AT 30, ‘ STAND BY ME’ ENDURES
Star Wil Wheaton reflects on film’s ‘ timeless’ appeal
With back- to- school posts plastered all over Facebook, people are feeling the passage of time this month.
Now imagine your friends’ kids asking you questions about a movie you made as a kid a generation ago, and you can begin to appreciate how Wil Wheaton feels about Stand By Me’s 30th anniversary Monday.
The 1986 movie, based on Stephen King’s 1982 novella The Body, featured a preteen Wheaton as Gordie LaChance, a future novelist, who spends his Labor Day 1959 weekend in search of the body of a missing boy before beginning junior high school. He was accompanied by three friends, from whom he would later drift apart. They were played by River Phoenix ( who died of a drug overdose in 1993), Corey Feldman and Jerry O’Connell.
“I just turned 44 and there are people my age who finally feel like their kids are old enough to watch Stand By Me,” Wheaton says. “That’s really weird.”
But he has been able to overcome the weirdness and embrace its enduring ap- peal. “One of the things I’m really proud of is that the themes and relationships are timeless. Whether you grew up in a rural area or the city or in the ’ 50s or ’ 80s or even the 21st century, a lot of the things our characters go through in the course of the film are things that are relatable to people all over the world.”
Wheaton counts his experience working on director Rob Reiner’s third feature film “a gift” and praises Reiner’s approach to working with adolescents. “He always made me feel like I deserved to be there, like I was an important part of his movie. He never treated me like I was a kid.”
Reiner did lose his temper with the boys once while filming the train trestle scene on a sun- baked Oregon day. “Rob got really angry at me and Jerry because we were acting scared rather than being scared,” Wheaton says. “Rob said: ‘ Everyone’s hot and you’re not taking this seriously. You’re ruining our movie, and if you’re not worried about that train killing you, you’d better be worried about me.’ Jerry and I both looked at each other and burst into tears. Then Rob was like, ‘ Roll the cameras right now.’ And the next take is in the movie.”
Who was the best actor, in Wheaton’s view? Phoenix. “We were all kind of go- ing on instinct and River was the one who had some technique. … There’s another scene where we’re walking down the train tracks and ( Phoenix’s character) Chris is telling Gordie that they’re not going to be friends next year because Chris is going to the shop classes and Gordie is going to college prep. River played that scene so calm and uncomplicated. I watch that scene and wish my performance had been in the same place as his.”
He recalls the unease he felt as he prepared to shoot his hardest scene, in which Gordie tells his friends about his problems with his neglectful father. “That scene was on the call sheet every single day if we got the right weather. In the film, that was during a storm. We were in Oregon, where it rains like 300 days a year — and in the three months we were there, it never rained. So we waited and waited for it to rain. Later, I realized that having that looming over me for the entirety of production informed a lot of Gordie’s character at an unconscious level, because it loomed over me just like it loomed over him.”
Scenes like those are why King has often called Stand By Me his favorite adaptation.
“It felt as though Reiner and company captured the core of truth in my story,” the author told USA TODAY via email. “That’s a rare thing. There’s a whole range of emotions, and I still love to watch it.”