Coreyography: A Memoir Page 8
* * *
It was all over a spelling test.
I was living with my grandparents, which was certainly better than living with my mother. My grandmother, after all, was a saint. And my grandfather, though still a terrifying figure, had never chased me around, naked, with a window stopper, had never actually beaten me bloody. In fact, the angriest I had ever seen him was a summer earlier, when he came to pick me up at Uncle Merv’s after my cousin Michael and I had engaged in an epic water fight. “What the hell? Why are you all wet?” he said as soon as I climbed in the car. Then he reached his hand behind my neck and slammed my forehead against the dashboard. It hurt, sure, but I had definitely been through worse.
Even though I wasn’t technically living with my mother, I was still being closely monitored, still being sent to school with those daily report cards. I knew that if I talked out of turn in class, if I laughed, if I so much as burped, or if I came home with a U or an F, I was going to see some trouble.
I no longer remember if my grades had dipped, or if I had brought home a string of poor progress reports, but the pressure to do better had been mounting, and it culminated with my performance on this test. Every night my grandfather was in my ear. “You’ve been screwing around too much lately,” he bellowed. “This is why your mother’s always so upset. If you want to keep treating her like this, I’m not going to let you stay in this house. So you had better take your schoolwork seriously. If you don’t get this right, I’m going to beat the living hell out of you.”
I didn’t know what “beat the hell out of me” might look like, but I was picturing something biblical. I had to pass that test. The ridiculous part is that I was usually great at spelling. But I was so nervous, so completely consumed with dread, I couldn’t focus. I could barely even sleep.
I had tried praying, down on my knees with my hands clasped firmly under my chin but, according to my grandfather, that was the wrong way to do it. “Jews don’t get down on our knees!” he hollered. “That’s for goyim. That’s what the schvartzes do!”
I hated that. I was fairly certain that I could have my God any way I wanted Him. And then, finally, I just gave up. This is ridiculous, I thought. I can’t live in fear like this! I’m just going to kill myself.
I went rooting around my grandmother’s medicine cabinet. I found a giant bottle of Bayer aspirin, one of those vintage brown bottles with the 1950s-style label and—for some reason—decided to chew them, the entire bottle of pills. And then I went to bed.
Two hours later, I was sicker than I had ever been in my life. I woke up vomiting, violently, over and over again. I could tell that my breathing was slow and shallow. When my grandmother found me, pale and sweating and puking, she immediately started poking around on my stomach. Like any respectable Jewish grandmother, Boobie was something of a hypochondriac. All the Goldsteins are, really. Everyone in that family was usually suffering from some kind of mysterious ailment or trying to diagnose one another. The scary part is that they were usually right.
Boobie, however, was especially obsessed with the appendix. For some reason, when she was a younger woman, everyone around her started dropping like flies, all victims of a sudden, unexplained rupture. So whenever I had a stomachache she feared it was my appendix. If I fell and bumped by head, she still had to check my appendix. So there I was, lying on the floor of her bathroom, probably dying, while she frantically jabbed her fingers in my abdomen. “Does this hurt?” she yelled, as if my hearing had been afflicted. “How about this? What about now?”
I didn’t want to tell her that I had swallowed a bottle of pills. But, by then, I had also decided that I definitely did not want to die. The thing about killing yourself is, in that moment of incomprehensible, utter despair, it seems like a good idea. Once you’ve done it, though, once you’ve actually made the decision to go through with it, you immediately start to wish that you hadn’t. It is a natural instinct to save your own life. Lying on the floor of that bathroom, I started to panic. I didn’t want to die. So, when she pushed on my stomach again and asked me if it hurt, this time I said yes.
“It does?”
I nodded.
“Well, if it’s right here, then it’s your appendix. Is this worse?” She pushed into my stomach again.
“Yes, Boobie. It’s worse,” I groaned. “It’s definitely my appendix.” I would gladly have told her that I was suffering from an acute case of smallpox if that’s what she needed to hear. I just wanted to get to a damn emergency room.
