MRH: Romero’s often cited in the interviews as the glue that kept the entire production together. There are cases where you have an independent film crew that comes to town, it’s their first feature film, and sometimes things don’t work out very well, and they leave the locals with a sour taste from the filmmaking experience.

With NOTLD, the community regarded the production as a positive experience: local news crews did their reports, and the local folks have souvenir snapshots that expand the archive of material to this iconic film.

Jeff Carney: They got incredible cooperation. If you asked [a news organization today] to bring their helicopter out to the shoot, they would charge you a fortune to do that. They got it for free, and [the news station] was more than happy to do it.

It was really a snapshot of a different time in America. Everyone was just interested in their project; they were willing to help them. They went out and got a lot of the customers that were clients from the commercial industry – Latent Image and Hardman Associates – to help them as zombies even.

When you have that type of support, and you have talent like they had, both in front of and behind the camera, only good things can come out of that.

MRH: I think the funniest commonality among the people you interviewed is that everyone wanted to be a zombie, which still continues today whenever Romero makes another zombie film. It’s funny to see that even in 1968, whether it was the sound recordist, an investor, or a housewife, they kind of wanted to figure out some way in which they could be a zombie.

Jeff Carney: Yeah, it didn’t matter if they were a businessman or owned a business, they just thought it was a great deal of fun to go out there and be a zombie and walk around and go after people looking for their prey.

Jim Cirronella: Some people didn’t really know what a ghoul was. As Bill Hinzman said, ‘The ghoul did whatever George needed the ghoul to do,’ you know?

If you needed to kill somebody, then they had to be killed. They didn’t think ‘We’re setting a precedent, and there’s going to be rules in this film that need to be followed in subsequent films.’ They didn’t care about any of that. I think it’s kind of like a goof, and that’s why I give those people who participated a lot of credit because there was no expectation that ‘I’m going to do this role in a horror movie.’

That’s what everybody wants now. Because of that film and because of the follow-up Dawn of the Dead, it’s like ‘I want to be a zombie in a George Romero movie.’ That didn’t exist then; they just thought this was great. Being in a movie made in Pittsburg.

MRH: Has George Romero seen Autopsy of the Dead?

Jeff Carney: I think he got a copy of it at some point…

MRH: Do you have another project in the works?

Jeff Carney: Yeah. I’m going to be working on a horror film, and I really enjoyed working with Jim on this so I’m sure we’re going to be doing something horror related in the future. I’m not going to pass up an opportunity to work with him again.

ALSO AVAILABLE :

In Part 2, Jim Cirronella discusses producing the definitive soundtrack album of stock music used in Night of the Living Dead, and details of the little-known, long forgotten Capitol Hi-Q music library.