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Table of Contents description: PROFILE: MARK JONES After months of postproduction tinkering, the "Leprechaun" creator hopes it finds a pot of box-office gold.

First-time directors face all kinds of problems, from paranoia on the part of the company that grants them their shot to the conflict of vision vs. commerciality. Leprechaun writer/director Mark Jones had to deal with those problems and more on the road to getting his tale of a miniature monster in search of his stolen gold made. But Jones' biggest headache was not whether his film would be released, but what form it would take.

"I wanted this picture to go out with a PG-13 rating," he explains, "but the problem was that the R-rated version was a better movie. I was really on the horns of a dilemma. The PG-13 version would have given young kids a scary movie they could go to. Unfortunately, the critics and the hardcore horror fans would have killed it, because the PG-13 version had to be cut to nothing and the sense of terror was weakened."

Leprechaun's rating was ultimately set as an R; Tim Swain, vice-president of domestic distribution for Trimark, says, "The company's inclination was always to go out with an R." But, ratings aside, Jones is quite happy with the way Trimark is handling his baby, which opened this month.

"Everybody told me Leprechaun would go straight to video," says an ecstatic Jones, "and the record seemed to indicate they were right. How many movies with a $1-million budget, written and directed by a first-time filmmaker, get a theatrical release? Not many."

But what Trimark saw in this fledgling effort, according to Swain, was a great deal of promise. "You only make a picture when you think it's going to do well and bring a lot of money to the company," he offers. "And we felt that the script for Leprechaun had a very commercial premise."

Prior to creating his tiny (and possibly franchiseable) terror, Jones had toiled as a writer on such genre TV series as The Highwayman, Galactica 1980 and Superboy, and began attempting to launch a feature film directing career in 1985. His fuel, the Leprechaun script, went begging - even though it preceded the demonic toy of Child's Play by a few years. "It was a movie nobody wanted to do," he recalls. "Nobody could understand how a little creature could be convincingly evil."

As Jones recalls, there would have been no question of the film's rating status had he gone with Leprechaun's initial conception. "Early drafts of the script were more along the lines of a Friday the 13th-style slasher movie," he admits. "There was no humor. Those were the things I added after I realized that a one-note slasher film would not work."

Jones found a temporary haven for his project with Moviestore Entertainment, who bought the project with Jones attached as director, only to let it languish even after Chucky made his first horrific mark. Finally, after much frustration, the writer got his property back and took it to the normally conservative Trimark, who threw aside their fear of untried talent and gave both Jones and the project a go.

"Everyone's a little nervous when dealing with a first-time director," admits Swain. "But that's part of the deal. Everybody has to be a first-time director. What we try to do here is find really good young talent when they're affordable, and the way to do that is to take a chance on their first film."

Jones, however, recalls some behind-the-scenes madness on Leprechaun that started a couple of weeks into filming. "My attitude had always been that Leprechaun would be a PG-13 kids' horror movie; that's how I cast, designed and shot the movie," he says. "The idea was to shoot it as an R and cut it back to a PG-13. Unfortunately, at that time, Trimark didn't really know what they wanted, and their idea of what the picture should be changed every week.

"Two weeks into the filming, after being told to make it a PG-13, I was sitting with Mark Amin from Trimark watching dailies, and he turned to me and said, "We want a much tougher picture, an R picture,'" Jones continues. "Here I was, right in the middle of shooting, and I'm thinking, "Does he want a rewrite, new scenes, what?' What finally happened was that nothing was changed or added. We were already shooting some graphic stuff that I knew would get us the R, whereas before I thought I would shoot things rough and then cut back."

Trimark had final-cut approval on Leprechaun and so, after his version of the film was handed in, Jones had to watch and wince as a few of his choicer scenes fell by the wayside. "When the film was delivered, Trimark was so adamant about getting an R that they wanted to take out some of the comedy," the director laments. "So scenes like the Leprechaun driving the police car with the cop's hat on, his eating donuts and the tire treads on his body after he is run over were pulled out.

"The suggestions were made primarily by the Trimark executives," he continues. "Five or six people, including myself, would get together and vote by committee on what would be cut and what stayed. We would sit around, make suggestions and then somebody would say, 'Let's take a vote.' My vote counted for one, everybody else's counted for one and the majority vote decided. From a creative point of view that was horrendous, but ironically, after all was said and done, they never ventured too far away from my version, and even when they did, they always seemed to come back to it."

While the film was being edited, Swain underwent an equally endless series of meetings with an ad agency, which resulted in TV and movie trailers as well as a knockout poster centering on the title character.

"The trailers emphasized the special effects and the characters, but it all basically revolves around the Leprechaun," Swain affirms. "He's the reason people are going to be interested in coming to this movie. That's why the poster [the creature peeking out from behind a door in a totally darkened room] centers on the Leprechaun. He's the real sell."

Trimark tested the marketability of the R-rated cut of Leprechaun in May, with three-day test screenings in Baton Rouge, LA and Grand Rapids, MI. The screenings were supported by newspaper ads as part of the company's plan to give their test the aura of an actual movie opening. The result was big business.

