A Lab Assistant's Look at the "Un-Making of a Classic"

by Mike Watt

October saw the release of yet another "Special Edition", another needless toying with a movie that has inspired filmmakers for thirty years. Of course, I'm talking about "Night of the Living Dead: The 30th Anniversary Edition". And upon viewing it in completion, my sorrow has increased. You see, I could have stopped it.

I'd first heard of the project through cult actress and Scream Queen, Debbie Rochon, who has befriended my wife and I over the years. It was a simple e-mail with a contact number, telling us to call if we wanted to be "part of history". My weekend full, I shook my head at the note. John Russo was re-visiting "Night of the Living Dead" yet again. You'd think he'd be tired of it after all the Returns, the remakes, the novel tie-ins. But I hadn't yet heard the whole chilling tale.

I used to work at WRS Film and Video Laboratory in Pittsburgh, where John Russo and Russ Streiner -- George Romero's partners in the undead -- have had nearly all of their films processed, assembled and transferred. At the time of the disaster's beginning, I was walking by the high-speed projector room when the workprint rushes were being screened, and I got to see the first images from the "30th Anniversary Edition". I was startled.

Bill Hinzman had returned to his famous role as the Cemetary Zombie, but the years had added weight to the man's bones. He looked less like his emaciated self of thirty years ago, and more like Robin Williams with cake icing on his face from "Mrs. Doubtfire". I recognized Hinzman's daughter, Heidi, as the waitress zombie we'd come to know as "Rosie". Heidi's Rosie was missing an arm, and as she shambled along, you could see Heidi wiggling her fingers beneath her waitress uniform, her elbow straining against the cloth beneath the prosthetic stump. I shrugged this off. "They'd never use those frames," I thought to myself, though still disturbed at Hinzman's 'young age' make-up. How would they ever get that to cut together.

And then a new character appeared, one that has come to be as universally despised as Sophia Coppolla in "The Godfather III": Scott Vladimir Licina as "Reverend Hicks". I didn't know who he was at the time, but I knew no one in 1969 rural Pennsylvania would ever put their faith in a bald, goteed, bucktoothed priest. "I thought Anton LeVay was dead," I mused.

I was pulling a stint in the company's enormous vault when we got the call to pull all the existing elements of "Night of the Living Dead", including the original assembled negative, still housed in a can marked "Night of the Anubis", the classic's original title. I got to hold the original negative in my hand (for some reason, I was surprised to see that the negative was on 35mm; my entire life I had labored under the misconception that it had been shot on 16mm., got to personally deliver it to the lab's finishing room for inspection). We then discovered that the original vocal tracks were missing; the lab insisted that they had been pulled some years before and sent to Germany for an overseas print. I didn't take sides. To my knowledge, these original tracks were never found, which explains the multiple dropouts in the sound of the "30th Anniversary Edition".

I learned that the lab had been given orders to strike a new answer print from the original negative, as well as a new silent intermediate print -- a "master positive" -- in order to insert the new footage into the film as well as for "new editing". That's when it hit me.

They weren't just inserting the new footage, they were going to hack stuff out. They were going to change Romero's original cut. I learned through their customer service agent that the video distribution company, Anchor Bay, was planning to offer a remastered copy of the original version along with the "30th Anniversary Edition", which made me feel a little better about it, but it didn't help the sinking feeling I got every time I stopped in to visit our in-house editor, Paul Martello, and watch him make the instructed cuts, and watch his trims roll grow. Soon, seventeen minutes were gone, and eighteen minutes were added. "They trimmed some scenes," Paul told me.

Half a year later, I was instructed to assemble a title crawl for the end of the new version, as well as new still cards reading "Night of the Living Dead: 30th Anniversary Edition". This was really my only hands-on part of the project, but it gave me the opportunity to actually interact with Russo, Streiner and Hinzman.

