R.I.P. George Romero & Martin Landau

[katmai]

Two icons from my youth passed away today.

George A. Romero, the legendary writer-director from Pittsburgh who made the 1968 cult classic Night of the Living Dead for $114,000, thus spawning an unrelenting parade of zombie movies and TV shows, has died. He was 77.

Romero, who put out five other zombie movies after a copyright blunder cost him millions of dollars in profits on his wildly popular first one, died Sunday in his sleep after a battle with lung cancer according to a statement from Romero's producing partner Peter Grunwald to the L.A. Times. Romero's family confirmed his death to the Times as well.

Romero's 1978 sequel Dawn of the Dead was made for $1.5 million and grossed $55 million. He followed that by writing and directing Day of the Dead (1985), Land of the Dead (2005), Diary of the Dead (2007) and Survival of the Dead (2009), a decomposing body of work that earned him the nickname Father of the Zombie Film.

Romero also penned a new version of Night of the Living Dead, released in 1990, that was directed by Tom Savini, his longtime collaborator and horror effects guru. (And Dawn of the Dead was remade by Zack Snyder in 2004.)

Some film scholars and horror enthusiasts contend that social commentary — specifically salvos against the military and materialism — lurked within Romero's films. Most of his work was shot in Pittsburgh, where Romero attended Carnegie Mellon University.

Night of the Living Dead, the story of seven strangers trapped in a farmhouse besieged by a lynch-mob posse of staggering zombies, devastated/delighted audiences at the time of its release, its stark and grainy black-and-white cinematography imbuing it with a documentary realism.

Romero and his nine other investors, including co-writer John A. Russo, had cobbled together $6,000 to start production on the film, then titled Night of the Flesh Eaters. It premiered at the Fulton Theater in Pittsburgh on Oct. 1, 1968, and quickly caught on as a staple of midnight screenings around the country. But most of the profits eluded the investors because of a mistake by the distributor.

"We lost the copyright on the film because we put it on the title," Romero explained in "Night of the Living Steelers," an installment of NFL Films' Timeline series that premiered in October 2016. "Our title was Night of the Flesh Eaters; they changed it to Night of the Living Dead.

"When they changed the title, the copyright bug came off, so it went into public domain [and] we no longer had a piece of the action. Everybody had a copy of Night of the Living Dead because they were able to sell it without having to worry about royalties going to us."

Night of the Living Dead was rare for its time in that it featured an African-American actor (Duane Jones) as a hero in a mainstream movie.

After directing the box-office failures There's Always Vanilla (1971), Hungry Wives (1972) and The Crazies (1973), Romero, looking to make ends meet, produced a series of TV documentaries that focused on such Steeler legends-in-the-making as Mean Joe Greene, Franco Harris, Terry Bradshaw and Rocky Bleier.

He returned to the zombie milieu with Dawn of the Dead (this time with copyright intact), which was filmed at the Monroeville Mall outside Pittsburgh. "This was the first indoor mall we had ever seen," he said in the Timeline documentary. "I said, 'Wow, this is a temple to consumerism. There's my topic.' "

Once, during an AFI screening of Night of the Living Dead, he was asked what terrified him. "I don't have any supernatural hobgoblins that I worry about," he said. "What scares me is life."

George Andrew Romero was born Feb. 4, 1940, in the Bronx. As a teen, he was crazy about movies, especially the Michael Powell-Emeric Pressburger opera fantasy The Tales of Hoffmann(1951). To watch it, he had to rent a movie projector and a print of the film from a movie house in Manhattan.

"They had one print," he recalled. "Whenever it was gone, I knew the guy who had it. And when that guy came in and it was gone, he knew who had it. And that guy was Marty Scorsese. ... We were the only two people who rented Tales of Hoffmann."

Romero studied art and design at Carnegie Mellon, graduated in 1960 and started a commercial production company, Image Ten Prods. He made a Calgon detergent ad that lampooned the 1966 film Fantastic Voyage and did a segment for the kids show Mister Rogers' Neighborhood that showed the host preparing to have a tonsillectomy.

All that helped pay for the camera his team used to shoot Night of the Living Dead. Money was tight, so the basement of his company's office on Fort Pitt Boulevard in Pittsburgh doubled as the farmhouse basement in the movie.

