FRANK MANCUSO, SR., President of Production, Paramount Pictures:
Every Friday movie after the first one, we had the rights to distribute the product. So if the boys from Boston wanted to make one, they had to offer it to us. We could say no, and only then could they take it somewhere else. But I must say this for them: they were extraordinarily loyal people. They were very grateful that we turned this little horror film into this incredibly lucrative franchise. And until we decided to not make any more of the films, they never, ever tried to go around us, or take the series anywhere else.
GEORGE MANSOUR, Distributor, Esquire Theatres:
When Phil and Steve Minasian and Bob Barsamian sold the rights to New Line they got a big chunk of money. Well, it seemed like it at the time—it's not too much now, but they maybe got $400,000 or $500,000. I don't think they ever had that ambition to get into the moviemaking business in a big way. They didn't have the resources to go and open a production company. These were real middle-class guys. Phil was a lawyer who certainly didn't go to Harvard, let's put it that way. And the other guys had accounting backgrounds. But remember, the Friday the 13th franchise was sold to Paramount. So in a way, they did do it.
Phil is dead, but Bobby and Steve>, they're still around. They're brothers-in-law and they're still involved with a group of movie houses in New England. Lisa Barsamian, Bob's daughter, was given a producing credit on Part 3, but the kids never really got involved with anything. The last time I knew, they were very reluctant to have any kind of publicity or really talk to anyone. Maybe someday they'll mellow out a bit.
At the time, the marriage of Friday the 13th and New Line Cinema seemed to be a match made in heaven—finally the foundation could be laid for the long-rumored, much anticipated battle between Freddy and Jason. Securing the rights, however, would be only the first hurdle in what would become a nearly decade-long odyssey of script delays and production set-backs. Both the Friday and Nightmare franchises were in mothballs following the dreary box office that greeted their latest installments, 1989's Jason Takes Manhattan and 1991's Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare. But old monsters, especially lucrative ones, have a funny way of returning to haunt the present, often in the most unexpected of ways. Wes Craven, the creator of Freddy Krueger, and an old friend and collaborator of Sean Cunningham's, would surprise everyone when, in 1994, he announced his intention to resurrect Freddy one last time. Enticed by the potential profits that the return of Freddy's "father" might bring, New Line gave the green light to Wes Craven's New Nightmare, an ambitious, post-modern take on the Freddy Krueger phenomenon. Again, for the first of many times to come, plans for Freddy vs. Jason were put indefinitely on hold. But Sean Cunningham had no desire to cool his heels or sit on a property that he had fought so hard to reclaim. Cunningham decided that if Freddy could come back for one last scare, so could Jason.
SEAN CUNNINGHAM:
I didn't come back to the franchise to do another Friday the 13th, I came back to do Freddy vs. Jason. Then Wes decided to do New Nightmare, so everything got put on hold. In the meantime, I said, "If we're just treading water, let's do another Friday, and try to get the franchise back out there."
ADAM MARCUS, Director:
Noel Cunningham and I went to grammar school together. I think Noel beat the crap out of me a couple of times, but by the first or second grade we became best friends. And we discovered we totally shared a love of movies—we even wrote our first screenplay when we were 11 or 12 years old. And as my real father lived in New York, and my mother in Connecticut, over the years I ended up spending a lot of time in Westport. Sean became a sort of surrogate dad to me. Then one day he asked me if I wanted to hang out in New Jersey while they were going to a shoot a film that turned out to be Friday the 13th. Of course I was like, "Yes, please!" So I got to hang out on the set, and help a lot—I remember getting Sean a lot of coffee during that shoot. And it was magical to me, my first taste of filmmaking that I'd ever gotten. Sean was this wizard—there was just something about him. He was very outspoken, but always truthful. A very direct kind of guy. He taught me a great deal—I'm incredibly lucky to have had Sean in my life.
