Crystal Lake Memories: The Complete History of Friday the 13th (Enhanced Edition)

by Peter M. Bracke

  I say this reluctantly because I don't know how I would do it differently. It would have been fun to have designed a detailed character makeup for Jason, including body appliances, but hell, with six weeks to do it all in, including all the blood effects, there just wasn't time. As it was, I had exactly one day to design and sculpt Jason's head—that was it! Then one day for research, sculpting, everything, the whole concept. That is unreasonably fast.

  MEG SIMON:

  The casing of Jason was the strangest part of doing the movie. I remember late during auditions, there was a guy who came in to audition for Jason, but by then we weren't even casting anymore. And he sat in the waiting room for hours with a machete, dead silent and just staring. I eventually sent out my assistant to go get rid of him. But to this day, I still don't know who that guy was...

  WARRINGTON GILLETTE, "Jason Voorhees":

  Like a lot of young artists, I had come to New York seeking fame and fortune. I was going to school at the time at the Lee Strasberg Institute and trying to get into the Actor's Studio. My agent submitted me for the role John Furey ended up playing. I don't know what happened in the audition, but I didn't get the part, although they liked me. They said, "We know you've been to the Hollywood Stuntman's School and that you can handle all the stunts. Would you like to be Jason?" The idea of running around killing people and offering them to my mother's head seemed amusing. So I said, "I'd be happy to do anything you want."

  "Walt Gorney was a great man, a very serious actor and very fun to have around on Part 1," says Steve Miner. I just knew we had to get him back for Part 2."

  TASO STAVRAKIS, Effects Assistant, Part 1:

  After Friday the 13th became this big thing, Steve Miner called me and said, "We're going to do a sequel. Do you want to play Jason?" And I said, "I don't think so." I remember silence over the line. Steve was like, "Are you serious?" But I hated the idea of sequels, and I was an "actor." I also didn't want to do effects for the rest of my life. And Tom Savini wasn't going to do it, either.

  So I'm an idiot. That was one of the biggest mistakes of my life. I wish I had worked on Part 2, if only to have worked with Steve. And since that day, I haven't spoken with him. Ever. If I could, I would say, "I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I wrecked my career. And I'm sorry I made it harder on you."

  WARRINGTON GILLETTE:

  Carl Fullerton was instructed by Steve Miner to make Jason look as bad as he could. So they went to a dentist to make Jason have the worst dental problems you've ever seen in your life. And the dentist made these horrendous sets of dentures with built-up gums that went in my mouth. It really distorted my face. Then they had rubber forms glued all over my head and closed one eye off, which is very painful for 12 hours at a time. You get a little dizzy and lose your depth perception. And I had to do all these stunts not really knowing where I was. I had the fake eye, the teeth and all this mongoloid hair. It had a little bit of the Elephant Man look to the structures of the skull.

  Add to that, you are living your day in reverse. You have breakfast at 6:00 p.m., lunch at midnight, dinner at sunrise. If I was in the makeup chair, I was there for six or seven hours. I might start at noon and then they'd be ready to film at seven, and that crap would be on me the entire day. So they can't feed you—all you can do was drink through a straw. And you look horrendous.

  Normally I'm not that hostile and violent. I'm more of an easy-going guy. However, I will tell you that the makeup made me very angry. They went overboard. The process was more shocking and painful than I had anticipated. But I dealt with it.

  CARL FULLERTON:

  It took about 7 and a half hours to put the damned thing on. Ultimately about one-fourth of his face is normal. The rest of his head is encased in very complicated latex appliances, with dentures and a false eye and bald cap that is functional in holding down his hair, and also gave me a base to glue on the other pieces. It was a very primitive technique. And the actor certainly spent far too much time in the makeup chair.

  BILL RANDOLPH:

  Warrington was a strange character. It was interesting because he was a good-looking guy. I don't know if he had a lot of money but he sure had the nicest clothes out of everybody else there. He was kind of a fish out of water. He wasn't really an actor, and he wasn't really a crew guy. The rumor that was going around the set was, essentially, that he claimed to be a stuntman but wasn't. He and the stunt coordinator got into it: "What stunts have you actually done? Who has paid you to do stunts? What's the real deal here?" And instead of just saying, "Look, I'm here on a wing and a prayer, can you use me anyway?" kind of deal, Warrington wouldn't really come clean. It just ballooned.