I'd met all three of them on numerous occasions over the years. Streiner is pleasant, but generally all business. Bill Hinzman is a "pull up a chair" kinda guy, and easily the most agreeable and pleasant of the three. Russo is hard to get a handle on, to put it diplomatically. He's usually very gruff and abrupt. While discussing the particulars of the titles, I got to ask some questions about the project, for my own benefit. I got some vague answers, some allusions. Streiner and Russo were hesitant to go into too much detail, you see, until the "deal was done". What I gleaned from them was the following, mostly speculation on my part, assembled from their round and about answers.

"The 30th Anniversary" was meant to be a jumping-off point for their proposed "official sequel" to the trilogy, "Children of the Dead", which they've discussed numerous times at conventions. In order to tie Children in directly with NOTLD, they needed to gain definite rights to the property, which they didn't own. As I understand it, creating the 30th Anniversary version would gain them those rights, at the same time giving them an all new project to release, at less than half the cost of a full feature. Russo implied that it was a project that he and George had been discussing for years, the origin of the Cemetery Zombie, etcetera, but due to time constrains (Romero was, at the time, working on "Resident Evil" in Japan), George would be unable to participate and gave his former Latent Image partners his full blessing.

Now, almost a full year from the start of the project, I finally saw the finished product, with sound, with all editing completed. Despite the crisp image, banishing the idea of "grainy film stock" forever, I must say, my worst fears were imagined. It was abysmal. And sad.

I tried to be objective, to look at the new version with a fresh perspective, trying to leave behind my love of the original, untouched classic. However, the amaturish appearance of the new footage makes the flaws in the original stand out all that more. The limitations of their small budget which used to add to the documentary feel of NOTLD; now it just seems like an ambitious student film. As beautiful as the transfer is, the cuts are obvious as the pictures jumps at each new change. As Russo and Streiner were the overseers of the entire transfer, there's no one to blame here but them. And the new footage does not match the original. Film stocks change over time, that can be allowed, but the direction, the framing, differs so much from Romero's that the new stuff really just stands out -- in a sore thumb kind of way.

"Vlad" Licina, who, with Russo, invented the nifty, one joke "Slice Girls", proves that the previous project was the height of his musical talent. His new score for the film ranges from irritating to derivative, hitting all negative aspects in between. But it's his performance as "Reverend Hicks" which is bound to go down in film history as the most grievous error of miscasting, rolling his eyes as he blusters about the "eternal fire of damnation" and tries to decide whether to use a southern dialect, or a rural northern one. And my friend, Debbie Rochon, who is always better than the material given her, has nothing to do here, sharing a scant few minutes of screen time with the odious Licina.

The worst crime of all, however, was their treatment of the ending. Even as a kid, when I first saw NOTLD, on a sunny afternoon, the cold and sudden death of the hero, Duane Jones as Ben, at the hands and gun of a redneck zombie killer, sucked the wind out of me and left me gaping at the screen, as it still does to this day. Here, in the 30th Anniversary Edition, the audience is given no time to mourn Ben, for as soon as he hits the floor, the image fades to black and we are back with Licina, "One Year Later". There is no dénouement, no chance to process the information. Instead, we are subjected to a ludicrous epilogue setting up the proposed sequel. It's a cheat. A cinematic crime and an offense to its legions of fans. I don't believe I'm overstating the fact here. It was a wrong-headed move from start to finish.

What bothers me most is not that they marred the only film they've ever been involved with that is considered a classic by movie fans across the world -- a movie recently listed in countless magazines as one of the "25 Scariest Movies of All Time". What bothers me is that, in the off chance that this version does not vanish from the shelves in a cloud of shame, this may be the version that future horror fans will see first. "Special Editions" always attract more attention than their original versions, some rightfully so. But if the 30th Anniversary were the version I had been exposed to initially, I sincerely doubt that "Night of the Living Dead" would be one my all-time favorite movies. Instead of sitting awake in the dark as a child -- long after its final image had faded from the screen, it remained burned in my memory, the haunting hopelessness of it all slowly creeping into my adolescent consciousness -- I may have merely turned off the set, rewound the tape and shrugged, "so what?" If "The 30th Anniversary" is not immediately dismissed, that is what "Night of the Living Dead" might become, the un-making of a classic.

Originally published on the GC Magazine website - Edited by Jon Keeyes.