Night Of The Living Dead:. Joe Kane

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СКАЧАТЬ actors knew what was coming, we knew that this was going to be the very first onset of the living dead things, and I just wanted to set the stage for the gloomy things to come.”

      In fact, the pair’s increasingly juvenile behavior reinforces the film’s dark fairy-tale flavor, as the two young adults regress into a veritable Hansel and Gretel, ripe, edible prey for the creatures of the forest—or the graveyard. “Russ and I had a great time doing that scene,” O’Dea recalls. “It amazed me how it took me back, warp speed, to when I was a little girl visiting the cemetery with my mother. Those visits always scared me…Death scared me back then. So being upset with Johnny in our cemetery scene was pretty easy to do.”

      To portray the quarreling Coopers, Harry and Helen, the filmmakers chose close cohorts Karl Hardman (born Karl Hardman Schon) and Marilyn Eastman. In addition to running Hardman Associates, Karl had performed in commercials like The Latent Image’s The Calgon Story and, before that, like Judith O’Dea, had tried his luck in Los Angeles. Karl’s on- and off-screen daughter, Kyra Schon, remembers, “He did study acting out there. He did some theater. But he didn’t get anything permanent, so he moved back to Pittsburgh.” Marilyn Eastman had worked extensively in regional theater as well as TV, performing such varied roles as a live commercials model and weather girl to a lady vampire on local horror host Bill “Chilly Billy” Cardille’s Chiller Theater.

      Both Karl and Marilyn were also well-known figures in the Pittsburgh radio orbit, with Hardman logging in several years on a mega-popular comedy show called Cordic and Company, for which he wrote skits and voiced some fifteen characters. The two also recorded and sold routines for radio syndication before that market dried up in the mid-’60s. The highly verbal, versatile pair improvised much of their Night dialogue, with Eastman coining the oft-quoted line, “We may not enjoy living together, but dying together isn’t going to solve anything!”

      A receptionist at Hardman Associates, the then-nineteen-year-old Judith Ridley was originally considered for the part of Barbara before being assigned the somewhat less demanding Judy role. Judith O’Dea affirms, “They originally considered Ridley over me because she was a hell of a lot prettier than I was! I have one of those character faces.” In fact, on Night’s iconic original poster, Ridley’s face is weirdly superimposed over O’Dea’s body. But the ultimate casting choice proved the correct one. “I was dreadful when I read for Barbara,” Ridley confesses. “I’d never done any acting. I think they took pity on me. They liked me. They made a little spot for me. But I was not prepared to be Barbara. I couldn’t have done that role.”

      Keith Wayne (born Ronald Keith Hartman), cast as Judy’s earnest young beau Tom, was, likewise, completely new to acting, though not to performing—he led the busy local band Ronnie and the Jesters and would later front such musical aggregates as Keith Wayne and the Unyted Brass Works. He spent much of the Night shoot commuting between Pittsburgh and a steady weekend gig in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. Romero, for one, was quite impressed by the lad: “Of all the people in the cast, I thought he was the celebrity. He was the showbiz cat. He was our Frankie Avalon.”

      “Of all the people in the cast, I thought he was the celebrity. He was the showbiz cat. He was our Frankie Avalon.”

      —George Romero, on Keith Wayne

      No Night performer would go on to enjoy a more devoted cult following than 9-year-old killer kiddie Kyra Schon, who commits the most transgressive acts of all in a movie packed with them—she kills her mom and devours her dad (!). She was literally fed up with him. For many ’60s youths and later punks and headbangers who proudly bore her image emblazoned on T-shirts or tattooed on their bodies, Kyra represented the ultimate in rebelliousness. Her only two words of dialogue in the film—“I hurt”—spoke volumes about the failure of her bickering parents and their misguided values—and, by extension, the entire social system—to nurture her.

      A schoolteacher today, Kyra looks back fondly at her time as a cannibal kid. “The role had originally been written for a boy but since there was a boy shortage that year, they settled for the nearest young, warm body they could find. That was me. I was already a horror-movie junkie at that point in my life, watching Chiller Theater every Saturday. The Crawling Eye and The Wasp Woman were my favorite movies. I just couldn’t believe my good fortune that I was gonna get to play a little monster and kill people. What could be better?”

      Kyra certainly made the most of her limited screen time. “I don’t do a whole lot in the movie! For most of it, I’m lying there on a table, and that was one night. Then there was the struggle with Duane Jones. That was kind of funny. I was sure he was going to miss the couch completely and throw me through the wall. But he didn’t. Then there was the trowel thing…. Shooting the scene wasn’t nearly as dramatic as watching it. I was stabbing into a pillow with the trowel. And then someone was behind me throwing chocolate syrup against the wall to make it look like the blood was splattering. I had a great time doing it. I didn’t feel that way so much when I was really young, because I took a lot of teasing as a result of it. Maybe it was just their way of paying attention. But I never liked being the center of attention.”

      “I just couldn’t believe my good fortune that I was gonna get to play a little monster and kill people. What could be better?”

      —Kyra Schon

      Today Kyra doesn’t shy away from her association with Karen—nor do her students. “[They] always ask me, ‘Which one were you in? Oh, you were in that old black-and-white one!’ And I say, ‘Yeah, the real one.’”

      Like most of Night’s participants, Kyra ended up doing double-duty on the film. “I was used as the upstairs body because they needed someone to drag away. I guess of all of the people there, I was probably the smallest.” Still, the most traumatic moment for Kyra occurred watching rather than appearing in the film. “I never liked seeing my father shot and falling down the stairs. It was too much, watching him grapple with that coat rack.”

      For the most part, though, the experience proved a childhood high point: “It was fascinating to watch ordinary people transformed into flesh-eating ghouls. I loved seeing zombies stand around the barbecue grills waiting for their hot dogs, zombies smoking cigarettes, zombies driving cars. There was a surreal quality to that scene that could only be truly appreciated by the mind of a child.”

      Another key to Image Ten’s successful secondary casting: hiring people to essentially play themselves. William Schallertesque Charles Craig, a radio and TV veteran who’d worked as Alan Freed’s newsman on the pioneering rock deejay’s Moondog Show in Cleveland and served as an actor and writer at Hardman Associates, portrayed the television newscaster who relayed the breaking bad news regarding the ongoing ghoul epidemic.

      “It was pure happenstance I was on the scene at that time as an experienced newsman,” Craig later related. He even wrote his own news copy and added a turn as an intestine-chomping zombie. Craig could also be heard as the eponymous character in the local morning radio comedy series The Teahouse of Jason Flake, produced by and featuring Hardman and Eastman.

      Similarly, Chiller Theater host and all-around WIIC-TV front-man Bill Cardille agreed to play the television field reporter—and had to wait some twelve hours on-set before his turn arrived, after a full night working at the station. “When you see me in that movie, that’s after no sleep for about two days.”

      Local news cameraman Steve Hutsko signed on to appear as Bill’s cameraman. His story is typical of Night’s naturalistic casting. He’d earlier accompanied Cardille to the set to shoot a local TV story about the filming in progress: “We went to the old farmhouse and they were setting up things. That’s how we got involved. Bill Cardille asked me, ‘Do you want to be in the film? I’m gonna be a reporter and they need a cameraman.’”

      Hutsko СКАЧАТЬ