“
What?
”
“Charcoal tablets. Buy a bottle, and whenever you see him overdosing—which will probably happen on a daily basis—you’re going to take a handful of pills and shove them down his throat. If he’s foaming at the mouth, or if his eyes roll back in his head, or if he’s so inebriated that he can’t put a sentence together, if he’s not making any sense, that’s when you’ll know to do it.”
“What if he’s choking?”
“If it’s so bad that he can’t swallow, you’ll have to call the paramedics. But hopefully you can get to him before things get that bad.”
It was the most surreal conversation of my life—and I starred on a show called
The Surreal Life.
It was as if we were chitchatting about vitamins or something. “You really think this is necessary?” I asked her. “You really think I’ll have to do this?”
“It’s not a matter of
if.
This is just his condition right now.”
I went out and bought the charcoal, and Haim’s behavior over the next few days scared me half to death. In the morning, he’d be a little slow but still lucid. An hour or two later, he’d start with the slurring. An hour or two after that, he’d be drooling and completely incomprehensible. Then came the eyes rolling back in the head and the charcoal. This happened every day, without exception.
At one point, it occurred to me that he just didn’t understand what he was putting people through. So, I decided to film him, at various points throughout a typical day, to show him. I wanted to put the evidence right in front of his face. The footage is devastating—by five in the afternoon, he couldn’t tell me where he was, couldn’t name the president of the United States. He was, to be frank, a drooling slob of a human, and I was afraid that he’d even done permanent damage.
By the time the idea for
Three’s a Crowd
came about, Haim was back in Canada. I had heard he was doing better, but I needed to see for myself. I called him up, told him about the premise of the show, and gave him an ultimatum. “If you want to do this,” I said, “you’ve got to clean yourself up. You have to lose the weight. You have to get yourself in shape.”
“Don’t worry, man. No problem.”
“Corey, if it was that easy you would have done it already.”
“Just trust me, man. Give me six months.”
“Okay,” I said. “But you need to understand, if after six months you show up and it’s obvious that you haven’t been taking care of yourself—if I even
think
you seem fucked up—I will walk. Do you understand? Right then. No hesitation.”
“I got it. I really appreciate what you’re doing for me. I promise, I won’t let you down.”
With that, we moved straight into preproduction. We had shopped the idea to a number of networks, but A&E was willing to order a full series without having to first complete a pilot. Plus, I would be one of the executive producers, which meant I would have a certain amount of control—this was essential, since I still had a bad taste in my mouth from my experience on
The Surreal Life.
I wanted to make sure that Haim and I wouldn’t be manipulated. And we set up some ground rules: some things—his history of drug abuse, for one—would be off-limits, and Zen would not be in the show. I want my son to have a normal life. He can’t do that if people recognize him because of me. So, Zen was not to be photographed, filmed, or in any way represented, even though he was right there with us the entire time.
We also got to work writing an outline of the entire season.
The Two Coreys
was never supposed to be a true “reality” show; it was a controlled, semiscripted sitcom. We didn’t have actual dialogue—the majority of lines were ad-libbed and improvised—but every scene was planned out in advance. Episode 1, Scene 1: Haim arrives at the house; Episode 1, Scene 2: the Coreys go grocery shopping, etc. We also made the decision to shoot the show in Vancouver; because of Haim’s troublesome immigration status, it was easier if all of us came to him.
During this months-long process, Haim and I stayed in touch via the telephone, but I hadn’t actually seen him. So, when it came time to film the first scene—Haim showing up at Susie’s and my home (which was actually a rental; we had no desire to film in our actual house)—my reaction was a hundred percent genuine. He looked incredible. He was down more than a hundred pounds. He was lucid, totally with it. I was beyond impressed.
