June 1985 features some Goonies, a Clint Eastwood western, and a Robert Altman experiment

Plus Jamie Lee Curtis and John Travolta tempt fate with a title and America gets Miyazaki wrong

The premise is simple, but the task is not. Every single movie released in the United States during the 1980s, reviewed in chronological order, published month by month.

Buckle up, because this is The Last ‘80s Newsletter You’ll Ever Need…

JUNE 1985

Biloxi Blues and Big River won big at the Tony Awards.

Larry King Live made its debut on CNN, starting an uninterrupted run that lasted through December of 2010.

The Lakers beat the Celtics at the Garden for a 4-games-to-2 series victory, and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar was named the MVP of the series.

And at his second trial, Claus Von Bülow was acquitted on charges that he tried to murder his wife. And somewhere, Jeremy Irons leaned forward and started taking notes.

When you’re fifteen years old and it’s summertime, the world is your oyster. All you have to do is enjoy yourself, right?

I wish I could go back and tell fifteen-year-old me that, because I was, to put it lightly, a fucking nightmare this particular summer. I was struggling with so much adolescent anger and I had no place to put it. The people in my family suffered because of it. My friends suffered because of it. And by June of 1985, it was out of control.

What I did not know is that my parents had reached a breaking point, and when we took a trip to Florida during spring break earlier in the year, my dad had taken a job interview on a complete whim. The friends we were staying with heard about a great job with Hillsborough County and in the middle of our vacation, my dad had borrowed a suit and taken a short morning meeting. By June, my dad had made a decision, and my sister and I were told that we’d be moving to Florida in time for school in the fall. While they did not tell me directly that it was my fault, I can look back at the situation now with some clarity and, uh… yeah. It was my fault. I had created a situation where my parents couldn’t imagine sending me back to my high school, and I went out of my way to burn some bridges as school ended, just to make sure I couldn’t stay.

When I went to the movies that June, I was hiding. I had one friend whose older brother had been our enabler for most of the prior year, an usher who would turn a blind eye as we walked into whatever movies we wanted to see, one after another, almost every weekend. That was one of the relationships that I damaged deeply, though, and suddenly I felt like that entire theater was off-limits to me. Right around that time, another friend of mine turned sixteen and started working at a different multiplex on the other side of the 75 freeway, so I started going to his theater as often as possible. Basically, if he was working, I would get dropped off and go theater to theater, watching everything and anything.

This was also a period where I found myself getting more pointed and hyper-critical in the way I processed movies. Yes, I’d see everything, but when I didn’t like something, it could be for arbitrary reasons and once I made my mind up, that was that. At fifteen, I felt like I wanted more adult fare and I didn’t want to be fed movies that were for little kids. This was a month where I fell deeply in love with some films, while I raged at others for what I saw as unforgivable transgressions. Part of the reason for my passion was I needed to put my energy somewhere I could control, and part of the reason was I was starting to get serious about my desire to make movies.

By this point, I had written a full season of episodes for a TV show one friend and I created, a script based on an idea another friend of mine and I came up with, a musical based on a Billy Joel album, a trilogy of big fantasy spec scripts, and a teenage werewolf movie that was more self-serious than Teen Wolf, which wasn’t out yet. I was writing all the time. None of that was particularly good, but the sheer volume of it was helping me learn. All of that had been written since my first attempt, which came after I visited the set of Starman and was given a copy of the script by the film’s unit publicist, Peter Silbermann. That was my first exposure to a real screenplay, and everything I learned about format was from that script and the Woody Allen books I checked out of the library and a handful of screenplays that were given to me by the mother of another friend. She worked in extras casting for films that were shot in the area, and she gave me both TV and feature scripts to look at. I don’t even remember what the scripts were for. I think one of them was The Night The Lights Went Out In Georgia. There were others, and I sponged up everything about them. I learned some bad habits because I had no one I could ask questions to, and I didn’t learn about Syd Field’s Screenplay until later in the decade.

