I loved working on The Series. Frank Mancuso, Jr. was fabulous. He let every director make his own little movie. And one day, while I was shooting an episode called "Thirteen O'Clock," Frank Jr. brought his dad to the set. I shook his hand and I was all enthusiastic: "We're doing this subway shot, and time's going to stop, and everything's going to go into black and white, then she's going to step out and everything is going to go back to color!" Then I went off and didn't think too much about it. A few weeks later, Frank Jr. called me and literally just said, "How would you like to write and direct the next Friday the 13th feature?"
In retrospect, there must have been half a dozen other guys up for the job. So maybe bringing his father down was a kind of audition, I don't know. But on The Series I was doing stuff differently, and I think they were ready to do a different kind of Friday the 13th movie.
Left Director Rob Hedden on the Vancouver set of Jason Takes Manhattan. Hedden had directed several episodes of Friday the 13th: The Series when producer Frank Mancuso, Jr. selected him to helm Part VIII of the theatrical film series. Right: In order to maintain secrecy during the three-month shoot, many substitute titles for Part VIII were used during production. "We very specifically changed the title of the movie during filming so no one would know what we were shooting," says Rob Hedden. "Because if people knew that Jason was walking down their street, everyone would want to come out and touch him, or get an autograph. Or maybe get beaten by him, I don't know!"
JOHN CARL BUECHLER, Director, Part VII:
I was omitted from the eighth one. Phil Scuderi was at the first screening of Part VII at Paramount, and he said, "Oh, you've got to do all of them. You're great!" And then I was not allowed to see him again. Barbara Sachs blackballed me after that because I did what I did in Part VII—I gave fans a look at Jason they wouldn't have gotten otherwise.
I would have stayed with the franchise, and I would have gone creepier with Part VIII. My idea was that Tina has been committed to a mental hospital, because everyone thinks she was the one who killed everybody in Part VII. But her boyfriend Nick is back too, saying, "No, it wasn't her!" And then, of course, Jason returns and he's killing everybody, and finally there's a big showdown. That would have been a hell of a movie. But what do you call it? "Friday the 13th Part VII—Vol. 2?" Maybe I would have tried to involve aspects of the other sequels in it. But I would have loved to have done more Fridays.
KANE HODDER, "Jason Voorhees":
The two characters I wished they would have brought back to the series were, of course, Betsy Palmer, and Lar Park Lincoln. Those two, out of all of 'em, would be the ones most fans wanted to see, even in cameos. The character of Tina was just so well received—nobody ever battled Jason like that.
LAR PARK LINCOLN, "Tina," Part VII:
Fans always want to know why I didn't do Part VIII. I was asked, but we never got past the negotiations. They offered so little money that my manager at the time was like, "You are going to have such a problem being typed, so let's try to get a little more." And we weren't asking for the moon. But Paramount, of course, wouldn't pay for anything.
I actually wrote a script for Part VIII and pitched it to Frank. It had Tina grown into a psychologist, and she's now helping young people who have gone through similar mental problems. And, of course, Jason comes back. It was quite cool, and my husband and I had a ball writing it together. But then the offer came in and it was so pathetic. And a woman named Barbara something was one of the producers, and she said, "That's not what we are planning on doing with a Part VIII." So they went in a different direction. But we had big hopes of Part VIII continuing Tina's story.
KEVIN SPIRTAS, "Nick," Part VII:
I actually wrote a really great spec script for a Part VIII. It was a vehicle for me. My take was that Part VII was all a dream, and I killed off Lar Park Lincoln. I don't know if it would have been a Jason movie in the traditional sense, but it definitely would be great to have tried it. I still want to sell it at some point.
ROB HEDDEN:
When I got the call to do the movie, I wasn't the equivalent of a Friday the 13th Trekkie. So the first thing I did was watch all seven of the previous movies. I especially liked the first one, and though all of the sequels have their moments, I really loved Part VI. Yet even if I hadn't seen all the movies, by the time of Part VIII, everybody knew what it was about. It was in the public vernacular. So I wanted to deliver what was expected by the fans, but also something fresh. I thought, "There's a responsibility that comes with this, but at the same time, what can I do differently than the other directors had before me?"