As a result of Haim’s transformation, we did some of the best work we had ever done together. No one could make me laugh at the drop of a hat or turn my mood like Haim; he knew all my buttons. He was also one of the wittiest, smartest men I’ve ever known (though Haim often played dumb for the camera). There were times during filming of the first season—even during the “fight” scenes, which were scripted, totally made up for television—that the cameramen would laugh so hard their cameras would shake. There was so much potential at that point. Haim and I would look at each other and think, we’re back! Then it all came crashing down.
Even before production began on
The Two Coreys,
I was approached by the folks at Warner Brothers about potentially making a
Lost Boys
sequel. There had been talk about making a sequel for years, pretty much since the original debuted and proved to be such a success. A script for
Lost Girls
was floated around Hollywood, I heard that Kiefer Sutherland had his hands on something, but nothing ever materialized. What Warner Brothers eventually sent over, however, was a cheap, schlocky script for a straight-to-DVD movie, in which I was being invited to shoot a five-minute cameo. I couldn’t believe that of all the versions that had been tossed out over the years,
this
was the one they wanted to move forward with.
“Where’s everyone else?” I asked one of the producers. “Where’s Jamison Newlander in this? Where’s Corey Haim?”
He told me the studio didn’t want anything to do with Haim. At that point, he had developed too much of a reputation.
The Lost Boys
had always been Haim’s favorite. It was the most successful of the “Two Coreys” films, but he always thought of it as
his
movie. He was very proud of it, and he wanted to make sure that if a sequel was ever done, it was done the right way, with a solid script, a guaranteed theatrical release, and a superb director (hopefully Joel Schumacher). When I saw what Warner Brothers was proposing, I turned them down flat. There was no way I was going to appear in a
Lost Boys
remake without my brother.
Meanwhile, filming of
The Two Coreys
was well underway. In the second episode, Haim, Susie, Jamison Newlander, and myself attended a special twentieth anniversary screening of the original
Lost Boys
film. After that, Haim was on and on about writing a sequel himself, until I eventually had to tell him that a sequel was already in the works, that it was going forward without him, and that I had passed on a part. I broke the news off camera first; when I told him on camera, it was actually the second time we’d had the conversation.
It wasn’t long after that when a “friend” brought Haim an enormous amount of Valium. Haim quickly returned to slurring his words. He wasn’t able to get through his scenes. He would get angry, and provoke fights with Susie and I and the crew. At his worst, he became unable to differentiate between what was real and what had been scripted for the purposes of the show.
By the time we started the publicity tour in the summer of 2007, Haim’s relapse hadn’t been made public, but one of the
Lost Boys
producers, Mary, had seen an advance copy of the show. She attended
The Two Coreys
premiere party in Hollywood, and told me she still wanted me for the movie. The entire script had been rewritten. Not only that, but she was willing to capitulate to my demands; Haim and Jamison would both be awarded parts. I told Haim the news, again promised him that I wouldn’t move forward without him. Together, we both agreed to sign on.
The problems started at the very beginning of production. Mary and another one of the producers approached me, and told me they needed me to make “the call.”
“Oh, God. What happened?”
“Apparently, Haim’s not coming.”
“What do you mean he’s not coming?”
“He doesn’t like his wardrobe choices.”
“You’re telling me that after twenty years, and I don’t know how many script rewrites, and all the shit I went through to get him in this movie, he’s not coming because he doesn’t like his
wardrobe choices
?”
I called Haim, and was able to talk him through his wardrobe dilemma. But the next day there was some new problem. And some new problem the day after that. He backed out of three different plane tickets, continually screwed up the shooting schedule. Finally, Haim was just fired.
* * *
I started getting
calls from the network. The ratings for
The Two Coreys
were high enough that they wanted to order a second season. At that point, I didn’t see how filming additional episodes would even be possible; Haim had spiraled so far, so fast. Plus, I was an executive producer—I had a contractual obligation to deliver a set number of episodes. I wasn’t willing to sign myself up for certain failure. The only way to move forward, then, would be to scrap the semiscripted sitcom format and shoot a more traditional “reality” show. We’d have to film the good
and
the bad and just let it all hang out. Let the chips fall where they may.
