For those who haven’t seen Friday The 13th Part 7: The New Blood, this article contains spoilers.
Jason Voorhees is one of the most enduring figures in horror. Regardless if you love or hate the franchise, there’s no denying its impact on popular culture. Often overlooked is what went into making the 12-film series. Through extensive research and interviews, I’m inviting you to take a closer look at each of the Friday The 13th films. This is Crystal Lake Confessional.
By 1987, audiences were enthralled by A Nightmare On Elm Street‘s charismatic antagonist, Freddy Kreuger, so much so that Friday The 13th executive producer Frank Mancuso Jr wanted Kreuger as the next threat to Jason. The only problem was New Line Cinema wasn’t interested in the matchup as A Nightmare On Elm Street 3 more than doubled Friday The 13th Part 6‘s theatrical haul.
Freddy didn’t need Jason but Jason needed a legitimate adversary.
To maintain the supernatural element, Mancuso shopped directors with genre film experience. This led him directly to Empire Pictures special effects mastermind John Carl Buechler. Although reluctant to sign on at first, Buechler liked the idea of doing something different with the franchise.
Like a counselor up against Jason, Buechler found himself at the mercy of both the MPAA and an ambitious associate producer, Barbara Sachs.
Friday The 13th Part 7 begins as telekinetic 10-year-old Tina Shepard accidentally drowns her abusive father in Crystal Lake. Nearly a decade later, the emotionally unstable Tina is brought back to the lake by her therapist Dr. Crews. Unfortunately, Crews is more interested in exploiting Tina’s undeveloped telekinetic abilities than working through her guilt. When Tina tries to end to her telepathic visions, she inadvertently resurrects Jason and causes an onslaught of murder.
Throughout the production or Part 7, Buechler was at odds with Sachs. She hated the look of Jason, rejected storyboards, and at times called for rewrites without notice. Making matters worse, the film was butchered by the MPAA to avoid the dreaded X rating. Part 7 was re-edited a record-breaking 9 times before securing the R rating fit for theatrical release. With few special effects and the gutted conclusion, Buechler himself wondered why he was even chosen for the project.
Buechler wasn’t the only creator to face-off against the now-infamous Barbara Sachs. In fact, before a director was even hired, screenwriter Daryl Haney felt the aches of studio interference.
Recently I was fortunate enough to catch up with Haney. We discussed working on one of the most troubled shoots in the Friday The 13th franchise.
Coop: How did you get involved in writing Friday 7?
Daryl Haney: I had just done a movie for Roger Corman, my first in LA, and was crashing on the dining-room floor of one of the producers, who was friendly with a woman named Debbie, and Debbie, in turn, was friendly with an executive at Paramount, where a search was underway for a young writer to “revitalize” the Friday franchise. Oddly enough, my involvement began with a remark I made one night about Reflections in a Golden Eye, a John Huston film starring Marlon Brando and Robert Forster.
C: That’s something I wasn’t expecting to hear; a Marlon Brando film birthing a Friday sequel.
DH: Debbie was watching it with a couple of girlfriends at the place where I was crashing. I walked in and said, “Oh, I really like that film,” and they said, “We can’t tell what’s happening except that Robert Forster is gay.”. I said, “Oh, no, he’s straight. It’s Marlon Brando who’s gay, and he’s obsessed with Robert Forster.”. For some reason, this impressed Debbie to the point where she recommended me to the Paramount executive. He then told me to come up with some pitch ideas.
C: Did you do any research?
DH: I watched all the Friday movies and called Barbara Sachs, the development person for the Friday franchise, and she singled out what she called my Jason vs. Carrie idea. I hadn’t yet officially moved to LA from New York, so when I flew home a few days later, I got a call from Barbara, literally as I was walking through the door after arriving from the airport, to say I had the job.
C: Up to that point you were an actor though, right?
