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