a series of older men in the industry to take me under his wing. The second was an actor named Joe Penny, who guest-starred with me in an episode of Lottery!, a short-lived show about two guys who travel the country presenting lottery winnings to strangers and watching how the money changes their lives. I played a troubled kid (a role I was starting to get cast in a lot), and I remember that at the end of filming, Joe Penny gave me his phone number. “Call me anytime,” he told me, “if you ever want to catch a ball game.”

  Joe and I spoke on the phone several times over the next few months. He gave me career advice. We talked about what kinds of roles I might take. He was someone I could actually trust. I didn’t have many people like that in my life.

  My grandparents, however, were not impressed.

  “Why is this grown man giving you his number?” my grandmother asked me, when she caught me up late, talking on the phone. “It’s not normal, Corey. It doesn’t make any sense.”

  “Joe just wants to be my friend,” I told her. “This is how Hollywood works. The older guys reach out to the kids.” That was how I saw it and, eventually, that’s how my family saw it, too. The more adult males I befriended, the less strange it started to seem.

  * * *

  As production on Madame’s Place dragged on, I started to become more and more concerned about E.T. I hadn’t heard a peep in months—not from my agent, not from the casting director, not from MGM, not from anyone. Nada. And then finally, on a rainy, otherwise uneventful afternoon, Steven called me at home.

  “Hey, Corey,” he said. “How ya doin’?”

  “When are we getting started?” I blurted out. “I’ve been waiting and waiting!”

  I could hear Steven breathing on the other end of the line and, immediately, my heart sank. I could already tell, this was not going to be the call I had been hoping for.

  “Unfortunately,” he continued, “I have some sad news. As you know, we’ve been working on rewrites, and the last one we did was major. It was an overhaul. Bottom line: your character has been cut down to nothing. If you want one of the small parts, one of the friends, you’re welcome to it. But I think you’re a leading role kind of guy. My advice to you is to wait for the next one.”

  “What’s the next one?” I asked.

  “Well, I don’t know yet. But I give you my word, Corey. Whatever it is, you’ll be in it.”

  Losing E.T. was agony. When it opened, in the summer of 1982, it became another instant record-smashing blockbuster as well as a critical darling, and—by the following year—the highest grossing film of all time. Billboards lined the boulevards of southern L.A., urging you to become “part of the experience.” Reese’s Pieces was everyone’s new favorite snack (and in fact, sales of the candies tripled within two weeks of the film’s debut). When my mother and I finally managed to snag tickets to a showing at the Cinerama Dome in Hollywood—nearly a month after E.T. premiered—there was still a line of people snaked around the building.

  I was old enough by then to understand the movie business, that things changed and it wasn’t anyone’s fault, that Steven hadn’t cut the character because he didn’t like me, that he certainly didn’t have to break the news by calling me at home. But I was still crushed. It didn’t help that—while driving back and forth to auditions—my mother felt the need to point out every single billboard along Sunset Boulevard, as well as the prostitutes loitering below. My mother thought it was cute for her eleven-year-old son to stick his head out the window and yell, “How much?” as we drove by.

  * * *

  Like any true Southern California kid, I have never seen snow. So I know the first day of filming is going to be magical. We’re shooting in Courthouse Square, a backlot at Universal Studios, the same set that would become Hill Valley’s quaint town square in Back to the Future. Today, it’s been transformed into the fictional setting of Kingston Falls—and it’s beautiful, a perfect representation of small town suburbia, an idyllic depiction of Anywhere, U.S.A., at Christmastime, awash in a sea of twinkling lights. As soon as I step foot on set, however, I realize that the “snow” is nothing more than acrylic paint chips mixed with bits of Styrofoam.

  “Where’s the real stuff?” I ask a grip, kicking the fake snow with the toe of my shoe.

  “This is how we do it in movie world,” he tells me.

  But I know that can’t be right. I quickly rattle off a list of movies in which the main characters go sledding, or make snowmen, or throw snowballs at one another—there’s no way anybody can make a snowball out of this stuff.

  “Sometimes we use Styrofoam,” he says. “Sometimes we use salt. If we’re shooting on a closed set, we might be able to make it. And if we’re filming on location, we might even use the real thing. But when you’re shooting outside in L.A. in the middle of summer, kid, this is how it works.”

  I felt like I was three years old again, discovering that Santa was just a guy in a glove.

