Essays and Unsolicited Opinions: NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (1968)

Essays and Unsolicited Opinions:  NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (1968)

by Jim Heffernan

 

The film nerd in me has wanted to write something about "Night of the Living Dead" for years but the procrastinator in me has pretty much won out every time. I have probably attempted a favorite horror films essay in October to coincide with the coming Halloween, at least a half dozen times, in the last twenty years. I do like to write, particularly about movies, and when it comes to this particular film, I find I have a lot to talk about. Almost too much to write about in any organized fashion. I did do a somewhat brief commentary on it, last year, as a tribute following the death of the film’s director and co-author, George Romero. This year, with both the most definitive release of the film (a restored print created with the recently discovered original camera negatives) coming back to the theaters and home media, courtesy of Criterion, and the film's fiftieth anniversary, I figured this would be a good as an excuse as any to finish this. Be warned.  This will likely be one of the nerdiest pieces of writing I will ever put my name on... until I commit to writing something about Japanese monster movies but if that's your speed, kick back and enjoy. 

In the Beginning….

I can't remember the exact year I first saw Night of the Living Dead but I can recall rather vividly many of the details surrounding my first experience viewing it.  It would have been during the autumn season, sometime between 1986 and 1988 (which would have made me somewhere between six and eight years old).  A local public access station was running a marathon of public-domain horror titles as a last minute substitution for a canceled haunted house that some unknown community program had scheduled for that year in a nearby town.  How I became aware of such an event is a detail lost to time but what I do recall is the title that was the selling point to this specific marathon.  That film was "Gorgo", a fairly forgotten UK-produced giant monster movie from the early 60's that owed more than a little of its creative inspiration to the success of the Godzilla films. 

Once Gorgo had finished, the host of the public access program, a gentleman speaking and behaving in a silly exaggerated manner that resembled a low-rent version of the horror movie host prototype that was all the rage during those days, announced the next movie... Night of the Living Dead. It was a title that sounded familiar but one I was relatively unfamiliar with beyond that. At that point, zombies as a horror movie species did nothing for me. I knew them as the lifeless souls usually brought back by voodoo curses in movies I didn't care to sit through or the chapter in the horror books I frequently read that I would usually skip past. I was too young to watch R-rated movies regularly at that age and in the rare instance that my parents would give in and let me watch one, I would gravitate more toward the Freddy's, Jason's, and Michael Myers. 

 I kept the TV on though, this night, and almost instantly, something grabbed my attention. A woman was attacked by the scariest looking human being I had ever seen before. I didn't know why or what was happening. As her brother intervened to try and help her, the man quickly overpowered him and slammed his head into a nearby gravestone, presumably killing him.  In a moment that seemed so visceral and haunting, the killer looked right up at the woman (and into my living room at young Jimmy). I was now completely empathizing with the young woman, trapped in some far off place, with no way to get home and this horrible man chasing her. She tried to escape in the car but the keys were in her dead brother's pocket. After throwing it in neutral and cruising it downhill into a nearby tree, she escaped on foot, running seemingly forever. Every time, she looked back, the man was still chasing her.  The idea of being pursued by someone through strange unknown surroundings spoke to some serious primal fears. This was certainly much scarier stuff than I was used to, watching those old black and white Frankenstein movies on Saturday mornings.  I didn't know this guy was supposed to be a flesh-eating ghoul.  All I knew was he was after this girl and if he caught her, it would be bad.  When the woman finally managed to escape the woods and get to a nearby house, it seemed I could breathe a sigh of relief but this was far from sanctuary. 

 

The claustrophobic surroundings of the farmhouse setting felt like a haunting isolated prison of its own, complete with taxidermied deer heads on the wall that seemed like they too could come back to life at a moment's notice and jump out at the already vulnerable protagonist.  Peering through the window, the woman would realize the futility of any escape efforts as her stalker was still roaming the yard by the farmhouse. She was trapped. In going upstairs to search for help, the movie's next big scare moment would come as the woman would find what could only be described as a mangled corpse... so bloody and devoured that it was nearly impossible to make out. Overwhelmed with fear, the woman would make a fight or flight dash back down the stairs and out the front door, only to run straight into the blinding high beams of an approaching automobile. Almost instantly, another figure would leap into frame with little time to distinguish whether its intentions were friendly or harmful. Lucky for the woman, who at this point was near catatonic from trauma, the figure was very much a good guy, there to help. 

