Last Updated on September 22, 2021
The Arrow interviews
Don
Mancini
I’ve
seen every Child’s Play flick on the big screen and always had
a soft spot for them. Child’s Play was spawned from the mind of
screenwriter Don Mancini who also went on to write the three
sequels. Arrow caught up with Don to talk about the series and
the canned “Seed Of Chucky”. Here’s how it went
down.
Arrow:
Did you go to film school?
DM:
I did. I went to UCLA, I was an undergraduate.
Arrow:
When did you start to write the screenplay for the original
“Child’s Play”?
DM:
I wrote the first Child’s Play while at I was at school at
UCLA.
Arrow:
Where did you get the inspiration for it? Was it “My Buddy”,
”The Cabbage Patch Kids”…?
DM:
It was certainly in the wake of “The Cabbage Patch Dolls”. My
father worked in advertisement and marketing when I grew up. So as
a kid, I was around advertising campaigns a lot and I
always wanted to write something about how advertising
affected children. It’s just an interesting area, very right
for satire and everything. So that was always in my head.
I’d always been a horror movie fan growing up and then
around that time, in the mid 80’s, “Cabbage Patch Dolls”
were very popular and movies like “Gremlins” had come out
so animatronics had come to a point where you could really
have creatures articulate. I had seen “Twilight Zone”
episodes where dolls were alive but it occurred to me that it
had never been done before in such a way where you could treat
the doll as a full fledged character, with lengthy
dialogue, a character arc and all that stuff. And I realized
that special effects had gotten to the point where
you could do that. So all that came together in the mid 80’s,
when I was at school and that’s what lead me to write it.
Child’s Play
Arrow:
Did you have any input as to how Chucky looked in the original
“Child’s Play”?
DM:
Yes, I described the doll pretty specifically in my original
script: two and a half feet tall, red hair, freckles, blue
eyes, red sneakers, blue overalls…all of that was within my
original script. And then David Kirshner, who produced the
movie and who is also an artist, actually drew the doll based on my
description and design.
Arrow:
So you’re happy with the way that he came out?
DM:
Yeah, more or less. David made certain refinements. In my
original script, I had described the red hair as being more of
a spiky Bart Simpson kind of haircut. I mean, that was before
there was a Bart Simpson but that kind of spiky, punky kind of
look cause that was popular at the time. David decided to go
with more of a mop top kind of thing. So yes, certain little
details were changed, but overall it was very close to what I
had described.
Arrow:
John Lafia and Tom Holland both contributed to the screenplay
right?
DM:
The first one, yes, but I wrote the original script.
Arrow:
What did they add or change?
DM:
Mainly the voodoo. The voodoo was not part of my original
script. See, in my original script, instead of being possessed
by a serial killer, the doll was more of an embodiment of the
little boy’s subconscious. And the way the doll came to life
was different. One of the features of the dolls is that it had
fake blood in it, a red synthetic substance so if you’re a
kid and you’re playing with the doll and its latex skin
breaks like a cut, then it would bleed a little bit and then
you’d have to buy these “Good Guy” Band-Aids. All part
of the marketing craze to get you to buy extra stuff. So you
had to buy these special Band-Aids to stop the bleeding. In
my original script, the little kid, like a right of brotherhood,
cut his thumb and the doll’s thumb and mixed the blood
together…and you know how that works, right?
Arrow:
Yeah, yeah…
DM:
That’s how the doll came to life and was therefore an
embodiment of the little boy’s id. I played with the audience
a little bit more; I delayed the revelation that the doll was
in fact alive. I teased the audience for longer into thinking:
was the doll alive or was the little boy actually a
psychopath?
Arrow:
That would’ve worked better, I think.
DM:
I thought so, too. I thought that it was creepier really. What
happens is that all the people the doll targeted: the
babysitter, ultimately the boy’s mother and also the boy’s
teacher (which was a set piece we wound up using in
“Child’s Play 2″), were all the boy’s enemies.
Enemies that children are not allowed expressing anger at. In
the original script, because his mother was a busy person,
always being at work because they had no father around (the father was
dead), the boy had a lot of anger towards his
mother since she couldn’t spend too much time with him.
That was kind of the idea: the doll was going after people
that the little boy felt anger at but couldn’t express.
Arrow:
So it was more psychological.
DM:
Absolutely, much more of a psychological thriller.
Arrow:
Once they made the changes and cast Brad Dourif as the voice of
Chucky, were you happy with the casting?
DM:
That was great. That was Tom Holland’s idea. Tom had
previously worked with Brad Dourif on a movie called “Fatal
Beauty”.
