JIM: You're listening to the Voice of the Arts, WQED-FM.

I'm Jim Cunningham.

John Harrison is here.

It's Dead Air centered around Halloween, but all kinds of things.

Zombies, of course.

John was our colleague here at WQED.

We met when you were here.

You were the voice of Channel 13, John.

Then George Romero and the zombie world.

Tales from the Dark Side.

You were in Dawn of the Dead.

You were a director.

Composer.

You still are all these things.

And a half dozen novels, too.

You're deeply involved in the zombie world, but an extremely creative and beloved figure.

Welcome.

Great to talk to you.

JOHN: Jim, It's great to be here.

And, I've been looking forward to this for a couple of weeks.

It's kind of like coming home in a way, because like you said, I was involved with QED for many years, including at the at the inception of WQED-FM, which is where I met you.

And it's always one of those things that I look back on very fondly.

JIM: Well, I remember and I think there are some audio examples of your station identification announcements on both television and radio.

Before we get started on the zombies, tell me about your QED connections.

How do you wind up here?

JIM: Well, I had been on the road as a musician for many years, and, after I all through high school and graduation and after that.

And but I came back to Pittsburgh and, my really dear friend Dusty Nelson had, just been given a fellowship to, study and to get a master's degree between Carnegie Mellon and QED.

And he said, Harrison, there's one more spot.

You've got to come down and apply for this, because I know you're in between things.

And this is a really great program.

And in fact, it was because it was there was a bit of academics to it, but it really was an apprentice program between working at WQED and, getting the master's degree at CMU.

So it was a tremendous experience and a tremendous opportunity.

I applied and I luckily got the gig.

So I've spent the first year.

It was a two year program.

I spent the first year working at various things at WQED as a filmmaker, partnering up with Dusty and our other dear friend Pat Bubba, who was also part of the project And then Jack Summers, who was an executive at QED, approached me and said, look, we're starting an FM channel.

And, I'm wondering if you want to help out with it because a lot of it's going to be volunteer.

And, but we're getting off the ground and it's going to be a classical music station.

And I know that you're a musician, and I know that you love this kind of music.

Do you want to help out?

And I, I did.

And for the next year, or I forget, maybe even a little longer.

Jim, I can't remember exactly.

I hosted the morning show, which was called Sleepers Awake.

And then on top of that, I did various, as you say, station IDs and and that kind of thing.

But it was a great time.

And then that's where I met you when you came on board.

And, it was just a great time because it was all brand new.

We didn't have this beautiful studio that you're sitting in no We had this tiny little.

Yeah, we had this little room right in the back of the building, and, it was like a closet.

And, then the engineers without were outside the window, and, you know, we would do a hand off in between shows.

I'd finish up and put on a record and walk out the door, and you or somebody else would walk in and sit down and take it over.

It was.

It was great experience.

I'd never done anything like it before, but I really loved it.

JIM: Yeah.

There was an engineer named Steve Zorbas, and he was famous for having used something like petroleum jelly on the doorknob, because our colleague Stephen Dick would arrive at the last possible moment and Stephen couldn't get the door open.

So this created a bit of hilarity there with the the jokesters.

And, I remember that time fondly myself.

I was a student intern first, and then came on board as a paid employee in 1978, but it was just I remember so much.

There was a lot of creativity.

Fred Rogers was making his shows.

There was a program called The People People's Business in Harrisburg, and there were national shows.

Soon the National Geographic specials were rolling.

Tom Skinner and Lloyd Kaiser were at the top.

Any other people that you remember from that time?

Did you know John Cosgrove and Susan Cosgrove?

JOHN: Of course.

And I still see when I come to Pittsburgh because my family is still there Some of my family is still there So I, I do come to Pittsburgh quite often.

It's, it's my home.

I even though I lived in LA for almost 40 years, and now my wife and I are here in New Hampshire.

I still consider Pittsburgh my hometown.

And so I come down there quite a lot.

And, I see guys on the crew, Ed Lottery and.

Nick Tallow, when he was still alive and, and people like that.

Most of the other guys you mentioned, Lloyd and Tom, they're gone.

Or not with the station anymore.

I haven't seen them in a while, but, yeah, it's, I drive by it all the time and have very fond memories.

JIM: How did you first connect with George Romero?

He was doing work for Fred Rogers.

He was making the Picture, picture films.

JOHN: Well, you know, you mentioned this just a second ago It was really a fantastic time to be in Pittsburgh because there was a lot of production going on.

