Shock Value - Jason Zinoman [36]
Becoming a filmmaker was far from Craven’s mind, but when a group of his students asked him to supervise a movie they were making, he thought he would give it a try. It was a short spoof of James Bond, but Craven took an active interest, enough to make the head of his department concerned about it being a distraction from his scholarship. He called him into his office for a chat. “It’s time to get serious about your work,” he said sternly. Instead Craven quit in the summer of 1969 and moved his family to Brooklyn, New York.
His plan was to try to sell his novel, “Noah’s Ark: The Journals of a Mad Man,” about a sensitive, troubled son of the caretaker at a New York cemetery, and then get into movies. His mother was perplexed. As soon as he launched his next career, it ended almost immediately. Craven couldn’t find work. The economy was weak and Hollywood studios were closing, pressured by low ticket sales. With his money running out, he was forced to teach high school and moonlight as a cab driver to support his family. He was starting to feel a little bit like his dad.
Craven wrote a friend from college in May of 1970, saying that he was just aiming for “pure survival.” The letter gives a picture of his state of mind, the seeds of his horror movies emerging:
Summer has settled onto the city. According to the news the carbon monoxide level yesterday passed the unhealthy mark and simply left the edge of the graph. The noise is incredible now. The windows of the subways are all thrown open for air and the screaming of the steel wheels is a knife to the ears. Outside there is a continuous clot of traffic, construction and demolition everywhere with hundreds of drills and jackhammers going like hell all the time.
Bonnie was unhappy. She did not see this as an environment in which to raise kids. Craven moved out, sleeping on couches in the Lower East Side while the bills piled up. His credit cards and driver’s license expired. He fell off the grid. Slowly, he even fell out of touch with his mother. “She didn’t understand me. She never tried to,” he says. “I think something about the way my mother looked at me, behind her eyes was the sense that her son was crazy. The word ‘crazy’ came up all the time.”
Craven had given up the old religion, but Hell still seemed close at hand. He had lost his family and his dreams appeared out of reach. But by the next spring, his life would turn around. It began with a porn film.
ADVERTISED IN NEWSPAPERS as a mainstream feature, Together, a sex film under the guise of an educational documentary about sex, featured an ad line that played on anxieties about the generation gap: “Look for yourself! Judge for yourself! See what your children can show you about love!” It was just the kind of soft-edged provocation that Sean Cunningham loved.
Wearing an easy smile that telegraphed a gregarious personality, Cunningham would become a pioneering horror director with the Friday the 13th series. But in the summer of 1969 when he met Craven, he had just made the transition to producing drive-in movies. This first collaboration—Cunningham produced and directed, Craven helped with editing—launched careers that would dominate the genre in the following decade.
Charismatic, confident, and always hustling, Cunningham talked a great game. All he wanted to do was scrape up enough cash to make his movies, which he would hand-deliver to the theaters. Craven recognized Cunningham’s business savvy. “Sean was somewhere between a mentor and a friend,” Craven says. “He was a much more practical guy and had an aversion to putting on any intellectual airs. We’re very different.”
Cunningham sold his film, which starred Marilyn Chambers, the adult movie star who eventually gained notoriety in Behind the Green Door, to Hallmark Pictures, one of the many small exploitation companies littering the film landscape, providing a steady stream