I was originally cast for a role in Part V, the part that DebiSue Voorhees eventually played. During my audition, Danny Steinmann asked me to lift up my top and show him my breasts. I said, "Excuse me, no, I cannot do that. It's incredibly unprofessional, and my agent didn't tell me about it. You can call my agent, and if he OK's it, I'm fine with that, because I'm comfortable with nudity." But to have something like that sprung on me? Then at my wardrobe fitting, Danny propositioned me. He wanted me to have dinner with him—I hadn't even read the script yet. And the next day, I didn't have a job, let's just put it that way. But I got paid for it, so it's fine.
After my bad experience on Part V, Pamela Basker and Fern Champion brought me back in for Part VI. They said, "Pretend like you never met Frank Mancuso, Jr." So I did, and I got the part. And it was immediately apparent the difference with Tom McLoughlin, with his script, and the humor.
JOSEPH T. GARRITY, Production Designer:
I remember going to the World's Fair in New York when I was a kid, in 1964, with my parents and brothers and sisters. I was amazed at all these made-up environments and pavilions that were built, these worlds that had been created. That really inspired me. I was the kind of kid that was always decorating the whole house for Halloween in a really elaborate way—I would have a marionette puppet and these little environments for the puppet to work in. I even made little cemeteries and tombstones and stuff. I was always drawing. So by the time I started high school I began working in stage crew and theatre.
The older you get, the more important the choices you make become. You're torn between doing a project and not doing it. We all have to wrestle with that. Whenever I get a script that's bad, I try to find what's good in it. Because if there's not something good in it, why should I even want to be a part of it? I think we all had heard that our film was going to take the Friday the 13th series in a different direction, because it went bad ways prior, especially with Part V. We were going to pull it into a saner, tamer place. We all had many discussions together about the psychology of the films, and why it works and why it doesn't work. And what responsibility we had towards young people. Of course, there was this character, Jason, and there was the death of teenagers, primarily. This needed to happen, I guess. But maybe films like this could keep violence from happening in the real world? I don't know if that's true or not. I think it has to do with who's sitting in that theater. But there's nothing wrong with putting out positive stuff. And not in the boring, Religious Right kind of way. Plus, Tom McLoughlin's wife was expecting their first child. I think he just wanted to lighten it all up a little bit. That is why I ultimately decided to do Jason Lives.
Genre vet Thom Mathews (center) stars as Tommy Jarvis in Jason Lives. Pictured here with co-stars David Kagen (left) and Sheriff Garris and Vincent Guastaferro as Deputy Rick Cologne, Mathews would also star in the first two installments of the cult classic Return of the Living Dead series.
DON BEHRNS, Producer:
My first film job was in the early 1970s, as a production assistant on a blaxploitation movie called Candy Tangerine Man. It was about a guy who lived a double life—businessman during the day, and at night he was out pimping and shooting up guys. And, ironically, I had worked on something called The Unseen, which Danny Steinmann took his name off of. I guess Danny had directed Friday the 13th Part V. And it's a good thing he vanished off the face of the Earth after that. He was an asshole to work with and a very incompetent director. Anyway, I had worked my way up to production manager, and that's how I met Debra Hill, who was a script supervisor on some of those films. One day she called me saying, "I'm living with this guy named John Carpenter and he has $300,000 to make a movie called Halloween. I'm producing. You want to production manage it for me?" I said, "What!? You've never produced before!" But she was a smart lady. I ended up working on both Halloween and The Fog.
I had a mutual acquaintance of Tom McLoughlin who recommended me for Jason Lives, so I met Tom, and Frank Mancuso, Jr. It was my first producing shot. It's funny—I never had a particular affinity for horror films. It just sort of happened that way. Once you start doing them and a few become successful, people look to you to do more. And I remember Tom had this marathon of the Friday movies right before we went to Atlanta—all five in a row. I couldn't separate one from the other!