And, I when I came back, George was making films.

I didn't know him then.

WQED was doing all this national programing, and, there was a major video production house in town called TPC that was doing all kinds of national commercials.

So if you wanted to be in the business, it was a really great place to be.

And it was kind of like the whole town was its own film school, which was great for all of us that wanted to be in the business.

Well, Dusty and Pat and I, having finished our master's degree at CMU, wanted to put our own film production company together.

So we raised a couple of bucks just amongst the three of us, and we actually got an office by bidding on it at the WQED auction and went down and started our own film production company.

Well, one day my friend Dusty Nelson comes in and he puts a newspaper down on the table and he says, look, we ought to call this guy because he just got this deal to do these sports documentaries And it was George.

So I picked up the phone.

George had his office at the other end of Smithfield Street.

We were down in the Oliver Building and, I, I expected to get a secretary on the phone, but it was George who answered.

And so I stumbled through my introduction.

Mr.

Romero, my name is John Harrison.

We read your article in the newspaper.

We've got some equipment.

Maybe we could work for you and help you out.

And he said, well, where are you guys?

I said, well, we're down in the Oliver building.

And he said, okay, I'll be there right away.

Click.

He hangs up.

Five minutes later, he walks into our office.

We show him a couple of films that we made.

We were trying to do the same th that he had been doing with light and image.

Industrials, commercials, public service announcements, anything to pay the rent.

And he took a look at this stuff and he said, let's work together And that was it.

And we all became really dear friends.

I ended up working with him on a bunch of his films, remained close to him right up until the end, and he gave me wonderful opportunities and got me started really in the film business.

JIM: You were in Dawn of the Dead, which was shot at the Monroeville Mall.

Yes?

JOHN: Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

That was a, I was actually called late at night to come out to the mall and solve a continuity problem.

For those of you who don't know what continuity is in filmmaking you have shots where because you never shoot anything in order, you're shooting it in a bunch of little pieces and you put it together in the editing.

And so, George, it's shot a scene with one of the primary characters of him going right to left in one shot and then left to right in the other shot.

And but in the in between those two shots, he the character forgot to put on a piece of his costume so the two shots wouldn't match.

And George and Tom Savini, the effects maestro in Pittsburgh, came up with a gag that would solve that problem.

And they called me and I went out late at night and ended up being a zombie in George's movie.

JIM: The Screwdriver Zombie.

JOHN: That's, I'm probably more famous for that than anything else I've ever done, Jim.

JIM: You know, I mentioned Susan and John Cosgrove.

I think they were in Dawn of the Dead somehow, but they say they can't remember exactly what they did and they've never watched the film.

So it's interesting that John Cosgrove turns up on the IMDb database for being a zombie.

But any of the other things that he did at QED and he did hundreds of things he's not there for.

JOHN: It's amazing, isn't it?

I mean, zombies are famous.

I mean, they're like everywhere.

JIM: And the success of the first movie.

We're going to show it and have it on WQED TV.

Of course, it's seen all over the world around Thanksgiving, and at other times around around Halloween and at other times of the year.

So what explains the unbelievable success of it?

It plugged into some spirit of the time in 1968.

JOHN: You know, that's a really great question, Jim, and I'm not sure I'm competent to give you a really erudite answer, but I think it had to do with the fact that, well, there are a couple of there was a confluence of events One is that it was a very well made little horror movie, and it was very graphic.

So it was a very different from what was out there.

And it kind of touched a raw nerve for people who were into spooky and, frankly, violent, movie making.

But George was also a filmmaker.

And everybody.

Some people forget this, that his movies were always about something.

And, Night of the Living Dead had a, an undercurrent of social commentary in it that I think elevated it beyond, say, just the normal slasher type movie.

So I think that that appealed to people beyond just the horror crowd.

But the other thing that happened, which was really interesting when the movie was going to be distributed, the company that distributed the Walter Reed organization in subsequent prints cut the copyright symbol off the bottom of the the prints So the copyright ownership became in dispute for many, many years, which allowed anybody that wanted to put out a version of it on CD or DVD or back then just, you know, screen it at movie theaters, could do so without having to have the ownership recognized as George Romero's ownership.

So what that allowed people to do, especially when VHS came in, it began to circulate around the world, as you pointed out.

And I'm not sure that that would have happened if it had been controlled by some distribution company.

So that really put it on the map all over the world.

JIM: The social commentary in the story, you have a cast of Caucasian actors with one African American guy who seems to be the most levelheaded of all.

