Editor’s Note: This is the sixth and final post in our theme for February 2025, “Celluloid City,” which explores the role of and interplay between cities and film. You can see all posts from the theme here.
By Victoria Timpanaro
October 1, 1968 was the world premiere of George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead at the historic Fulton Theater in downtown Pittsburgh. Filmed entirely in and around the city of Pittsburgh rather than in Hollywood or even New York City, the movie was the product of Image Ten, a band of collaborators from several commercial production offices within the city taking their first venture into feature films. Having forged successful careers in commercial and industrial filmmaking, Pittsburgh proved to be the perfect home for their entrepreneurial spirit as their clients became backers in this new project. It took a city to make this film, and that city was Pittsburgh, PA.
From the late nineteenth century forward, the city’s economy revolved largely around steel mining and manufacturing. This remained true for nearly a century. As the world moved away from its reliance on steel, the city worked to redefine itself. Some historians have argued that the decline in steel forced the city to explore possibilities for technology and medicine. Though debate regarding the accuracy of this narrative persists, in the case of George Romero and his team, this period of limbo between the decline of steel and manufacturing and the rise of health and science industries set the stage for Image Ten, which gained experience in the area through its film production for local businesses.
Image Ten’s Pittsburgh journey really began on the campus of Carnegie Mellon University, which was then still known as the Carnegie Institute of Technology. At the university, a group of friends developed a passion for telling stories with film, which would eventually lead to the decision to leave college and form their own production company in Pittsburgh, named The Latent Image.
“A couple of years later, in fact, we set up a company to do commercials and industrial films and like that here in Pittsburgh. And because this is a big corporate market, we got some jobs. There were advertising agencies here and it was kind of like being in the right place at the right time.”[1]
The Latent Image consisted of George Romero, Russ Streiner, Rudy Ricci, and, once he returned home from military service, John Russo. Thanks to a loan from the Pennsylvania Regional Industrial Development Corporation (RIDC), the company moved into downtown Pittsburgh in 1964.[2] At first work was scarce, but slowly they built up their list of clients, eventually emerging as a busy production house that served local business big and small. They worked to produce short commercials, industrial films and, at the same time, developed the narrative skills needed to tell stories visually. From a technical perspective, they were also able to acquire the necessary equipment needed for better and bigger productions. Over time they eventually made the leap into feature-length movies, going beyond the short films that had gotten them started in college.
As John Russo (Latent Image member and co-writer of Night of the Living Dead) recalls, “We busted hump making literally hundreds of TV spots, sales films and documentaries–award-winning stuff on ridiculously low budgets. Our goal was to acquire skills that we could turn to good use if the opportunity ever came to make a full-length theatrical feature instead of films about ketchup, pickles, paint, beer, art schools, chemical corporations and political candidates.”[3]
When Romero and Russo decided that they would make a horror story, they knew it needed monsters and they had to decide which monster would be the best fit. From a practical sense, zombies felt like something they could achieve with their meager budget and experience.[4] Zombies are the monsters most like us. They used to be common, everyday people, leading normal lives before they met their untimely demise. They weren’t wealthy, ancient vampires who lived in European castles or the mummies of Egyptian royalty. They were the working class stiffs who lived in the suburbs in a small house with 2.5 kids, a dog, and a picket fence. Before they died, they had gone to work every weekday and stopped at the bar for a cold Iron City Beer afterwards.
In 1967 Romero and his Latent Image compatriots joined forces with other independent production facilities in Pittsburgh to form Image Ten, which included John Russo, Russ and Gary Streiner, Marilyn Eastman, Karl Hardman, and Richard and Rudy Ricci among others. Each member made an initial investment of $600 to get the movie started.
These fledgling production workers were all thriving on opportunities thanks to the city’s initiatives for growth and new business opportunities. Through industry targeting, the political and civic leaders of Pittsburgh were making a concerted effort to put policies and incentives in place to help the city work to survive the impact of the failing steel industry.[5] As the city struggled to reinvent itself, entrepreneurs were building their own futures. Through their existing knowledge, equipment, and client base, this new limited partnership that would work on weekends to make their monster movie hoping Yinzers would take the film in at local theaters and drive-ins.
