Last week, the University of Pittsburgh Library System received original 35mm camera footage from the filming of Jacaranda Joe, George Romero's lost film. The film requires an assessment and preservation work before we can examine it in depth, but, for the moment, here's a remarkable look behind the scenes of the studio used by Valencia Community College. Take a look at the guy in the background!

In the Archive, we have a screenplay titled Gunperson, a treasured project for Romero that he would talk wistfully about for the rest of his life.

In July 1975, distributor Joseph Brenner announced that he would be co-producing tne new film from George A. Romero, and that it would be filming shortly. Brenner was known primarily as a distributor of horror movies, and in the 19790s he was carving out a special niche for himself within the genre as the American distributor of Italian horror films. But he was starting to branch out into production. In October of that year, he took out a full page ad in Variety announcing the full slate of releases from Joseph Brenner Associates, Inc.

Throughout the 1960s, George Romero, Russ Streiner, John Russo, and the other Pittsburghers who would would form The Latent Image made a name for themselves as the city's premiere makers of commercials. We have a number of them in the archive, including restored versions on 16mm film of a handful. Some have been released on home video as DVD extras, some have found their way onto YouTube. The most widely-seen is a delightful spoof of undersea adventure films that they called "The Calgon Story," a fairly high budget production for the Pittsburgh team.

As mentioned in our post on Jacaranda Joe, George Romero had first tried to make a Bigfoot movie in the mid-1970s. The Footage was a project that Romero developed in between The Crazies and Martin that never came to fruition, but, at one point Pittsburgh Steelers legend Franco Harris was attached to star.

In June 1994, George Romero traveled to Valencia College in Florida to make a short film called Jacaranda Joe. It was a re-imagined version of a movie he'd tried to make in the 1970s called The Footage, about a TV show in which a famous athlete learns to hunt alongside a handful of experienced outdoorsmen that stumbles onto a bigfoot community.

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.

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.

In 1979, flush with the surprisingly immediate success of Dawn of the Dead, Romero quickly began developing another Dead sequel. It would be another 5 years before Day actually went into production, and its final form would be radically different not just from his original idea. This brief synopsis is just over 4 pages long – almost more of a sketch than a proposal – but much of it would be retained in the early drafts. 

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.