DH: It was a strange turn in that I didn’t see myself as a writer at the time since I was an actor. Though I had both written and acted in the movie I did for Roger Corman. I had been writing, in fact, since high school. I collaborated on some scripts with my manager—who was also, by the way, a coke dealer. We would snort coke while fleshing out his screenplay ideas, and I would leave his place with my nose bleeding. That’s how much coke we would do!
C: Had you ever watched a Friday film before your research? Were you a fan of the franchise before then?
DH: In those days movie theaters in Manhattan, especially around Times Square, would place TV monitors outside to show trailers for the movies playing inside, and I would stop to watch the trailers for all those movies I was sure I would never see, including the various Friday the 13th sequels. So that’s as familiar as I was with the franchise before I was up to write the latest sequel. I was an art-house guy, and that’s another reason it was strange to find myself with this job. I did it for the money, really.
C: That seems to be a long-running theme with this particular franchise.
DH: I was paid $30,000, which was a fortune to a broke actor. When I received my first installment, I bought a 1966 Ford Mustang with an as-is warranty for $5,000, and the next day the engine blew up. That Mustang was a horror movie unto itself! A vintage car should only be owned by a gearhead, and it’s a rare gearhead who’s likewise an art-house guy, needless to say.
C: What were some of the other ideas you pitched for the story? Were there any you liked more than what you were told to go with?
DH: I’ve been asked this question before, but no, “Jason vs. Carrie” is the only idea I remember. I came up with my pitches while pacing and drinking beer. When an idea occurred to me, I would scribble it down in a sentence or two. Then pace and drink until eventually there were beer cans everywhere. I wasn’t attached to any of my ideas, though probably I considered “Jason vs. Carrie” the weakest in the bunch. I remember I pitched it last and somewhat apologetically, like “This is all I’ve got left.”
C: Barbara Sachs has become a sort of a villain within Friday lore. Do you share the same sentiments?
DH: In some ways, she reminded me of industry people I had met in New York. But there was definitely something LA about her, and I didn’t understand LA well at the time. That whole Hollywood, corporate, art-is-a-dirty-word mind-set, so I was wary of her. Physically she put me in the mind of a troll doll. Professionally she was incompetent; but personally she could be, at times, almost maternal. She had a son who wasn’t much younger than me. I went to her house in Westwood once or twice, I think to use her computer since I didn’t yet own one. That was another weird thing to me about LA: a lot of people there owned computers, whereas in New York I think I knew just one, and he worked in the computer industry.
C: A computer of all things! It’s easy to forget this was the late 80’s.
DH: The world has become a lot more homogenized since then so that it doesn’t really matter whether you’re in New York or LA. But in those days there was only so much overlap between the New York sensibility and the LA sensibility. Particularly if you were a black-clad, pompadoured downtowner like me. My acting agents used to tell me I was too “punk,” but I refused to dress and behave like those square actors I would see in midtown with their Cats jackets and shoulder bags and blow-dried hair.
C: Did the folks at Paramount feel the same way?
DH: Barbara was proud of her association with the civil rights movement in the 1960s. “I’m a little phobic about the South,” I remember her saying when I told her I was born and raised in Virginia. Such high-mindedness didn’t prevent her from throwing me under the bus when my agent demanded payment for all the drafts of the script I had written on her instructions. Drafts I wasn’t contracted to do. She blamed me for the surplus drafts, so I liked her less, not more, by the end.
C: Did she ever have a kind thing to say about the work you put it?
DH: I’ll give her this: once, out of my earshot, she paid me a nice compliment. I had written a line of description, something about the light in a room, and based on that, she said, “He must write lovely prose,”. Or so her assistant reported to me. Her assistant was into EST, a self-help movement that peaked in the late ’70s. I never knew a New Yorker who was into EST, so here’s another example of me feeling like an alien in LA.
C: After going through the previous installments, did you get a better understanding of why people like the Friday series?
