All You Zombies

I'm in the red square!
Originally uploaded by jerebo.

I'm a zombie on the Land of the Dead poster! Just look in the red square. That's me. (My next posting will show a close-up of this area, since I can only include one pic per posting.)

Special thanks to my friend Sergio Grisanti who drew this poster. In an age of US Weekly-inspired poster campaigns in which the teenybopper cast's faces are Photoshopped together, Sergio's work is a throwback to the old school era of movie posters, in which actual artistry was involved. I like to take some credit for Sergio's success, since I referred him to my friend's father, John Alvin, who is the maestro of poster artists. If there was an IMDB for such artists you'd see that Alvin drew the posters for Batman, E.T., Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein, and Blade Runner. Alvin took young Sergio under his wing much like Yoda mentoring a young Luke Skywalker (sans that nasty scar). After several years under Alvin's tutelage, Sergio was set free to embark on his career.

I remember when I saw Sergio's first solo piece. I was at the awful AMC Van Ness 16 in San Francisco glancing at all the lobby posters. The one for Wonderland caught my eye, since it was actually drawn and didn't resemble the above-mentioned Photoshop jobs. I admired the artistry, then yelped when I saw Sergio's signature at the bottom. I was proud of my boy. A nice detail was the "©1981" he added in the corner since the move took place in the early 80s.

Other posters followed: The Cooler, The Singing Detective, Alone in the Dark. But one night at a friend's party he dropped the zed bomb.

"Dude, guess what I'm doing next."

"What?"

"Land of the Dead, baby!"

I nearly shit my pants.

Sergio and I are big horror geeks, with an affinity for zombie movies. (I even wrote a zombie script several years ago whose plot is scarily similar to the soon-to-be-seen on Sci-Fi Channel, Return of the Living Dead Part 4: Rave From the Grave. Read more about this in a future posting.) I like to think I turned Sergio onto the genre, so it is satisfying and surreal that he is now doing the posters for sequels and remakes of horror movies from our childhood.

Originally Land of the Dead was set to be released around Halloween, but Universal wanting to cash in on the zombie craze (which was ironically inspired by George Romero's original trilogy), is releasing the film on June 24th. This meant the poster had to be done sooner rather than later.

Sergio called me a few weeks ago asking for a JPEG of my image so that he could include me on the poster. I couldn't believe it! I have been a huge fan of George Romero's films since I was a kid and now I was going to be a zombie on the poster for his fourth epic. My life is finally complete! How can it get any better?

Oh, I guess a full-time job would be nice.

Or a script sale.

I could probably think of some other things, but hell, I'll settle for being a zombie.