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  Curious Goods: Behind the Scenes of Friday the 13th: The Series

  © 2016 Alyse Wax. All Rights Reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, digital, photocopying or recording, except for the inclusion in a review, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  This version of the book may be slightly abridged from the print version.

  Published in the USA by:

  BearManor Media

  PO Box 71426

  Albany, Georgia 31708

  www.bearmanormedia.com

  ISBN 978-1-59393-893-2

  Cover Design by John Teehan.

  eBook construction by Brian Pearce | Red Jacket Press.

  Table of Contents

  Acknowledgements

  Introduction

  Season 1

  Season 2

  Season 3

  Epilogue

  An Interview with Frank Mancuso, Jr.

  Afterword

  Acknowledgements

  If you would have told me twenty years ago that I would make Friday the 13th: The Series a huge part of my career, I wouldn’t have believed you. The series always seemed so far removed from regular life. As a teen, my fandom into the series felt like fantasy role-play. It didn’t feel real. Ironically, it was Marc Scott Zicree’s The Twilight Zone Companion that made me realize that a book about an old television show could find an audience. Now, here I am, with an actual book in my hands, one that other people will read. It is an ode to my obsession. I guess obsessions can, in fact, be productive.

  I want to thank everyone who I interviewed for this book. I asked people to dig through memories from twenty years ago, and was duly impressed with the results. I also want to thank all the agents and managers who helped facilitate the interviews.

  Many thanks go to Rebekah McKendry for becoming my unwitting “mentor” through this whole book process; and to Patrick Doody for getting me that one, elusive interview.

  Finally, to my husband, Tim. He put up with my mania and my obsession; he is my calming force, my biggest cheerleader, my best friend. I quite literally could not have written this book if you weren’t in my corner.

  Introduction

  I first saw Friday the 13th: The Series when I was about nine years old. It was Saturday morning, the eleven o’clock hour — the awkward television time when morning cartoons were over but old sitcoms like The Munsters and I Love Lucy were still a couple hours away. I was flipping channels, and landed on KCOP 13, a local Los Angeles station. There was something incredibly gory on the TV, a man with throbbing, oozing pustules all over his head. I was fascinated. Entranced.

  That show was Friday the 13th: The Series. The episode? “Stick It in Your Ear,” with the cursed hearing aid. The obsession had begun.

  Around that same time, I was just getting into horror movies. My first one was Nightmare on Elm Street: The Dream Child, shown to me by a school friend, who promised it wasn’t actually scary. After watching that movie, I realized I was scared of the idea of horror movies; the movies themselves were not scary. In fact, I found a lot of humor in it. It was a few more years before my parents gave in to my horror obsession by renting me videos and getting me a subscription to Fangoria, but somehow, if it was on television — Saturday mornings, no less — it was “safe” to watch.

  I recorded each episode on VHS, then would watch them after school, when I was done with my homework. This was 1989. The Internet was scarcely more advanced than CompuServe and BBS. I knew nothing about this wonderful mystery show; I just enjoyed it.

  My obsession was deeply rooted in two aspects of the show: the gore and the lead. Micki Foster. Micki was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen (still is) and as a ginger kid, she was my first exposure to a beautiful redhead on television. I don’t remember ever being teased for having red hair, but it was somehow validating to see a redhead on TV.

  Micki was my idol. She was smart, she was capable, and she always took care of herself. More often than not, she got herself out of dangerous situations (“And Now the News” and “Bedazzled” come to mind immediately) without needing to be rescued by the boys. The “final girls” of horror movies of that era were generally all either bubble-headed idiots or fleshpots there to add a little T&A before getting ripped to shreds. Micki was neither of those things. I loved that she wasn’t afraid to use her sexuality, but there was always intention behind it. Plus she had a fantastic wardrobe.

  It was frustrating, because all I ever wanted to talk about was F13, but I couldn’t find anyone who had seen an episode. For a while, I started to wonder if I had made up the show all together. One morning, I woke up fifteen minutes into the episode; from that day on, I set my alarm to make sure that never happened again. Sometimes I would wake up 3:33 a.m. and I would lie still, waiting to see if anything weird happened (nothing ever did). I can trace my intense phobia of snakes back to “And Now the News.”

  The local station took F13 off the air at some point. I don’t remember how long it was before it disappeared, but I was devastated. Another show, She-Wolf of London, appeared in the same time slot, and that held me over for a few months, but with a mere twenty episodes, it didn’t last long.

  I remember going to Florida with my mom in 1992, a short trip to see an old friend of hers. There wasn’t a lot to do, so I studied the TV Guide — and found an episode of F13 playing at 1:00 a.m. “The Butcher,” I believe. I was ecstatic; it was the highlight of the trip for me. I remember sneaking out to the living room late at night, waiting for the show to come on…and I couldn’t quite make it. I fell asleep about a half-hour before it aired and didn’t realize until my mom found me passed out on the couch in the morning. I was heartbroken.

