It became clear to the young cast and crew of The Final Chapter that Joseph Zito's perfectionism would come into play well beyond the casting sessions. Those who soldiered under him came away from the experience with a range of emotions: many positive, some mixed, and a few bordering on hostile—particularly Ted White, a professional stuntman who became the fourth actor to win the role of Jason Voorhees. White's relationship with Zito was, by all accounts, initially positive; soon, however, the director's battlefield mentality and, in particular, his "tough love" approach to his actors clashed with White, who was already reluctant in accepting the role. The situation eventually boiled over during one particularly long, cold, bitter night out in the hills of Hollywood while shooting the film's most harrowing murder sequence. It would not be pretty.
"I wanted him to be a 35 year-old version of the kid we saw in the first film," says Tom Savini of Jason in The Final Chapter. "That's why I came back—I wanted to kill Jason personally. I gave him birth and it was up to me to get rid of him. And they paid me a fortune to do it!"
JOSEPH ZITO:
I wanted to change Jason. In a way, he was a little more humanized. He would hide his bodies, he would move them around, he nails a kid to a wall, and during the climax with Tommy, he listens to reason—sort of. So Jason had to move in different ways. And since we were making a departure with the character anyway, I thought it was important to hire a stuntman who could do that and take direction.
I had made a ridiculous decision during the making of The Prowler. I thought, "The guy under the mask, what does that matter?" But I was wrong. It is very, very important who's under that mask. On The Final Chapter, I auditioned a number of actors for the role, but we ultimately went with a guy who had tremendous experience as a stuntman and a double in many big Hollywood movies. And he was way older than any of the other Jasons—I think he was in his 60s at the time.
TED WHITE, "Jason Voorhees":
Before I did Jason I was a full-time stuntman. I doubled John Wayne for 40 years. I doubled Clark Gable. Those two guys kept me busy most of my career. Then I doubled Victor Mature and Rock Hudson, and I did the "Daniel Boone" series for six years. I was very busy. Right before The Final Chapter, I had done a film called Romancing the Stone that Bob Zemeckis directed. I did the opening—I'm the cowboy that walks in the hut to get the girl. I enter through the door, silhouetted in the frame. And I can't remember, but I think Mancini, or Mancuso—what the hell was his name?—he saw that and said, "Find out who he is. That's the guy we want for Jason."
It really was not a role. All I'm doing is killing and mangling these young kids. I hate to put it this way, but it's the God's honest truth: if it wasn't for the money, I never would have done the show. I even turned it down originally. It was on hold six weeks. But during that time, greed just took over and I said, "I'll do it."
TOM SAVINI, Special Makeup Effects:
He's a cowboy, Ted White. He would be in the parking lot, lassoing the rearview mirrors of cars as they went by.
COREY FELDMAN:
Ted White was a Jerry Lee Lewis type dude, and that was hard for me to relate to, 'cause I'm not a cowboy type. He was nice and kind, but distant. You'd see him playing poker and chewing tobacco with the crew guys, but he didn't have a lot of interaction with the cast. He stayed off in his own "Jason world." But out of all the Friday films that I've seen, I think he did the best job: menacing, brooding, with that stance and that walk. Silent, but deadly.
JOAN FREEMAN:
Ted White was a real cowboy. He used to chew tobacco, and carried around a cup he'd spit into. It was digusting!
TED WHITE:
After I decided that I was definitely going to go ahead and do the film, a friend of mine said, "My son has got all the tapes of the other movies." So I went over and watched one—maybe six or seven minutes of it—and I just decided I would do the same old walk that I normally do and not change anything.
But I did do things that none of the other Jasons did. I never, ever, took off my makeup while I was on the set, and I kept away from the cast and crew completely. And by doing so, I created a little bit of a mystique. When visitors would come onto the set, oddly enough they would not come up and talk to me. They would walk around quite a ways away and just look.
ERICH ANDERSON:
Ted hated every single aspect of it. We were all neophytes, and Ted was a seasoned stunt professional. We made mistake after mistake, and I think that was frustrating to Ted. Also, Joe was very demanding about what he wanted. Then, the last 40 scenes in the movie take place at night, and in the rain. And I don't know how many hours of makeup Ted had to go through just for the scene where Jason takes off his mask.