Very little of what followed in the film stayed with me after the first viewing. I recall a little conversation between the two, the reveal of additional survivors in the basement, and a whole bunch of footage of some four eyed newscaster guy talking about an "ongoing epidemic". None of it really resonated with me at that point in time and kind of tuned in and out, pretty much only keeping it on so I could see what the next movie was in the marathon.  I didn't even remember watching the ending. The next movie was "Little Shop of Horrors", which I watched even less of.  By the following week, I was on to other movies but the opening chase scene stayed with me. 

 "Night of the Living Dead" would get another day in court in 1991 when the A&E network showed it in prime-time as part of a Halloween theme. By this time, I had had a couple years of having that opening stuck in my head and wanting to see how it actually ended. This time, I would watch it the whole way through and it was practically a religious experience. I became obsessed with the film and watched it over and over again. There was no other movie like it. I now had fully embraced the idea of zombie movies, particularly the ones with a siege concept where a band of survivors had to work together. I was not only trying to find every zombie movie I could on TV or at my local video store but I was plotting my own ideas for zombie movies of my own. Since my family didn't own a camcorder, the planning mostly consisted of acting out my loosely organized zombie movies with the kids in the neighborhood. If you were a friend who lived near me when I was eleven or twelve, you probably rehearsed a scene or two with me on my folks' front lawn. 

Bringing New Life to Old Genres. 

While most commonly defined as a “zombie film”, Romero’s seminal horror classic also deserves recognition for reworking another popular if widely ignored subgenre of films known unofficially as “siege” pictures.  These films were generally built around the idea of a group of people, often strangers, trapped in a confined location, and forced to band together to get out.  Prior to Night of the Living Dead, the more known examples from this genre were westerns like Howard Hawkes’ Rio Bravo and lower-rent creature features like The Killer Shrews.  Romero would attribute a great deal of his inspiration for Night’s concept to the 1964 Vincent Price film, The Last Man on Earth (a sort-of one-man siege picture, based on Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend). It is in using the “siege film” template as a backbone for their script that Romero and co-writer John Russo arguably got the most creative mileage out of their zombie concept.  The idea of countless undead bodies slowly marching from out of the darkness toward this one farmhouse in the middle of nowhere is as imaginative a use of the formula as any that came before.  It would not only transform the way filmmakers used zombies but also in how they would come to approach the mechanics of a “siege film”. 

 

The trapped humans inside the farmhouse are seven strangers (a truck driver, a catatonic woman, a young couple, and a married middle-aged couple with a wounded child).  Romero makes good use of media sources like television and radio broadcasts to paint a broader picture of the epidemic going on outside while also cutting away at the appropriate times to see the growing hoard of “misshapen monsters” waiting in the shadows.  It’s easy to see the influence this would have on future filmmakers like John Carpenter, whose 1976 sophomore effort, Assault on Precinct 13, portrayed gang members attacking a decommissioned police station with the same lifeless and mechanical instincts as Romero’s zombies.  Likewise, Frank Darabont’s 2007 sleeper, The Mist, based on a Stephen King best-seller of the same name, found Sunday morning shoppers hiding out in a grocery store, from a similar far reaching disaster involving creatures of an unknown origin.  The marriage of the siege concept to the horror/science fiction genre is still growing strong today with fresh contributions from everyone from Robert Rodriguez to M. Night Shyamalan.  It’s hard to imagine what so many of these glimpses of cinematic post-apocalypse would look like without the existence of the Romero “Dead” film.

Exploring Conflict at 24 frames per second.

One of the more timeless qualities of Night is its portrayal of human conflict in the midst of turmoil. Almost immediately, two of the male characters, Ben and Harry Cooper, are at odds over the survival strategy for the entire group. Cooper believes that hiding out in the basement until they are rescued is the best way to stay alive while Ben wants to remain upstairs in a more open space so they have room to escape if the zombies get in. Ben theorizes that with only one way in or out, the basement would be inescapable if the undead army got through the door. Cooper argues that one door in means only one door to protect where numerous doors and windows means having to constantly stay on top of each. The argument in itself is almost a moot point to Romero. Both men are so married to their own point of view that it overtakes everything else, even survival.  Their stubbornness takes on a "with me or against me" ultimatum where the remaining members of the group are forced to choose sides or face certain wrath. It is in this moment where the storytelling takes on a more allegorical approach. The zombies become merely a symbol for any disaster. The human characters have exposed themselves as their own true enemies. 