Between in the 1930s and the 1980s, drive-in theaters created a new marketplace for fledgling filmmakers like Romero and the Image Ten team.[6] They were local, small businesses that always needed material to help fill their lots.[7] Relying on the assumed clientele of teenagers, monster movies were a safe bet. With drive-ins like the Starlight Theater in Butler, PA (formerly known as the Pioneer and in operation since 1958), the nearby suburbs offered an affordable night of entertainment for anyone in the Pittsburgh area with a car. An independent film could potentially shop a movie to a drive-in on their own even if they couldn’t find wider distribution.
The decline in the steel industry affected everyone. Residents had to face a shifting job market, which led to layoffs beyond the steel mills. Ripple effects were felt all over Pittsburgh as lives were changed and families struggled. Though the steel industry went into precipitous decline, municipal efforts to attract new industries and keep local businesses like Iron City Beer afloat encouraged new local businesses to tap local talent in regard to commercial advertising. The Latent Image stepped into this breach, producing film for all kinds of clients in and around the city including the aforementioned Iron City Beer and Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood along with localized commercials for national companies like Calgon and Pittsburgh’s own Heinz ketchup.[8]
The production company now had the experience and know-how to tell clear, streamlined stories. They had the means and the connections to put together not just a cast and crew, but also find fellow investors necessary to build the needed funding required for making their movie. And everything about Night of the Living Dead’s production wrapped around the city and its surrounding suburbs, in which they all lived and worked.
The film is the story of a small group of strangers that must learn to work together if they are going to survive the night. Six people come together to seek shelter in an abandoned farmhouse as an epidemic of violence is taking over the small town of Evans City and eventually the country. The dead have started coming back to life and attacking the living. At first there are only a few but eventually the protagonists are outnumbered by the slow, lumbering, flesh-eating zombies outside their door. Over the course of the film, the audience witnesses the best and worst of humanity. Characters struggle over power and control as the survivors aren’t able to put their differences aside and work together. The story ends on a bleak note, reminding the viewer that hard work and determination may fall apart in the face of overwhelming odds. Much like the city of Pittsburgh, the world we see in Night of the Living Dead was about coming to the end of an era as a new reality was taking over.
The reality of the film meant the zombies would persist, even if the town of Evans City managed to get them under control. The zombies, like residents, still had work to do (and more films to make). The hordes of monsters would still labor away, much like the workforce of Pittsburgh. The city has been home to hard—working, struggling masses since the nation’s nineteenth-century industrial boom. And while the East End of Pittsburgh may have been the hub of the richest men in the world, the city’s average folks kept the coal and steel industries on the map.[9] For all their wealth, tycoons did not build the city; rather workers laboring in their factories and plants did, shipping Pittsburgh to the world. As the tides changed and steel’s day passed, the city of Pittsburgh faced a change in the jobs that were available for that working class. The job market changed as the landscape of the city changed. It was a new era.
When it came time to make a sequel to Night, Romero pulled together a crew and trekked out to another suburb, this time Monroeville, to show that the zombies were there. In 1978’s Dawn of the Dead, four survivors escape the chaos of Philadelphia and head west to find a safe haven. They end up at the Monroeville Mall, one of the first indoor malls in the country, just outside of Pittsburgh. They find that the zombies are already there, waiting for the shops to reopen. The ragtag group soon discovers that they are not the only people left alive in this new world and they must fight to keep the home that they have made at the mall. In the end they must survive a fight with not just the zombies but a gang of bikers that want to take it from them.
Here Romero is showing us how far we have come, as a country, as we fight not to save democracy or freedom, but consumerism. As our cities, like Pittsburgh, moved away from traditional industry and pushed towards finding its new place, we are clinging to commercialism and becoming inundated with national chains, as local businesses fail and disappear.
If zombies fight to keep the mall from the living, Pittsburgh’s working class fought to stay afloat. The city would have to reinvent itself as the demand for coal and steel diminished. This struggle enabled Pittsburgh to survive the Dawn. And it did with the boom of the technology age. The push to attract new businesses was targeted towards technology-based corporations and the hope of becoming a hub for West Coast and international tech giants. In recent years, that has increasingly included green or environmentally friendly technology and architecture.[10]
As the times changed, so did industry within American society. No longer did we run on steam or need mass steel production. As technology of all kinds took precedence, the workforce shifted and adapted. The city worked to rise from the ashes of the mining industry and sought revitalization through the computer revolution.