Eventually, I went to NYU Film School, and as I was finishing I got two job offers. One was to write for TV, and the other was to come out and be Sean's slave for a year and he'd give me my break. So I started working for Sean, and had brought out with me a script my friend Dean Lorey had written called "Johnny Zombie," that later became My Boyfriend's Back. Dean wanted me to direct, but the film got set up at Disney, and when it became a bigger movie they wanted a different director. So I turned to Sean and said, "Come on. Give me a movie!" And he said, "Well, New Line wants another Jason movie." Now, I'll be honest. I was like, "Oh, no! C'mon, Sean. I want a career!" But what an opportunity! I was 23 years old, being offered the chance to direct a movie!
I remember that New Line, Sean, and all of us involved felt like we needed to go in a new direction. Everybody was tired of every Freddy Krueger movie getting raves, and every Friday the 13th movie getting torn to pieces. So we said, "Why are we limiting ourselves? Why be confined to the same old formula?" That was the initial attitude we wanted to go into a new Friday with.
NOEL CUNNINGHAM:
Adam was a friend of mine, and he'd just gone to NYU and had done a short film that garnered some attention. He also brought a friend back with him from NYU, Dean Lorey, who'd written a script called "Johnny Zombie." That went through some incredible changes, but Sean really dug Adam's ideas and he'd grown up with us. Sean also thought Dean was smart. And as we were developing "Johnny Zombie," Adam was initially attached to direct it but then it became a studio project and the studio, of course, wouldn't let a first-timer direct it. So when a "Friday Part IX" came up Sean was like, "Adam, you need a first-time gig. Why don't you take this Friday movie and show everybody what you can do?"
DEAN LOREY, Screenwriter:
In 1990, I had just graduated from film school and had no ins in the film business at all. So I created a series of black-comic sketches. They were about this guy coming back from the dead as a zombie and having to deal with polite society. After I did the sketches, I thought, "Wow, this might make a cool movie." So I wrote the script and gave it to my friend Adam Marcus to read. He liked it, and when he went out to Los Angeles to work as a production assistant on House IV, he brought the script with him and gave it to Sean to read.
Sean was always saying that he wasn't going to do another Friday the 13th unless he could do something different with it. There had been eight movies and most of them had been pretty bad. Usually they were just carbon copies of the previous one. And there was no reason to remake the earlier movies because anybody could just go out and rent them. We went for a new direction, keeping Jason and some of the basic elements. I also thought the other movies worked best when they had a protagonist who was a match for Jason, like the telekinetic girl in Part VII, rather than a bunch of teenagers who get slaughtered one by one.
We also tried to go back to the first one and get into the Voorhees family history and tie up some loose ends. Throughout these films Jason always gets killed in different ways and he keeps coming back, but the reasons are never explained. So we decided that we'd create a mythology that explains the history of Jason and explains how this could be happening. There were too many loose ends before. I really liked the first movie, and I really like the character of Jason. He's the ultimate spooky guy in the woods. But after a while the movies just gave up making any sense. In one movie, he's this little deformed kid living in the lake, and in the next he's this lumbering psycho who's somehow gotten to be 40 years old. We tried to tie it all together and give this guy a decent mythology.
Jason goes to pieces… literally. "We wanted to come up with the most conventional Friday the 13th opening we could," says helmer Adam Marcus. "Then, at the very end of the sequence, we just blew the shit out of Jason. After that, the audience had no idea what to expect next!"
ADAM
MARCUS:
One of the first instructions I received was to ignore Jason Takes Manhattan. My original treatment started after Part VII. Jason has been dumped back into Crystal Lake, and they dredge his body back up. This one character, an insanely strong yet kind of frail looking guy, drags Jason's body back to the camp and into a cabin where he has a science lab set up. He straps the body down and starts an autopsy, and opens up his black heart. And when he goes to pull it out of his chest, that's when Jason wakes up. But what we don't realize is that this guy is actually Jason's brother, Elias. And then Elias consumes his brother's black heart, and thereby takes Jason's power. Eventually, we dropped the whole Elias character from the script. But that's where the basic concept of the movie evolved from, and the idea that Jason's essence could move from one body to another.