While the concept of fear and paranoia as a catalyst for tribal-like self-destruction was hardly uncharted territory in popular culture in '68 (a classic Twilight Zone episode, "The Monsters are Due on Maple Street" had done a great job with similar material), Romero definitely earns credit for pushing away from a conventional approach to how these themes are explored. In particular, he guides the audience toward developing a sense of trust with Ben (the de facto hero, played by Duane Jones). He is painted far more sympathetically than the belligerent and boorish Harry Cooper.  He is shown to have an admiral amount of strength, intelligence, and survival skills while Cooper comes off as kind of loud and overbearing to the point where even his own wife is getting tired of him. Because of this, Ben's idea ends up seeming more attractive. But in the end, he ends up being wrong. The zombies do get through the windows and doors upstairs and completely engulf the place. It is only through abandoning his own plan and escaping to the basement that Ben escapes. At this point, he has already killed Cooper and watched the rest of the survivors perish as well. It is Cooper's idea, the very one he has been vocally opposed to since the beginning, that ends up saving him. At least, from the zombies. 

 

NOT All Massage Parlors Offer Happy Endings.... 

Night of the Living Dead features one of the more memorable downbeat endings in film. It's surely not the first time a horror movie ending went that way (though the Hays Code, established in the 1930's, had more or less restricted endings that showed evil triumphing at the end of studio pictures) but it still remains one of the most defining. After all of the other characters have met their demise, either through flawed planning or turning on each other, only Duane Jones' Ben, the hero of the story, has lasted through the night. With the sun rising on a new day and an organized posse of armed locals closing in on the farmhouse, the film seems to be moving optimistically toward an eventual rescue for the only survivor of the evening. As he glimpses through the window though, the men outside seem to confuse him for one of the undead and blow him away on sight without a second thought. It is here where the coincidental casting of a black actor takes on an uncomfortable subtext as the all-white clan of white men drag his corpse off to be burned without ceremony amongst a large pile of the dead. The chilling newsreel-style black and white photography combined with the appropriately ghoulish library music make for one of the more unsettling finales ever committed to celluloid. Even as this heavily-armed militia moves their way through the countryside, blasting away the undead, Romero doesn't leave us with much optimism. We get the sense that society has lost. All attempts to handle the issue have resulted in grave loss.  As a film produced at a time when the United States was still heavily involved in the Vietnam War, the wears of that conflict certainly seem evident in the story without it ever once being mentioned. 

While it might be inaccurate to assign Romero sole credit for pioneering the transition away from more textbook happy endings into bleaker, more ambiguous conclusions, he certainly should be credited to sticking to his guns when it came to how his film ended. Reportedly, his decision to deal with smaller distributors for the picture was largely due to the fact that every major studio with any interest wanted a more optimistic ending before they would agree to handle it. Twelve years prior, Don Siegel had infamously run into a similar problem with his "Invasion of the Body Snatchers", ultimately leading to Allied Artists, the studio in charge of it, opting to have its chillingly powerful ending altered with narrations and added scenes to give it a "less pessimistic" feel.  A lot of the impact of Siegel's original ending, which saw a screaming Kevin McCarthy declaring that the pod people had already begun infiltrating our society, would wind up being compromised by a tacked-on epilogue that explained how the military had intercepted the pods in time and seemingly vanquished the threat. Siegel and producer Walter Wagner both had very mixed feelings about the changes but were largely powerless to do much. Thankfully for Romero and Russo, the culture had changed significantly since. The wholesome ideals being sold to Americans in the 1950's were no longer being digested by a generation caught up in the horrors of the Vietnam War.  Audiences were now coming around to the idea that not everything was as glamorous as they'd been lead to believe. A revelation that would even prove sobering for Romero and company when during a trip out of town to sell their finished movie, news came out through the radio that prominent Civil Rights leader, Martin Luther King Jr., had been assassinated on a motel balcony in Memphis. 

What makes the conclusion of Night all the more powerful are the small, fleeting moments of optimism that Romero sprinkles throughout the film, slight reminders of what could be if the characters functioned in a more tactful and unified manner. An ill-fated escape plan involving a pickup truck and a nearby gas pump briefly shows heated adversaries, Ben and Cooper, working together unselfishly toward a common goal.  When the plan falls apart in a literal explosion, costing the remaining survivors their only chance at a getaway, the ugly side of their humanity resurfaces.  Cooper, who just moments prior, was willing to work for the good of the group, is now seen cowering away from the door, unwilling to remove the boards that are preventing Ben from getting back in, even as he yells urgently for help. 