JON KRANHOUSE, Director of Photography:
I shot my first feature when I was 23 years old. It was called Brain Waves, and there's this scene where there is an electrocution in a bathtub. We took a bunch of little tiny flashbulbs and wired them up, then triggered them to go off the same way you do a machine gun. And in the tub was this girl who was Playmate of the Year from Hustler or something. And she wiggles around and dies and all the lights are flashing. Frank Mancuso, Jr. saw that and said, "Oh, what a great death scene!" He even mentioned that to me when I interviewed for the job on Part VI. I remember I wasn't sure what to expect when I first met Frank, Jr. I got to his office at Paramount, and here's this guy with high-top sneakers on—unlaced—and jeans just ripped to shreds, as was the fashion of the day. And hanging up on the door to his very plush office was an Armani suit. It was such an extreme contrast.
When I read the script for Jason Lives, I thought, "This could be interesting and fun." Tom McLoughlin certainly wanted, visually, a more classical approach to the film. He wanted to give it a real sense of mood. But most importantly, I thought he had a very healthy sense of irony about it all. You know that line in there, the one that the groundskeeper at the cemetery has: "Some people have a funny ide'r of entertainment?" I think that perfectly summed up the movie Tom wanted to make.
After the on-set tensions of the three previous Friday the 13th films, shooting another sequel in California would have been a near impossibility. The threat of a backlash from the unions was too great a risk for Frank Mancuso, Jr.'s upstart Hometown Films to take, and Tom McLoughlin's script, the first in the series to feature pre-teen protagonists in prominent roles, required that the production find a "right-to-work" state amenable to extending the hours a child could legally perform. The locale the producers of Jason Lives would eventually settle upon, the picturesque town of Covington, Georgia and its surrounding communities, turned out to be a boon for the production. Quaint, accommodating and woodsy, it was not quite the authentic Camp Crystal Lake of the first two films, but it was a far more suitable stand-in than the desert hills of Southern California had been since Part 3.
As cameras officially rolled on Jason Lives on February 6, 1986, the crew settled in for a six-week shoot that proceeded in marked contrast to the pressure-cooker environment that dominated the last few Friday films. This production had a downright congenial atmosphere; if it is a cliché that the cast and crew of a film often form a makeshift "family" during production, then Jason Lives is the Ozzie & Harriet of the Friday the 13th series. Tom McLoughlin not only cast his new wife Nancy in a key role in the film, she became the production's unofficial den mother. Illegal substances were conspicuous by their absence, replaced by all-night Scrabble games, midnight bowling tournaments and, when things got raciest, the occasional round of "Truth or Dare." Finally, the makers of a Friday the 13th film were having fun.
TOM MCLOUGHLIN:
Even today, out of all the films that I have done in my career, when people ask me which one I had the most fun on, I say Jason Lives. To escape the prying eyes of the unions, we shot it under the title "Aladdin Sane," and we really were young and crazy. I was 26 years old. We knew we were making a Friday the 13th, but this was only my second film, and I was so into it. Everybody caught that passion.
Camp Forest Green counselors. From left: Jennifer Cooke as Megan, Kerry Noonan as Paula, and Renee Jones as Sissy. "I tried to find a way to make each character have a voice of their own," says Jason Lives writer/director Tom McLoughlin. "With the girls, it was finding young actresses that were all different types and all had a strong unique style."
KERRY NOONAN:
The funniest thing wa
s being picked up at the airport by a guy holding up a sign that said, "Terror, Inc."
JON KRANHOUSE:
I remember being on the crew bus and coming in from the airport with some of the special effects group. As we got off the interstate and turned onto this side road going to the location, there was some huge industrial building that was very close to our motel, and it had a large sign near the entrance that said, "Two hundred days since the last industrial accident!" I leaned over to one of the effects guys and asked, "What do they do there?" And he says, "Oh, they make dynamite."
I looked at where this factory was, and the size of it, and then I looked at where our motel was, and I was sure we'd be a steaming crater by the end of the shoot.
TOM FRIDLEY:
By the time of Part VI, Friday the 13th had become a moneymaking machine for Paramount. But wherever that money was going, it sure wasn't being spent on accommodations.