But I didn’t tell anyone at the hospital what I had done, either. I was too ashamed. I figured all the doctors and nurses fluttering around me were brilliant, surely they would be able to figure out what was wrong. I remember a doctor coming in and asking where it hurt. I just repeated everything I had already told my grandmother.
“Do you feel like it’s your appendix?” he asked.
“Oh, yeah, it’s my appendix all right.”
“Well then,” he said, “I guess we better get that taken out.”
So, that’s exactly what they did. I had my appendix removed, unnecessarily, by the good doctors at Tarzana Medical Center. But my five-day stay in the hospital proved to be a relaxing kind of vacation—three meals a day, unlimited ice cream, and all the movies I could watch on my very own television.
* * *
I knew that The Goonies would change my life. I had envisioned it. I believe, very heartily, in the power of positive thinking. Call it The Secret if you want, or the law of attraction, but I believed in putting good things out into the universe and getting good things back, despite what the bulk of my life had looked like up until that point. Maybe that’s how I survived it all.
Plus, I had read the script. Whenever you read something—a novel, a play—you naturally start to envision the characters in your head, you see them in your minds’ eye. When I read movie scripts, I do that, too, except I don’t just envision the characters, I mentally cast all the roles. (I’ve actually been right on quite a few occasions—the very actors I had envisioned wound up playing those same parts.) But when I read The Goonies script, the entire world opened up to me. I could picture us riding our bikes along the foggy coastline of Oregon. I imagined us traversing the dank and crumbling caves underneath the abandoned restaurant where the Fratellis were hiding out. I could see One-Eyed Willie’s pirate ship. I knew, even before that first day of filming, that this would be something special. And The Goonies couldn’t have come at a more appropriate time; in real life I felt like a reject; now I was making a movie about a group of awkward kids who didn’t fit in.
I immediately fell in love with the coastal town of Astoria, Oregon, an antithesis of sorts to the hustle and bustle of L.A. Astoria is perennially muggy and rainy and overcast, and very much a “fish town” (which is what, in those days, I called it). Fishing communities have their own distinct rhythm; they tend to be insular and isolated, outsiders are often met with wariness and suspicion. Once you’re “in,” however, these are some of the warmest, most generous people on the planet.
Getting “in” in Astoria can be attributed to the brilliance of the Goonies production team, who had intuited that an uninvited Hollywood film crew, descending on a tiny town for four long weeks (by the time we were done, it ended up being closer to nine), might not be something about which the locals were excited. So, they printed buttons and T-shirts and ball caps with the words “I’m a Goonie” or “I [heart] Goonies” and stocked them in the town gift shops, a sort of subliminal way of ingratiating ourselves, of subtly rooting ourselves in their culture. And in a lot of ways, that town, to all of us, became like home. For nearly three months, we walked their streets, watched movies in their theater, ate in their restaurants, and shopped in their stores. We rode our bikes down Main Street, past the pizza parlor where we sometimes ate as a cast (where John Matuszak, who played Sloth, once got so drunk that he peed in the bathroom sink), or played games in and around the Walsh house, which was an actual home in Astoria,
as opposed to a façade or a set. In fact, the only place we weren’t welcome was inside Richard Donner’s trailer.
On a kid-centered movie like The Goonies, it’s common for the director to become your personal hero, a sort of father figure. Which is exactly how we had all grown to feel about Dick. He never had children; I’ve often felt as though the kids he worked with became like kids of his own. And despite his penchant for yelling, he was really just a big softie. So it was natural that we all wanted to spend time with him. But we were not allowed—under any circumstances—to bother him when he was in that trailer. It was a monstrous box of a thing with heavily tinted windows; he usually kept it parked at the bottom of a giant hill just below the Walsh home. (There’s a scene in the beginning of the movie, a panoramic shot of Mikey staring out at the Goon Docks from the rickety front porch. If you pay attention, you can see Dick’s Winnebago, tucked behind the bushes in the corner of your screen.) It’s precisely because we weren’t allowed in Dick’s Winnebago that it became a wonderful mystery. What did they do in there? What was so private and secret that we couldn’t be a part of? But we were forbidden even from hanging around outside. We were to leave the trailer alone. Whenever Dick was in the trailer, we were supposed to disappear. So we did.
