Independent Films

"Theresa Wayman - "Food Service Girl""

"Fred Savage - Marc"

"Eric Stoltz - Mr. Lance Lawson"

"Faye Dunaway - Mrs. Eve Denton"

"Thomas Ian Nicholas - Mitchell Allen"

"Clifton Collins, Jr. - Rupert Guest"

"Kip Pardue - Victor Johnson"

"Kate Bosworth - Kelly"

"[voiceover, after getting high] I need to get some more pot. I'm running out. Then I need to get laid. Where the fuck was Lauren tonight? That Lara girl was kind of hot. I could bang her and feel good about it. But I'd rather have Lauren. I wonder why? It would just ruin my illusion of her purity. Whoa, is that really what I want? [pause] I need to get laid. [sniffs] Then I need to get more pot. I wonder if Lauren goes wild during sex. I wonder if she comes easily. Or at all. I won't go to a bed with a girl who doesn't. If I can't make a girl come, then why bother? It's like asking questions in a letter. Hm, I'm hungry."

"Jessica Biel - Lara Holleran"

"Ian Somerhalder - Paul Denton"

"Russell Sams - Richard 'Dick' Jared"

"Swoosie Kurtz — Mimi Jared"

"Shannyn Sossamon — Lauren Hynde"

"James Van Der Beek — Sean Bateman"

"Rules Are Made to Be Broken"

"From the Corrupt Minds That Brought You 'Pulp Fiction' and 'American Psycho.'"

"Past Perfect. Present Tense. Future Uncertain."

"There Are No Rules"

"We all run on instinct."

"Victor Johnson: I no longer know who I am and I feel like the ghost of a total stranger."

"[voiceover] Three months later, the handsome dunce was having an affair with a friend of mine. Within a year he was a full-blown queen and telling people I couldn't get it up. Luck has nothing to do with anything."

"[voiceover] I watched him with growing intensity as he refilled the pipe in the dark and smokey din of the room. He delicately fingered what looked like dried moss to me, and it struck me then that I liked Sean because he looked, well, slutty. A boy who'd been around. A boy who couldn't remember if he was Catholic or not."

"[last line] I didn't know where I was going, some place unoccupied I hoped, at first I thought there were things about her I would never forget, But in the end all I could think about was-..."

"[reading a love letter, voice-over] Got you. You're mine now. For the rest of the day, week, month, year, life. Have you guessed who I am? Sometimes I think you have. Sometimes when you're standing in a crowd I feel those sultry, dark eyes of yours stop on me. Are you too afraid to come up to me and let me know how you feel? I want to moan and writhe with you and I want to go up to you and kiss your mouth and pull you to me and say "I love you I love you I love you" while stripping. I want you so bad it stings. I want to kill the ugly girls that you're always with. Do you really like those boring, naive, coy, calculating girls or is it just for sex? The seeds of love have taken hold, and if we won't burn together, I'll burn alone."

"Charles Craig - Newscaster/Zombie"

"I found that this film actually did something a lot of modern zombie movies fail to do - surprise me; The characters had been so well established that I found myself saying "They won't kill him, he's too important." I felt this emphasized the point Romero himself says he tries to make in most of these films, which is that they are films about people and how they cope in tough situations, not zombies."

"A few weeks later, George finally decided which ending to use (we’re keeping it a secret) and he had worked up a beginning, which had worried him greatly. He was criticized in Night for having a deux ex machina – in that case a radioactive satellite – activate the zombies. Dawn will begin with a TV newscast – with the film’s credits over – just announcing that the zombies are out and about. I called him up to suggest that recombinant DNA would be a good cause, but he wouldn’t hear of it. “I want it to be unexplained because the zombies really just come out of to rather than a third party. It just happens.”"

"“The sellouts,” he finally continued, “the scientific community is saying, ‘Let’s feed ’em. They’re wasteful. They eat only five percent of a body and then the body’s intact enough to revive and it comes back as a zombie. The government says we should feed them and control that pattern – which seems probably what those cats would do. So if someone has died in your family, cut them into meal-size bits.” He was roaring with laughter and the businessmen at breakfast around us began throwing odd looks toward our table. George wiped tears of laughter from his eyes and went on: “That’s probably the way it would go. My idea to take it further is to actually have human operatives that are trying to preserve their own kind of operative situation and in fact using the zombies initially, training them to serve their own needs. There are beginnings of that in Dawn. I show a few flashes of intelligence or at least a learning capability in the zombies. If there are human sellouts that first start teaching them to do things so that they become really operative, then it’s over. But that is also what’s happening to us, those kinds of monsters, our corporate monsters that prey on us more as we fear them less. I mean, that’s this whole false security concept of the mall, being funneled into it, the temple to consumerism, the mall. And being perfectly happy, you know, absolutely lulled by it and yet eaten by it like that.”"

