It wasn’t just the fictional 1980s version of Astoria, Oregon, that had to deal with The Goonies, as one of the men responsible for the kid gang revealed during a new reunion.
Josh Gad reunited the cast of the 1985 comedy movie for the first episode of his Reunited Apart series, with talent involved including Josh Brolin, Kerri Green, Corey Feldman and Jeff Cohen. Also making an appearance was Steven Spielberg, who wrote the original story and served as executive producer on the movie — and, as he shared, also worked to keep director Richard Donner on his toes.
Heat Vision breakdown
“My best memory, I have to say, didn’t happen during the shooting of the movie, it happened after the movie was over,” Spielberg revealed. “Everyone we cast was high energy, and after a while, it kind of started working on Dick. It’d tear him apart a little bit, a piece [at a] time.
“And so by the end of the movie, in the last two weeks, Richard kept saying, ‘Oh my God, I got two weeks to go, and I can’t wait to finish and I’m going to go to my house in Hawaii, and I’m gonna get away from all of this noise; it’s extraordinary, and I love ’em to pieces, but I can’t stand it anymore!’ So right after we wrap up the film, I take the whole cast and put ’em on American Airlines and send ’em to Donner’s house in Hawaii. So before Dick ever landed, they all showed up in his living room.”
Castmember Martha Plimpton recalled Donner's reaction.
“He dropped to his knees. He went white as a sheet,” Plimpton said. “We thought we’d given him a coronary.”
Donner himself also appears in the episode, alongside screenwriter Chris Columbus and, for full effect, Cyndi Lauper, who sang the movie’s theme song. Watch the episode, which benefits the Center for Disaster Philanthropy, below.
