Читать книгу Night Of The Living Dead: - Joe Kane - Страница 12

I thought George was kidding. People eating people!

—Rudy Ricci

It was a cold and snowy day in January 1967 when three twentysomething principals of a modest Pittsburgh commercial/industrial film house, The Latent Image, Inc., repaired to a local eatery for a late lunch, well-lubricated with equally cold beers. The three—George A. Romero, John A. Russo (“Jack” to his friends), and Rudy Ricci—were bemoaning their business struggles. Russo, like the others a frustrated filmmaker, suggested they undertake a feature-film project for the drive-in circuit. Little—make that nada—did they know that such a seemingly whimsical notion would, less than three years later, result not only in a completed movie but an international pop-culture phenomenon that would endure decades into the future, still with no end in sight.

Meanwhile, back at the drawing board, or lunch table, major obstacles loomed. On the upside, The Latent Image HQ harbored all the basic equipment needed for low-budget feature-film production. The group had already produced such commissioned mini-epics as The Calgon Story (quite possibly the first detergent-oriented sci-fi film) and Mr. Rogers Gets a Tonsillectomy (“probably the scariest movie I ever made,” Romero would later declare). But the company could only loosen some $6,000—and that with a little help from its friends—to fund filming. Even in 1967 Pittsburgh, six grand could barely buy a 30-second local commercial, let alone bankroll a marketable movie. What kind of feature could be lensed, or at least begun, on so low a budget?

“How about a monster movie?” Russo suggested.

“How about a monster movie?” Russo suggested.

While certainly a thought in the right direction, that inspired query didn’t immediately lead to the creation of the immortal Night of the Living Dead. Russo recalls:

The first concept—one that we all liked—was about monsters from outer space, only it was going to be a horror comedy instead of a horror drama. Some teenagers “hotrodding” around the galaxies were going to get involved with teenagers from Earth, befriending them, while cartoon-like authority figures stumbled around, trying to unearth “clues” to the crazy goings-on. The outer space teenagers were going to have a weird, funny pet called The Mess—a live garbage disposal that looked like a clump of spaghetti; you just tossed empty pop cans, popsicle sticks, or whatever into The Mess and it ate them. There was also going to be a wacky sheriff called Sheriff Suck, who was totally inept and kept being the butt of all the teenagers’ jokes.

Make that a long way from the Living Dead. Indeed, that initial concept hewed closer to an earlier indie horror hit likewise lensed in the wilds of Pennsylvania, Irwin S. “Shorty” Yeaworth’s The Blob (1958). “The main reason this project got scrapped,” Russo elaborates, “was that we couldn’t afford the props and special effects that would have been required to pull off the spaceship landing, The Mess, and so on. We had to scale our thinking down a little in terms of logistics.” In this instance, lack of budget may have actually saved the day, or at least rescued The Latent Image crew from ongoing obscurity.

Fueled by such fave fright films as Forbidden Planet (1956), Psycho (1960), and especially the über-creepy Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), Russo began exploring a darker idea: A boy runs away from home following a fight with his brother—the same basic setup employed by an earlier, gentler indie film, Morris Engel’s Brooklyn-set Little Fugitive (1953). The similarity ends there, however: Instead of frolicking at Coney Island like the latter film’s titular runaway, Russo’s young hero arrives at a clearing in the woods, where he discovers large panes of glass covering rotting bodies. “Ghoulish people or alien creatures would be feeding off the human corpses,” Russo remembers, “setting them under the panes of glass so that the flesh would rapidly and properly decompose to suit the ghouls’ tastes.” Russo further determined: “Whatever we did should start in a cemetery because people find cemeteries spooky.”

Russo relayed his bare-bones idea to Romero, who, a few days later, “amazed me by coming back with about forty really excellent pages of an exciting, suspenseful story. Everybody in our group loved it. We all decided this had to be it—the movie we would make. It was the first half of Night of the Living Dead.”

Those forty pages described a new breed of 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 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. 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 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.