DH: I don’t think I questioned why fans liked the films; I just accepted they were a pop-culture phenomenon, and most pop culture is vapid, especially when it’s so successful. Even the Friday people were flummoxed by the success of the films, and they would gripe that Jason was a lug compared to Freddy Krueger, who talked and joked and transmogrified and so on. But it’s probably Jason’s utter lack of complexity that accounts most for his appeal. There’s nothing to ponder. A preschooler can know everything there is to know about him at a glance—killing machine in humanoid form—and switch off the prefrontal cortex, insofar as it was ever activated, and watch him do his thing.
C: Right. A lot of the die-hards insist it’s their series, taking it out of the hands of filmmakers.
DH: Of course, film nerds take pleasure in second-guessing the filmmakers and feeling superior to them. “Worst kill ever,” etc. and I suppose that counts as a kind of analysis, though I’m uninterested by it, personally. I’m not very interested in opinions as a rule, including my own. But I have developed some respect for the durability of Jason and the franchise, which indicates cultural roots deeper than I would have guessed thirty years ago. Maybe Jason represents the strict paternal figure who was thought to be essential before the ’60s when young people abandoned traditional morality, Daddy be damned.
C: In my interview with Tom McLoughlin, he touched upon this briefly.
DH: Maybe there was a longing for a paternal figure to again set limits, as Jason does by dismembering teenagers for fornicating and getting stoned, and so on. I mean, it’s striking that Jason debuted the same year Ronald Reagan, that scourge of sixties radicals, was voted into the White House.
C: I’ve often read about Sachs believing Part 7 had the potential to win an Oscar, is this true?
DH: At any rate, I always saw simplicity as the key to the Friday formula, so I thought it was ridiculous of Barbara Sachs to complicate the early drafts of my script with her delusions of grandeur. The Friday people were all somewhat embarrassed by these films, so she was probably trying to lessen her embarrassment by aiming for a “quality” product, though I’m sure she never believed it would win an Oscar. That was a joke—by her standards, a thigh-slapper. Lenny Bruce, she wasn’t.
C: Getting back to all of those drafts, were you compensated for all the extra work?
DH: I had the standard contract, which was for a treatment: an outline, followed by a first draft, a revision, and a polish. So three drafts of the script altogether. It almost never works out that way though. A writer ends up doing more than he or she is paid to do and to complain is to be considered “difficult,”. So most writers don’t complain, and I didn’t—to them. At least once a week I would get a call from Barbara or her assistant about a meeting. After the meeting, during which I was handed pages of notes about the most recent draft, I would be escorted like a prisoner to a trailer on the Paramount lot.
C: That sounds like punishment!
DH: The trailer was an office with a computer in it, and again, since I didn’t have a computer, I would bang out a new draft there—in a single night. That’s how fast I worked at the time. I didn’t keep track of the number of times it happened. Later, Barbara’s assistant, the EST guy, said there had been around a dozen drafts of the script. Clearly I was being exploited, so I did complain to my agent, and when I was wrapping up work on the project, he sent a letter to Frank Mancuso, Jr. requesting compensation for all the extra work I did. Did you ever hear of an eighties band called Missing Persons? My agent had something to do with Missing Persons when he was starting out—he managed them or did PR.
C: I imagine this is where the writing credit for Manuel Fidello came in?
DH: I was supposed to get an extra ten grand for the project if I was the only writer hired for it. But after Mancuso got that letter from my agent, he hit the roof. Once again, Barbara Sachs blamed the additional drafts on me. So in vengeance, another writer was hired for some tweaks on the script. He was paid half my bonus and the rest, I was told, went into a certain party’s pocket. My replacement used “Manuel Fidello” as a pseudonym, I believe because he was in the Writers Guild and the project was non-union.
C: Any idea who it could’ve been?
DH: I never knew the writer’s real name, but there was a short-lived Friday the 13th television series at the time, and I would guess that he had written for it. Jason was not a character on the television series, which had to do with a cursed antique shop. When I visited the office, Barbara and her staff were often watching a cut of one of the episodes on VHS. She wrote an episode. Everyone’s a writer in Hollywood, you know.
