RON MILLKIE:
Sean always had a sense of humor and took things in stride. He never got stressed out; even when we all made mistakes it was no big thing. I played Officer Dorf as a jerk, a dork. I know cops like that—very filled with themselves, big men. But the funny thing is, I can't even ride a motorcycle! So Sean said, "Just hold on to it!" I did, but then I tumbled and the motorcycle fell on top of me. Everyone was laughing. They ended up having to hire a real state trooper as my "stunt double." Now in the film, I only make the motion of starting the damn thing, and then they cut to my double riding off. Pretty embarrassing.
JEANNINE TAYLOR:
Sean was very easygoing and he knew exactly what he wanted, and he conveyed that mostly non-verbally. If he didn't like something, he wouldn't say, "No" or "Don't," or any of the negative words that make actors—especially young, inexperienced actors—freeze and feel upset with themselves. He was very good that way. The silent message was: "Okay, kid, if I don't say anything, you're doing all right and if you're messing up I'll gently redirect you."
I remember when Kevin Bacon and I made the entrance into the cabin to do the sex scene, I was extremely nervous because I was going to do this very private, naughty thing. I was a modest person—I still am, really. So I did it very clumsily. I was just really bad on that first take. Just to show you what kind of person Sean was, he said "Cut," took me by the hand, privately walked me away from the rest of the crew and said very slowly and quietly in my ear: "Now, we can do better than that." He was very gentle and compassionate about it—it calmed me down immediately. And I did a little better on the next take.
KEVIN BACON:
When I first started out, I had the idea that there were two sides to acting—"out of work" and "star." That was a misconception that was blown apart when I realized that there was this whole middle range of actors who were making a living in the theatre, playing a wide variety of roles, tuning and tightening and mastering their craft. So I took whatever acting work I could get at that time. I worked as an extra, and tried unsuccessfully to land commercials. I did soap operas. That being said, I think I was still really careful not to make work decisions based on money.
Friday the 13th, honestly... it was material that, for whatever reason, I didn't necessarily feel connected to. But I tried to take the size of the budget and the size of the part and the size of the paycheck out of the equation. And then a huge variety of things open up to you, because there is something about a truly collaborative effort that really feels right. Movies are an isolated medium. You're taught or learn to look out for number one—yourself. Rarely do you encounter something that's really my concept of what an ensemble is.
"When I wrote Friday the 13th, I had no background in horror movies whatsoever," says screenwriter Victor Miller. "Sean Cunningham made me go dutifully to see Halloween. I think that John Carpenter and Debra Hill did a wonderful job. And one of the things I noticed is that the first act of Halloween is filled with the more innocent scares. So I wrote a scene early on in Friday the 13th that called for a snake to be killed. I wanted to show that these kids could fight back and use violence if necessary."
RICHARD FEURY:
I got to know Kevin, and he was a genuinely likable guy. He'd hang out with everybody. Everyone got along. But it's funny— and I don't want to use the term "pretty boy"—but at the time, you'd look at him and say, "He's really good-looking," and kind of discount him for that. And Kevin's probably seven or eight years younger than me, and we'd talk once in a while. He grew up upper-middle-class in Philadelphia, but he had a real working-class attitude. I don't think he was thrilled to be doing Friday the 13th. He had higher aspirations—which he certainly has fulfilled.
RON MILLKIE:
When I first auditioned for the film, I read with Kevin, and even then I could tell he had something special. I remember I was very impressed with him. He was improvising with me; I didn't expect him to do that. He came over to my motorcycle and I didn't know what to say, but I indicated for him to get away. Kevin made that whole scene spontaneous and fresh. He was very good and very free.
ADRIENNE KING:
Kevin Bacon had the greatest body. He was working out all the time. He would do like a hundred push-ups, every hour. That's what he did in his down time.
