But Frank Jr. did not want me to really kill Jason, so we decided to just leave him stuck down at the bottom of the lake. I thought there might be something cool to that, where he's just there, waiting for his day to come back up. I was fortunate enough to be part of a first week crowd that saw Halloween, and it was really exciting to see a horror movie where the villain just walks away at the end. There wasn't that usual cathartic thing; instead, the audience walks out going, "He's still out there!" That changed everything.
We shot some of the scene literally out in that lake in Georgia. Mike Nomad, who played the blond-haired cop, doubled Jason for the long shots with the fire around the boat. But CJ was amazing. He literally would walk right out into the middle of that crazy, freezing lake with cottonmouth snakes and everything else in it. He just went right out there and walked into the water, and then completely submerged himself.
CJ GRAHAM:
When Thom and I are fighting in the canoe and the stuff where they light me on fire, that was all done at the pool in L.A. But for the shots when I first walk out and go underwater and I had to completely physically disappear under the surface of the lake. And the water was stagnant, so it had leeches in it. We had leech patrol. Every time after a scene I'd have to go to the showers and take my clothes off. I'd be standing there buck naked while all the wardrobe girls were looking for leeches, and I'd be thinking, "Okay, this is kind of demeaning…"
TOM MCLOUGHLIN:
We shot most of the climax, with Jason and Tommy in the motorboat on the water, down at an Olympic-sized swimming pool at the USC campus in Los Angeles. But the only thing they wouldn't let us film was the moment when we slice into Jason's head with the outboard motor. The school didn't want any gunk in their pool. So I called my dad up in Culver City and said, "Can we come out and use our family pool?" We brought the whole unit out to his backyard, and totally destroyed his pool. It was so bloody and gory. But for my dad, it was one of the greatest moments of his life—that his son was making a feature film in his backyard.
JOSEPH T. GARRITY:
One of the ideas that I loved and wanted to do, and that Tom liked a lot, was, for the shot underwater when the rock Jason is chained to hits the floor of the lake, to have the old "Welcome to Camp Crystal Lake" sign down there. I was able to get that from the first movie. But we had a problem with the swimming pool. We had lined it with a black fabric all around and made a 10 foot by 10 foot bottom for the lake out of fiberglass. All the rocks, the Crystal Lake sign, old tires and whatever, everything was stuck to it. Then we lowered that into the pool for the shot. But then the chlorine in the pool started taking the color out of some of the material and turning it gray. We all started to panic. We ended up having to put dark green plastic in there. It was too bad, because even in the finished film, I'm not sure the color of the lake bottom in those shots every really came off right.
"My favorite kill in 'Jason Lives' would probably be the back bending of the cop," says Tom McLoughlin. "It gets back to that old adage that what you put into an audience's mind is more effective than what is just gross and bloody."
DON BEHRNS:
Ultimately, we came in just barely under budget. Frank was happy about that. There's only so much money to spend on a movie like this. But everything creative I left up to Tom. I was a hired gun. I didn't get involved with that stuff except when it seriously affected being able to make the schedule. We stuck very close to the script. A couple times, I urged Tom to move along because I wasn't sure we were going to stay on schedule. And I know a couple times he got kind of pissed off at me—particularly when he found out I was getting a bonus if I brought the picture in on time. But that was something Frank Jr. wanted.
JOSEPH T. GARRITY:
Production managers are in that precarious area of being between the creative side and the financial side. I do recall that by the end of the shoot there was a little bit of animosity between Tom and Don. Tom probably wasn't getting what he needed. I don't remember anything that we seriously felt we did not get, and in retrospect, I think Tom should be really happy with what he was able to pull off.
VINCENT GUASTAFERRO:
I remember Don being a very tense on-set presence. He showed up as a wrist-glancer. And, at the time, he was a little sinister looking—I don't know what he looks like now, but back then he had a beard and wore an Australian cowboy hat. I have to say, in sticking with my artistic brothers and sisters, and after many years of experience, I know the line producer's job is to show up on the set and act in such a way to keep things going. But I've also worked with enough of them to know that there's a way to wield authority on a set with grace. I don't think Tom was reaching beyond budget.
NANCY MCLOUGHLIN:
I think Don was doing a good cop, bad cop thing. His job was to be stern and keep Tommy on track. That's a difficult job. And bless Don's soul—I think he and other people in that position put up with the flak they receive. And I think Tommy, or any director, who fights their battles is all the better for it.
JON KRANHOUSE:
I thought it could be adversarial but in a good, friendly way. It was hard conditions, and you've got to find ways of keeping things jovial, even if Don at times maybe was the butt of the joke. I think Tom in his heart knew that helped keep everyone together in a cohesive, productive way. And I really think Don knew that as well.
It all came to a head when we shot that scene where the RV crashes. Don had dibs on the RV's much lusted-for rooftop swamp cooler. And said cooler was atop the Winnebago when it met its fiery demise. And that was quite intentional on Tom's part: "If he wants it I'll be damned." But Don thought since the motor home was to be destroyed, why waste a perfectly good cooler? Couldn't Tom agree to save it for Don's personal use, and have it removed from the vehicle before the stunt? But Tom had heard a lot of "No's" from Don, and now it was Tom's turn. He absolutely insisted the cooler stay atop the RV and be destroyed, if only for the sake of art. The issue became such a public snickering point that many whoops and guffaws were heard during dailies as the air conditioner beautifully disintegrated upon impact and cartwheeled down the road, then out of frame. But Don was a very good sport about the whole thing.
