by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2018 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Ultimately last night I
watched the Lifetime movie A Tale of Two Coreys, yet another tiresome story of promising Hollywood
careers derailed by drug use. The promising Hollywood careers that got derailed
were those of young actors Corey Feldman and Corey Haim, who met while
appearing in the film The Lost Boys (a film about teenage vampires directed by Joel Schumacher in 1987 — I
had an old VHS tape of it and The Big Easy which I recorded when my then-partner John Gabrish and I had cable TV
with HBO, and I remember that at the time he liked The Lost Boys better and I liked The Big Easy better), became bosom buddies and were frequently
bracketed in teen-idol magazines as “The Two Coreys.” The Lifetime movie about
then was directed by Steven Huffaker from a script by an even larger writing
committee than usual: the story is credited to Feldman himself along with Tejal
Desai, Jeffrey Schenck. Peter Sullivan and Henry Wassenburger, and Schenck,
Sullivan, Wassenburger and Jessica Dube are credited with the screenplay (and
on screen the writers’ names are linked with ampersands rather than the word
“and,” meaning that they all worked on the script together instead of taking it
over relay-style one from the other). It’s narrated in flashbacks by both
Feldman, who’s still alive and sat for an interview that was taped and aired
after the movie; and Haim, who died from pneumonia in 2010 after a lifelong
struggle with drug abuse.
The producers (14 are listed) and casting directors
Dean E. Frank and Donald Paul Penrick double-cast the parts of Feldman and
Haim, with Elijah Marcano and Justin Ellings playing Feldman and Haim (in that
order) as teenagers and Scott Bosely and Casey Leach playing them as adults.
Elijah Marcano is a hauntingly beautiful young man who doesn’t look either like
the real Corey Feldman in his teens — quite frankly, his ethereal baby face and
long brown hair would have made him better casting for a biopic of David
Cassidy than of Corey Feldman — and he also doesn’t look like he’d grow up to
be the nice-bodied but rather hatchet-faced Scott Bosely. Justin Ellings looks
like a mouth-watering morsel of boy-meat for Gay men into twinks — which
actually fits a key story point of the film, as we’ll see later — and he
doesn’t look like he’ll grow up to look like his adult counterpart, Casey Leach,
though for my money Leach was by far the sexiest of the four: tall, blond,
muscular, butch and also quite strikingly reminiscent of the surviving film of
the older Corey Haim. For the most part A Tale of Two Coreys is a pretty-standard issue “Behnd the Music” story
of a promising young talent (in this case, two promising young talents) wrecking their careers by
partying, clubbing, screwing, drinking and, most destructively, drugging.
But
there are two distinguishing characteristics that set A Tale of Two Coreys apart from most efforts in the
salvation-from-drugs genre whose conventions were set relatively early (in 1821 by the British
writer Thomas de Quincey in his book Confessions of an English Opium-Eater). One is how vividly it demonstrates that child
actors are really commodities, controlled both by their bosses and their
parents; in one chilling scene, Feldman comes home after three classmates
bullied and badly beat him when he bragged to them about landing a major movie
role — and his mom sees the bruises on his face and, rather than say anything
supportive, chews him out for having got into a fight that bruised his highly
valuable face and risked him getting replaced in that big role. Both Feldman
and Haim came from broken homes; Feldman’s parents divorced before he started
his career and Haim’s broke up while he was just taking off as a young actor —
and Feldman’s dad was an aspiring rock musician and his son’s manager until
Feldman abruptly fired him after realizing his dad was just taking his money
and pushing him off into quick-buck projects that would bring in short-term
income but be bad for his long-term career. The breaking point came when
Feldman’s good friend Michael Jackson (no, I’m not making this up!), to whom
he’d been introduced by Steven Spielberg on the set of The Goonies, told him it was stupid for Feldman to appear on
the quiz show The Hollywood Squares because “that’s something you do at the end of your career,” but dad remained firm that
Feldman do that show and not even Michael Jackson himself, dressed in the
costume he wore on the cover of Bad and played by Brandon Howard (who looks “blacker” than the real Jackson
did at that point but gets the famously whispery speaking voice down pat), can
talk Feldman père out of pushing his son
onto a humiliating gig. (It’s somewhat ironic that the movie presents Michael
Jackson and Carrie Fisher as voices of reason to the young protagonists when
Jackson died a drug-related death and Fisher’s mysterious death remains
unexplained and, given her history, could well have involved drugs as well.)
