Baby Health in Winter How FREAKED Became an Unexpected Cult Hit

When Alex Winter and Tom Stern had their avant-garde script up for development by Joe Roth at Fox Studios they found themselves flung into making a $10 million counter culture movie that featured all their friends, creative collaborators, and seemed too good to be true. With the first rough cut filed and approved by Joe Roth, the pair was ready to expand with a bigger budget to polish their baby and a soundtrack that would feature Iggy Pop, Parliament Funkadelic, Henry Rollins, and even new tracks from Nirvana. But before that could happen, Roth left Fox and suddenly the future of Freaked was in question.

“It was devastating,” Stern told me over the phone. “Joe Roth was a huge fan of the film, he was ready to give us more money. This was really a film that they thought they were going to make money with. We were working on the edits and started to get our list of songs together for the soundtrack. But then he was gone.”