"Tom Savini just amazed us with his imagination," raves associate producer Steve Miner. " The decapitation appeared on the screen in the most
powerful and visceral way possible!"
In early 1980, the directive given by Paramount Pictures to Frank Mancuso, Sr., the company's then 46- year-old Executive Vice-President of Distribution & Marketing, was as clear as it was direct: augment the studio's slate of in-house motion picture productions by acquiring low-cost, independently-produced product. While the concept of the "negative pickup" was not an entirely new one in late 1970s Hollywood, the zeal with which Mancuso was to go about his task would instigate a major change in motion picture distribution and exhibition, blurring the previously steadfast division between the "A" and "B" picture and the marketing of low-budget acquisitions. But even Mancuso did not know what lay just around the corner. Following a series of screenings in February 1980, a bidding war broke out over the rights to Friday the 13th between representatives of four major motion picture studios—Paramount, Warner Bros., MGM and United Artists. The film eventually would be picked up by Paramount for domestic distribution, with Warner taking international markets.
After 10 years in the trenches of low-budget filmmaking, and his 40th birthday just past by the turn of 1980, fate was about to smile upon Sean Cunningham. Back in 1971, unable to afford a $90 airline ticket, he once schlepped by bus the film cans containing his first full-length theatrical feature, Together, to the offices of Hallmark Releasing. Now, he would never have to worry about the price of an airplane ticket again.
SEAN CUNNINGHAM:
When you finish a film, all you have to do is call distribution companies. Literally, you can cold call them. That doesn't mean they'll buy your movie, but they're delighted to look at it. That's as true today as it was in 1980. And with Friday the 13th, my investors were guys that had a background in exhibition—they'd call their friends, and their friends told their friends. The selling of Friday the 13th happened very quickly, really within a matter of two weeks.
FRANK MANCUSO, SR., Former VP of Distribution & Marketing, Paramount Pictures:
I was raised in Buffalo, New York. I was mesmerized by film from the time I was small. When I was a teenager, I started working as an usher in a movie theater. Then I progressed through the action side of the business. I managed a theater, then got into booking movies into different demo areas throughout Upstate New York, Ohio and Pennsylvania. I would match the population with the movies that were available. I was hired by Paramount in 1959 to do distribution, and stayed with them until 1991.
Paramount used to have these events where we would show a reel of our upcoming product. We would fly out to the West Coast, then you'd fly out to the East Coast and do the same thing. Phil Scuderi was a customer and I met him many times. And I don't even know if it was Phil or Sean who contacted me first about Friday the 13th. I just remember seeing it at a screening with our distribution guys.
ADRIENNE KING:
I asked Sean if I could bring my mother to the screening and he said, "Sure." So we were sitting up front and all the guys are sitting in the back. And my mother's nervous because she thinks I'll probably take my shirt off in the Monopoly scene or something like that. Anyway, at the end, she's easing into her seat and she thinks the movie was over. Then Jason comes out of the water, and I'm telling you—she bolted six feet out of her chair. She screamed so loud that she could have aced my audition better than I did. If Sean didn't have a deal at that point, then trust me, she sealed it. I think that's the day Sean sold the film.
BILL FREDA:
I remember the Paramount screening distinctly, because I was working the soundboard in the back. All the studio execs at the distribution level were there, too, including Frank Mancuso. And when Sean and I had been editing, we used scratch music. And there was this one piece of music that we used at the end, with a big "Bang!" in it, for when Jason pops up out of the water at the end. And at that screening, I remember I took the volume band and just went crazy with it. I mean, everything would shake at that volume. And boy, when I bounced that thing up all the execs just jumped. I think that's the thing that sold it. I think these guys sat there and said, "Even if we buy this movie for the ending, it'll be worth it."
Completing Friday the 13th's famous "chair jumper" would take three attempts to get right. The process took its toll on cast and crew. "It was tough," winces Adrienne King. "I remember that morning before we started, there was a little snow falling and—I'll never forget this—over the radio a weatherman says, '...And it's 28 degrees.' Everybody stopped. '28 degrees! Are you sure the lake isn't frozen?' It was a good-sized lake, but still!"
FRANK MANCUSO, SR.:
Obviously, the ending was a highlight. I said, "Oh, boy! The audience is going to leave the theater talking about this movie for days because of that ending!" It is a truly visceral moment. I left that screening saying, "If we could get this for the right price, it will have a market. I know exactly who will want to see this, and I know who doesn't want to see this. And we have many slots coming up in the year where we could use a movie like this."
SEAN CUNNINGHAM:
We started to screen Friday the 13th for distributors and it had just incredible success. Mostly because of the sucker punch in the last reel. They loved it. Then all of a sudden we're setting up another screening and they bring in all the secretaries and their other friends and they would sit in the back and wait for the ending, to watch their friends get scared. Then they'd jump up and they'd laugh and they'd high-five each other. It was exactly that kind of fun that created this little bidding war between United Artists, Warner Bros. and Paramount.
