Coreyography: A Memoir by Corey Feldman Page A

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.
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    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