This weekend ScareLA hosted “Meet George C. Romero: 50 Year Anniversary of Night of the Living Dead” a Q&A style presentation with George C. Romero, son of legendary filmmaker George A. Romero. While the presentation had little to do with the 50th anniversary of Night of the Living Dead, Romero did spend some time talking about his father, his life, and his thoughts on the direction of the horror genre. A highlight of the panel for horror fans was the reveal that Romero is working to develop a new division of Romero Pictures dedicated to releasing unfinished, or unreleased work from his father.
The new division will be called Orange Folder Productions and is named after an orange file folder Romero inherited after his father passed.  “I’ve got this orange file folder I found,” explained Romero. “It’s a bunch of stuff that my dad left behind…It sat on my desk for almost a year after he died and I opened it up one day and inside, I didn’t realize, but there was a big folder of catharsis just sitting on my desk.” Inside the folder, Romero uncovered hand illustrations, unpublished books, unmade scripts and treatments for things his father created that were never used. One of the items found in the folder was a pencil sketch of Ben and Barbara from Night of the Living Dead that George A. Romero did in 1968. A sketch that Romero scanned and made prints of that were unveiled and made available for purchase at ScareLA.
In terms of other finds in the folder that Romero would like to see released, he shared that his dad created a cover-to-cover pencil drawn comic book western. “He literally illustrated every panel of this thing in pencil by himself and that’s something I’d like to put into the world.” Additionally, Romero is working to finish a treatment for a film that his father had started writing. Beyond that, Romero is uncertain where things will go. While many may think an effort like this is simply a money grab to profit off his fathers’ works and take advantage of his die-hard fans, Romero stressed that he only plans to release things that really gain traction on their own.
“I’ve never been a greedy person,” said Romero. “I’ve never been the type of person who wants to just squeeze every drop out of everything. So what I would be more interested in doing is putting what I have out there and seeing if it develops its own life.”
Currently, Romero and Romero Pictures is working on The Rise, a prologue to George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead that explores the events that unfolded in the six years leading up to the events from the 1968 film. The script for The Rise, previously titled Origins, was written by Romero in 2010 for his father. It was a film the two were planning to make together, but due to his fathers passing in 2017 that obviously can’t happen. Romero plans to move forward with the production based on the script his father was hoping to make based on the edits and reworks the two had made over the years.
