SEAN CUNNINGHAM:
While I was working on Manny's Orphans, I was trying to figure out a marketing campaign for that movie and distributors were telling me, "The title's no good. 'Manny' is too ethnic. 'Orphans' sounds too sad. We should have another title." So I started making these long lists of titles and one that just came into my head was "Friday the 13th." I didn't know what it would be about, but the title intrigued me. And out of frustration I thought, "Christ, if I had a picture called Friday the 13th, I could sell that! But what am I supposed to do with this?" I had been toying with it, and it just kinda stuck in the back of my mind.
So I took out this full-page ad in Variety over the Fourth of July weekend of 1979 that said, "Friday the 13th" in great big block letters and crashing through a mirror. And underneath it read, "The Most Terrifying Film Ever Made! Available December 1979." Immediately I started getting all of these telexes from different foreign distributors all around the world who said they'd love to see this picture.
I had gone away from the investors at Hallmark, but after I placed the ad they called and said they would like a piece of it. I was trying to budget it at $500,000, and they came in with an initial offer of $125,000. It was a good start. Then they came back after we had an early draft of the script and they said that they had changed their mind—they wanted to invest the entire $500,000. They really wanted to control it all. We tried to negotiate the deal in a certain way that I thought I could live with, but they wouldn't cave on a few points that I considered to be crucial, like who gets the money and when, and cash flow. Finally, one night I was having a phone conversation with Phil Scuderi. I said, "No. I just can't do it." And I hung up on him. It wasn't the wrong thing to do—it was the right thing to do. And I think it would still be the right thing to do if it were only myself involved. On the one hand, they're putting up all the money, so we get to make the movie. On the other hand, it was just going to be like signing up for a root canal. It was a way to go forward, but it was another way to go backwards.
That was a very troubled night. I spent it tossing and turning. Then I got up early in the morning and went jogging. I remember this so clearly. I thought, "It's not the deal you want, but it's not the movie you want, either. And all these people are counting on you. Fuck, what's the big deal?" So I come back to the house, it's 6:45 a.m. and my kids had just gotten up. I called Phil at home and said, "I thought about our conversation last night, and I changed my mind. I'm willing to do it on the terms you suggest." And he said, "I'm glad you called because I was just leaving the house." He was about to go take the money and invest it in a shopping center. That's how we got to make Friday the 13th. It really came down to, if I had called him 20 minutes later it never would have happened.
With the relentless shocks of Halloween still fresh in the minds of young moviegoers, Sean Cunningham realized he had to do more than simply replicate the modern scare techniques and camera trickery employed by the likes of John Carpenter and Alfred Hitchcock before him. What could his film bring to the marketplace that was fresh and commercial? Could the inspiration for one Cunningham's early dream projects, an aborted attempt to film Hansel & Gretel, and the disturbing, often graphic imagery of the Grimm's fairy tales, be updated for the sophisticated, sensation-starved youth audiences of 1980? And how could the creative and graphic murder sequences suggested in Victor Miller's script be realized practically and logistically on a limited budget?
With the arrival of a 26-year-old makeup effects artist named Tom Savini, Cunningham would have his answer.
SEAN CUNNINGHAM:
I discovered Bruno Bettelheim and his book Uses of Enchantment back in the mid-1970s when I had tried to develop an update of Hansel & Gretel. He says one of the values of these grim, ugly fairy tales is that young people have unnamed fears: fears of abandonment, fears of death, fears involving sexual repression. Scary stuff. Parents read these stories and get spooked, but the kids love it, because at a young age we don't have words or names to go around these things, we just know they are out there lurking. What fairy tales can do, and by extension certain kinds of horror movies can do, is take the fear, dress it up in a costume, look at it in the safety of a story and then put it away. As a result of listening to the story a number of times, each time the fear becomes more and more manageable and less and less scary.
