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Rolling Roadshow Screenings Keep Corey Feldman Alive (Cont.) For the Roadshow, a good deal of the fun is the nearly insane effort its attendees have to make to see the films involved. (I had to take an afternoon bus to Bakersfield and then a regional bus to get dumped off on the side of a nearly barren road a half-mile away from the airport in an absurd parallel to Grant's being dropped off in the middle of nowhere just before the plane attack.) And that is nothing compared to the effort it took fans to see Sergio Leone's Western classic Once Upon A Time in the West, which was shown in the desert heart of Monument Valley, Utah, or the tour's grandest adventure: the screening of Close Encounters of the Third Kind at Devil's Tower. The surreal effect at each stop is that the audience becomes a part of something greater than simply watching the film. You are now part of it, experiencing a power that even Knowles finds hard to grasp, a power that helped him overcome troublesome early years through the magic of fantasy. "A few months before I started, in February 1996, I had an accident where I got hit in the lower back and wound up paralyzed below the waist. So I couldn't go to the movies and was practically having DTs over it, just jonesing to go," recalls Knowles as the crop-dusters roar overhead and the crowd roars with equal approval in the distance. "As a result, I kind of went crazy about hooking up with people on film newsgroups and was finding that a lot of people had really great information from working on films, going to test screenings and reading all the different magazines. "I cultivated a group of people who were writing and we were in the right time and right place with the right personality to get attention, because right then is when people everywhere thought pimply faced kids living in their parents' basements were going to change the world through the Internet. And the people we were scaring just happened to be movie studios and multinational corporations." The reason why Knowles and his cronies scared them by the summer of 1997 was that the movie industry was in a disastrous period akin to this summer's load of flops. Studios had long thought they could pass off cinematic crapfests like Speed 2: Cruise Control or Batman and Robin onto an unsuspecting public if they just marketed the films cleverly enough. But that summer, the old formulas suddenly ceased to work, and the bad movies bombed. As Ain't It Cool's reputation spread, so too did the blame for the failures fell upon them. "God bless Hollywood for screwing up so badly because their reaction and over-reaction to all that wound up creating a point where things kind of got crazy and people started focusing on us," Knowles recalls. "And with Titanic, it's hard to calculate what I did other than convince the press to hold off from attacking the film by saying this could be a great one. It made them shut up and give the film a chance to find an audience, which is what happened. "The studios tried to artificially recreate our sort of buzz, but I haven't let them because ultimately I really read the script and check out the casting and director choices before I start promoting a film as special," he continues. "We discovered Lord of the Rings a year before the public did and plugged the script of [major cult classic] Donnie Darko four years before it was made." As North By Northwest faded away, the screen deflated and the crowd of 300 film fans dispersed. There was no rest for the wicked, however, as that very Saturday afternoon, the Roadshow was hosting a scavenger-hunt-style road rally through the sketchiest streets of L.A. in honor of the 20th anniversary of the cult classic Repo Man. The rally's prize was to win the classic car from the movie, a 1964 Chevy Malibu that housed space aliens in its trunk. The goal was to follow written and verbal clues from a CD, in search of four other Malibus, with the first person to find all four winning the movie car. Yet since the movie centers on comically sleazy repo men who prowl the worst streets of Los Angeles, the devious Tim League sent participants through what could most charitably be called the Devil's tour of Los Angeles -- a succession of alleys, bridges and near-abandoned buildings which all seemed to feature an assortment of crack addict camps and heroin shooters. Best of all, the four alleged Malibus were in actuality spray-painted silhouettes of the cars, hidden among the most graffiti-strewn walls of the city. "This tour was really a continuation of the things we were doing in Austin area, doing road shows for five years, and we talked about making them more over the top. This year we thought we had resources and crew available to take time off and run the tour while still operating theaters back home," explains League, who runs the Drafthouse empire with his wife, Karri. "The hardest part for all this was getting permission from different places. We wanted to show The Shining where it was shot at the Hotel Overlook in Oregon, but they weren't all that thrilled to get a new round of publicity calling it The Shining hotel." For my run through Los Angeles’ urban jungle, I was lucky enough to team up with the actress from Repo Man and a whole host of other '80s underground films, Jennifer Balgobin. She was to be a surprise addition to that night's reunion of the cast with Repo writer/director Alex Cox. For Balgobin, the chance to take part in the road rally and the night's reunion brought back a flood of memories. An exotic Brit of Indian ethnicity, she had left England at 17 after telling her friends that she would make it to the big screen within five years. Balgobin recalls that director Cox kept a loose and friendly vibe on the set, allowing the actors to improvise freely with what was already a wild script. The $1.5 million budget and the surrounding nascent era of independent films also added to the special spirit involved and created a film that was an instant obsession for some people, such as one USC student she met who saw the movie 13 times in the theater during its initial run. She kept going in the indie-film circuit, working with Cox on two more films and building a friendship that lasts to this day. While the residual payments from her string of oddball film roles have been a great income source, she eventually outgrew her Mohawk stage and dropped out of acting seven years ago. Yet in the past year she has again felt the tug, and at the reunion she was surrounded by autograph seekers who helped her realize that even supporting roles in unusual movies can touch people's lives. For me, the Roadshow experience that truly mattered was the last of the four stops on my West Coast jaunt: the screening of The Goonies that inspired hundreds of Astorians to line up chairs and blankets on the town's football field after being forced to dance the film's beloved Truffle Shuffle dance -- a move the crowd, in turn, forced Feldman to attempt. The film instantly took its audience back into their childhoods with its depiction of friends engaged in life and death adventure to save their parents' homes and prove their never-say-die attitude. It's no wonder the film has proven to be one of the top 20 best-selling videos and DVDs of all time. "It amazes me what you guys remember from the film. I had a line where I said 'I want a nice wet liquory kiss', a phrase I made up, but I think it's really funny that 20 years later there's a T shirt with that word 'liquory' on it because it's not a word," Feldman laughed as he addressed the crowd before the film. He took a shot at the dance and displayed a quick sense of humor in dealing with questions about the film and his career, which was spotlighted before the screening as a series of trailers from his films with frequent '80s sidekick Corey Haim played out on the giant screen. Seeing the top scenes from films that remain popular to this day -- Stand By Me, The Lost Boys, License to Drive, and The Burbs, to name but a few -- it was suddenly easy to recall that Feldman had a real knack for comedy and a sly sense of sarcasm before his early '90s drug habit often sent his flicks direct to video. But the ultimate dream of a Goonies sequel seems to be an impossibility. "It's not looking good at this point. I think it would be a great idea, and many conversations have happened with [director] Richard Donner and [producer] Steven Spielberg, and a good script came close to being made," says Feldman. "But Warner Bros. doesn't want to make it without more control and so we're stuck in the middle, like so many political things. "It's been a great ride so far, but although I've been doing this for 30 years, I feel like I've just begun and have much more to come. Looking back I definitely would have made some better choices on roles in the '90s, but everything happens for a reason," says Feldman. "But faith in God, determination, hard work and belief in never giving up, plus a good sense of humor all help me keep it going. Now I have my wife and child, who keep me even stronger."
Maybe Feldman will
have another shot at bigger stardom some day, and maybe not. But his
determination to keep trying shows what Knowles and League have built
their careers around: Goonies may never say die, and neither does
the magic of movies.
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