All were anxious to make their mark on motion picture history. And they would.
SEAN CUNNINGHAM, Producer & Director:
I didn't grow up in the film business at all. I wasn't even allowed to read comic books. My parents just thought they were stupid. They said, "Read books. Comics will rot your mind!" So without knowing what I wanted to be, I decided I should be a doctor. I ended up going pre-med to a little liberal arts college in Pennsylvania called Franklin & Marshall. And while I was there, mainly as a social and creative exercise, I got into theatre. That's where I discovered an abiding love for Shakespeare. It was great! But, I had also been accepted into Stanford Medical School, so I had to do a soul searching. I realized I didn't want to be a doctor as much as I wanted to have a lot of the things being a doctor offered. And I didn't even like science. So I wound up going to Stanford, but to the School of Speech and Drama to pursue a Master of Fine Arts. I was 20 years old.
Eventually I found myself in New York, getting a job on the road company of The Merry Widow, and where I trained as a stage manager. And as many stage managers do, I started to take on directing the plays that I was managing. As it turned out, this kind of made me a child prodigy, because I was now very successful in a career that's usually reserved for men 20 years my senior. But what I loved about stage management was only up through the opening night and the first two weeks. After that it became a routine. I had also recently gotten married to my wife at the time, Susan, and we had our first child. That was a major changing point in my life. I said to her, "Look, if it's going to cost X amount of dollars to do an off-Broadway play, why don't we just do a movie for the same amount of money? How hard could it be?"
This just all speaks to how young I was at the time. I had no idea whatsoever what I was getting into. I knew nothing about making movies. But I didn't know enough to be intimidated. Most people who want to make movies, they have a passion, a drive for it. I didn't. I liked going to the movies, but I didn't want to be a "filmmaker," I wanted to make a living. I wanted to support my wife, my family, myself. Not as a creative exercise and to have a vision or whatever, but as a way to make money. Because growing up, I never had money—I didn't come from money. So that is how I embarked upon my filmmaking career.
GEORGE MANSOUR, Distributor, Esquire Theatres:
Back in the late 1960s, I was working for Warner Bros. as a "short-booker"—in other words, I wasn't trusted with major films. There were big books and you had a number of prints and you wrote in where the prints were going and the name of the movie house. Esquire Theatres was one of Warner's accounts. They owned and operated about one hundred screens, mostly on the East Coast. Esquire was not the best payer—they were a little shady and shaky—but they also had a lot of good movie houses. I got a rapport going between myself and the owners. Their names were Phil Scuderi, Steve Minasian and Robert Barsamian. One thing led to another, and they had an opening and offered me a job. So I went from a trainee booker for Warner Bros. who was selling to movie houses, to working at a distribution company who was booking movies from them.
It was a different time back then, in the way movies were distributed. That age is gone. Films didn't have to compete against a window of video. And they weren't given a saturated release. They could play in one movie house for a very long period—I remember I booked The Graduate here in Boston and it played for almost two years in one movie house without ever going wide. Television advertising also wasn't as important. You had local radio, and newspapers—everything relied on regional newspaper. It's entirely different today, of course, because movies are on video in three months. You have to play wide.
There were also a lot of hardcore porn houses then. This was right before the "porn chic" explosion, and Behind the Green Door and Deep Throat—Esquire had a few movie houses back then to show hardcore, mostly gay porn. We had what were called "white coaters"—you billed your film as "educational" or "medical," and it allowed you to get away with showing hardcore XXX-rated movies. At the beginning, someone would come out in a white lab coat and say, "We're now going to show you marriage practices in Denmark and these are the ways you can improve your marital bliss." And then for the next 80 minutes you saw people fucking like crazy. At the end, the same guy with the white coat would come back out and say, "Now that you have experienced these methods, you can go home with your mate and practice these things at home." People were coming to these things to be "enlightened."
Sean Cunningham (left) and Steve Miner, circa 1986. After Cunningham hired the young Miner as a production assistant on 1970s The Last House on the Left, directed by Wes Craven (center, in a 1984 publicity still), they formed a close friendship that continues to this day. Miner went on to direct the first two Friday the 13th sequels, as well as the hit 1986 horror-comedy House, which Cunningham produce. Frank Mancuso, Sr. (right, in a 1982 publicity pose) he began his career as a booking agent for Paramount Pictures in 1962, and by 1983, was named the studio's chairman and CEO. He would acquire Friday the 13th for the studio in 1980.
BILL FREDA, Editor:
I first met Sean Cunningham in New York City. At the time, there wasn't much of a major film industry there. The only way you broke into that business was to make a low-budget movies. And people were making a lot of porn movies—those were very big in the early 1970s. Because it was something that could get you into shooting and editing dialogue, and then, hopefully, lead to something better.