You have to understand the world of distribution at that point did not exist the way it does now. The notion that an independent film would ever be released nationally had never occurred. When I made Friday the 13th, I wasn't trying to jump into or resurrect a previously established pattern of distribution. It was a pattern that didn't exist. What I looked to do was make a movie for the $500,000 we were able to raise. And hopefully get our investors their money back.
GEORGE MANSOUR:
To be honest, we all just thought it was going to be another rip-off movie. I didn't think it was very good. I wasn't keen on it. I liked Last House on the Left better. I never thought it would do as well as it ultimately did. But this was quite a coup for Esquire and Hallmark, to have this association with a major company like Paramount.
VICTOR MILLER:
Sean and I had done two movies before and they were nice and respectful and nothing happened, so I was used to nothing happening. Then I got a call from Sean saying Paramount had picked up Friday the 13th and was going to release it in a thousand movie theaters, which was an unheard of number. I just went, "Holy shit!"
One charge that plagued Friday the 13th was that it was a cynical gorefest, reveling in the kind of lurid, sadistic violence that tested not only the standards of the Motion Picture Association of America's ratings board, but all manner or good taste, propriety and social responsibility. Yet the MPAA ultimately requested a mere nine seconds of deletions from the film's graphic murder sequences and, after only two submissions, granted it an R classification.
In the years since the film's domestic release, the unexpurgated international version of Friday the 13th, which Warner Bros. issued overseas and that restores those nine seconds of deleted footage, had remained a highly sought-after collectible on the American market. Additional still photography shot during the movie's production, showing images of murder sequences or behind-the-scenes tomfoolery of cast and crew that was never intended or even shot for the finished film, also surfaced in various magazines and media, leading many fans to believe that a longer cut of Friday the 13th was buried somewhere deep in the Paramount vaults. But even today, with the studio having made the international version widely available on DVD and Blu-ray, rumor persists of even bloodier and more violent versions of the film, a claim its filmmakers continue to deny.
VICTOR MILLER:
I think the funny thing about Friday the 13th, and I will go to my grave saying this, is that it is not grossly violent. What I think was so great about the editing and the special effects is that everything had a buildup, and then you finally you saw this one shot of this thing and nobody lingered on it. We got in and we got out real fast. It was more of the thought of having an ax in your face that lingers with you, rather than seeing blood dripping all over or whatever.
SEAN CUNNINGHAM:
It's like the relationship between pornography and erotic storytelling. That when the specifics are presented, it's not what you think. It's off-putting. It doesn't take you to the right fantasy places. We needed to have long attenuated moments that would end in a moment of surprise. We were trying to see how long we could maintain suspense. That was the goal, rather than extreme gore. We had to push the envelope, not rip it open.
There has been a lot of talk about additional scenes and all this extra gore stuff that was shot and not released. The truth is that we had so little money. We used every scene, every possible shot we had. We didn't have the luxury of shooting an extra 20 minutes and deciding what worked the best, and then taking those 20 or 30 minutes out of the movie.
BILL FREDA:
I think the build-up is more of what Sean was trying to create rather than focus on the actual murder. That moment of impact is all that matters. And then let them imagine the rest. When you start showing it too many times it loses its effect.
Tom Savini puts the finishing touches on one of his most famous creations (left, with actor Ari Lehman), while Steve Miner (right) poses with Lehman and Sean Cunningham.
BETSY PALMER:
Who would have dreamed that Friday the 13th would be as scary it is? To me the secret is that in the film, your eyes are the camera. When Jeannine Taylor goes to the bathroom after she left Kevin Bacon in the bed and he gets the arrow through the throat, she's standing washing her hands at the sink, and then she looks over and thinks she sees something in the stall—as the audience saw it, the shower curtain, they look and say, "Did that move?" I remember seeing that scene when it was all put together in the final film, and that to me was one of the scariest moments in the whole movie because it let's you use your imagination. That is what's really wonderful about a lot of Friday the 13th.
SEAN CUNNINGHAM:
Over the years, many people have commented on the fades to white that we used at the end of the murder sequences in Friday the 13th. But it meant absolutely nothing. It was just, "Let's try something here to make this edit work."
BILL FREDA:
I had been impressed by a movie called The Pawnbroker. Ralph Rosenblum, who cut it, he used the flashes and it was amazing what he did. So I utilized them throughout Friday the 13th. It's not like a stock dissolve. The white flashes were timed perfectly, and where they are placed is a big part of their effectiveness. It just kept that momentum going. I also think it worked well here because Friday the 13th was a movie where continuity could be a problem. This solved that in a lot of ways. These things often come about whenever you're stuck editing.
TOM SAVINI:
The first two kids in the movie, during the prologue, we should have killed them gloriously. There are a few still pictures floating around, of Debra Hayes, who plays one of the kids, and we're goofing around with a machete and she's screaming, and so everyone thinks we shot a bigger, bloodier death for them. But we didn't. Because when nothing happens to them, you're thinking, "Okay, well I can deal with that, it's not that scary, 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:
Originally, we planned to shoot that prologue scene in quite a different way. It was written to occur by the lake on the campgrounds, there was to be a chase through a boat house and by the water, and a few other things.