I pitched to Frank and Barbara in his office. I said, "Can I take Jason out of Crystal Lake? Can we take him and put him in a big city?" And Frank says, "Oh, Jason takes Manhattan." I said, "God, that's brilliant! I can see the ad campaign. It's going to be great!" I wasn't even thinking New York. I was just thinking in a broader scope. Then they asked, "How are we going to get him to New York?" So I said, "The kids of Crystal Lake are going to take a cruise for their graduation. And no one knows exactly where Crystal Lake is anyway—it's close enough to New York." They all loved that. Frank said, "Cruise ship, great!"
The way I envisioned it, for the first third of the movie we'd be on the boat, then we'd get to New York at the end of Act I. Everything about New York was going to be completely exploited and milked. There was going to be a tremendous scene on the Brooklyn Bridge. A boxing match in Madison Square Garden. Jason would go through department stores. He'd go through Times Square. He'd go into a Broadway play. He'd even crawl onto the top of the Statue of Liberty and dive off. Of course, just about none of that made it into the movie.
RANDOLPH CHEVELDAVE, Producer:
I've been interested in film all of my life, by virtue of the fact that my father was a motion picture distributor and exhibitor. He and his partner had a chain of small town theatres throughout British Columbia, so my earliest memories are of sitting in my father's theatres and watching movies for hours. Though I was never too interested in distribution or the exhibition, only production, and living just outside of Vancouver there were no film schools at the time. So I went to theatre school at the University of Victoria.
Jason Takes Manhattan was my first producing credit. I had met Frank Mancuso, Jr. out of the blue, when he phoned me about locations for a project called April Fool's Day. He and the director, Fred Walton, were not able to find anything suitable in Vancouver, so I took them around Victoria, and there was one place that was perfect—it looked like it had been designed for the script. I ended up the production manager on that show.
Frank and I had gotten along quite well, so when he was contemplating producing Jason Takes Manhattan up in Canada, he called me and said, "Do you think this movie could be done in Vancouver?" But at that point there was no script, just an outline that Rob Hedden had written. And Rob was signed to take it from outline to script, and if everybody was happy, then he would be assigned to direct it. At that point, at least the outline I saw, it was only Jason on a cruise ship, and the Manhattan part came in later. The storm at sea wasn't in the outline, either. So it was decided, because of budgetary reasons, to only include Manhattan a little bit.
"That was one of the scariest moments I've heard had on film, for real," says actress Tiffany Paulsen of Part VIII's opening prologue kill. Paulsen, who plays graduating Crystal Lake High student Suzi Donaldson, finds her and her boyfriend at the deadly end of Jason's spear gun after the amorous pair's boat inadvertently awakens him from his watery grave. "They put me up against the fake wall of the boat," remembers Paulsen, "and they were shooting an actual spear gun! I just remember them specifically going, 'Okay, we have one shot at this, and if you screw it up, it's gonna be a long time and we're gonna have to rebuild the wall.' So the look on my face when they fired the actual spear at me is absolute real, sheer terror. It worked!"
ROB HEDDEN:
The one thing everybody says is it's not "Jason Takes Manhattan," it's "Jason T
akes a Cruise Ship." And I agree. But in my first outline it was flopped the other way. It had all this great New York stuff in it. Then the preliminary budget people took a look at it and said, "We're only going to give you $4 million to make this movie. You can't do all this. You're going to get one week in New York, if you're lucky, and the rest is going to be shot in the cheapest place we can find." And that was Vancouver. So I said, "Okay, we'll make Vancouver look like New York and we'll do it that way." But they came back again with, "You can't do the Brooklyn Bridge in Vancouver. You can't do Madison Square Garden in Vancouver. You can't do the Statue of Liberty in Vancouver." Pretty soon it was half New York, half on the boat. Then it was the last third in New York. It just kept getting whittled down and whittled down.