I also believe that, as teenagers, we think of ourselves as invulnerable. Bad things happen to other people, but not to us. And everybody has that story of somebody in high school who got on a motorcycle and hit a tree and died. And the school is in shock. "How could this possibly happen?" It's simple—you get onto a motorcycle, you run into a tree, you die. These events call into sharp focus the fact that we are vulnerable. This is where we wanted to go with Friday the 13th, to deal with untimely, unwarranted death. I still think that's at the core of the most successful horror films.
We also had a really tough bullet to bite—there is no discount for the patron at the box office to see a low-budget movie. On any particular night, people are either going to see your film or someone else's. They are all first-run movies. Even at that time, the whole idea of a second feature, the B-movie that plays at drive-ins and exploitation houses, didn't exist anymore as a viable alternative to conventional distribution. That was the reality. So when Victor and I were conceiving Friday the 13th, we were very aware that what we needed to create something that had an element of circus to it.
VICTOR MILLER:
From a very early age, my mother and father called me a worry wart because I was always creating these dire scenarios. If I had an infected finger, well clearly I was going to die by the morning. Certainly the idea that my mind instantly leaps to a negative outcome made it possible for Friday the 13th to happen. Each of the killings in the film did not need to be particularly gory but they had to be inventive. They certainly had to be something very personal and a hand-to-hand thing. It was one of Sean's pieces of wisdom that guns are terribly impersonal weapons. Unless I can wrap my hands around your throat, it is really not killing you, because murder is a very intimate act and you have to take full responsibility for it.
SEAN CUNNINGHAM:
I had, in fact, no notion of the tradition of the European body count movies or the gross-out, Grand Guignol kind of thing when I conceived of Friday the 13th. I never saw Twitch of the Death Nerve or any of those other movies that people say influenced Friday the 13th—the first time I ever heard the name Mario Bava was when I went to a film festival in 1986 or '87. I knew that Hammer made some movies, but the idea of Spanish or Italian or Japanese horror films—I didn't know anything about it. I was not even aware of horror films in the United States! But there was a film George Romero had shot in Pittsburgh, Dawn of the Dead, that came out right when we were working on Friday the 13th. I hadn't seen it, but Steve Miner had, and told me that this special effects guy Tom Savini is somebody I should talk to. That maybe he could meet with us because he knows low-budget filmmaking and he could give us some advice, or help us.
Camp Crystal Lake counselors (clockwise from top left): the late Laurie Bartram as Brenda; Jeannine Taylor and Mark Nelson as Marcie and Ned; Harry Crosby and Adrienne King as Bill and Alice; Kevin Bacon (right) as Jack and Peter Brouwer as camp owner Steve Christy.
TOM SAVINI, Special Makeup Effects:
The whole reason I got into effects was seeing Man of a Thousand Faces, the story of Lon Chaney. He was a silent screen actor, a make-up artist and a stunt man—all the things I wanted to be when I grew up. Lon was my first inspiration, and of course Jack Pierce, the guy who created Frankenstein and the Wolf Man. Then, after that, Dick Smith, who is still the greatest living make-up artist today. And of course Rick Baker, Rob Bottin—those guys are in a class all by themselves. They're my idols, my inspiration, who I strive to be like.
My first memory of Sean Cunningham is of a whirling dervish. I remember I went to his house in Connecticut and we talked about the film, effect by effect. Sometimes the script was pret
ty descriptive as to what it wanted, sometimes it wasn't. But that was the fun—inventing how to do this stuff. Then, I could give Sean a budget and how many people I needed, and how long it would take to prepare.
VICTOR MILLER:
I remember it was a hot summer afternoon in 1979 and this guy came up in his car with Pennsylvania plates. It was Tom Savini. We sat around Sean's patio and I was stunned. This guy was saying things like, "Okay, on page 43 you've got an ax in the face. Now, do you want a fake ax on a real face, or do you want a fake face with a real ax in it?" I looked at Sean and said, "My God, I just write this shit!"
SEAN CUNNINGHAM:
Tom Savini is a fucking nut. He's wildly energetic. He's got this Peter Pan quality about him, and this desire to have fun and play around, and boundless enthusiasm. So crazy Tom comes up and we all hook up, and he's just loves the notion of the idea of the film. He throws himself into it and he's got all of these ideas on ways to push the envelope, to do things that hadn't been done before.