"Despite Romero’s avowal that he’s just making “comic books,” I reminded him, he gets very close to a message when he talks about “human sellouts” and “operatives” versus the “alternate society.”"

"I mentioned to him that I liked the mall better at night, that the zombies seemed to have more purpose than the shoppers. “That’s how I got the idea!” he said. “I know the people who own it and I went through the mall, empty, one time and I said, ‘Holy shit! That’s the perfect place for the fulcral episode where we can show the false security of the whole consumer America trip. That’s why this is in color – Night was black and white – because of the mall. So I wrote a little sketch about it and then put it in a drawer while I did some other things I’m really surprised no one else picked up on the idea, because now there are these shopping developments where you can live on top and work and shop down below and never have to leave the building. That’s a trip. In this film, the mall becomes the cause. The four heroes get in there to get some Civil Defense water and food and then they rack out and this consumerism, it’s too tempting for them to resist. They arm themselves heavily, they become banditos fighting for all that stuff.” Are the bikers then supposed to be an antidote for them or are they actually an exaggeration of that; racing through the mall at l00 miles an hour and scooping up color TVs? “I think they’re the ultimate of what the heroes are becoming, fighting for control of the Mothership. In fact, when they first see the raiders, the bikers coming over the hill, Peter takes off his new watch and all his other shit and that’s a flash toward realization. The raiders are consumerism at its extreme and they just storm in there and go bananas and then of course that causes the downfall. But the heroes, even though Roger is dying at that point, he still has his candies and radios and shit … and that’s why they’re so extreme in their garb during the attack scenes, all the crossed gun belts, fighting over microwave ovens, I mean…” He doubled over with laughter. Romero has a weird slant on the world, to say the least. With Night and Dawn he has filmed some of the most explicit violence imaginable and yet he can argue, convincingly, that it’s detached violence because it’s directed at things rather than people; that the zombies become merely so many insects to be swatted aside. At the same time, he’s starting to make the zombies smarter and more sympathetic because he genuinely likes them. On a set, he resembles a giant, bearded shepherd with his poor dead flock shuffling after him. Sometimes he refers to his zombies as “sharks,” which is a startling but dead-on comparison."

"“This is beginning to feel like Dachau,” a man beside me was saying later as we watched a zombie get his hand – very bloodily – cut off in a door. “This is far beyond Sam Peckinpah.” The man speaking was Gary Zellet, who supplied the weapons for the film and handled explosives and breakaway special effects. Among many other projects, he worked on both Godfather films. He is one of the few crew members not acting in the film. “I didn’t want to,” he said, “this is getting depressing. Twenty gallons of blood used, animal intestines for the zombies to eat – this morning I was eating a corned barf sandwich and somebody said, ‘Hey that’s a prop.’ We use corned beef in some of the artificial arms. Real amputees volunteered, makes it look real. I’ve rigged over 500 bullet squibs. We kill ’em every possible way, burn ’em, shoot ’em blow their heads off. It’s good there’s some comic relief now and then because this movie runs like a machine gun."

"Sharon Ceccatti, the nurse zombie, came up to congratulate me as I caught my breath. “Is it always like this?” I asked. “You bet,” she said. “Most mornings I go home and I shake. I can’t sleep.”"

"I stationed myself in the Pup-A-Go-Go stand and the minute Romero yelled “action” something remarkable happened: my eyes went out of focus, my hands clenched grotesquely, and I developed a lurching gait as I went after that motorcycle. I wanted that food and I almost got it. By the time the scene was shot twice – once with a mannequin that is beheaded – I was our of breath and my pulse was pounding."