 

 

The Trials and Tribulations of Distributing the Dead.

Much of the enduring popularity of "Night of the Living Dead" can be arguably attributed to a distribution error that likely wound up costing the rights holders millions of dollars in royalties. When Walter Reade, the company originally in charge of distributing the film pulled the title card to have it replaced (the original title was "Night of Anubis"), the new card came back without a copyright notice. Due to copyright laws at the time, this allowed it to slip into public domain, which essentially meant that anybody with a print of the film could run it publicly for profit without having to pay for the rights to do so. The problem continued during the advent of home video and cable television with many networks and budget video labels also capitalizing on the mistake. Latent Image likely lost millions. The silver lining here, as mentioned previously, is the copyright blunder made the film significantly more accessible than most other films. Because so many films, television commercials, and clip shows were allowed to incorporate footage from the movie without paying licensing fees, it was able to maintain a much higher visibility in the market which presumably strengthened its following considerably once the midnight grindhouse theater and drive-in screenings had run their course. Just how much of an impact its public domain status had on its shelf life is anybody's guess but all my early exposure to it came through avenues that likely wouldn't have existed if the film were tied down to a specific rights owner at the time. 

 In attempting to reestablish some control of their own creation and earn back some of the money lost through the "public domain" fiasco, many ideas were implemented throughout the years to try and get the money back to the original investors. This included a colorized version created for home video and television markets during the late 80's, an official theatrical remake in 1990, and numerous video, laserdisc, and DVD releases with the authorized participation of Romero, Russo, and the original crew. Of these ideas, the one that would be met with the most backlash was a 30th Anniversary special edition release in 1999 that would incorporate new footage filmed by Russo and Bill Hinzman and a modern synthesizer-based score. The new version was met with generally negative reactions from the fans and Romero himself would publicly dismiss the project as being "dumb".

 
Beyond distribution errors and rights problems, the filmmakers would suffer additional headaches, not long after the film's initial theatrical run when a flood would completely destroy the basement where a good deal of the production materials including the master print of the film were being stored. Just a few years before George Romero's death though, a duplicate negative would resurface allowing for a new restoration of the film to be put together and eventually released in time for the 50th anniversary of the film. Included among the surviving materials were sections of a long lost workprint of the film with its original title card and unused dailies and alternate takes from the shoot. Both would be included in a 2018 Criterion Collection release. 

 

George Romero and the Legacy of the “Living Dead”.

In the wake of George Romero's death from lung cancer, last year, much of social media was understandably ablaze with tributes from fans, colleagues, and fellow filmmakers alike, all paying homage to an innovative talent whose work had meant so much to them on a personal or professional level.  In attempting to transcribe my own such tribute, I realized that looking back at "Night of the Living Dead", in particular, its influence was as multi-layered as its message.  The most obvious thing to say would be that it changed and forever shifted the image of zombies in modern cinema and popular culture.  Anything zombie-related that came after it was undeniably and unavoidably the result of what George, Jack Russo, and all the Latent Image crew had put together back in 1968. Return of the Living Dead.  The Walking Dead.  28 Days Later.  All children of George's unique vision.  And that's to say nothing of the massive outpouring of Italian zombie films that came out in the 70's and 80's (which George further influenced with "Dawn of the Dead" in '78).  But to pull the curtain back even further, "Night" also showed how easily and effectively horror films, even those not specifically connected to the zombie subgenre, could be made on a lower budget level. Films like The Evil Dead, the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Blair Witch Project, and the like seemed undeniably built from the same guerilla filmmaking foundation as Night.  Horror, as arguably best exemplified by Night's shoestring budget, remains one of the rare genres that not only doesn't require an abundance of expensive resources to pull off but in many cases, actually benefits from having less. So much of scaring an audience is less about designing the visual and more about allowing the greatest scares to come from the viewer's subconscious.  And "Night" pulled that off as imaginatively as any horror film I have ever seen.  It conserves its big zombie scares and uses them masterfully at the times where they cost the most impact. Scenes of the undead appearing from the shadows and moving slowly toward the farmhouse are the stuff that nightmares are made of. Even more interestingly when the sequences are just simple dialogue scenes with characters talking about the atrocities they have already experienced or that could be waiting just around the corner, the sights we already have been shown do the job of informing the ones that will only ever play out inside our heads. 

