Coreyography: A Memoir (9 page)

Things at school, however, did not go as planned.

“What the hell is
mogwai
fur?” someone yelled out. The kids in the back of the class—the cool kids—erupted in a fit of guffaws and snickers.

“Mogwai are part of a movie that Steven Spielberg is making called
Gremlins,
” I said, completely undeterred.
“
Trust me when I tell you, this movie is going to be
huge
.”

“Who the hell is Steven Spielberg?” A spitball flew through the air, landing on the floor near my shoe. Needless to say, my mogwai show-and-tell did nothing to help my reputation.

CHAPTER 5

I ran out of the school trailer as soon as I heard the commotion. Joseph Zito, the director, was pacing along the lakeshore, alternately mumbling to himself and screaming at the producers. Several members of the crew had donned wetsuits and were now bobbing up and down in the water. “What’s going on?” I asked, running up alongside Joe, my feet sinking into the muddy shore.

“It’s Crispin,” he said, visibly distressed. “He was out in the lake, playing with his submarine. I guess it went down too far and didn’t come back.” He put his hands on his hips and gazed at his men in the water. “
Fuck,
” he spat. “It’s gonna be awhile.”

Camp Crystal Lake, the fictional stomping grounds of the serial killer Jason Voorhees, has been created and re-created in small towns in New Jersey, Connecticut, and California for each of the three Friday the 13th films. To make
Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter,
the fourth movie in the franchise and my follow-up to
Gremlins,
we’re shooting near the tiny town of Buellton, two hours north of L.A. It was my first road trip—Grandpa sat up front with a teamster; he’ll be my on-set guardian for the duration of the shoot. And though I am by far the youngest member of the cast, Crispin Glover is easily my favorite. He reminds me of a young James Dean, a shadowy figure, good-looking but in an off kind of way, always dressed in a long trench coat pulled tight at the base of his throat. While the other young actors spend their free time drinking and flirting and socializing, Crispin can usually be found down by the lake, alone, staring out at the water, into nothing.

A few days earlier, most of the cast had driven into the neighboring town of Solvang, a village of half-timbered houses with thatched roofs and four different windmills, all done in the Danish provincial style, in search of a bar. But Crispin had wandered into an antique store and come out with a thousand dollars’ worth of toys. His favorite was a novelty yellow submarine. I remembered hearing the story—the way he had whined and complained until the other actors reluctantly squeezed themselves into the already overpacked van in order to make room for his purchases—but that still didn’t explain why production had been delayed. By the time I popped up alongside Joe, we’d been shut down for nearly two hours.

“I don’t get it,” I said. “What’s the problem?”

“He won’t come back to set until we find it.”

I looked over at Crispin, who was now in the middle of a full-on star fit, huffing and puffing and stomping on the ground, and laughed out loud. I couldn’t help it—this was hilarious. I was also totally impressed. Here was a fully grown man (at twenty, he seemed fully grown to me), throwing a childlike tantrum—and it was working! I thought that’s what it meant to be famous. And being famous, to me, meant that you were loved. It would be many, many years before I learned the difference.

*   *   *

Nobody seemed to
think it was strange that, immediately after wrapping a PG-rated family film for Amblin, I would be starring in an R-rated slasher flick. In fact, the greater concern among the casting directors had been whether or not I was big enough and strong enough to properly wield a machete. In the final scene, it would be my character, twelve-year-old Tommy Jarvis, who violently hacks a deranged serial killer into pieces.

“They think the machete is almost as big as you are. They’re worried you won’t be able to pick it up and swing it,” my agent explained.

Pretending to be a serial killer, however, was not my particular concern. I was much more worried about a scene several pages earlier, when my character was supposed to shave his head.

“There is no way in hell I’m having my kid out of operation for three months because he shaved his head for a movie,” my mother yelled into the phone. For once, I actually agreed with her. I ended up wearing a bald cap for the final scenes of the movie (and though I was able to master the machete, I had blood-soaked, gory nightmares for months).