  Friday the 13th: The Series returned to television when I was thirteen. Flipping channels on a Saturday evening, I passed something with Chris Wiggins in it. Doubling back, I discovered my beloved series was back! The newly launched Sci-Fi channel (before it became Syfy) was running the series, allowing me to record the remaining episodes I didn’t already have on VHS. Sci-Fi Channel ran the series regularly for a number of years. Every Friday the thirteenth, they would run a marathon of the series, hosted by Ron Perlman, which even included a few exclusive interview clips with Louise Robey.

  Sometime around 1994, the Internet was really becoming consumer-friendly, thanks to America Online and “blazing fast” 14.4k modems. I soon discovered that, on the Internet, you could always find someone who was into the same weird stuff as you. I quickly found other fans and started what was the first Friday the 13th: The Series Internet fan club. I wrote my first-ever episode guide, an embarrassingly bad piece of fan fiction. I had over a hundred people with which to discuss my favorite topic (a few of which even thought I was Micki — I didn’t dissuade them). I even had a terrible, bare-bones web page devoted to the show. To this day, my techy husband is still a little bitter that, even though he built his first computer at age eight, I had a website long before he did.

  In 1996, my obsession showed no signs of abating, and I devoted months to creating my first (and only) Friday the 13th: The Series fanzine. Filled with my afore-mentioned atrocious episode guide and worse fan fiction, some short stories and poems from other fans, generic clip art, and some pretty good original drawings, I sold over sixty copies and didn’t make a penny profit. (I sold them at cost, which was still nearly $20.)

  By the time I went to college, I had my obsession (mostly) under control. I had a boyfriend, a social life, and classes that were interesting. I didn’t watch the se
ries on a daily basis, but every once in a while I would find an episode on cable late at night, and my heart would skip a beat.

  It wasn’t until writing this book that I found out that “The Inheritance” wasn’t the first episode shot, like a traditional pilot. That was probably one of the reasons it didn’t feel like a pilot episode to me, but it was also the skilled script by Bill Taub. The episode was laid out in a 50/50 split, divided between meeting our heroes and exploring what the show will be. It wasn’t crowded with a lot of extra back story or mythology. So many traditional pilots jam all that in to appease network executives. No network, no need to appease them. “The Inheritance” is one of the few “pilots” that just works.

  I am tempted to say that Season 2 was the least memorable season of Friday the 13th: The Series, but then I look at the list of episodes, and there are so many good ones. The violence of “Better Off Dead;” the two-for-one of “A Friend to the End;” the real-life terror of “And Now the News;” the creepy carnival setting of “Wax Magic.” Over the course of Season 2, Micki dies, comes back to life, discovers she has occult powers, and puts Johnny in his place. Ryan falls for no fewer than three girls who all fall victims to cursed objects. And Jack fights Nazis!

  The big change in Season 3 was, of course, John LeMay’s exit. Everyone was surprised that the young actor would want to leave a hit television series, especially after only two seasons.

  Brought in to replace LeMay was Steve Monarque, who had been introduced as a minor recurring character in Season 2. From the start, it was clear that Johnny would be a very different character than Ryan. That was fine when he was a recurring character, but as a series regular, he really threw off the balance of the show. Whereas Ryan was intelligent, sensitive, and thoughtful, Johnny was brutish, self-serving, and just plain dumb. It was a good decision not to simply recast Ryan, but a new character could not match the magic that we had in the first two seasons. I never liked Johnny. Not because he wasn’t Ryan, but because he was Johnny. Friday the 13th: The Series was always a show that aimed to elevate the genre. Johnny brought the show down. Decades later, and he still gets me riled up.

  Despite the casting change-up, Season 3 had some of the strongest episodes of the series. “The Charnel Pit” was a sumptuous swan song that didn’t hold back — why would it? “The Long Road Home” was a genuinely well-paced and scary episode that borrows from films like Texas Chainsaw Massacre without copying them. “Repetition” used a different story format that proved delightfully ironic. “Hate on Your Dial” tackled racism in a direct, yet non-preachy way. “Mightier Than the Sword” was one of the earliest film depictions of a sociopathic female serial killer.

  Frank Mancuso, Jr. is unequivocal about the reason Friday the 13th: The Series was canceled: conservative groups started to boycott the show’s sponsors, who eventually pulled out. No sponsors, no money, and since this was a syndicated show, there was no network to back them up.

  Interestingly, in an article from the Los Angeles Times, [*] Paramount denied reports that Friday the 13th: The Series was canceled due to “advertiser resistance.” Instead, they claimed that Friday the 13th: The Series and War of the Worlds had been pulled “because of lackluster ratings and because sufficient Friday the 13th episodes had been produced to ensure its future in syndication.” Later in that same article, spokespeople from the U.S. Department of Defense (who ran recruitment ads) and SmithKline Beecham Consumer Brands (who sold products like Oxy-10 zit cream) admitted they pulled their advertising because of viewer complaints. However, the complaints seem tiny. The Department of Defense guessed they averaged “maybe one letter every couple of weeks;” while SmithKline admitted less than a hundred complaints prompted their decision. David Boyd of the National Coalition on Television Violence claimed responsibility for a letter-writing campaign. Most of the crew involved with Friday the 13th: The Series blamed Donald Wildmon of the American Family Association for the letter-writing campaign, and while that may be true, I could not find any news articles or press releases in which Wildmon or his organization specifically name Friday the 13th: The Series.

