TV Talk: George A. Romero transports viewers to ‘The Amusement Park’

Trib Total Media TV writer Rob Owen offers a viewing tip for the coming week.

There are no zombies in the usual George A. Romero sense in his recently restored film “The Amusement Park,” streaming Tuesday on Shudder and AMC+. Instead, the emphasis is on discrimination against the elderly.

“The Amusement Park” opens with actor Lincoln Maazel as himself walking through West View Park in the North Hills, where the one-hour movie was filmed in 1973. Maazel lays out the concerns expressed in the film (rejection of the elderly by younger members of society). He reminds viewers, “Remember as you watch this film: One day you will be old.”

The first scene of the movie is set in a stark white room where a beaten, bleeding old man mutters about the dangers of the world outside to a well-appointed older man (Maazel) who then exits the white room (think: a waiting room like David Lynch’s Black Lodge in “Twin Peaks”) through a different door into The Amusement Park. There he’s met with assorted indignities, including age and economic discrimination. Occasionally the man is fleetingly shadowed by the grim reaper.

Suzanne Desrocher-Romero, George A. Romero’s widow, has been spearheading the restoration and release of “The Amusement Park” for several years. She first saw the film in 2017 after a friend who had borrowed it to show at a film festival returned it to George Romero.

“About three weeks before George passed, we watched the film. And it was the first time I’d heard of it,” Desrocher-Romero said. “I think he was surprised by our reaction. Because for him, it was his first and only director-for-hire (film). It was a three-day shoot. The film cost a grand total of $37,000. So to him, it was nothing.”

But to Desrocher-Romero and others who saw it, “The Amusement Park” was edgy, scary in a creepy (but not gory) way and “it had Romero all over it: His editing skills, his approach on how things were shot; it just oozed his style.”

After her husband’s death, Desrocher-Romero was determined to get the film out to the public, embarking on a years-long quest to restore “The Amusement Park” and then secure distribution. Its first public showing was, appropriately enough, in Pittsburgh in 2019.

“The Amusement Park” was produced in cooperation with the Lutheran Service Society of Western Pennsylvania and the Pitcairn-Crabbe Foundation. The film was never intended to have a theatrical release, rather, it was envisioned to be used as a discussion-starter within church congregations but may have been deemed too extreme for that purpose. Desrocher-Romero said while Pitcairn-Crabbe did have records of its involvement with “The Amusement Park,” LSS did not.

Mark O’Donnell, director of communications for Mars-based Lutheran Senior Life, which absorbed LSS in 2014, notes that LSS was sensitive to those who are “disengaged from society,” fitting with the theme of the movie. In the mid-1970s, a history of LSS includes “aging services” as one its three main programs.

“The Amusement Park” isn’t the only unearthed, unreleased Romero production to become available this year. In April, an independently produced, failed Romero pilot for a TV series was released on DVD. Desrocher-Romero says there’s another recently discovered Romero short film that truly was thought to be lost.

“I’m working on George’s very first film that he made in 1961,” Desrocher-Romero said of the 21-minute silent movie, now known as “Romero’s Elegy.” “It’s extraordinary. He meant to add music to it, add narration to it but he got busy doing commercials so he put it away and never got it done. We’ve knitted together some of the elements.”

Desrocher-Romero recruited 1961 University of Pittsburgh grad Richard Ricci, a longtime Romero friend who played a zombie in “Night of the Living Dead,” to write a poem that will be used as narration (read by “Day of the Dead” actor Terry Alexander). A jazz score has been added because Desrocher-Romero said Romero was listening to jazz around the time he made the movie. There’s currently no distributor attached to make the film widely available.

“It’s still in an embryonic stage,” Desrocher-Romero said. “But I do think cinephiles, Romero completists, are going to want to see this.”

McCandless native Greg Nicotero (“Creepshow,” “The Walking Dead”), a producer, director and makeup effects artist who got his start working with Romero on 1985’s “Day of the Dead,” said he’s thrilled that there’s still Romero material out there to be discovered.

“It’s sort of like when a musician dies, people become hungry for more material from them,” Nicotero said in March. “I like the idea that there are still things out there that we haven’t seen. And I feel like it’s part of our responsibility to keep George’s legacy alive. All of his papers are at a permanent collection at Pitt. There’s the George A. Romero Foundation that’s committed to cultivating new talent and scholarships and screenwriting competitions to keep that George Romero independent spirit alive.”

Plenty of zombie movies have tried to follow in Romero’s footsteps (and “The Walking Dead” on TV). Desrocher-Romero said her late husband was supportive of Nicotero’s work on “Walking Dead” but Romero wasn’t wild about others’ zombie stories.

“He used to always say that he used to be the only guy in the sandbox. And now, suddenly, there are other people in the sandbox. It was more about that than anything,” Desrocher-Romero said. “I just think that he felt that it was just not him, that’s all.”

There may be one more Romero zombie flick in the offing.

Desrocher-Romero said prior to his 2017 death from lung cancer, the 77-year-old Romero wrote a treatment with Paolo Zelati (“The Profane Exhibit”) for a fifth film to conclude his zombie saga, “Twilight of the Dead.” Zelati, Joe Knetter (“Blind,” “Terror Overload”) and Robert L. Lucas (“One for the Fire: The Legacy of ‘Night of the Living Dead’”) used that treatment to write a script.

“It’s a little daunting, because I need to be extremely careful as to what team makes this film,” Desrocher-Romero said. “So we’ll have to see. I was there throughout the whole (script-writing) process. It’s very dark. It’s extremely dark. In fact, at one point, I said, ‘Jesus, give me some light. I need some light, just a little bit of light.’ And they accommodated me. It is a very dark piece and it’s absolutely spot on.”

Desrocher-Romero recalls asking her husband over a game of Scrabble what he thought his legacy would be.

“You know, nobody really cares,” George A. Romero replied.

“That haunts me today,” Desrocher-Romero said. “I think he was wrong. I can’t get over that he said that. And it gave me the energy to slow by slow, inch by inch get forward momentum. We get the Foundation, we get the Archive, we get all these things together to prove him wrong. I’m going to keep doing my work to prove him wrong.”