FRANK MANCUSO, JR.:
Personality conflicts that exist in the making of a film are like anything else in life. So many factors can affect someone's personality, and when you're together that many hours, that many days in a row, and then it's late, and everyone's tired—you can't take it seriously. Plus, I never felt that anyone was ever trying to undermine the well-being of the movie. I certainly didn't feel that with Ted.
TED WHITE:
I hate to tell it to you this way. Joe Zito and I, we started off pretty good for about the first six or seven days, but after that he became kind of a bully. And I'm not the kind of guy you can bully around. I don't like to see people get hurt, or abused. A lot of these kids I had to physically handle—I really had to grab 'em and do it. It just wasn't pleasant for me. I told Joe several times, "Kiss my ass," because he treated those kids like dirt. He really and truly did. They hired them for minimum. They got no money at all—I think at that time it was something like $455 a day. I'm sure not all of them had a bad experience, but it was just terrible what I had to do to them.
The new group of vacationers arrives at Crystal Lake.
JOSEPH ZITO:
The truth of the matter is that Ted's main problem was that he was embarrassed because of the Jason makeup. It actually made him drool—and he didn't want to be seen drooling. It wasn't an effect. It literally was choking him up, to have this thing on his teeth and all that. I know because Savini told me the story, too.
But the toughest thing on this guy, and the way we really actually could have lost Ted, was the scene at the lake. Oh, boy.
JUDIE ARONSON:
We shot my death scene in a reservoir in Coldwater Canyon—in December. They put me in a wetsuit, which went from my waist down, and then the raft had a hole in the bottom of it. My body went up through the hole vertically, like I was standing up—kind of floating—with my chest and my arms hanging over the edge of the raft. Then they connected a fake back from my shoulders down. This took hours to set up and film, from sundown until sunup. At night in L.A. it can get down to like 40 degrees—even the crew were in parkas. And I'm a California girl used to it always being 70 degrees. It was horrible.
TED WHITE:
It was extremely cold. We'd gone through four or five takes, and they weren't exactly right. Judie said, "Please, can I get out of the water?" And Joe said, "No, we'll be with you in just a few minutes." And she said, "Please, I'm freezing to death!" And they still said, "No." Finally, I said, "That does it. Get the girl outta the damn water right now, or I walk. I'm not gonna put up with this bullshit any longer. She's an 18-year-old kid and she's dying in that water, and you're telling her no?" Well, they got her out. But from that minute on, Joe and I never saw eye-to-eye.
JOSEPH ZITO:
Here's the real story. The toughest thing for Ted to do was stay in the water; he wanted to come out. He didn't want to finish the scene. Judie was cold, but she was fine. That girl was absolutely, 100 percent naked in that raft and a real trooper. Ted said, "Joe, I'm getting to feel cold; I'm feeling it in my bones, I don't want to stay in here."
It wasn't really a fight. The fight was this. I said, "You're not getting out of that lake." Yes, I bullied him into staying in the lake, when naked Judie was willing to stay there, and tough guy Ted wanted
to get out. That's a pisser. Ask Judie about that.
JUDIE ARONSON:
No, that's not true. When half of your body is in the water for that many hours it becomes really unbearable. I cried. I tried not to. I was a little bit delirious. I was out of my mind. I remember saying, "I can't do it anymore, I just can't go on," and they would be like, "A little bit more, just a little bit more." They would not let me stop, that I remember. At one point they did take me out and heated me up, but then I had to go back in. And it was just as miserable. It was just way too long to be outside in the water. Wetsuits don't matter when you're in it that long and it's cold out, and the wetsuit was only actually from the waist down, so my top part was still freezing.
I don't remember a lot about that night because I was really sick. In the true sense of hypothermia, I lost my mind. All I remember is when it ended. I couldn't even deal with taking my clothes off when I got home. All I could think about is, "I need to get warm really fast." I was in college at the time and I had a roommate, so I crawled into bed with her. We laugh about it now. I should have gone to the hospital, but I didn't. I was sick like a dog after that.
