In 1995, George Romero wrote The Golem, a screenplay that radically re-imagined the golem myth - a myth that would continue to be important to his thinking about science, technology, and society: the monster that turns on those who create it. Many of the themes would, for example, re-appear in the Resident Evil scripts he'd write in the next two years.
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.
In 2006, Romero wrote several treatments for a proposed television series called, alternately, Zombisodes and Zomboid. The script is a cartoonish burlesque on zombie movies whose hapless undead protagonist is slashed, shot, blown up, crushed, run over, and otherwise punished over and over again. His jokey introduction sets the tone:
A world no longer in use. Deserted. No Cars. No pedestrians. Only RUBBLE drifting on the breeze.
WIND blows a NEWSPAPER up against a wall. It flips open revealing a BANNER HEADLINE:
In 1992, R.L. Stine debuted Welcome to Dead House, the first Goosebumps book. It was creepy, it was spooky, and it was MASSIVELY popular, introducing countless young readers to the horror genre and spawning a series that would sell hundreds of millions of copies around the world. For a stretch in the 1990s, Stine was the best-selling writer in America, aided in no small part by his incredible productivity, publishing dozens of books in that span. TV quickly pounced on it, with an ongoing series premiering in 1995.
War of the Worlds was one of a handful of science fiction projects that Romero undertook in the post-Dawn era, of which Copperhead received the greatest part of his attention and energy. For Romero, science fiction was not just a lateral move into other brands of creature features, but a leap into higher budgets and narrative ambition.
Last week, I joined Media Curator Miriam Meislik and Steven Haines, local archivist and proprieter of Flea Market Films, to inspect the nine reels of 35mm film recovered from Jacaranda Joe, George Romero's once-lost short film made in 1994. Several of the reels were visibly damaged, with warping and sticking making it dangerous to even unroll the film.
When Night of the Living Dead premiered in late 1968, the idea of a feature film from Pittsburgh was a novelty, to say the least. The sad saga of how Night’s profits failed to trickle back to the Pittsburgh-based filmmakers is well-known at this point, but, even without their share of the box office, George Romero and his compatriots in the Latent Image had momentum. They had proven that a low-budget indie from Pittsburgh (of all places) could be a hit! And, of course, they had proven to be hitmakers.
Forty years ago, George Romero's Knightriders reached theaters. It was the first film of a three film deal that Romero and producer Richard Rubinstein had negotiated, capitalizing on the remarkable box office success of Dawn of the Dead. That deal required a sequel to Dawn but allowed Romero a kind of freedom that would be utterly unique in his career.
In 1981, producers and executives arranged for Romero to meet the Pittsburgh-born Editor in Chief of Marvel Comics Jim Shooter. The two of them came up with an idea for a superhero movie, which they developed together until 1985.
The earliest material for Dawn of the Dead seems to come from 1974, possibly late 1973. We have a letter dated April 1974 that refers to a meeting between American International Pictures and Romero about a sequel to Night of the Living Dead (already called Dawn of the Dead at that point) and, for reasons that will be explored at a later post, the unfinished draft dubbed a "First Draft Treatment" seems to be the version of the story Romero had proposed to AIP.