  * * *

  True to his word, Steven does cast me in the next one, which turns out to be a film called Gremlins. Joe Dante, an up-and-coming science fiction director, will helm the project; Spielberg will executive produce. The film—about a strange creature called mogwai, and the evil, destructive little monsters it eventually spawns—will become the first to feature the official logo of Amblin Entertainment, a silhouette of E
lliott’s bike flying across the face of the moon.

  “How ya doin, Corey?” Joe Dante said, hustling over to me just moments after I had discovered the fake, movie-set snow. “You’re gonna be great! Now, we just have to get you in this Christmas tree.”

  “What?” I choked out, probably a little too loudly. I had read the scene, of course—it’s the first of the movie, it comes immediately after the opening credits—but I always imagined that I’d be standing behind the tree. I didn’t think I’d actually be in one.

  “Oh, no,” he explained. “We built this costume for you. You’re going to be wearing it.”

  He seemed way too excited about this, in my opinion, because that costume was itchy, scratchy, and weighed a ton. Actually, it sort of sucked.

  The scene is a small one, but it takes nearly two full days to shoot. Sheriff Frank saunters up to the town Christmas tree tent—as “Christmas tree Pete,” I have apparently donned the tree costume as some sort of sales tactic—and accidentally ruffles my branches, not realizing that I’m inside.

  “What the hell is this?” he says, confused. “Pete? What are you doin’ in there?”

  “Don’t ask,” I say, pulling the branches apart to reveal a tiny sliver of my face, before running off to deliver a different tree to Mr. Anderson’s truck.

  When filming finally wraps, Joe Dante calls out to me, “See you next month!”

  “Uh, don’t I have a pretty big role?” I asked him. “What do you mean, ‘see you next month’?”

  “This is a six-month shooting schedule,” he explained. And so began what was, for me, a very unusual acting experience—I’d shoot a few days out of every month and then return to my regular life.

  By the time Gremlins began filming, in the summer of 1983, I was back to living at my grandparents’ house more or less full-time. Mindy stayed behind in Canoga Park, effectively raising my two little brothers. Tom, my mother’s boyfriend, was thankfully gone, but my mother was back to going out every night. Sometimes she didn’t come home until morning. Sometimes she’d up and disappear for a week or more at a time. Since she didn’t want—or couldn’t handle—the responsibility of delivering me to set on time, she agreed that moving out for a spell would be for the best. Of course, she had no trouble cashing my paychecks.

  Though it is the first time in my life that I am living almost fully outside of my mother’s grasp, it is not the first time the subject has been broached. When I was eight, around the time of my parents’ divorce, my uncle Merv—bless that man—pulled me aside one afternoon and locked me in my grandmother’s bathroom.

  “Listen, Corey,” he said, more serious than I had ever seen him. “You need to understand something. You are a very bright young man. You have magic in you. I see it. I don’t want you to listen to the negative things people put in your head.”

  I stared at him, wide-eyed. No one had ever said anything like that to me before.

  “Mary and I have been discussing the possibility of bringing you to live with us,” he continued. “What would you think of that?”

  I was instantly flooded with images of what my new life at Uncle Merv’s house might look like: home-cooked meals, everyone eating around the table. Being tucked in to bed every night. Being hugged. Being told that I was special. I could have kissed him. Instead, I threw my arms around his neck.

  “Thank you, thank you, thank you,” I told him, my shrieks reverberating against the tiles of the tiny bathroom. Merv promised that he would speak with my mother and find a way to make it all work. But then his wife, Mary, was diagnosed with cancer and the issue of me coming to live with them was put on hold indefinitely.

  When Mary died, little more than a year later, something in Merv broke. We sat shiva, the Jewish tradition of mourning a loved one for one whole week. He strung her wedding ring on a chain and wore it around his neck. He wore black. But he never recovered. He became further and further disconnected from the family, recluse-like, and I knew that I would never be invited to stay.

  There was talk, briefly, about going to live with my uncle Murray after that. Of all the Goldstein children, Murray was the most financially successful; he lived in a sprawling home in Encino, complete with an in-ground pool. But Murray was strict and severe—more strict, even, than my grandfather. I wasn’t convinced that living with Uncle Murray would be any better than staying with my mother. So, I settled in with my grandparents and enrolled in a school near their home.

  Public school, to put it mildly, was awkward. I had been in and out my entire life, so maintaining normal friendships with kids my age was virtually impossible. I was small and scrawny and, as my experience on The Bad News Bears could attest, decidedly not an athlete. Add to this the fact that I was an actor—something that, even this close to Hollywood, was met with suspicion, a raised eyebrow, and quite a bit of teasing—and it’s no wonder that by age twelve, I had officially and irreconcilably been labeled an outcast. I did not fit in with the effortlessly cool surfers and stoners, the Valley preppies, or the Mexican and black students, who were bused in from east L.A. Girls were a complete mystery. Though I had started to notice them, they were definitely not interested in me.