"Night of the Living Dead" is arguably one of the single greatest examples of filmmakers innovating through necessity. Some of its strongest, most unique creative contributions might only exist because of the limitations that Romero faced.  Though color film had long become the industry norm by 1968, the choice of black and white film stock made "Night" stand out, both highlighting its nightmarishly surrealistic qualities and probably hiding a few of its low-budget production blemishes by not revealing them in full color. The black and white decision was more or less, always written off as being more driven by finances (the cost of shooting in color would have been substantially more expensive in those days) than artistic motivation but it is hard to deny that it is a choice that greatly benefited the aesthetic of the picture. Such is also the case with the film's soundtrack. Foregoing the traditional method of hiring a composer to produce an original music score, Romero and company instead carefully pieced together their film's musical backbone utilizing stock music selections from various library sources. While the music cues had been used fairly regularly in various genre pictures (most notably in 1959's "Teenagers from Outer Space"), its use in Night would prove so effective that it would ultimately be linked permanently to in nearly every facet of popular culture. Perhaps the most effective cost-cutting choice to come out of the production was the use of the zombies themselves (or ghouls, as the script most often calls them) as the creatures of choice for the allegorical American nightmare. Whether or not, there was ever any serious consideration to use any other type of cinematic monster like a werewolf, vampire, or alien is anybody's guess but given the budget restraints, the zombie feels every bit the perfect choice. The zombies used in the movie are from a stylistic standpoint, pretty standard. They look like regular people in clothes. The only real distinction is in their completely lifeless appearance, which is owed more to performance and creative direction than to any kind of elaborate effects work. It would seem arguable that Romero's reinvention of the zombie genre, the defining element of his film career, was likely more economical in its origin than it was a premeditated concept to turn the horror genre upside down. 

 

Final Eulogy for an American Classic.

Regardless of the reasons why it came to be, "Night of the Living Dead" is film school to me. It is the great American independent film. It built the foundation that became the exploitation film movement, where big ideas became the answer when big stars were not affordable. It borrowed the most spectacular elements from the established horror flicks from the eras that proceeded it (the atmosphere of the Universal horror flicks, the envelope-pushing shocks of Hitchcock's Psycho, the shameless marketing of the William Castle pictures) and used it to influence and inspire all that would come after it.  The door was now open, not just for different kinds of horror films, but for all types of low-budget genre fare with a brain and a social conscious.  Few films, if any, have provided such food for thought for cash-strapped aspiring filmmakers outside of the Hollywood studio system. While some of the lesser ones took a more straight forward approach to George's work, creating cheap imitations of "Night" with their friends and family. Some more attentive viewers took a closer examination on why it worked and used that influence to create more inspired and imaginative works. There is so much I am still learning from "Night of the Living Dead", both as a filmmaker and as a fan.  

 

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jim Heffernan is a shameless self promoter.  To learn more about this, check out the Facebook pages of his two films, The Angry World of Brian Webster and Destroy All Sisters, both debuting at The Regent theatre in Arlington, Mass on Thursday, February 7, 2019. Purchase tickets HERE.  

“Yo, peep this.  The story I’m gonna tell you is wild. Some of it’s real serious and some of it’s real funny but it’s all the truth. So go ahead and laugh and go ahead and cry but listen up.”

It’s been a cold, snowy weekend here in Mass and to break between the monotony of shoveling snow, organizing production notes, and composing e-mails, I figured I would do a little writing.  The creative juices aren’t quite flowing properly in a focused enough direction to where I feel I can add anything of substance to any of the specific scripts I am currently working on so I’ve decided to put together a little blog touching on various topics and what not.

I have a few reasons for wanting to do this. The most obvious being that I like to write. It’s a very therapeutic practice for me personally and I think more people should do it. I’ve been working on a project that holds a fair amount of personal significance to me for most of the last year and before I start putting the final touches on said project, I would like to take the very short amount of time I’ve been afforded to stop and reflect on some things. This could allow me at some point in the near future to come back and maybe get a glimpse at what my mind state was at the time or maybe even help guide me in getting the ball rolling on some other things.  I have a lot stored up right now and throwing some of it out there, even in a somewhat chaotic and unfocussed manner, might help get the ball rolling. It is my hope that this will all lead to me coming up with a formula for some interesting new creative outputs but if nothing else, it will give me an outlet to reflect, share some of my opinions, and even offer up some personal things for public consumption. After all, ain’t that what most people on the Facebook are up to these days anyways? Given the loose format and my struggles with ADHD, I apologize now for what will likely look like a mixture of a serial killer’s notepad and a thirteen-year-old boy’s journal, bathed in excessive self-indulgence. Hey, nobody is forcing you to read this.

