Makeup effects artist Tom Savini, circa 1979.
SEAN CUNNINGHAM:
Wes and I made a lot of money from Last House on the Left, especially considering that he had been driving a cab and I was working in a theatre. But my career wasn't progressing at that point; Last House became a double-edged sword. Since it was very cheap and exploitative, and successful at its own level, all people thought of me was, "If you want to get puke in a bucket—and get it cheap—boy, I've got just the guy for you!" In terms of film politics and possibilities, Last House is important. But it is very, very hard to watch. It's not a fun movie at any level. And boy, did I not want to make Last House on the Left Part II or Part III. Wes and I were also striking off in slightly different directions. I was trying to do documentary films and commercials. Steve Miner had been working for me, and he was trying to cut some NHL film. We were all just learning. I also did not want to deal any longer with Phil and the folks in Boston. They were and continue to be very difficult people to deal with. In a perfect world, you wouldn't have to deal with people who cause you problems. So after Last House, Wes and I just decided to stay away from them. We were friendly, and I didn't want to quite close the door, but I didn't particularly want to work with them again either.
GEORGE MANSOUR:
To try and gauge what Last House on the Left eventually grossed would be difficult, but in 1972 dollars, it was a lot in comparison to what it cost. The initial grosses were spectacular for the places where we played it. In some cases the film performed so well that we sold it away from our own movie houses! But it is also true that even after all the money he made from Last House, Sean didn't like Phil. He didn't like the way he was treated, so he went out on his own to make movies. Whether the movies were good or bad, I don't know—I never saw them.
BILL FREDA:
I have always thought that Last House evolved more from Wes than Sean. And if you look at Wes Craven's career, the path he's taken since Last House, he hasn't really done anything other than horror-type pictures. But I believe there was an impetus at the time, in the financial sense, for both Sean and Wes to get another movie made together. But I don't think Sean was moving in the same direction as Wes.
SEAN CUNNINGHAM:
I never really thought about going to Hollywood, the way Wes eventually did. After Last House I was asked to a couple of times. Once specifically by Sam Arkoff, who was running American International Pictures. He had a history of hiring talented filmmakers—kids who he thought had talent and would work really cheap, like George Lucas and Francis Coppola. Sam was suggesting that I come and do some pictures for him, which on the face of it would be great. But all I knew was that he was one of those Hollywood guys—he wore a pinky ring, smoked a big cigar and had this big, pretentious office. And I wanted to make money doing this stuff, but he was talking about back-end deals, and in an aggressive way. I didn't want to get involved with this—it seemed like a silly, stupid place to be. It would not have been, but I didn't know that at the time.
STEVE MINER:
Wes had done what you're supposed to do—got an agent and went to Hollywood and made movies there. Sean and I stayed back East, but we all remained very much in contact. I worked on a couple of features right after Last House and nothing ever came of them. For the next four or five years after that, I had an editing business in New York, doing commercials; I also did some producing, directing and writing of industrial films, mostly sports-oriented. After about five years of it, I finally said enough is enough, I wanna do features. Then I got a call from Sean to go down at the last minute and work on a movie. I worked on it for two or three weeks or however long we shot. It was a real mess, and I think I ended up cutting it when we got it back to the editing room. It was supposed to be a comedy, but it wasn't funny… it was just stupid. It was the first time I directed anything though—I shot a bunch of insert scenes back in Connecticut, the stuff with the two cops. It got a limited release in the U.S. as The Case of the Full Moon Murders, but I've heard that it was a big hit in Australia. They thought it was hilarious down there.
DENNIS MURPHY, Co-Producer, Friday the 13th Part 2:
I first met Sean Cunningham when he and another friend of ours, Bud Talbot, produced a picture down in Miami originally called The Silver C, for "The Silver Cock," which became know as The Case of the Full Moon Murders. Sean was against hiring me because I had never worked on anything before, but in preparation for the interview with Bud I did a lot of research, and I eventually knew more about Miami than the people who lived there. Bud was very impressed with that, I got the job and Sean went along with it. But Sean and I became friends and he became a really great mentor to me—I knew he was an enormously smart guy.
