Crystal Lake Memories: The Complete History of Friday the 13th (Enhanced Edition)
Page 29
GERALD FEIL:
3-D has a peculiar history of cycles. It goes back to the turn of the century. Interest in it peaks and then subsides and then disappears for a period of time. After Jaws 3-D and a few more studio movies, the process once again fell into marginal extinction. Now there's a renaissance with digital and 3-D—IMAX 3-D is the best-looking stuff ever.
Part 3 does stand up. Part 3 was the test bed for a new way of doing 3-D. It was much better than what had preceded it, and Friday the 13th Part 3 was the pivot.
TRACIE SAVAGE:
I joke that Part 3 is the highest-grossing 3-D film ever produced for its time—but then there were only two other 3-D movies produced in its time. Still, it's something to brag about, isn't it?
STEVE MINER:
I think with any hard "R" horror film you have a certain limited audience, and you're not going to have much of a crossover. Yet the core audience is very sophisticated in their own way, and you're not going to get them all in unless you have something different. It turned out that I was right, and Part 3 recaptured the vast audience that the first film had. A big ingredient in that success was that Paramount was willing to go out on a limb with a big-time release of a 3-D film, which no one had done since the 1950s.
I do jump around a lot and have always tried very hard to do different things. Which is why I haven't talked about my Friday the 13th stuff in a long time. The hardcore fans remember, but I don't think I'm as well known in the genre as people like Wes Craven and Sean Cunningham. And maybe I've made some that don't work. The script wasn't very good or the acting wasn't up to par. But I think the 3-D effects worked out well, although my feeling is that at the time, a really good 3-D system hadn't yet been invented. My hope is that I brought something different to my Fridays as a director, but at the same time I stayed within the formula and made a commercial movie.
4. Jason's Unlucky Day
By the beginning of 1984, the heyday of the slasher film was already in sharp decline. The years 1980 through 1983 have come to be regarded as the sanguine years of the genre, when all of Hollywood—from the sleaziest "independent producer" whose office was located in the trunk of his parked car to the highest paid studio executive—was green-lighting any film that featured a masked killer, scores of dead teenagers and an ample array of sharp instruments (or, in the best of worlds, all three). To critics, it was an inexplicable phenomenon. But to the horror-hungry teenagers of the early 1980s it was like being let loose in a candy store with a week''s worth of lunch money. Nary a week went by that a new film wasn't released that featured some imitation, variation or regurgitation of even the hoariest slasher movie cliché. And these were not merely little-seen curios of the drive-in circuit. Following the smash success of Halloween and Friday the 13th, the major studios quickly mimicked (with varying degrees of success) the strategy Frank Mancuso, Sr. so successfully employed when he acquired Sean Cunningham's low-rent shocker for Paramount. Any even remotely marketable slasher quickie was now gobbled up and treated to a wide theatrical release backed by an aggressive multimedia advertising campaign.
The trend arguably reached the pinnacle of absurdity when the studios attempted to take the next logical step—elevating the merely exploitative to the level of respectable with an influx of imitative "adult thrillers." Slasher movies in all but budget only, these glossier, in-house studio productions boasted big-name stars and A-list directors. Yet despite the fancy logos and occasional top-caliber talent, the sight of Lauren Bacall fending off a crazed stalker (The Fan, Paramount, 1982), Clint Eastwood hunting a serial rapist (Tightrope, Warner, 1984), or Oscar-winner Lee Grant catfighting with a transsexual killer (Visiting Hours, Fox, 1982) would not have been out of place on double bills with such unapologetic slasher fare as Hell Night (1983, Compass International), Terror Train (Fox, 1982), My Bloody Valentine (Paramount, 1981) or The Funhouse (1981, Universal). In fact, in the year 1983, nearly 60 percent of all motion pictures—not just horror films—produced in the United States bore lineage to the slasher genre.