I am NOT a morning person. Some days, it takes me about two or three hours after I wake up just to get in the right temperament to where I don’t want to cause bodily harm to people who come into my comfort zone with their bullshit. There is no moodier bitch on this planet than me at the breakfast table. I like to think of myself as a fairly easy-going guy, most of the time, but it is real easy to set me off before noon.

 
I’m beginning to come around on the idea of children.  Took me years before I knew what to make of them.  Always crying.  Spilling their drinks.  Taking naps at odd times of day. Going the bathroom wherever the hell they feel like it.  It’s like half the people I go on canoe trips with. Maybe it’s that I have a niece now and a lot of my friends are starting to have children.  It’s more than likely that I have an infantile sense of humor and that anyone over the age of about seven or eight can see right through it. The younger demographic gets it though. I have this penchant for making goofy faces at random times and those little guys eat that shit up.  By comparison, the teenage girls I do it to at the mall just think it’s creepy. I’m still probably too neurotic and irresponsible to have kids of my own but when it comes time to hang them upside down and give them Japanese power bombs on the sofa or make silly cartoon character voices, it’s my time to shine.
 
Probably the coolest thing I ever got out of writing something was having people that read it tell me how much they related to the material. With writing, you’re dedicating a whole lot of time to sitting in a room by yourself in front of a keyboard or note pad and there really isn’t any guarantee that anything you write is actually going to get read.  You put a lot of time into it and put a lot of yourself out there for that small chance that it might resonate with someone.  When it does, there are few greater feelings.  It’s also somewhat comforting to know that no matter how odd or out there you may go, there’s equally odd people out there that get it.
 
I’m pretty sure I am a hypochondriac but a very lazy one. I’m often legitimately convinced that I have any number of diseases but I am too busy/broke to regularly visit the doctor’s office.
 
Before all is said and done, I think I’d like to try and do a musical.  Not the traditional operatic kind or even a parody of the style. Which is not to say that I wouldn’t incorporate certain stylistic devices from either but I’d like to see what I could come up with within the perimeters of that genre. I’ll probably start writing it around 2027.

I think I’m the only person I know who really isn’t scared of going to the dentist. As long as they aren’t drilling cavities. That shit is for the birds. The novocaine never kicks in during the actual drilling. It’s always like an hour after I leave where my entire mouth goes completely numb and I turn into a drooling mental patient. Even if it kicks in during the procedure, there’s still that whole issue of having a loud-ass surgical instrument inside your face. Never had a root canal but I’m told it’s one of the most miserable things any human will ever experience so can’t wait for that one. The only thing that bugged me at my last trip to the old tooth doctor was the X-rays. They have this X-ray machine in the hall ways that was clearly built for an eleven-year-old and they want me to contort my body like I’m getting ready to blow the world’s tallest invisible NBA player but don’t want to get my knees dirty. This is all in plain view of the entire staff and any patients that happen to be roaming the halls at that time. The actual cleaning?  Not that bad.  I know most people can’t stand that whole deal where they scrape the plaque off the old pearly whites but I don’t mind it much. The only really painful part is having to pay the bill when you don’t have dental insure. * CUE DRUM ROLL *
 
I’ve come up with a fool proof plan for combating anxiety. I am probably going to die a very horrible death live a very wonderful life. See? Worked like a charm.
 
I read a lot of books but outside of Stephen King and the occasional Elmore Leonard crime novel, I don’t much get into fiction. I usually skim through books and start reading the most interesting chapters first. I think the way fiction is written doesn’t lend itself much room for this admittedly unorthodox reading style that I’ve adopted.
 
I once “accidentally” took part in a reverse prank call. This is, of course, being when someone calls you that you don’t want to talk to do so you have a little fun with them. The incident in question involved me being awoken from an afternoon nap by a college loan collector looking for my sister. I didn’t intend to fuck with them at the time but I was tired and the only excuse I could come up with what was to tell them that they had the wrong number. The tone of the woman on the other end suggested rather strongly that she was on to me but I had already committed to this half-assed and poorly-researched lie so I was going to ride it until the wheels fell off. After about a good thirty-second back and forth, I heard a deep sigh followed by a faux polite request that I please just leave a message for my sister informing her of this call. I can’t recall my verbatim response but it was something along the lines of, “I would really like to help you, lady, but nobody by that name, lives here”.
 
