Crystal Lake Memories: The Complete History of Friday the 13th (Enhanced Edition)
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CJ GRAHAM:
I got a call one Saturday to come back for another interview with Frank Mancuso, Jr. That meeting with Frank was more just coming to his office and sitting down and discussing the role with him, my physical characteristics, my abilities and my comfort zone—for being set on fire, jerked out of a cabin with a chain and to breathe off regulators for long periods of time without getting scared.
I spent four years in the Army, from 1974 to '78. I was infantry, I was a grunt, then I was a sergeant. A little bit gung-ho, so to speak. And when you're in the military at 17 years old, you're taught, as most males full of testosterone are, that you're not allowed to cry, that you're not supposed to be fearful. They teach you credibility, honor and integrity. In the Army they have a saying, "Search and Destroy"—adapt and overcome. So when I apply for a job, when it says "Special Skills," I put down "common sense." I always tell people I have an I.Q. of 10, but a street I.Q. of 160. And I'm not bragging, but I still bench 405 pounds and work out four days a week religiously. At that time, I was younger and I was even more crazy. I didn't feel intimidated at all going into Jason Lives because everything they wanted me to do was like, "I can do that."
After the second meeting with Frank, I got another call to ask if I could be in Covington, Georgia, by Monday morning. I immediately met with Tom McLoughlin and Michael Nomad and they told me what they wanted. And it's not an easy task. How do you show somebody you're pissed off when you're dead? My goal was to figure out how to convey the anger, the dominating presence of this demon, without being human and without being robotic. Tom wasn't looking for Frankenstein from the 1960s. I needed to be menacing, in control, and express intent with the physical turns of my head and body. Because you can't raise your eyebrows. You can't scream and yell. Everything had to be based on the way I cranked my head or turned my neck.
I did go out and rent the movies so I could familiarize myself with the character, because I didn't want to walk in there and not have an understanding. I had never seen the movies. But again, from a military background, you learn to recon—to get out there and see what the target is, so to speak, so when you have to come into a landing zone, you're familiarized with the area and the terrain. I did the same thing with the movies to understand I was going to get myself into, so I wouldn't be sitting there not understanding the formalities of Friday the 13th.
Kerry Noonan's photo album #1.
BRIAN WADE:
I had worked for Reel EFX, which was Martin Becker's company, on April Fools Day, for Frank Mancuso, Jr. I got a callback for Jason Lives from Marty and Chris Swift, one of the effects supervisors. I can tell you, when I first heard it was Friday the 13th Part VI, my knee jerk reaction was, "Oh, they're doing another one?" At the time I didn't know who was in it, who was writing it or who was directing it. But my very next thought was, regardless of the number it was, it's still an opportunity to work on one of the great franchises and doing something cool with the character of Jason. And despite what it took to get it done, in terms of the difficulty of the time constraints we were under, it was all a joy.
When I originally got the call for Jason Lives, Chris Biggs, who I had worked with before, was already hired to also work on the makeup. I think Tom and Frank, and Marty and Chris, in terms of the evolution of Jason, they were trying to step it up. We had to do something new. This was also the first one where Jason went from being made of real flesh to something unnatural, a monster. CJ Graham was this young, really tall and good-looking guy, and just had a really great attitude. We did a life cast of CJ. It included a head cast to the shoulders, and even a hand cast up to the elbow. And we did this on a Friday, and had to be back in Covington, Georgia that immediate Monday to shoot! I was like, holy mackerel, here we go. I had a weekend in L.A. to basically create Jason, and then be on the plane by Monday.
We all wanted to respect what had come before in the previous Friday films. For example, in The Final Chapter, Jason got a machete through the left side of his head, so we made sure he was missing his left eye. I also wanted him to look significantly rotted, because he's been in the ground for what was likely a few years, but at the same time not be a nondescript, dripping mass of goo. So I used many materials, including latex, cotton and clay, to build up stringy, deteriorated zombie-like effects over his face and hands. I'm very pleased with the final design, especially given the short time frame we had to complete it.