ROBBI MORGAN:
The only drag about the whole experience was that I only worked a couple of days, so I didn't get to meet most of the cast. None of the other counselors, not Kevin Bacon, no one. Even that scene early on, where I'm in the truck with the truck driver and talking about going to the camp, Sean filmed our scenes separately. So when I'm supposed to be talking to the driver, played by Rex Everhart, and doing all that dialogue, he wasn't even there. That was Sean feeding me the lines. It was tricky. And now, when I watch myself, I can tell I got the eyelines all wrong, because Sean is a lot shorter than Rex. It's like, "Oh, I'm not even looking at him!"
RONN CARROLL:
Kevin Bacon, Adrienne King and I used to ride out to the location at the camp. And as you remember in the movie, I was always separated from all the kids. All my scenes are like, "There's trouble down at camp! Where are we going?" And I had never seen the whole script, so I had no concept of what Adrienne and Kevin were telling me on our trips out, that it was going to be pretty gory. So I actually used that for the character. That he seemed like a regular guy, just a nice cop that got caught in the middle of this huge thing. I also think that Sean, like most directors—he had vision as to who he saw the character as. He saw that in me, that there was no tough side to this guy, that he was just a small town sheriff in over his head.
SEAN CUNNINGHAM:
I have a recollection of Laurie Bartram, who played Brenda, that this was an adventure for her in particular. Laurie—she has since passed away—her whole family background was Christian Fundamentalists. I think her father was a minister. She was completely buttoned up—not uptight, but she was in fact very devout. And her she was, in the middle of doing this horror cum sex extravaganza at a boy scout camp!
ADRIENNE KING:
I remember Harry Crosby being such a great and classy guy—he didn't like to talk about his personal life. And this will put it in perspective—1979 was the summer of "Who Shot J.R.?" And Harry's sister, Mary Crosby, was on "Dallas." And as it turned out, she was the one who shot J.R., but no one knew it yet. Harry had to keep it from all of us, and we all kept asking and pleading and begging him to tell us what he knew. He had the inside scoop and at the time, this was huge. But he never told.
VICTOR MILLER:
I thought they all did a fabulous job. If it had been cast in Los Angeles, I think the look would have been quite different. Clearly these are New York actors. The women were not pneumatically endowed, which was a fantasy of mine, so I missed that. But I thought it made it much more real.
SEAN CUNNINGHAM:
When you're dealing with seven or eight would-be protagonists in a horror film, you really don't have a chance to get into what you'd normally call character development. And especially when you are casting low-budget films, what you ask the actors to do is be consistent with who they are personally. That makes it easier and credible to the piece. Sometimes it is a double-edged sword, because it can work great or it can turn out to be a real embarrassment. But if you're fortunate enough, you wind up with a situation where you just turn the cameras on and your actors behave how they would behave in real life. No matter how scripted it was, it would appear natural. Hopefully, there was some feeling in the boy-girl relationships. I loved Adrienne King's work. Laurie Bartram had those wonderful eyes, and that big smile. Jeannine was the tough guy—I remember that she was small, but very strong. And a great sport. Robbi Morgan's scenes were basically the prologue, so she didn't work that much, but boy, she was a real treat. She was just all bubbly and light and fun. And Harry Crosby, I found his manner to be incredibly warm and affable. He was a very endearing man. If any of the actors didn't do better in this film, it's my faul
t.
As the first weeks of daytime shooting came to a close, it was clear by incoming dailies that the carefree and playful atmosphere on the set of Friday the 13th was translating to the screen as well. The film's expository scenes portray a youthful exuberance and teasing, non-explicit sexuality that would not have been out of place in any of the tamer teen movies of the period, and was purposefully designed to contrast the graphic horrors to come. Little seems to occur in the way of narrative consequence or complex characterization, with a languid and deliberate pacing that belies today's modern fast-cutting techniques. And as if to intentionally rebuke—if only with the benefit of hindsight—Friday the 13th's reputation as a non-stop bloodbath, just a single onscreen murder occurs during the film's first, post-credits 40 minutes.