Storyboard gallery: back break.
DON BEHRNS:
My side of the story on that one is that I had a motor home of my own, but I didn't have a generator or an air conditioner on it. So our transportation coordinator had found this nice motor home for the movie that had a great air conditioning unit, and I said, "Why wreck it for the movie? No one's going to know the difference." I even very carefully took it off and put it away. But by the end of the film, it mysteriously was gone and back on the camper. I was so pissed!
VINCENT GUASTAFERRO:
Oh, man—the blowing-up of the trailer! I wouldn't have missed it for the world. It was the very last thing we shot, and there was pressure to beat the sunrise. It took all night to get everything set up so the ramp was just right and the explosion just right. And I swear to God we were racing minutes until dawn. The sky was going to get bright any second. It was the first time I'd ever witnessed that kind of pressure and a deadline, because if they didn't get it that night, they would have had to go another day, and there was no budget for that. But they pulled it off. And once we got that shot and it was a wrap, the entire set exploded. You would have thought we won the Super Bowl.
TOM MCLOUGHLIN:
That was our big stunt. It scared the hell out of me because we didn't have a Hollywood stuntman, we had a "good ol' boy" from Georgia—and he shows up in this Evel Kneviel jumpsuit. Seriously. I kept turning to the stunt coordinator and asking, "Are you sure this guy can pull this off?" We've essentially had the whole camper rigged so that if it collapsed, it still wouldn't hurt this guy, and they strapped him into this thing like he was going to the moon. But still I thought, "I hope to god we didn't just kill this guy." Then the RV goes, it hits the ramp, takes off into the air, crashes, there's fire, and it's perfect. We even had f
our or five cameras on it. Then this guy climbs out of that thing like he has just been hit over the head with a baseball bat—and gives the thumbs-up gesture that's he's okay. It was a huge relief.
After that, everybody wanted to be back on the plane to go home, so we had a little get-together in the parking lot of the Waffle House, and that was it. Ours was a wrap breakfast. It's sad when you have to break up. But as it turned out, we all had to get back together again to shoot additional stuff. It wasn't over yet…
Despite the best efforts of Tom McLoughlin and his cast and crew, the director's first cut of Jason Lives did not fully meet the expectations of producer Frank Mancuso, Jr. That it was as funny and action-packed as any summer popcorn movie was fine. Even calling it a "nice" Friday the 13th movie would not be derogatory. But McLoughlin's attempt at reducing the Friday series' requisite double-digit body count—and its ever-more gruesome parade of creative murder sequences—was vetoed by Mancuso. The solution came in the form of one of the most dreaded words in Hollywood parlance: reshoots. By the end of post-production, Jason Lives would have additional scenes, a higher body count and a truncated ending. Yet, ironically enough, what wasn't added was more blood and guts. For there was still one pivotal group of decision makers who would not be swayed by Tom McLoughlin's kindler, gentler Friday the 13th: the Motion Picture Association of America's ratings board.
TOM MCLOUGHLIN:
Something I learned from the many, many directors that I studied is that if you can get the audience to laugh, then they would be much more open to experience the hard stuff. A lot of films just want to be pedal-to-the-metal horror, and unfortunately they have characters that the audiences laughs at instead of with. Although if there's too much humor, you can overplay your hand and undercut the tension. It's a tough balance. I felt we got away with it because at the time of Jason Lives, nobody had really seen quite that blend of horror and comedy before.
BRUCE GREEN, Editor:
After Friday the 13th Part V, I had edited April Fool's Day, and a TV movie based on Family Ties. Those were all Frank—he kept me busy because he wanted me to be available for Part VI. And despite my experience on A New Beginning, I was thrilled to be working, because it was immediately apparent that the script was much better, and that Tom McLoughlin seemed like a real director. Tom is great—there's a big difference in tone between Danny Steinmann's Friday the 13th and Tom McLoughlin's Friday the 13th.
Tom went into it so the audience would have fun. I believe there is a definite relationship between comedy and horror. From the standpoint of my training as an editor, comedy is the most frame-specific genre. Just a frame or two in or out, and the joke lives or dies. I would say horror films are also very frame-specific. How far can you milk the audience? How long do you leave them on the edge of their seat until you let Jason jump out at them? It's tricky.
TOM MCLOUGHLIN:
I wanted everyone to know upfront from the opening credits that this was a sort of parody of another well-established series of movies, James Bond. So we came up with the opening shot, where we go right into Jason's eye like it's the gun barrel sequence in a Bond film. I also thought it would get me off the sights of a myriad of critics who were ready with shotguns to blow my head off.