There’s a title we’re going to talk about this month that bounced right off of me when I saw it the first time. I was, as I’ve said before here, a maniac for any movie novelizations that came out, particularly if they were tied to my favorite filmmakers or genres. As soon as I saw The Goonies at the bookstore, I picked it up because of the writing credits on the back. “Based on the screenplay by Chris Columbus, Story by Steven Spielberg.” Considering they had worked together on Gremlins the year before, that was an instant sale for me. I read the book before the film came out. As a result, I knew what I was getting when I walked into the theater, and so I was surprised by how much I hated the film. It all came down to tone, too, because I liked the book. I liked the story and the idea and the whole vibe of the project. But the execution drove me up a wall, and I knew why right away. I hated the kids. I hated the way they were directed to essentially spend the film yelling over one another. I would never want to spend time with those particular kids, so I rejected the movie outright. Fifteen-year-old me found them annoying on an almost chemical level. I just couldn’t get past it, and as a result, I dismissed the film, and I never really thought about it again. I did not realize how deeply it landed on the kids who were younger than me, or the kids who found it later, and it wasn’t until I was working at Ain’t It Cool and I started meeting people who had found the film formative that it even occurred to me that people might like it.

I also found myself almost incandescent with rage when talking about Prizzi’s Honor. You have to understand that I had a pretty serious hormonal response to Kathleen Turner in Romancing the Stone the year before and The Man with Two Brains before that, and I found the idea of her in a grown-up Mafia comedy with Jack Nicholson irresistible. Before I saw the film, I was manic about it. I was convinced it was going to be the movie of the summer for me. And for a big chunk of the running time, I was convinced that I was right, that it was indeed a home run. Turner was terrific, and she had real chemistry with Nicholson, who was hilarious and scary at the same time. Then the film’s ending happened, and I lost my mind. I couldn’t handle it. I went from loving the movie for most of the running time to hating it all because of a single decision. I would rant about it at the slightest provocation, and I am sure I must have sounded like a maniac to anyone unfortunate to ask me what I thought about it.

I enjoyed Secret Admirer and The Stuff quite a bit, and I found myself willing to put up with pretty much anything Perfect did in order to watch Jamie Lee Curtis in her workout outfits. Even though things were tense between me and my parents, I did talk my dad into an outing to see Pale Rider together, and I still remember the long conversation about Clint’s whole Western filmography that happened on the way home. While I was starting to realize that my taste in film was not the same as my dad’s taste or my mom’s taste, I was also aware that both of them were part of introducing me to things I loved. I think you pick up your movie taste in bits and pieces from all sorts of influences, and one of the reasons I loved it when my parents showed me things was because it gave me a chance to react to these things. It didn’t matter if I loved them or hated them. It was just interesting to me to see what it was that my parents loved and valued, and even today, I can hear comments they made 40 years ago while we watched something on VHS or when we left a theater.

Often, though, at this particular moment, I had these experiences alone. There was one day in particular where I got up early, mowed the lawn so I had enough money to buy some concessions, and got a ride over to the theater for an early afternoon screening. I stayed for three movies in a row, walking over to a fast food place for lunch at one point, and only called my parents after the prime-time screening of one of the films I was most excited about all summer long. All three of those movies hit me hard, all for different reasons, and I was almost speechless at the end of the day. I could barely articulate to my parents just how great a day it had been, how many different worlds I had experienced, and just how much I needed every one of those hours of escape. I still think it’s kind of insane that I saw Lifeforce, Return to Oz, and Cocoon in one day, and I love that these were the kinds of swings Hollywood was taking that summer.