NANCY MCLOUGHLIN, "Lizbeth":
It was desolate—there was nothing there. Nothing but this stinking motel. And Tom and I had a "suite," so-called because there was a lump in the middle of the room. It was such a dive. We shot essentially all nights. I think there were maybe three or four days, then it was like six weeks of six-day all-nighters—going to bed when everybody else in the world was waking up. Everybody would go to the bar at the Waffle House in the morning to wind down—the crew would raid you if you didn't. They'd break in, bring out the sleeping people's bodies and deposit them at the bar. It was a huge party.
Sometimes we would also go bowling at like three o'clock in the morning. And one time, I went to the bathroom, and I hear a little girl by herself in one of the stalls. I opened up the door and there's this three-year-old angel, and she says, "Would you wipe my butt, please?" Turns out her mom was a barfly, picking up guys around the room. That shocked me. So I grabbed a paper towel and start wiping her butt, but then another came in and saw me, so the rest of the shoot everyone would come up and ask, "Would you wipe my butt, please?"
VINCENT GUASTAFERRO:
You'd look out the window of the Motel 6 and the only thing on the cloverleaf was the Waffle House. So every morning, we'd risk our lives by running across the highway just to have pecan pancakes and bacon. But Covington is historically preserved—it's one of the few towns that wasn't destroyed by Sherman's March to the sea—so it was small with beautiful houses with big porches. And we were 50 miles out of Atlanta, so for the few days we had time off we'd treat ourselves to a trip to the big city, and eat fried ice cream and go to a good blues club in town.
Nancy was extremely gracious and generous. "Motherly," and I don't mean in a bad way, like she's not hip—she's very contemporary and intelligent. It's her nature to be very giving. She was like the den mother of the movie, because she and Tom didn't have children yet. When she wasn't working, she was on the set, asking "Who needs water?" She was happy and supportive of Tom. To this day, I love her.
KERRY NOONAN:
The person I hung out with most was Nancy. She did her scenes and then would stay on set, so she had all this free time. She was really fun and we had a lot in common. We'd play Scrabble, and even hitch rides to the set, back when you could still do that sort of thing.
NANCY MCLOUGHLIN:
My father's a writer, his name is Bob Mott. I was Nancy Mott. He wrote for Your Show of Shows, a sketch show, and he was Dick Van Dyke and Red Skelton's personal pantomime writer. And, oddly enough, the only other personal writer Dick Van Dyke has ever had was Tommy—it was what got him into the Writer's Guild. My father also ended up working on The Gong Show, and it's funny, the one memory I have of being on the set of that show was when Tommy's brother was on it, a fire-eater. I was like 13 or something, watching this fire-eater and watching Tom's family around him and thinking, "Oh, aren't they sweet?"
Years later, I think it was around 1979, and I'm on the set of this really terrible movie called Prophecy, and Tommy's playing the monster. I was visiting the set with my girlfriend, whose father was in charge of security. And Tommy was climbing out of the monster outfit and I thought, "Oh, he's cute." I was 21. And at the time, I didn't date, I didn't do anything. I was really shy. I thought I'd never marry, I'd never have children—when you're an actress, these are the things you give up. So Tom's looking at me and I'm looking at him and… I run and hide. For like two hours. And what I did say to my girlfriend when I saw him? "That's the man I'm going to marry." I had no idea. I didn't have a second thought about it. But I did say it. And by 1982, we were engaged.
"It's so much fun making a horror movie!" says actress Nancy McLoughlin. "You get to act scared, get covered in blood and, hopefully, get a great death scene. And I love screaming!"
TOM MCLOUGHLIN:
That's how I met my wife, crawling out of a monster costume. I admire wives who work with their husbands. It's a whole different process than is usual between a director and an actor. We've managed to make it work. Nancy and I have done a number of films together and she's a terrific actress—she's funny, she's got a great face and a great scream. I wanted to tailor a role for her in Part VI as one of the teenagers, although there's that cliché in horror movies that all the kids look like they're 26 and I did not want to fall into that trap. So I said to Nancy, "I'm going to write a part for you as a head camp counselor, but we can have a sense of humor about the whole thing of 'This person doesn't look like a teenager.'" I also wanted to give her a great death scene.
