July 2021

It is no secret that George Romero and Stephen King enjoyed a close friendship and admired one another’s work.  This is perhaps to be expected from two of the most influential voices in horror.  Their friendship and mutual admiration led them to many ambitious plans to collaborate on projects, perhaps the most successful of which was the anthology film Creepshow in 1982.  An homage to the EC Comics of their childhoods, the film is perfect example of blending horror and comedy and truly lived up its tagline of ‘the most fun you’ll have being scared’.

King wrote the screenplay in 1979 in which he adapted two of his own short stories for the screen (the other three segments and the frame story were original for the screenplay).  The two adapted tales, “The Crate” and “The Lonesome Death of Jordy Verrill” (published in story form as “Weeds”), offer an opportunity for further exploration.

Despite the success of Creepshow, and the fanfare of these two segments in particular, the original short stories remain among King’s more elusive writings.  They have never been included in any of his collections and have only appeared in a few hard-to-find anthologies or limited edition, small press collections.  Both originally appeared in men’s magazines – “Weeds” in Cavalier in May 1976 and “The Crate” in Gallery in July 1979.  This was common practice at the time, particularly for newer writers and genre fiction, and indeed many of King’s early stories appeared in men’s magazines before being collected or reprinted elsewhere.  Many of these magazines followed the lead established by Playboy and included fiction and political writings alongside the pictorials (hence the running joke of just having the magazines to read the articles was not entirely a stretch).  While common, it also leads to a rather humorous incongruity between the way in which one encountered the original piece (interspersed between nude pictorials and sex columns) versus the film (presented as a comic read by a child).  Although, perhaps one might find similarities among the advertisements such as x-ray specs to see through clothes (comic books) or how to use hypnotism to convince women to fall for you (a real ad appearing among the pages of “The Crate”).

The stories themselves are fairly faithful adaptations.  The short story ‘Weeds’ is much darker than its screen counterpart.  Jordy does retain some of the same yokel-ish qualities that provide for some levity (for example, his exclamations of ‘lunkhead’ and his disgust over ‘meteor shit’ on his hand), but overall the general poverty in which he lives mixed with the increasing direness he finds himself in as he transforms casts a pall over the story that leaves the reader feeling drained.  The film takes a lighter tone, due in part to King’s own portrayal of Jordy.  As seems to be his style when on-screen, King heavily plays up the yokel qualities to noticeably lighten the mood of the story.  While the story does include Jordy hoping to make money from the University, the added sight gag of Jordy showing up with his bucket to the Department of Meteors in particular shifts the mood from tragic to farcical.  Even Jordy’s eventual demise by his own hand somehow feels less bleak on screen due to the overall tone set throughout the segment.

“The Crate” in story form is much more streamlined and focuses only on the relationship between and the retelling of stories by the two main characters, Dex and Henry, without much of the framing and character-building scenes (such as the garden party).  Although in a testament to her abilities, it is impossible to read “The Crate” now and not hear Adrienne Barbeau’s acerbic voice come through in her fantastic performance as Billie despite only have a few lines of dialogue in the story.  As an aside, her iconic threat to wear Henry’s balls as earrings was ad-libbed by Barbeau; it was so memorable that it was later scripted for her character to use in an episode of the soap General Hospital.  Perhaps the most interesting aspect of “The Crate” is the development of Fluffy.  In neither the short story nor the original screenplay does the beast have the sort of primate features that it does in the film.  Rather it is a furry six-legged beast with either feline or canine features: in the story it is described as having a “bullet head of a young lynx” while in the screenplay with “a body like a whippet”.  Additionally, the screenplay gives it “spider-like arms ending in huge claws”.  This spider-like description almost seems reminiscent of the ‘true’ form of IT encountered by the Losers Club in the sewers.  It should be noted that Romero flatly disliked the spider-ish qualities in both instances, although the eventual design of Fluffy was more the result of Tom Savini’s creative aesthetic than direction from either King or Romero. 

Ultimately, Creepshow remains Romero’s most fun film and stands as a testament of the collaborative spirit and camaraderie among two horror masters.  The two would continue to work together over the next two decades on projects both produced and unrealized.   

Ben Rubin

I've been speaking to crew members who worked on George A. Romero's Jacaranda Joe and will have a more substantial update soon, but, briefly, the film was the second installment of an innovative program devised by Valencia Community College faculty member Ralph Clemente that brough established filmmakers to campus to direct a short film. The previous year, Robert Wise (director of The Haunting, West Side Story, and The Sound of Music), filmed a short called Best Two of Three with Valencia students. Jacaranda Joe was written by Romero with the scope (and limitations) of filming in ten days in central Florida with a student crew in mind. Romero picked up an idea he had first developed two decades earlier, about a tv show that stumbles across a bigfoot society in the woods. Romero transposed this from the woods to the Florida swamps, reduced the bigfoot community to a single "skunk ape" creature, and built the majority of the narrative around a sleazy talk show host's discussion of the brief glimpse of the creature that had come to be known as "Jacaranda Joe." That meant that most of the shoot would take place on a single set. Joe himself only appeared in a single, blurry shot, which meant that while a full creature needed to be designed and executed, it could be relatively simple compared to a monster that needed to be on camera for long stretches of a movie. 

There was discussion of Romero returning to continue the rest of the story the following year, but there's no indication that he ever wrote anything else or did any concrete work to develop the project beyond his time at Valencia. Beyond Romero's own interest or other projects (most pressingly Before I Wake) that began to take up his focus, there were basic logistical difficulties to continuing the short film. For one thing, other than Clemente and Joe director of photography Dominic Palmieri, none of the crew would be returning. He'd need to start over, work with a different Assistant Director and Art Director and different Editors and Sound Recordists. Valencia was a two-year school, but the filmmaking program did not begin until a student's second year. So every one of the 40-ish students who were in the filmmaking program graduated shortly after Romero finished shooting in June 1994. The editors who continued working on the film - George Rizkallah (referred to as "Little George" on set bc of his relative height compared to the 6'4" Romero) and Bobby Gibis, both of whom have had long and productive careers in film and TV - did so out of dedication to the project, but the vast majority of the crew were no longer even in the area. 

Jacaranda Joe was shot in the awkward transition between film-only shooting and fully digital filmmaking. All in-studio filming was done on 35mm, while exteriors were meant to mimic local news and TV and so were done entirely on video. The 35mm was transferred to video to be edited on a state-of-the-art AVID system, which meant a substantial loss of image resolution. So, the goal was to eventually cut the film on film - a step that was never reached in the post-production process. At this point, digital editing was essentially a way of creating a rough cut to guide the physical cutting of the film prints. There were at least two cuts of the film completed by Rizkallah and Gibis, but titles and credits were never added. So the cuts of the film that were exported to VHS or the digital video formats of 1994 are the only copies of the edited film that had ever existed.

All of this means that there never would have been a public screening of Jacaranda Joe, as the cuts were completed well after graduation, so most of the people who'd have wanted to see the film would no longer have been at the school, and the only copies of the film to be created were on video transfers that were too low-resolution to be projected.

More interviews and research and potential discoveries will be coming soon, but I'm writing now in part bc both Rizkallah and First Assistant Director Michael Sellers have dug out some amazing materials from the shoot, including the crew t-shirt. The archive does not, alas, have a Jacaranda Joe t-shirt of its own, but I think we can all admire just how AMAZING it looks. HUGE thanks to Rizkallah and Sellers for their assistance and for sharing their recollections with me. 

- Adam Charles Hart