“I have one of two problems with the work of George Romero.
Either I don’t care much for his work in print, OR I don’t care much for his later stuff, say, post Land of the Dead.
And I wondered which might be true. Maybe the limitations of moviemaking created something that was more to my taste, where the print world didn’t do that and made something less for a reader like me.
To try and figure this out, I attempted to get a copy of the original 1982 script for Day of the Dead.
A 1985 version is out there on the internet in pretty wide distribution, but I wanted the 1982 version as I thought it’d be the purest Romero product, less affected by outside forces.
I’d heard that Romero had higher aspirations for Day of the Dead, that he wanted to make an epic, super long, “Gone With The Wind of zombie movies.”
When people talk about hopping to multiverses, I feel like everyone leaves out the idea of going to other universes mostly like ours, but where this movie got made, where Alien 3 wasn’t a studio-meddling nightmare, where the director’s cut of Event Horizon still exists. I know, it’s not as exciting as averting a huge tragedy or something, but whatever, couldn’t we find a Roger Ebert from another dimension, one who is alive and well and also didn’t have such bad takes on slashers, and send him around to other universes?
Anyway, Romero’s papers are at the University of Pittsburgh, which is nice, Romero seemed like such a Pennsylvania supporter (until nearer the end of his life when he moved to Canada, at least).
I made an account and sent in a request for a digitized version of the 1982 script, which they have.
Now, libraries that have things like this will often grant access to them through services that display documents on a web page, but the documents are not available for download. I read John Steinbeck’s werewolf novel this way, thanks to The Harry Ransom Center in Texas. Granted, reading on your computer screen isn’t a total blast, but I get it, it’s the limitation we work within, I’m not going to complain about that.
I figured University of Pittsburgh might have a similar setup.
Hoo boy.
Here’s the response I got:
“This item cannot be reproduced or distributed digitally due to copyright restrictions. If you are able to visit our collections in person, you are welcome to use this resource in our Reading Room.”
Now, this wasn’t impolite or a huge shock to the system, but also seems like an easy dismissal. “Simply travel to Pennsylvania, halfway across the country, and spend a couple days in our reading room.”
I can’t promise anything, but it’s possible the University of Pittsburgh is going to learn a lesson about threatening Pete with a good time in the not-too-distant future.
But before I start looking at plane tickets, I responded the the turndown:
“Thanks, I understand.
“I wonder, because it’s under copyright, whether there’s a place I can purchase a copy from the rightsholder, and if that’s not possible, if you’re able to tell me who the rights holder is so that I might contact them and see whether there’s a version available for purchase.”
I don’t think this is the case, I couldn’t find that anyone was selling the script. I thought, for example, the George A. Romero foundation might sell it, which would actually be an excellent idea. I think people would read it, and I think if a PDF was made available for a reasonable price, especially knowing some of the money goes to a good cause, people would be game. Or, print it up, bind it, and sell it in print. People would go for it, guaranteed.
But I couldn’t find a copy for sale anywhere, legitimate or no, and after reading through a lot of stuff on the University’s website, it’s possible that the University itself is the copyright holder.
You might not know anything about me, but I’m a librarian with 15 years experience, I have a masters degree and everything. And the purpose of archives, in my opinion, is information storage AND RETRIEVAL. In other words, information that’s not made available to people really does nobody any good. Archived documents like this are wonderful, but only if they’re available.
And here’s the thing: there’s an excellent fair use case to be made here.
I’m not profiting from it, the library is not duplicating it, technically, it’s provided to a closed audience (as opposed to being thrown up on the web), it’s not replacing a commercially-available product or affecting the market for an existing product in any way. It’s a movie script, 40 years old, for a movie that was never made.
I only sent my reply 4 days ago, so it’s certainly not outside the realm of a reasonable response time. I’ll update this in the case that I receive further/more/better direction.
In the meantime, I would suggest the following to the University of Pittsburgh:
1. Make the script available, at least for online reading! I do understand it would potentially create more work for you, and I think it would be fair to charge a nominal fee for access, much the way libraries did/do for printed copies of items. If it takes someone the better part of an hour to send this out to requesters every week, we can pay for that hour, fine by me.
2. I really think it’d be great for the George A. Romero Foundation to have this for sale. They could do a simple PDF of the script, a more involved thing that has different versions of the script, whatever, I think this could be a really nice piece of film history to have and would put some money into the Foundation’s coffers. Win/win.
