Coreyography: A Memoir (10 page)

Forget what I said about the movie-making process being slow and arduous. This was ridiculous. I thought I was a shoo-in, then I was made to come in and read for the part, and I still hadn’t gotten a callback. What was going on here? I called my agent at the time, Iris Burton. She was a legend, and also something of a crazy lady. (She once told
People
magazine: “I hate to say it, but kids are pieces of meat. I’ve never had anything but filet mignon. I’ve never had a hamburger. My kids are the choice meat.” Though she did have a point: at various points in their careers, she represented virtually all the Phoenix kids—River, Joaquin, Rain, and Summer—as well as Henry Thomas; Fred Savage; Kirk and Candace Cameron; Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen; and Kirsten Dunst, to name but a few.) She gave me a slew of assurances—“They definitely want you”; “You’re definitely in”; “Everything is going to be fine”—and then two more months went by without another word.

Finally, I got another call from Iris. “There’s been a little hiccup,” she said. “Steven is no longer directing the film.”

My heart sank. This is what I was afraid of. I could practically feel the job slipping through my fingers.

“The new director is open to you,” she continued. “But you’re going to have to go in and reprove yourself to him. And from what I hear”—she lowered her voice a bit, a sure sign that she was about to dish some insider dirt—“he’s tough, kid. Don’t be intimidated.”

I wasn’t intimidated. I was terrified.

*   *   *

The first thing
I noticed about Richard Donner was his size. He’s only actually about six foot two but to me he seemed like a damn giant, just a towering hulk of a guy with a big, booming voice—he was usually,
always,
yelling. The second thing I noticed were the toys. There were models and toys and trinkets on every available surface. I remember, vividly, the skeleton from
Tales from the Crypt
propped up on a chair in the corner (but that must have come later; the show, of which he was an executive producer, didn’t premiere until 1989). And everywhere—stashed on tables and bookcases and sofas and on the desk in the center of his office—were mementos from
Superman,
the film that launched the career of Christopher Reeve.

“You directed
Superman
?” I blurted out. My whole life, up to that point, had been about dressing up in superhero costumes. The fact that Richard Donner had directed what was easily one of my favorite films made him, officially, one of the coolest men I’d ever met. Suddenly, he didn’t seem all that scary. I immediately relaxed.

“I just have one simple question,” he said, reclining a little in his chair. “Tell me why you should play Mouth.”

I took a deep breath. I exhaled. And then I launched into a twenty-minute dissertation, just an absolute onslaught, an avalanche of words. He kept trying to interrupt, trying to get a word in, and I absolutely would not let him. I was like a little used-car salesman. “Whaddaya want? You want character voices? I can do character voices.” Then I’d run through my whole carefully rehearsed repertoire, all those voices and sketches and improv routines I’d honed with my cousin Michael and a tiny cassette recorder. “You want a cool guy? I can be a cool guy.” Then I’d pop the collar on my jacket, pretend to slick back my hair, and do my best impression of The Fonz, the coolest guy I knew. When I finished my sermon and finally shut my mouth, Donner leaned forward a little in his chair.

“Well, I’m not going to argue with you,” he said. “You definitely seem like Mouth to me.”

The Goonies
was the first job that I really, really wanted. I wanted to perform. To deliver. I wanted to redeem myself from that earlier streak of being an obnoxious brat on the set. Plus, I knew that if Steven was producing it, it would be a great movie. And if Richard Donner, the director of
Superman,
was doing it, it would definitely be a great movie. Now I just had to wait around and see if they would give me a chance.

I will never forget the day that script arrived. I had been sitting in my grandparents’ kitchen when Iris called to tell me I got the job, that they were messengering the pages right over. Not only did this mean I had done it, it meant at least three months of freedom, of shooting on location. It meant being around other kids my age. It meant three months of a normal life. Ironic, considering that I was signing on to make an epic adventure movie, for three months of intense work, for more professional pressure than I had ever before experienced. But all of that sounded like a field trip. And I needed one. Because only weeks before that initial call from Amblin, I had swallowed a bottle of aspirin. That was the first time I tried to kill myself.

*   *   *

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.