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