Three Weeks With the Goonies

My friend Mick Alderman just published a book, Three Weeks With the Goonies, on his experience observing the location filming of The Goonies (that cult classic from the 80's that was filmed in Astoria). He read excerpts from his book and had a book signing last week. J and I both went and had a great time. It was like getting the DVD extras from the movie in person.

When the movie was shot, Mick made a deal to be able to be a "fly on the wall" of the production. So he had a lot of standing around, but also got to witness the process of making a big budget film (which IS a lot of standing around). It was neat to read the anecdotes but also neat to get a 19 year old outsider's perspective on the movie business... Mick does a great job of describing what was happening even if he did not understand it at the time (he was not allowed to read the script, so he had no clue about the plot of the movie as he observed everything being filmed). The part that is amazing is that Mick wrote this book while doing post-production work on the movie Crimps, which he wrote, directed, edited, and has been slaving over for almost three years. For more information on the book, go to 2001productions.com

Made me think of the first time I saw The Goonies. I was in Phoenix, Arizona, visiting my cousin for two weeks, the longest I had ever been away from home. I was homesick. My cousin Jes had recently moved away from the Oregon coast and when we sat in the movie theater and saw Astoria, Ecola Park, and Cannon Beach, we held hands and cried. For me, the movie was about home. Such beautiful cinematography.

And when I moved to New York for college, that was how I described where I was from. "You've seen The Goonies? I live there."  (Incidentally my favorite geography lesson in college was with someone who said,  "Seaside, Oregon? Is that somewhere on the Great Lakes?" Those opposite coasts can be confusing. To make it simpler, my father once told a cabbie in Manhattan that Oregon was a suburb of California)