January 2021

For a variety of reasons, we don't have a ton of material from the development of Night of the Living Dead. It was the first real feature-length production for everybody involved, and they were figuring out most of the logistics as they went along. We have a shooting script that is FILLED with scribbles in the margins and on the back of pages, indicating not just that many decisions were made during the actual filming, but that these decisions were sometimes major. The shooting script names Duane Jones' character Ben as "truckdriver," and all of his typed dialogue is written in a kind of stereotypical "redneck" slang ("This outta hamp their crimper..."). But the handwritten scribbles giving the character the dialogue found in the actual movie name him as either "Ben" or "Duane." And, for some reason, about 2/3 of the way through the typed script, the character's name changes from "Truckdriver" to "Ben," which suggests that there was a rewrite done of the last few scenes at some point. But the scribbles, marginalia, and new scenes written on the backs of pages tell us that most of the rewrites were done after production had begun.

As Romero's future cinematographer Michael Gornick has noted to us, when similar changes were made on the 1977 production Martin they were either written by hand or not even noted in the script. Even a decade later, Romero was not aware of the standard Hollywood practice of "pink pages" to indicate revisions. But, also, for Martin, the crew was already so overtaxed that nobody had the time to revise every single page, and the budget was stretched so thin that they didn't want to "waste" funds on printing new pages. It's reasonable to assume that, for most of the production of Night, it was easier to make changes by hand than to rewrite and re-print a new draft. 

Which is to say: this page gives us a glimpse into the decision-making process in real time from the set. Night changed the horror genre, it changed American independent filmmaking, it changed the city of Pittsburgh, which makes it seem monumental and eternal. But it was made by folks who were figuring it out as they went along.

-Adam Charles Hart

In 1979, flush with the surprisingly immediate success of Dawn of the Dead, Romero quickly began developing another Dead sequel. It would be another 5 years before Day actually went into production, and its final form would be radically different not just from his original idea. This brief synopsis is just over 4 pages long – almost more of a sketch than a proposal – but much of it would be retained in the early drafts. 

This synopsis was whipped up as preparation for a 3-picture deal that would ultimately finance Knightriders, Creepshow, and Day - the zombie sequel was a necessary component to obtain funding for the other two. Romero would develop a version of Day over the next few years that was, as I've described on this blog before, a grand epic. He would ultimately have to hack at the budget so much that he would later consider the original version of Day to be an entirely different, unrealized project from the film he ultimated produced and released. 

In the synopsis, "the world as we know it has ended." The process of societal collapse shown in Dawn is now complete and zombies are the dominant population on earth. The lone exceptions are isolated refugee groups - the spiritual leader, John, of one of these groups will be the hero of the film - and fascistic militaries that have sprouted up across the country. John's "commune" is attacked by zombies, who kill the rest of the group. This is where Romero's approach to zombies differs radically from what came before: 

John faces death once more at the hands of the attacking creatures but to his amazement and to ours, he is allowed to live. The Zombies take him prisoner.

We also note that the creatures do not devour the other victims. Instead, they load the corpses onto refrigerated vans. This organization is startling in creatures who had previously acted on pure animal instincts. We are puzzled until we become aware of human "Lieutenants", who are running the maneuvers. The Living Dead seem to respond to the officers' commands and do their bidding in every way.

In this version of the story, the zombies are trained by the militaries to kill rebels and refugees. Their training in some early scripts goes beyond blitz attacks to include clean-up, operation of machinery, and even precision shooting. That training requires, of course, ensuring that the zombies do not get hungry, a logistical problem that leads to some of the most disturbing moments in Romero's entire body of work. A version of this persists into the final film, but here the villainous General Balthazar, who commands a literal army of the undead, has instituted the farming of humans to provide meat for his troops. (He first begins exploring this idea in 1974, with the first, unfinished script of Dawn of the Dead.) Even darker: this version of Romero's zombies starve and wither away if they don't feed. So not only is Balthazar slaughtering humans like cattle, he is perpetuating and worsening the zombie apocalypse. 

The story climaxes with a battle between Balthazar's zombie army and that of a rival military leader, which provides enough confusion and cover for John and a group of rebels to break into the general's headquarters in an underground bomb shelter. John dies in the attack, but his supporters prevail, exiling Balthazar to the surface, "where he and a small band of defeated tyrants are literally consumed by the returning army of the Living Dead."

The group that Romero does actually refer to as "the 'good guys'" wait out the zombies and let them start to die and disperse before resurfacing to clear up the corpses and mourn the dead. The synopsis ends with a remarkable bit of ambiguously hopeful poetry from Romero:

Then the humans begin to look for ways to resume a life.