  Clearly, Friday the 13th: The Series is a topic that is near and dear to my heart. I never wanted to be a writer — my mother is a journalist so that was my “rebellion” — but as it turns out, I have a knack for it. I fell into horror journalism many years ago, without even realizing that was a “thing,” but once I was there, I knew I found a home. I have always been a rabid television viewer — if my husband doesn’t hear it on while I am home, he worries that I might be dead. Ironically, it was a copy of The Twilight Zone Companion, written by Marc Scott Zicree that showed me there was a market for writing about television. This book feels like a culmination of all these factors. Plus, I like being able to point out to my parents that my obsession led to something.

  * Mahler, R. (1990, May 6). The New Power of TV Advertisers. Los Angeles Times.

  Season 1

  Frank Mancuso Jr. (creator, executive producer) — Mel Harris, who used to be the head of television at Paramount, came to me and said that he wanted to create a Friday the 13th television series. They had a great deal of success in syndication with Star Trek, so they were looking through their sci-fi/horror catalogue, saying, “What titles do we believe we could get traction on, that have enough name value that it wouldn’t require sizable casting or a lot of advertising dollars spent on making people aware of what the show is?” At the time, I felt as though I’d kind of done Friday the 13th and I wasn’t really interested in revisiting it. I felt like it ultimately was limiting how people perceived what I was capable of doing. So, I said, “Yeah, I really don’t want to do this. I don’t watch television, so I don’t think I’d be very good at making it. I’ve made these other films and people are finally starting to put that Friday the 13th thing behind me.” Now, all of a sudden, I would be jumping right back in the middle of it. Then, there was the obvious part of it: the certain limitations of what you could put on television. Friday the 13th movies are known for certain scenes of real aggression, and that would be a real limitation if you brought it to television. He basically said, “Look, we really want to do this, and you are really the only one who can do it. I don’t care what the show is; just call it Friday the 13th. You make it anything you want for an hour, and we will put it on the air.” I told them I get it, but I just don’t want to do it.

  My dad, who was the chairman of Paramount at that time, said, “Look, this is a real opportunity to do something you’ve never done before. Theoretically, they can sell this thing.”

  So, I said, “It can be anything we want?”

  He said, “Absolutely. Because it is syndication, you aren’t going to get a lot of notes, you aren’t going to get a lot of structure from us. You are just going to get a budget from us, then you can go do whatever the hell you want.”

  That, ultimately, made me curious enough to start thinking about, Well, if I was going to do this, what would the show be? I started meeting with people about various scenarios in which this might be fun. I was certainly drawn towards a sort of anthological premise because I felt like that most naturally suited the way my head worked. They kept wanting some common openings and closings, so it will feel more like a TV series and less like a movie. So, we started thinking about The Twilight Zone and how that had common elements and they were bound thematically but they weren’t necessarily a traditional series. We started riffing off that, and that’s sort of how it all got going.

  Tom McLoughlin (director, story editor) — Right after I finished Jason Lives: Friday the 13th Part VI, Frank Mancuso said, “You know, there’s this guy who came in, who is talking to me about doing this as a series.”

  I said, “A weekly thing with Jason?”

  He said, “No, no, it’s like with cursed objects and stuff. I don’t know if it is going to work.”

  I said, “Why the title?”

  He said, “Meh, we own the title.”

  It was my second feature fil
m, and as far as I was concerned, my career was doing features. I wasn’t interested in signing up for a series. That was kind of the end of it. Then, the conversation swung over to Jason vs. Freddy. We started talking about that back then — it was 1986. That went nowhere because New Line wasn’t about to give up Freddy.

  William Taub (executive story editor) — My agents set me up with a meeting with Paramount for this project called Friday the 13th. That is not my genre, I’ve never done anything like that, and I couldn’t be less interested in that. I went through interview after interview after interview. This was the first show that Paramount, through a subsidiary, was going to shoot in Toronto. The way it was explained to me was that I would be responsible for thirteen episodes in Los Angeles, and they would hire the equivalent to me in Toronto to be responsible for the Toronto thirteen. I would only have to worry about the U.S. half. But that never happened. They never found anybody in Toronto. It was hard. I had to do the whole twenty-six. So, it was very different from the way it was described.

  The first thing I did when I got on Friday the 13th was hire someone — I had to. Someone brought to my attention The Twilight Zone Companion, so I said, “Get me the writer who did that.”

  Marc Scott Zicree (story consultant) — My agent told me that Friday the 13th was going to be a series. I knew about the movies but I had never seen them. If the series had been like the movies, just a serial killer sadistically murdering, I would not have done the show. I didn’t want to do anything that I thought might cause harm in the world. I found out it wasn’t going to be anything like the movies, they were just using that as branding to get the show greenlit.