Romero's other work included Knightriders (1981), a mayhem movie with combatants jousting on motorcycles; Creepshow (1982), modeled after horror comics and scripted by Stephen King; Monkey Shines (1988), a psychological thriller revolving around a killer simian; The Dark Half (1993), where a writer's alter ego aims to take over; and Bruiser (2000), about a man who finds his face transformed into a blank mask.

Romero also dabbled in the world of comic books with the limited Marvel series Empire of the Dead.

Glimpses of the man himself can be seen in many of his films, and he had a cameo as an FBI agent in Jonathan Demme's The Silence of the Lambs (1991).

Thanks to Romero, Pittsburgh has been called the "Zombie Capital of the World" and each year hosts an event called Zombie Fest, complete with a brain-eating contest.

"I used to be the only guy in the playground, I was the only guy doing zombies," he said in the Timeline doc. "Then all of a sudden The Walking Dead happened and it became mainstream. And now they're all over the place."

Martin Landau, the all-purpose actor who showcased his versatility as a master of disguise on the Mission: Impossible TV series and as a broken-down Bela Lugosi in his Oscar-winning performance in Ed Wood, has died. He was 89.

Landau, who shot to fame by playing a homosexual henchman in Alfred Hitchcock's 1959 classic North by Northwest, died Saturday of "unexpected complications" after a brief stay at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center, his rep confirmed to The Hollywood Reporter.

After he quit CBS' Mission: Impossible after three seasons in 1969 because of a contract dispute, Landau's career was on the rocks until he was picked by Francis Ford Coppola to play Abe Karatz, the business partner of visionary automaker Preston Tucker (Jeff Bridges), in Tucker: The Man and His Dream (1988).

Landau received a best supporting actor nomination for that performance, then backed it up the following year with another nom for starring as Judah Rosenthal, an ophthalmologist who has his mistress (Angelica Huston) killed, in Woody Allen's Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989).

Landau lost out on Oscar night to Kevin Kline and Denzel Washington, respectively, in those years but finally prevailed for his larger-than-life portrayal of horror-movie legend Lugosi in the biopic Ed Wood (1994), directed by Tim Burton.

Landau also starred as Commander John Koenig on the 1970s science-fiction series Space: 1999 opposite his Mission: Impossible co-star Barbara Bain, his wife from 1957 until their divorce in 1993.

A former newspaper cartoonist, Landau turned down the role of Mr. Spock on the NBC series Star Trek, which went to Leonard Nimoy (who later effectively replaced Landau on Mission: Impossible after Trek was canceled).

Landau also was an admired acting teacher who taught the craft to the likes of Jack Nicholson. And in the 1950s, he was best friends with James Dean and, for several months, the boyfriend of Marilyn Monroe. "She could be wonderful, but she was incredibly insecure, to the point she could drive you crazy," he told The New York Times in 1988.

Landau was born in Brooklyn on June 20, 1928. At age 17, he landed a job as a cartoonist for the New York Daily News, but he turned down a promotion and quit five years later to pursue acting.

"It was an impulsive move on my part to do that," Landau told The Jewish Journal in 2013. "To become an actor was a dream I must've had so deeply and so strongly because I left a lucrative, well-paying job that I could do well to become an unemployed actor. It's crazy if you think about it. To this day, I can still hear my mother's voice saying, 'You did what?!' "

In 1955, he auditioned for Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio (choosing a scene from Clifford Odets' Clash by Night against the advice of friends), and he and Steve McQueen were the only new students accepted that year out of the 2,000-plus aspirants who had applied.

With his dark hair and penetrating blue eyes, Landau found success on New York stages in Goat Song, Stalag 17 and First Love. Hitchcock caught his performance on opening night opposite Edward G. Robinson in a road production of Middle of the Night, the first Broadway play written by Paddy Chayefsky, and cast him as the killer Leonard in North by Northwest.

In Middle of the Night, "I played a very macho guy, 180 degrees from Leonard, who I chose to play as a homosexual — very subtly — because he wanted to get rid of Eva Marie Saint with such a vengeance," he recalled in a 2012 interview.

As the ally of James Mason and nemesis of Saint and Cary Grant, Landau plummets to his death off Mount Rushmore in the movie's climactic scene. With his slick, sinister gleam and calculating demeanor, he attracted the notice of producers and directors.