In retrospect, they absolutely should have just shot it in a tank, because during the actual shot where I die, you don't see anything around the raft anyway. And I would not accept that now. I would walk off. But at the time I just tried to grin and bear it.
JOSEPH ZITO:
I'm not trying to protect the story or deny it. I just know that I was never aware of Ted's concerns about anything but himself being too cold. He never said anything to me. He might have had a conversation with the assistant director. I would think as an experienced guy, it's very, very likely that he was an advocate for Judie. But she was okay. I don't want you to think we were completely crazy. We had professionals there—we had medical personnel and we had divers. It wasn't just like we thought, "Hey, lets go to a freezing cold lake and put a naked girl in it." Ted was right to be concerned, but we were concerned, too.
The truth is, I had no social relationship with Ted. I don't remember once talking to him outside of him being in character: "Do this" and "Stand there." I don't remember having a single conversation with the guy.
TED WHITE:
I kept telling Joe, "You just wait, when this movie is over, I'm gonna kick your ass." And when he yelled cut for the last time, he actually ran to the car just to get away from me. He's lucky, because I really was going to kick his ass. And that's the last time I saw him.
TOM MORGA, "Roy Stunt Double," Part V:
I like Ted. He's been in the business for years, and he's a good actor, done a lot of roles, and he knows how to make movies. But he is a very opinionated guy. And a guy that, because he's done hundreds of movies, if you're not really doing what he thinks you ought to be doing, or floundering around on set, he doesn't have a whole lot of tolerance. I'll tell you what: I don't know what happened on The Final Chapter, but nobody intimidates Ted White.
Top left: Doug (Peter Barton) and Sara (Barbara Howard) share a tender moment, one of many additional scenes shot for but deleted from the theatrical version of The Final Chapter. "You always end up shooting a longer movie, and a lot of the things get eliminated that only seem important on paper," says editor Joel Goodman. Much of this excised material, however, can be found on the film's DVD release, as well its frequent broadcast television airings—much to the chagrin of director Joseph Zito: "We, as filmmakers, are supposed to be involved with the TV versions of our films, but The Final Chapter is out there playing with scenes in it that were absolutely not ever supposed to be there. I can't even watch the TV version!"
DICK WIEAND, "Roy," Part V:
I remember meeting Ted, and the rest of the actors that played the early Jasons, when we all did an episode of "Good Morning America," with Joan Lunden. And Ted didn't have very good memories of The Final Chapter. Anyway, when they flew us all out to L.A., I remember Ted at the airport, coming in from New York. We were all there boarding the plane, but Ted was waiting there because he wanted first class, and he was going to wait there until they gave it to him. Then that night at dinner after we did the show, Ted ordered some sort of fish entree, where they have to skin and de-bone it right in front of you. And Ted gave this waiter such a hard time. I asked him, "Ted, we're eating on the company tonight. Why are you giving the guy such a hard time?" And Ted says, "Well, he doesn't have anything else to do anyway, does he?" That's the kind of guy Ted White is.
PETER BARTON:
I'll go along with backing up the Jason guy—Zito wasn't a caring kind of individual. I'm not trying to badmouth Joe, but he was all about being hard on Judie, because it was like, "Let's get it done." I could see Ted getting upset. No doubt about it. To be fair to Joe, probably he just didn't know. But the water was really cold, and unless you're in it, you don't know how painful it is when your body starts shutting down. He should have gotten in.
We were just making a movie. I always cared about it, but I also know that like in television, it's more a machine kind of thing—actors don't get a lot of takes. In my experience on The Final Chapter, Joe never worked with me. Never. And if you start caring so much about your performance, and then they just move on, you've got to be able to let it go, otherwise you get really angry. They couldn't care less about what the scene was about, or the acting. Their focus was on the effects, which I don't blame them for. Whatever came out of your mouth, it was like, "Fine, print. OK, next shot. Let's get to the killing."
