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. None of the original short made it into the final cut of The Slumber Party Massacre, because none of the actors were part of the Screen Actors Guild (SAG).