FRANK MANCUSO, JR., President, Hometown Films:
We were not in the position to shoot the whole movie in New York because, quite simply, we didn't have the money. And no one ever thought about asking for more, because the reason the movies were making profits was because we were able to control the costs. The budgets for the Friday the 13th movies were always determined by the box office of the previous film, and what we thought we'd get on the new one.
But the opportunity was there to use New York—a monster in an urban center. That became the whole reason to make a Part VIII. It was a concept piece that we could let Rob run with. And we really liked Rob. He had directed a couple of episodes of The Series, and we all thought he did some really good work on it. I felt he deserved a chance to break through on the feature side and this could be his shot.
MICHAEL SHEEHY, VP Creative Affairs, Hometown Films:
To be honest, I don't remember how or why we ended up in New York. To me, it would have been more interesting to have the whole movie take place on a cruise ship, because it's such a confined area. Look at Dead Calm—that was a phenomenal film.
ROB HEDDEN:
If I had already been in the ring a few times, I may have had the balls to say, "I'm not going to make a movie called Jason Takes Manhattan when only a half hour of the movie takes place in New York." But I was a first-time director who was thrilled to be doing a movie. And I was, and still am, a very can-do kind of person. When somebody says to me, "You've got this amount of money and this is what you can do," my answer is, "I'm going to do it. I can do it. I will do it. I'll make it the best movie I can make." And that's what I said. But I also said, "For the record, I think it should be more New York." And Frank replied, "You're right—it should be more New York. But we can't." I was not about to walk away from it. It was too great of an opportunity. And I was excited. "Fine, we'll make this boat the centerpiece. We'll do a disco on the boat. We'll do all this great stuff."
I think any person out there making films considers every choice they make and wonders, "Is this going to hurt me or help me?" But at the same time, I couldn't have been more excited and thrilled to be given the chance. I've done a lot of stuff before and since where you mention the title and the reaction is, "I didn't see that." But there's instant recognition with Friday the 13th. I knew that having this franchise behind me would be a wonderful thing. These are classic movies and they'll be scaring people for generations. So I only had to doubt it for half a second: "Hmmm, am I making a mistake? No. I'm the luckiest guy on Earth!"
Production on Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan officially set sail on February 8, 1989, in one of the most picturesque provinces of Canada—Vancouver, British Columbia. One of the challenges of casting any Friday the 13th has always been finding a group of talented young hopefuls on the verge of their first break who could play genuine, believable teenagers within the constraints of the formulaic plot requirements. But Jason Takes Manhattan would prove a particularly unique journey, combining both American and Canadian talent in a Friday film for the first time, and setting cast and crew adrift on a luxury cruise liner for the start of what became an exhausting, nearly three-month, shoot.
Writer/director Rob Hedden also chose to cast his lead actress—the resilient, beautiful, yet troubled "final girl" who ultimately reveals a past connection to Jason—somewhat against the established "blonde and plucky" Friday the 13th stereotype. And among the sea of fresh new faces, at least one familiar passenger was back on board. Kane Hodder would become the first actor ever to don the world-famous hockey mask more than once. Kane's enthusiastic and always menacing portrayal of Jason ensured that the graduating class of Crystal Lake High would have the voyage of their lives.
Writer/director Rob Hedden's oriignal storyboards for Part VIII's opening kill.
ROB HEDDEN:
Every character in this movie is not just some random choice. They are all people who are reflective of what I thought was going on in teenage America at that time. And that is something that is not, of course, my brilliant new idea—it has been around in all seven Fridays prior to mine.
In casting, I was looking for actors that I felt the audience could relate to—the trick being, of course, to find new talent who don't look too old and aren't too polished. And, are they going to be fun to work with? Because you don't want to be stuck on a ship for a couple of months with people that are going to make your life miserable.
JENSEN DAGGETT, "Rennie":
I always just assumed that I would be an actor, because I worshiped my grandmother growing up, and she had been an actor before she got married. Her debut was in Gone With the Wind—a little more impressive than my first film role. So I pursued theatre in high school and loved it. And when I turned 18 years old, I moved to L.A. and studied with Stella Adler at her conservatory in Hollywood. I was also lucky enough to have crashed an audition with a casting director that liked me enough to get me an interview with a wonderful agent. After I signed with her, she sent me to a meeting with one of the top managers in Hollywood. I had an incredible team right off the bat—I was feeling that the whole world was open to me, and the sky was the limit. I felt like I was exactly where I was meant to be.