-Adam Charles Hart

In 1975, a new feature film production was announced in the trades called Blood. It was a vampire movie to be written and directed by George Romero, and produced by Joseph Brenner Associates.* It would have been filmed in early 1976, but nothing would come of it in that form. The initial versions of Blood in the archive identify it as an early version of Martin, which he would film in 1976 without Brenner's funding on a shoestring budget - according to Martin's cinematographer Michael Gornick, the budget was able to stay so low in part because they shot most of in the house of crewmembers Pasquale and Tony Buba's mother and were able to finagle other free shooting locations in Braddock through friendly connections, and in part because a substantial portion of the film stock they used was swiped from the TV documentaries Romero was making at the time. 

This initial version of Martin tells the story of a middle-aged family man, Martin Matthias, who finds himself suddenly succumbing to a strange illness that drives him to kill people and drink their blood. An elderly relative named "Tati Voda" (the name retained for Tati Cuda all the way to Martin's shooting script and changed at the last minute) understands the disease as a kind of family curse.

Martin Mathias in Blood is a dissatisfied businessman with a wife named Helen and an elderly relative named Tati Voda. It becomes a sort of midlife crisis movie, with a blood disease resembling vampirism driving him into a wild life of sex and violence that is at first a relief from the punishing indignities and unhappiness of his life. It resembles a drug addiction. When he loses control and feeds on a woman he had fallen in love with, he realizes how far gone he is and kills himself. The film ends with him in the funeral home, opening his eyes. The punishment for his transgressions is that he can’t even die. (George would channel some of these ideas into Bruiser more than two decades later.) Romero would reconceive the film from the ground up as a vehicle for a young actor he had seen in a local production of Philemon, John Amplas. But the vampire would still be named Martin, there would be an elderly relative named Tati Voda, and vampirism would be a physiological disease rather than something supernatural. 

In an envelope marked "Old Writings," there was a collection of stories and treatments - all of them undated - that Romero worked on at some point before the mid-1970s. Our best guess is that most of them are from after Night of the Living Dead and before Romero's partnership with Richard Rubinstein begins in 1974, but this is just a guess. In that envelope is a story fragment that appears to be the first chapter of an unfinished novel. It's about a middle-aged Pittsburgh businessman who is growing tired of his life and is dangerously narcissistic to the point of a Messiah Complex. The protagonist of that story is named Martin Matthias. His wife is named Helen. And he refers in his internal monologue to elderly relative Tati Voda. 

After a few pages of set-up, the fragment ends. But it's followed by a handwritten page of notes that seems to be Romero's attempt to work through possible directions in which to take the story: 

"argue: physical vs mental"

"Death...vivid imagination"

"E.S.P."

"higher order of destiny...you're mental"

"others not sensitive –"

"Murder - alright... not nec. evil. if you could live with it"

"higher order destiny

"cheat: solitaire. exams in school...blow job"

"plane crash..."

"robbery..."

"cancer..."

"bomb..."

"world destruction"

And so on. There are obvious differences, but it seems that this was the first attempt to work through the idea that would become Blood and then Martin. There's no indication of vampirism on that notes page, but it seems apparent that that would be the answer he was searching for on that notes page. So he had a set of characters that he'd begun thinking about and placed them into this vampire scenario for a film to be produced by an experienced horror distributor. But when, for unknown reasons, that production fell through, Romero reconceived the film entirely while retaining his own version of vampirism as a disease, the name of the main character, and the figure of Tati Voda. Is that note about murder being "not nec. evil" the germ that would develop into story about Martin's physical need to drink blood? 

* Side note: Brenner was primarily known as a distributor and he had enjoyed a great deal of success importing Italian horror films by filmmakers such as Sergio Martino and Umberto Lenzi and, later, Dario Argento, whose Suspiria was one of the last films he distributed. It seems possible that it was because of the connection through Brenner that Argento initially approached Romero to make Dawn of the Dead. Brenner might also make an appearance in the backstory of one of the curiosity's in Romero's career: the 10 minutes of footage that he reportedly shot for the US release of Lenzi's bonkers giallo Spasmo. That connection, however, could also have come through Spasmo's US distributor, Libra Films, who would re-release Romero's film The Crazies shortly after that and would distribute Martin in 1978. The latter film underperformed at the box office in part because it was overshadowed by the distributor's first sizable hit, released *just* after Martin: David Lynch's Eraserhead. Libra was a very small distributor with limited resources, and with two "cult" films in release, their promotional efforts were quickly focused on Eraserhead which, to everyone's surprise, met with substantial (and growing!) success on the thriving midnight movie circuit. 

-Adam Charles Hart