Ben, that was Duane Jones?

JOHN: Yes, Duane Jones.

JIM: And he gets shot in the end.

It's really another shock that you don't expect where the good guy is killed and he winds up on a meat hook and in the in the pile of zombies along with everybody else.

I mean, this was when Martin Luther King was in the news and racial relations were extremely difficult.

So I don't know that George Romero... JOHN: And the Vietnam War was going on.

And, it really just I think it caught the pulse of the times, really in a strange, in a strange way.

Not I don't know that, George.

George would have said, you know, I never set out to make a, you know, a social commentary movie.

I mean, these were just my thoughts.

He says he always.

He casted.

He cast Dwayne because he was just the best actor, not because he was black.

But, it resonated with people.

And I think that that's another why, it it became so ubiquitous.

JIM: Have you stayed in touch with any of the members of the cast?

Many of them are gone.

I knew Carl Hartman.

He's long gone, and Dwayne is gone.

Anybody left that you've stayed in touch with?

JOHN: Well, not really.

I mean, the people that worked on it, I was not there during the making of night.

When I eventually moved back to Pittsburgh, I started working with George around the time of Knight Riders and Creepshow and Day of the Dead and that whole era.

The era of, Night of the Living Dead and Jack's Wife and those movies even, some of the others, at that period of time, I was not involved in.

I screened them all with George.

We used to have great fun going back and looking at those in the crazies.

But I wasn't involved.

I knew some of the people that had worked on them.

Richard.

Richie.

John.

And you know, Russ Reiner, you know, all those guys.

But I didn't work on them.

JIM: How did you begin working with George?

With the the music and writing the soundtracks for his productions?

He originally was using production music that was just off the shelf.

JOHN: Yeah, he the amazing thing about George, his he had a he wasn't a musician, but he had an incredible musical sense and he could take live what we call library music or needle drops that he got from Capitol Music Library or DeWolfe, and he would score his movies that way because he didn't have a lot of money.

These were all, remember, very low budget films.

So you could get these needle drops and then cut them together and make entirely new cues.

And he was a genius at that.

When we were doing Creepshow, and even before that on Knight Riders, he had had enough money to hire Donald Rubinstein, who was the producer's brother, to do some cues for him on Knight Riders.

But when we got to do Creepshow, his first instinct because of the kind of movie that it was, was to use these old needle drops of old 1950s horror movies which would have been consistent with the theme of the of the movie itself and the look of it that he and Stephen King wanted to have, but some of it just wasn't working.

And I had had the great opportunity of being his assistant director through the whole movie.

So I was at his side the entire time we were making it, and I kind of knew what his instincts were in terms of each scene that we were doing, like what would be good here?

And you remember that cue from Bernard Herrmann?

Man, if we had something like that, that would really work right here.

Or a goldsmith sting right about now.

So I, I talked to George about all that, and at one point he said, hey, listen, John, you got the piano.

Why don't you, why don't you write me a couple of cues and see if we can come up with original music?

And that was it.

And then I ended up scoring the the movie.

JIM: Now, Romero himself, you knew him very well.

I never had a chance to meet him but he seems like a very thoughtful, gentle guy.

The criterion version of the film of the opera.

Which one was it?

Sir Thomas Beecham conducted it, but I think it was a Mozart.

Was it Magic Flute?

It'll come to me the minute we start... JOHN: Are you thinking about Tales of Hoffmann?

JIM: Yes, exactly.

And that had commentary from George Romero on it.

He really knew opera very well.

And of course, Tales from Hoffman It sort of fits with the thinking of George Romero.

JOHN: Of course, that's an anthology.

It is, and it's a I have a very interesting story to tell you about all of that.

But first, I'll tell you that George will say has said that that was one of the first movies that made him want to be a filmmaker, when he was a kid in Brooklyn or the Bronx.

He was, he saw this movie at the lake on the late night show, and he would go down, and you could still rent 16mm films back in the day, and he would go down and try and rent a copy of Tales of Hoffmann so that he could watch it at home.

And his biggest complaint was that half the time he would go down there, and there was this other guy in New York who had always wanted to get Tales of Hoffmann, too.

And so they were competing with each other for who could get to the store first and rent it.

Well, guess who that other guy was in New York?

Marty Scorsese.

So the two of them share this love of Tales of Hoffmann.

And in fact, Martin Scorsese, longtime editor Thelma Schoonmaker Married the director of that movie, Michael Powell.