SEAN CUNNINGHAM:
It was a nifty time. It was the early 1970s and this was alternative filmmaking. My belief was that you didn't need big Hollywood trucks and shit like that. All you needed was a 16mm camera, then throw it on your shoulder and go shoot. My first film was a white coater called The Art of Marriage. I just can't tell you how simple things are when you don't know anything. I had never even touched a camera before. I had no idea whatsoever what I was getting into. The Art of Marriage cost something like $3,500 that I had scraped together. I think we had three crew members, and I don't even know why we had to have that many. We just were afraid of getting arrested.
As dreadful as The Art of Marriage was, I had to find a theater that would make a deal with me to play it. I was in completely uncharted waters. It was one of those scenes right out of an old B-movie—I figured out who owned the local movie theaters in my area and literally looked them up in the phone book. One guy I got on the phone was Bingo Brant, part of the Brant family of theatre houses, and I went over to his office and showed him the picture, and he says he wants to play it. He kept the first $3,500 or something, and then after that, we'd get a piece of the box office. The Art of Marriage was first released at the Brant Theater on 42nd Street in Manhattan. And it played for like 27 weeks! We probably grossed over $100,000. So I had what most people in the film business never had, a hit movie.
But The Art of Marriage was crummy, so I thought if we could make a real version of it, we could play it in suburban theaters. That was how my next film, Together, evolved. I ended up renting office space in New York with the profits from The Art of Marriage. And I raised another $50,000 from my family, and friends, and people I knew. Everybody was in for $1,000 or $1,500. It was kind of a lark, a silly crapshoot for them. "Crazy Sean doesn't know what he's doing, but he seems to think that this might work."
WES CRAVEN, Filmmaker:
The late 1960s was not a successful time for me. At that point in my life I was still trying to please my parents, unconsciously trying to be the good boy that went off to school and then became a teacher. This was an acceptable profession and very respectable. But four or five years into teaching I realized I was profoundly bored and out of place. It just wasn't me, and so I made one of those big leaps. I said, "I'm gonna take a shot at doing something that I would really enjoy." So I quit and went to New York to work in filmmaking.
It was a very intense year and a half of doing everything, from sweeping floors upwards. Before I met Sean Cunningham I was working around the clock, just going from one job to
another, from managing post-production to synching up dailies for various documentaries. It was very intense. My marriage collapsed. I lived on virtually nothing. But it was a real watershed in my life—within a few weeks of meeting Sean, I had this job synching up dailies on this little feature he was directing, Together. It had already been shot, and Sean hired me to synchronize the dailies from a three or four day reshoot of additional material. After that, they asked me to come aboard as assistant editor. Sean and I got that film ready under horrendous conditions of no money and no sleep for practically two weeks. We stayed up all hours just working through the night, and we bonded. We really became war buddies at the end of that process.
GEORGE MANSOUR:
Hallmark Releasing was one of the names for Esquire's many distribution arms. We'd look to acquire movies from overseas—mostly from Germany—with the view of making them exploitation movies. Hallmark was really the first to perfect the art of this kind of rip-off movie. We bought some of the first karate movies ever brought to this country. Not real Bruce Lee movies, of course; our character was named Bruce Li. Another one we had was with a female karate woman, Angela Mayo, and we renamed the movie Deep Thrust, to capitalize on Deep Throat. We literally just made up these titles on the way back on the plane. It was also on one of these trips that we bought Mark of the Devil, and on the way back made up the idea that we would print the ads for the movie on vomit bags, then we'd distribute the bags in New York City—the idea that when you saw this movie, it would make you so sick you'd have to throw up! It was the same kind of thing as William Castle was doing, only not as legitimate. He made real movies and promoted them; we just did the same thing on a shoestring.
I first met Sean Cunningham when he was shopping around a print of this movie, Together. He had heard about Hallmark and came up to our offices. I remember he arrived by bus—he didn't even have the $90 to fly up from New York City. I looked at the film and said, "It's pretty crude and stupid, but I think that people would pay to see this." It had a very pretty girl, Marilyn Chambers, and one incredible sequence with this tremendously good-looking black man. Very handsome, fantastic body. And Marilyn Chambers took a yellow flower and she runs it along his flaccid penis, and as she runs it along, the penis becomes erect. I said, "You know, Phil, there's a large group of people out there who have never seen a big black dick before. We can exploit this." So Hallmark bought Together for $10,000 flat.
Left: One of the many shocking images from The Last House on the Left. Distributed theatrically in 1972 by Hallmark Releasing, this notorious cult classic was directed by Wes Craven and produced by Sean Cunningham. The film was initially tested under different titles, including Sex Crime of the Century and Krug & Company. It was not until the film was renamed and coupled with an inventive ad campaign (right) that recommended to terrified patrons, "To avoid fainting, keep repeating, 'It's only a movie...'" that it became one of the most successful exploitation films of the early 1970s.