* * *
Part of the magic of The Goonies, for me, was spending so much time among kids my own age. (Though, at sixteen, Josh Brolin was a few years older than the rest of the cast; most of his time off-screen was spent with Kerri Green, and most of Kerri Green’s downtime was spent with Josh Brolin. And Martha Plimpton, the quintessential New York actress—both a graduate of the Professional Children’s School in Manhattan and the daughter of two well-known stars—was full of East Coast bravado; we famously didn’t get along, and she spent a lot of time in her own world, with her mother. So that left me, Sean Astin, Jeff Cohen, and Ke Huy Quan, a sort of rag-tag Four Musketeers.)
One thing about Sean Astin, which has never changed, he’s a mile-a-minute kind of guy. He’s laser-focused, and once he gets an idea in his head, it’s nearly impossible to convince him otherwise. He’d be motor-mouthing on set about something—Guys! You have to listen to me! This is the way it’s supposed to be! Trustme! Doitlikethis!—and I would look at him and say, “You definitely should have been Mouth.” The kid’s a closer. If the acting thing hadn’t worked out, he would have made an excellent defense attorney. I say that with great respect; out of the entire cast, we’re the only ones who have remained great friends. As I write this, we’re actually at work on a new project. I believe it’s the first time that any two Goonies alums have collaborated in more than twenty-five years.
Meanwhile, Jeff Cohen, otherwise known as Chunk, quickly became known for his hat collection. Every day he wore a different outrageous hat to set. He had one with a giant moose head, another with a giant pair of hands poking out of the top; when you pulled the strings, the hands would clap. It was a gimmick a day with that kid. But I liked him, which made the fact that my job was to bully him, to poke fun at his weight, to goad him into the “truffle shuffle,” one of the most awkward and uncomfortable parts of filming.
In many ways, Mouth was just the first in a series of roles in which I played, well, a bit of an asshole. Here’s this loudmouth, smart alec, joke-cracking, wise-ass kid; he certainly wasn’t what you would call nice. I followed that up by playing a bitter, abused boy in Stand by Me. In The Lost Boys, I became a sort of rambunctious Rambo, and in License to Drive I am, again, the wise-cracking loudmouth. It would be years before I realized that people were starting to perceive me that way, like so many of the characters I once played.
CHAPTER 7
What a lot of people don’t realize about The Goonies is that Richard Donner picked Steven Spielberg as his second unit director shortly after filming began in Oregon in the fall of 1984. A second unit director is typically responsible for shooting “pickups” (panoramic views, background shots, or “establishing” shots of the film’s setting and location), as well as special effects and action sequences, which might be filmed on a closed soundstage, rather than on location, or with stuntmen instead of the principal cast. But when you’re making a movie as sweeping and epic as The Goonies—with 1984 technology, no less—second unit directing becomes a fairly massive job. That probably wasn’t such a bad thing, because even after wrapping in Oregon (roughly six weeks or so behind schedule), we still had a ton of work to do.
We reconvened at Warner Brothers in Burbank to shoot the remainder of the film—the underground sequences, the pirate ship reveal, and the battle with the evil Fratellis—on a closed soundstage; four of them, actually. Two of those four, stages 15 and 16, are the biggest soundstages on the entire Warner Brothers lot. Generally speaking, Steven would utilize two of the four, working on stunts and inserts and pickups, while Dick was running the others. This meant they were directing concurrently; Dick might be shooting with me on stage 16 at the exact time that Steven was working with my stunt double over on 12. So there were often three or four different versions of Mouth (and all the other principle characters) running around on set—the real me; the stunt version of me, same height, same build, same clothes; and the stand-in version of me. It was all very Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
It wasn’t until we started shooting in Los Angeles that the sheer size of this film began to sink in. For one thing, what was supposed to have been a three-month shooting schedule had ballooned to nearly six months. For another, everybody who was anybody was stopping by to check out the set—that’s when you know you’re involved in a giant project. Harrison Ford, fresh off the massive success of Indiana Jones, was one of the first. We lead him through the caves under the Fratellis’ restaurant, over the log bridge and past the waterfall, and I just kept thinking, this is absolutely unreal. We were taking Indiana Jones—Indiana Jones!—on a tour of what was, essentially, a kid-friendly version of his blockbuster film. After that came a string of random celebrity appearances. Dan Aykroyd stopped by and so did Cyndi Lauper; she wound up performing “The Goonies ‘R’ Good Enough,” the title song on the Goonies soundtrack.
