Happy Friday the 13th! Now get outta here.
I remember this story from the first time around (blawg.com, anyone?). Ian is a bass player, writer & generally nice fellow I sorta know. His dad wrote “Friday The 13th,” but that’s not what paid his bills for most of his writing career. Read:
What follows is a copypasta of a blog entry I wrote a million years ago on my now-defunct blog. I know it’s way tl;dr, and that’s OK. It’s not for you, it’s for me.
Wishing you a happy Friday 13th might seem strange, but it makes perfect sense to me. You see, my dad wrote Friday the 13th.
In the late ’70s, the old man was making a living doing freelance writing, screenwriting, teaching, workshops, and whatever else he could to feed his wife and two young kids. My parents were bohemian artist types, pseudo-hippies in a redneck blue-collar New England town. Needless to say, we didn’t fit in.
But he was plugging away, making enough money to keep us clothed and fed. He hooked up with Sean S. Cunningham, producer of Last House on the Left, in 1977 or so. Together they set about knocking off popular movies of the day. “The Bad News Bears” became “Here Come the Tigers,” and “Halloween” became “Friday the 13th.”
But then something happened. “Friday the 13th” scared the shit out of people, and they liked it. In fact, they liked it to the tune of about $78 million. (The film only cost about $700,000 to make.) And Pops was famous. But still broke.
“How the hell could that be?!?” you might ask. Well, it’s simple really. As a struggling, nonfamous screenwriter, you really don’t have any juice. The old man wrote the thing for a lump sum that kept me and my bro in Steak-Ums and Atari games, but it certainly wasn’t gonna move us out tha ‘hood ta up in the woods. And he didn’t have points, or back-end, or any of that Hollywood jive.
No, his real break came when he got the call from One Life to Live. Now I wouldn’t think that writng a smash-hit horror movie would qualify you to write soap operas, but luckily the folks at ABC did. Dad started at One Life in ‘82, and did stints with All My Children, Guiding Light, and Another World over the next 19 years, winning three Daytime Emmys in the process. And today he gets to retire.
Pretty fitting that the cat who gave Friday the 13th all those evil connotations gets to hang up his spikes today, on Friday the 13th. But hey, he’s earned it. He put me and my brother through college, and not cheap ones either. And he made sure my momma was livin’ good, and they eventually did move ta up in the woods. Now he and Moms are packing up and moving out to the Yay Area to be near the kids and grandkid.
So hats off to you, Victor Miller. And they told you you’d never amount to anything. I guess you showed them.
recent comments