It was Tom, Steve and Victor and I hanging out in my backyard, asking, "How can we do this?" Victor and I had been trying to figure out better ways to tell the story, but we were never sure what we could or couldn't do. This was the era of low-tech makeup and special effects. Now, we're so spoiled with computers and CGI—anything you can dream up you can just put on the screen. But in 1979, if you wanted to chop someone's head off onscreen, it hadn't been done before. We were creating a magic show, and that the fun would be that you know the magician didn't saw the girl in half, but dammit, it sure looks like he did. You've been tricked but are delighted by it. That is, ultimately, what we were trying to do. It wasn't really about grossing the audience out—it was about showing the audience something that they hadn't seen before.
TASO STAVRAKIS, Effects Assistant:
Tom Savini and I were best friends in college. We both grew up in Pittsburgh. I was an actor, and Tom was teaching acting and makeup classes. I went on to do Dawn of the Dead with him. It was low budget and they didn't have any stunt guys, so we said, "Hey, we can do that, too!" Then we just kept finding these low-budget pictures like Friday the 13th. It was great. And Tom's signature was that he didn't want to cut away from the horror moments—he wanted to watch it and see it, like a cartoon, which is something that no one else had done. It was thinking in reverse. Tom and I both come from a theatre background, so we would always say, "How can we do this stuff live? How can we do it right here, in front of an audience?" That was the approach we went into with Friday the 13th. It was just a big game.
The hodgepodge of characters that pepper Victor Miller's script for Friday the 13th are undeniably generic, albeit dependable, archetypes: roughly a half dozen thinly sketched, would-be victims familiar to any American teenager—the good girl, the practical joker, the jock, the slut, the potential boyfriend. And in the film's heroine, Alice, Miller would build upon the foundation laid by Carpenter's prototypical babysitter Laurie Strode in Halloween, while also granting his creation a resourcefulness and intelligence lacking in many a transparent scream queen past.
Few answering the open casting calls could have expected anything more than just another low-budget horror film in the wake of Halloween's success, but for one group of fresh-faced young actors, Friday the 13th would be a very lucky day indeed.
VICTOR MILLER:
I was sitting in the waiting room at Columbia Pictures after Friday the 13th had come out and was such a success, and I heard one of the guys describing the movie as "the Pepsi Generation being horribly killed." I had started by peopling the script with types. It just seemed like I needed enough really good-looking young people, all clean-cut and nice—you couldn't just have two or three people to open up a camp. And although I was 40 years old at the same time, I had a house full of teenagers, so I could ask them anything that was necessary. Plus, I have always been enough of a "Peter Pan" to identify downward...
SEAN CUNNINGHAM:
I remember thinking what was so scary about JAWS were the point-of-view shots of the shark looking up at the legs of all these innocent children and lovers and parents. It wasn't that they did anything wrong, or right. With Friday the 13th, I wanted to create this world of young lovely kids, and somebody is going to bite their legs off without any rhyme or reason. And therein lies the fear.
We'd never used a casting agency before. I was very fortunate to run into Barry Moss in New York. He worked with Julie Hughes at TNI Casting, and they were primarily theatrical agents. Barry really responded to it; Julie wasn't quite so sure. But they broke their necks to get me the best actors they could find and were absolutely instrumental in getting us the credible cast that we wound up with.
BARRY MOSS, Casting Director:
We had done Hero at Large and The Champ before Friday the 13th. We didn't think it was a comedown, not at all—this was before the stigma of horror movies. There was Halloween, which was a big hit, and this was the next one. It wasn't grade-A, but in New York actors loved to do movies because there were so few opportunities. And I loved the script. I remember reading it one night on my little terrace, "Oh, no, not Jack! Don't kill Jack!"
Adrienne King won the lead role of Alice in Friday the 13th over hundreds of other girls—and to the surprise of no one more than King herself. "The funny thing was, they were looking for a star name," smiles King. "I even heard Sally Field was being considered at one point. Thankfully, she didn't do it!"