  CLIFF CUDNEY, Stunt Coordinator:

  The whole situation with Warrington came to a head during the climactic scene when Jason is supposed to crash through the window at Amy Steel. We filmed that early on. Steve Miner wanted Jason in slow motion, going up through the window, like he was heading for the ceiling, then almost freeze in mid-air. So I had to design a special rig that was like a pendulum. Warrington was on the end of it and it swung him up through the window, and when it got to the right height, we just held it there. And he was strapped in a harness under the clothing, and it came out his back so you couldn't see it. But when we tried putting him on the rig, he couldn't handle it. The first time we did it, he didn't even get halfway through the window.

  PETER STEIN:

  It was really awful. We shot it in regular motion and in slow motion, with two cameras from two different angles. And poor Warrington. They had him on this swing contraption, and he was supposed to go through this sugar glass window, but his head went right into the top of the window frame. Oh, god, it was a really rough few days of shooting. Just really intense and unpleasant.

  RICHARD FEURY:

  It was a half-day's work just to get this one shot—very little page count for a low-budget motion picture. And it just didn't look impressive. You could clearly see, without even looking at the film, that it didn't work. Even the camera operators were worried about it. And then they got the film back and it definitely didn't work—there was this big piece of window frame that stayed perfectly in line between the lens and Jason's face on the main camera, all the way through the shot. So there were a lot of meetings about it, and the whole thing had to be reshot.

  Amy Steel won the lead role of Ginny Field much to the delight of casting director Meg Simon. "We thought Amy Steel was terrific. Great spirit, great personality, she had talent, and she was gorgeous!"

  WARRINGTON GILLETTE:

  They built a platform outside of the house and it was long enough so that I knew I had three steps to take before the stunt. Just one, two, three, then jump and bust the whole window out. And I did this about 10 times. It didn't work the first time. The boards of the window pane didn't break—I just slammed into them and bounced right back. They scored them but they didn't cut them. Then they made some adjustments and we just kept doing it.

  I was crying underneath all that stuff, so I had eyes tearing and snot coming out of my nose. There was blood. It was quite a spectacle. No question, I was angry. There was no method acting requirement at all. I wanted to kill somebody. I'm drooling and snot is coming out of my nose. I was hurting. I was in pain. The Jason face was horrific.

  STEVE MINER:

  The first time we filmed that sequence, it just didn't work. There was a lot to coordinate. I just didn't figure it out properly.

  AMY STEEL:

  It was so horrible. I remember one day Steve Miner said, "We have to drive into town." So we go on this drive, just talking, and it's beautiful. Then he said, "I have some news I need to tell you. We have to do that scene again."

  Steve had to talk me through it. I'm sitting there going, "Muffin! Come here, Muffin!" Then they'd hook up the high-speed camera, which goes "Rrrrrrr!" And I know someone is behind me, waiting to go, "Bam!" I had to act all calm and the dog is coming up. And some guy is about to bash through behind me. The fake glass and the balsa woo
d and Jason behind me, swinging on one of those rig things—that was truly the worst part of making the whole movie.

  JOHN FUREY:

  I remember Warrington was kind of a WASP-y rich kid or something. He finally quit after two weeks. I don't think he wanted to do the physical stuff and I don't know if he was any good at it, either. Steve Miner just said he sucked.

  WARRINGTON GILLETTE:

  For someone 21 or 22 years old to be working in a motion picture, I thought, "Aw, man this is my break into Hollywood. This is great! I got a part! I'll be a big star." Then I get a bag on my head. Then I have to jump through a window to kill Amy Steel with a machete through my shoulder and blood squirting all over the place. It was a shock. When you're trying to break into the business and you get a part that requires you to have a bag over your head, stomping around and killing people, it's just not that exciting.

