The Goonies at 40
Steven Spielberg and Richard Donner team for ultimate treehouse movie
Video Days is on summer vacation and idling away the afternoons in our clubhouse, craving an adventure. Join us in the month of June for five films combining adolescent spirit and a journey.
THE GOONIES (1985) is to children’s adventure films as a ‘62 Shelby Cobra is to a Radio Flyer wagon. A marvel of engineering, everything is bigger and comes faster, and under the roar of its V8, it’s at times challenging to hear ourselves think. With resources that Walt Disney Pictures could only dream of with live action entertainments like Swiss Family Robinson (1960) or The Moon-Spinners (1964), the filmmakers raced into the 1980s with a pop culture savvy, often foul-mouthed gang of kids discovering the opposite sex and disobeying adults. In other words, kids who explore the world rather than being protected from it by their parents.
Looking to get his production company Amblin Entertainment off the ground in 1982–producing films for other directors as well as himself–Steven Spielberg had settled on starting with a reasonably budgeted horror thriller. A script with the title Gremlins caught his eye, and with Warner Bros. Pictures footing the bill, Spielberg took it off the market, serving as executive producer (with Frank Marshall and Kathleen Kennedy) and changing the life of twenty-five year old screenwriter Chris Columbus. Spielberg recognized childlike qualities in Columbus he did not only in himself, but the characters of another movie he wanted to make. Spielberg was a fan of “lust for gold” pictures and in particular, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer–the David O. Selznick production of 1938 more than the Mark Twain novel it was based on–in which 13-year-old Tom and his sweetheart Becky Thatcher are lost in a cave. Upon escaping, they must go back to beat the nefarious Injun Joe to a cache of stolen gold. Spielberg summoned Columbus–his first and only choice to adapt his ideas into a screenplay–to Los Angeles to draw up characters and scenes. Spielberg knew there would be a bunch of kids, and his organizing principle was: “What would kids do on a rainy summer day when bored?” He knew they’d live in a neighborhood referred to locally as the Goon Docks, and each kid would possess a quirk. After spending a week with Spielberg in 1983 hammering out a storyline, Columbus returned to New York to write. Several months later, the screenwriter had generated a first draft, titled Goon Kids.
Up to a revised second draft dated May 16, 1984, Goon Kids was set in the fictional Cauldron Point, a town in New England. There were two communities: the Hillsides where the upper class lived, and a village built on the water known as the Goon Docks, where the lower middle class kids of the title resided. Columbus drew on his own childhood in Youngstown, Ohio, which most teenagers dreamed of escaping, perhaps with a treasure they found in the abandoned coal mines beneath the town. Columbus spent the summer working on two more revised drafts with Spielberg and in September 1984, the executive producer sent a copy of what was now titled The Goonies to Richard Donner and his producing partner Harvey Bernhard. A prodigious television director in the 1960s of everything from The Rifleman to The Twilight Zone to Danger Island–the latter about archaeologists pursued by pirates around the South Pacific locale of the title–Donner had been promoted to a director of event films like The Omen (1976) and Superman: The Movie (1978). He knew Spielberg, and rather than take time off with his recently married wife, producer Lauren Shuler, after spending nearly four years working on their latest film Ladyhawke (1985), Donner leapt at the opportunity to direct a movie that not only had financing (via Warner Bros.) locked in but a release date: June 7, 1985. Despite the harried production schedule, it seemed to Bernhard and Donner an easy movie to make at the time. The publicized budget would be $19 million.
Harvey Bernhard–who had a second home in Washington and relatives in Oregon–had always wanted to make a movie in the Pacific Northwest, and suggested to Donner a funky seaport town in the Beaver State called Astoria for their setting. Spielberg took a lead in casting, consulting with Mike Fenton and Jane Feinberg–who’d cast Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), Poltergeist (1982), E.T. The Extra Terrestrial (1982) and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984)--and Judy Taylor. Of the seven title characters–five boys and two girls–four would be played by actors making their film debuts. Corey Feldman and Jeff Cohen were the veterans of the adolescent cast, Feldman of Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter (1984) and Gremlins (1984), Cohen guest starring on the television sitcoms The Facts of Life and Family Ties. Ke Huy Quan had been plucked out of obscurity to play opposite Harrison Ford in Temple of Doom. Martha Plimpton was the daughter of actors Keith Carradine & Shelley Plimpton and had played the title role opposite Tommy Lee Jones in The River Rat (1984), a tale that drew heavily on The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Sean Astin and Josh Brolin–cast as the top-billed Mikey and Brand Walsh–were the progeny of actors John Astin & Patty Duke, and James Brolin, respectively. Kerri Green, like Astin and Brolin, was making her film debut, as the cheerleader who the 17-year-old Brand is doting on and the 14-year-old Mikey is smitten with.
