We managed to track down the female Jason, Ellen Lutter, who stood in for him in PART 2 for the scene where he steps across a puddle and walks across the street,” reveals HIS NAME director Daniel Farrands. “Those were her legs. And how many people knew that it was Marilyn Poucher who played Mrs. Voorhees in the scene where she pops out of the lake in PART III? We found her too.”HIS NAME WAS JASON, which recently completed shooting in Los Angeles and New York (and currently has a street date of February 3, 2009 for its DVD release by Anchor Bay), has been a labor of love for producers and lifelong fans Anthony Masi and Thommy Hutson. And it’s one that the former says has been three years in the making. “We tried to get this project going with New Line Cinema three years ago,” Masi recalls, “and they told us to bring them some numbers on how my last documentary HALLOWEEN: 25 YEARS OF TERROR did and wait for them to make the next FRIDAY movie. That’s exactly what we did, but then New Line folded. So we went to Anchor Bay, which had released 25 YEARS OF TERROR, and they were interested in whether we could get the licensing. So we went to Paramount and Warner Bros. [which took over New Line earlier this year], and they agreed.”
HIS NAME WAS JASON, which includes more than 90 interviews with the film series’ actors (including everybody who played its signature villain), directors and behind-the-scenes people, showcases such obvious choices as Sean S. Cunningham, Kane Hodder and John Buechler as well as such rarely-heard-from alumni as FINAL CHAPTER’s Bonnie Hellman and PART VII’s Diana Barrows, the cast of the FRIDAY reboot due next February and Fango’s Tony Timpone. There’s also the extra added bonus of famed makeup artist Tom Savini appearing in a series of wraparounds as he explores the icon that is Jason while following the killer’s latest slaughter at the FRIDAY THE 13TH maze at Universal Studios Hollywood’s Halloween Horror Nights.
The producers of HIS NAME WAS JASON took an ambitious approach to making this documentary come alive. “Everyone knows a lot about the FRIDAY THE 13TH films,” Hutson notes, “so our approach was, rather than gather all of these great actors and have them tell the same old stories everybody has already heard, we’d give it a feel like the fans are sitting down with Kane Hodder or Betsy Palmer and they’re saying, ‘OK, I’m going to give you my story, but in a way it has never been told before.’ And fortunately, what we’ve found is that everyone seems to have a different take on the experience and tells it a different way.”
Masi adds that rather than follow the FRIDAY saga in chronological order, they decided to arranging HIS NAME by topic. “Things like, what makes Jason such an icon? Your favorite experience? By doing it this way and not just going from film to film, it has opened things up to being more of a discussion, rather than just a bunch of talking heads answering the same old tired questions.”
Farrands cautions that the goal of HIS NAME WAS JASON is not necessarily to suddenly elevate the movies to high art. “Although the films are legitimate and deserve examination, we never really saw this documentary as being totally serious business. Yes, you’ll learn things about the films and maybe think about them in a different way. But we’re not going so far as to try and put these films on a par with the work of Scorsese. The tone is good old-fashioned campy fun—which, to an extent, is what the films have always been about.”
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