LITMIR.BIZ

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Ricci

      It was a cold and snowy day in January 1967 when three twentysomething principals of a modest Pittsburgh commercial/industrial film house, The Latent Image, Inc., repaired to a local eatery for a late lunch, well-lubricated with equally cold beers. The three—George A. Romero, John A. Russo (“Jack” to his friends), and Rudy Ricci—were bemoaning their business struggles. Russo, like the others a frustrated filmmaker, suggested they undertake a feature-film project for the drive-in circuit. Little—make that nada—did they know that such a seemingly whimsical notion would, less than three years later, result not only in a completed movie but an international pop-culture phenomenon that would endure decades into the future, still with no end in sight.

      Meanwhile, back at the drawing board, or lunch table, major obstacles loomed. On the upside, The Latent Image HQ harbored all the basic equipment needed for low-budget feature-film production. The group had already produced such commissioned mini-epics as The Calgon Story (quite possibly the first detergent-oriented sci-fi film) and Mr. Rogers Gets a Tonsillectomy (“probably the scariest movie I ever made,” Romero would later declare). But the company could only loosen some $6,000—and that with a little help from its friends—to fund filming. Even in 1967 Pittsburgh, six grand could barely buy a 30-second local commercial, let alone bankroll a marketable movie. What kind of feature could be lensed, or at least begun, on so low a budget?

      “How about a monster movie?” Russo suggested.

      “How about a monster movie?” Russo suggested.

      While certainly a thought in the right direction, that inspired query didn’t immediately lead to the creation of the immortal Night of the Living Dead. Russo recalls:

      The first concept—one that we all liked—was about monsters from outer space, only it was going to be a horror comedy instead of a horror drama. Some teenagers “hotrodding” around the galaxies were going to get involved with teenagers from Earth, befriending them, while cartoon-like authority figures stumbled around, trying to unearth “clues” to the crazy goings-on. The outer space teenagers were going to have a weird, funny pet called The Mess—a live garbage disposal that looked like a clump of spaghetti; you just tossed empty pop cans, popsicle sticks, or whatever into The Mess and it ate them. There was also going to be a wacky sheriff called Sheriff Suck, who was totally inept and kept being the butt of all the teenagers’ jokes.

      Make that a long way from the Living Dead. Indeed, that initial concept hewed closer to an earlier indie horror hit likewise lensed in the wilds of Pennsylvania, Irwin S. “Shorty” Yeaworth’s The Blob (1958). “The main reason this project got scrapped,” Russo elaborates, “was that we couldn’t afford the props and special effects that would have been required to pull off the spaceship landing, The Mess, and so on. We had to scale our thinking down a little in terms of logistics.” In this instance, lack of budget may have actually saved the day, or at least rescued The Latent Image crew from ongoing obscurity.

      Fueled by such fave fright films as Forbidden Planet (1956), Psycho (1960), and especially the über-creepy Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), Russo began exploring a darker idea: A boy runs away from home following a fight with his brother—the same basic setup employed by an earlier, gentler indie film, Morris Engel’s Brooklyn-set Little Fugitive (1953). The similarity ends there, however: Instead of frolicking at Coney Island like the latter film’s titular runaway, Russo’s young hero arrives at a clearing in the woods, where he discovers large panes of glass covering rotting bodies. “Ghoulish people or alien creatures would be feeding off the human corpses,” Russo remembers, “setting them under the panes of glass so that the flesh would rapidly and properly decompose to suit the ghouls’ tastes.” Russo further determined: “Whatever we did should start in a cemetery because people find cemeteries spooky.”

      Russo relayed his bare-bones idea to Romero, who, a few days later, “amazed me by coming back with about forty really excellent pages of an exciting, suspenseful story. Everybody in our group loved it. We all decided this had to be it—the movie we would make. It was the first half of Night of the Living Dead.”

      Those forty pages described a new breed of screen monster. “George had the dead cannibalizing the living,” says Russo. Some of those pages were adapted from an earlier prose effort. Romero states, “I had written a short story, which I had basically ripped off from a Richard Matheson novel called I Am Legend.” In any case, according to Russo, “It clicked. It had action, tension, and horror. It turned us all on.”

      That turn-on resulted in the formation of Image Ten, the Latent Image-spawned outfit that would produce the group’s feature-film debut. Beyond the three “R” s—Romero (director), Russo ( co-writer), and Ricci (actor)—the company consisted of Latent Image cohorts Russell Streiner (producer) and Vince Survinski (production manager), cousin Rudy Ricci (actor), sibling Gary Streiner (sound), friends Karl Hardman ( co-producer, actor) and Marilyn Eastman (makeup, actress), as well as partners in the industrial/commercial sound studio Hardman Associates, Inc., and attorney Dave Clipper.

      Says Russo: “We agreed—and later it turned out to have been a critical decision—that Image Ten would be chartered to make only one feature motion picture. This was our way of guaranteeing the investors that we wouldn’t tie up any profits by sinking them into a new project of which some of the group might not approve. In other words, if our very first venture made money, we would be obliged to pay it out to the risk takers who had supported us.”

      While eager to produce a feature film, not all of the ten were entirely enthused about going the straight-ahead horror route. As Russ Streiner, who would achieve scare-screen immortality as Barbara’s brother-turned-zombie Johnny, noted, “Deep down inside, we were all serious filmmakers and somewhat disappointed that we had to resort to horror for our first film.” Rudy Ricci was likewise unmoved by the undead cannibal concept. “I thought George was kidding. People eating people!”

      Still, the premise ultimately earned enough support among the consortium to keep the project rolling. Romero’s early draft for the as-yet-untitled horror film (known simply as Monster Flick during production, it would later acquire the obscure working title Night of Anubis, a reference to the Egyptian god of death; it then switched again to Flesh Eaters) pleased his partners for another reason. It had a small cast, “not counting extras,” Russo points out, “and was within logistical constraints that could be kept within our ridiculously small budget.”

      Originally, Barbara was to emerge alive from the zombie onslaught after Ben drags her down to the cellar.

      Several Image Ten members, including Romero, Russo, Russ Streiner, Hardman, and Eastman, brainstormed the second half of the grisly tale, with actual scripting tasks falling to Russo: “I rewrote what George had written, changing whatever needed to be changed, and then wrote the second half of the script.” During that process, several key changes were effected. “In the first script there wasn’t a young couple,” Russo reveals. “There was a middle-aged gravedigger named Tom. Then we decided the movie needed the young, good-looking girl in it. We made Tom younger and made him the boyfriend. That was all written in after the fact.”

      But the most notable alterations involved the ending. Originally, Barbara was to emerge alive from the zombie onslaught after Ben drags her down to the cellar. Ben’s dire fate, however, was present from the get-go. Says Russo:

      We figured it would shock people and they would hate it, but it would make them keep talking about the picture as they were leaving the theater. Karl Hardman suggested a third possibility: He wanted to see the little girl (Kyra Schon) standing in the foreground as the posse members finished burning the dead bodies and drove off. There would thus be one ghoul still left alive.

      With the basic script in place, directorial chores were assigned to Romero, who’d grown up a committed movie addict in the Bronx, New York. Intellectually precocious, of Cuban and Lithuanian-American heritage and a bit of a loner, young George found refuge and inspiration in the local theaters. There he was enthralled by such screen wonders as the Frankenstein and Dracula re-releases, sci-fi greats, such as The Thing (From Another World) and The Day the Earth Stood Still, and his all-time fave, Michael Powell’s and Emeric Pressburger’s enchanting dance

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