*   *   *

Friday the 13th:
The Final Chapter
and
Gremlins
both hit theaters in the spring of 1984; their premiere dates were less than two months apart. I had actually gone to the movies with Mindy and a few of her friends to see
Friday the 13th
when I noticed a poster for
Gremlins
hanging up in the lobby. “This is my movie!” I shouted. I couldn’t wait for it to come out.

When I saw that poster, I could sense that something was starting to happen. I felt like I was on the cusp of something. Not really stardom, which seemed unthinkable, too outrageous then to be true. It was more like a promise, the hope that good things were on the horizon. The idea that if I could just hold out a little bit longer, I might find a way out of my shitty life. It was around that time that I started “running away” from home, usually to Mann Valley West, a giant movie theater on Ventura that has long since closed. Saturday matinees ran for three dollars; I would usually pilfer enough money from my grandmother’s purse to get in, then sneak from theater to theater, watching as many movies as possible until nightfall, when I was typically ready to return home.

Later, after
Gremlins
debuted at number-two (right behind the original
Ghostbusters
), and raked in nearly $150 million, it occurred to me that I should probably be getting in to see movies for free. I caught a bus from Northridge to Woodland Hills, where I transferred and took a second bus to Tarzana, walked right up to the box office and pointed to a nearby poster.

“You see that movie?
Gremlins
?” I said to a bored-looking teenager, chomping on a piece of gum, seated behind the glass. “I’m in it.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. Can you let me in?”

I spent most of that afternoon bouncing in and out of screening rooms, watching all the movies I wanted, including my very own. By the end of my second viewing, though, people had started to recognize me.

I had been recognized in public before, of course, as far back as my time on
The Bad News Bears.
Between that show and
The Shining
, actually, I got recognized—or mistakenly recognized—quite a lot. I
did
look an awful lot like Danny Lloyd (mostly due to our matching bowl haircuts), the kid who had become famous for the creepy way he said “red rum” in Stanley Kubrick’s classic thriller. People sometimes asked me for my autograph even after I explained that I was Corey Feldman. But I had movies in theaters now. Things were different.

A lot of people dream about getting famous. And I would be a liar if I said it didn’t have its perks. But that day in the theater, I was just a sullen twelve-year-old, sneaking in and out of movies and hiding from my mom. I was contemplating the strangeness of that while waiting in line for some popcorn, when a young girl approached me. “Can I take a picture with you?”

She was just shy of fourteen, nearly two years older than me, and pretty. She told me her name was Laura.

“So, what are you doing here?” she asked.

“I ran away from home.”

“Oh. I’m here with my family.” She gestured to some adults milling about behind her. Later, I would find out that she was Laura McAnally. Her father, John, was a horse trainer, famous for his work with John Henry, one of the most successful thoroughbreds in racing history. “So, you’re a tough runaway kid, huh?”

I smiled. She had managed to see through my tough-guy exterior.

We exchanged numbers, and then I watched her disappear into the darkness, ambling slowly behind her parents, peeking over her shoulder at me the whole way. I watched as the heavy metal door to the screening room swung shut behind her. Laura would eventually become my second “girlfriend,” though I think we only went out on one official date, to a horse race with her parents.

I stood in the lobby for a while, half hoping Laura would reappear, before finally scrounging up some change and dialing my grandmother’s house from a nearby payphone.

“Where have you been?” Boobie answered. “We were so worried about you!”

“I ran away.”

“Oh, Corey. We love you. Come on, now. It’s time to come home.”

It was dusk. The streetlights along the boulevard were blinking to life. It was quiet, and I was alone. Also, I had run out of money.

“Okay. Have Grandpa pick me up on the corner by the theater.” I felt a gurgling in my stomach. I was hungry. “And maybe we can stop by Burger King on the way home.”

