Random Behind-The-Scenes Details From 'The Lost Boys,' (14 items)

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  (#5) Joel Schumacher Lobbied Unsuccessfully To Get A ‘Lost Girls’ Sequel Made

  The Lost Boys did well in theaters but was a huge hit on home video, prompting producer Richard Donner and Warner Bros. studios to look at the possibility of a sequel. Director Joel Schumacher, who had been the one to propose the idea of the vampires sleeping in a ruined hotel that had crumbled into the San Andreas Fault, initially suggested a prequel set during the earthquake of 1906. When that didn't fly, he instead proposed a Lost Girls movie with "Drew Barrymore and Rosanna Arquette on motorcycles. I wanna see that movie!"

  Sadly, neither version ever went before the cameras, and while The Lost Boys later got a pair of lackluster direct-to-video sequels, the Lost Girls idea was suitably lost to history.
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  (#1) The Initial Idea Was For A Kid-Friendly Film Focused On Peter Pan As A Vampire

  "It was very much 'Goonies Go Vampire,'" director Joel Schumacher said of the original script, penned by Jan Fischer and James Jeremias, a first-time screenwriter who had the idea after reading Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire. Specifically, the character of Claudia, "a 200-year-old vampire trapped in the body of a 12-year-old girl."

  "Since Peter Pan had been one of my all-time favorite stories," Jeremias later recalled, "I thought, ‘What if the reason Peter Pan came out at night and never grew up and could fly was because he was a vampire?'" In Jeremias and Fischer's initial version of the story, which Schumacher called "charming and adorable, and very G-rated," all the characters were pre-teens, from the vampires themselves to the protagonists to the vampire-hunting Frog brothers.

  It was producer Richard Donner (then still attached as director) who had the idea of making the characters older. "He said, 'Old enough to drive,'" Jeremias recalled, "but what he meant was, 'Old enough to f*ck.'"
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  (#7) Ben Stiller Apparently Auditioned To Be A Lost Boy

  "Last time I saw a room full of so many talented faces was when I auditioned for The Lost Boys," Ben Stiller joked at the 12th Annual HollywoodLife Young Hollywood Awards in 2010. While the cast of The Lost Boys ended up including Kiefer Sutherland, Jason Patric, Alex Winter, Jami Gertz, and Coreys Haim and Feldman, Stiller apparently didn't make the cut.

  "It was between me, and Kiefer, and the two Coreys," Stiller told the crowd back in 2010, though we don't know for sure what part Stiller was actually auditioning for.
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  (#8) The Film Originally Had A Post-Credits Scene In The Vampires’ Lair

  The ending of The Lost Boys is already pretty memorable, with Grandpa's memorable last line about what he never could stomach about Santa Carla, but apparently, the script originally also had a post-credits sequence that was never filmed. While post-credits sequences are de rigueur these days, they were a rarity back in the '80s. In it, viewers would have been taken back into the subterranean hotel lair of the vampires, where we would see a mural from the early 1900s, depicting master vampire Max, surrounded by a group of young boys who, presumably, became the film's eponymous Lost Boys.

  This sequence would have tied in nicely with Joel Schumacher's proposal for a prequel featuring the earthquake of 1906, which is what plunged the hotel into the San Andreas Fault in the first place.
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  (#3) They Got To Film In Santa Cruz Only If The Name Was Changed (To Santa Carla)

  "This is exactly where you would go if you were a teenage vampire," director Joel Schumacher said of the Santa Cruz Boardwalk, where much of the movie was filmed. Santa Cruz didn't want to scare away any tourists, so filmmakers had to change the name of the town in the movie to Santa Carla. That infamous graffiti on the back of the "Welcome to Santa Carla" sign, though? That was true, at least according to Schumacher.

  "Santa Cruz had more murders per capita than anywhere else in the United States," the director recalled. "There was a murder outside of our hotel while we were preparing the movie."
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  (#2) Kiefer Sutherland Angered The Director By Changing His Character’s Haircut

  Inspired by singer Billy Idol, Kiefer Sutherland told the set hairdresser to snip off his long hair on the second day of filming, creating his character's unmistakable look. "Joel Schumacher wanted me to have long hair," the actor recalled, "and I had long hair at the time, and then he wanted it white, a timeless kind of thousand-year-old look. So I dyed it white, and my hair was like normally long, like long everywhere. And I just looked like a wrestler! I hated it."

  So the actor had it changed on the sly, which initially angered the director, though he eventually came around. "I actually think I might’ve been responsible, or at least partially responsible, for creating the mullet," the actor says. "And for that, I’ll apologize to the death."

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