The Silver C was essentially a soft-core porn. Fred Lincoln was in it, from Last House on the Left. But it was illegal to shoot an adult film there at the time, because Deep Throat was such a big hit and it was filmed right in their backyard and they didn't know what it was. So we were continuously being surveyed by the police. But they waited, and on a Sunday night when we were filming in a private house, they just burst in. I don't know what the pretense was—loitering about the premises where drugs were being used or sold or something else pretty weak. But a number of us got arrested Sean and Steve Miner got busted. Eventually they hired a lawyer and everyone all got off. Though it was all pretty funny, I have to say.
The film turned out to be a mess. It was a big struggle to finish it, and everyone was broke. Finally a deal was managed for the Australian rights, for I think $5,000 and a fifty-fifty split on the profits. Then at the last minute, Sean said, "Oh, give us $10,000 and you can own the film outright." I think he was just anxious to get whatever money they could get out of it. Then later, after it became a huge hit over there, Talbot told me he'd seen the Australian distributor at the American Film Market, who came up to him and said, "Hey mate, thanks for making me a millionaire!"
These stills were taken by unit photographer Richard Feury, leading many fans to believe that a more graphic murder was shot for Friday the 13th's doomed pre-title heroine, Claudette (Debra S. Hayes). Special makeup effects artist Tom Savini clarifies: "The first two kids in the movie, we should have killed them gloriously. But we didn't. Because when nothing happens to them, you're thinking, 'Okay, they're not gonna shock me too bad.' And then from there on out, with every increasingly gruesome murder, the audience just went, 'Oh my god!'"
SEAN CUNNINGHAM:
You have setbacks, but I think setbacks are a part of life. For years I worked really hard for a few years trying to get children's fairy tales going. I tried to do Hansel and Gretel and a couple of other things, and nothing came of it. Case of the Full Moon Murders wasn't really my picture. Bud Talbot was a Rhode Island rich kid who had raised some money and wanted to make this sex comedy film and asked if I would help him out. So I went down to Florida, acting as a sort of line producer, but the footage was dreadful and he ran out of money, and I couldn't get paid. I ended up taking over the film and trying to find a way to finish it and get it released.
After that, eventually I wound up going to Spain to do a tax shelter movie called Blind Planet—I was somehow the American who had brought in the financing and they wanted to make their own movie, but they didn't want my input. And in Spain they have siesta so I was getting drunk twice a day. Plus, I didn't have too many responsibilities, so I could get drunk as much as I wanted to. I had two alcoholic parents so I knew a lot about booze. I thought I had decided that I wasn't going to become a drunk like my parents. And I didn't—I became a drunk unlike my parents. When I came home, my wife had had it. I went to AA on Mondays to get her off my back. Meeting after meeting. And as it turned out, I was one of those fortunate guys—I discovered sobriety. That's when my life really changed dramatically. Sobriety brings with it very different perspectives. I no longer had interest in the "naughty factor." I just wasn't going to do that anymore. That was a big turning point.
Coming back from Spain and still wanting
to do something else, one day, out of the blue, I got a call from Phil Scuderi to come out to Boston. I said, "What the hell?" So he sits me down in his office, and this is around Labor Day, 1976. And he has this thick Boston accent: "Have you ever seen that Bad News Bears movie?" So a writer named Victor Miller and I put together this silly little rip-off movie called Here Come the Tigers with only three weeks of prep and script.
VICTOR MILLER, Screenwriter:
I started my career as a playwright off-Broadway, but the whole process was so painful that I decided to be a novelist. I switched paths and wrote a novel that was bought by Bantam Books, a rather undistinguished paperback about a female private eye. Then I moved into novelizations—Kojak episodes, mostly—and eventually somebody asked me to take a novel called The Black Pearl and turn it into a screenplay. I finally got around to seeing the movie and it was pretty ghastly, but the people who produced it introduced me to Sean Cunningham, who was wandering around New York at the time. This was around 1977.