3. I put this option last: Just put it up as an accessible document on the library’s website. This eliminates any further work, really, you don’t have to grant individual access, it’s all good. This option is last because I think it’s reasonable to make a small profit, and I do think there’s monetary value to the document, but if the barrier here is the time and effort of sending it out to people every week, just throw it up there.
3.5 – This is 3.5 because it goes in with 3: I would like to make a broader suggestion to archives: When you have cool shit like this, come to an agreement with rights holders and other folks, what you think the item is worth, and put up a crowdfunding campaign. If the total is met, everyone gets access to the shit. If not, eh, you return to business as normal. You could even to a crowdfunding campaign that just grants access to it for a period, say, one year. You could seek out donors to cover the cost of the document for the year. I’ve donated to FAR stupider things in the past.
Did I just use an entire review space to talk about how I was let down by a University library in another state that I have no relationship with, simply because I’m grouchy that they didn’t let me look at something? Yeah. Yeah, I did.
I mean, okay: The comics are…fine. I liked them better than I’m liking The Living Dead so far because the comics drop us right into the zombie action, assuming the reader is familiar with the Romero zombie movies (or the general concept of zombies), where The Living Dead, as an audiobook, takes a full 90 minutes to give us our first zombie. You could watch the entirety of any of the first three movies in the Romero zombie trilogy in the time it takes for one zombie to show up! It’s not a terrible sin, it’s just kinda boring. Because at this juncture, we know what a zombie is, and the disbelief on the part of the book’s characters is just silly at this point. Romero was smart enough to spare us that in almost all of his movies, but somehow it ended up in the book.
The elephant, or maybe bat, in the room is the presence of vampires in the comics. Which I will admit feels a little like…”What should we do now? I know, vampires!”
I think for al George Romero did with zombies, his vampires aren’t as interesting.
As a younger man, I kind of hated Day of the Dead because I felt that a zombie that could learn was a stupid idea, that it kind of defeated the entire idea of zombies. But over the years, I’ve softened. Because Bub learning, or showing that he may be capable of learning, takes things in a direction, and it neither makes nor breaks the core of the story of Day of the Dead. Romero could have potentially left it out and the movie would’ve been okay, and he could’ve ramped it up a bit and the movie still probably would’ve worked.
Romero’s zombies evolved, slightly, over the course of those movies, but his vampires are pretty much the same as vampires in modern fiction.
And I sort of dislike how Dracula is always this aristocratic so-and-so, like just because he’s been around forever, he is rich and powerful all the time.
And this series does feature, very briefly, my least favorite character: Rape-y guard who is rape-y for NO reason. And a pedo to boot, in this case.
And while we’re on cliches, the whole “post-apocalyptic gladiatorial arena” thing is not my favorite.
A theme you’ll see in most reviews here is that the first 2 of 3 acts here are pretty good, and act 3 kind of falls apart. I think what happened here is that there were a lot of threads going, and it almost felt like maybe this was meant to be a 5-act story, but they wrapped it up early.
Did anyone else watch Longmire? I have a special place in my heart for that series, long story, but the ending was a bit rough. This is because the show was getting cancelled, I believe they found out after shooting of the final season had already begun, so they kind of had to make a decision: Do we just run through what we had planned for the season, or do we quickly try to cobble together an ending and wrap things up? They went the wrapup route, and I can’t blame them. It was a little bit of a mess, but you could feel the good intentions, that they were like, “Well, this is it, let’s at least get things to a decent stopping point.”
Empire of the Dead felt kind of like that. In the last act, maybe even the last third of the last act, we try to wrap up a political story, a vampire evil story, a zombie story, a love triangle, a heist that also contains within it two different factions, a pair of Southerners coming to NYC to do…something. There was a lot going on in the book, and that wasn’t necessarily bad, but man did it feel like there was a lot of ramp up to an ending that didn’t (un)live up to the work it took to get there.
It almost feels, between this and The Living Dead, that Romero wanted to tell some kind of other story, but he was “the zombie guy,” so he was confined a bit.
It reminds me of the time I went to KISS mini golf in Las Vegas, where a sullen teenager told us, “You can request ANY song… … … … so long as it’s by KISS.”
George, you can write ANY book…so long as it’s about zombies.
And if that’s the case, it’s a shame. I wouldn’t mind seeing a non-zombie comic or movie or book from Romero. He made AT MINIMUM 4 inarguable classic films, and that number bumps up to 6 or 7 if we lower the bar to REALLY GOOD FILMS. I think he’d earned the right to do whatever the fuck he wanted.
So my sincerest hope is that this is what he wanted to do. And though it wasn’t to my taste, if George Romero got to do something he was excited about, good enough for me.”