Night Of The Living Dead:. Joe Kane
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couldn’t afford to buy or build a house to destroy,” Russo recalls, “since the $12,000 had to cover all the costs of production.”
But a long day’s journey into Night yet awaited. While the group had attracted an additional ten investors, swelling the budget to a skeletal twelve grand, they still needed to procure the film’s crucial main setting, the farmhouse where the bulk of the zombie and human horror would unfold. “We couldn’t afford to buy or build a house to destroy,” Russo recalls, “since the $12,000 had to cover all the costs of production.”
Luckily, a young Latent Image intern named Jack Ligo provided a critical lead. Says Russo: “A large white farmhouse in Evans City, Pennsylvania, was going to be bulldozed because the owners were intending to use the property as a sod farm. It looked perfect. The owner agreed to rent it to us for several months before he bulldozed it for about $300 a month. It had last been used as a summer camp for a church group. There was no running water, and, while we were working there, we had to carry our water from a spring down a steep hill, quite a distance away. The house didn’t have a suitable basement for filming. So we decided to film our basement scenes on a set built in the basement of the building where The Latent Image was headquartered.”
Now that they had their setting, the eager filmmakers rushed headlong into production, ready or not, before their enthusiasm had a chance to wane. While placing Romero in the director’s chair was a no-brainer, many of the other assignments were largely improvised. Sound engineer Gary Streiner, younger brother of Russ, recalls: “I wasn’t a soundman. I was just a guy who put his hand up and said, ‘Okay, I’ll do that.’” Gary felt inspired by the troupe’s determination. “I saw people who were actually doing things, not just talking about them. So many people don’t do things out of fear. I think the beauty of The Latent Image and the beauty of the association with George and the rest of the guys was that there was no fear. It was, ‘What did we have to lose? What’s the alternative? Nothing!’”
Nearly all The Latent Image/Image Ten principals multi-tasked during the production. Romero not only directed but worked, uncredited, as both cinematographer and chief film editor; Russ Streiner served as a producer, while Karl Hardman operated as a producer and still photographer, ultimately, compiling some 1,250 publicity snaps. Vince Survinski was the production director; George Kosana handled production manager chores. All of the above also played onscreen roles ranging from key characters (Hardman’s Harry Cooper) to iconic cameos (Romero’s Washington reporter). Propman Charles O’Dato was a part-time taxidermist, so he contributed the animal heads mounted in the farmhouse, each of whom received its own close-up in a scene later famously quoted (and affectionately spoofed) in Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead 2.
As John Russo summed it up: “We had the zest and determination to work together as a group to pull our ideas off. We could not have anticipated that the Monster Flick would eventually be called a ‘classic.’ But we fully expected, every step of the way, that we would make a very good motion picture of its type, better than most other pictures in the genre. We were that cocky.”
A Night to Remember: What the Living Dead Means to Me
by Frank Henenlotter
I first saw Night of the Living Dead at the Valley Stream Drive-In in Valley Stream, Long Island. I think it was maybe the fall of ’68 or the spring of ’69. Night was top of a double bill, so I assume it was first run. I’d been out filming one of my amateur 8mm epics with three friends, Tom, Colleen, and Emma. We’d gotten done filming early, so we figured we’d go to the drive-in, which was the fun place for seeing schlock; and any movie named Night of the Living Dead must be schlock, right? How quickly the foolish learn.
We sat in that car feeling as trapped and claustrophobic as the people in that house, blindsided by what was obviously the most potent horror film of the ’60s since Psycho. At one point, someone heading to the snack bar must have brushed against our car because Emma let out with a scream that I thought would bring the cops. It was also the first time I ever looked away from the screen—mommy getting killed by her little-girl zombie was, at that time, the most shocking thing I’d ever seen on the screen, and it was just too much for me.
I didn’t feel like we’d spent an evening at a drive-in; I felt like we’d been assaulted. Of course, it was a far more innocent era back then. A little bit of blood went a loooooong way in that pre-Fulci world, especially when there was no Internet for fans to warn and buzz about films in advance. Funny, but I have no recollection what the co-feature was. We either didn’t stay for it, or it was erased from my memory in the wake of Night. As it was, long after the film was over, Colleen sat in the car crying.
I didn’t catch up with Night again until it emerged as a midnight movie in Manhattan where I saw it a number of times more. Nowadays, however, I’m sick of zombie movies and just ignore them. Yes, they’re gorier and faster paced and blah, blah, blah, but none of them catch the horrific beauty of George Romero’s one-of-a-kind original.
Cult writer/director FRANK HENENLOTTER is the brains behind Basket Case, Brain Damage, Frankenhooker, Bad Biology and other outré cult fare. His Basket Case would occupy the Waverly Theater weekend midnight slot a decade after Night of the Living Dead.
4
CASTING A CULT CLASSIC
“They’re dead. They’re…all messed up.”
—Sheriff McClelland, Night of the Living Dead
Before filming could begin, Image Ten looked to cast the core characters caught up in the zombie menace. Most crucial was the lead, Ben, who would have to carry much of the movie on his shoulders. As originally written, the character was a resourceful but rough and crude-talking trucker, a role initially envisioned for Rudy Ricci. Those plans changed when a thirty-one-year-old African-American actor named Duane Jones competed for the part.
“A mutual friend of George’s and mine was a woman by the name of Betty Ellen Haughey,” Russ Streiner relates. “She grew up in Pittsburgh, but at that time she was living in New York and she knew of Duane Jones. He’d started off in a suburb just outside of Pittsburgh, yet he was off in New York making a living as a teacher and an actor. And she said to us, when Night of the Living Dead was really developing in preproduction and building steam, ‘You should meet this friend of mine from New York.’ Duane happened to be in Pittsburgh visiting his family for one of the holidays, and we auditioned him. And immediately everyone, including Rudy Ricci, said, ‘Hey, this is the guy that should be Ben.’”
Romero agrees with that recollection: “Duane Jones was the best actor we met to play Ben. If there was a film with a Black actor in it, it usually had a racial theme, like The Defiant Ones. Consciously I resisted writing new dialogue ’cause he happens to be Black. We just shot the script. Perhaps Night of the Living Dead is the first film to have a Black man playing the lead role regardless of, rather than because of, his race.” (Contrary to that opinion, oft-expressed by Romero and others, Jones was not the first black actor to be cast in a non-ethnic-specific starring role; Sidney Poitier earned that distinction in 1965 playing a reporter in James B. Harris’s nuclear sub suspenser The Bedford Incident and, the following year, portraying an ex-military man turned horse-breaker in Ralph Nelson’s western Duel at Diablo, doubly ironic given Duel’s racial theme, albeit one centering on Native-Americans.)
At that, black actors were no strangers to Latent Image ads. “In looking at some of those old [ mid-’60s] commercials,” says Russo, “we always had black actors and we always gave a lot of work to people who had a tough time getting it. That was our nature, so we didn’t blink at casting a black actor in that role.” The slim, handsome Jones was himself quite familiar with aspects of the ad world, having earlier posed as an Ebony magazine model in layouts selling everything from liquor to Listerine.
“We didn’t blink at casting a black actor in that role.”
—John Russo
Still, Russo detected an initial uneasiness. “At first he distrusted those of us on the crew, behind the camera. He wondered why we would cast a black man in the lead role of our movie, and he thought we might