The completion of Jason Lives' final duel between Tommy and Jason in the waters of Lake Forest Green required additional reshoots. "We shot most of the climax down at an Olympic-sized swimming pool at the USC campus in Los Angeles," recalls Tom McLoughlin. "But the only thing they wouldn't let us film was the moment when we slice into Jason's head with the outboard motor. The school didn't want any gunk in their pool. So I called my dad up in Culver City and said, 'Can we come out and use our family pool?' We brought the whole unit out to his backyard, and totally destroyed his pool. It was so bloody and gory. But for my dad, it was one of the greatest moments of his life—that his son was making a feature film in his backyard."
DAN CURRY, Title Designer:
I designed the Friday title sequences for Part 2, The Final Chapter and Part V, but I had the most involvement with Jason Lives. The others were pretty much straightforward, but Part VI was much more a collaboration with Tom McLoughlin. We thought it would be really cool if we kept pushing into Jason's eye and then we see him dance out inside his pupil, like James Bond when he's pointing the gun at the audience at the opening of every Bond movie.
They had already shot the original opening material in a rainy location, so back in Los Angeles we rented an abandoned building to shoot the rest of the credit sequence. I took cans of spray paint, knowing that in extremely close photography, everything behind the character is out of focus. I did a rough free hand painting of what the set would be like on big pieces of muslin, and then we had hoses sprinkling water on it. The actor playing Jason was there, and we did extreme close ups of him, with living maggots sprinkled on his face so that he looked decayed in his grave. Eventually we go in real tight, so his pupil filled the screen, like the inside of the James Bond gun barrel. Then we shot Jason walking into frame with his machete, just like Bond, then he looks at the audience and takes a swipe across the screen.
To create the illusion that he hacks his way out of his own eyeball, I had a large plywood box made with a round hole in one side of it, and then put a big black garbage bag inside filled with milk. Then I reached inside with a razor blade and sliced it from the inside, so that the milk would gush out in the same pattern that the slash of the machete made. And because it was very opaque white milk against black plastic, we could do a color separation, and then I could tint that red so that it would look like blood. Then the blood gushed by on the screen and it would leave a residue on the title card "Jason Lives" on the film. I think it worked out great, and even fans and critics who didn't like the movie still remember that title sequence.
TOM MCLOUGHLIN:
When I saw Halloween, it was amazing—I had never seen audiences jump the way they did in that theater. That became the bar for all horror filmmakers at the time, in that how many "jump" scares could we get? But to be honest, I also felt, did every shock have to accompanied by that John Carpenter sound, "Eeeeeeeee!"—could you do it more subtly? That's the missive I gave to Harry Manfredini, to try and score this so the audience wouldn't be so alerted to what was happening, or about to happen.
Harry came with the package. It seemed like he had a fairly steady gig. Frank just said, "Harry's the guy!" But after I said to him, "I know you do every Friday movie, and I know there are certain aspects we have to put in here, but I really would like a more Gothic score," I think he thought that was pretty exciting. He really brought some different things musically to Jason Lives than past Fridays.
HARRY MANFREDINI, Composer:
I believe there is no question the director changes my work, Friday the 13th or otherwise. I loved what Tom McLoughlin did with Jason Lives. He was a real fan of the series and tried to add wonderful touches. He was also one of the best experiences I had with a director—I was very aware of what he was trying to do and it inspired me to become more aware of the music I was adding. And as far as the comedic tone, I intentionally did not write any "funny" music. I just tried to capture some of what Tom was trying to incorporate into the film. Music doesn't have to actually sound comical to underscore something that is humorous.
What was ultimately disappointing was that Tom's film was changed from his original conception. There was a test screening, which did not produce the results wanted, or at least that Frank Jr. wanted. Tom had all sorts of cool intellectual things in the film at one point—there were only 13 murders, and all sorts of references to the characters and filmmakers involved with the original Friday the 13th. Then, after the screening, some kills were gratuitously added and characters introduced solely to get offed. I thought, after the changes, the slickness paled a bit.
TOM MCLOUGHLIN:
The preview process is like a monster without a head. If one person out of 500 makes a laughing sound, somebody goes, "It's fun
ny? Oh, it's funny!" And they can turn the whole screening process around. I've seen that repeatedly. In previews, you can literally sabotage someone's film.
We had our first screening of Jason Lives, which was my first cut, at a little theater and recruited an audience from a local shopping mall or something. The line snaked around the Paramount lot, and they came to party—they were young, stoned and drunk. They screamed and talked through the whole thing. I'm not exaggerating—we had that little sucker that controlled the volume all the way up and I still couldn't hear anything that was going on. It was just one big massive wall of sound from the audience. And, of course, every time there was a kill the volume would go up 10 more decibels. Afterward, I went up to Frank and asked, "Did it work? They never shut up!" He goes, "No, it's great. We just need five more kills."
I was a little bit upset. I wanted the film to have 13 kills, to have this weird sense of logic to it. I was very proud of the fact that I was staying with these little rules that I had come up with. But Frank Jr. said, "No. We need more characters to kill off." I said, "What do you mean? We're all out of money!" And Frank goes, "No, no, no, your producer saved a ton of money. We're fine. We can go shoot two more days!"
Crystal Lake Memories: The Complete History of Friday the 13th (Enhanced Edition) Page 49
