Sunny side of horror

It must’ve been ages ago -- OK, maybe it was 1999 -- when I was at New Line, watching a pair of perky young screenwriters pitch then-New Line production chief Michael De Luca on their idea for a smack-talking showdown between horror moviedom’s two titans of evil, Freddy Krueger from “Nightmare on Elm Street” and Jason Voorhees from “Friday the 13th.”

De Luca listened attentively and threw out a few ideas of his own; after all, he’d written the sixth “Elm Street” installment, 1991’s “Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare,” himself. But it was pretty obvious by meeting’s end that the scribes had stumbled down another blind alley. Dating back to the early 1990s when the studio acquired the rights to the “Friday the 13th” series, New Line had been trying to create a franchise-capping film that would pit Jason with Freddy, the horror icon behind the hugely lucrative “Nightmare on Elm Street” series, which helped keep New Line afloat during the 1980s.

Apparently, it was worth the wait. After nearly a decade of misbegotten pitches and abandoned scripts, the studio finally struck gold. Opening Aug. 15 on 3,000 screens, “Freddy vs. Jason” shocked industry observers with a $36.4 million opening weekend, the biggest-ever launch for a genuine horror film. The movie is now on track to make close to $85 million, making it one of the surprise hits of a generally lackluster summer. Made for $28 million with no profit participants, it will be a big moneymaker, especially overseas and in home video.

“Freddy’s” reviews were scathing, focusing on the movie’s unrelenting mayhem. “The violence is extreme,” wrote New York Daily News critic Jack Mathews. “It’s hard to imagine a bloodier, more exploitative episode [of a sequel] than this one.” In fairness, even the best episodes of “Nightmare on Elm Street” prompted similar outrage -- critics almost always trash horror movies. You can bet the upcoming flood of blood-drenched horror pictures (see accompanying sidebar) will be greeted with more critical indignation.

For New Line, the bitter tirades are a small price to pay for box-office pay dirt. “Freddy’s” success comes at an especially critical time for Toby Emmerich, who succeeded De Luca as New Line’s production chief and has struggled in his first two years on the job. In fact, “Freddy vs. Jason” is Emmerich’s first major hit as production chief, since the studio’s franchise cashcows, “Lord of the Rings,” “Blade” and “Austin Powers,” were developed long before he took the job. The horror film’s box-office performance also vindicates New Line founder Bob Shaye, who has tirelessly lobbied his staff for years to jump-start sequels to the studio’s most valuable properties.

“When I came in to run production, getting sequels made was clearly Bob’s big priority,” says Emmerich, who headed New Line’s music department before taking the production reins. “Bob and [New Line Co-Chairman] Michael Lynne were very frustrated by how hard it had been to get sequels going. They said, ‘Don’t drop the ball. We want “Freddy vs. Jason,” a “Dumb and Dumber” prequel, another “Friday” sequel and another “Blade” movie.’ One of the reasons Bob was so attracted to shooting the ‘Lord of the Rings’ movies together was that if the first one worked, we had two more in the can.”

There are a myriad reasons why sequels are difficult to get off the ground, one being that they offer little cachet for the studio hands associated with them. “A lot of execs here didn’t want anything to do with ‘Freddy,’ ” Emmerich explains. “It’s not very sexy when people ask what project you’re working on and you have to say, ‘Oh, I’m doing “Freddy vs. Jason.” ’ One reason I hired Stokely [New Line production executive Stokely Chaffin who oversaw the project] was that she had a real enthusiasm for getting ‘Freddy’ made.”

Even though the last “Nightmare” and “Friday” movies were under-performers, Shaye was convinced that combining the two franchises would create an event film. (When the film’s ending played poorly before test audiences, it was Shaye who came up with a more irreverent finale.) In fact, Emmerich’s biggest accomplishment so far has been his ability to wrestle sequels out of New Line development hell, most notably “Freddy vs. Jason”; “Dumb and Dumberer,” this summer’s prequel to the 1994 hit (which may make a modest profit in its video afterlife); and a sequel to “The Mask,” which goes into production this fall.

