Kudos to Variety for interviewing members of the cast and crew of Stand By Me, which came out in the summer of 1986. As I’ve insisted here before, if you grew up in the 1980s, ’86 was a hell of a year for pictures: Top Gun, Platoon, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Aliens, About Last Night, and Back to School, to name a just a few. And then there was Stand By Me, which was made on a budget of $7.5 million and went on to gross more than $52 million. Hard to believe, but almost every major studio turned it down.

According to producer and cowriter Bruce Evans,