Director – Lisa Downs, Producers – Lisa Downs & Ashley Pugh, Music – Toby Dunham. Production Company – Life After Movies/Spare Change Films/Strict Machine.
Joey Cramer, Matt Adler, Mark H. Baker, Tim Blaney, Veronica Cartwright, Cliff De Young, Edward Eyth, Raymond Forchion, Mark Green, Howard Hesseman, Jacqui Kaese, Randal Kleiser, Jeffrey Kleiser, Carollyne Leighland, Valorie Massalas, Jay Quintal, Keri Rogers, Jonathan Sanger, Tony Urbano, Dimitri Villard
This is one of a series of documentaries produced by a US company called Life After Movies, depicting the after-life of former 1980s pop culture stars. The same people also produced Life After the Flash (2017) about Sam J. Jones and Life After Atreyu (2022) about Noah Hathaway Jr. This is a documentary devoted to the making of the Disney film Flight of the Navigator (1986) and in particular the subsequent life of the film’s child star Joey Cramer.
About a third of the documentary is devoted to the making of Flight of the Navigator. The film crew have done an excellent job in bringing together and managing to interview all of the principal actors and behind the scenes crew on the film. About the only ones not present are Sarah Jessica Parker, who is an A-list actress these days, and Paul Reubens aka Pee-Wee Herman, where it is not clear why he did not appear.
The early sections of the film (and those interspersed throughout) give a rundown of the making of Flight of the Navigator. The crew have done an exceptional job in tracking down everybody involved from Matt Adler, the now grown-up kid who played Joey’s brother, even to Valorie Massalas, the now grown young girl who crushes on Joey in a couple of scenes. The technical side of the at-the-time quite revolutionary visual effects and the puppetry is gone into in some detail – director Randal Kleiser mentions how James Cameron told him he was inspired by the mirror ship to create the liquid metal T-100 in Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991). We even get to see audition tapes for the kids, production sketches for the design of the ship, storyboards and behind-the-scenes footage unearthed.
From there, the film delves into Joey Cramer’s story. Things get weirdly interesting from when he was born – his mother (who is interviewed) was a hippie, which evident in Joey’s birth name Deleriyes Joe August Fisher Cramer. She says she wanted to raise a child on her own and found a man ten years younger to impregnate her. This left Joey with father issues all his life – he tells how he sought to reconnect with his father who coldly rejected him when he eventually did and then how they reconciled when his father was dying.
We go through Joey’s initial success as a child actor, beginning with playing Tom Selleck’s son in Runaway (1984). Unlike most child star tragedies, Cramer’s problems go almost the opposite way. Rather than being the child star who rose to the top, found drugs, drink, success etc and then found himself washed up a few years on, Cramer made the eminently sensible decision to forego Hollywood fame and to go to school – he even tells how he turned down the role of Wesley Crusher in Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987-94). However, once there he was teased for his success and so deliberately got into trouble to prove himself. This led to drugs then hard drugs and addiction problems. The film follows the course of his becoming an addict before in 2016 he was arrested after conducting a bank robbery in Saanitch, British Columbia, which led to him being placed in a court-mandated recovery program.
It’s a sensation story but it also leads me to wonder how much Cramer’s recovery journey is due to him being a child star. He still looks like a grown-up kid even at the age of 47 and has handsome good looks where you could easily see him playing leading man roles. Joey takes us on a tour of Main and Hastings, the area of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, colloquially known as ‘Canada’s Worst Neighbourhood,’ where he used to live as an addict. I know the area well as I used to work at a hotel nearby. It is a place inhabited by the dregs of local society – addicts, hookers, the severely mentally ill, tent villages of the homeless.
On the other hand, I kept wondering if this documentary would be being made about any of those people if they did not have a pedigree as a child actor. Similarly, Joey talks about losing his teeth as an addict but when we meet him, he has a new set. So clearly someone somewhere has given him the money for a dental refit, which is not cheap in Canada, but again not something that would be accessible to the average addict in the DTES. So in other words, what we have is not so much a portrait of how someone pulled themselves up from the bottom of society but of someone who fell down but finagled the resources to get himself sorted out.
Maybe I am being too hard on Cramer. He does after all talk about how difficult it was to get into rehab in British Columbia – I can confirm, I have friends who are being given two year waiting lists to access things like mental health counselling. As a result of this, he claims he was driven to rob a bank to try and get into rehab. Now the reasons he gives for robbing the bank seem to vary each time he discusses them – from a cry for help to get into rehab, to being able to use the money to buy enough drugs to end his life, to being able to afford to go into rehab – but I won’t go too hard on him as one’s motivations under the influence of drugs is confused.
It becomes an eventually moving journey watching Cramer get his life back together and start building something else – he is now working as an acting coach. The film ends on him being brought to L.A. for a reunion of the various cast and crew of Flight of the Navigator and shows him enjoying life, apparently having been rediscovered on the convention circuit.
Trailer here