On a personal level, I knew change was just around the corner, and I felt like I was treading water, trying not to make things worse before we moved but not sure how to stop myself from being a chaos pinball. Out of this entire decade, this three or four month stretch is one of the most difficult for me to revisit emotionally, and it’s interesting how charged my memories of these films and my experiences with them are. Part of the turbulence was because my father and I were going to move first, while my mom and my sister stayed behind to deal with the sale of our house. We were going to move into a brand-new house in Florida, but it hadn’t been built yet, and my dad wanted to be in town to make sure it was done the right way. He also needed to start his job and, most importantly, they wanted to get me the hell out of Chattanooga. My sister was much younger, and they wanted to give her as much time with her friends as they could before they yanked her away from everything she’d pretty much ever known.

This first weekend is a short one, but there are a lot of great things to talk about here, even with a mere three films, so let’s jump right in and start with a title that I’m sure people have a whooooooooole lot of feelings about, one way or another…

---

JUNE 7

The Goonies
Sean Astin, Josh Brolin, Jeff Cohen, Corey Feldman, Kerri Green, Martha Plimpton, Ke Huy Quan, John Matuszak, Robert Davi, Joe Pantoliano, Anne Ramsey, Lupe Ontiveros, Mary Ellen Trainor, Keith Walker, Curt Hanson, Paul Tuerpe, George Robotham, Charles McDaniel, Elaine Cohen McMahon, Michael Paul Chan, Nick McLean, Bill Bradley, Jeb Stuart Adams, Eric Briant Wells, Gene Ross, Max Segar, Newt Arnold, Jack O’Leary, Patrick Cameron, Orwin C. Harvey, Ted Grossman
cinematography by Nick McLean
music by Dave Grusin
screenplay by Chris Columbus
story by Steven Spielberg
produced by Harvey Bernhard and Richard Donner
directed by Richard Donner
Rated PG
1 hr 54 mins

A group of kids follow a treasure map, hoping to discover a pirate’s secret in time to save their houses from being foreclosed on by a greedy local developer.

It’s genuinely interesting how people are still playing the “who really directed Poltergeist?” game all these years later, while the “who really directed Goonies?” game never really gained any traction. I’d say a strong case could be made that for both films, producer Steven Spielberg exerted an outsized influence over every aspect of production, enough so that even the cast seems unsure how to answer that question.

I think the truth is that ‘80s-era Steven Spielberg had more creative energy than any one filmmaker could have spent, no matter how fast they worked. Becoming a producer was as much a practical matter as a creative one for Spielberg. Amblin’ allowed him to outsource every whim he had, and as he looked at screenplay drafts and pre-production art, he found himself carefully picking which ones he was the sole author of and which ones he was willing to let someone else direct. Clearly, there were creative relationships that were like striking gold for him, and one of those was with young Chris Columbus. Their relationship began in 1980, when Spielberg saw a short film that Columbus made at NYU called I Think I’m Gonna Like It Here. Spielberg wasn’t the first person to hire him, though. He actually worked on Reckless first, but once James Foley came onboard as director, Columbus felt like he got railroaded off the film. When he did finally see a screening of it, the experience left him in tears. Thankfully, that was not the only film he had working its way through the development process at the time, since Steven Spielberg bought his spec script Gremlins in 1981, and when that finished film came out four months after Reckless, it was enough of a hit that it erased Reckless from everyone’s memories completely. By that point, Spielberg had already hired Columbus to write several other screenplays, including Young Sherlock Holmes and a film that was based on an original idea of Spielberg’s, originally called The Goon Kids.

Spielberg’s original notion was simple: what do kids do when they’re bored and stuck at home on a rainy day? What Columbus crafted from that idea is a movie that continues, even now, to resonate loudly with audiences forty years later, and its durability is kind of remarkable. After all, it is a strange grab-bag of ideas and genres. You’ve got pirate treasure and cartoon gangsters and ‘80s teen movie dynamics and real estate deals all thrown into the mix, and the entire thing depends on a bunch of kids talking about “One-Eyed Willy” with reverence. It shouldn’t work at all. One of the things that helps is the exact thing that drove me crazy when I saw the film, the young ensemble cast. Impeccably chosen, they have chemistry that more than patches over whatever problems I have with the film or the filmmaking. They are all painted in broad stereotype, and that includes the actual character names. Mouth, Data, Chunk, Sloth… these are names that define the entire character at once, and Richard Donner and Steven Spielberg hired kids who could quickly and easily slip into those names.