  AMY STEEL:

  I had a personal connection with Warrington—I knew his family in Florida and we were from the same town and had friends in common. I knew he wasn't very happy because of all the prosthetics, and he realized that he was basically a stuntman wearing a mask. I think we should all just be thankful Jason ended up being played by a real stunt guy.

  STEVE DASKAWICZ, "Jason Stunt Double":

  I had been acting since 1977. My very first movie was called Wolfen, then I got a part as a cop in Nighthawks. That is where I met Cliff Cudney. Then Cliff had gotten this show called "Jason." He called me and said, "Can you get up to Connecticut? The guy we hired to do the lead role didn't work out." I have to tell you, I was ecstatic. A starring part in a film! This was the biggest thing in my life. I even had to borrow 20 dollars from my brother-in-law for gas just to get up to the set because I had no money.

  Then Cliff greets me and takes me in to see Steve Miner and Dennis Murphy. They looked me up and down and say, "He looks pretty good—take him over to wardrobe and see if he fits." So we get over there and he hands me the shoes, and they were too small. But they say, "You have to wear the shoes because we already shot some scenes of the character walking through the woods." Then they say, "Okay, he looks great. Get the bag." I said to Cliff, "What's the bag?" Cliff says, "Oh, I forgot to tell you. You're going to have a bag over your head." I'm like, "You're fucking kidding me! I'm going to have a bag over my head? I thought I had the lead role in a film! Now nobody's going to see me?" Then Cliff says, "Well, at the end, they take your bag off and you have this hideous face." So they put the bag on and I ask, "You want to give me a script?" And they say, "You don't really need a script. There's a lot of grunts and groans and you're chasing people and killing them." This is unbelievable. I have the lead role in a film and I don't have any lines and nobody's going to see my face. Then for the final insult, Steve Miner said, "There's one more thing. Warrington's agent won't release us from the Jason credit, so we'll have to give you billing as 'Jason's Stunt Double.'" So I go from lead role to no role.

  Needless to say, I was disappointed. But I just said, "What the hell?"

  Jack Marks as Deputy Winslow.

  As the early weeks of filming commenced, the on-set presence of a baby-faced, incongruously well-dressed production assistant went largely unnoticed. While few paid much attention to the ambitious young man, one of the most important figures in the future of the Friday the 13th franchise was about to make his introduction.

  RICHARD FEURY:

  We had three production assistants and one of them was Frank Mancuso, Jr. Now, normally, a P.A. comes dressed very sloppily to work. Then I meet Frank and he has this very nice late-model Corvette and expensive shoes and slacks. And I had him getting refills on coffee. By the third night, he said, "I really can't be going off and getting coffee and stuff." My initial reaction was, "What are you talking about? You're a P.A.! Don't give me this shit!" And he goes, "Well, I'm really here to keep an eye on things for my father." So I ask, "Who's your father?" And he replies, "Frank Mancuso. He's a Vice-President at Paramount Pictures."

  I just walked away, put on my walkie-talkie and yelled to Dennis Murphy, "Dennis! Do you know who Frank Mancuso is?" And Dennis acted as though he didn't. In retrospect, Dennis is a smart man and I am fairly sure he was just putting on a good act for me. He had to have known who Frank Mancuso was.

  DENNIS MURPHY, Co-Producer:

  I knew, but no one else did. I called Frank Jr. right before we were to begin production and said, "Frank, if you really want to be part of the company, do yourself a big favor and don't drive your nice Corvette up there." Sure enough, he came up with his Corvette. And I realized that he had no intention of disguising who he was. And that's okay. It's a choice he made and I think it was a right choice, actually, all things considered.

  FRANK MANCUSO, JR., Associate Producer:

  I grew up in Buffalo, and then in Toronto. My dad was involved in film sales, but not too much in the making of movies. His influence on me was that, probably more than most people, I started to think realistically about a life in the industry earlier than I otherwise would have. In him, I saw somebody enjoying what he did, and that meant something.