In a further, intentional homage—or as some critics carped, outright pastiché—of Psycho, Sean Cunningham and Victor Miller would subvert traditional narrative convention by introducing the audience to who they presume will be the film's main protagonist, the soon-to-be-doomed Annie. These early scenes would also introduce many secondary characters of the fictional surrounding Crystal Lake community, that to this day remain fan favorites: the inept, bumbling Officer Dorf; a kindly local truck driver Enos, played by the late Rex Everhart; and perhaps most memorably, Walt Gorney as Crazy Ralph, the local "prophet of doom" who's warnings of a "death curse" go tragically unheeded by the naïve counselors. If Cunningham and Miller remain not quite as convinced of the effectiveness of some of these creative conceits, the first half slow burn they constructed for Friday the 13th nevertheless cemented many of the defining structural characteristics of the prototypical slasher film.
Ron Millkie was cast in the role of Officer Dorf after spotting an ad for an open call in Variety. "I had known Sean Cunningham back in the days when he was doing industrial films, so I called him up and he said, 'Come to think of it, there might be a part for you. I was going to play Dorf myself. Why don't you come on up?'" Millkie found the comedic character enjoyable to play. "Officer Dorf is a jerk, a dork. I know cops like that. Very filled with themselves, big men."
SEAN CUNNINGHAM:
I was strongly aware of the setup for Psycho—that the first girl you are introduced to dies. I purposely set up Annie as the lead, and she isn't the lead at all. That's why I think the audience is so surprised when she becomes the first victim, because they didn't expect her to die. This is about structure—getting the audience to buy in as the film progresses. Those early scenes with Annie, like where she comes into the tiny diner and announces she's going to Crystal Lake, and the people just stare—that was to set the mood. I think Sergio Leone did that better than anybody—where somebody would come in to a new land and ask for a drink, and everybody stops and looks. It's so the audience would think, "Oh, there's something out of the ordinary going on here!"
Subsequently, many people have criticized some of those early scenes in Friday the 13th, that they are too slow and chit-chatty. Take the scene where Ned fakes his own drowning. By itself this scene doesn't play, but in the context of the film and our expectation of what is in store for these characters, it means something different. All of this is eventually what will make the last act of the film work. You buy in. If you play the hour that precedes it, you carry that emotional investment in what happens to these characters.
VICTOR MILLER:
Sean was instrumental in saying, "Look, we should learn from Alfred Hitchcock, when he killed off Janet Leigh in this big, horrible surprise." Psycho totally spun horror movies around, in that you could kill off a major contract player. That resulted in the Annie character, and it is a piece of structure that I think was really important. I certainly knew I had to establish in Friday the 13th how helpless these characters would be. So that after Annie is killed, the audience would say, "Whatever this movie is about, the people who made it are not taking prisoners!"
BILL FREDA:
Sean saw the overview of it. And that's a big compliment for him on the movie. I remember one comment Sean made during the editing that I think really paid off. I was moving a scene along. He said, "Slow it down." That was a big influence. Because it's that pacing that, as an editor, you don't want so much. Today, people would be like, "Let's get on with it." But at that time it worked. The audience waited for the murders to happen, and to see how they happened.
VICTOR MILLER:
When I wrote Friday the 13th, I had no background in horror movies whatsoever. But when I saw Halloween, I loved it—I think that John Carpenter and Debra Hill did such a wonderful job. And one of the things I noticed is that the first act of Halloween is filled with the more innocent scares. So I wrote a scene early on that called for a snake to be killed. I wanted to show that these kids could fight back, if necessary, and use violence.
SEAN CUNNINGHAM:
The killing of the snake, it was an important moment in the film. It was tone setting. Though it was very upsetting that we actually chopped up that snake with a machete.
ADRIENNE KING:
Thank God PETA wasn't around when we shot that! I was shocked. I remember that the owner of the snake was just standing off to the side, tears running down his cheeks.