JOEL GOODMAN, Editor:
I made little films in high school, but I didn't really want to go to film school, so I went to Berkeley but then dropped out to work as an apprentice editor for commercial house. But I always wanted to do features. Then I cut a documentary called No Nukes, and based on that Joey Zito gave me The Prowler. At the time of The Final Chapter, I had never even been to Los Angeles—it was like a foreign territory. And I had no idea how I was to go about cracking into that business. So I was thrilled to have the opportunity, and be moving ahead for myself.
Joe is very magnetic. He's got an intensity, and he sucks you into his world. In an alternate universe, Joe would be a general leading people up into some kind of bizarre battle, "We're gonna take that hill!
KIMBERLY BECK:
There wasn't a lot of respect for the process. People were like, "Oh, just get the fucking thing done and shut up!" I don't want to say anything bad about anyone because I really was grateful for the experience. I talked to Joe a little bit about it, but then you feel kind of stupid because of the way they're approaching it. But Joe was so sweet. He was just really, really serious. But then, we all were.
ERICH ANDERSON:
Joe's thing was that he didn't want this to come off as a cheap horror movie. Joe wanted what he wanted, and we did it until he was happy with it. We were supposed to shoot for 6 weeks and we shot for 12. We went way over. It was because Joe was a perfectionist. He wasn't concerned so much with fulfilling the needs of those paying the bills as he was determined to make a good movie. I always admired that. And in the end—at least at that time—it was considered the ace of that series, from a critical standpoint.
BARBARA HOWARD:
Joe and I—we certainly weren't close. It was not like how I've felt with some other directors that I've worked with. I didn't leave with any sort of relationship with him whatsoever. We had a better rapport in the audition process—I remember him being warmer and seeming to be interested in the character. But once we were shooting… maybe he just felt he cast well. Sometimes, after that, the director will just get out of your way.
BARNEY COHEN:
I learned a butt-load of "Zito-isms" on The Final Chapter. Like, never audition for a job you already have. And that no matter what you're doing, you have to work at the top of your craft. I eventually took the movie very seriously, but I didn't start out taking it seriously. I started out kidding and joking—being "better" than the material. And Zito kept calling me on it. He finally said, "You're not
better than this, or you would be writing stuff that's better than this, so let's do the best we can." He was right, I was disrespecting the material. I think what I learned most from The Final Chapter is that no matter what it is you're doing, it is what you're doing, so you've got to do it as good as you can. And that is in part thanks to Joe. I still keep that close to my heart.
In the three years between the release of Friday the 13th and pre-production on The Final Chapter, special makeup effects wizard Tom Savini became something of a star in his own right. Dubbed the "guru of gore" by the press, few makeup effects artists in history remain as closely associated with the art of gruesome, bloody effects as Savini; in fact, his illusions have been so influential that, arguably, his is one of the most recognizable names of any personality from the 1980's slasher era outside of, perhaps, Jamie Lee Curtis. Savini even became a key component in the marketing campaigns of the films to which he contributed: when a fledgling new studio called Miramax rolled out the press junket for their 1981 Friday the 13th clone, The Burning, they didn't bother to send any of the actors (including then-unknowns Holly Hunter and Jason Alexander). The only star worth mentioning was Tom Savini.
Left: Ted White, as Jason, finds his next victim—Paul (Alan Hayes) meets the receiving end of Jason's spear. Note the thin wires required to suspend the actor to achieve the effect.
ERICH ANDERSON:
Every time someone would ask what film I was working on and I'd say Friday the 13th, they'd ask, "Do you know Tom Savini!?" He was the star.
JOSEPH ZITO:
It'll offend one or two, but I'll tell this story anyway. I thought it was really important to get Tom Savini. At this point, we had done The Prowler together and I knew how terrific Tom was. And the character of Tommy Jarvis is definitely an homage to Tom Savini—Tommy's obsessions are Tom's obsessions. But even more important, Tom had conceived of the look of Jason, and as we were going for a real revelation in The Final Chapter, to really show Jason behind the mask, I felt it was imperative for Tom to build upon what he had created.
Crystal Lake Memories: The Complete History of Friday the 13th (Enhanced Edition) Page 32