Steven Spielberg had to be evacuated from the set of The Goonies because of a shooter
Few films from the 1980s induce as many warm fuzzies in a certain type of Generation X as Richard Donner’s “The Goonies.” Written by future “Home Alone” director Chris Columbus, this turbulent adventure about a group of young friends searching for real pirate treasure in order to save their low-income parents’ homes from being razed by a rapacious country club is vintage Amblin escapist fare. It’s basically a big-budget Little Rascals movie filled with teenage hijinks, Rube Goldberg gags, and so much screaming. I loved it when I was 11, but it irritates me something fierce as an adult. Some films should be left in childhood.
No matter how I feel about “The Goonies” now, I can’t deny that it’s a good-hearted Steven Spielberg production, from a time when all summer movies wanted to do was take you out of the theater and onto the air. It may be boring, but it’s also Above all nice (the poor translation of Corey Feldman with a Spanish housekeeper is somewhat mean-spirited) and ultimately harmless. Therefore, it’s crazy to learn that principal photography almost took an inexplicably tragic turn when someone started randomly shooting a gun on set. The situation was so awkward that Spielberg had to be rushed into a police car and driven away from the filming location in Astoria, Oregon. Why was someone taking photos on a film set? This story is about to get even wilder.
The Goonies’ youthful antics were nearly derailed by two kids with guns.
In a 2015 oral history of “The Goonies” published by Willamette Week, retired Astoria police officer Dave Johnson recalled in the Morning that, out of nowhere, the filming of “The Goonies” came under fire. “Someone was shooting out the window of a house,” he said. “People called 911 saying the car windows were blowing out, and they realized they had fired shots near the Goonie house.”
After evacuating Spielberg, police located the shooter and found, to their surprise and dismay, “two young children, 8, 9 or 10 years old.” As Johnson told Willamette Week: “Mom and Dad had gone to the hospital because she was pregnant. [The kids] I took Dad’s .22 rifle and was shooting out the bedroom window. I just shoot randomly. They didn’t understand why we were so upset. »
These kids blew out car windows and, more disturbingly, took aim at a person across the street. “[T]“There was a little old man mowing the lawn, and they kept shooting at him and making the dirt come up behind him, but they couldn’t touch him,” Johnson recalled. These kids seemed to think they were just shooting a BB gun, which infuriated the police chief. (“It was the big moment when the hair was raised on the back of the neck.”)
Fortunately, no one was injured/killed and “The Goonies” resumed filming without further shooting incidents. Years later, while filming on the Brooklyn Bridge, the filming of “Hudson Hawk” also drew sniper fire. Police never found the shooter, but moments like these are a sad reminder that in 2025 we live in a society where guns are everywhere and people need to be, if not vigilant, at least aware of that fact. Fun times.