Dean came up with the idea for Creighton Duke, a bounty hunter who had been trailing Jason for years. We thought that was a great idea, because anything that could complicate the formula in a positive way should be in the movie. We were also trying to play a bit more in the Terminator realm. Another choice we made was to create a group of more believable adult characters that functioned as a logical part of the community. And although we eliminated Elias, we still wanted to tie in the idea of the Voorhees family tree into the mythology of the series—that it took a Voorhees to kill a Voorhees, all that stuff.
However, at the end of the day, we knew this was still the equivalent of a wrestling picture. We had to be true to the roots of the franchise. I was just not that concerned with having Jason in every frame of the film. I didn't care. I felt like the previous eight movies gave you plenty of that. But everyone who made this movie was a fan of the series, contrary to what some diehard fanatics of the franchise have said. No one was trying to hurt the series. Ultimately, we just wanted to honor the fans by giving them something different.
SEAN CUNNINGHAM:
Adam is an absolute bundle of self-possessed energy. And he always wanted to be the director of the play and he put on the shows. He was always like, "Do it! Do it! Do it!" He's such a type-A personality. And I don't remember how I got to talking with Adam, but he was, or so he seemed to be, a horror aficionado. He knew this stuff inside and out. I didn't know anything>. I just did not follow these trains of thought>—boy, did I not care about Halloween III or whatever! So I knew I wasn't the director for this, but I also knew I could help, and talking to Adam, he really had such a passion for it. And without that passion, the picture wouldn't be any good.
NOEL CUNNINGHAM:
What became The Final Friday not really a Jason movie. Adam had his own concept. And of course, ideas got developed away from that and back to it. But Adam had passion in spades, that's for sure. You get caught up in it. Plus, it's difficult to get a green-light on anything as it is, so that is what we went with.
KANE HODDER:
There was a little bit of concern about Adam's inexperience, all around. But what helped sway opinion was that we did some test shooting before Adam was officially given the job. New Line and Sean both said, "Before we say you're doing this, go out and shoot a scene." So we shot a scene that had nothing to do with Jason, where the two guys point guns at each other in the jail cell. And everybody was reasonably impressed with it.
DAVID HANDMAN, Editor:
Jay Huguely had originally written a script for Jason Goes to Hell that was unintelligible, but Sean had to turn it into New Line the next day. This was like the final draft that was supposed to become the shooting script. So Sean said to Dean, "Listen, you have to do me a favor. There's no way New Line is going to be able to green-light this script the way it is." So Sean locked himself in a room with Dean for four days and wouldn't let him out until the script was done. And what we ended up with was a barely greenlight-able script. But I take my hat off to Dean that he could get as far as he did in only four days.
Lewis Abernathy, who had written Deep Star Six for Sean, also came in and he wrote the opening sequence. And I remember seeing Leslie Bohem in the office, who did a last-minute polish as well.
NOEL CUNNINGHAM:
You want to find somebody who is young and talented, that needle in the haystack, and then you try to develop that relationship. Sean has done it with Dean Lorey, and Todd Farmer on Jason X. Leslie Bohem had worked for Sean before. Leslie is listed as "Executive Typist" in the credits of Jason Goes to Hell, and he came up with that himself because he did a pass on the script over a weekend and didn't want to take credit, but per WGA rules, you have to take a credit of some sort. At that point, Leslie had sold already sold something—I think it was Daylight or Dante's Peak—so he was starting to have a name. A credit is a credit, but a credit can hurt you.
Armed with a script that was, by design, radically different from any other Friday the 13th, Sean Cunningham decided that the casting of the as-yet-untitled Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday also required a unique approach. Once again, Cunningham called upon veteran casting director Barry Moss—who, like Cunningham, had not been associated with the series since the original Friday. But unlike the casting sessions of the summer of 1979, Moss was being asked to look beyond the fresh young faces that Hollywood had to offer up for Jason's annual summer smorgasbord, and to bring together a more experienced cast to help create a believable—and hopefully more appealing—ensemble. For the first time in the franchise's history, not a single teenage character was featured in the script. Instead, Moss would assemble a cast of recognizable faces culled largely from series television, including Erin Gray (Buck Rogers, Silver Spoons), Steven Williams (21 Jump Street) and Allison Smith (Kate & Allie), as well as Friday the 13th: The Series alum John D. LeMay (the only actor to appear in both incarnations of Friday as separate characters). Even if some of the casting choices were not always unanimous, Jason Goes to Hell would be the first Friday to make a sincere attempt to cast without regard to age, ethnicity or even gender.