Seven weeks after Harvey Bernhard and Richard Donner came aboard to produce The Goonies in association with Amblin Entertainment and with Donner directing, shooting commenced in Astoria, Oregon, in October 1984. The Walsh house had been found overlooking the Port of Astoria, with picturesque views of the Columbia River. Production designer J. Michael Riva lobbied the producers to allow him to renovate the property–which was in some disrepair–to motion picture standards, and the woman who owned the home agreed. With the exception of the attic scene, the Walsh home interiors would be filmed under her roof. Astoria played itself, the jail break, ensuing car chase and the Goonies’ bike riding all shot in town, pumping $1 million into the local economy. State officials gave Riva the go-ahead to construct the “Lighthouse Lounge” twenty miles south of Astoria near Cannon Beach in Ecola State Park. The location served as the exterior of an abandoned lighthouse and restaurant where the treacherous Fratellis (Anne Ramsey, Robert Davi, Joe Pantoliano) are holed up, obstructing the entrance to the pirate One-Eyed Willy’s tunnel network. After the first day of shooting, Donner noted that the young cast had lost a good deal of the spontaneity he’d encouraged in rehearsal, delivering their dialogue less like kids and more like actors waiting for each other to finish their lines. In what would be cited in most of the reviews for The Goonies–positive and negative–Donner adjusted by encouraging the cast members to talk over each other when they saw fit.
After five weeks on location in Oregon, production moved to Los Angeles for fourteen weeks of filming on what was then referred to as Burbank Studios on the Warner Bros. lot. On his initial read of the script, which climaxes with the Goonies reaching One-Eyed Willy’s lost ship, the Inferno, in a cavern pool, Donner proposed they could build the vessel in pieces, shooting one angle at a time and using matte paintings to complete the illusion. In what would actually reduce costs, Riva sold Donner on constructing the Inferno full-scale on the second largest soundstage in L.A., Stage 16 at Burbank Studios. The stage had 65 feet of clearance from floor to lighting grid and would be used by Spielberg to shoot the T-Rex attack in Jurassic Park (1993). Stage 16 could hold up to 2.3 million gallons of water, courtesy two water towers on the WB lot, in cooperation with Burbank Water and Power. Proceeding to build what Riva and Donner referred to as the biggest treehouse in the world, the set would take two and a half months to complete, not just the Inferno, which measured 138 feet in length (105 feet at the water line) and 42 feet in height to its highest point on the rear deck, but the cavern, which before carving styrofoam or molding fiberglass became standard, rock had to be spoofed using plaster. Every plasterer in town was hired for what art director Rick Carter chalked up as the biggest Hollywood construction project in fifteen years. Crews worked in twenty-four shifts–ship crew by day, cavern crew by night–to have the set ready on schedule.
Donner added a wrinkle by banning the cast from the set until their reactions could be captured on camera. On the day of the reveal, the actors were blindfolded and led into the pool facing away from the ship. The trick was effective enough for Josh Brolin to let loose a pair of expletives that ruined the first take. Stage 16 became a celebrity tourist attraction, with Michael Jackson visiting, and later, Cyndi Lauper, at her maximum career prestige between two hit LPs–She’s So Unusual (six times platinum in the U.S.) and True Colors (double platinum). Lauper agreed to serve as uncredited music director for the film’s soundtrack, co-writing and performing a theme song, “The Goonies ‘R’ Good Enough” and recruiting The Bangles, a pop rock quartet that had opened for Lauper on her She’s So Unusual tour, to contribute a song, “I Got Nothing.” Taking his shot at unseating Michael Jackson’s “Thriller,” Donner would hastily direct a two-part music video, which like the theme song, had little to do with the film and was Cyndi Lauper kitsch, filled with appearances by professional wrestlers. The songstress from Queens disliked the track so much that she stopped performing it in 1987 and excluded it from her greatest hits LP. (The energetic musical score by Dave Grusin would be heard in trailers for years to suggest a joyful romp at the movies). While the community of Bodega Bay, California are thanked in the end credits, the final scene was shot specifically on Goat Rock Beach in Sonoma Coast State Park.
