Curious Goods: Behind the Scenes of Friday the 13th: The Series
“Lewis Vendredi made a deal with the devil to sell cursed antiques, but he broke the pact, and it cost him his soul. His niece, Micki, and her cousin, Ryan, inherited the store, and with it, the curse. Now they must get everything back—and the real terror begins.”
So opens Friday the 13th: The Series. In 1987, Paramount Studios found success selling a new Star Trek series into syndication. Eager to cash in on other studio-owned properties, Paramount asked producer Frank Mancuso Jr. to develop a series around Friday the 13th (1980), and the new television series was born. The story lines had nothing to do with the popular slasher film franchise, which was both a blessing and curse. The cast and crew were largely young and inexperienced, and they were one of the first Hollywood productions to shoot entirely in Canada.
In the first-ever examination of the TV series, author Alyse Wax delves into the series episode-by-episode, with more than sixty exclusive interviews with the cast, writers, directors, and producers, as well as nearly fifty never published behind-the-scenes photos from the cast and crew’s personal collections.
Interviews include series creator Frank Mancuso Jr.; series stars Louise Robey, John LeMay, and Steve Monarque; notable guest stars including Elias Zarou, Kate Trotter, Wayne Best, Barclay Hope, Angelo Rizacos, Monika Schnarre, and Ingrid Veninger; directors and production crew including Jim Henshaw, Marc Scott Zicree, Tim Bond, William Taub, Francis Delia, Armand Mastroianni, Rob Hedden, Tom McLoughlin, and Atom Egoyan.