Warner Bros. Pictures
Few 1980s movies induce warm fuzzies in a certain type of Gen X-er more than Richard Donner’s “The Goonies.” Written by future “Home Alone” director Chris Columbus, this rambunctious adventure about a group of young friends seeking literal pirate treasure as a means of saving their lower-income parents’ homes from getting razed by a rapacious country club is vintage Amblin escapist fare. It’s basically a big-budget Little Rascals movie filled with adolescent hijinks, Rube Goldberg gags, and so much screaming. I loved it when I was 11, but it grates something fierce on me as an adult. Some films should be left in childhood.
Regardless of how I feel about “The Goonies” now, I can’t deny that it’s a good-hearted Steven Spielberg production from an era when all summer movies wanted to do was to send you walking out of the theater on air. It may be annoying, but it’s also mostly kind (Corey Feldman’s mistranslation bit with a Spanish housekeeper is somewhat mean-spirited) and ultimately innocuous. Hence, it’s wild to learn that principal photography nearly took an inexplicably tragic turn when someone started randomly shooting a gun at the set. It was such a gnarly situation that Spielberg had to be hustled into a cop car and rushed away from the filming location in Astoria, Oregon. Why was someone taking potshots at a movie set? This story’s about to get even wilder.
The youthful antics of The Goonies were nearly derailed by two rifle-wielding children
Warner Bros. Pictures
In a 2015 oral history of “The Goonies” published by Willamette Week, retired Astoria Police officer Dave Johnson recalled the morning that, out of nowhere, the set of “The Goonies” came under fire. “There was somebody shooting out of the window of a house,” he explained. “We had people calling in on 911 that car windows were blowing out, and they realized they had a shooter up near the Goonie house.”
After evacuating Spielberg, the police located the shooter and found, much to their surprise and dismay, “two young children, 8 or 9 or 10 years old.” As Johnson told Willamette Week, “Mom and dad had left to go to the hospital because she was pregnant. [The kids] got dad’s .22 rifle, and were up shooting out the bedroom window. Just shooting randomly. They could not understand why we were so upset.”
These kids blew out windows of cars and, most troublingly, aimed at a person across the street. “[T]here was a little, old man mowing the lawn, and they kept shooting at him and making the dirt come up from behind him, but couldn’t hit him,” Johnson recalled. These children seemed to think they were just shooting a BB gun, which infuriated the police chief. (“That was the big stand-the-hair-up-on-the-back-of-your-neck moment.”)
Fortunately, no one was harmed/killed, and “The Goonies” resumed filming with no further shooting incidents. Years later, while filming on the Brooklyn Bridge, the set of “Hudson Hawk” also drew sniper fire. The police never tracked down the shooter, but moments like these are a depressing reminder that, in 2025, we live in a society where guns are everywhere, and people have to be if not alert, at least conscious of this fact. Fun times.