By the time the fourth Friday the 13th film—ceremoniously proclaiming itself to be The Final Chapter—went into pre-production at the end of 1983, the series was already in danger of becoming a dated anachronism. Even its now-trusted shepherd, Frank Mancuso, Jr., had grown tired of the formula despite its enormous profit margin and the hands-on filmmaking experience it offered him. The critical and moral backlash against the slasher film was beginning to take its toll, not just on the younger Mancuso's professional reputation but Paramount's public image. Bad reviews were one thing—even the intermittent letter-writing campaigns organized by conservative parent and religious groups could be brushed off—but the contempt directed at Mancuso by the industry's artistic elite represented a potential glass ceiling that couldn't be shattered. When, in his 1981 thriller Blow Out, Brian De Palma used a sleazy, cynical mock-slasher film as a bookend—complete with shaky camerawork, nubile females and a maniacal, heavy-breathing killer—it was impossible not to see it as a barely concealed swipe at Friday the 13th, the film which had single-handedly taken down De Palma's 1980 Hitchcock homage Dressed to Kill at the box office. By the time Paramount announced that the final Friday the 13th was ready to go into production, there seemed to be little question that it was time to go out while the series was still on top. It was time to kill Jason. Once and for all.
FRANK MANCUSO, SR., Chairman & CEO, Paramount Pictures:
Let it be said that, while it is possible there were concerns about Friday the 13th at the upper level of Paramount, there certainly wasn't at the senior level. At the time, Michael Eisner was President of Paramount and Barry Diller was Chairman. I reported directly to Barry. I never heard anything negative about Friday the 13th from him. Quite simply, these films were big moneymakers and they helped our year-end bottom line.
Oh, sure, we'd get letters. But we received letters about a lot of things. Did we get the level of complaints about Friday the 13th compared to, say, a Last Temptation of Christ? Absolutely not. And God bless America, because this is a free society. It is your choice to write a letter to a studio to complain about their product. But it is also your choice to leave your home and enter the theater. It is your choice to put your money down. And if you don't want to do that, you shouldn't.
Studios are public companies, and they have stockholders. The responsibility of the chairman is to make the most money for the company. I don't believe, and never did, that there is a bad piece of film if people want to see it. It's not up to me, or anyone, to make that decision. It is up to the moviegoer. Yes, we had to make decisions about what to produce and what to acquire. But the public is still, ultimately, the determiner of whether your instincts are right and the product you've created is accepted.
FRANK MANCUSO, JR., Producer:
I certainly would be surprised to hear that, if you said to Barry Diller, "Name me the top 50 movies you've been involved with," he would say Friday the 13th. But when Paramount was green-lighting Reds and whatever else, there was significant exposure. On these movies, there was none. If there was any resentment toward the movies, it was simply the fact that they were exercises in commerce. These movies introduced the idea of negative pick-ups. It said there were people involved with the studio, but yet had nothing to do with production, that could generate real revenue. At that time, you have to understand that at a studio like Paramount, the distribution and marketing departments probably outweighed the production entity by a significant measure. In some ways, Friday the 13th gave them their own sense of pride because this was a series that had nothing to do with the people in Hollywood.
There was a moment in time where I hated the Friday the 13th movies because that's all everybody ever affixed me to. With the fourth one—which I entitled The Final Chapter for a reason—I really wanted it to be done and walk away. In some ways, I felt I had grown beyond it, but it was really more me coming to terms with the fact that these movies should be made by people who are learning and g
rowing. The fact of the matter was that I wasn't in a place where I could get excited about doing one again. It became a chore. I was also now living out in Los Angeles, so the people in the filmmaking community weren't exactly looking at me as any particular talent. They were saying, "Oh, the Friday the 13th guy." I was never given the chance to even read anything that wasn't in that ilk. That became limiting and disappointing.
Phil Scuderi, I'm sure, was of a different mind. But he also would have been comfortable—as he ultimately was—with me just saying, "Look, Phil—I can't do this anymore." I'm not necessarily sure he, his partners or even Paramount wanted it to be the end—they might have wanted to use it as a marketing ploy. But it wasn't a ploy for me.
As The Final Chapter opens, Jason is presumed dead and taken to the local county morgue, only to stalk anew. "We knew that anyone who was seeing The Final Chapter had, in great likelihood, seen Part 3," reasons director Joseph Zito. "So we felt that there was no reason to go ahead and thrust our film years into the future. Instead, we wanted it to feel as if this was all one big, continuous movie."