The
other unusual part of this film — and one which makes it particularly relevant
in the so-called “moment” in which America in general and Hollywood in
particular are becoming more aware of, and more sensitive to, charges of sexual
harassment and the heads of once-powerful people are rolling as they get ousted
from their jobs and positions of power following revelations of their records
of sexual misconduct over the years — is the allegation that both Feldman and
Haim were raped early in their careers, before they were over the age of
consent, by the people who were supposedly on the sets of their films to
chaperone and protect them. Indeed, though the story is only obliquely hinted
at in the movie itself, Feldman is more explicit about it in his post-film
interview (and his 2013 memoir, punningly titled Coreography), saying that both straight and Gay pedophilia is
the real dark secret of Hollywood.
Though he’s still too scared of the man who raped him to mention his name — he
says the man is still a power player in the industry and could literally have him killed, which is why, he told his
interviewer, he has at least one bodyguard (and usually more than one) on duty
all the time, including at home when he sleeps — he describes himself as “a man
on a mission” to expose the rampant pedophilia in Hollywood and drive its
perpetrators from power. Given that memoirs of classic Hollywood have exposed
such legendary names from the past as David O. Selznick, Arthur Freed and John
Huston as pedophiles — Selznick and Freed were named by none other than Shirley
Temple in her 1988 memoir Child Star, in which she wrote that both of them chased her around their desks
when she had past her peak as a child star and was attempting a comeback as a
teenager (and was still below the age of consent) and Huston by a woman who
claimed that her father was the “Black Dahlia” killer and that he not only
molested her himself but passed her along to his powerful Hollywood friends,
including Huston — I can readily believe everything Feldman is saying; his
description of how the powerful pedophiles in Hollywood throw grand parties at
their estate, invite lots of kids, offer them games, snacks and, eventually,
booze and then have their wicked ways with them may sound like something
novelist Jonathan Kellerman would make up, but I have no doubt it happens.
I’m
also not sure how much of this actually has to do with sex; just as feminists
like Susan Brownmiller in the late 1970’s argued that rape was a form of
assault and its purpose for the rapist was not sexual gratification but the
expression of power and domination over women in general and their victim in
particular, so it seems to me that a group of jaded people who are literally in the business of selling hot young bodies to the
public would essentially establish their “ownership” over the possessors of
those bodies by violating them. Both the film and Feldman’s post-film interview
make clear that not only is the “casting couch” alive and well, but young men
are as likely to be the victims of it as young women — even if, as I suspect,
it’s not just Gay men like Bryan Singer and Kevin Spacey that are doing the
exploiting, but people who self-identify as heterosexual, Bisexual or without a
particular sexual orientation at all. (One of Feldman’s abusers in the film
says chillingly that he isn’t Gay and doesn’t consider himself Bi, either: “I
just like both women and men.”) Though on its face A Tale of Two Coreys is a pretty standard tale of drugs-and-redemption
for Feldman and drugs-and-death for Haim, the sexual overlays and the whole
critique of how the entertainment industry commodifies its victims mark it as a
quite relevant work for today’s headlines as well as a personal tragedy for
Feldman, whose career ambitions as he explained them at the end of the
interview — to be in one of the Godfather movies and to work with Al Pacino — seem rather forlorn reaches for the
higher things he was too locked into being first a bankable young-adult
commodity and then a “bad boy” and reality-TV star ever to hope to achieve.
