December 2020

In 1986, George began what would have been an epic, two-part adaptation of H.G. Wells' foundational science fiction novel War of the Worlds. He completed a draft of the first part, "The Night They Came," which covered an on-the-ground account of humanity's attempts to survive the initial alien invasion. That screenplay ended with the humans starting to rise up and fight back, and an announcement of part two, "The Day of Combat." Along with the drafts of the first part, there were designs for the alien ships and machinery, including a unique take on the iconic tripod walkers from which the aliens attack. 

It's little known that Night of the Living Dead was not actually Romero's first feature film. The first was a mostly-lost anthology film from the early 1960s called Expostulations. According to Romero, it was fully shot and edited but it was shot silent - as was customary for low-budget independent filmmaking at the time - and the company hired to create and record the soundtrack went out of business. It's unclear what happened to the footage, but some footage (from a segment by Richard Ricci starring future NFL fullback Robert Brooks) has resurfaced. In an unpublished interview from the 1990s, George described the film as follows:

The film was an anthology containing five short stories written by myself, Rudy [Ricci], and (the biggest contributor) Rudy's cousin Richard Ricci, who wrote the two longest set-pieces, 'Connection,' a poem (which we visualized) about blacks driven to crime in the inner city, and 'A Door Against the Rain,' the closest to a 'real movie,' a story about a poverty-stricken boy whose grandfather builds him a free-standing door in an empty lot. The boy moves through the door into imagined places.

The other three pieces... Mine - 'Average Morning' (a montage of images depicting a commuter's morning) and 'The Framistan' (a slapstick about a scientist who creates a machine which makes people disappear); Rudy's 'The Rocketship' (also slapstick, about a two-inch-long rocket from space which lands in a man's ice cream cone at an amusement park... seen through the eyes of the rocketship's crew).... were quite frivolous compared to Richard's.

It was an ambitious project. We were seriously dedicated to it, and, most important, we finished it (at two and a half hours). We worked with real actors (friends from CMU and from The Pittsburgh Playhouse). We build elaborate sets, props, etc. It was really our first 'professional' work.

In trying to provide a musical score for Expostulations, we got involved with a small audio recording company in Pittsburgh, Lavere Music. After a short time, Lavere went bankrupt. We secured a business loan and took over their office and studio space which we still occupied in 1984 (as Laurel). Expostulations, in my mind, represents the real beginning of my career. It was the first time I could possibly achieve something as a filmmaker.

In the archive, we only have one item from the film: a promotional booklet created to raise funds  for the production. It contains surprisingly little information about the film! Without any narrative description, images from the film, or any specifics about the project, the booklet imagines a dialogue between the filmmakers behind Expostulations and an unsophisticated rube of a moviegoer who expects every film to be a genre movie with big stars and hot babes and a very familiar story. This project, in contrast, is ART. 

Without any additional context, this sheet was included in the middle of Romero's production. We don't know where it came from, but it's a wryly humorous (and depressingly accurate!) summary of Romero's experiences in the film industry. 

The Six Phases of Film Production

1. Wild enthusiasm
2. Disillusionment
3. Panic
4. Search for the guilty
5. Punishment of the innocent
6. Reward of the non-involved

The George A. Romero Archival Collection contains literally hundreds of drafts from unproduced projects, including at least 80 that seem to be unique projects begun by Romero himself or in collaboration with another writer. There are other projects that began as a script by someone else, or which seem to be screenplays that Romero acquired or was sent but never worked on (including a screenplay written by Let's Scare Jessica to Death writer Lee Kalcheim adapting his acclaimed play, Friends, and a draft of Peter Jackson, Fran Walsh, and Phillippa Boyens' Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring).

