BOYS ON THE HOOD (from left): Wil Wheaton, Jerry O’Connell, Corey Feldman and River Phoenix. “Stand by Me” celebrates its 25th anniversary this year. (Columbia Pictures)
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When Stephen King first saw it, the master of horror — the man who had dreamed up a cannibalistic clown and a possessed Plymouth Fury — needed a moment. King walked out of the screening room at the Beverly Hilton hotel and tried in vain to compose himself.
What he’d just seen on that day in 1985 was a film called “The Body,” later to be renamed “Stand By Me.” It was based on a King novella and was a bittersweet coming-of-age story about a quartet of 12-year-old Oregon boys in 1959.
“I was so nervous about his reaction,” director Rob Reiner tells The Post. “The lights came up and he was really shaking. He couldn’t talk. It was his childhood, and he saw it portrayed there. It hit him hard.”
King was not alone in his admiration. “Stand By Me,” released in August 1986, went on to gross $52 million and became one of those classic movies that fans can’t help but watch again each time it’s on TV. A 25th anniversary edition Blu-ray hits shelves March 22.
It was a miracle that the movie got made at all. Two days before shooting was to begin, the studio, Columbia, was sold to Coca-Cola. The family-friendly corporation wanted nothing to do with an R-rated film about four adolescents wandering off in search of a corpse, so “Stand By Me” was dumped.
Luckily, Norman Lear, the man behind “All in the Family,” in which Reiner played son-in-law Michael “Meathead” Stivic, stepped in and financed the entire $7.5 million budget himself. Production began on schedule in the summer of 1985 near Eugene, Ore., and lasted for 60 days.
The movie’s success would live or die by its casting. Working with child actors is difficult in any film, much more one in which they are the sole focus.
To improve the chances of getting realistic performances, Reiner cast young actors whose actual personalities were similar to their characters. River Phoenix, 14, would play cool bad boy Chris Chambers; Wil Wheaton, 12, the bookish Gordie Lachance; Jerry O’Connell, 11, the pudgy, cowardly Vern Tessio; and Corey Feldman, 12, the angry Teddy Duchamp.
“I was exactly what you see on-screen,” Feldman tells The Post.
O’Connell had almost no acting experience, so Reiner spent two weeks before the cameras rolled running the four boys through improv games and theater exercises.
“I didn’t want to be spoon-feeding them off-camera,” he says. “By the time we started shooting, they were all a tight unit. They were very connected.”
Most of the cast and crew stayed at the Eugene Hilton (with the exception of Phoenix, who bunked with his family on a ranch outside town), and the atmosphere those two months was like summer camp.
“We did all sorts of fun things,” Wheaton says. “We went whitewater rafting a couple of times. We had a cast-and-crew softball game and a cookout one day.”
The young boys also got into a fair amount of trouble.
“For me, it was truly a coming-of-age experience,” Feldman says. “I turned 13 onset, and not only was I making that huge leap in the Jewish tradition, there were so many firsts on that movie.”
Including: the first time his parents left him alone during a production, his first off-camera kiss and his first real drink.
Feldman and Phoenix spent many nights at a local under-18 club. There, they befriended local youths and began hanging out regularly. One night, a girl suggested they get some drinks. The group hung out in front of a club and begged of-age passersby to purchase alcohol for them. One man obliged and handed them 40-ounce beers.
Feldman got drunk and stumbled toward his hotel. It was then that art and reality blurred, as Feldman would unintentionally re-enact a scene from “Stand By Me” in which his character, Teddy, nearly gets hit by a train.
“I remember crossing over the railroad tracks trying to find my way back to the hotel, drunk, and I just laid down on the railroad tracks,” he says. “There I was, Teddy Duchamp in full effect, dodging the train in my own way. That moment defined me becoming that character and that character becoming one with my reality.”
He and Phoenix also smoked pot for the first time, after they begged one of the sound guys for a hit off a bong that they found in his hotel room.
Wheaton and O’Connell were, for the most part, better-behaved.
“Wil was pretty much as you see in the film,” Feldman says. “He was this nerdy kind of computer geek. He would say, ‘Hey, I can’t go play right now, I’ve got to go to the store and pick up this new hard drive.’ ”
O’Connell was too young to hang out with the older boys, but one night, he did manage to sneak out of his hotel room and join some of the crew at a local Renaissance fair. According to Kiefer Sutherland, who played bully Ace, O’Connell bought some cookies there and ate them — only to find out later they were pot cookies.