"As I listened to the dialogue in the scene in front of Penney’s, I caught one line that began to offer an explanation. The four heroes are trying to figure out what’s going on, and one of them says, “It’s something my granddaddy, who used to practice macumba in Trinidad, told me: ‘When there’s no more room in hell, the dead will walk the earth.'” “George,” I asked, “where did you get that line?” He laughed: “I just made that up. Truly. On a drunken night when I was really crashing to finish the script and I thought that was kind of nice. It was from something Dario Argento [the Italian director of Suspiria, who’s doing the sound effects and score for Dawn] told me. My family is Cuban and Dario said, ‘Well you have a Caribbean background and that’s why you’re into the zombie thing; zombies originated in Haiti.’ I said, well, all right, and I just figured that’s something a voodoo priest might say. Whee! I’m just having fun, man.”"

"“Maybe the bad guys win here,” he said, “and I like the switch – but I’m not sure the zombies are the bad guys because we can’t help being zombies. I love zombies.”"

"Hill was carrying a Thompson submachine gun as we walked. A retired Air Force officer, he’s the film’s weapons coordinator, but he really likes being a zombie. “This is supposed to be a horror movie,” he said, “but it’s also an action thriller It’s a whiz-bang. We’ve fired thousands of rounds of blanks; every type of weapon available. “Now, let me tell you about being a zombie, When you go into your zomb, you’re in a fantasy. I go into the role feeling I am the living dead, I can’t focus on things, I can’t get it together. I researched it in books – the wide-open eyes, the clutching hands, the slow movements. Then I made my own zombie. I asked George and he said, ‘Be your own zombie.’ I intend to be the best zombie there ever was. I want people to come away from this movie saying, ‘Wow, he was a good zombie.’ Sharon, the nurse zombie, got into her zomb so heavily the other night, she made herself sick. We’ve got some good zombies. When we were shooting the exteriors and it was zero degrees, there was this 300-pound guy showed up every night in a bathing suit. He said, ‘I’m not cold. I love it.'”"

"With 'Dawn,' I wanted the slick look, I wanted to bring out the nature of the shopping center, the retail displays, the mannequins. There are times when maybe you reflect that the mannequins are more attractive but less real - less sympathetic, even - than the zombies. Put those kinds of images side by side, and you raise all sorts of questions."

"Some audience members at Dallas complained that the film never offers any rational explanation for the sudden plague of zombies. But of course not. No explanation would be rational, and any explanation would undercut the creepiness of the danger. What the film does do is raise sneaky questions in our minds. It's impossible, for example, to watch the zombies marching through a shopping mall, accompanied by Muzak, and not find a satiric statement on the mildly trance-like state Muzak is supposed to inspire in shoppers. It's disturbing to see images of horror juxtaposed with the gaudy artifacts of a lawn furniture display. And it's difficult to make up our minds about the endless violence inflicted on the zombies. They are shotgunned, run over, hacked to bits, decapitated by helicopter blades . . . and after a while we notice that our reaction to this mayhem is curiously complex. On the one hand, the violence isn't as disturbing as it would be against "real" human beings: Since the victims are without intelligence or personalities (and, for that matter, are already dead), their fates are less compelling. And yet, at the same time, we feel a sympathy for them: It is not their fault that they're zombies, and their activities aren't deliberately anti-social. It's just in their nature to eat human flesh."

""Dawn" is a carefully crafted work that shouldn't be confused with run-of-the-mill horror exploitation films. If we can survive the gruesome imagery and see beyond the obligatory scenes of the horror genre, Romero gives us a savagely satiric vision of America that's not easy to forget. This is both a very difficult film and a very good one."

"A film critic at the New York Times walked out of "Dawn of the Dead" (1979) after the first 15 minutes, complaining of a pet peeve" against zombies. A film critic at the Dallas Times Herald described the film as "without any doubt the most horrific, brutal, nightmarish descent into Hell ever put on the screen." A film critic at the Village Voice thinks it's one of the most important films of the year. They all have a point. "Dawn of the Dead," which opens here Friday, is an ultimate horror film, one that takes traditional images of zombies and ghouls, makes them uncomfortably real, and treats them with a certain poignant humor."

"Dawn of the Dead is one of the most prophetic and disturbing films you’ll see, and I challenge you to find anyone who can find another film from that era which provides the same level of social commentary."

"Richard France - Dr. Milliard Rausch"

"David Early - Mr. Berman"

"David Crawford - Dr. Foster"

"Gaylen Ross - Francine"

"Scott H. Reiniger - Roger"

"Ken Foree - Peter"

"David Emge - Stephen"

"Say goodbye, creep!"