A whole lot has happened in the world of Friday the 13th this year, at least behind the scenes. And let’s face it. Most of us aren’t legal experts, so all the messiness has been quite confusing.
Enter Larry Zerner. In addition to playing beloved character Shelly in Friday the 13th: Part III, Zerner is also an entertainment lawyer who happens to specialize in copyrights (go figure, eh?!), and he’s really been our main source of continued clarification about the legal mess that the Friday the 13th franchise has spent the last couple years mired in. It’s Zerner, mostly through Twitter, who has made sense of all the confusion, boiling each new piece of information down to its essence and making it easy for us all to understand.
The most recent developments? A judge has ruled that writer Victor Miller is the sole owner of the original Friday the 13th screenplay (in the United States only, oddly enough), but the judge declined to make a ruling on who currently owns the character of “adult Jason Voorhees,” who of course didn’t actually appear within the franchise until the second film.
Subsequently, Friday the 13th director Sean Cunningham filed a notice of appeal, and then we soon thereafter learned that LeBron James is working on getting his hands into the franchise. So what’s the current state of everything going on, who exactly owns what, and how are things likely to play out from here? In a chat with Slash ‘n Cast, Zerner breaks it all down.
This is an *essential* watch, if you’re a big time Friday the 13th fan…
