Book excerptL On Location in Blairstown: The Making of Friday the 13th

Here's an excerpt from the book On Location in Blairstown: The Making of Friday the 13th related to the planning and pre-production and the crew members of teh film.

http://www.amazon.com/On-Location-Blairstown-Making-Friday/dp/0988446820


In the summer of 1976, Cunningham emerged from his feature filmmaking sabbatical. He and Steve Miner began work on Here Come the Tigers, a children’s comedy film shot in and around Cunningham’s home-base of Westport, Connecticut. Budgeted at $250,000, Cunningham’s largest budget to date, Here Come the Tigers was directly-inspired by the box office success of the 1976 film The Bad News Bears, which starred Tatum O’Neal and Walter Matthau and followed the wacky adventures of a little league baseball team and their dysfunctional coach.

Here Come the Tigers attempted, within the resources of Cunningham and Miner, to copy The Bad News Bears model, as sort of a Bad News Bears on the East Coast. “I thought it would be fun to make children’s movies,” said Cunningham of the inspiration that was partly born out of his aborted Hansel and Gretel project. “There’s a feeling that you get, especially when you’re making “snuff ”
movies. Do I have to do this? Can’t I do anything else?” The Bad News Bears had been a solid hit, grossing more than $40 Million at the North American box office and returning nearly $25 Million in rentals to its distributor, Paramount Pictures. In truth, The Bad News Bears had been more of a cultural phenomenon than a commercial one. The 1976 film, which later spawned two sequels and a 2005 remake, would ultimately be regarded most as a scathing satire of sports competition in America, but Cunningham wasn’t interested in attempting satire or social commentary, nor would he have been suited to the task.

For Cunningham, Here Come the Tigers was an obvious, transparent move to hit on a commercial formula. Cunningham would follow Here Come the Tigers with another formula kids’ movie, Manny’s Orphans, which was shot in the summer of 1977 and centered around the wacky adventures of a kids’ soccer team. “They were formula pictures and I had fun doing them,” Cunningham says. “I knew they weren’t going to be masterpieces. We had a theory at the time and the theory was that America was looking for some good old-fashioned family fare. That’s where we made the mistake.” If Cunningham’s theory had been correct, Friday the 13th probably never would’ve been attempted. Here Come the Tigers and Manny’s Orphans represented a stab at respectability. Cunningham’s failure in this led him back to the horror genre. The greatest significance of Here Come the Tigers and Manny’s Orphans is that the films were populated by most of the crew that would later march to Blairstown with Cunningham to make Friday the 13th.

Here Come the Tigers also sent Cunningham back into Philip Scuderi’s clutches. The principals of Esquire/ Hallmark financed Here Come the Tigers and Manny’s Orphans. This was a time when Scuderi and his partners were focusing more and more on film production and away from the theater business which was showing signs of stagnation. By 1977, the Esquire theater chain, which had once totaled over 100 screens throughout New England and the Northeastern section of the United States, had dwindled to a reported twenty screens. It was during this period that Universal Pictures sued Esquire for the alleged nonpayment of film rentals in the amount of $82,000, a lawsuit related to receipts taken from early 1970s blockbuster films like American Graffiti (1973) and The Sting (1973).

Like many fringe/regional film companies, Esquire/ Hallmark was a direct victim of the blockbuster
mentality seeping through the film business, slowly but surely, throughout the 1970s. Whereas the Esquire theater chain had once grossed upwards of $20 Million a year at its height, the company was, by 1977, in financial straits. Here Come the Tigers represented the beginning of the company’s eventual permanent shift away from distribution and releasing, toward a focus on the financing and producing of feature films.Scuderi saw film production as the company’s future. He also felt that Cunningham was a good bet, given how profitable their previous ventures had been. Here Come the Tigers was an easy sell for Cunningham. “My conversation with the producers probably went something like, ‘Did you ever see Bad News Bears?’” Cunningham recalled. “’Yeah,’ and then, ‘Do you think you can make a movie like that?’ ‘Well, sure.’ ‘But can you make it now?’ ‘Yeah, I can make it.’”

For partners Robert Barsamian, Stephen Minasian and Philip Scuderi, the company’s increased emphasis toward feature film production necessitated the three men supervising their investments personally. Cunningham and the rest of the cast and crew on Here Come the Tigers, Manny’s Orphans, and especially Friday the 13th learned this firsthand. The making of Here Come the Tigers was also notable for marking the addition of two more key Friday the 13th principals: cinematographer Barry Abrams and screenwriter Victor Miller. Both men brought interesting and varied life experiences to Sean Cunningham’s