Being the sad ballad of Coreys Haim and Feldman, the teenage princes of 80s cinema. First published in Empire Magazine, October, 2017
A tantalising hidden history of Hollywood in the 1970s and ’80s no doubt resides on long-discarded answerphone tapes: tiny C30s lodged in attics, bearing on their thin, magnetic strips ghostly fragments of Hollywood brouhahas long past. “Steven, pick up. I just saw the shark footage from yesterday. We’ve really got a problem...” “Call me as soon as you get this. Coppola’s gone goddamn rogue in the Philippines, and there’s talk of a hurricane. A fucking hurricane, John. I think we have to get someone down there.” Or then, there’s this one: “Hey, man. It’s Corey. Corey Haim. Listen, I’m really excited ’cause we’re going to be working together on The Lost Boys. That’s really cool. And we have the same name, so we’re probably going to end up being really good friends. Why don’t we plan a time to get together, man? Maybe we could go to the beach, throw a football around? Call me.” “Sounds like a nice guy,” thought Corey Feldman, a Hollywood veteran at all of 14 years old with hits including Stand By Me and The Goonies behind him, after he had pressed play. “Maybe we’ll get on.” And so, on a grey SoCal afternoon in 1986, Corey Haim and Corey Feldman met for the first time on a deserted beach called Paradise Cove in Malibu. The former revealed that his favourite number was 222; the latter replied that his was 22. Fate, man.
It was the start of a friendship that would endure for 24 years, until Haim’s death, aged 38, in 2010.
“We became fast friends, obviously,” Feldman tells Empire. “We had so much in common at that point. We were the same age, the same height, both Jewish, both girl-crazy. And we both had screwed-up families. His was screwed-up in a different way. But we both understood each other.” They would, truth be told, make a scant two and a half decent films together. But they were, wholly unbeknownst to them, the reluctant outliers of a new kind of Hollywood culture; one of TMZ and the Kardashians, where infamy was not an unwelcome byproduct – but the endgame.
And, amidst the wreckage, it is also worth noting that talking to people about working with both of them, almost no one has anything but happy memories and terrible regret about what happened. They were nice kids, it turns out, the Coreys; beset by Sturm and Drugs and by here unnamed people for whom, in some cases, the adjective evil is not too strong.
Through all that follows, we should remember this.
The Lost Boys had begun as a screenplay by aspirant screenwriters James Jeremias and former Golden Girls scribe Janice Fisher, which had been picked up by Warner Bros as a project for the studio's then star director Richard Donner. Jeremias had, like the rest of the reading public been captivated by Anne Rice’s Interview With A Vampire and been reminded by the character of the ageless girl Claudia, of Barrie’s classic Peter Pan.
"The first notion that started Lost Boys was – what if the reason Peter Pan never grew up and came out at night, and could fly, was because he was a vampire?,” remembered Jeremias later (co-writer Jan Fischer died in 2011). “So in our screenplay the three main characters were John and Michael and the mother was Wendy. The kids were 12 and 8, and we purposefully picked that time because we wanted it before sex rears its ugly little head.”
But fate had intervened in the shape of a spec screenplay titled Lethal Weapon that Warners had paid a fortune for and Donner intended to direct. So, on a Saturday afternoon in 1986, Joel Schumacher met Mark Canton, the legendary fast-talking Executive Vice President of Warner Brothers, for bloody marys. But even to a helmer who, as he admits now “really needed the cheque” the project Canton described didn’t sound at all promising. “Are you actually offering me the job of directing a kids’ vampire movie?” Schumacher had spluttered.
“Mark was very restrained,” he remembers, speaking to Empire from his apartment in a snowbound New York. “He swallowed his rage and very quietly said would you give me the respect of taking some time out to read it? And I said oh yes I’m so sorry, so sorry. I’ll absolutely read it.”