I was very impressed with Sean. He had an incredible mind and seemed to know a lot. And, of course, he had done Last House on the Left, which was a lot more than I had done. Though it's funny, because Sean was anything but scary—he was goofy and sort of carefree at that point. I remember we were both commuting back and forth from Stratford and Westport, and we would be on the train for an hour, talking about projects we were going to do. I also always liked his metaphor that a good movie was putting together a good rollercoaster for people. We both wanted to make a living at it—we definitely thought about movies as entertainment, not as teaching tools for the universe.
BILL FREDA:
The stories go that Sean used to ride the railroad to New York City and play cards with people. Though I don't believe that, because when I met him he had a nice home and he and Susan were still married. Someone there had money so he was able to survive. Sean eventually hired me to edit two of his kids movies for him—Here Come the Tigers and Manny's Orphans. They were good; in fact, I actually look back on them and think they're better movies than Friday the 13th. But, of course, they weren't horror movies.
I had heard of Last House on the Left, but I wasn't interested in background when I took the job on Here Come the Tigers. It was a low-budget movie and it gave me a chance to cut dialogue, and that was about it. And I liked Sean, he's a very sweet guy. Though, and I hope this doesn't reflect poorly on anybody, but I think Sean was in it for the money. And at that time, why not? Though, and I'm not sure if this has anything to do with the way those kids movies were received, but I just don't think he was very creative—he was not a "filmmaker," in that sense.
SEAN CUNNINGHAM:
I don't remember what the connection was between Victor and I, but we just hit it off. Then was like he was a constant. A very funny guy, and always a lot of fun to work with. I think Here Come the Tigers cost like $250,000, if that. It could be much lower. It was guerrilla filmmaking. It was all kids from the local little leagues; it was like being on a three-week field trip with a bunch of sixth-graders. It was good and bad, frustrating and exciting. I loved it. Those were the greatest times I ever had making movies.
VICTOR MILLER:
Those where the days when everybody said, "What America needs is a good G-rated movie." I guess Here Come the Tigers made its money back, but they lied about America wanting G-rated films. But that did not stop us from making another G-rated film right after it, Manny's Orphans—or Kick, depending on which version you saw. Steve Miner had come up with the idea for it and I wrote the screenplay and we did it, another low-budget film, and shot it around Bridgeport, Connecticut.
HARRY MANFREDINI, Composer:
I didn't start scoring films until I was 35 years old. There was a film community in New York City back in the 1970s, but it was all about production. Post-production? No. The opportunities were very slim. So I had been working on documentaries and short films. Two of them, Angel and Big Joe, with Paul Sorvino, and The End of the Game, both won Oscars in the short film categories. And I did one porn film, Through the Looking Glass, which was actually a great way to learn scoring, because there's little dialogue and 90 minutes of music—you really got to hone your technique. Anyway, I have this theory that you can't do three pictures in New York City without clicking with somebody involved with those three pictures. It was too small a community. And one day I was introduced to a guy named Steve Miner, who was editing for Sean Cunningham. Steve had seen one of the shorts I scored and said to me, "Oh, you did this? We've got this kid's film, would you do it?"
The first two movies I did for Sean were Here Come the Tigers and Manny's Orphans. I loved Sean—if you don't like Sean, you don't like sliced bread. He's so amicable and extremely bright. And he is one of those guys with such great ideas, but he's usually just a little late with them. Manny's Orphans was a movie about soccer when soccer was just starting to get big in the United States. And then soccer didn't make it, and neither did Manny's Orphans.
Robin Mogan as the ill-fated Annie.
SEAN CUNNINGHAM:
We had this notion of a bunch of orphans in a halfway house, and they put together a soccer team and the underdog wins. Again I loved working with kids, and it was a lot of fun to make. This time, I really thought it was going to be a breakthrough film for me. Then we went out to try and sell it and the reaction was lukewarm. United Artists said, "Let's take this and use it as a pilot for a TV series," and they optioned the movie. That was the good news. The bad news was, all they did was option it, but they didn't buy it.
