Night Of The Living Dead:. Joe Kane
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to drive me back to my parents’ home, all the way out to Duquesne, every night. Jack Russo, usually. He never did that begrudgingly. They were wonderful folks to work for. They really were.”
Jones owned up to having problems with many critics’ perception of the film. “The thing that used to bother me the most was that interviewers just assumed that we were a bunch of amateur actors. It was an interesting mix of amateurs and professional actors, which was even more clever on George’s part.” Jones also had high praise for the filmmaking approach. “The best storytelling in the world goes on in commercials. So there was that cleanliness and very sharp editorial eye that went into it. Internally, in the film itself, they captured somehow an independent aura. If you really look at it technically, it was most professionally done.”
In that same interview, Jones conjured a rare sour moment, a negative incident that had haunted him for two decades. “I guess because everything was so pleasant that one of the things that sticks out in my mind is a moment that was strangely unpleasant. There was a point where George and the crew were planning a shot and setting up. It was getting to be late afternoon, evening, and this magnificent butterfly wandered into the house. I remember clearly that it landed on the far wall. And to a person, every single one of us stopped what we were doing and we were just standing around admiring this beautiful, beautiful creature that had just come in as a spirit among us and attached itself to the wall. Soon it was time to get started and someone thought that his idea of a joke would be to come and smash the butterfly. I remember the stunned silence of the group, and the visceral reaction of wanting to regurgitate was just so real that that moment sticks out in my mind that it was out of synch with everything. Nobody could believe that he had done that to us—and to the butterfly. I don’t think we ever quite convinced him that it was a horrible thing to do.”
Though Jones would go on to appear in several subsequent regional and New York City films—most notably as an academic vampire opposite Marlene Clark in Bill Gunn’s 1973 cult fave Ganja and Hess (“another underground classic,” Jones once stated, “one of the most beautifully shot films of that period”)—Hollywood didn’t come calling. Nor were any other Night players summoned. Jones had his own theory on that subject. “For whatever reasons, the reality of who we were in the first place was never clear. Critics assumed we were all a group of amateurs from Pittsburgh. The so-called ‘amateur’ they decided to bestow professionalism on was George Romero. I would never for one second begrudge George any of his acclaim and fame. But some of us could have used another kind of boost to our career, whereas nobody ever assumed we were actors or professionals in the first place.”
Instead of pursuing a West Coast film avenue, Jones followed his first loves, devoting most of his professional life to the theater and teaching, separated, for the most part, from his Ben persona: “I was teaching at N.Y.U. and I used to walk past the Waverly—I used to get out of the subway there—and it showed at the Waverly at midnight for years. One time I was with a group of acting students after class. We were sitting in a restaurant in Manhattan. And it was getting on into the Halloween season and two of the kids were sitting across the table from me and I looked up at the television and realized that the movie being shown was Night of the Living Dead. So I glanced at it for a moment and we went on talking. I kept glancing at it too often because eventually they followed my eyes to see what I was looking at and they looked at the television. And they did not recognize that it was me. Then, when one of the students did identify that that was me, the other two argued that it was not. So we left it at that and went on talking. One said, ‘What ever happened to him?’ I was sitting across the table from him!”
Ferrante fondly recalls his meeting with Duane Jones. “The moment he spoke you just knew he was a special human being. You suddenly forgot he portrayed Ben; he was far too interesting in many other ways. He was gracious, fiercely intelligent, funny, charming, respectful…it was impossible not to like him.” Jones had zero interest in exploiting his cult rep. “It was his practice to not draw attention to himself,” Ferrante explains. “He wasn’t going to live in a world that forever identified ‘Duane Jones’ as the star of Night of the Living Dead and nothing else. He wasn’t arrogant about it, though. He certainly recognized the power of the movie and his role in it, but he was too gifted an intellectual to permit that kind of societal typecasting. I remember pointing out that millions of people loved him in that role; his withdrawal from it wouldn’t make that go away. He appreciated and understood it and was somewhat grateful, but such singular adoration wasn’t a necessary ingredient in his life. He expected people to recognize him as a person and not as Ben, which they did because that’s how he carried himself. He had class. Besides, he was such an arresting man. Night was a mere sliver of his life.”
Jones’s Night cohorts felt the same way. Judith Ridley recalls, “Duane was the only black man on the shoot and perhaps he was feeling a little out of place. He’d always bury his head in a book; he was always reading. But you did really admire him—he was a very classy person.” Gary Streiner holds a similar impression. “I really liked Duane but I didn’t get to the point of friendship with him as I did as with lots of the others.” Says a grateful John Russo, “I doubt that our movie would have been a success without him. His screen presence was one of the key ingredients that helped lift that low-budget pipe dream up by its bootstraps and make it into something that it almost had no right to be. The dream became reality, partly because of Duane Jones.”
“I doubt that our movie would have been a success without Duane Jones.”
—John Russo
With Ben present and accounted for, other key roles went to a variety of Latent Image cohorts. For Barbara, Romero originally wanted Betty Aberlin—“Lady Aberlin” on the Pittsburgh-based Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood, for whom The Latent Image had occasionally labored—but a perhaps overprotective Fred Rogers discouraged her from appearing in a horror film. The part went instead to Judith O’Dea, a twenty-three-year-old actress and voice-over specialist who had been working in regional theater since the age of 15 and had recently returned to the Steel City after a stint in L.A., where she’d been trying to break into the Hollywood acting ranks. “I had been there a short while when Karl called and said we’re gonna make a movie. It changed my life. It was exciting. It was where I wanted to be. Anything that came my way, whether it was long hours, whether it was waiting two months to go back and readdress a scene that was already done, didn’t bother me. I loved doing it.”
O’Dea also enjoyed working with Romero. “George would describe what he was trying to achieve in each scene—plot progression, emotion, and so on—then let me ‘go at it.’ Barbara evolved every time we shot a scene.” And Romero allowed for ad-libbing when the situation called for it. Says O’Dea, “The one section I can recall specifically is when Ben tells Barbara what happened to him, and then she explains what happened to her and her brother. For me, that was all ad-lib. I had read the script, but then we just, basically, went by the seat of our pants.” She adds, “That scene was done fine on the first take. I had really gotten into it. I can remember crying like a fiend when they filmed me talking about Johnny. But something went wrong with the sound recorder, or so they had thought. We did shoot it again, but they later found out that the first take was okay.”
O’Dea credits the cast and crew’s earnest approach with putting the story over. “When we were shooting, we wanted it to be as real as possible. I know that many of us really did go through a lot of that emotion and terror making it. It wasn’t done with tongue in cheek. It was done very seriously.” And O’Dea had the literal scars to prove it. “[Duane] never made contact with my chin. But he sure put black and blue marks on my arms where he grabbed me during that fight scene. I didn’t realize till I got home how black and blue they were.” But the filmmakers saved her scariest moments for last. “Barbara’s death sequence was an extremely frightening thing to film—being pulled out amongst all those people.”
Russo feels fortunate that an actress of O’Dea’s caliber was available for the role: “Judy O’Dea brought a tremendous energy to her part in the movie. The way she ran, you really believe her life’s in danger, the way she’s terrified and so on.”
Regarding Barbara’s oft-criticized “helpless” behavior, O’Dea maintains, “I believe Barbara exemplifies