Stand by Me (1986) on Netflix
In 1959 Oregon, Gordie Lachance and his friends Chris Chambers, Teddy Duchamp and Vern Tessio learn that a boy from a nearby town has gone missing. They set out to find him.
- Netflix4.1/5
- IMDb8.1/10495,033 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes88%
Trailer
Plot summary
In 1985, the writer Gordie Lachance learns that Chris Chambers, his closest friend from boyhood, has died, and he remembers the Labor Day weekend of 1959 in Castle Rock, Oregon. Gordie is twelve, five months after the death of his older brother Denny, and his grieving parents do not share his love of writing. He spends his days with Chris, Teddy Duchamp and Vern Tessio. Vern overhears his older brother Billy and Charlie Hogan talk about a body they came across in the woods by the train tracks. The four boys think it is Ray Brower, a boy their age who vanished three days earlier while picking blueberries, and they decide to walk out and find it, telling their families they are going camping.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Stand by Me (1986)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Days before shooting was to begin in the summer of 1985, Columbia Pictures purchased Embassy and planned to cancel the production. Norman Lear, one of Embassy's co-owners and the developer of All in the Family, gave $7.5 million of his own money to Rob Reiner to complete the film.
- The scene of the boys outrunning a train on a railroad trestle took a full week to shoot and used four small adult women as stunt doubles, made up to look like the young stars, running across plywood-covered ties for safety; a brand-new camera the crew brought in jammed between the rails on the very first take.
- After watching a private early screening of the film, Stephen King was so moved that he left the room for fifteen minutes to compose himself before returning to tell Rob Reiner that it was the best film ever made out of anything he had written.
- For the film's mass-vomiting "barf-o-rama" pie-eating scene, a local bakery supplied real pies mixed with large-curd cottage cheese to simulate vomit, with the amount used per actor ranging from as much as five gallons down to a sixteenth of a gallon.
- More than 300 boys auditioned and Reiner and the producers interviewed over 70 of them for the four main roles. River Phoenix originally read for the part of Gordie Lachance, and Ethan Hawke auditioned for Chris Chambers.
- Director Rob Reiner had the child actors smoke cigarettes made from rolled cabbage leaves rather than real tobacco for the film's smoking scenes.
- In March 1986, Columbia Pictures changed the title of the film from The Body to Stand by Me, because the studio was concerned that the original title was misleading.
