A 1987 photo provided by Warner Brothers shows Corey Haim, left, and Jason Patric in The Lost Boys.The Associated Press
Right up until the last days of his life, Corey Haim kept insisting that he was making a comeback.
The last known moving images of the Toronto-born Haim, who died yesterday in Los Angeles of an apparent drug overdose, went up on the TMZ website within hours of his official death notice. Filmed two weeks ago, he is shown leaving an L.A. club with his long-time actor friend Corey Feldman. Looking puffy, a tad spacey and possibly wearing eyeliner, Haim told the TMZ reporter that he was "doing well" and was mounting yet another career comeback.
"I got a whole bunch of things coming up. … We're definitely doing License to Fly," he said, referring to unconfirmed plans to shoot a sequel to the 1988 Haim-Feldman teen comedy License to Drive. As was often the case, Haim looks unsure and distracted in the clip. In the end, he really was a Lost Boy.
The fleeting life and time of Haim is a reminder of how unkind Hollywood can be to former child stars who grow up and lose their cuteness.
In the mid-eighties, the teen fan magazines would often make hay of the folklore that Haim was enrolled in acting lessons by his mother in an attempt to overcome his shyness. Haim was undeniably adorable, and the lessons worked. By the age of 11, he was a support player on the CBC series The Edison Twins. Unlike the other kids on the show, Haim could act.
Bigger things came for Haim in the movie world. He made his film debut in the 1984 feature Firstborn, playing opposite Sarah Jessica Parker and Robert Downey Jr. No one noticed the movie, but young female fans noticed Haim, as did casting directors.
The inevitable move to Hollywood came next, and Haim notched film credit after film credit in the mid-eighties - portraying a precocious kid in the Sally Field-James Garner comedy Murphy's Romance; playing a willful paraplegic in the Stephen King-penned Silver Bullet; and notably, in the 1986 teen drama Lucas, playing, for the first time, a decent, normal kid - and the star of the movie.
The apex of Haim's career came one year later with The Lost Boys. Directed by Joel Schumacher, the tongue-in-cheek vampire movie earned solid reviews and was a summer box-office hit. Reviewers cited the performance of Haim and Feldman - the Two Coreys, as they were instantly flagged on teen-idol mag covers. The Lost Boys also established the careers of a young Jason Patric and Kiefer Sutherland.
But those actors stuck around. Post- Lost Boys, Haim was less cute and therefore less bankable in the movie community. License to Drive was a minor hit two years later and Dream a Little Dream was even lower-profile. In one attempt to kick-start his career, Haim appeared in a self-promotional video called Corey Haim: Me, Myself, and I, which consisted mostly of the shirtless actor floating on a raft in a pool and talking about his future.
And so began the downhill spiral. Like every child star from Mickey Rooney to Gary Coleman, Corey Haim fell out of favour in Hollywood, simply for growing up.
In the mid-nineties, he was, by his own admission, using cocaine regularly - later, crack cocaine. By then, he was still getting acting roles, but the low-budget films Snowboard Academy, Demolition High and Fever Lake were direct-to-video titles that went virtually unnoticed. By 1997, he had filed for bankruptcy.
By 2000, Haim could not get A-list acting work, although he was still living the hard life in the City of Angels. Next came the repeated trips to rehab to kick his cocaine habit, which led to the rise of new demons. By his own count, he was taking 85 Valiums a day. "And that was just the Valium," he told one reporter, almost as a badge of courage. "I'm not talking about the other pills I went through."
And payback for a former child star can be a bitch, or at least rife with pathos. By 2001, Haim's life was the stuff of an E! True Hollywood Story, which in fact did an entire story on him, and referenced him frequently in profiles of other failed child stars.
The unkindest cut of all may have been Haim's cameo appearance in the 2003 film comedy Dickie Roberts: Former Child Star, in which he appeared alongside Danny Bonaduce, Emmanuel Lewis and most of the former Brady Bunch cast. Like all of them, he had been effectively reduced to a cartoon of a stereotype.
By 2004, Haim was reputed to have finally kicked his substance problems and had relocated back home in Toronto. He put on the brave face for one local newspaper reporter, stating, "I'm clean, sober, humble and happy."
Which didn't seem to be the case in 2006, when Haim began taping The Two Coreys for A&E. Lasting two seasons, the improv-reality series was little more than a series of snapshots in the daily lives of Feldman and Haim, two thirtysomething former child stars and supposed best friends.
Sadly, the tone of the show seemed to be set in the debut episode. Feldman was depicted as the stable, respectable Corey, who was married and looking to the future. In almost every episode, Haim was the sad and hopeless Corey, prone to rambling and emotional outbursts.
And was he back on drugs? The second season of the series found Feldman and Haim in therapy sessions, supposedly to repair their tenuous friendship. By the midway stage, Feldman was trying to force Haim back into rehab to get help with his "addiction issues." At one point, Pauly Shore and once-troubled Diff'rent Strokes star Todd Bridges were enlisted as counsellors. Haim refused to listen, and once abruptly departed his therapy session. On the way home, he got into a car accident.
A&E pulled the plug on The Two Coreys and Feldman publicly said he would refuse to work with him until he returned to rehab. Thereafter, Haim returned to anonymity.
His last desperate attempt to find acting work was evidenced in early 2008, when he paid for an ad in the trade publication Variety. The ad featured a picture of Haim, and the copy: "This is not a stunt. I'm back. I'm ready to work. I'm ready to make amends."
He never got the chance. Haim made a brief appearance in the low-budget sequel Lost Boys: The Tribe, but did not appear until the closing credits. The final entries on his film résumé, including such titles as American Sunset and the filmed-in-Toronto Shark City, list his name beside an astounding array of no-names and never-weres.
And this time the death of a former child star seems somehow a little sadder. Without fail, each TV news report said Haim was a former eighties teen idol, who once appeared in The Lost Boys.
Few of the brief obits bothered to point out that Haim had died in a decidedly low-rent area of Los Angeles, known as Oakwood. Or that his body was found in the same apartment complex where the body of former music star Rick James was found in 2004. In death, as in life, Corey Haim was little more than a passing pop-culture footnote.