But even after perusing the screenplay, Schumacher remained unconvinced. “It was really ‘Goonies Go Vampire’,” he says. “The Frog brothers when I got the script, they were chubby, cub scouts. And they had cute little kids' jokes. There wasn’t a girl in it.” During a long run, he pondered the story and began to see the outlines of a different take on the material. “I remember I was running along and thinking well . . . I can make it teenagers . . . The Frog brothers could be little Rambos . . . and why can’t Star be a sexy girl?” By the time he returned he had reversed his decision and described the movie he envisaged to Canton. “Just do it,” was the exec’s reply. Casting began. Or rather, it had already begun — Corey Feldman had been approached to play young vampire-hunter Edgar Frog when Richard Donner, the man who made the actual The Goonies, was in talks to direct. Schumacher asked Feldman to come in and read for the role, and was immediately enthused. “Corey had been in Goonies and done Stand By Me, and I was already crazy about him as a young actor,” he says. “I thought he was great and very versatile.” He gave Feldman instructions to watch Schwarzenegger and Stallone movies and gave him one note: “Can you maybe butch it up a little bit?” As for the role of Sam Emerson Schumacher was advised by a manager friend to check out Corey Haim’s performance in tiny Canadian indie Lucas. “He was so charming and good in it,” remembers Schumacher. “I once heard Ed Zwick say that there are some actors that seem to carry their own light with them when they walk in a room and it’s true. Corey was like that.” In fact, the Coreys had been circling each other for a while, having almost been brought together a year earlier for Stand By Me. Haim had read for, and been offered, the role of Chris Chambers (eventually played by River Phoenix) but had accepted the lead role in Lucas only hours earlier. He never regretted it: his performance in the high-school drama gained raves from critics, Roger Ebert writing, “If he can continue to act this well, he will never become a half-forgotten child star, but will continue to grow into an important actor. He is that good.” Shooting in Santa Cruz, California, and on the Warners lot, Haim and Feldman didn’t share a huge number of scenes. But when the movie came out in July 1987 and proved a massive hit (pipped to the number-one spot only by The Living Daylights), the pairing of these two kids named Corey proved a big talking point. Fans began to snap photos of them whenever they ventured out in public. And with then-mighty teen magazines 16 and Tiger Beat fanning the flames, soon the pair were receiving 2,000 fan letters a week. Postcards, love letters, invitations to junior prom and giant boxes of polyurethane sushi, mailed with incandescent affection by 12-year-old Japanese schoolgirls, were all physical testament to their sudden, trans-planetary appeal. “When we met on Lost Boys, it was the beginning of some happy days,” remembers Feldman, who fought to be legally emancipated from his parents in 1987, alleging physical and mental abuse (claims his mother has denied). “I realised my parents were so screwed up that I wasn’t going to have any semblance of normality if I stayed on this course.” However, in Hollywood normality is a relative concept. A small amuse-bouche presaging the brewing weirdness was served up when Feldman, he says, was informed that his agent had arranged a date for him and Drew Barrymore. “Isn’t she a bit young for me?” the perplexed Feldman, 14 at the time, remembers asking. Barrymore was ten. Individually, Haim and Feldman were becoming household names. But together, the entity known as The Two Coreys was becoming an untameable beast with a demented mind of its own.
Hollywood, then in the midst of a teen golden age, crawled with youthful talent, and Ground Zero for the Clearasil crowd was Alphy’s Soda Pop Club. According to writer and artist Jennifer Juniper Stratford, who was a regular attendee during the club’s three-year life from 1986 to 1989, it was a “disco designed for kids in ‘the industry’. With a clientele aged 16 and under the club guaranteed a dance floor full of the hottest teen stars as well as all the free soda you could drink. It was the ultimate teenage wonderland.”
Studio 54, then, for those who needed to be home by nine.
Hosted weekly at some of the town’s swankiest hotels attendees included Ricky Schroder, Drew Barrymore and Sean Astin as well as both Coreys who became lauded regulars, infamously hosting one party during which someone dived from the 12th floor into an air-bag while captive tigers were disported on leashes below. It was manna for the burgeoning 80s celebrity magazines. But then was wholly designed to be.
In fact, Alphy’s Soda Pop Club was a smart marketing shill for New York Seltzer, the overpriced fizzy water then becoming, entirely deliberately, the taste of the New Hollywood. But carbonated water wasn’t the only distraction on offer there or at any of the other less public venues that the pair frequented.
“By the end, it was dying out and everyone was on drugs,” Haim told Stratford in 2012. “I was on drugs, Feldman was on drugs. At the end of it, we were 16 or 17 years old, Lost Boys was done, and we were going to other clubs and doing drugs. So at that time, a lot of people were getting messed up.”
