Night of the Living Dead notes by Bill Russo.

While George Romero often gets the credit for Night of the Living Dead - and he is the co-author the script, the story idea was originally developed by John Russo.

Briefly here's how the entire zombie-living dead genre came to be. After serving a two year hitch in the U.S. Army, John Russo re-joined a few of his old college buddies in a group that wanted to develop a film. George Romeo was a member of the team.

(click the link to watch for free https://youtu.be/rxPTdGdJpyE)

John Russo worked up a concept involving a young man stumbling upon a gaggle of ghouls feeding off human corpses. George Romero was excited about the possibilities of the idea. He went home and in a few days came back to John Russo with a 40 page skeleton of a script. Together they crafted those 40 pages into a finished product that became the iconic genre building “Night of the Living Dead”.

After the immense success of the movie they went their separate ways with Romero having rights to some of the movies in the new genre, while John Russo had rights to others, including the 'Living Dead' series.

John is about 80 as of 3-3-2021 and is still working like someone 40 years younger. He's got two or three projects going right now, including a new movie. You can visit with John at his website which is TheJohnRusso.com

Though we both have the same last name, I am not related to John Russo, though I believe that if I could trace back 8 or 10 generations, I'd probably find some common ancestors. At any rate, I'd like to be related to him. He's a pretty amazing guy, as you will see if you check out his website.