BOB LARKIN:
We filmed in this small town about 50 miles outside of Atlanta. Sherman's March had gone through it in the Civil War, so the town was a historical landmark. That was very nice, and they had this picturesque graveyard, where we shot. Working on the set was terrific. The cast and crew all got along very well, and that it made it a really light atmosphere and we all joked around.
Tom McLoughin was so terrific to work with. Everything was timed perfectly—he really knew what he was doing. He had written the script, of course, so he knew what he wanted. And it's an example of Tom's sense of humor in the way that he would have you give a reaction to something or the way he'd have you say a line. Like that one great line that everyone remembers, "Some folks have a strange ide'r of entertainment." Tom had an interesting way of seeing things, with the comedy, because he had me say that looking right into the camera. You don't usually do that. But that was a really great way to do it, so I really enjoyed it.
VINCENT GUASTAFERRO:
Tom really knows how to talk to actors, because he was one once. And that makes him get better performances. He never asked me to deal with the crap of a backstory. We just talked about what this character wanted to do. And that's great because, in terms of acting, actions define intentions. I would say to Tom, "What's this guy about?" and he'd say, "Rick Cologne is a small-town deputy, and Tommy Jarvis is the biggest criminal that he's ever had the opportunity to arrest!" Tom is completely responsible for the tone of the film and the way we as actors approached the material. Tom was very clear that he wanted much of the overt humor and jokes underplayed, almost thrown away, so the ridiculousness of saying it was more inherent than hammered home.
DAVID KAGEN:
I look at material as a piece of music. When you play a piece of music, it does something to you. It makes you feel a certain way, it makes you dance a certain way. Certainly there were things I noticed in the script that were supposed to be fun. Tom had lines in there like "screwing the pooch" that people love. I just played it for all it was worth. I had some awareness of it potentially being over-the-top, or even campy, but I just played it for real. I think that is the case for all of us in the film—we all played it somewhere in the middle between complete seriousness and going too over-the-top. Finding that place was very satisfying.
TOM MCLOUGHLIN:
There is a lot of stylistic dialog in Jason Lives. I've always been a fan of the screwball comedies from the 1930s and '40s, even though that is not the way people really speak. I mean, poor David Kagen—he
had a mouth full with some of the lines I wrote, my strange twists on profanity and avante garde ways of coming up with insults. But David is a trained actor and he understood that. The same thing with Vinnie, another incredibly talented and trained actor who could go in there and be the heavy, but still be funny.
DARCY DEMOSS:
I hadn't seen Jason Lives in a long time, and when I watched it recently I laughed so hard. That scene in the RV, where I'm being bounced around, that was a blast. The photos on the wall were all attached to strings that the crew were pulling—a whole bunch of little gizmos wired all over the place. And my legs flying over my head and the shoes flying off—I remember Tom showing me how to do it. It was like an I Love Lucy episode, not a horror film.
JOSEPH T. GARRITY:
Tom wanted people to laugh and be scared at the same time, and I think he accomplished that. What is still so memorable about the film are just all those little details he threw in there, like that sign on the road during the chase scene—"Dangerous Curves Ahead." Or when those two little boys comment, "We're dead meat." That is all Tom.
"Part VI was a really fun film fun to work on," says special makeup effects assistant Gabe Bartalos. "In one scene, Jason smashes the survivalist against a tree, then he pulls into frame the guy's severed arm and it is still holding a machete. The tricky thing was, it is a challenge to make a mold of a clenched fist that allows for the fingers to look like they are still naturally in that position. We also molded a machete so it looked just like the actual one used in scene, but made of a lightweight material so the hand itself could hold it. Then to complete the illusion, when Jason holds up the stump we put a bunch of blood on it. The effect out worked great."
Crystal Lake Memories: The Complete History of Friday the 13th (Enhanced Edition) Page 45
