Possibly the most remarkable aspect of George Romero's career was how incredibly prolific he was. He would write almost constantly, as evidenced by the hundreds of drafts of made and unmade projects we have in the archive, and he would work closely with collaborators to develop others. Amazingly, we are still hearing about projects that are not represented in the archive - scripts, treatments, stories, and fragments that, for one reason or another, Romero did not hold on to. Some of his earliest work - the anthology feature, which was filmed and edited, Expostulations, and a feature project called Slant or Fugue - seems to have been mostly lost. But for someone who produced so much, it is perhaps inevitable that some drafts have fallen through the cracks. That is especially true for collaborations on which someone else was the credited screenwriter. Tracking these scripts down is important not because Romero is responsible for the ideas or the story, but because he was often a highly active collaborator whose feedback on drafts written by another screenwriter can provide fascinating, even revelatory, insight into Romero's creative process. The most substantial version of this contained in the archive is a 50+ page document sent to Lawrence D. Cohen that Romero cheekily titled "Much Ado About It." At that point, Romero was attached to direct Stephen King's It for television, and we have a multiple drafts and other materials related to a production that seemed to come very close to being realized. (Cohen's script would eventually be filmed by director Tommy Lee Wallace as the mini-series featuring an iconic Tim Curry as Pennywise.)

However, there are a number of growing projects that were developed for which we have nothing. One of the most intriguing is a project called Mayday, a screenplay written by Paul Larsen based on the book by Thomas Block and Nelson DeMille. It was one of several projects that Romero worked on in the early 1980s as a possible follow-up to Creepshow. 

The story - eventually filmed as a TV movie in 2005 - takes place on a passenger jet that is struck by an inactive missile. The collision and the subsequent loss in pressure kills numerous passengers and leaves nearly all of the rest brain damaged in a way that causes them to act frenzied and violent. According to Block, the depiction of the crazed passengers was inspired in part by Romero's own Night of the Living Dead and, indeed, he and several other people involved in the production jokingly referred to the project as "Flight of the Living Dead." Two survivors then have to fend off attacks while trying to figure out how to land the plan, while both the military (who fired the missile) and the insurance company (for whom a crash is less damaging than a plane full of survivors needing a possible lifetime of hospitalization) work against their efforts. 

The book was released in 1979, credited solely to Block, and the story of its development is delightfully characteristic of Romero's way of working. Supposedly, while he was working on Creepshow, King picked up a copy of Mayday on a whim at an airport bookstore (a surprising choice for someone who already famously hates to fly!). During the cross-country flight, King read the book and loved it. When he arrived, he called up Romero and told him to pick up a copy. Romero saw its possibilities as a film and he and his producers secured the rights. Block, who was an airline pilot in addition to being a novelist, lived in the Pittsburgh area, and so he and Romero met up to discuss the project numerous times during the production of Creepshow, in which Block makes a memorable cameo. During a fantasy sequence in "The Crate," Hal Holbrook's Henry imagines shooting his wife Wilma (Adrienne Barbeau) at a garden party. The guests respond not with horror but with appreciation: the tall, thin man with glasses who leads the applause is Thomas Block. (He also ended up playing another role in the production, as a pilot flying Romero back and forth from Pittsburgh to the New Jersey coast for the filming of the beach scenes in the "Something to Tide You Over" segment.) 

Meanwhile, Romero had attended multiple editions of the US Film Festival in Utah - a festival that was still in its infancy, but which would become one of the film world's premiere events a few years later when it aligned with Robert Redford and was renamed "Sundance." Martin had played the first US Film Festival and Romero was invited back a couple years later to take part in a panel. An aspiring Utah-based screenwriter named Paul Larsen attended the festival every year and, as an admirer of Romero, came to the panel. Afterwards, he approached Romero and told him how much he had admired Martin, a film which had received a theatrical release, but one that was highly limited. So it was an unsual opening line, which started a conversation between Larsen and Romero that lasted more than an hour. Before he left, Romero handed Larsen his business card, with his home phone number written on the back. 

Larsen followed up, sending Romero a horror script that he had written. It was more of a slasher film, not really in Romero's wheelhouse, but he liked it. So a few months later, when he began to think about Mayday as a possible project at a time when he was too busy with Creepshow to adapt it himself, he got back in touch with Larsen. Larsen wrote the script in Utah, getting feedback from Romero on his pages during the shooting of Creepshow.

As Romero's collaborators at the time have relayed, Larsen's script was very good! Exciting and involving, with a great hook that was loosely tied to Romero's other films but would be a new kind of movie for him. It was tense and thrilling, and Romero wanted to make it. But the effects would require a leap to a new budgetary level for an indie filmmaker like Romero. Creepshow wasn't a flop at the box office, but it wasn't a hit, either. And it followed Knightriders, which was a flop. So Mayday petered out and Romero focused on developing Day of the Dead, Pet Sematary, Copperhead, and several other projects. It is unclear whether any drafts of Larsen's script still survive.

-Adam Charles Hart