One of the most intriguing, exciting projects was a film to be co-produced by Marvel Comics that Romero conceived with the legendary Jim Shooter (a fellow Pittsburgher!) called, variously, Copperhead, Mongrel: The Legend of Copperhead, or Copperhead Conquers the Warhawks. We have several drafts in the archive from the early 1980s, including an "illustrated story" that summarizes the action with illustrations for each scene. It's a science fiction epic, set in a world of space travel and robots and hyper-advanced military technology in which rebels are fighting against a rigidly militaristic, fascist system. "Copperhead" is the hero, a soldier transformed into a Robocop-like fighting machine (several years BEFORE Robocop, to be clear) and sent to seek out and eradicate the rebel "terrorists" who supposedly destroyed his home city. The scope of the story expands as it progresses, climaxing with Copperhead fighting alongside the rebels as various sides attempt to gain control of a massive stockpile of nuclear weapons. The story is wild and fun and, like all of Romero's projects, fundamentally political.

Romero and Shooter worked on the project over the course of several years (our materials are dated between 1982 and 1984), with the project evolving in each iteration. Alongside the drafts we have a collection of slides, color illustrations of character designs and action set-pieces.

This wasn't the last time Romero and Shooter would work together. In the late 1990s, as Romero was pondering a return to zombies with a Resident Evil adaptation, a Night of the Living Dead television series, and a script first called "Dead Reckoning" that would be filmed and released as Land of the Dead, he would also be working on big screen adapation of the Shooter-created Shadowman. For anyone familiar with the characters and the mythology that Shooter and his fellow Valiant Comics creators developed, this would have been a particularly intriguing project for the director of Night of the Living Dead, as it would have melded Romero's own approach to the undead with the traditions of Haitian Vodoun. 

Among the materials for Night of the Living Dead, we found a handwritten sheet of notebook paper with the heading "20 or 25 Cities" at the top. It took us a minute, but we soon figured out what it was: this list would become the crawl at the bottom of the screen during the news broadcast in Night. These are all the safe destinations for survivors in southwest Pennsylvania as the dead begin to rise....

As someone who has screened Night for a class at the University of Pittsburgh, I might have been a bit more attuned to some of those locations than others. As the crawl proceeded, there was murmuring in the classroom as students started recognizing not just the cities but, sometimes, the actual buildings. This culminated in the Pittsburgh location - "Oakland Medical Center" - only a couple blocks away from our classroom. 

-Adam Charles Hart

There are some clearly important, revelatory materials in the Romero archive, but sometimes the most entertaining bits are the ephemera. This utterly delightful doodle, signed by Romero and dated February 7, 1974, reprises a caveman design we've also found in a Latent Image Christmas Card (undated, but presumably December 1973). 

These sorts of seemingly random bits can be INCREDIBLY helpful for researchers, however. Because Romero dated this little bit of paper on producer Richard Rubinstein's stationary, that lets us date the rest of the info on the page: "WFL-Bruno." This blog will be posting more info and discussions of Romero's almost wholly unknown TV work from the 1970s in the coming weeks, but, briefly, he worked with Rubinstein to make a series of sports documentaries for television between 1973 and 1975. It was crucial to getting his career back on track after a series of flops (not to mention the lack of returns for Night of the Living Dead) left him in debt and unable to finance a new feature. "WFL" refers to a documentary on the World Football League, while "Bruno" refers to legendary Pittsburgh-based wrestler Bruno Sammartino. The latter film was directed by Romero, with interviews conducted by local newsman, horror host, wrestling enthusiast, and Night of the Living Dead actor "Chilly Billy" Bill Cardille, and it's a wonderful portrait of not just a performer but of the city. Thanks to this randomly saved bit of paper, we can now be reasonably certain that they were filming both simultaneously in February 1974. 

-Adam Charles Hart

George Romero worked for several years on an adaptation of Stephen King's Pet Sematary, but the timing never worked out. Between post-production on Day of the Dead and the development of Monkey Shines, Romero's schedule conflicted with the various windows of funding/production that opened up. It was, for him as for King, a very personal project that spoke to family and fatherhood in ways that were incredibly meaningful to him. Working from King's screenplay, the project came close enough to production with Romero at the helm that Romero storyboarded the project. 

