DAY 15. George Romero!
As a yinzer, I have seen every Romero movie many, many times. So other than his OJ Simpson documentary and Iron City Asskickers, I had no idea what to do.
Do I go to the George A. Romero Archival Collection at Pitt and write about one of his unproduced scripts like Black Mariah, Cartoon, Chain Letter, Cherubs, Cupie, Dark Secrets, Dark Young Things, Darque Passages, Dead Man’s Catch, Death of Death, Divine Spirit, Dracula, Dreamwalker, Enemies, Figments, Flying Horses, Funky Coven, George Romero’s Scary Tales, Germs, Ghost Town, Gogiro (Loves You), Golem, GPS, Hell, Hell Hotel, Hell Bent, Hot-L Diablo, Honus, House With a Clock In Its Walls, Jack and the Beanstalk, Meatmarkets, Midnight Show, Monster MASH, Moonshadoes, Native Tongue, Night of the Living Dead: The Series, Nuns from Outer Space, Peter and the Wolfman, Scream of Fear, Shop Til You Drop…Dead, The Calling, The Collaboration, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, The Raven or Jacaranda Joe?
How about Welcome to Dead House, an unproduced adaption of the first Goosebumps book that has the dead of Dark Falls become zombies instead of ghouls? Supposedly Tim Burton was to direct and other scripts were written by John Sayles, Mick Garris and Alan Ormsby.
Then I remembered — Bill and I did a talking head doc about Romero’s Resident Evil project and it never got released, so why not use the research I did?
It all started when Romero directed a live-action commercial promoting the video game Resident Evil 2 in Los Angeles. The 30-second advertisement featured the game’s two main characters, Leon S. Kennedy (Brad Renfro) and Claire Redfield (Adrienne Frantz), fighting a horde of zombies while in Raccoon City’s police station. This commercial was only shown in Japan where the game is known as Biohazard 2.
Trust me — this thing looks great. A million dollar budget for 30 seconds of commercial? Amazing.
Frantz said to Variety: ““It was an honor to work with a legend like Romero,” Frantz said. “All of the zombie TV shows and movies that we see today are because of him. He started an entire horror film revolution.”
That’s true. We wouldn’t even have this video game without him, as so many of the things accepted about zombies come directly from him and his films.
Resident Evil was created by Shinji Mikami and Tokuro Fujiwara and released for the PlayStation in 1996.It is credited for defining the survival horror genre and returning zombies to popular culture. Game design started in 1993 when Capcom’s Tokuro Fujiwara told Shinji Mikami and other co-workers to create a game using elements from Fujiwara’s 1989 game Sweet Home on the Super Nintendo Entertainment System. Sweet Home was based on a movie that was released around the same time. The cinematic nature of Sweet Home led to Biohazard.
Capcom was so impressed with Romero’s work, it was strongly indicated that Romero would direct the first Resident Evil film. He declined at first — “I don’t wanna make another film with zombies in it, and I couldn’t make a movie based on something that ain’t mine.” He reconsidered and wrote a script for the first movie. which was eventually rejected in favor of Paul W. S. Anderson’s version.
Romero’s Resident Evil was set in the Spencer Mansion and focused on Chris Redfield and Jill Valentine. It’s a lot more faithful to the game than the Paul W.S. Anderson movies and has giant snakes, man-eating plants and mutant sharks. Barry Burton, Rebecca Chambers, Ada Wong and Albert Wesker were to also appear. Not a gamer, Romero had his assistant Jason play the game for him so he could get a feel for it.
The ending to the film would have been similar to the best ending to the first Resident Evil game. Romero even got Berni Wrightson to do artwork for Tyrant, the villain.
Buts adly, Capcom producer Yoshiki Okamoto bluntly stated at the time: “Romero’s script wasn’t good, so Romero was fired.” There’s also rumor that the movie would have been NC-17 so he wasn’t picked.
Romero also said in an interview with Paul Weedon, “…this guy named Bernd Eichinger, who came in and said “No, this is not what I want.” And that was it. And he had no idea what a video game was. This is the guy that made House of the Spirits and Das Boot and he just had an impression of what he wanted the thing to be, which sort of flew in the face of all of us – Capcom and his own guys. So that was it.”
Alan B. McElroy (Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers and Wrong Turn) and Jamie Blanks (Valentine, Urban Legend) also were said to work on treatments.
While not a gamer, Romero was smart enough to recognize that they led to the return of zombies. He said, “I do think the popularity of the creature has come from video games, not film. Zombieland was the first zombie film to break $100 million at the box office, and therefore Hollywood got interested. The remake of Dawn of the Dead did about $75 million … But dozens of hugely popular video games have had a bigger impact.”
Luckily, he saw the benefits of this new fame for the walking dead. As Book of the Dead: The Complete History of Zombie Cinema says, “Whatever criticism one might want to level against the first Resident Evil movie, it had an undeniably positive effect on the zombie’s fortunes. Dragged into the mainstream by the videogame franchise and Anderson’s blockbuster, the living dead suddenly achieved a degree of respectability they’d never had before. It was as if, after seventy-odd years of being ignored, they’d finally received their invite to the Hollywood party. Within mere weeks of Resident Evil‘s opening came a series of press releases and announcements suggesting that the zombie had finally broken free of its marginal roots: a remake of Dawn of the Dead had received the greenlight, a big-screen adaptation of arcade game The House of the Dead was going into production; and, perhaps most exciting of all, George Romero announced at Fangoria’s Weekend of Horrors Convention in August 2002 that he was in serious talks with Twentieth Century Fox to complete the fourth and final installment of his trilogy — provisionally dubbed Land of the Dead, with a $10 million budget and a planned R-rated release.”
You can watch this on YouTube.
B&S About Movies 