The list of movies I like more than any rational human being probably should include Predator 2, Truck Turner, Orca the Killer Whale, Monument Ave, Godzilla 1985, Who’s The Man?, Runaway (with Tom Selleck and an evil Gene Simmons), Carnosaur, Kickboxer 2: The Road Back, Money Train, Kingdom of the Spiders, the 1970’s remake of King Kong, Original Gangstas, Piranha II: The Spawning, Belly, and all three entries in the “No Retreat, No Surrender” trilogy.  I also like anything where giant non-computer-generated monsters ravage through cardboard cities. This list is subject to change.

Top 5 Hilarious “Simpsons” Moments That Immediately Come To Mind.

 

1)    Mr. Burns crippling an Irish worker with a bumper car and laughing about it for weeks.

2)    Homer going to see a movie called “Hail To The Chimp” featuring a scene where a monkey president starts pummeling his secretary in the face. 

3)    Smitten over the newly-hired Marge, Mr. Burns declares over the loud speaker to his employees that “Anyone who has found true love may go home early”.  This leads to everybody excitedly celebrating and marching off, except for one guy, who stays behind, crying a single tear.

4)    Nelson laughing at the tall, nerdy guy who can’t afford a comfortable automobile.

5)    NASA watching an episode of “Home Improvement” where Tim Taylor accidentally reverse drives over Wilson and kills him.

And just for a shit and giggles… a funny “Married… with Children” moment involving Al Bundy holding his kids’ place in line so they can buy concert tickets.

 

“Hey, old dude.  They sellin’ Wayne Newton tickets too?”

“At least, Wayne never had to pee on his audience to gain their respect.  (pause.) Or maybe he did.  I don’t know. I can’t explain his popularity.”

 

During my brief tenure working at the local Wal-Mart in high school, I got light-headed one day, and went crashing to the floor of the electronics department.  As I was being wheeled into the ambulance out front, one of the EMT’s asked me, “What happened?  Get hit by all those falling prices?”.  I was too young/incapacitated, at the time, to fully appreciate his brilliantly-timed comedic observation but if I have the necessary resources today, I would track that man down and buy him a beer.

I was always a pretty big professional wrestling fan but I feel it lost its essence, once it started trying to appeal to the everyman. I miss when it was about finding the most bat-shit crazy human beings on the planet and putting them on TV. I’m talking borderline psychopaths who were so over-the-top and out of their minds that they had to bill them as being from “Parts Unknown” because there wasn’t a city in America that wanted to claim them.  The good old days when going front row to a show might mean Rick Rude would try to turn out your mom or girlfriend. When there was no amount of money worth taking to trade places with the guy that Randy “Macho Man” Savage was promising to take apart in the steel cage at the Spectrum on Saturday night. Now, it’s all glorified former high school jocks or night club bouncers doing bad high school play impersonations of the wrestling promos they watched as kids.  It’s all catchphrases and no psychology. 

 
In having a chance to work on a film, I now have a much better understanding of why guys like Joe Dante and Tim Burton have their own little stables of “stock players” that they cast over and over again in their movies.  Or why some directors hire their wives to be their leading ladies. Sometimes, it’s a difficult task to effectively communicate what you want when the clock is ticking so it’s good to use people that you have some kind of history with so you can point to certain past instances as a “frame of reference”. Also, it can get crazy on these things and it’s nice to have people around who are both easy to work with and understand their day-to-day responsibilities.

I would make a shitty teacher on just about any subject.  Even the things I consider myself decent at doing, I learned by finding out all the wrong ways to do them. I’d make a much better cautionary tale. I’d be ideal for the “Don’t Do What That Guy Just Did” picture. It sounds wrong and self-deprecating but I’d say if anything, I’ve perfected a style that works for me and probably wouldn’t for anybody else.

And, finally… another reason why I love Pizza Hut.  “Making it great”, indeed.

Jim Heffernan is a tired, tired man. He hopes to one day, reside on a tropical island with his beautiful wife, Scarlett Johansson-Heffernan and their three kids, Charlie, Rodan, and Megatron Heffernan.