And, it not not the director of the opera, but the movie they made of it.

And George and I at one point talked about actually reviving it.

He wrote a story called Mansions of the Moon.

That was a interpretation of The Tales of Hoffmann set in outer space.

We never got a chance to make it I wrote an overture for it.

But we never got a chance to make it.

But it's really interesting that that was a movie that really made George want to make movies.

JIM: We must talk about the production of Christian Kriegeskotte with the Romero theme that is coming through the sponsorship of the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust and others.

I understand you're involved in it.

JOHN: Well, yes.

Christian came to us, the George Romero Foundation and said, look, I formally am with the Pittsburgh Symphony, but I think there's an opportunity here to do a concert program of all the music of George Romero's films.

And if you know, Jim, this is this is actually become quite a popular, concert event around the country.

They do Star Wars, they do the Never Ending Story.

They do some other horror movies where live orchestras perform, sometimes just concert music of the scores, sometimes a live orchestra playing along with the film.

Replacing the the score and the movie.

And he said, why not do that with George's stuff?

His his films are iconic.

The music would be a, a wonderful way to kind of introduce other people to his body of work.

I can arrange and put this whole thing together.

And he has.

So we're going to do on March 26th at the Byham Theater, which is down in the Cultural district.

We're going to do a full concert of the music of George Romero's called the Romero in Symphony, and it is a live orchestra.

He's arranging all of it.

There will be some celebrity guests as part of the show, if you will.

And, we're very excited about this.

So tickets are on sale now, through the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust, who are our partners.

And we've been fully financed by great grants from the Hunt family and from the Richard K Mellon Foundation.

And this is going to be quite, a quite an evening of, of really great music.

And there will be a the premiere of one of George's long lost films, one of his first films with a brand new score and a completely original, new overture to Night of the Living Dead, which Christian has composed and arranged based on the music that George actually used in the original movie.

JIM: I'll look forward to that with great anticipation.

I hope it will bring you back to town for it.

JOHN: Oh, I'll definitely be here for that.

JIM: All the best you will see when you get here in March, if not before.

JOHN: Yes.

Go see the Romero in concert.

It's going to be a great, great show.

JIM: Happy Halloween.

JOHN: Yes, Happy Halloween Jim.

JIM: The Voice of the Arts with Christian Kriegeskotte I'm Jim Cunningham, and it is a real treat.

You're part of the family, Christian.

You are our intern here at WQED.

FM interviewed Robert Page and all kinds of good people FM interviewed Robert Page and all kinds of good people just steps away from where we're sitting now.

You have a new project coming in March at the presentations of the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust.

You'll be at which theater in downtown Pittsburgh?

CHRISTIAN: At the Byham Theater downtown.

JIM: We want to talk about that in detail.

And I want to talk about you and what you've been up to since we got together last tell me about some of the great success you've had with all kinds of things in Los Angeles.

In New York, you worked in the motion picture studios as a copyist and other things as well.

You were affiliated with Star Wars.

It's a tremendous curriculum vitae that you've acquired.

CHRISTIAN: Well, I appreciate that.

I'm still still working on it.

But yeah, when I when I finished school in the early 2000s.

You know, it's one of those things you choose a career in the arts and the one thing that you really need to focus the hardest on is the entrepreneurial spirit.

You know, I always used to joke they're not hiring at the composer store.

You know, when you come out with your degree in composing, and it's a long story for another time, but, through a series of unexpected connections, I wound up in Hollywood.

And the first job that I got was a job I didn't even know you could have really, you know, and sort of.

You're prepared for it.

You learn all about it in music school.

But my first job was working in the music department of Star Wars Revenge of the Sith as a copyist as you as you rightly pointed out.

And that summer I worked on two films with John Williams.

The other one was Steven Spielberg's War of the Worlds.

And just the amazing training that that provided to me, and the perspective on how that's done, particularly with a guy like John Williams, who then and now he's still with us, is a titan of film film scoring.

And to get those those original manuscript copies every note written in pencil lik a giant architectural drawing on paper this big.

And to think he wrote, I mean, it had to be hours and hours of music in the same summer for two unrelated films, you know, both huge blockbusters.

It was very cool, you know, and it gave me a great perspective on the sort of pragmatism and efficiency of how to prepare music, which is such a critical piece of composing, because you could be the most creative composer on earth and then hand somebody a stack of nonsense on paper and they'll have no idea what they're supposed to do with it.

So, you know, connecting those dots was really a training that I don't take for granted.