RON KURZ, Screenwriter, Friday the 13th Part 2:
I had known of Phil Scuderi and Esquire since my days in the early 1970s as a theater manager in Baltimore. I became aware of Phil because of some of his distribution tricks, which were well known at the time. Phil, who has since died, was quite a force in the schlock movie business. Just picture a cross between Roger Corman and Michael Corleone—a trained lawyer, crude and suave at the same time, and full of street smarts. And when he got into movie production, he could rip off the latest box office hit and have something on the screen in a matter of months. He was like William Castle—taking out insurance policies against dying of fright or having kids handing out logo-imprinted toilet paper on downtown street corners.
GEORGE MANSOUR:
Instead of Together playing the conventional XXX-rated movie houses, Phil said, "We're going to give this a class campaign. We're going to play it in regular movie houses so real people—the non-raincoat crowd—can come. Just to see nudity in a place where they can see it respectably." And Esquire had a very good movie house called the Fourth Season in Providence, Rhode Island. So that's what we did. We played Chinatown and Together in the same theatre! We even actually got a kind of favorable review in the Providence Journal. We did tremendous business the first week, and then in the second week we broke the house records we set in the first week.
SEAN CUNNINGHAM:
Phil saw what I saw. If you marketed Together right, it could play in suburban theatres. We'd take out big ads in local papers that read, "What can your children teach you about S-E-X? Find out Tuesday—Special Screening at 10:00 am. Free!" And who's going to come at ten o'clock in the morning? Housewives. The buzz was off the charts. We just did phenomenal business. People were literally lining up around the block to see it. Nobody had seen anything like this. It was 1971—before Deep Throat. "Porn chic" happened later. That's when censorship came and everything changed at that point.
Of course, it all felt great. It was glorious. But Together wasn't an aesthetic success. So after that, Hallmark said, "Well, what do you want to do?" Wes and I said, "Something else. If you guys will write us a check, let's figure out another movie." And that movie would become The Last House on the Left.
WES CRAVEN:
Sean had been offered $90,000 as the whole budget for a scary movie as a result of Together. He asked me if I wanted to write, direct, and cut it. I said sure. Our attitude was that we were going to do this tiny little film for a company in Boston, and it was only going to be shown in two or three theaters up there. Nobody was ever going to see it, and nobody was ever going to know that we did it. So we essentially said, "Let's be as bad boys as we can. We're going to show things that people have never seen before on a movie screen, we'll pull out all the stops, and just do whatever the hell we want." And by doing this, we were basically going to teach ourselves how to make a feature film.
SEAN CUNNINGHAM:
When we made Last House... it was a different time, a different place. Last House was shot right around my house. It was literally made in the backyard, essentially by kids.
STEVE MINER, Associate Producer:
I always say in interviews, "Yeah, I loved horror movies as a kid" and stuff, but no, I never really did. I'm not one of the children of Forry Ackerman and Famous Monsters. But my mom was a film librarian, and she would always bring home movies for us to watch. I'd see a lot of 16mm films and that's when I really started to fall in love with cinema and decided that I should try to make them.
In the early 1970s, I was a ski bum in Colorado, and I had decided that I wanted to get into the film business. I grew up in Westport, and I knew that there were a number of industrial and educational filmmakers there. So I moved back home to Connecticut in hopes of finding some work. I heard that somebody in town was shooting a movie, and it turned out to be Sean Cunningham, who was producing Last House on the Left with Wes Craven. I didn't know Sean at the time, but I had grown up with his younger brothers. So I asked Sean to give me a job, and he did, at something like $15 a week. I was a gofer, but I ended up doing a little bit of everything. I held the boom mike, I carried lights, I took script notes, anything that was needed. I remember a lot of 24-hour days, trying to finish up and get out of a given location. And we didn't have script boards, so we would be going through the script, crossing out pages, wondering, "Did we shoot this part yet?"
I was with Wes every day in the editing room. Wes essentially cut the entire movie himself, and as he went along, he'd show me various techniques and ways to make a scene work. I didn't know anything about editing at the time, so I just tried to absorb as much as possible. It was actually a very exciting time for me. One of the things I remember most about the movie is that it seemed like we cut it for about a year, mostly because nothing matched. In fact, it seemed like five years. I think the main influence Last House had on all of us was that we learned from the mistakes we made, and tried not to make them again.
WES CRAVEN:
There was a period of, I think, about
six to eight months after Last House was released, when nothing came in, and Sean and I thought, "Well, we'll never see any of that money." Then, suddenly, I got a check for $20,000. After that first check, another one came, this time for $30,000. You could have floored me! In the year following the movie's release, I made close to $100,000 from it. It was like a dream. I had been living semi-communally with a group of people on the Lower East Side, and had virtually no money, and suddenly I was making all of this cash. It was difficult to process.
Both Sean and I went back to our typewriters trying to write things that were "socially responsible." Nothing happened with any of them. We went about three years that way, at which point I ended up broke because we were devoting all our time to doing that, from about 1972 to '75. At that point, I was saying to myself, "Did all that really happen?" It was strange, and the beginning of a rollercoaster ride of ups and downs.
Crystal Lake Memories: The Complete History of Friday the 13th (Enhanced Edition) Page 3