Source: http://www.sfgate.com/
In 1968, George A. Romero ran a company in Pittsburgh that produced commercials. In building his business - one of a handful in the country at a time when most commercials were shot live - Romero collected quite a bit of camera and audio equipment and lights.
It was always in the back of his mind to use it all to make a feature film, and he knew just what kind, too: a horror film. More specifically, he wanted to make something about zombies.
In the Judy Garland-Mickey Rooney tradition of “let’s put on a show,” Romero talked some of his closest friends into investing $600 apiece in the production, and kicked in another $600. With that seed money, a producer was able to raise $70,000, and on that budget, “Night of the Living Dead” - the most influential horror film of its time - was made.
It’s a simple story: Seven people trapped in a farmhouse surrounded by zombies fight over the best escape. But it never fails to chill and thrill.
With a 40th-anniversary edition of “Night of the Living Dead” coming out on DVD - along with a DVD of his latest zombie flick, “Diary of the Dead”- Romero recalled his influences and what it was like to hit it big as a 28-year-old first-time filmmaker.
Q: What made you settle on zombies?
A: An early influence was the old EC Comics that I read as a kid. They were gleeful horrific tales told in a humorous way. I recall one where a team turned on its third baseman and ended up ripping out his heart and using it as third base. I always chuckled.
Q: “Living Dead” has become a cult classic with a huge afterlife on DVD. What do you think it is that makes people watch it again and again?
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Source: http://www.fangoria.com/
Producer Richard Rubinstein gave Fango the scoop on a wild development concerning an upcoming revival of George A. Romero’s DAWN OF THE DEAD. Rubinstein, the man responsible for producing many of Romero’s films as well as the 2004 DAWN remake, is planning to rerelease the 1979 zombie epic in true 3-D! In-Three, Inc. of Agoura Hill, CA will be responsible for the “dimensionalization” process.
“When Mike Messina [another producer on the DAWN redux] and I began to investigate using In-Three’s technique, I was very skeptical,” Rubinstein tells Fango. “I couldn’t see how it could be used without re-editing George’s film, which I was not going to do. I was also concerned that converting a 29-year-old movie would not be competitive qualitatively with the new 3-D live-action features being shot today. I was wrong in both cases. George’s DAWN OF THE DEAD can be reformatted into 3-D without any editing, and the image looks spectacular! As it stands now, it will take about a year to complete the conversion of the whole film.” Indeed, In-Three’s work has been hailed by George Lucas, James Cameron and Peter Jackson, among others.
Lucky FANGORIA chief Tony Timpone got a sneak peek at several scenes of the 3-D DAWN in NYC, and came away suitably impressed. “I was blown away by how easily DAWN OF THE DEAD lends itself to 3-D,” he says. “This is not a gimmick. Romero’s film looks better than ever, and the extra dimension adds, well, another vibrant dimension to Romero’s masterpiece. I can’t wait to see the final product when it emerges in 2009. The idea of seeing a spiffed-up DAWN—the original!—on the big screen again is a cause for celebration.”
Rubinstein also has plans to create a direct sequel to the original DAWN (!) and will be producing a new screen adaptation of Frank Herbert’s DUNE, to be directed by Peter (THE KINGDOM) Berg. Keep checking this site for further developments on both DAWN projects.
Source: http://edition.cnn.com/
Bitten by a zombie, his fate sealed, a character in George Romero’s new film mutters to a friend, “Shoot me.” The friend first points a video camera at the man, then a gun.
Romero’s latest zombie film uses the same handheld, subjective camera approach as “The Blair Witch Project” and “Cloverfield.” Calling into question the morals and motives of whoever is filming, it makes the case that YouTube and MySpace are as frightening as walking dead.
“If Hitler were alive today, he wouldn’t have to stand out in that square. He could just put out a blog and he’d have millions of followers,” Romero told The Associated Press in an interview. “It’s completely uncontrolled. It’s not information, it’s opinion. And it’s scary. You can get an audience no matter what your opinion is.”
In “George A. Romero’s Diary of the Dead,” opening in limited release Friday, footage is purported to have been filmed by survivors of a wave of zombies, then pieced together with news clips and scenes from surveillance cameras. The cameraman at one point decides he can’t run to help his friends off-screen because he’s busy charging camcorder batteries.
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Source: http://www.iht.com/
We get the zombies we deserve. Over five films and four decades the director George Romero’s slack-jawed undead have been our tour guides through a brainless, barbaric America that seems barely hospitable to the living. They lurch across a bigoted civil-rights-era countryside (”Night of the Living Dead,” 1968), claw at a suburban shopping mall (”Dawn of the Dead,” 1978) and wander dazed in an anxious post-9/11 world (”Land of the Dead,” 2005).
Romero is now 68, and his influence has long saturated the cultural mainstream, but he has exhumed his living dead yet again for “Diary of the Dead,” opening Friday in the United States, next month in Britain and in May in Japan. The zombies’ - and Romero’s - current bugaboo? The blogging, uploading, navel-gazing infotainment age.
“It’s scary out there, man,” Romero said, gesturing at a laptop as he sat in his apartment here, chain-smoking Marlboros. “There’s just so much information, and it’s absolutely uncontrolled. Half of it isn’t even information. It’s entertainment or opinion. I wanted to do something that would get at this octopus. It may be the darkest film I’ve done since ‘Night of the Living Dead.’ ”
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Source: http://thevaultofhorror.blogspot.com/
Whether you love or hate Opie & Anthony (I fall amongst the former), it is very cool that they gave George A. Romero 45 minutes on a national radio show. Romero sat down with O & A and their comic sidekick Jim Norton to plug Diary of the Dead, plus talk frankly about a whole bunch of other horror-related stuff yesterday on XM Satellite Radio’s The Virus (Ch. 202).
If you’d like to take a listen, you can download the show in its entirety here (for a small fee). For the rest of you, here are some interesting highlights:
For me, the most candid moment came when George was asked what he thought of Max Brooks’ written work (World War Z, Zombie Survival Guide). It was obvious Romero didn’t want to badmouth the guy, but he basically intimated that he and Brooks have totally different objectives. Brooks, he explained, was more interested in “zombies for zombies’ sake”, while his films are more about the living people. He seems to feel Brooks takes the material too literally, and I’d have to agree.
He didn’t sound all to happy with Land of Dead. It sounded like he had to make some studio concessions, which is why he’s so glad to be back to making independent films. Also, he felt the story got too overblown, which is why he brought it back to an intimate setting again.
When asked what he thought of modern horror movies like Saw and Hostel, his response was: “I’ve seen enough of them to know not to see the sequels.” Ouch.
Continuing in the same vein, the director lamented the lack of creativity and insight amongst Hollywood studios which motivates them to greenlight endless horror remakes. He was particularly perturbed by the news of the redo of A Nightmare on Elm Street, a film of which he’s very fond.
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