Frank Mancuso, Jr. wasn't the only one who had grown tired of Friday the 13th. After cutting his teeth on the first three Friday films, Steve Miner would opt out of directing The Final Chapter, leaving Mancuso, aided by the ever-hovering presence of Phil Scuderi, to once again look to the realm of exploitation cinema to find a creative team that could both bring something new to the series and please longtime fans who, after years of anticipation, were expecting Jason's swansong to be nothing less than the best Friday the 13th yet. It would be the missive of the filmmakers that Frank Mancuso, Jr. would eventually choose to shepherd The Final Chapter to gift the film's characters and situations with a sense of humanity sometimes lacking in previous entries in the series.
STEVE MINER, Filmmaker:
They stopped offering me the Friday the 13th movies after the fourth one. I've always wished them well—I just couldn't do them anymore. The success of that series is based on remaking the same film, over and over again. As a filmmaker, I wanted to go on to something different. And with notable exceptions, a horror film will have a limited audience. I was fortunate to get a chance to make movies that had a broader appeal than any of my earlier work. You have to do what's best for you.
JOSEPH ZITO, Director:
I always wanted to be in the film business, so in the 1970s I opened up an editorial service. I rented some offices and got some guys who knew how to do it, and we would take in all kinds of jobs—we would make trailers and product reels, and dubbing foreign films into English. And occasionally we'd get a film that was incomplete or failed in some way, and that needed film doctoring. So I became a film doctor as a way to keep directing—I would look at the film and have to figure out a way to make it work, so that people would actually pay to see it. And I remember often having to say to the people who brought me these awful things, "Look, there is absolutely no way to get this corpse to dance. You might be able to dress it up and put it on the cross-town bus, but it's not going to walk." So that's what I was doing—trying to make stuff commercial.
Around 1980, I had made a small, sort of scary movie, and also a short 10-minute product reel, and taken them out to the Cannes Film Festival. So there I was with my little reel, and I'm showing it to a buyer from India or something like that, and there's another guy there in the room. His name is Carl Kaminsky. He's got this seer-sucker jacket on, and apparently he had cut himself shaving, because he was bleeding in two or three places through toilet paper stuck on his face. He looks at this reel and says, "You're great! You're a terrific director! When we get back to the United States, I want you to meet some of my clients, and we'll make films!" And let me tell you, that reel did not demonstrate anything of the sort. If I could look at it now, I'd be appalled.
Of course I never thought any of this would actually happen. But when I came back to the United States, Carl and I had dinner. Afterward, he says, "Come back to my office, I'm going to call two of my clients. These guys are going to love you." And he calls them on the phone, and says, "I met this guy Joe Zito—he's a terrific director!" Based on this crappy reel. And with those two phone calls—this is true—I end up getting two movies. I thought, "Wow. This is easy! Go to Cannes, meet a guy with toilet paper on his face, he makes a phone call and the next thing you have a movie!"
The first phone call resulted in a film called The Prowler, which was like a no-risk thing, the kind of movie that sort of happens before you know it and that you didn't think anybody is going to see. Then when The Prowler was completed, it's seen by the guy from the second phone call. A guy in Boston. He calls me and says, "This movie is great. But if I could call this movie Friday the 13th, we could make a fortune with it." The guy was Phil Scuderi. Then he says, "When I make another Friday the 13th film, I'll make a beeline for you and you're going to be the guy." And I never, ever thought that phone call would come.
FRANK MANCUSO, JR.:
I sat down with Joe and I liked him, just personally. Joe eventually did ask to do a lot of different things than had been done in past Fridays, but we always wanted to flavor each movie differently anyway, whether it was in 3-D or The Final Chapter. So I went with Joe because I thought he understood what we were trying to do. He had a feel for the genre and we had a compatible personality—I could see him making the movie.