  In my middle-to-late teens, I worked at Paramount in different places and different departments—the acquisition of grosses, that kind of thing. I learned a lot about marketing and distribution. But it became clear to me early on that what I was more interested in was coming up with ideas and making movies that I wanted to see. I had worked on several movies over summers where you're the gopher and did whatever needed to be done. And I liked the process. I liked the creative engagement. I loved watching people push themselves. Plus, I had no interest in acting nor did I want to direct. So what that really told me was that I wanted to produce. It became very clear to me.

  The guys who financed the Friday the 13th movies were exhibitors out of Boston, so they had a relationship with Paramount. Because of my dad, they knew I was getting out of school and that I had worked on productions. So they said, "If he wants to work on this production, there's a space for him." I was probably close to 20 or 21 years old.

  RICHARD FEURY:

  Right from the beginning we all felt a lot more secure than we had on the first film, now knowing that there was a deal upfront with Paramount. At least it was, "Great. I'm going to get paid." Although nobody from the studio ever came up—it was just clear that they were involved once Frank Jr. revealed who he was. Eventually we had a different P.A. come in to replace Frank, and then Frank never left the set. The word was out by the next day that he was now an associate producer. But he was smart. He never lorded over me or any of the other P.A.s. Everybody was ready to not respect him for not coming in and being upfront. But clearly he knew what to do in his situation. He didn't even have to put on any airs. I think his father had trained him well.

  After his arrival, I think we all thought it was much more of a "real" picture after that. All of a sudden, we had six weeks of rain and six weeks of Steadicam. We knew were all going to be working a lot harder and we were going to be a lot wetter and a lot colder. But the Steadicam made the movie interesting. It was a new toy at that time, and to have the camera moving like that made it scarier. Steve Miner really pushed for it. It was a good idea, but there was a lot of discussion going on, "Can we afford this?" I think Frank Jr. was part of that decision, to spend the money. To this day, I believe that his presence truly elevated the movie.

  Left: Warrington Gillette (center), in full Jason makeup, poses with John Furey (left) and Steve Miner. Top right and bottom right: Makeup effects designer Carl Fullerton shows off his newest creation (Warrington Gillette, in makeup). Hired to reinterpret Tom Savini's original design concept of Jason Voorhees, Fullerton aged the character considerably but maintained a consistency in appearance to ensure continuity with the original film.

  PETER STEIN:

  On Part 2 we had a bigger budget and a bigger crew. Enough to do it right, I think. And halfway through the movie, there was a big discussion to bring in more elements, including rain, which is always
very expensive. And then the Steadicam came onboard. I think many of the shots were conceived for the Steadicam originally by Steve and Marty Kitrosser, the script supervisor, who was very instrumental in helping plan shots with him. And then Steve became totally taken with it. Then all of a sudden, they decided to use it for a lot more scenes, which was great. I could focus more on the lighting, we could get more movement, and real coverage within the house, which wasn't even a set. It was all on location. I think all those factors really influenced the effectiveness of Part 2. I think that is why many people say it is, at least, a better-looking film than the original Friday.

  RON KURZ:

  There was an incident where we were viewing some completed footage at a local theater and Steve was concerned about some technical aspect. Frank Jr. got on the payphone in the lobby, said the word "Mancuso," and within minutes had the top technical man at Paramount on the line. He was just a kid, although one with the right last name.

  AMY STEEL:

  Frank Mancuso, Jr. was incredible. He was a baby, but he was always very serious. All of us would be partying and he would be working. And he could read the day-to-day budget boards like no one else. He was a really brilliant producer. He came out as "dad's kid," and when he left he had earned a lot of respect.

  FRANK MANCUSO, JR.:

  I didn't have a title and I was making $175 a week. I don't think anybody paid any attention to who I was or why I was there. I was just another guy working on the movie. That was the grace. I didn't start off as the boss. It's unwise, no matter how much you know, to go out there and presume that because you have a certain title that you're the most informed.

  I simply got the opportunity to do the gig based on certain fortuitous moves I made and I ended up with a good working relationship with the director and I had a keen understanding of the whole issue of fiscal responsibility. I had made certain fortunate moves in scheduling that they had benefited from. And because they seemed to like me, they just kept giving me more responsibility, and as I received more responsibility, I took advantage of it and continued to push it.