Bad movies are just as difficult to make as good ones, and while horror films get little respect, getting the “Freddy” franchise going was still a formidable task. During De Luca’s tenure, he wooed everyone from Rob Zombie to Rob Bottin, the special-effects makeup artist behind such films as “Legend,” “The Thing” and “Total Recall.” Budget restraints made hiring an A-list filmmaker impossible. De Luca, now head of production for DreamWorks, recalls that he could never spend more than $25 million on the film, knocking out Bottin, whose budget for the film came in considerably higher.

New Line also had agreed to let “Friday the 13th” creator Sean Cunningham work on a “Freddy vs. Jason” script, which didn’t jell either. “The whole dynamic of how Freddy’s powers would interact with Jason’s powers always made doing a script difficult,” says De Luca. “At one point we even had a plan where half of the prints of the film would have Freddy winning and the other half would have Jason triumphing.”

Before De Luca left New Line, he hired the screenwriting team of Damian Shannon and Mark Swift, whose convincing take on the material gave the project some badly needed momentum.

In short: Jason and Freddy are both in hell, but Freddy has a plan to get them out. “Most of the previous ideas had been terrible,” says Chaffin. “The fans would scream in agony if they heard them. Mark and Damian had some simple, good ideas that weren’t too cool or too complicated.”

It’s a testimony to the global impact of horror films that when New Line took the script out to directors, the filmmakers who showed the most interest were directors who’d fallen in love with the “Nightmare” and “Friday” films growing up in distant countries. New Line’s first choice as director was Ronny Yu, who’d made some cult Hong Kong action films, including “The Bride With White Hair.”

When Yu was unavailable, a Spanish director, Jaume Balaguero, lobbied for the job. “He wore all black and he had this beautiful Catalonian girlfriend,” Emmerich recalls. “But we weren’t that excited by his take on the movie.”

Out of desperation, Chaffin announced that she would take a meeting with anyone who loved the original movies. “That was probably a terrible mistake,” she laughs. “I ended up taking meetings with everybody who’d ever wanted to take a meeting at New Line.” By then, the movie had been in development so long it had accumulated $4 million in development costs. Emmerich convinced Shaye to push the film’s budget to $28 million -- and forget about the extra $4 million.

Then New Line went back to Yu, who agreed to direct. “We begged him,” says Chaffin. “Even if you could only understand Ronny’s every third word, you could feel his passion for the material. He even came into Bob’s office and acted out a scene from the script, where he stepped on Bob’s toe and spun him around and I was going, ‘Oh God, what are you doing?’ ”

Before shooting began, New Line timed the script and discovered that it clocked in at nearly 2 1/2 hours, far too long for a horror film. Emmerich brought in “Blade” screenwriter David Goyer, who had an overall deal at New Line and had written a draft of the script himself years earlier. He did an uncredited rewrite, working with Chaffin, who was dating him at the time. “David made it a more cinematic movie,” she says. “He was so good at streamlining the material that you never even noticed what he took out.” (The finished film runs a crisp 97 minutes.)

New Line executives screened a rough version of the film early this year and then tested it with a recruited audience of fans in Redondo Beach. The movie played well, but it was obvious that the finale was anticlimactic. Yu shot a new ending, largely culled from Shaye’s idea, which has Jason emerging from a lake, carrying Freddy’s severed head, which winks at the audience.

The critics may have gagged, but it was a hit with a generation of horror fans too young to have seen the original series, except on video. “In all honesty, I don’t disagree with the critics,” says Emmerich. “If I were being paid by the New York Times, I’d probably give it a mixed review too.

“But our exit polls were really strong, so the film’s real fans obviously enjoyed it. I wish we could’ve made a movie that pleased the fans and the critics, but that would’ve taken another five years and another $20 million, and that wasn’t what we had to work with.”

“The Big Picture” runs every Tuesday in Calendar. If you have questions, ideas or criticism, e-mail them to patrick.goldstein@latimes.com