This was when I was trying to figure out what the heck we could to do keep the lights on and to support my wife and my kids. I loved this notion of doing warm, fuzzy children's movies, but that wasn't gonna pay the bills. I decided I had to make some kind of other movie. I didn't want to go back to horror, but we were broke. And the most important thing you can do in a film career is make money. Because if you make money, people will let you make more films and take chances and nobody will blame you. After 10 years I didn't want to make things any longer that people didn't want to buy. I wanted people to pay me to put images up on a screen, so what could I put up there that they're going to like?
Sean Cunningham would find the answer he needed with the release in 1978 of a low-budget, independently financed and distributed horror film entitled Halloween. The story of an escaped mental patient named Michael Myers who returns to his hometown to stalk and murder a trio of babysitters, the film's stylish direction by John Carpenter and easy-to-replicate elements—a simple but effective structure, limited locations, a masked killer and a fresh-faced cast of relative unknowns—served as the blueprint for a new sub-genre of horror film that would soon become known as the "slasher" movie.
Although excited by the commercial possibilities of following in the success of Halloween, Cunningham's return to horror was still a reluctant one. Even if the film that would become known as Friday the 13th was more calculated rip-off than genuine inspiration, the roots of its conception, development and financing would, ultimately, need to begin with the relationships Cunningham had forged eight years prior—and the three men with whom he had sworn he would never do business with again.
VICTOR MILLER:
Around early 1979 I was living in Stratford. Sean and I were going to each other's houses probably three or four days a week, just working on things. We were coming up with projects that we thought would be great for Clint Eastwood and other stuff that, of course, never got made. Then one day he called me up and said, "Halloween is making a lot of money at the box office. Why don't we rip it off?"
STEVE MINER:
I loved the original Halloween. It was a breakthrough for American cinema. It pioneered the concept of the independent film having mainstream success, and of a certain type of horror film as a sub-genre. And it was really well done—it relied on classic suspense and situations, and not gore. With Friday the 13th, we tried to copy the success of Halloween, clearly. We did it to break big into the mov
ies. At the time, we were working out of a garage in Connecticut. We didn't even have a script.
BILL FREDA:
I can tell you how I first heard about Friday the 13th. It was a while after Manny's Orphans, and Sean Cunningham called and said he was doing a feature and that he was going to make me famous. I remember I said, "I don't want to be famous—I just want to be rich." I never forgot that. That is the kind of attitude we were talking about here.
SEAN CUNNINGHAM:
Victor and I sat down at the kitchen table and started kicking around the concept—we'll take a remote location and put a lot of young people in jeopardy. Then we went down the list: are they in jeopardy from a real force or an imaginative one? Who's going to survive, if anyone? Locations were kicked around, too. How about an apartment building? A funhouse? An amusement park? An island off the coast of Spain?
VICTOR MILLER:
Everything happened really fast. This was the middle of 1979. My first week's work was coming up with about 50 different venues. Anywhere that kids would be. Like high schools, playgrounds, forests, whatever. I would go over and pitch my ideas to Sean and we would say, "Nah, nah, nah." Then I remembered that going away to summer camp was just too scary for me. My older brother went to camp and I did not like the stories he came back with—the whole idea of living in these big rooms with people and sleeping in double bunk beds sounded pretty awful. So I finally went over to Sean's and said, "I think I got it. It's a summer camp before it opens." And we both said, "Yippie!"
I went off to my little office, typing my life away. And after I started writing I came up with the highly unfavorable title of "Long Night at Camp Blood." That was its working title until about the third or fourth draft, when Sean came and said, "I've got the name of the movie."
Top left: "The scene where Annie comes into the tiny diner and announces she's going to Crystal Lake, and the people just stare?" says director Sean Cunningham, "that was just trying to set mood. So the audience would think, 'Oh, there's something out of the ordinary going on here!'" The scene also features an early screen appearance by actor Irwin Keyes (center), who would go on to provide the likeness for the titular character in the blockbuster Shrek animated motion picture series.
Crystal Lake Memories: The Complete History of Friday the 13th (Enhanced Edition) Page 4