The 95th Academy Awards, March 2023. Ke Huy Quan has just won Best Supporting Actor for “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” and he is having the kind of night people write books about.
Somewhere in the middle of it he thanks his lawyer.
Not unusual on its own. Everybody thanks a lawyer. What made this one land differently is the phrase he used for the man. He called him his “Goonies brother for life.”
Because that’s what he is. Ke Huy Quan played Data in “The Goonies.” His lawyer played Chunk.
The kid on the poster
Jeff Cohen was born on 25 June 1974.
“The Goonies” opened in American theaters on 7 June 1985, which means that when audiences first watched Chunk do the Truffle Shuffle in front of a locked screen door, the boy doing it was ten years old. He turned eleven eighteen days later.
He’d started before he hit double digits. Between 1983 and 1991 he worked steadily, the way a certain kind of eighties kid actor did: “The Goonies,” episodes of “Family Ties,” episodes of “The Facts of Life,” commercials, guest spots. Then he stopped, and this is the part that separates him from most of the child stars whose names end up in these stories.
Nothing bad happened to him.
There’s no ugly turn here. No arrest, no bankruptcy, no cautionary tale. He grew up, his face changed, the parts stopped fitting, and he decided he was finished. He was a teenager when he made that call.
Berkeley, and the man who helped pay for it
Cohen went to the University of California, Berkeley, and took a bachelor’s degree in business.
He has never hidden who helped make that possible. Richard Donner, the director of “The Goonies,” contributed to funding his college education. A director who worked with a ten-year-old on a movie set in 1984 and then, years later, when the kid was no longer useful to anybody’s box office, quietly paid toward his tuition.
That detail says more about Donner than any tribute could.
From Berkeley, Cohen went to UCLA School of Law. He earned his JD in 2000.
In 2002 he co-founded Cohen Gardner LLP in Beverly Hills, a boutique entertainment firm. He has been practicing there ever since. In 2015 he published a book about negotiation called “The Dealmaker’s Ten Commandments.”
So by the early 2000s the situation was this. Two boys from the same 1985 movie poster. One became an entertainment attorney with an office in Beverly Hills. The other could not get cast.
What happened to Data
Quan’s story from those decades is well documented and it is not a happy one. He acted as a child, memorably, in “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom” and then in “The Goonies,” and then the industry ran out of roles it was willing to imagine him in. He moved behind the camera. For a long stretch he wasn’t acting at all.
The comeback, when it came, came through “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” released in 2022.
And the deal that put him in it was negotiated by Jeff Cohen.
Sit with the sequence. In 1984 two children are on a set in Astoria, Oregon, being told where to stand. In 2022 one of them is on the other side of a table in Los Angeles doing the paperwork that gets the other one his part. In 2023 the second one is holding an Academy Award.
“Goonies brother for life”
That’s the phrase Quan used from the stage. Not “my attorney.” Not “my representation.”
Brother.
Cohen didn’t act in the movie that won the Oscar. He isn’t in the credits any moviegoer reads. What he did was a contract, which is the least cinematic job in the business and one of the most decisive, because a part someone can’t close is a part someone doesn’t get.
He is 52 now. Same age bracket as the rest of the Goonies, all of them somewhere in their fifties, most of them recognizable to anyone who was a kid in 1985.
Every few years a story goes around about a former child star who lost everything. This is the other version, the one that doesn’t trend as often. A ten-year-old walks into a movie, walks back out of the industry as a teenager, goes to Berkeley on a director’s generosity, gets a law degree at 26, opens a firm at 28.
And then, three decades later, uses that entirely unglamorous skill to open a door for the boy who stood next to him on the poster.
They still call each other brothers. On the evidence, they’ve earned it.