King and Romero had sought to work together several times over the course of their careers, with Creepshow and The Dark Half being the only completed films. But Romero worked towards filming not just Pet Sematary but The Stand, It, Children of the Corn, and The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon. The archive also contains a 1983 screenplay by King called The Shotgunners, which King would rework in the 1990s for his novel The Regulator.

In the late 1990s, George Romero began exploring the possibility of a TV adaptation of Night of the Living Dead, writing a treatment in 1997 that retold the beginnings of the zombie apocalypse from the perspective of a different cast of characters. In 2004, he adapted that idea to a style and structure modeled on The Blair Witch Project: the series would consist entirely of footage shot within the world of the film, primarily from the cameras of the film students that would be its main characters. After Land of the Dead was released to modest box office returns, Romero returned to the Night TV pilot script with the thought of making an ultra-low budget zombie movie, possibly with film students at Valencia College in Florida, and adapted it into Diary of the Dead. When a production company suggested a slightly larger budget with the prospect of a theatrical release, Romero added a few action setpieces to give viewers their money's worth, but, most importantly, he added one major character (Debra, the nominal protagonist of the film) but otherwise he otherwise kept most of that TV script with minimal changes. 

At this time, Romero had moved away from his longtime home of Pittsburgh, where he had lived and worked for most of his life. But he compensated by setting Land explicitly in downtown Pittsburgh, and making Diary's characters students at the University of Pittsburgh. There is a great deal to say about the evolution of all these projects, but I wanted to begin with this paragraph from the Night of the Living Dead TV pilot script describing his then-former hometown. If you wanted to know about the Steel City, this is as good an introduction as any.

...PITTSBURGH. An urban environment, not too small, not too large. Thought of as an armpit, the brunt of many a one-liner, Pittsburgh has always been a progressive city. It boasts the first radio station in the country. The first TV station, the first movie theater. The home of the Salk vaccine, it is currently ranked #1 in pediatric medicine and organ transplantation. The original Carnegie Hall sits in the heart of its cultural center which contains five major universities, including Carnegie Mellon, the home base for C.E.R.T., along with the world's most advanced experimental laboratories in computer technology, serving, among others, the U.S. Defense Department.

-Adam Charles Hart

In the first draft of Stephen King's screenplay for Pet Sematary - which is, of course, about resurrecting the dead - George Romero's Night of the Living Dead makes an appearance. This first draft, dated November 15, 1984, is unfinished. It was written and originally developed with Romero as the intended director, but unfortunate timing led to the producer moving on from Romero and drafting the great Mary Lambert to create her own iconic version of King's novel. But Romero worked on develping the film with King for multiple years, getting far enough in the process for Romero to draw his own storyboards.

In the 1984 incomplete draft, Louis is watching Night of the Living Dead on TV "in Beautiful Black and White," when his daughter Ellie approaches to ask him "Daddy, do you think Missy Dandrige went to heaven?" 

The first full draft would be dated April 1985, and it would not retain the jokey reference to Romero's debut. 

It would, however, retain another in-joke, to Michael McDowell. McDowell is now best know as the writer of Beetlejuice and The Nightmare Before Christmas, but at the time he was a novelist who had worked with Romero on the Tales from the Darkside television series, including one adapting "The Word Processor of the Gods," a short story written by King and one of the series' signature episodes.

The relevant exchange, between young Ellie and her father Louis, comes almost exactly halfway through the script: 

ELLIE: At school Michael McDowell said she was gonna fry in hell. Michael McDowell says all sewersides fry in hell.

LOUIS: Well, I think Michael McDowell is so full of shit he probably squeeks [sic] when he walks... but don't you dare say that. 

The moral of this particular archival story would appear to be that Stephen King has a lot of fun when he writes, and that includes saluting and/or roasting his friends.