Corey Feldman basically played variations on Mouth for the rest of his film career, wise-ass loudmouths who used bluster to cover vulnerability. Data, a bespoke role created for Ke Huy Quan after Spielberg worked with him in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, is a gadget-crazy inventor kid who gets most of the broad physical comedy here, and he is relentlessly charming in the part. Jeff Cohen, who is long-retired as an actor at this point, is the group’s donkey, the one they all tease and bully, a “husky” kid who tells constant and outrageous lies to make himself seem cool. They are held together by Mikey, played by Sean Astin, and he’s the nerdy little asthmatic brother to Josh Brolin’s cool teenage big-brother, Brand. Throw in Andi (Kerri Green), the cheerleader Brand wishes was his girlfriend and her sassy glasses-wearing best friend Stef (Martha Plimpton), and the result is a shaggy, rowdy group to go treasure-hunting with.

While Cohen may not have built a lasting onscreen career (he’s a successful entertainment lawyer now), everyone else here went on to further work, and when you watch them here, at their most raw and unpolished, it’s easy to see why. There is an easy, natural energy between all of them, and they all manage to find moments to shine. For Feldman, it’s a moment under a wishing well, when he angrily says he’s taking back all of his wishes that never came true, and you are reminded in that moment what it was we liked about Feldman in the first place. He constantly feels like he’s teetering on that junction point between carefree child and cynical adult. Ke Huy Quan gets the corniest comedy material in the film, but there’s such joy to the way he plays it that it’s hard to get upset about anything. There are few things more appealing than Quan’s smile right before he deploys one of his gadgets. Plimpton, who is ostensibly there as Green’s sidekick, gets the majority of her good scenes playing opposite Feldman, and the two of them have terrific comic chemistry. And then there’s Sean Astin, who is as important to the success of this film as he is to the success of Lord of the Rings. There’s something about his earnest intensity that makes him the perfect center for a film as potentially ridiculous as this. He and Brolin have a great lived-in chemistry as brothers, too, and one of my favorite things about the production of the film is the wealth of stories that locals in Astoria have about meeting John Astin and James Brolin, who were on-set as guardians for their sons.

We haven’t even addressed the adults in the film yet, and oddly, after living with the film for decades, my problems are more about the adults than the kids at this point. It’s smart to make the bad guys threatening, but cartoon threatening. You don’t want to push the film into being genuinely scary or menacing. This is a kid’s adventure story, after all, and ultimately, it is a film for children. The worldview the film creates is a child’s take on things, and you have to lean into that to enjoy it. All three of the Fratellis are played by terrific character actors, and they are clearly doing exactly what Donner hired them to do. There’s a lot of playful energy between Robert Davi and Joe Pantoliano, and I think they’re both good in the film. I wish the film had taken even more of a Charlie Brown approach to the adults, keeping them at more of a remove from the world of these kids, which is so clearly the thing that Donner’s most interested in.

Speaking of… why Donner? The only truly noteworthy performance by a child in any of his movies before this was by that creepy li’l kid that played Damien in The Omen, and when Spielberg approached him about the film, Donner told him point-blank that he didn’t feel any particular affinity for kids. If I had to guess, I’d say it’s the light touch that Donner exhibited in Superman. That film is funny when it needs to be, serious when it needs to be, and it creates a reality that is heightened and almost childlike. Everything is simplified to the point of primary colors. That’s true here, too, and I also think Donner’s love of widescreen and his eye for composing in widescreen may have helped. Like Spielberg, he stages scenes in long masters, allowing his cast to set the comic tempo of scenes. I don’t think Donner is as precise a visual wit as Spielberg, and some of the film’s shagginess feels like much of his work from the ‘80s, but there is an overlap between their style as filmmakers that feels like the place where The Goonies happens. I can see both of them in the film, and the chaotic noisiness of the scenes with the kids all talking over each other feels akin to both the family scenes in Close Encounters and the police precinct of the Lethal Weapon movies.