I remember the audition for Part VIII well. I met Rob Hedden and spoke for a moment about what they were looking for, and then read the audition scenes. After that, I literally had a "scream test." They asked me to scream several different ways on camera. I went all out and they seemed impressed with my vocal cords and my reading. I left there feeling pretty confident. And I had grown up watching the series, so when they called me to let me know that I had gotten the role, I was excited, even though honestly, it was not really the kind of film I had imagined doing when I moved to Hollywood. But I thought, "Okay, not everybody gets to say that they killed Jason." And I liked Rennie because she begins the film a little repressed and unsure of herself, and is forced to become strong overnight. Or, to be more exact, over a weekend.
ROB HEDDEN:
You'd be surprised who auditioned. Renee Estevez came in. Michelle Pfieffer's younger sister, Dee Dee. Pamela Anderson, too. And Elizabeth Berkley. Elizabeth had the look, the body, the sex appeal, but there was something that was…I don't know. She was great. I can't say anything negative about anybody who didn't get the part.
But Rennie is this sympathetic innocent girl who's got this troubled past and you want to feel for her right from the get-go. How do you find innocence in Hollywood? Jensen came in and, you know, it's so subjective, but she had that innocence and those eyes. Even her skin glowed. She had the tears, this kind of sensuous look, and the camera loved her. She was vulnerable. Plus, at the end of the day, you have to ask yourself, "Am I attracted to her?" and be able to answer, "Yes."
RANDOLPH CHEVELDAVE:
Jensen Daggett beat them all, hands down. Absolutely. Looking at all the audition tapes, she was the one who shined.
KELLY HU, "Eva":
I was born and raised in Hawaii. I pretty much told my mother that I was moving to Hollywood to be a superstar when I was four years old—I didn't know there was another word for "actor." I would have done it for free. I loved performing. I took ballet when I was a kid, and jazz and acrobatics—anything tha
t gave me an audience. Acting was just sort of in my blood.
Part VIII was my very first-ever film. I auditioned for it while I was in L.A. and they flew me up to Vancouver. The only apprehension I had was that right after I got it, I was at dinner with Martin Sheen—I'm a friend of his son, Ramon—and we'd just gotten back from church. Ramon said, "Oh, dad, Kelly's doing a movie! She's going to do a Friday the 13th!'" Then I got lectured for like three hours, because Martin thought it was evil. But I was so excited to be doing my first movie that even Martin Sheen wasn't going to change my mind.
Graduating Class of Crystal Lake High. Left to right: Jensen Daggett as Rennie; Scott Reeves as Sean; V.C. Dupree as Julius.
SHARLENE MARTIN:
Rob Hedden had come up to Vancouver to begin casting. I'm originally from Canada, and they were really looking at that point for more Vancouver actors, because they already had quite a few people they were bringing in from California I interviewed with a Canadian casting agent first, and then I met Rob and we really got along well right away. And he's just the nicest guy in the entire world. So they sent my audition tapes down to Paramount in L.A., and I got the part. It really was exciting, and for me, to do a Friday the 13th was a big deal.
I also really liked my character. Tamara Mason, I would definitely call her manipulative, definitely older than her years. She would blackmail, she would do whatever it took to get what she wanted. And she had a goal—there was nothing that was going to get in the way of her getting that A! And so that biology project blackmail scheme she pulls on her teacher, for her, that was nothing out of the ordinary. So it was really fun playing her, because, thankfully, we are not the same at all.
MARTIN CUMMINS, "Wayne":
In Canada in the 1980s, the big American promotion machine rolled right on up. So everyone knew Friday the 13th—it wasn't just an American thing. But in Vancouver, at that point, they didn't do a lot of movies here. It was predominately a television town, so this was a very big deal. And I was 19 years old and this was my first movie. It was very exciting.
Crystal Lake Memories: The Complete History of Friday the 13th (Enhanced Edition) Page 59