Night Of The Living Dead:. Joe Kane

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      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. We probably would have eventually gotten it up some other way, but that’s really what enabled us to make Night of the Living Dead.”

      “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.”

      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 СКАЧАТЬ