Don Jones was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1938 and spent much of his childhood raised on a farm. As a result, he saw very few films as he was growing up and initially harboured dreams of becoming a professional boxer, even scoring minor success under the moniker Irish Frankie Conway. When his parents decided to relocate to Florida in the late 1950s, Jones instead opted for Los Angeles and, upon arriving in the city, found himself desperate for work. With a friend at a studio, Jones was able land small jobs on such productions as My Fair Lady, in which he worked as an electrician. When that fell through, he was forced to park cars for a living at a restaurant called The Fog Cutter, where he made friends with one of the doormen, Gary Kent.
He found menial work within the industry and was employed as a gaffer on a variety of television shows during the late 1960s. He also worked as a stuntman on various low budget movies such as A Man Called Dagger and 2000 Years Later… read more
Don Jones was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1938 and spent much of his childhood raised on a farm. As a result, he saw very few films as he was growing up and initially harboured dreams of becoming a professional boxer, even scoring minor success under the moniker Irish Frankie Conway. When his parents decided to relocate to Florida in the late 1950s, Jones instead opted for Los Angeles and, upon arriving in the city, found himself desperate for work. With a friend at a studio, Jones was able land small jobs on such productions as My Fair Lady, in which he worked as an electrician. When that fell through, he was forced to park cars for a living at a restaurant called The Fog Cutter, where he made friends with one of the doormen, Gary Kent.
He found menial work within the industry and was employed as a gaffer on a variety of television shows during the late 1960s. He also worked as a stuntman on various low budget movies such as A Man Called Dagger and 2000 Years Later, before finding himself drifting into the adult industry. During the early 1960s a few type of film had emerged called the ‘nudie cutie;’ T&A comedies and exploitation pictures that would be popularised by Russ Meyer and Herschell Gordon Lewis. Jones gained experience as a filmmaker during this time and found also direct several cheap flicks of his own, including two for smut pioneers Canyon Distribution (Excited and Kiss-Off). Having followed them with a detective feature, Who Did Cock Robin?, Jones would also work as a director of photography on Six Women and One Million AC-DC (which had been written by an uncredited Edward D. Wood Jr.).
Soon the nude cuties led to more graphic material and so Jones decided to try his hand at horror instead, shooting a feature called The Black Widow, which would later be renamed by distributor Mirror Releasing as the sleazier sounding Schoolgirls in Chains. He followed this with two more efforts during the mid 1970s – The Love Butcher and Sweater Girls – before deciding to produce a straight horror. The concept for what would eventually become The Forest originated with the story of two ghost children, which would be refashioned into Deliverance-style’ stalk and slash’ thriller. The script was completed in thirty days and, conscious that his own name would appear too many times on the credits, opted to bill the writer as Evan Jones. —drgoresfunhouse.com