CJ GRAHAM:
The special FX people are artists, and they were perfectionists. Martin Becker was incredible. They were looking at photographs of Jason from past movies to make sure the continuity was there. And even though Jason is a zombie in this one, they didn't want it to be hokey, they wanted it to look as realistic as possible in the fantasy world of the movie. Yes, the makeup can be uncomfortable, but the artists—without them these movies would be nothing.
The makeup was, in fact, very simplistic, but challenging because you had no peripheral vision. When Jason was wearing his hockey mask, it was more of a hood that I pulled over and that attached around my eyelids and down through my mouth and neck areas. And then the mask was attached to the front of that. If you put your hands out in front of you with a little circle, like when you were a kid making glasses, that's all the vision I had. And don't forget that the left eye is blacked out, too—they put a black nylon behind the mask so no light would come through. You've only got one eyeball you're working with—that was Jason' vision. So for every scene, I would take the mask off and walk the floor to pace out my moves, and make sure I knew where I was supposed to be and where I was supposed to go.
NANCY MCLOUGHLIN:
The role was really demanding physically and he was uncomfortable a lot because of the makeup and the conditions, but CJ chose to take the high road and it made all the difference in the world. A lot of people are troublemakers—you just see it. They're people just trying to disturb things. And it's so infinitely unkind to the group, just so unfair to the production and the director. But CJ really made sure that nobody got hurt. His heart was really good and he has such a presence. Everybody was in love with CJ.
TOM MCLOUGHLIN:
I spent nine months on Prophecy, working with John Frankenheimer. I was the mutated bear. For three months I trained to run around on all fours with these extenders in a 150-pound suit, and I had to do all this stuff underwater. Essentially I had to work out like a stunt man. All my research told me that the best movies were the ones that could play universally, and that the great movie characters, like John Wayne—it wasn't what they said, it was how they said it.
CJ GRAHAM:
To me it was a blast. Everything was like a challenge—"I can do this!" And before every scene, Tom would give me a quick pep talk of what he was looking for. I was pleased with his overall directing as far as my motivation. There was a humor to what he was doing, but at the same time an intensity. He would always say, "This is the effect I'm trying to get, CJ," and then give me great visual guidance as to what he was trying to achieve, so I could formulate it in my head and feel satisfied when I walked on to the set.
KERRY NOONAN:
It's hard to get scared on a film set because there are a ton of crew members and big lights and you've hanging out with the person putting the mask on between takes. You have to work very hard to imagine this person as scary. The night we were going to shoot my death scene, I asked CJ, "Could you not hang out with me between takes?" And he said, "Why?" And I said, "Well, I don't want to remember that you're CJ. I want to be scared of you." He had no clue. I didn't want to be laughing and joking with the hockey mask—I wanted to be shocked and surprised by it, like my character would have been.
Kerry Noonan's photo album #2.
VINCENT GUASTAFERRO:
When we were in Georgia, it was very remote. Now, I'm not putting those folks down, but the kind of people who live in out the woods and are really into Jason are a little spooky. And then 30 or 40 of them show up on set and start chanting, "We want to see Jason
! We want to see Jason!" So Tom would have to get CJ to come out of the trailer with his mask on and wave at them. And they were ecstatic.
CJ GRAHAM:
I remember the very first scene I shot, when I approached the RV. I walk up, I stop and you see my head turn a little bit. I remember Michael Nomad telling me, "I want you to take a deep breath. I want you to push those lats out in the back, so all you see is mass from behind." And it was like, all of a sudden, you get to put a baseball uniform on and you're the pitcher in the ninth inning of the World Series. It is an incredible feeling.