If there is a single MVP for the film, I might pick Dave Grusin. His score for the film ties together all the disparate parts and tones, and he cycles through a few different themes that all stand out. I love Data’s theme, and the Fratellis are given just the right sort of sonic underlining as threats. That main theme, though, is fantastic, a propulsive earworm, and it perfectly captures the spirit of adventure that the film’s trying to capture. Production design, editing, cinematography… all of it is top-notch. This is Spielberg throwing every resource he can at things, and that’s most evident in that final sequence in the cave where they find One-Eyed Willy’s pirate ship. There is an apocryphal story that the footage in the film of the kids seeing the ship for the first time was done by keeping the ship a total secret until the moment the cameras rolled, and they did indeed try to do that. What you see in the film is a reshoot of the moment, though, because the kids were apparently too overwhelmed by what they saw, and I get it. It’s an amazing physical build, a full-sized pirate ship, pretty much the best playground anyone could build for a bunch of kids. It feels like it comes so late in the film, though, that hardly anything happens there, and that gets to my main complaint about the film. It’s all preamble. I like some of the traps and the stops along the way, but it almost feels like they didn’t know what to do once they actually got to the finish line. The punchline’s a nice one, and I’m curious how many people realize that shitty Mr. Perkins, the land developer who is about to tear down all the homes where the Goonies live, is played by Curtis Hanson, director of LA Confidential and so many other films. Steve Antin plays Troy, his shitty son, and Antin’s one of those ‘80s kids who was born to play a smug rich piece of crap.

As I mentioned in the introduction for June 1985, I read the novelization for The Goonies before I saw the film, so I was a little less confused by some of the vestigial pieces of scenes that got cut that remained in the film, like Data’s breathless description of the octopus, and I was left wondering how much of the book’s extra material was actually shot and considered for use at some point. In addition to the octopus scene, which was actually shot, there was a much more complicated opening. Infamously, in the car chase, there was more mayhem, including a circus wagon that tips over, allowing a bunch of apes to escape. They steal the golf cart that Troy’s father drives around and they end up stealing Troy’s Mustang. The gorillas were played by men in suits, and Hanson, the film’s most odious bad guy, talked about how sorry he felt for the stunt men who learned how to do all of their stunts while also wearing gorilla suits. It feels like they were constantly struggling to figure out the reality of the film, and there are plenty of moments in the final edit that feel like live-action cartoons.

Maybe that’s why everyone thought they could get away with Sloth. John Matuszak was, by all accounts, a handful to have on a set, and the production hired a Matuszak whisperer to hang out with him during the shoot and help keep him from riling up any locals. His make-up took five hours to apply, and it was a combination of prosthetics and animatronics, a whole-head appliance that only allowed Matuszak a limited range of vision out of one eye. Knowing how technically demanding it would be to do any emoting through that kind of appliance, he definitely deserves kudos for creating an appealing, empathetic personality that makes it through all of those layers between his real face and the audience. I just wish the design itself wasn’t so “Zippy the Pinhead.” I don’t like the character as conceived. I don’t like the design. I really don’t think his relationship with Chunk is as charming as they think it is, and this feels like the absolute last moment a major studio family film would dare put this kind of character into a film. There’s a startling amount of cruelty baked into the entire idea of the character, but the film wants to play it for laughs. I can’t fault John Matuszak with the idea of the character, but I also can’t fully judge his performance because I dislike the character so much.

In the end, my opinion of The Goonies doesn’t matter. The film has passed any test that a classic has to pass, and the fact that it’s still shared, still rediscovered, and still inspiring new generations of young fans is impossible to deny. I used to wince if I heard the Cyndi Lauper theme song, but no longer. I’ve come to enjoy the things that work and let go of the things that I don’t like. The Goonies is, indeed, good enough.