Jim Stoffer | Astoria

I didn’t know they killed horses, but that’s what they did – the movie industry. All the Westerns I watched so loyally  – they consumed horses and other animals like any other expendable commodity. Growing up, I didn’t know that movie directors would have trip wires set out so running horses would fall down and the camera could get a great shot and the horses would die.

Part of the film “The Goonies” included a road race filmed just north of Haystack Rock on Cannon Beach. The movie crew staged a mock racetrack in the sand and set up a platform decorated with black and white checkers and flags and lights so that it was supposed to look like Daytona. In front of that they lined up a couple rows of muscle trucks to race down the beach. To make it look real, they hired 300 extras to be enthusiastic spectators. For showing up and being in the movie they paid us $35 and a box lunch at noon.

The way the filming went, they had a little Robinson helicopter with a camera hanging out the copilot’s side swoop down and get shots of the crowd and the trucks on the beach from above. Later, when I saw the premier at the Liberty Theater in Astoria, I was on screen for three seconds, in the crowd, if you knew where to look.

To make the film more appealing, the director had breadcrumbs spread out in front of the race trucks, and the seagulls loved it. The idea was that once the race started, the trucks would plow through all the birds and they would fly up into the air and it would be cinematically beautiful. The problem was that not all the birds flew up; some just got run over while they were eating the crumbs.

After the first take, we could see dead birds lying on the sand, others with broken wings still flapping, walking around in crazy dying circles. As the race trucks made their way back to the start line, movie set people gathered the birds into cardboard boxes to get the beach ready for another take. Director Richard Donner was about to find out there was a hero in his crowd of extras by the name of Andy Kerr, a newly-arrived and now longtime Cannon Beach local. Andy was standing a few feet from me, and when he saw the dead birds being shoved into cardboard boxes, he went ballistic. “That’s not right,” he shouted, and by the time we looked up, he had broken away and was halfway across the racetrack headed toward the men with the dead seagulls.

Andy’s partner, Bill Ittman, knew that Andy would stand up for innocent killing, and he didn’t try to hold him back. He just said in a voice loud enough for us all to hear, “Watch out.”

Andy grabbed two of the dying birds out of the cardboard box and marched right up to Donner and held them in his face, screaming about what he had just done, and demanded an answer. As Donner tried to move away, Andy moved closer. A few minutes went by and one of the producers came over and got into the conversation. Then an announcement came over the loudspeaker that it was time for our box lunches and shooting would resume in half an hour.

After lunch, two things were different: Andy was fired and didn’t come back on the set; he’d lost his job as an extra for the road race shooting. But more importantly, on the next several retakes, the director didn’t use breadcrumbs and no seagulls were hurt.

In the 25 years that have passed, moviemaking has changed. Moviemakers no longer consume animals just for the effect. Now even insects are treated with respect. Thank you, Andy Kerr, for being a hero that day.