STEVE MINER:
The first night we tried to film that prologue, it snowed. Then when we did it the second time, the generator died. So we were forced to choose the barn, as it eventually appeared in the movie, out of necessity, because that was the one location we could think of that had its own power source. And I liked what we ended up with. But the original sequence would have been very exciting.
RICHARD FEURY:
Probably the most famous promotional photograph taken from Friday the 13th was actually a fluke. We were eating in the dining hall at the Boy Scout camp. It was basically open-air, so it got very cold, and they set up sheets of plastic with space heaters inside. I said to Betsy Palmer, "Why don't you just lean into that plastic and scream?" She did, and the photo wound up in Time magazine. And it's really funny, because it's not from any scene in the movie.
BILL FREDA:
Ultimately, there were no bloody, gory scenes left on the cutting room floor, I feel quite certain of that. I'm being completely honest—after that screening at Paramount, the final domestic version didn't change much from the original cut. I do recall a few seconds being excised. It was hardly a big deal. And remember, Sean had been making very low-budget movies, so he was more than willing to make cuts to allow a major distributor like Paramount to pick up the movie.
Tom Savini, Ari Lehman and Adrienne King joke around between takes, while Savini (right) enjoys a brief respite during the arduous filming.
Frank Mancuso, Sr. was taking a gamble on Friday the 13th. He eschewed the regional platform distribution pattern usually afforded to prestige pictures of the era, yet did not discard the film directly into the dumpster of the drive-in and exploitation circuit. Instead, he gifted his low-budget acquisition with an unprecedented—at least for a low-budget negative pickup—mass media marketing campaign that highlighted the film's key selling point: its succession of creative murder sequences. Mancuso also shrewdly refused to screen the picture in advance for critics.
Mancuso's conceit, combined with a release date set strategically placed well ahead of the summer's expected blockbusters, would pay off. Handsomely. Friday the 13th opened on 1,127 screens on May 9, 1980 and topped the box office with a three-day opening gross of $5.8 million. But even more remarkable to observers was the film's staying power. Unusual for a horror film, whose receipts traditionally decline after its opening weekend, Friday the 13th remained second behind only The Empire Strikes Back as the top money-earner of the summer, and would go on to best such higher-profile major studio rivals as Stanley Kubrick's The Shining and Brian De Palma's Dressed to Kill. By the end of its run, Friday the 13th would pull in an impressive $39.7 million, inspiring over 14 million ticket holders to sleep with the lights on.
If the popularity of Friday the 13th baffled the industry and mystified critics, it would shock no one more than its cast and crew, who were expecting little from the film on which they labored so enthusiastically. For its creator, investors and studio, it was a financial windfall that would change their lives—and the face of the horror genre—forever.
SEAN CUNNINGHAM:
Friday the 13th was made for about $600,000. We had $2.6 million in guarantees before the picture opened. And that was not the end of the line, just an advance against our participation. I didn't know what was going to happen. I just hoped that if the film were to do more than $6 or $7 million then I would see some real money. But back then, how many pictures saw that kind of return? Very few. Independent films? Almost none. So we were really fortunate there wasn't anything else going on at that time approaching the format of the film. And the success of Friday the 13th could never have been accomplished without Paramount and Warner Bros. They had the money and the resources to sell it, to put it into theaters and present it in such a way that it reached a mass audience.
Frank Mancuso decided to take a chance on this low-budget film with no stars and release it nationally. That had never been done before. He could have fallen on his face, but he believed in the film and took enormous chances. And he was absolutely correct. We happe
ned to be at the right time at the right place, and we were very, very lucky. The success of Friday the 13th was completely unanticipated by everybody, except maybe Mancuso. We sure didn't expect it.
FRANK MANCUSO, SR.:
What we started doing with Friday the 13th was target marketing, because I never believed we would have a demographic spillover for the film beyond, say, someone in their early 20s. That was it. The early 1980s was the beginning of when Hollywood started to realize that the teenage market was the driving force at the box office. The attraction of acquiring Friday the 13th for the studio was that it served a natural, frequent movie-going demographic. It was the right subject matter and the right title.
Everything we did on Friday was targeted, as opposed to something like JAWS. That was a mass audience picture, so their coverage in print, television and radio was much more general in purpose and intent. What we needed to discover was much more specific. What do teenagers listen to? What do they watch? Where do they go? What do they read? So in many ways our campaign for Friday the 13th was less expensive but much more effective.
GEORGE MANSOUR:
The original marketing for Friday the 13th was Hallmark's. And it could easily have been the idea of any of the guys in the office, because it was very loose and crazy. We didn't have an ad agency or anything like that. It wasn't until Paramount really came in on the third Friday that they were involved in the marketing. It's like what the Weinsteins do today. They're totally publicity-driven. They make much better movies, obviously, and they have much better taste and much higher budgets, but when it comes down to it, they run things on the basis of publicity and advertising. In a lot of ways, they're a high-class rip-off of the old Phil Scuderi school of film distribution. There are definite parallels there.
Crystal Lake Memories: The Complete History of Friday the 13th (Enhanced Edition) Page 12