Marilyn Eastman, one of the stars of Night of the Living Dead, has passed away at the age of 87. Before her roles in front of and behind the camera for Night, Eastman was, along with her real-life/screen husband Karl Hardman, a prominent performer on Pittsburgh radio.
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.
Night of the Living Dead was developed with the title Night of the Anubis, with its titled changed to Night of the Flesh Eaters during production. Famously, the distributor, the Walter Reade Organization, worried that title was too close to that of the 1964 low-budget horror movie The Flesh Eaters and changed the title to Night of the Living Dead at the last minute.
In the first draft of Stephen King's screenplay for Pet Sematary - which is, of course, about resurrecting the dead - George Romero's Night of the Living Dead makes an appearance. This first draft, dated November 15, 1984, is unfinished. It was written and originally developed with Romero as the intended director, but unfortunate timing led to the producer moving on from Romero and drafting the great Mary Lambert to create her own iconic version of King's novel.
Among the materials for Night of the Living Dead, we found a handwritten sheet of notebook paper with the heading "20 or 25 Cities" at the top. It took us a minute, but we soon figured out what it was: this list would become the crawl at the bottom of the screen during the news broadcast in Night. These are all the safe destinations for survivors in southwest Pennsylvania as the dead begin to rise....