He went on to perform for such top directors as Joseph L. Mankiewicz in Cleopatra (1963) — though he said most of his best work on that film was sent to the cutting-room floor — George Stevens in The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965), John Sturges in The Hallelujah Trail (1965) and Henry Hathaway in Nevada Smith (1966).

Landau met Bruce Geller, the eventual creator of Mission: Impossible, when he invited the writer to an acting class. Bain was in the class as well, and Geller wrote for them the parts of spies Rollin Hand and Cinnamon Carter. Landau earned an Emmy nomination for each of his three seasons on the series.

He could have starred in another series.

"I turned down Star Trek. It would've been torturous," he said during a 2011 edition of the PBS documentary series Pioneers of Television. "I would've probably died playing that role. I mean, even the thought of it now upsets me. It was the antithesis of why I became an actor. I mean, to play a character that Lenny (Nimoy) was better suited for, frankly, a guy who speaks in a monotone who never gets excited, never has any guilt, never has any fear or was affected on a visceral level. Who wants to do that?"

Landau found a kindred spirit in Burton, who also cast him in Sleepy Hollow (1999) and as the voice of a Vincent Price-like science teacher in the horror-movie homage, Frankenweenie (2012).

"Tim and I don't finish a sentence," Landau told the Los Angeles Times in 2012. "There's something oddly kinesthetic about it. We kind of understand each other."

Landau played puppet master Geppetto in a pair of Pinocchio films and appeared in other films including Pork Chop Hill (1959), City Hall (1996), The X-Files: Fight the Future (1998), Rounders (1998), Edtv (1999), The Majestic (2001), Lovely, Still (2008) and Mysteria (2011).

On television, he starred in the Twilight Zone episodes "Mr. Denton on Doomsday" and "The Jeopardy Room," played the title role in the 1999 Showtime telefilm Bonnano: A Godfather's Story and could be found on The Untouchables, Bonanza, Gunsmoke, Maverick, Wanted: Dead or Alive, Wagon Train, I Spy and The Man From U.N.C.L.E.

More recently, Landau earned Emmy noms for playing the father of Anthony LaPaglia's character on CBS' Without a Trace and guest-starring as an out-of-touch movie producer on HBO's Entourage. He portrayed billionaire J. Howard Marshall, the 90-year-old husband of Anna Nicole Smith, in a 2013 Lifetime biopic about the sex symbol, and starred for Atom Egoyan opposite Christopher Plummer in Remember (2015).

Landau worked as director, teacher and executive director at the Actors Studio West. He has been credited with helping to guide the talents of Huston, Warren Oates and Harry Dean Stanton in addition to Nicholson.

Survivors include his daughters Susan (a casting director) and Juliet (an actress-dancer) from his marriage to Bain.

[Ed Anger]

I loved Space:1999 as a kid.

[mongers]

Damn. 

[jimmy olsen]

Terrible news

[The Brain]

RIP

[Duque de Bragança]

Another bad day

[CountDeMoney]

You'd all shit if Romero came back.

Monkey Shines was one of the absolute worst movies of all time. 

[Josephus]

Yeah, will always associate Landau with Space 1999. 

[viper37]

I loved Space:1999 as a kid.

most of us did, I guess.

[CountDeMoney]

I loved Space:1999 as a kid.

most of us did, I guess.

grumbler hated it with a passion, but he wasn't a kid, then.  When he was a kid he hated his hoop and stick.

[Admiral Yi]

most of us did, I guess.

Mission: Impossible for me.

[Tonitrus]

I loved Space:1999 as a kid.

most of us did, I guess.

grumbler hated it with a passion, but he wasn't a kid, then.  When he was a kid he hated his hoop and stick.

Ha dad wouldn't get him a gladius?

[viper37]

most of us did, I guess.

Mission: Impossible for me.

that came later for me.

[CountDeMoney]

most of us did, I guess.

Mission: Impossible for me.

that came later for me.

Yeah, me too;  only because M:I was in syndication, so the only time you got to see it was during the summertime or when you were home sick.

[grumbler]

grumbler hated it with a passion, but he wasn't a kid, then.  When he was a kid he hated his hoop and stick.

Funny that you are the one who cannot tell the difference between mocking and hating.  I thought Space: 1949 was ludicrous and badly written (though decently acted), but wasn't in the target audience.  I can still mock them for such ideas as  the opening windows on a moon base, and a bomb explosion sending the moon off at FTL speeds.