"What we discovered in the exit polls is that the kids loved it," Jones reports. "They liked the idea that it wasn't a fluffy movie that was talking down to them, and that we were giving them a really hard picture."

Swain adds, "The testing also showed us that a lot of younger people who normally don't like horror films liked this one. But we wanted to have one more test to make sure we weren't missing the boat."

That last preview consisted of testing out a PG-13 cut of the film on the masses, which necessitated braving the gauntlet of the MPAA ratings board. Swain diplomatically remembers that the MPAA "was very cooperative on this film. We've had a couple of disagreements, but so far they've been fine with us."

Jones, on the other hand, grouses, "They were very tough on us. They made us take out things that hurt the film. The cuts were so bad that some parts of the PG-13 Leprechaun don't make sense. They said we couldn't have a PG-13 rating if one person died in the movie. Hell, how many people died in Batman Returns? We couldn't show the dead cop in the same frame as the Leprechaun, we couldn't show the Leprechaun sticking the club in the cop's eye. (Note from Connie: the facts are wrong, but it's what it says in the magazine) We couldn't even show the Leprechaun smashing his fist through the truck's windshield.

I had my own idea of how a PG-13 version of this film should play, and if Trimark had stayed with that rating, I would have gone before the ratings board myself to plead my case. I have no problem with this film going out with an R, except for the fact that I would have liked 10-to-16 year old kids to be able to see it."

Director Jones teaches his diminutive monster a few driving lessons.

According to Jones, the actual filming of Leprechaun was a mixture of excitement and pressure, with lots of cold, windy nights and a miniscule 30-day filming schedule. "I was like a kid with a new toy," he says. "This is what I had been working toward for years, and I was going to wring every bit of enjoyment out of it that I could. But basically, it was one unbelievable shock. Trimark was always a presence on the set, and I was dealing with a professional crew for the first time."

Even before Leprechaun's release, Jones had already begun to reap the benefits. He recently jumped to a higher-profile agency and is currently in the running for several major-studio assignments (all of which are too close to call for Jones to discuss specifics). He is upbeat enough to explain that all the aggravation and knocking heads with Trimark has worked out for the best.

"It was a love-hate relationship," he says. "But it's always like that between a filmmaker and a studio. They wanted what they wanted out of this project, and I wanted what I wanted. Everything basically worked out. Trimark will make a lot of money, and I'm supposed to make a lot of money. I didn't make much up front, but I'm supposed to get a lot of money on the back end - which I'll probably never see. But no matter how much money I receive from this, I feel that my real reward will be seeing this film on the big screen.

"Man! It's been a long haul," he laughs. "If nothing else, Leprechaun has proved to me that there's no such thing as shooting a movie, and the next thing you know it's in the theaters or on the video shelves. There's a whole lot that has to be done in between."

The Editor's Note at the beginning of the magazine was all about the Leprechaun too:

Ever since the success of Joe Dante's Gremlins in 1984, the screens have been bombarded with endless variations and ripoffs of that seminal creature feature. Some eight years later, we're still suffering through a pathetic parade of Ghoulies, Critters and Munchies sequels. By the time Dante got around to sequelizing his own smash in 1990, audiences stayed away in droves because the idea of miniscule mischievous monsters just wasn't fresh any more.

Part of the filmmakers' dilemma with movies of this ilk is deciding whether to make their tiny terrors cute or ugly, nice or lethal, funny or scary. Take the case of Leprechaun, which opens theatrically this month from Trimark Pictures. Playing up the humor and lessening the fright factor would win the film a PG-13; heightening the gore and malevolence of the titular creature would garner the film an R. As you'll read in Marc Shapiro's informative article, the creators of Leprechaun remained undecided over which way to go just a few months before the release date.

In another sense, I remained just as indecisive about doing another article on Leprechaun in one of my magazines. FANGORIA #111 featured a set visit to the low-budget film and included interviews with lead actor Warwick Davis and writer/director Mark Jones, among others. What else could we say about a jokey-looking miniature monster? A new story, however, slowly emerged, one that would provide a fascinating look at the marketing and selling of today's terror pics.

Trimark originally planned to open the film last St. Patrick's Day. When that March release date became doubtful, the publicity people tried to talk me out of running our story in the spring, threatening to hold back good photos so that we timed our coverage to their indecisive whims. "It may open in May, or September, or go straight to video in time for St. Patrick's Day in 1993," one source told me. "We have to test the film first and see if it works." After much coaxing, we eventually got the photos anyway, once we promised additional coverage in the fall. Only when I learned of all the company's test screenings, marketing maneuvers and ratings vacillation did the angle of a follow-up piece come together.

On one hand, I salute Trimark for their cautious approach to distribution and selling. Too many gung-ho independent companies have folded in recent years after rushing out flop after flop without knowing who their target audience was. However, I get uneasy when films are created by committee, the way Leprechaun's postproduction transpired. I prefer films that have a distinct directorial vision.

Whatever Leprechaun's fate, at least the film's being shown in theaters. This issue's other cute critter, the topliner of Stan Winston's Adventures of a Gnome Named Gnorm, has sat on the shelf for at least four years due to the collapse of two different indie distributors. Our review this issue reveals what we've been missing.

Anthony Timpone, Editor