Arrow:
Yeah, with Whoopie Goldberg…
DM:
Right, so I thought that was really a great idea, I thought
that was brilliant. And I can’t take any credit for that at
all because I had nothing to do with it. But that was really
smart.
Child’s Play 2
Arrow:
Okay, now let’s hop on to “Child’s Play 2”. In the script, the Catherine
Hicks and Chris Sarandon characters were excluded. Was that
due to the actors being unavailable? Or did you want to take
it in a different direction?
DM:
In my original draft of CP2, they had cameos. If memory serves
me right, it was more of a budgetary thing, they just wanted to
save the money. I don’t know if either of them was ever
officially approached for doing it, but I don’t think they
were. I do remember that in the very first draft of CP2 there
was a courtroom scene I had written, it was in the wake of the
murders to determine the little boy’s sanity at the hearing,
and the mother and the cop were there, but in any event, I was
told to take it out very early on.
Arrow:
Due to pacing?
DM:
No, they just didn’t want to deal with having to get
those actors back, thinking that it would be too expensive or
something.
Arrow:
Are you happy with the way CP2 came out?
DM:
Hmmm, you know certain aspects I like and certain aspects I don’t.
I feel like it’s too much of a retread of the first one in
retrospect. At the time when we did it I was. But with the
benefit of having 10 years or whatever I think that’s its
too similar to the first one for one thing, just too much of a
retread. Although you see more of the doll. But I feel the
most successful sequels are those that kind of reinvent the
wheel to some degree.
Arrow:
Kind of like “Bride Of Chucky”…
DM:
Well yeah I just felt like CP2 was maybe a little bit too much
of the same.
Arrow:
Well, at least it brought Chucky into the limelight
DM:
Yeah, that’s true.
Arrow:
The effects were better. No midgets in a suit.
DM:
Definitely, yeah…
Child’s Play 3
Arrow:
Let’s hop on to “Child’s Play 3”, which
is actually my least favorite of them all.
DM: As
most people would agree…
Arrow:
Yeah, it was released only a year after “Childs Play 2″…
DM:
Actually nine months…
Arrow:
Nine Months!
DM:
Yeah, it was ridiculous.
Arrow:
That’s crazy!
DM:
I was writing CP3 before CP2 had even been released. There
wasn’t enough time between the movies. You really have to
give the audience time to miss the characters. You don’t
want to oversaturate the market place… another term I
learned from my father. Yeah, I just think it was just too much, too
quickly basically.
Arrow:
Did you have a hard time writing a script so fast?
DM:
In a sense I had written so much between CP1 and CP2, I really
would’ve preferred to do something else first. In fact,
initially I was supposed to work on “The Green Hornet” and
that was for Universal as well but they told me to write CP3
first. You know, I think my creative juices as far as Chucky
goes were maybe a little bit low because I just had been doing
it so much.
Arrow:
In such a short amount of time too. You just finished CP2 and
boom…CP3!
DM:
Right… I tried to do different things with it by setting it
in a military school, by making Andy older…stuff like
that…. but again it was…you know…more of the same.
Bride
of Chucky
Arrow:
But then you hit the bull’s-eye with “Bride of
Chucky”.
DM:
We had more years in between and I think I grew as writer. I
also got more confident in asserting myself as a writer. I
love horror movies but another thing I always loved is comedy
and I felt that it was very difficult to make this concept
that scary after a while.
Arrow:
Yeah, especially since Chucky became the hero by the end of Part 2….
DM:
Yeah, it’s a problem with any horror franchise…it’s true with
Freddy, it’s true with Jason. The more you see these
characters, the less scary they are. It’s this weird
dichotomy. On one hand, the audience wants to see them more,
they want them more front and center but the more you do that,
the less scary they become. But I think it’s particular with a
character like Chucky. There’s a basic silliness to the
premise anyways…it’s a doll. So you can’t ask an audience
to be scared of it that long. So I thought that if we were gonna
bring him back, we had to go all the way with the comedy. We
were allowed to that, that time. I think Bride Of Chucky is
in my mind the best of the series.
Arrow:
You must’ve had fun writing that one…?
DM:
Yeah, that was a blast!
Arrow:
There are a lot of movie references in there. Were they all
yours?
DM: Yup.
Arrow:
The whole movie was a lot of fun!
DM: And
the one I wrote after that, “Seed Of Chucky” went even a
little bit further in terms of comedy and had a lot more movie
references and what not.
Arrow:
I’m glad you brought that up. This is one thing that I’ve been
wondering about for some time now, and I’m happy that I could
actually ask you this personally. What really happened with Universal and
“Seed Of Chucky”?
Why did they blow it away?