VICTOR MILLER:
One thing that's funny about Friday the 13th is that there is only one reference to the actual day Friday the 13th in the whole film. Sean called me and said, "Look you got to put in some reference to the day in there. Otherwise, it's nice that I came up with this title, but it won't have some kind of reverberation in the movie." So I added that line, in the scene with Ronn Carroll, and had him turn to Peter Brouwer and say that little bit of dialogue about how it's "a full moon and a Friday the 13th" and all that. Talk about shoehorning!
JEANNINE TAYLOR:
Doing nudity in the film was a big decision for me. I consulted my agents and other people about it, and I was told that, ultimately, it would be up to me. It was not to be a condition of taking the job. And I initially decided not to do any nudity—that was my decision. But then, when it came time to shoot the love scene with Kevin Bacon, it seemed unnatural to worry about if my chest was exposed. It's summertime—why is the girl all huddled up under a blanket or whatever? It seemed unrealistic at the time. A phony, artificial thing. It just didn't seem like a big deal while I was doing it, and less of a problem to just do the scene as it would happen in life. To the degrees possible, of course—I was not nude from the waist down.
It was only afterward that I was very embarrassed. I said to myself, "Oh, no—you've taken some of your clothes off!" My Victorian-era side came out. I was upset that my family would see it, and my friends, and especially my elderly relatives. And I was married at the time to a fellow actor and he had very nice parents who I cared about very much. He had a lovely family and I thought, "My in-laws are going to see this!"
ADRIENNE KING:
I think we were lucky compared to later Friday the 13ths, and certainly slasher movies at the time—there's a little T&A in ours and that's it. Though at one point I remember someone saying, "Maybe you should go into the lake naked." But that, thankfully, got overruled. And I do remember the "Strip Monopoly" scene came out of nowhere. We all just had a laugh about that...
VICTOR MILLER:
"Strip Monopoly" came from when I was 13 or 14 years old. Jane, Peter, Henry Fonda and the third Mrs. Fonda lived down the road. My older brother and me and the two young Fondas were always looking for things to do. One day we played "Dirty Scrabble." There I was, not knowing that I was with the 15 year-old Jane Fonda. And that has always stuck in my mind. So somehow, I just went to "Strip Monopoly."
"I was aware that we needed someone who the audience would think was the potential love interest for our heroine," says Sean Cunningham about casting Harry Crosby (below, right) in the role of Alice's doomed love interest, Bill. "And it turned out Harry really served us very well."
SEAN CUNNINGHAM:
Friday the 13th has very little nudity in it. It probably would have b
enefited from having a little more but I was nervous about the MPAA in the first place. I was very suspicious about the story value of nudity. I think there can be a lot of commercial value to having nudity in this kind of a film. Not for story reasons but purely for commercial reasons. Your primary audience is teenage boys and they are interested in what naked girls look like. It is kind of fun at that level. And there is always gonna be some version of a girlie calendar. But there are also calendars that exploit motorcycles or exploit gay men. It's just a part of our culture. I think if you make too big a deal out of it, you do yourself a disservice.
VICTOR MILLER:
It was not necessarily important that the heroine be a virgin, historically, in these kinds of films, just that you not fool around. But I bent that rule around, because it was more interesting to me, and because I was 40 years old writing this. Remember that line Alice says to Steve Christy, "You did last night?" That used to be a more important exchange about the nature of their physical relationship, but it just got whittled down, both by budget and the time constraints of shooting. The reason it was even there is because I really wanted Alice to be more of an outsider. That is probably the only thing that I was conscious of doing with her—that all the other kids kind of fit in better with each other.
HARRY MANFREDINI:
I rarely go to the sets of movies I'm scoring, because it's so boring—it's like watching paint dry. And sometimes that is very strange, because then I'd go to cast parties and, of course, everyone would know everyone else and they'd all wonder who I was. Anyway, I did go to the set of Friday the 13th a couple of times, though I guess I missed all the fun parts. But on one of the days I was there, they were shooting a scene with the Crazy Ralph character. Walt Gorney, that guy really was scary. He wasn't acting.
Crystal Lake Memories: The Complete History of Friday the 13th (Enhanced Edition) Page 7
