An Exclusive Interview With Screenwriter, Daryl "Duke" Haney
Interview Conducted by Jason R. Stewart
I just fell into it. I was an actor living in Williamsburgh, Brooklyn, and I�d just been fired from my waiting job and was feeling so hopeless I went out one night with a friend of mine named Morphine and we dropped acid and stayed up for the next twenty-four hours, taking the Staten Island ferry and riding a motorcycle around Manhattan on LSD, and then I went home and was just about to crash when the phone rang and there was Joe Minion, who�d written After Hours, asking if I could fly out to L.A. to star in a Corman movie. So I borrowed the money from my mom to catch a plane and when I got to L.A. I found out we didn�t have a script, all we had were some existing sets for Big Bad Mama II. Well, I was determined to get a good movie out of this thing, and I went out with Joe and came up with a really wild story influenced by Sam Shepard�s plays and the stories of Flannery O�Connor! It was really Gothic, really surreal, and when people see the movie these days they go, �Oh, it�s like the Coen brothers,� but, actually, at the time, they hadn�t even started doing that kind of thing. Anyway, I wrote the script and of course the finished movie was a disaster, this weird combination of Corman flick and American Gothic literary influences, which absolutely nobody had the wit to recognize, and when it was all over I was hanging out in L.A. and got a call from Anna Roth, who�d line-produced the Corman flick, and she told me that a friend of a friend of hers was looking for a young writer to �revitalize� the Friday the 13th series. I�d never even seen a Friday the 13th movie! But I really needed a job: I had no car, no phone, I was living in a place with no furniture � nothing! So I went out and rented all the Friday movies to date and watched them at Anna�s place on her VCR and after about an hour and forty-five minutes I had the whole formula figured out and walked up the street to a payphone and pitched some ideas to Hometown Films on the Paramount lot. That was my first exposure to hardcore Hollywood people. I remember being on that payphone and listening to this woman speak that Hollywood exec-speak and thinking, �My God, these mythological creatures actually exist! How strange!� I had a feeling from the very beginning I was going to get the job. I don�t know why. I was the last person in the world who should�ve been up for it. And, sure enough, a few weeks later, I was officially hired, and that�s how I went from unemployed actor to constantly-employed screenwriter practically overnight!
2. If you were asked to write a screenplay for another Friday The 13th
film, would you? If so, how would approach such a project?
Well, it�s not a job I�d seek out. I had a really bad experience last time around � why try to duplicate it? But if I really needed a job at the time and that one came along I�m sure I�d jump at the chance. That�s how it works in the screenwriting game.
I haven�t really the Friday series since I wrote Part VII � in fact, I only saw about thirty minutes of that one! � so it�s hard to say what kind of approach I�d take. I know I�d try to have fun with it and try to do the best job I possibly could, but I always do that. Sorry this is such a dull answer!
3. Early in your career you worked with legendary B-movie king, Roger Corman. How was that experience?
I really enjoyed working for Roger. I was very aware of all the great people he used to work with � Nicholson and Dern and Sayles and Scorsese � and I really liked the idea of being part of that tradition. I�m not sure Roger�s eye for talent is all it�s cracked up to be, though. I think so many people have worked with him that, by the law of averages, a handful have turned out to be the real thing.
Roger underpaid you, but he at least paid you on time, and he never weighed you down with unnecessary notes. He was only interested in the most basic beats of the story and making certain every exploitation note was being hit � nudity, violence, and so on. In story conferences he�d say things like, �Let�s see if we can�t work in some breast nudity here.� He was so specific about what kind of nudity he wanted he sounded like Colonel Sanders! I remember when we were working on Masque of the Red Death he took this one scene I�d written and said, �Let�s see if we can�t turn this into a medieval striptease.� A medieval striptease?! Who the hell thinks of something like that?! Roger Corman, that�s who. Oh, and possibly Hugh Hefner. They kind of reminded me a little of each another, demeanor-wise.
Roger didn�t come across as a stereotypical B moviemaker. He was actually a really elegant man � a little reptilian but, overall, pleasant to be around. All his assistants went to Ivy League schools or Stanford � Roger�s alma mater � and one of his story editors went to Oxford and the other used to teach literature at USC! But the Hollywood mainstream has never taken Roger seriously. They should. He�s actually lasted in the business for a really long time and made a fortune doing it! A great many Hollywood people end up going belly-up. Not Roger. He�s very shrewd. I think he actually made a couple of great films too. There�s definitely one I know of: House of Usher. I think that�s one of the great adaptations of Romantic literature. Honestly! He really captures that Poe feeling. I think a few of his other movies from the late fifties and early sixties are pretty good too, but by the time I worked for him that was all a thing of the past. He�d lost whatever passion for filmmaking he ever had. But I had a great time working on Corman sets. We usually shot at a lumberyard in Venice and we�d do thirty and forty and fifty set-ups a day and it was really exhausting but, at the same, youthful and fun and adventurous. He�d always send you off to these remote countries � in fact, that�s how I ended up in Serbia the first time � Roger sent me there! I have no shame at all about my Corman tenure. Well, except that I wrote three episodes for the Emmanuelle TV series. That�s come back to haunt me more than anything I�ve ever done. But that�s the only thing I ever did for Roger that I really regret, and I made some really, really bad movies for him! But I see those as future camp, and camp, at least, has a shot at longevity. I don�t think that�s true for ninety-eight percent of most movies. People are completely ahistorical these days and don�t give a rat�s ass about old movies. But they do have a soft spot for camp.