Coreyography: A Memoir by Corey Feldman Read Free Book Online Page A

when she saw me, crying, covered in blood and gravel and snot. “You’re going to fuck everything up. I swear to God, if that director sends you home tomorrow, I’ll make you wish you were still tumbling down that hill—that’ll feel like nothing compared to what I’m gonna do to you.”
    The next day I slid from my father’s car and scampered over to the makeup lady’s chair, set up just to the left of third base underneath an enormous yellow umbrella.
    “Please fix it,” I told her, trembling. “My parents are going to kill me if I can’t work.”
    *   *   *
    California law dictates that child actors can work a maximum of eight hours a day, three of which must be devoted solely to education. For the bulk of the last two years, I’d been given a lesson plan from the public school where I was still technically enrolled and studied on set with a private tutor. Lessons are conducted in a designated “school trailer” or, if there aren’t any other kid actors on set, in the privacy (and cramped quarters) of my dressing room. The mandated three hours, however, almost never comes in one uninterrupted block of time; it’s broken up into chunks, no fewer than twenty minutes, squeezed into natural gaps in the shooting schedule, in between camera setups or while other actors are at work on a scene.
    Occasionally, a really well-organized producer will arrange for my day to be “shot out early,” meaning that all of my scenes will be shot one right after the other so I can be dismissed from set with a full three hours (or more) still left in the day. More often, though, we would wrap a scene and the assistant director would call out, “Okay, Corey goes to school.” Then I’d stroll over to my dressing room, transitioning from a foul-mouthed little leaguer to an ordinary second-grader, cramming for a quiz on consonants and vowels or learning the fundamentals of fractions.
    Working with child actors is, frankly, a giant pain in the ass. They bring with them a cadre of on-set guardians and labor workers, private tutors and chaperones (all of which are expensive), but if a production is running behind schedule, “school time” is the first thing that gets cut. Producers get around the legal implications of that through a system called “banking.” On a day when you’re not much needed, you might go to school for, say, five hours rather than the mandated three. Those two extra hours can then be rolled over, applied to a day when there isn’t time for school at all. This jiggering of schedules makes learning difficult, to say the least.
    Midway through shooting season two of the Bears, the producers call a cast-wide meeting on the set of our little league locker room. We shoot on the soundstage where The Brady Bunch was filmed, but it’s now clear that The Bad News Bears will not have that kind of longevity: we’ve been cancelled.
    Looking back, I can’t believe this came as that much of a shock; our show aired at eight-thirty on Saturday night, and our lead-in was a new sitcom called Working Stiffs with Jim Belushi and Michael Keaton. It was a tough time slot for a kids’ show. But everyone, from the cast to the crew to the production team, seems completely and utterly crushed. (At the wrap party, someone from the cinematography department got drunk and sobbed on my shirt collar.)
    The cancellation, aside from throwing my family’s finances into sudden disarray, comes at an awkward time for me personally: I’ll be sent back to public school, just as my classmates are making the transition from simple mathematics to the single most baffling concept I had ever encountered in my life: multiplication.
    I had always excelled in my other classes, subjects like spelling and reading and social studies, and have a near photographic memory—hand me a script and I can remember every single word on the page—but multiplication, for some reason, just does not compute. Both my parents and teachers begin referring