C: I’ve always liked how Part 7 was about Tina’s guilt and being exploited. Jason is merely a by-product and something she has to deal with instead of the film continuing his story. Was this a conscious decision?
DH: I never thought of Jason as a by-product per se. His story was well established, unlike Tina’s. She was a much more developed character, of necessity, than was usual in the series, so she had to be given more time. Also, she had to be provided, I guess, with some sort of internal conflict. Hence her guilt (over her father’s death) and her exploitation (by the ruthless parapsychologist). And, you know, Jason never really had much of a story. He’s just a killing machine like I said, so the “story” in all of the films has typically to do with the teenage idiocy of his victims. I suppose Tina’s cousin in the series, her male counterpart, would be the institutionalized Tommy Jarvis in the fifth installment.
C: Does the completed film differ much from your writing? Did you see it and think “oh that’s not mine”?
DH: I was out of the country by the time it was released. when I returned I found myself on Times Square, where it was playing on a triple bill at a rundown movie palace. So I ducked inside and caught maybe the last half-hour. There was some awful line about a “personal penis enlarger,” which certainly wasn’t mine. I didn’t see the rest of the film until many years later, and by then I no longer remember if I had written specific lines. But most of the structure was mine. I believe “Manuel Fidello” just punched up the dialogue with gems like the one about the penis enlarger.
C: What are you working on these days?
DH: I’ve had three books published over the last eleven years: a novel about punk rock, Banned for Life, and two essay collections, Subversia and Death Valley Superstars. The latter has a subtitle, Occasionally Fatal Adventures in Filmland, which clarifies, hopefully, that the essays have to do with Hollywood, which I see as the true Death Valley. I thought I was finished with that book, but I recently stumbled upon a remarkable true story, never touched by another writer, that I’ve been investigating like a regular Woodward/Bernstein, and once I’ve written it, which won’t be for a while, the plan is to include it in an expanded version of Death Valley Superstars. Meanwhile, I hope to write another novel. I’ve been trying to start one for over a year.
C: What is your biggest takeaway from working on this film. Are there any positives?
DH: The experience of writing that movie is woven into my memories of the period, which was rather exciting, on the whole. I moved into a house in Silver Lake with musicians and film students as my housemates. There were parties with bands playing on the lawn and a lot of arty people dropping by otherwise. Whenever I hear The Ideal Copy by Wire or Garlands by Cocteau Twins, I think of that house; those are two of the albums that were in heavy rotation there. Meanwhile, I was also writing a film for Roger Corman, Crime Zone, and once, because I needed privacy to bang out a new draft of it, I checked into the Highland Gardens, the hotel where Janis Joplin died, which is the sort of luxury I couldn’t have afforded up until then, and of course, it was the Friday money that made it possible.
C: So your relationship is more of a love/hate kind of thing?
DH: I used to wince when people raised the subject of Friday, but that’s no longer the case. On the contrary, it’s nice to be remembered for something. Although I wish it were for my books, which are far more representative of me. I can’t say that Friday represents me at all, but it’s not an era for book reading and movies are moribund also. I see a greatly diminished audience for movies going forward. The young, with a few inevitable exceptions, don’t really care about them. Technology has not inculcated a better breed of cultural custodians, and I expect a lot of great work will be expunged—in cinema, literature, you name it—because it doesn’t fit “enlightened” political notions. The prevailing attitude toward art is Soviet these days.
Special thanks to BeardedGentlemenMusic’s very own Brandon Perras for setting up this interview.
Catch up with previous installments of Crystal Lake Confessional here.
Part 1 – Part 2 – Part 3 – Part 4 – Part 5 – –Part 6 – Part 7
Part TS – Part 8 – Part 9 – Part HM – Part 10 – Part FvJ – Part 2009