KEVIN BACON, "Jack":
Ever since I was a little kid, I always had an over-developed fantasy life and plugged myself into those fantasies whenever I could. By the time I was 9 years old, I wanted to be a painter. When I was 13, I wanted to be a conga drum player. Then, when I reached 15 or 16, it came to me that I was going to be an actor. And I had a really strong sense that I was going to make a living even though I was going to be an artist. That was a big driving force, because I wanted to be free from any financial connection to my parents as soon as I possibly could. I didn't want to owe anybody anything—I still think of myself as a workhorse. The summer I turned 18, I remember coming up out of the New York subway at 72nd Street and Broadway, with my little suitcase, thinking it was the center of the universe.
My first movie was National Lampoon's Animal House. I was attending Circle in the Square at the time, and the casting director called up the school and said, "We're looking for preppy freshman, wet behind the ears." It didn't register as anything real. The guy said, "How's scale?" and I said, "Scale is fine." I had no idea what scale meant. I ended up with a couple of scenes in that movie, in which I get whacked on the backside with a paddle and flattened into the cement at the end. And after five weeks on the set in Oregon, I figured I was a movie star and didn't have to go back to school. Six months later, there I was, back in New York, waiting tables.
I heard about Friday the 13th because I traveled in some of the same acting circles as Mark Nelson, and I knew Jeannine Taylor as well. I think the casting directors just thought we worked well together as a threesome.
BARRY MOSS:
The first thing you do when you cast is, you read the script and write down your ideas for the role. Then you send a breakdown out to all the agents and ask for their submissions, and they send you headshots and resumes. From there you audition—usually the casting director interviews everybody first, and then you bring back your top choices to read for the director. On Friday the 13th, we usually brought in about three or four actors for each part, and sometimes you just get lucky right on the first day. Like when you bring in Kevin Bacon, and he's the answer—you don't even have to bring in anyone else.
SEAN CUNNINGHAM:
At that point he wasn't Kevin Bacon the movie star as we know him now, he was just a kid from New York trying to figure out how to make it happen. And he had a chance to be in a movie, to have a bunch of lines and show what he could do. I thought he was really smart. And I guess he still is great looking, but he was a great looking kid. It was kind of a no-brainer to hire him.
JEANNINE TAYLOR, "Marcie":
I had the bug pretty early. I began to take voice lessons at the age of 14 and then sang in school assemblies and at church and community events. Then I got some parts in school plays, and began to yearn to be a serious actress. Right after college I immediately moved to New York. I couldn't wait. I had the great fortune to work with really fabulous, renowned artists very early. I was incredibly lucky. I was living many an American girl's dream.
As far as acting in major motion pictures, frankly, I didn't think I was pretty enough; I didn't ever think of myself in that way. Friday the 13th was kind of a fluke, really. Barry Moss and Julie Hughes were a big part of my auditioning because they were very well regarded. I was very confident that any part that came through that office would be a good opportunity. I didn't even really think of this movie as a horror film. To me, this was a small independent film about carefree teenagers who are having a rip-roaring time at a summer camp where they happen to be working as counselors. Then they just happen to get killed.
MARK NELSON, "Ned":
Friday the 13th was my first movie. I had done an off-Broadway play at the Joseph Papp Public Theatre right after college, and some other small theater jobs. I had also done a few plays with Jeannine Taylor.
I first got sides from the script, a comedy scene among the counselors. Then I got called back and my agent told me that they wanted me to come to the second audition in a bathing suit. That was when I was clued in that something was unusual about this movie. It certainly was not a straight dramatic role, and it was only after they offered me the part that they gave me the full script to read and I realized how much blood was in it. I did wonder how it would turn out, but I knew that Kevin Bacon was going to be in it and I liked Sean Cunningham from the auditions. And I was anxious to start an acting career.
Crystal Lake Memories: The Complete History of Friday the 13th (Enhanced Edition) Page 5