In fact both teenagers had become acquainted with narcotics well before they started attending Alphy’s. Corey Haim had first been introduced to marijuana while filming The Lost Boys (though not on set) while Corey Feldman had first tried cocaine when it was offered by a supposed friend of his mother around the same time.
Schumacher observed the developing Two Coreys phenomenon from a distance with more than a little pride tinged with concern. “What I knew was that they were making movie after movie after movie together. And I’m sure that was based on how great their relationship on screen was in Lost Boys, because that’s the first time they met,” he says. “I thought well you know, they’re young, they’re making a lot of money. And if any of this [tabloid noise] is true, well you know, hey give a couple of kids a lot of money and limos and girlfriends and blah blah blah. Well, maybe they’ll come out the other end of it.”
Eager to monetise the duo’s unexpected heat 20th Century Fox put License to Drive into production within months. A buddy comedy in which Haim plays a 16-year-old suburban every-kid who fails his driving test and lies about it to impress a girl (Heather Graham) aided and abetted by his best friend Dean (Feldman) it was the work of neophyte feature director Greg Beeman, much later to become a heavy hitter in T.V. as executive producer on among others, Smallville and Heroes.
“John Hughes was the king at the time, and every studio was looking for teen comedies,” Beeman tells Empire, who was only in his mid-20s himself when he shot the film. “I remember being on set thinking how young everyone was. Corey Haim didn’t even have a driver's license. Despite Feldman, in particular, having been in the business for years, they just seemed to me to be a pair of kids. They treated the set like high school, they were professional while they were there, but they couldn't wait to get out.”
“They were obviously great friends. They had a lot of friends, entourages and so on. But I didn’t sense any trouble brewing. I saw Corey Feldman a few times afterwards, and he was always very gracious and said how much he’s enjoyed making the movie.”
Beeman would not see Haim again. “At a certain point you just become like everybody else in the world, reading the news,” he says. “I thought it was very sad, obviously, because I liked him a lot. Untrained, but he had access to this incredible charm. But, thinking back, I wonder if he really had the desire. In retrospect, I never really detected that deep hunger for it. But it was a lovely experience making that film, and as time goes on seems a better experience really.”
Over the years the awe-inspiring details of the pair’s adventures have populated tabloid covers and TV exposes. But for now, a brief digest will have to give a flavour. From the late 1980s to the early 2000s the pair’s crimes (high) and misdemeanours included, but were absolutely not limited to: Selling personal CD collection on street corners for drug money (Feldman); misdemeanour arrest for threatening a manager with a BB Gun (Haim); arrests for possession of heroin concealed in balloons in socks with intent to sell (Feldman); auctioning teeth and hair (possibly pubic) on eBay to buy crack (Haim); launching teen drug line 1-800-COREY but being loaded whilst giving advice (Haim).
In the early 1990s, facing financial ruin Feldman finally got sober, with the help of among others Richard Donner, who had kept an eye on his protege ever since the Goonies days.
“If I didn’t have Richard Donner, if I didn’t have some of these older people in my life who taught me right from wrong, who showed me business, who showed me how to do something for myself, who knows where I’d be,” says Feldman. “Maybe it would be the other way round. I would be the one that was dead and Corey would still be here.”
Happily, Feldman’s sobriety endures to this day. For Haim though, always tortured by the distant hoots and screams of a better party, somewhere out there in the night, things would never be so clear cut.
By the early 90s Haim and Feldman were radioactive to the major studios thanks to their, by now, well-publicised addiction issues but pure gold to the supermarket tabloids. Blown Away was a final attempt to resurrect the success they had enjoyed as a double act on The Lost Boys. The work of Brenton Spencer, a veteran TV Director of Photography who had cut his teeth on 21 Jump Street and who was eager to make his directorial debut, it was to be a low-budget-but-as-glossy-as-it-can-be DTV sex thriller. For Spencer, it would turn out to be a trial by fire.
“It was a gong show,” Spencer tells Empire. “Even though I had done a lot of work by then it was still like being on a wild horse.”
Spencer says that, as far as he was aware, drugs were not present during filming. But nevertheless, the shoot was beset by chaos from the get-go. While Feldman had by now entered and completed rehab (he remains sober to this day) Haim was still a mess with his repeated admissions to hospital amongst the film’s many disruptions.
