13 Things You Didn't Know About Friday The 13th
11. The Film Was Sold Before There Was A Treatment
Cunningham, working hard on making a fast buck out of family movies, was working on selling the idea for a Friday The 13th movie long before there was anything resembling a script, or even an idea for one. In an interview with SFX, he explains:
“I was sitting around with some friends one night, trying to work out how to make a hit children’s film. We came up with this title – Friday The 13th – and I thought, ‘Well I could sell that but it won’t work as a kids’ movie’. But the title stuck with me. Eventually I decided to create this advertisement for Variety – this great big thing with bold white letters that said ‘Friday The 13th - the most terrifying movie ever made’.... I got a ton of telexes from around the world because people really wanted to see a horror movie called Friday The 13th... We didn’t even have a script to shoot! People were asking us what it was about so they could invest and we had to bluff everything until the screenplay was done.”
That full page Variety advertisement was posted over the 4th July weekend in 1979. In response, the backers behind his previous exploitation movies Together and The Last House On The Left offered to put up the whole $500,000 production budget. Initially, Cunningham said no: the deal wasn’t that great, and he wouldn’t make enough money from it.
They next day, however, he changed his mind when it was pointed out to him that he’d just received financing for a screenplay that didn’t exist.