DARCY DEMOSS:
When I first got to the set, it was dark because we were filming at night. And they had these fog machines going everywhere, and CJ was standing next to the trailer. And they're like, "Hey Darcy, go stand next to CJ." I was like, "Eeek! Why me?" But they just wanted to get a light reading. So I was standing next to him, and I say, "You look really scary." And CJ didn't turn around quickly—he just slowly tilted his body towards me. He was playing the role. It was so creepy. But that's CJ. He was a great Jason.
Even with a happy cast and crew and a gentle giant for a Jason, production on Part VI was not without its trials and tribulations. The real villains of a Friday the 13th movie were still the same: the lack of budget and the dawn's breaking sun. And Tom McLoughlin's ambitious attempt to pump up the creative deaths of his Friday with even more over-the-top physicality only added to the challenge of bringing in Jason Lives on time and on budget. Yet ultimately even the typical production anxieties experienced on set among the filmmakers—in particular a growing resentment by an ambitious director toward his clockwatching producer—took on a playful tone. Tensions never lingered, and by the end of the shoot, whatever residual animosities there may have been would be diffused by one big, fiery punchline.
DON BEHRNS:
On Jason Lives, we were given a rough budget of around $3 million. More than the past Fridays, but Tom's script was ambitious. Going over it, there were things in there that, right away, I knew were going to be particularly expensive.
TOM MCLOUGHLIN:
What I kept asking throughout the making of the movie was, "What hasn't been done before in a Friday the 13th? How can I do an underwater sequence? How can I do a car chase? How can I do more than just kids in cabins and knives and running around?" We managed to do it, and stretched the boundaries every way we could. Perhaps I bit off a lot more than I should have. Car chases are cheap if you shoot them during the day, but because we did it at night you had to light the forest, and it wasn't even that great of a car chase. And I had all these campers—actual children—in the script for the first time in a Friday film, which was the big taboo because you were not supposed to have kids in these things and, of course, we were working long night shoots. But I wanted the innocence of actually having little children in the story. As a result, some of the rules got bent a little bit—not badly, but enough to make me a little nervous. Sometimes we would finish late and we were way out at a campground so it was a long drive back for the parents. But despite the time and trouble it took to shoot stuff like that, at least it was something new for the fans, as opposed to just another one in a tent or whatever.
JOSEPH T. GARRITY:
Covington is about 50 miles northeast of Atlanta, and it was perfect. It had a very scenic quality, it had a town square—very all-American. The townspeople were great, and we even brought some of them into the production and they helped us out. My design budget was only about $150,000. We found an old Bell's Department Store right in the town square, and that was our little soundstage and art department. The sheriff's office we created was actually a shopping center. And right next door was a post office that we turned into the police station exterior. It was like another world that we got to become a part of for a while.
The camp was already there—Rutledge Camp in Hard Creek State Park. We built the entry gate, the one with the signs on it that Jason walks by with his machete, and that always gets a laugh from the audience. There was also a dock at the camp, but we added to it—we totally dressed it out with lights and other elements.
TOM MCLOUGHLIN:
We were coming out of winter when we first started scouting locations, so all the foliage in the area was as dead as could be. So we found locations that seemed to be the ones that would get green the quickest once we began shooting. We found a great campground that actually had all the cabins we needed and was right on the lake. Then Joe could build the rest—about 90 percent of the rest of the camp set was constructed right on location.
One thing we could not find, though, was an old cemetery. They were all either too nice looking or only had flat gravestones. I wanted a big gothic cemetery. So Joe found this field and basically built the cemetery out in the middle of nowhere, from scratch. And we're trying to do all this for under $3 million! Joe was a great guy and did a terrific job.
Right: "It's like all of a sudden you get to put a baseball uniform on, and you're the pitcher in the ninth inning of the World Series," says stuntman CJ Graham of playing Jason Voorhees in Part VI. "It's an incredible feeling." Left: Original production report for Jason Lives' centerpiece "camper massacre" action scene.