The Goonies was filmed at a time when music videos were not only a new and exciting medium for the music industry, but also an excellent new way to market a movie. (Pair some young, good-looking actors with a pop star or two, shoot a video and—boom!—smash success.) That was virtually unheard of before MTV debuted in the summer of 1981; very few television programs dedicated to music even existed. Casey Kasem’s America’s Top 10, a spin-off of his popular radio show American Top 40, comes to mind. So does Solid Gold. Once MTV launched, however, there was suddenly an entire channel dedicated completely and solely to music. Yet, in the early days of the network, there weren’t nearly enough music videos in existence to fill up twenty-four-hours of airtime, so they pretty much played the same songs over and over and over—like “Video Killed the Radio Star,” Billy Idol’s “White Wedding,” and “Thriller” by Michael Jackson.
Of course, I knew who Michael Jackson was even before the launch of MTV. Sort of. I had heard “Rock with You” and “Don’t Stop ’Til You Get Enough,” though at the time I hadn’t realized they were by the same person. Actually, I hadn’t even realized they were by a man. The Michael Jackson of the late 1970s, I didn’t really get. But the Michael Jackson I watched—mouth agape, standing stock-still in the middle of my grandparents’ living room—in May 1983, that was a guy I wanted to know more about.
Motown 25: Yesterday, Today, and Forever, the concert at which Jackson debuted his now legendary dance moves, is one of those iconic moments in history, like the moon landing or the day President Kennedy was shot; everyone knows exactly where they were when it happened. It is etched in my memory, indelibly printed on the film reel of my mind. That jheri curl! The glittery glove! The moonwalk! I had never seen anything like it. Even my grandfather, admittedly something of a racist (throughout my entire childhood, he referred to black people as schvartzes), was impressed. And that performance
marked the birth of an infatuation for me just as it did for so many others. I immediately went out and bought the album; it was the first LP I purchased with my own money. Not long after that came the debut of “Thriller,” the greatest music video of all time. Fourteen minutes of pure magic directed by none other than the great John Landis.
The “Thriller” campaign, of course, was monstrous, and a then-burgeoning MTV was playing it round the clock. So every hour—on the hour—I would drop what I was doing and jump in front of the television. I studied that video until I had learned every beat, every breath, every bit of dialogue and, of course, every single second of that dance.
My mother had enrolled me in a dance class, briefly, back when I was seven. It was a tap class, a lot of “shuffle, heel” and “kick, ball, change.” I spent the majority of the time staring at the wall or looking at my feet. When I emerged, my mother took one look at me and shook her head. “God, you must be the most uncoordinated kid in the world,” she said. It was just like being made to sing “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head” during all those auditions—I couldn’t carry a tune. Clearly, I wasn’t much of a dancer, either.
But there was something about watching Michael, the way he moved, so smooth, so fluid, as if sliding across the ice; I guess I sort of got the fever. Because suddenly, I could dance. Just like Michael Jackson. Not that I was prepared to show anybody (not yet at least). But locked in my room, practicing the moonwalk in front of the mirror, I felt good about myself. I had this newfound self-confidence. That’s part of the magic of Michael. Somehow, just by striking a pose, just hearing that opening drumbeat of “Billie Jean,” he made you feel better about yourself.