DM:
The head of Universal is a woman named Stacey Snider. Very
smart executive, very nice, she doesn’t really like horror
movies.
Arrow:
Great…
DM:
And she’ll be the first to say that, too. It’s not really
her favorite genre. And that coupled with the sort of social
and political climate right now, it’s becoming less and less
politically correct. Basically Stacey is not interested in the
genre right now. I’m sure you know she decided not to
release Rob Zombie’s movie (“House of 1000
Corpses”). She decided not to release it
but at least she’s allowing him to take it elsewhere. In our
case, we’re trying for her to let us take the franchise
somewhere else or work out some kind of deal where we could do
the movie at another studio in a film-by-film basis, where the
studio can profit in some way financially, but it’s really kind
of hit a wall.
She really didn’t respond to the script
for “Seed Of Chucky”, although a lot of people did, the coverage on
the script was really good, I got a lot of jobs off the script
and Jennifer Tilly loved it. Those of us who are at the core
of the franchise, were all happy with it. I think Universal
were a little confused with the comedy in it, one of the
confusing things for us when we we’re doing “Seed Of Chucky” is
that after the first draft they said: “we need to make it
scarier”. They wanted it to be more like the first “Child’s
Play”. And I think that’s impossible to do and I don’t even think it’s the right thing to even
try! I think with “Bride Of Chucky”, we showed that the audience liked it to be
funny.
Arrow:
It made a killing at the box-office, too…
DM: Right,
our position was look, if you push the comedy here you could
open up the potential for the audience. It doesn’t have to
be just the horror audience; we can go after a kind of
“American Pie” audience, a young teenage kind of gross-out
comedy for lack of a better term. And I think they were a
little confused by it. It focused on the child that Chucky and
Tiffany had and it was really extremely funny. One of the
things they didn’t understand is that the character of the
child…you know it’s a doll…is not a killer, he’s like
really sweet and innocent which Chucky hates. And he’s also
gender confused…
Arrow:
DM:
…because he wasn’t born anatomically correct. So he
didn’t know if he was a boy or a girl. So we played with all
of that. Chucky is trying to make a man of him, show him how
to dress appropriately, taking him out to learn how to kill
people where Tiffany at the same time is trying to be a
responsible parent. Now that she has a family, she decides that
she can’t kill anymore, you know a bad habit they have to get
over, join a twelve step program, trying to keep the kid on
the straight path and also dresses the kid in little dresses
wanting it to be a girl. The kid is completely confused, torn
in two different directions!
Arrow:
That’s hilarious, man!
DM:
It was a really funny parody of the family unit and a sort of
parody of the “Father Knows Best” family sitcom. And a parody of
family and child rearing in the 21st century.
The studio didn’t
really respond to it, which was quite frustrating for us.
Arrow:
You think it was the comedy aspect?
DM:
At one point, I heard that someone at the studio tough it was
too gay…
Arrow:
Ooookay…
DM: My
feeling was that “Bride Of Chucky” was kind of gay. In a certain
way, it had a somewhat kind of “gay sensibility”. It’s just a
stupid criticism.
Arrow:
Yeah, it is. Universal doesn’t make sense to me these days. I
mean they release “Hannibal” where some dude feasts on some
other guy’s brain, but they have trouble with Chucky or
“House
of 1000 Corpses”.
DM:
The difference is that a movie like “Hannibal” confers a lot of
prestige on them because first of all, there’s a lot more
money at stake. Chucky makes money but not that kind of
money. Also, a movie like “Hannibal” stars big and
glamorous movie stars, and directed by Ridley Scott. Studio
execs like doing business with people like that, it makes them
look good and they get a lot of publicity out of it. But a
movie like Chucky or Zombie’s movie isn’t the kind of film
that’s going to
get a lot of prestige for them. There’s less in it for
them, if you know what I mean.
Arrow:
Yeah…
DM:
We’re talking about people who are not fans of the genre to
begin with. Some movie executives like Weinstein,
Miramax,/Dimension or Michael DeLuca who was at New Line, they
are genuine fans of the genre. But Stacey Snider at Universal
is not, it’s not her cup of tea.
Arrow:
Does Universal exclusively own the rights to the series?
DM:
Yes, they do.
Arrow:
I heard through the net that you were re-writing a new script
for Chucky, which was…
DM: The
Hannibal thing?
Arrow:
Yeah…
DM:
That was one idea that I had. I met with David Kirshner to see
if we could come up with an idea to take some kind of action.