Opening on schedule the first weekend of June 1985, The Goonies snared positive reviews from a number of leading critics. Gene Siskel & Roger Ebert gave it two thumbs up, agreeing that the movie took too long to get going, with the Goonies talking over each other and Ebert going as far to say he was mad at the filmmaking for being so difficult to hear. Once the adventure begins–albeit with what Siskel remarked was Spielberg ripping off his own Indiana Jones series–they found the movie fun, likable for both kids and adults. Writing in the New York Times, Janet Maslin credited Spielberg and Donner for utilizing “every imaginable funhouse flourish,” the Goonies appealing as individual characters, though when talking in a group, difficult to understand. Maslin called the movie “fast, funny, entertaining and almost entirely without staying power.” In its opening weekend, The Goonies nearly surpassed Rambo: First Blood Part II as the #1 grossing film in the U.S. It spent six weeks among the top ten moneymakers in the country, and did enough business to finish the ninth highest earning film of the year. By the time Generation X was old enough to start having their own kids, rumors of Spielberg and Donner developing a sequel refused to die, not even after Donner passed away at age 91 in 2021, long since retired. The film’s 40th anniversary fueled a fresh round of rumors of a legacy sequel.
Warner Bros. designates The Goonies a family film, and while the crudeness and profanity of the first half hour (the MPAA settled on a PG rating) is mild by today’s standards, the target audience is not children, but junior high school kids seeking independence and their own stories, and adults who remember experimenting with language or behavior their parents did not approve of. Exhilarating throughout most of its 114-minute running time, unlike Back to the Future (1985), this is a disposable movie. The reason is that while the Goonies are given tasks to perform, they aren’t given a problem to solve. Whereas Marty McFly not only had to repair his time machine, he was doubly challenged by playing matchmaker for his parents in order to fix his own timeline. The Goonies is a ride that acts on the viewer, but doesn’t engage us on a deeper level. Its plot doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. That no adult in the Goon Docks is current on their mortgage–if they don’t already own their old homes free and clear–defies believability, nor is it plausible that “rich stuff” would satisfy the bank, Mikey’s father knowing better than anyone that One-Eyed Willy’s booty belongs to someone who can afford better lawyers than he can. The movie would be just as entertaining if the Goonies went adventuring out of sheer boredom, with no way back but forward, and though forced to hand most of their loot back, are rewarded with something that isn’t material, like pride at not being helpless misfits. It would take Steven Spielberg a couple of more productions to embrace a hero or heroes whose reward isn’t financial.
A treasure hunt adventure in name, The Goonies is a genre removed from the Indiana Jones series. Indy doesn’t know he’s in a movie, but the Goonies have all seen Raiders of the Lost Ark and dream that their lives could be that exciting. Escapism on a long summer day is what the characters pursue, not fortune or glory. While Indy takes for granted he’ll experience adventure every time he takes a business trip, the Goonies are every kid who had to manufacture his or her own fantasy life. This is the nostalgic allure of the movie. While not a spoof, the dialogue (the WGA awarded screenplay credit to Chris Columbus and story credit to Steven Spielberg) includes enough clever pop culture references to come off as a commentary on treasure hunt adventures (when Cohen’s character asks if 1632 on a map means a year, Feldman tells the big kid it’s his top score on Pole Position). The casting is an A-. Ironically, the Goony who gives the stiffest performance (Josh Brolin) is the one who went on to have the most prestigious acting career. Martha Plimpton was most capable of carrying a movie without a lot of help, but help is what the cast get from their director, establishing credible rapport and thoroughly amusing as they react to each other and to their environment. The world of the Goonies is tangible. J. Michael Riva is the answer to anyone who’s uttered the words “practical effects.” Richard Donner–who often over-decorates his films as if every gathering should be a lavish reunion–has his excesses checked by the material, The Goonies set over 24 hours and mostly underground. Spielberg, Columbus and Donner made the movie many of us imagined as children, ourselves as the stars, and one that set the bar for subsequent creators of children’s adventures in film and television to top.
Video rental category: Action/ Adventure
Special interest: Kids On Bikes