Night Of The Living Dead:. Joe Kane

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СКАЧАТЬ screen monster. “George had the dead cannibalizing the living,” says Russo. Some of those pages were adapted from an earlier prose effort. Romero states, “I had written a short story, which I had basically ripped off from a Richard Matheson novel called I Am Legend.” In any case, according to Russo, “It clicked. It had action, tension, and horror. It turned us all on.”

      That turn-on resulted in the formation of Image Ten, the Latent Image-spawned outfit that would produce the group’s feature-film debut. Beyond the three “R” s—Romero (director), Russo ( co-writer), and Ricci (actor)—the company consisted of Latent Image cohorts Russell Streiner (producer) and Vince Survinski (production manager), cousin Rudy Ricci (actor), sibling Gary Streiner (sound), friends Karl Hardman ( co-producer, actor) and Marilyn Eastman (makeup, actress), as well as partners in the industrial/commercial sound studio Hardman Associates, Inc., and attorney Dave Clipper.

      Says Russo: “We agreed—and later it turned out to have been a critical decision—that Image Ten would be chartered to make only one feature motion picture. This was our way of guaranteeing the investors that we wouldn’t tie up any profits by sinking them into a new project of which some of the group might not approve. In other words, if our very first venture made money, we would be obliged to pay it out to the risk takers who had supported us.”

      While eager to produce a feature film, not all of the ten were entirely enthused about going the straight-ahead horror route. As Russ Streiner, who would achieve scare-screen immortality as Barbara’s brother-turned-zombie Johnny, noted, “Deep down inside, we were all serious filmmakers and somewhat disappointed that we had to resort to horror for our first film.” Rudy Ricci was likewise unmoved by the undead cannibal concept. “I thought George was kidding. People eating people!”

      Still, the premise ultimately earned enough support among the consortium to keep the project rolling. Romero’s early draft for the as-yet-untitled horror film (known simply as Monster Flick during production, it would later acquire the obscure working title Night of Anubis, a reference to the Egyptian god of death; it then switched again to Flesh Eaters) pleased his partners for another reason. It had a small cast, “not counting extras,” Russo points out, “and was within logistical constraints that could be kept within our ridiculously small budget.”

      Originally, Barbara was to emerge alive from the zombie onslaught after Ben drags her down to the cellar.

      Several Image Ten members, including Romero, Russo, Russ Streiner, Hardman, and Eastman, brainstormed the second half of the grisly tale, with actual scripting tasks falling to Russo: “I rewrote what George had written, changing whatever needed to be changed, and then wrote the second half of the script.” During that process, several key changes were effected. “In the first script there wasn’t a young couple,” Russo reveals. “There was a middle-aged gravedigger named Tom. Then we decided the movie needed the young, good-looking girl in it. We made Tom younger and made him the boyfriend. That was all written in after the fact.”

      But the most notable alterations involved the ending. Originally, Barbara was to emerge alive from the zombie onslaught after Ben drags her down to the cellar. Ben’s dire fate, however, was present from the get-go. Says Russo:

      We figured it would shock people and they would hate it, but it would make them keep talking about the picture as they were leaving the theater. Karl Hardman suggested a third possibility: He wanted to see the little girl (Kyra Schon) standing in the foreground as the posse members finished burning the dead bodies and drove off. There would thus be one ghoul still left alive.

      With the basic script in place, directorial chores were assigned to Romero, who’d grown up a committed movie addict in the Bronx, New York. Intellectually precocious, of Cuban and Lithuanian-American heritage and a bit of a loner, young George found refuge and inspiration in the local theaters. There he was enthralled by such screen wonders as the Frankenstein and Dracula re-releases, sci-fi greats, such as The Thing (From Another World) and The Day the Earth Stood Still, and his all-time fave, Michael Powell’s and Emeric Pressburger’s enchanting dance fantasy The Tales of Hoffman, all from 1951. The last-mentioned had aired on New York City’s Million Dollar Movie, a TV series that emulated a movie theater by hosting 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 СКАЧАТЬ