We set about redrafting our contracts, making it very clear what we would and would not show in this new iteration. My personal requests—mainly, to keep Zen uninvolved in the production—remained the same. With regard to Haim, we would not discuss his former or current drug use, unless he visibly relapsed. If and when that happened, his struggles with sobriety would become an integral part of the show. He was fine with that arrangement. The only topic we were not to discuss, under any circumstances, was his history of abuse. “If I fuck up, I fuck up,” he told me. “But you better give me your word that you never bring up those three or four names, you never talk about the fact that I was molested.” I had no intention of discussing his abuse publicly, so I readily agreed.
Then, in the very first episode of the second season, he just went for it: “You let me get fucked around in my life—raped, so to speak—when I was about fourteen-and-a-half-years-old.” My jaw was on the floor, and I knew the rest of the season would be a doozy.
In a matter of weeks,
Lost Boys: The Tribe
would prepare for a few days of pickups and reshoots. Despite his earlier disruptions on set, I somehow convinced the producers to let Haim try again. We would give him one more opportunity to shoot a few scenes for the movie, and incorporate the filming of those scenes into the filming of the television show.
At 7:00
A.M.
, I was in the makeup trailer, being fitted with a long, blond wig. (I had actually grown my hair out for principle shooting, but cut it short again before the filming of the second season.) The sun was shining, the birds were chirping, and in walked Haim—loaded out of his mind. He could barely speak, could barely string two words together, and was completely incapable of delivering his lines. We spent hours trying to nail down a single scene. I was so mad at him. I couldn’t believe he had chosen this moment, surrounded by executives from Warner Brothers and A&E, to blow it so catastrophically. Ultimately, his scenes had to be cut completely from the movie.
We moved forward with the season. We shot an intervention episode. Haim and I even talked with a therapist. But I realized I wasn’t helping him. When
The Two Coreys
was finally cancelled after filming wrapped on season two, I decided the best thing to do would be to walk away for a while. He had so much potential, but again, he had imploded and sold himself short.
* * *
Many people, fans
of the “Two Coreys” even, seem to be under the misconception that we never spoke again, but Haim reached out to me in 2009, at the end of what proved to be the most difficult year of my life.
Marc Rocco, the director of
Dream a Little Dream,
died suddenly in May, at the age of forty-six. My grandfather, Bedford Goldstein, passed away a short time later; that was like losing a father. In June came the news of Michael Jackson’s death, as shocking to me as it was to everyone else. And by the end of the year, my wife and I decided to end our marriage.
Susie and I may have had an unconventional relationship, but it worked because complete and brutal honesty was the foundation upon which the rest of our lives were built. She had been my partner and my best friend for more than seven years. But when the trust was gone, and the foundation was broken, there was no rescuing the relationship. Still, I was devastated. I felt totally alone in the world.
One day, not very long after Susie and I split up, Haim called me up out of the blue. We hadn’t spoken in more than a year. He knew, of course, about the string of deaths and the divorce. But now, he told me, his mother had been diagnosed with cancer. He had cleaned himself up, had moved Judy in. And he wanted to mend things. It wasn’t about our careers, it wasn’t about being the “Two Coreys,” it was just about being friends. I knew a thing or two about losing someone before you could repair a broken relationship. I was happy that he had called.
Haim was incredibly supportive in the months following my divorce. He spent a lot of time with Zen, and he doted on his mother. He didn’t have a car, so he would walk to the store, picking out aromatherapy candles and bubble baths, trying to create for her a healing, spa-like atmosphere. He would get up early and cook her breakfast. He would take her to chemotherapy. For the first time, he was caring about someone more than he cared about himself.
Haim’s career seemed poised for a turn-around, too. He had a small role in the action film
Crank: High Voltage,
starring Amy Smart and Jason Statham. He was also attached to star in a number of indie movies. Over the next few months, we grew closer than we had ever been.