CHAPTER 6

My hand was trembling as I opened the envelope and pulled out the pages. It was another Spielberg project, which meant that—like so many of his films—it was completely and utterly top-secret; you had to sign a nondisclosure agreement as soon as you pulled out the script. I thumbed through quickly. Every single page, all 120-plus of them, had a giant red stamp on it, proof that what you had in your hands was an authentic original copy. Scripts with black stamps, sure signs they had been (illegally) run through a machine, were strictly
verboten.
I let the pages flutter through my fingers until I was staring at the big bold letters printed across the cover. There were the words I had been waiting more than six whole months to read:

Amblin Entertainment and

Warner Bros. Pictures

present

The Goonies

The ceiling in my grandparents’ kitchen was rather low; it couldn’t have been much higher than seven feet, but I jumped up and down, higher and higher, high enough to brush the exposed beams with my fingertips. High enough to reach the roof.

“I just got the
Goonies!
” I yelled. “I’m a Goonie! I’m a Goonie!
Wha-hoooo
!”

My grandfather, halfway through his evening shot of whiskey and a cigarette, looked up from his black-and-white television.

“What’s all this racket?” he grumbled. “And what the
hell
is a Goonie?”

*   *   *

Almost a year
earlier, not long after finishing up on the set of
Gremlins,
I had gotten another call—again, at home—from the offices of Amblin Entertainment. Steven was requesting to meet with me the following Saturday. I had never heard of taking a meeting on the weekend, so I figured it had to be important. It had to be something unique.

When I got to Amblin, it was just Steven and Kathleen Kennedy, Steven’s coproducer, waiting for me in the boardroom.

“I’ve got this idea for a kids’ action-adventure movie,” he said. “Think
Indiana Jones,
but with kids. We’re thinking it would be you, and maybe Ke Huy Quan—Short Round from the
Temple of Doom
—and a bunch of other young actors. What do you think?”

“That sounds like a great idea!” I said. “I’d love to see the script.”

Steven chuckled. “Yeah, well, we’d all love to see the script. But we’re a ways off on that. I just wanted to get a general meeting to gauge your excitement level.”

“Well, of course I’m excited,” I said. In fact, I was ready to go right then. “Sign me up!”

I didn’t hear another word about it for about six months.

Making movies is a slow, arduous process. Even after a project has cleared the two biggest hurdles—securing funding and getting a green light from the suits upstairs—there are still a million potential pitfalls in the preproduction process, from script approval and rewrites, to finding an appropriate-sized hole in everyone’s schedule (when you’re Steven Spielberg, you tend to get a little busy), to location scouting and procuring filming permits, to culling together the perfect cast and negotiating everyone’s salaries. Some movies can get bogged down in this process, stalled for months or even years. Some films never wind up getting made at all. Deep down, somewhere in my sub-conscious, I knew that. But it was still tough to wait.

Eventually, I got another call from Amblin. This time, though, they were requesting that I come in and audition. That was odd. I had been under the impression that I was one of the
chosen ones,
one of the kids Steven wanted to, essentially, build the movie around. I consoled myself with the idea that, maybe, he just wanted to get all of us together, see what our chemistry might be like.

It wasn’t until I arrived that I realized I was walking into a massive cattle call. There were easily a hundred kids there, milling around the lobby and the waiting rooms of Universal Studios, where the Amblin offices are housed. I quickly scanned the room, looking for familiar faces. Any kid who’s ever been in this business can write you a term paper on those rooms; you might find yourself there for three, maybe four hours, waiting and waiting and waiting, depending on the size and scale of the project, and you never knew who might show up. (Back in the late ’70s I was more than a little starstruck when Danny Bonaduce breezed through the doors, igniting a firestorm of whispers and murmuring in the process.) I scanned the room until my eyes rested on an unknown actor, also reading for the part of Clark “Mouth” Devereaux, the wise-cracking smart alec of the group. It would be several years before I learned that this had been a young Corey Haim.

The audition—pretty much old hat by then—had gone smoothly. “You’re great, you’re great. You know I love you for this. We just have to go through the protocol,” Steven said. And then another two months went by and I still didn’t have an offer on the table.