We haven’t even gone to the studio with that idea yet. But
it is a funny idea. The funny thing would be that it would
focus on Chucky’s only surviving victim who is bent on
revenge. Where in Hannibal it was pigs, this character would
feed Chucky to a pack of ravenous toy poodles
Arrow:
DM:
It could be a really funny idea but we haven’t brought that
to the studio yet. Really, we’re at this point where we’re
dealing with the legalities to see if we can make some kind of
deal or see if they’d want to do a movie at all…you know…
Arrow:
I heard at a certain point that Universal was ashamed of the
franchise. I thought that since Paramount felt the same way about
the “Friday The 13th” series, and they sold it to
New Line, that Universal might sell Child’s
Play to a more “genre friendly” studio?
DM:
I don’t know, that is one of the things that I want to look into.
I don’t know if they will or not.
Arrow:
Because there definitely is an audience for these movies!
DM: One
way or another the movie will be made sooner or
later…there’s money to be made. We have to wait and see.
Right now, there are agents and lawyers involved with that to
see if we can make headway.
Arrow:
Okay, enough about the studios. What Child’s Play
flick came closest to what you wrote?
DM:
Definitely “Bride of Chucky”. I was a producer on that one as
well and I was more involved with that one than any of the
others. I really got to be involved in every aspect of the
movie, we shot it up in Canada and I was there every day, and
instrumental in choosing the director and the cast.
Arrow:
Great choice of director, BTW.
DM: Yeah,
he did a great job.
Arrow:
He brought this all-new energy to the look of the movie.
DM:
I don’t know if you’re aware of it, but our cinematographer
Pete Pau just won an Oscar. He shot “Crouching Tiger, Hidden
Dragon”.
Arrow:
No, I didn’t know that, that’s pretty kool!
DM:
“Bride Of Chucky” looks amazing…we really had to fight to get
Ronny Yu and Peter Pau into doing that movie.
Arrow:
It looks like a Hong Kong action flick but with Chucky in
it…
DM:
We really wanted to reinvent it. We reinvented it on the
script level but we also wanted to reinvent it visually and
really crank it up a notch from the formulaic movie people
kind of expected.
Arrow:
Apart from the “Child’s Play” series, you wrote a
“Tales From
The Crypt” episode. Do you have any other scripts that will be
made and are not connected to Chucky?
DM:
Like any writer in Hollywood, there are a number of things that
I’ve sold and sometimes it takes a long time to get made.
Sometimes it winds up sitting on a shelf somewhere. I sold
one last year to Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin. An idea
called “The Fur Flies”, which is basically an homage to another genre that I love, which is the disaster movie. The spin
on it is that it’s an airport movie that focuses on all of
the pets that are traveling in the cargo hold of a 747 and
there’s a disaster. You know in the disaster formula, people
are all from different social strata and wouldn’t even meet.
They’re brought together by a disaster and have
to toss aside
their differences to work together to survive. In this case,
it’s different species of animals that in real life not only
don’t get along, but also like to eat one another. But they have
to set aside their differences to save the plane and bring it
down safely. So I sold that as a pitch to “Metropolis
Entertainment” and last I heard they’re going to make it
as an animated movie which I think is not as good as doing it as
a live action movie, but that’s not in my hands anymore. It
seems to be moving forward. Then I have another horror script
called “PET”, which is kind of a technological version of “The
Birds” about robotic dogs that run amuck and kill
people.
Arrow:
Didn’t John Lafia do something similar…”Man’s Best
Friend”.
DM:
Right, a genetically altered dog, but this is different.
It’s on a much bigger scale. This is a script that I sold
many, many years ago to Warner Brothers back in 1992 which
predates John Lafia’s movie actually. Now it seems to be
possibly resurrected.
Arrow:
Kool, the horror genre is doing good these days, it’s “in” and
it’s making money. I wouldn’t see why not. You were also set to
direct “Seed Of Chucky”, and I wondered if there was
to be a CP5, would you still direct it?
DM:
Yeah, if we could ever get it going, I believe I will be the
director.
Arrow:
Always wanted to direct?
DM:
Oh yeah, definitely and on “Bride” I directed the second unit,
directed the ending where the baby is born and various shots
throughout the film. Yeah, I’m ready to do it.
Arrow:
Any advice for the struggling writers out there?
DM:
I guess just keep writing. So much of it in the movie business
is about luck. So you have to be ready to take advantage of
your strokes of luck when they come your way. That means
writing as much as you can, and having as many things to show
for yourself, having as many things to throw against the wall
and hopefully one of them will fit.
Arrow:
Thanks a lot, Don..
DM:
Thank you very much.
Thanks
a bundle Don and come back any time! This interview really
made my week. Hopefully Universal will get their act together and
let Chucky go at it for another round. Long live Chucky!!!!
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