He was later found asleep in the woods.
These late-night adventures never affected the boys’ work, Reiner says. About the only time he couldn’t get the correct performance out of the young actors was a scene in which Wheaton and O’Connell are running from a train across a railroad trestle. The actual train was so far away from the actors that they found it difficult to convey realistic terror. So Reiner conjured terror of his own.
“It was a hot day. The camera grips were pushing the camera down a dolly track, and they were sweating,” he says. “Finally, I said, ‘You kids, these guys are tired of pushing that thing down the track! If you’re not worried that the train is going to kill you, be worried I’m going to kill you!’ ”
The next take was perfect.
Reiner nearly cut what is arguably the film’s most famous scene — a story-within-the-story sequence in which a fat kid vomits on an audience at a pie-eating contest as revenge for being made fun of. (The fake vomit was made of large-curd cottage cheese and blueberry pie filling.) Reiner felt the sequence, taken directly from King’s novella, was out of place, but he eventually changed his mind.
Another memorable sequence involved the boys wading through a swamp, only to find themselves covered with leeches. (This actually happened to King and his friends as boys.) The production built a fake swamp by digging a hole in the woods, lining it with plastic, then filling it with water. The only problem was, they built the set two months early. By the time the cameras rolled, the fake swamp may as well have been a real swamp — hardly a pleasing prospect for the kids.
“On-screen, Jerry was the wimpiest of the four kids,” says producer Andy Scheinman. “But off-screen, he was the toughest. He would sit there in this cold water, and Rob would say, ‘Cut,’ and all the kids would come out and get toweled off, shivering. Jerry would just say, ‘Well, I’ll just sit here.’ Nothing bothered him.”
When the film was finished, Reiner shopped it around, but every studio passed. Finally, he took it back to Columbia, which agreed to release it. It stayed in theaters for 19 weeks.
“When the film first came out, a guy came up to me and said, ‘I love this film so much. It reminded me of my childhood,’ ” Reiner recalls. “I said, ‘Oh, you grew up in a rural area of the country?’ He said, ‘No, I grew up in Manhattan.’ That’s when I knew it was universal. It didn’t matter where you came from or when you grew up. The movie was about the power of friendship at that age.”
Wheaton was away on vacation when the film opened.
“I came home, and there were a number of boxes on our front porch, and they were filled with fan mail,” he says. “I remember thinking, ‘Well, this is weird.’ I remember staying up all night and reading one box of fan mail.”
“I didn’t really realize the impact it would have,” says Kent Luttrell, Feldman’s stand-in, who also played the dead body of Ray Brower. “It has followed me forever, and for the longest time, people would introduce me as, ‘This is Kent, the dead body in “Stand By Me.” ’ ”
The film truly cemented its place in pop culture with the death of Phoenix in 1993. In the film’s coda, the narrator reveals that Chambers would later die during a restaurant robbery, lending an eerie synchronicity to an already powerful film.
Where the boys are:
Vern Tessio
Jerry O’Connell
“I hadn’t seen Jerry for a while, and all of a sudden he’s this six-two underwear model,” says producer Andy Scheinman. “I said, ‘Jerry, you haven’t gained a pound.’ ” O’Connell, age 37, is married to model Rebecca Romijn and appeared in last summer’s “Piranha 3-D.” He also stars in the CBS legal drama “The Defenders.”
Gordie Lachance
Wil Wheaton
Like his character, Gordie, Wheaton became a writer. After an ongoing role in “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” he cut down on acting to write a popular blog, opinion pieces and comics, and published the bestselling memoir “Just a Geek.” Wheaton, age 38, pops up occasionally in guest-starring TV roles.
Teddy Duchamp
Corey Feldman
The former teen heartthrob, along with the late Corey Haim, had his own reality show on A&E in 2007. Feldman, age 39, continues to work in movies, and his latest is the straight-to-DVD “Lost Boys” sequel “The Thirst.”
Chris Chambers
River Phoenix
The acting prodigy was nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for 1988’s “Running on Empty,” and also played the young Indy in “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.” The actor died of a drug overdose on the sidewalk outside LA’s Viper Room on Oct. 31, 1993. He was 23.
reed.tucker@nypost.com