JOSEPH ZITO:
When I got the call on The Final Chapter, there was no story, there was nothing. The deal offered was, "We want you to write it and direct it." I said, "I don't really write. I know other people I can recommend." And they said, "No, no, no, we want you." So I get a contract to write and direct the film, but I ended up hiring Barney Cohen and paying him out of my salary. Later, it all got folded into the Writer's Guild of America and became a giant disaster. Because while The Final Chapter was in fact a negative pickup, it was released by Paramount and deemed to be a Paramount Picture by the WGA. I never even thought to take a writing credit on the film.
I had some pretty aggressive ideas about it. And now, when I think back on it, the arrogance to even ask for that stuff seems impossible. I thought, "Okay, we can do this a little differently than the other ones. How about if we set the whole film at night?" Which is a giant production problem. "And in the rain?" Which is the most disastrous thing to suggest, production-wise. "Oh, and what if we have a kid in this one—a 10 or 11-year-old?" Which is another giant production problem, because child actors are not allowed to work long hours. "And twins would really be cool! Oh, and one more thing. How about the kid has a dog?" All of those things Frank agreed to.
Tom Savini returned to create the many makeup illusions in The Final Chapter, beginning with the gruesome death of morgue attendant Axel (Bruce Mahler).
BARNEY COHEN, Screenwriter:
I started in the ad business, as a copywriter and concept guy. I had written a couple of screenplays, and ended up being offered a couple of Afterschool Special-type programs for CBS. This was more exciting than advertising, so I quit. And one of those specials I wrote was called—goodness gracious, stay with me here—The Inside-Out Clown, about a fat kid who went to clown school and learned that life isn't about clowning, clowning is about life. And I don't know why he read the script, but Joe Zito—who is also, shall we say, an overweight person—called me up and said, "I love the kids you draw. I want you to write a horror film for me."
JOSEPH ZITO:
Right before The Final Chapter, I had already been working with a writer named Bruce Hidemi Sakow, who had written a script called Quarantine, based on an original idea I had. And he did a really very good job of it, but we never made the movie. So Bruce and I hashed out a story together for The Final Chapter that became the outline. Then Barney was brought in and I worked with him on finishing the screenplay.
The method of writing the movie was absolutely unique—I can say, 20 years later, that I have never heard of anything quite like it. I would call Phil Scuderi every night at 8:00 p.m., like c
lockwork. I don't know if he had a television show he liked to watch at 9:00 p.m., or if he had a whole schedule of people calling him about different movies, or what, but I'd call him at exactly eight-zero-zero and somehow he would wrap it up like a television show by nine-zero-zero. And this is not a guy who was a writer, he was a theater owner, yet he had the whole thing memorized—it was absolutely mind-boggling. He would recite the script from page one to wherever we were at, and talk about the scene. I would then meet with Barney the next day, and tell him roughly what was done, implement that, and then turn that into pages. I would send those pages out to Boston, and then, all over again, the next day at 8:00 p.m., we would talk about the whole script again, including that scene. Barney and I built the script from the beginning, but it was completely visualized by this guy sitting in Boston.
BARNEY COHEN:
The whole process was a lot of fun—just me and Zito in this apartment on the East Side of New York. And Zito likes to eat, so we had a fridge stocked with champagne and kishka. We would just eat and write, write and eat. I think Zito's role during the development was almost like a facilitator, explaining the producers to me, and me to the producers. That was not normal. I can't think of another film subsequently where that happened. And I think Joe, genius that he is, is a controlling personality, and was afraid that if I talked to anybody but him, ideas might creep in that he didn't want.
JOSEPH ZITO:
The entire process of The Final Chapter would be one of preconceptions that turned out to be different from what the reality was to be. I will admit at first blush that I had been waiting for years to direct a motion picture that people were going to see, and this is the last thing in the world I thought it would be. But I said to myself, "I had better not take pretense into this project. If I'm going to do this, I'd better figure out what people want to see in a film like this, and respect how it works for them." So I carefully studied all of the Friday the 13th films made up until that point. I understood you were going into something that had an audience with certain expectations, and this had to be as good as, or hopefully better than, what they had expected. I know how pretentious that sounds, but that's the job. That's what I reached for.