JOSEPH T. GARRITY:
Of all the sets we designed for the film, I'm most proud of the cemetery in the opening. It was ambitious for any low-budget film, let alone a Friday the 13th. It was a dream come true—we had complete control. There was all sorts of effects—wind, rain and even a tree getting hit by lightning. We took the cemetery gates and pulled all these old vines from trees and turned it into this wild, unkempt place. Then we created about six big, above-ground mausoleum grave sites with stone walls, and we also built all the tombstones by hand out of Styrofoam then painted them. Although, if you notice, there are no names on the tombstones—except Jason's. That was the only one created out of actual stone. There is even a mosque—a big crucifix behind Jason when he gets up out of the grave, just for that one shot. Tom McLoughlin also wanted to be able to film up from out of Jason's grave looking at the actors, so we create a separate u-shaped unit made out of dirt that was about four feet high and about the depth of the grave hole. It had an open end to it, so we could do those shots. It was all a challenge, but great fun.
NANCY MCLOUGHLIN:
The opening cemetery scene was shot near the top of production, when we first starting shooting nights. There was a real excitement, because we were just beginning and no one was too tired yet. Frank Jr. came out for that, too. I remember thinking the lightning was really amazing—they had these huge, tall lightning boxes that would flash so bright they were almost blinding. There was all this wind, and it was really cold and creepy. There was a real feeling that the scene was going to go well. I had no idea what my husband was actually doing, but I still knew it was gonna be real cool.
TOM MCLOUGHLIN:
This is a David Lean influence, but I always thought the elements should play as a character: rain, fog and wind. I wanted stuff flying through the frame as often as possible, to always have motion going on. And we used a lot of wind, which of course meant we had to loop all the lines later because of the noise.
JOSEPH T. GARRITY:
I remember that there were never enough wind machines. If you watch the scene you can hear all this wind howling on the soundtrack, and we have wind on Thom Mathews, but if you look carefully at the trees behind him, they're still. It was frustrating because we wanted to go all the way with it, but we just didn't have the funds to blow the shit out of everything.
JON KRAHOUSE:
In pre-production, I made arrangements for these very large, beefy stands that we could secure branches of trees onto, then tie a rope to, so the crew on the ground could wiggle it to make it look like it was windy. Then we could also light through the trees, to get the shadows of the branches. We even had a "Branch Director," who would be on his radio, talking to his "Branch Managers" to cue them to wiggle the leaves.
Tom certainly wanted a more classi
cal approach to the look of Jason Lives, to give it a real sense of mood. He also wanted some pretty expansive views of the woods. At the time, I was very much into trying to motivate and justify light sources from nature, so if it's just moonlight and no one has a flashlight… where is the light coming from? But sometimes I had to surrender—the light in the movie comes from the same place the music comes from. It's just there. We also eventually had to do rear projection for some of the driving scenes, such as when Tommy is driving to the camp. Because when you're driving at night, where's the light coming from? So we made some day-for-night background plates with lots of trees going by, and projected them outside the car windows. Looking back, we accomplished a great deal for a very little amount of money.
One thing I tried to do was keep the film dark and moody—I thought some of the early Fridays were a little on the bright side. And I was pretty happy with the dailies, and Tom was as well. But then Frank Jr. came out to the set and watched them, and said, "It looks great. It looks wonderful. A lot richer than a lot of the other movies. But you know what? You guys don't get it. Friday the 13th plays in a lot of crummy theaters and drive-ins. This is too friggin' dark! Make it brighter, or you're fired." I'm paraphrasing, though—Frank said it in a nice way.
KERRY NOONAN:
As a running joke, the crew hid rubber chickens everywhere. That started during that opening sequence. Then when Nancy goes to open the glove compartment when Jason is attacking her car, there was a rubber chicken in there. When we were rehearsing CJ walking by my window with the headless body, they hung rubber chickens outside the window. You can even see one in one of the last scenes, when Jennifer Cooke is crying and she's looking at Thom out on the water, fighting the fire. There's a shadow of a rubber chicken across her chest.