Between the 1970s and the 1990s, Pittsburgh shifted its focus to find the new industries that would keep the city economically relevant. It’s leading industries today are medicine and higher education, which today make up the largest employers in the city, which has also become a leader in green environmental design for the nation.
Romero would continue to make films in Pittsburgh into the 1990s. It was important for him to remain independent of the Hollywood system and stay where the people he trusted and wanted to work with also lived. As he said in an interview on Pittsburgh’s local PBS station, WQED, in 1982:
“All of the people we are working with, on the creative side and on the technical side are from Pittsburgh. I would say 90% of the staff is Pittsburgh-based people. People that live full time in Pittsburgh and either work here or at Westinghouse or some of the other facilities here in town. And they care about what they are doing, I mean really care about what they are doing rather than a pickup staff on a studio lot somewhere that is really just there as a nine to fiver that doesn’t even know the name of what movie they are working on today.”[11]
Years later, the city would come to cherish George Romero as one of their own. After his death in 2017, Pittsburgh embraced his legacy in various ways, the culmination of which was the 2019 event, “Romero Lives!”, a partnership between the city and the University of Pittsburgh. As part of the event, Mayor Bill Peduto expressed the city’s gratitude to the filmmaker. “He was proud of his Pittsburgh roots and could have chosen to live anywhere, but instead he helped bring an industry to Pittsburgh.”[12]
Thanks to fan-based events throughout the years in and around Pittsburgh starting with the Zombie Jamboree in 1993, followed by The Living Dead Festival and now The Living Dead Weekend, as well as The Living Dead Museum & Gift Shop, people from all over the world come to visit and celebrate where the films were made. Thanks to George A. Romero, Pittsburgh will forever be a City of the Living Dead, even as it has gone on living.
Victoria Timpanaro is a PhD Candidate at Rutgers University – Newark in the American Studies program. Her areas of study are film, media, gender, and popular culture. She is currently working on a dissertation focusing on the work of George A. Romero and female representation in horror cinema. Victoria is a Humanities Adjunct Professor at Essex County College and Union County Colleges in New Jersey, as well as SNHU Online. She is also a filmmaker and musician.
Featured image (at top): Title card for Night of the Living Dead, 1968, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
[1] Rawson, Mary, “Interview with George A. Romero”, Lyceum with Mary Rawson, Pittsburgh PBS station WQED, 1982.
[2] Gagne, Paul; The Zombies That Ate Pittsburgh: The Films of George A. Romero; Dodd, Mead & Co.; 1987.
[3] Russo, John; The Complete Night of the Living Dead Filmbook; Imagine Inc.; 1985.
[4] Russo, John; The Complete Night of the Living Dead Filmbook; Imagine Inc.; 1985
[5] Muller, Edward K. and Coleman, Morton and Houston, David (2012) Pittsburgh’s Failed Industry Targeting Strategy of the 1960s. Working Paper. UNSPECIFIED. (Unpublished)
[6] New York Film Academy. “Student Resources.” Student Resources, 24 July 2018, http://www.nyfa.edu/student-resources/the-history-of-drive-in-movie-theaters-and-where-they-are-now/.
[7] Kellem, Betsy Golden; “The Enduring Drive-in Theater – JSTOR Daily.” JSTOR Daily, 24 July 2024, daily.jstor.org/the-enduring-drive-in-theater/.
[8] Gagne, Paul; The Zombies That Ate Pittsburgh: The Films of George A. Romero; Dodd, Mead & Co.; 1987.
[9] Skrabec, QR; The World’s Richest Neighborbood : How Pittsburgh’s East Enders Forged American Industry. 1st ed. Algora Pub.; 2010.
[10] Conti, John; “Growth with a Vision”; Tribune-Review; October 27, 2012.
[11] Rawson, Mary, “Interview with George A. Romero”, Lyceum with Mary Rawson, Pittsburgh PBS station WQED, 1982
[12] Pipenburg, E.; “Pittsburgh Embraces a Father of Zombies: A citywide initiative celebrates the director George A. Romero and hopes to attract his fans”; The New York Times. 2019.