-Adam Charles Hart

Back in 1960, just after he turned 20 years old, George Romero had his first major role in a play, Pittsburgh's first production of Jack Gelber's controversial off-Broadway sensation The Connection. The groundbreaking "play with jazz" was about a group of beatniks and jazz musicians waiting around for their heroin connection, and it broke with all sorts of conventions of style and taste. It would become one of the foundations of the modern American theater, helping to redefine what plays could be and what they could do. This production, put on at the Young Men & Women's Hebrew Assocation auditorium March 17, 19, and 20, 1960, cast Romero, he later claimed, "because I was large, my only impressive quality." Also in the cast was later longtime collaborator Rudolph Ricci. Romero played Leach, the owner of the rundown loft in which all of the action took place. At the end of the play, his character overdoses, which required Romero to use a needle and some skin-colored putty to inject himself. In 1959, the legendary Living Theater's production in NYC had brought the avant-garde theater to some level of fame among hipsters and intellectuals around the country. The Pittsburgh production premiered less than a year later, so it would have been one of the first productions anywhere outside of New York.

In a speech written later in his life, Romero recalls the revelation he felt on stage: 

"We played five performances, and each time, when I shot a needle into the silly-putty on my arm, the audience gasped. They gasped! I had the power to Make them gasp! I was hooked. I had to find a way to make audiences gasp again. But how? I'd never even had a thought about a career in the theater, or in film. I figured you'd never be allowed in, unless you were some sort of 'Born Royalty.'"

At the time, Romero was a self-confessed poor student training to be an artist at Carnegie Tech (now Carnegie Mellon). In the audience for one the play's performances was the head of the Fine Arts department, Ted Hoffmann. Hoffmann, a drama teacher, was impressed by his performance and suggested Romero change his major to drama. Or, in Romero's account, he told him, "George, you're a much better actor than you are a painter." Romero agreed and became a drama student. He would never get enough credits to graduate in his new major, though he did have a small role in a student production that also featured Carnegie Tech student and future Star Trek: The Next Generation actor Rene Auberjenois. Instead, he and other young actors, drama students, and others working in andaround the theater in Pittsburgh soon began developing a more active interest in the movies. 

Romero didn't save much from his artistic career pre-Night of the Living Dead, but in the Pitt Libraries theater archives we happen to have a single archive of the YM&WHA. Of that most of the playbills and other materials are from the 1930s and 1940s, when public funding created a theater renaissance. We happen to have one playbill from the era, and it's of The Connection. 

One early biography of Romero, created along with promotional material for Night of the Living Dead, mentions not just The Connection but another landmark work of avant-garde theater in which Romero appeared in Pittsburgh: Jean Genet's The Balcony. In my research, I've found absolutely no mention in the Pitt theater archives, in searches of newspapers and magazines, or google, for that matter, of any production of The Balcony in Pittsburgh in the 1960s, let alone one that featured Romero. 

-Adam Charles Hart

Night of the Living Dead was developed with the title Night of the Anubis, with its titled changed to Night of the Flesh Eaters during production. Famously, the distributor, the Walter Reade Organization, worried that title was too close to that of the 1964 low-budget horror movie The Flesh Eaters and changed the title to Night of the Living Dead at the last minute. In doing so, they removed the copyright notice attached to the original title and neglected to include one on the new title screen. This put the film into the public domain, which would lead to counteless screenings in cinemas and (especially) on TV in the 1970s and 1980s. The archive contains scripts and script pages referring to the film by its earlier titles, but one of the more unexpected finds were these colorful mini-banners. According to writer John A. Russo, these were produced by George Romero's father, who was a printer in New York. There were a number of them made to promote the film before it obtained a distributor, including giant banners intended to be hung outside the theater. Photos from the archive of the premiere of Night of the Living Dead at Pittsburgh's Fulton Theater indicate that this design was reused with the new title, at least for promotion in the Pittsbugh area.

