Amy Holden Jones is an American screenwriter and film director best known for directing Slumber Party Massacre and for creating the FOX medical drama The Resident. She has edited various films and later began directing and writing. She currently works in television.
Early life and education
Jones was born on September 17, 1955, and grew up in Florida. She lived in Buffalo, New York, during her high school years. She was interested in photography and wanted to study alongside Minor White who was teaching at MIT at the time. Jones attended Wellesley College in Wellesley, Massachusetts, majoring in art history, so she could also take film studies courses at nearby MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Career
Editor (1976–1981) Jones broke onto the festival circuit when she won first place at the American Film Institute National Student Festival, where Martin Scorsese was a judge, for her short documentary film A Weekend Home (1975). A year later Jones was struggling to make ends meet living in Boston due to a lack of funding for documentaries. After she read an article about Martin Scorsese beginning to produce another film, she reached out and called him asking "Do you remember this film? Would you advise me to move to New York?". Five days later he called her back and offered her a job as his assistant during the production of Taxi Driver. It was there that she met her husband cinematographer Michael Chapman. Martin Scorsese told Jones she was “too good to be an assistant” and got her in contact with film producer Roger Corman. She went on to work for Corman editing Joe Dante's first film, Hollywood Boulevard, when she was 22 years old. She edited American Boy: A Profile of Steven Prince for Scorsese, Corvette Summer for MGM, and Second-Hand Hearts for Hal Ashby. Despite the film Second-Hand Hearts being critically panned Jones learned a lot about editing from Hal Ashby as he was an editing genius.
The Slumber Party Massacre (1982–1983) After editing these films, Jones realized that she did not want to spend the rest of her life editing; she was frustrated with the fact that an editor can dramatically improve a film, however, it is not their film. Jones felt that she was being typed as a film editor. She was scheduled to edit Steven Spielberg’s E.T, however, it was being continuously pushed back due to Poltergeist going over schedule. At this point she made a decision she has called crazy herself and decided to walk away from E.T to direct her own film. Jones promised herself she would only continue to be a film editor if she could not make her own movie. Ultimatum in mind, she approached Roger Corman about directing, asking “What would I have to do to become a director?” Corman professed that her documentary work did not show him enough of what he wanted, insisting “You have to show me that you can do what I do.” Having not written for the screen before, Jones went searching for an existing script. After scouring Corman’s library of scrapped scripts, Jones took special notice of Rita Mae Brown’s “Don’t Open the Door”. Jones was especially enthralled with the eight page prologue which included the holy trifecta of exploitation storytelling: a dialogue scene, a suspense scene, and an action scene.
After rewriting some of the scenes, Jones got together a group of short ends from prior shooting projects. Her husband, a cinematographer, took behind the camera and her neighbor was a sound technician. Jones committed herself to special effects, and she cast students from the UCLA theater department to act in the film. Over three days, Jones and her team shot the first eight pages on 35mm film. Jones edited the short on Joe Dante’s Moviola after hours while he was editing The Howling. Dante also assisted Jones with temporary music cues.
Jones dropped off the nine-minute reel for Corman, confident that its three-part structure would convince him that she could fulfill all of the tropes which make up an exploitation movie. Impressed by her limited budget of just $2,000, Corman granted Jones a mere $200,000 to direct a feature length version of the script, of which Jones had not read past the first eight pages. With her tight budget as a roadmap, Jones utilized her skills acquired as a film editor and documentary filmmaker to do an intensive rewriting of the script. But, before sitting in the director’s chair, Jones underwent acting lessons with blacklisted actor Jeff Corey, a condition of all directors who worked for Corman. The shoot took 38 days across a school and two houses that were all side by side.