  I confided in my cousin Michael. While I had been busy acting alongside a life-size puppet on Madame’s Place, he had somehow managed to get himself an actual, honest-to-God girlfriend. They had even made out. I was astounded at his prowess. “How’d you do it?” I asked him. I could barely get a girl to look at me, let alone agree to lock lips.

  “The best way is to make a game out of it.”

  “What do you mean, a game?”

  “You know, like ‘spin the bottle’ or ‘seven minutes in heaven.’”

  I did not know, but I was excited to find out. “Let’s do it!” Within minutes, Michael had arranged for two girls from school to come over and “hang out.” Both Amanda and Leighann, he informed me, were excellent kissers.

  Before the girls arrived, Michael and I decided to play a quick game of “rock, paper, scissors” to determine who would go with who. I was desperate to be with Amanda—the doe-eyed brunette with a face full of freckles—but Michael’s paper covered my rock. Amanda would go with Michael, while I would be stuck with Leighann. She was a sweet girl, and we did share one passionless peck, but most of that afternoon we spent just talking. When we finally went looking for Michael and Amanda, however, they were full-on making out in the closet.

  Back at school, still reeling from the fact that Amanda was clearly more into my cousin than me, I decided to rethink things with Leighann. I wasn’t even sure if I liked her, but I felt like a shoo-in. Better to start off with a sure thing, I thought, and then graduate to a girl like Amanda once I had some experience under my belt. That day in class, I wrote Leighann a little note: “Will you go out with me?” She wrote back quickly, a simple one-word response.

  “No?” I shouted—out loud—as soon as I read it. Then I cowered in my seat while everyone turned around to stare. I spent most of the rest of that day in a haze, completely and totally crushed, until after the last bell rang and Leighann asked me to go for a walk.

  “As you know,” she stated, oddly professorial about the whole thing, “you don’t have a very good reputation around here. You’re not really one of the ‘cool kids.’”

  I stared at her.

  “But I like you. I wouldn’t mind being your girlfriend.… We just can’t tell anybody. As long as it stays our secret—and you don’t tell anybody, ever—then I’ll go with you.”

  That was good enough for me.

  * * *

  I’m more comfortable, more at home, back on the set of Gremlins. Joe Dante, who has a reputation for working with the same actors on project after project, has managed to create a little family out of the cast. Zach Galligan, who plays the lead role of Billy Peltzer, and I play arcade games like Food Fight and Paperboy during breaks in filming. (In fact, Zach likes Food Fight so much that he asks Steven Spielberg to relocate the game from the offices
of Amblin Entertainment right to the Gremlins set. Amblin Entertainment, it turns out, is filled with arcade games; Steven is also a fan of them.) And Joe becomes another in a long list of substitute fathers. He is something of a cinefile, a huge fan of the classics. Sometimes, on days off, he invites me along for private screenings of old prints he had pulled from the WB vault, like 1953’s The War of the Worlds. It marks the beginning of a long and treasured friendship and the first of several projects we will work on together.

  I am also captivated by Gizmo, who seems even more real to me than Madame. Gremlins employs a lot of sleight-of-hand tricks to make Gizmo and the other Mogwai believable on screen. When Billy first meets Gizmo, for example, the puppet he pulls from the gift box is an inanimate, stuffed puppet. The Gizmo he cradles in his arms is a moving, mechanical device. And the Gizmo that pops out of the gift box is a different animal all together (if you’ll excuse the pun). All of this means we’re often working with multiple puppets at once, as many as three or four different Gizmos for one, seemingly simple scene.

  I quickly befriend the men of the special-effects crew—the inner-workings of the mogwai remind me of the days when I would pull apart my superhero action figures—and they patiently explain to me how everything works. Some Gizmos are mechanical, their heads, eyes, and arms animated by remote control. Some are hydraulic, fixed to the surface on which they appear (a counter, a desk, etc.), but open at the bottom; a jumble of cords passes beneath the stage to a crew of four or five different men, all lying on their stomachs, staring at a tiny monitor, controlling Gizmo’s movements.

  One day I strolled over to the special effects area. There were five or six different puppets strewn across the table—a stuffed puppet, a mechanical puppet, several versions of Stripe and the green monsters—and, suddenly, I had an idea.