Things weren’t helped by the film’s demands that both Haim and Eggert play the most explicit sex scenes of their careers. Haim’s natural anxiety at the prospect of extensive nudity, still a rarity for male stars in the early 1990s, was compounded by the fact that the years of high living had left him in poor physical shape. It was bad enough that when Spencer hired a trainer and accompanied him to the gym the alarmed staff intervened, stopping the session on safety grounds. “I guess I‘m really out of shape,” Spencer remembers puffing to the concerned trainer. “Not you, it’s Corey,” was the response.
But in the midst of the chaos, what impressed itself on Spencer was the relationship between Feldman and his friend. “You know [The Coreys] went from making eight hundred thousand a movie to making fifty grand a year on these indie features. It was such a fall,” he remembers. “But there was a great simpatico between the two of them. Corey Feldman could see his struggles with drugs and alcohol and would want to meet at lunch and take a moment. Look, it’s not enough in Hollywood to be the most divine and inspired actor. You have to surround yourself with people who are like-minded and who are not there to take from you. There were so many takers in Corey’s life, except for Corey Feldman. Corey understood him. And Corey did not take from him.”
But by the time Spencer came to direct The Club, in which Haim had been cast solo, he had become a straight liability. “It wasn’t completed with Corey,” sighs Spencer, obviously still grieving over the events of 30 years ago. “We’d go to the hospital, I’d go and wait for him in the lobby at outpatients, this is while we’re shooting." A week into the shoot Haim was fired. “Corey was so vulnerable, he was at a real low then, you could see that. I was very frustrated and upset,” remembers Spencer.
After Blown Away the pair’s demise as a marketable duo seemed pretty much sealed. National Lampoon’s Last Resort (1994) was a grim, and aptly titled, cynical farrago which used corporate skullduggery to hijack the Lampoon brand and which was so aggressively bad that later Feldman took a VHS tape of it to Haim while he was confined in one of his increasingly frequent, and unsuccessful trips to rehab. “Dude, this movie sucks,” an appalled Haim had told his friend. “Yeah, but we thought it was great. That’s what drugs do to you,” Feldman had responded. And if Feldman had Haim’s drug habit to blame for Last Resort a similar excuse was not available to him for Busted (1997), a criminal Police Academy rip-off that marked Feldman’s directorial debut and the final time they would share a big screen.
By the end of 1997 Haim, finally apparently admitting defeat, returned to live in Canada with his mother and filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Sporadic appearances either in forgettable DTV movies or in the pages of gossip rags continued for nearly a decade. But after the publicity generated by the TV reality show The Two Coreys in 2007 (and after a reversion to unreliable form on Lost Boys: The Tribe – “I turned up in Vancouver [to shoot] and there was no Corey. When I heard what was happening I gave him a call and asked him what was going on and never got a clear answer,” remembers Feldman, who had made his appearance conditional on Haim being given a role) their careers seemed to be undergoing a small renaissance. There with a small but fun role for Haim in Crank: High Voltage (2009). Reunited after an estrangement caused by the rifts documented on the show and The Tribe, the pair were reported to be prepping a sequel to License To Drive titled License To Fly.
“When he was sober, we had some of the funniest moments ever created between the two of us, even funnier than some of the films we did,” Feldman tells Empire of shooting The Two Coreys. “When he was at the top of his game he was so funny and so witty and so brilliant.”
But on March 10, 2010, paramedics were called to the Oakwood Apartments where he was then living, looking after his mother, who had received a cancer diagnosis. He was pronounced dead in the early hours at Providence Saint Joseph Medical Center. The cause of death was later determined to be pneumonia.
“I’m responsible, without realising it, for what were the best of times, and the worst of times,” muses Schumacher, 30 years after his pop classic first launched The Coreys upon an unsuspecting planet. “I suppose if I have an enduring memory, it’s of them becoming fast friends almost immediately. I’ve seen Corey Feldman many times since and I’m so proud of him that he really really pulled himself together. He’s been through a lot.”
“For all intents and purposes we really were brothers,” remembers Feldman. “We both dealt with some of the same demons, both the demons we brought onto ourselves and more importantly the demons that were pushed onto us.”
But then that always was the grim secret of Hollywood, that neon-flecked boardwalk by the sea.
All the damn vampires.
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