Boys with guns. Friday the 13th: The Series regular John D. LeMay (left) would star as an entirely different character, Steve Freeman, in Jason Goes to Hell. "It was a childhood dream come true. I got to jump over handcuffs, shoot a gun, and kill Jason," says LeMay. "What could be cooler than that?" He's pictured here with director Adam Marcus' brother, actor Kipp Marcus, who co-stars in The Final Friday as Officer Randy Parker.
ADAM MARCUS:
I wanted characters that were as interesting as Jason. Tommy Jarvis was a very interesting guy too, so I think that's why he showed up a few times in the earlier movies. But otherwise, you rarely had characters in the previous movies that you wanted to root for as much as you wanted to root for Jason. So at the end of this movie, when our hero is pummeling Jason with a shovel, I really wanted people cheering him on instead, you know?
DEAN LOREY:
We wanted to take a lot of the dopiness out of the character's decisions. In the other Friday films, people tended to do things for stupid reasons. We decided that by making the main characters a bit older and giving them real lives outside of just being lunch for Jason, we could give them more depth and subtext.
BARRY MOSS, Casting Director:
The reason Jason Goes to Hell happened for me was because Sean was being very generous. My mother was dying of cancer and she lived in Los Angeles. And he said, "Why don't you come cast this movie? Then you can stay at home with your mom." Which was very nice.
I certainly didn't have the same reaction to this script as I did to the first one, which I absolutely loved. I did Jason Goes to Hell because I love Sean, and I did it to be home. And I did believe in it enough that I could tell an actor that I thought it was a good thing for them to appear in. Because by 1992, it was not such a prestigious thing to do a Friday the 13th. There had been eight of them, so it was more difficult to get good people, certainly compared to the first film.
JOHN D. LEMAY, "Steve Freeman":
I was born in Minnesota and grew up in Normal, Illinois. I won a talent contest in seventh grade or eight grade, and one of the judges wa
s the director of the local summer musical theater program and he asked me to audition for him. I did "You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown." I played Linus. I quickly discovered that I was a ham, and loved being in front of people. Then later in university I majored in musical theater and discovered it had a deeper resonance for me, and the self-discovery that goes along with that led me to start feeling like an artist of sorts. Though it's funny, I've never been crazy about horror movies. When I was a kid I used to try and stay up late at night and watch a show called "Creature Features" that showed movies like the original Frankenstein and The Wolf Man, but I'd always end up falling asleep and never make it all the way through.
Before I came to L.A., I went to Illinois State University in Chicago. I was doing an internship at the Geffen Theatre and working part time at MCI Telecommunications. There I was, looking down through the window high above, at my agent's office on Michigan Avenue, just hoping and praying that something would happen to take me away from the miserable cold and winter on the streets below. Then it happened very quickly. I did all the agent rounds and stuff, and got a couple of commercials right off the bat. Next thing you know, I was reading for a movie called Once Bitten that Jim Carrey ended up doing, and I was being touted as the next John Cusack, who was very big at the time and also from Chicago. All of a sudden my agent sent me to L.A. to get more high-profile representation. So I kind of got the red carpet treatment very early in my career.
I was slowly building up a resume when I got the lead on Friday the 13th: The Series. I was on it for two years but left before the third. It was a great experience. I was working every day for two years, and I came out of that a much more confident actor. But every interview I did during the TV series spent a lot of time comparing the show to the movies, even though the only thing they had in common was the title. So I tried to disassociate myself from it, and I left the show in 1991 after the second season.
Crystal Lake Memories: The Complete History of Friday the 13th (Enhanced Edition) Page 67