-Adam Charles Hart

One of George Romero's more beloved creations is Bub from Day of the Dead. Smart enough to learn a few basic tasks, and to grow emotionally attached to the scientist who's teaching him. The earliest materials we have for Day of the Dead were produced all the way back in 1979, when Dawn was still in theaters. That document, a very short synopsis, was likely written to secure the deal that would fund his next three films: Knightriders, Creepshow, and Day. The first longer draft comes from 1982, and it's very different from the finished film. The original conception is a huge, sprawling epic, with a giant cast of characters navigating zombie armies that have been trained to fight humanity's wars. It would have been a remarkable film, on a far grander scale than Romero would ever get the chance to work with. According to Romero's collaborators at the time, Romero could have filmed this script, but he'd need to promise an "R"-rated cut. Suspicious that fans of zombie movies would show up for a sequel that was light on gore, he instead opted to make the film with a drastically reduced budget, and that lower budget would grant him the freedom to release the film unrated. The differences between the finished film and his original conception were stark enough that he listed "Day of the Dead (version 1)" as one of his "unrealized projects" in a 1992 letter. 

There are significant differences between the synopsis, the first version, and the finished film, but some of the most fascinating elements of the early drafts are the consistencies. Rhodes, memorably played by Joseph Pilato in the finished film, is also the main villain of the first version. In the first version, however, he has actual military power, and he is more openly cruel, even bloodthirsty. But perhaps the most interesting consistency between the first and second versions of the script comes in the portrayal of fan favorite Bub, the zombie. 

In the finished film, we see Bub being taught and trained by the Dr. Logan. He shows glimmers of humanity and possible memories of simple tools and tasks, and in his progress throughout the film he seems to grow emotionally attached to Logan. In the chaos of the film's climax, Bub shoots the villainous Rhodes in vengeance for the scientist's murder, followed by a bitterly sarcastic salute. In the 1982 draft, Bub is one of several zombies to have been trained by a scientist named Mary Henried. But, whereas in the finished film Bub is the first and most successful experiment in domesticating zombies, the military dictatorship of the first version has a mass of trained zombies who perform basic tasks. Cleaning and transporting materials, mainly, but they're also trained to attack rebels and outsiders. Bub is the most advanced of Henried's students, a quick-draw sharpshooter who is loyal to his teacher and wants to impress her - their relationship in this draft seems very much like a mother-son dynamic.

We have briefly met Bub before, alongside fellow students Bluto and Tonto, but this is his first sustained scene: 

IN THE CLOSET STALL, the tall ZOMBIE named BUB is trying to attract MARY's attention. We met him last night, too. He was the one RHODES referred to as MARY's pride and joy; the one that was surly and unsociable to RHODES. BUB can tell the good guys from the bad guys.

BUB stands in his shooting stall wearing western-style gun belts. Six-shooters hang in holsters on each of his hips. A GUARD is trying to turn BUB around to face the target wall, but the tall creature seems more interested in MARY.

MARY faces BUB and she delivers a military salute with her hand.

Mary: Good morning, Bub.

BUB replies with one of those pathetic sounds that obviously means something to him. Then he, too, salutes. 

The rest of the scene plays out with Bub continuing his attempts to please and impress Henried, showing off his prowess as a gunslingers and saluting her repeatedly, making snarling sounds as if trying to talk to her. Bub was, in both the first version and the film, Romero's first attempt to explore the "humanity" of zombies that would be so central to his subsequent zombie films and to the novel that Daniel Kraus finished after Romero's death, The Living Dead. Seeing the humanity in zombies, and attempting to, in her words, "humanize" them, is what makes Mary Henried a heroic figure in Day, and Rhodes' contempt for her efforts is one of many things that makes him a villain. 

NOTE: Many thanks to Peter Schöfböck for his assistance with this post. Peter was able to identify and decipher a cryptic memo written while Romero was in Germany, and which pertains to the reception of Dawn of the Dead in that country rather than, as I had previously assumed, to the development of Day.

-Adam Charles Hart

In the archive, we discovered the designs for what we believe to be the 1973 Christmas Card from the Latent Image, presumably designed and drawn by George Romero himself. The first image more or less replicates Romero's doodle of a caveman, and then the image presumably designed for the inside of the card is this, with the caveman scampering away after bonking Santa on the head and stealing his hat. 

-Adam Charles Hart