Night Of The Living Dead:. Joe Kane
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multiple showings (as many as 10) of the same film over the course of a week. George caught them all. He later said, “I think that film made me want to make movies more than any of the other ones.”
“The Thing was the movie that drew me to the genre. I was the right age, it was exactly the right time, and it had exactly the right effect on me.”
—George Romero
As for his attraction to horror, Romero specifically credits Howard Hawks’s above-cited sci-fi trailblazer, The Thing—complete with documentary-style overlapping dialogue—wherein characters trapped in a remote locale are forced to battle a powerful unidentified enemy. “The Thing was the movie that drew me to the genre. I was the right age, it was exactly the right time, and it had exactly the right effect on me.”
“George Romero was absolutely wild about movies—wilder than any of the rest of us—and he started making them sooner than any of us, too,” Russo recalls. Romero’s filmmaking “career” in fact dated back to age eleven when his rich physician uncle, Monroe Yudell, presented him with an 8mm camera. Says Romero, “I used to take the camera out and mess around. I actually made my first little film at age eleven, The Man from the Meteor.”
That now-lost science fiction effort, which reportedly bore more than a passing resemblance to Edgar G. Ulmer’s The Man from Planet X, released earlier in that same year, 1951, provided a spark but didn’t quite light a professional filmmaking fire. “I never went beyond thinking I could make a little movie, splice it together, and show it to the neighbors. It was playtime. It was like kids saying, ‘Let’s put a rock band together.’ With absolutely no idea there was any sort of professional future in it for me.”
The Man from the Meteor also marked the lifelong maverick’s first run-in with authorities—not meddling producers but unamused security guards who intervened after the young director tossed a flaming dummy off a rooftop for the sake of his art. Along with underground legends George and Mike Kuchar, creators of such homegrown fare as Sins of the Fleshapoids and Pussy on a Hot Tin Roof, Romero likely ranked as the Bronx’s leading teenage auteur—even if few beyond those fledgling filmmakers’ families and friends were aware of it.
Later, at Suffield Academy, which Romero attended for a year after graduating high school at the tender age of sixteen, he made a more earnest film, a documentary entitled Earthbottom, which earned him an award and membership in the Future Scientists of America.
Those experiences, amateur though they may have been, supplied Romero with some much-needed know-how, the kind one couldn’t easily acquire outside of specialty film schools like UCLA, certainly not at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Institute of Technology (later Carnegie Mellon), which Romero entered at seventeen to pursue an art degree. “In those days,” he remembers, “a film appreciation course was all you could take. Which meant you watched Battleship Potemkin and talked about it.”
Beyond his teenage 8mm efforts, later, ultimately abortive projects included Whine of the Fawn, a proposed art film in the vein of Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin Spring (also the basis for Wes Craven’s influential 1972 feature-film debut The Last House on the Left). Romero wrote his own screenplay draft for Whine of the Fawn and, prophetically enough, interviewed then-adolescent future makeup effects collaborator Tom Savini to play the lead role.
As Savini recalls, “George came to my high school to audition people. Later I approached him about doing the makeup for his Night of the Living Dead. He was so busy I was following him around the studio flipping pages of my portfolio. He said, ‘Yeah, man, we could use you.’ Unfortunately, they called me to go into the army right before George shot. So when he did that, I was in Vietnam.” Another Romero project, an offbeat 1960 comic anthology entitled Expostulations—boasting a budget of $2,000 and starring actor friend Ray Laine—was actually filmed but the soundtrack never completed.
Romero had even dipped a toe into the cinematic mainstream, working as a go-fer on a pair of major Hollywood productions that would play a significant role in shaping his negative view of the industry. First up was Alfred Hitchcock’s 1959 North by Northwest, which left a teenage Romero less than wowed: “I didn’t see him [Hitchcock] much, but I did see him some, and the way he worked was just so mechanical! There was no vitality on that set.” His experiences assisting on the Doris Day comedy It Happened to Jane later that year only strengthened his deprecatory ’tude. “I really think that was the one that did it. It seemed so clearly like one of those things that was just a deal and nobody gave a shit about what was going on.”
“I didn’t see Hitchcock much, but I did see him some, and the way he worked was just so mechanical!”
—George Romero
The aspiring auteur gained far more useful knowledge working at Pittsburgh film labs and delivering news footage to local TV stations. Says Romero, “I just went down and hung out at one of these film labs. My first job as a P.A. was literally bicycling news; news was on film. These journeyman guys would be splicing this stuff together while smoking cigarettes over flammable glue pots! It was like a pressroom. It was in one of those labs that I learned the basics.”
Feature filmmaking had been Romero’s goal since co-founding The Latent Image in 1963. After dropping out of Carnegie Tech and leading a restless boho existence for a couple of years, Romero and former college bud Russ Streiner opened the production house in a $ 65-a-month office that doubled as the pair’s crash pad. John Russo was invited to join them but opted instead for a two-year army stretch. Says Russo: “George and Russ told me they were going to start a commercial film company and if they were doing well by the time I got out, I could come to work with them.”
The Latent Image ranks increased to three when local roller-rink owner Vince Survinski bought his way into the outfit in a bid to fulfill his own long-simmering celluloid ambitions: He hoped to produce a fact-based Rudy Ricci script about an East German prison escapee/defector named Aberhardt Doelig. While that project fell through, Survinski stayed on.
At first there wasn’t much shaking beyond wedding and baby pictures. Romero would sell an occasional oil painting for fifty bucks or so, enough to allow the three to purchase a pet monkey (!) and a table-hockey game. In the beginning, they spent more time playing with both than meeting nonexistent clients’ imaginary demands.
Armed with a 16mm Bolex and some rudimentary lighting equipment, the three scored their first significant gig creating a cost-conscious TV spot for Pittsburgh’s Buhl Planetarium, depicting a rocket ship landing on the moon. Romero painted the backdrops, while Streiner molded the clay that formed the lunar surface; Rudy Ricci’s brother Mark chipped in the toy rocket. The ad took off, so to speak: The client loved it, forked over $1,600, and the spot even played during local drive-in intermissions, marking Romero’s first big-screen exposure.
That effort proved successful enough to attract bigger players like Iron City (“The Beer Drinker’s Beer”) and Duke beer. In the latter spot, a proto-redneck of the sort that would join Night’s posse greedily gulps down not only his Duke brew but his understandably bitter half’s too, leading the miffed missus to moan, “And I had to pick a natural man!”
After The Latent Image secured a thirty thou business loan and relocated to a more expansive office space, larger Pittsburgh-based corporate clients, like Alcoa and Heinz, came calling. This resulted in a workaholic lifestyle for the group. Russo recalls: “We had gotten a reputation in some circles of being an energetic nucleus of creative maniacs who could make good films for those who couldn’t afford—or didn’t want—to spend very much money. We were fiercely proud of our work. But most of the time, we were broke, frustrated, and physically and mentally exhausted.”
It was The Calgon Story, however, budgeted at a lofty $90,000, that brought much-needed cash into the company coffers, allowing the lads to spring for their first 35mm camera. It also injected them with the confidence to plan their feature-film plunge in 1967. Though the imaginative ad, a spoof of the hit sci-fi film Fantastic Voyage (1966), received but a single airing due to Calgon’s sale to a new corporation, Romero cites it as a major turning point. “The Calgon spot, in fact, was the trigger. It gave the company a little money to be able to take the time to get something going.