I'm very lucky to have been able to do that.

JIM: When you were here at the studio last, And by the way, we should get back to that topic of Los Angeles and all the thing you did there, because it's fascinating.

But the last time I saw you, you were working with FRZY, the rapper and had a great Pittsburgh Symphony concert with FRZY, and you've recorded some of the orchestrations and arrangements that you did for FRZY but you've also done work with Steven Reineke, whos been here as a pops conductor.

He's the regular pops conductor in Houston.

You've been heard at Carnegie Hall with some of those arrangements too.

Talk about some of those successes you've had.

CHRISTIAN: Yeah, well, I appreciate you calling them successes.

Some that's that's encouraging.

Yeah.

So, you know, I did work in the administration at the Pittsburgh Symphony or a number of years and through another sort of series of chance encounters, met our friend FRZY, who wound up who the Pittsburgh Symphony wound up presenting in his own concert.

And I was very lucky to be engaged as the music director for that show.

So I worked very closely with FRZY to recreate his hip hop catalog.

And, you know, FRZY was great to work with because it's for me as an arranger when I'm when I'm arranging music, it's not enough just to reassign the notes and the harmony.

We have a symphony orchestra and the Pittsburgh Symphony, you know, the best symphony orchestra in the world at our disposal.

So don't just give them, you know, simple stuff to recreate that work and sort of reinvent it as though it were written for symphony orchestra, really in the symphonic idiom.

And FRZY was so great to work with because he was curious about everything, and he really wanted to understand.

Well, what is symphony orchestra music?

How does it work?

You know, so it was really a lot of fun.

And we had a we had a great show.

And then through that.

Yeah.

As a result of that show and working with the Pittsburgh Symphony, I also had the pleasure of working with Steven when he would come here to do some of his programs, and we connected.

Steven, you know, also started as a copyist and an arranger originally.

So we hit it off.

And since then, Steven has engaged me to do quite a number of arrangements for the New York Pops, who is home base is Carnegie Hall.

So a couple of years ago, you know, I was surprised to find myself sitting in Carnegie Hall hearing my own arrangements of Motown songs and, you know, whatever they needed.

And they've they've engaged me quite a number of times, actually, for a little bit, you know, for, for every show since then.

So it's been a lot of fun working with them.

And they're just a spectacular group.

Talk about efficiency.

The New York Pops puts together a stellar show, and they rehearse once the day of the concert.

Because Carnegie Hall, I think, is prime real estate.

So you don't get to just fool around in there.

And it's remarkable.

And they bring the house down every time.

So it's a lot of fun working with them.

JIM: Next big fun project George Romero.

Dead Air is our overarching them for our Halloween celebration.

We're going to have George Romero, the inventor of the zombie world and his classic black and white film that started it all at the Oaks Theater.

We'll have it on the air on Channel 13, and we'll hear some of John Harrison's music.

The composer, who worked with George Romero and worked here as well.

But you've connected with George Romero in a big way.

And in March, the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust will present a brand new program that you've put together.

CHRISTIAN: That's right.

Yeah.

So it's funny, actually, in in working at the Pittsburgh Symphony, it was sort of a trip for me because it was this sort of full circle moment, as we mentioned, you know, when I started out working on Star Wars and War of the Worlds and all those films, 20 years ago, here I am at the Pittsburgh Symphony more recently, and all of a sudden we're renting music from the place I used to work at when we would do Star Wars Live in Concert, for example.

And I thought, oh my God, you know, 20 years ago when I was just a young tike cutting my teeth in the biz, I made this sheet music, and now we're renting it at my new job.

And, you know, our world is small, so we're always treading in these sort of little loop de loops.

But after working with FRZY, doing my work with the New York Pops and seeing Reineke at Carnegie Hall, I thought, well, I want to make a show, you know, my own show.

And so one day just occurred to me that no one had ever done a similar, similarly formatted show for the work, the music of George Romero and George Romeros films present an interesting, sort of puzzle because some of them don't have original music.

They're they're made up of library cues, for example.

It's all synthesizer music.

There was there was no orchestra music to reference.

So initially I thought it would just be fun to arrange the music from George Romeros films and put on a show.

And then in the process of going around talking to people like you or initially having conversations, meeting people at the George Romero Foundation, at the newly minted Horror Studies Center at the University of Pittsburgh.

You know, a whole new concept emerged, which is what we're going to be exploring in March in the Byham theater, which I should note is the the theater where Night of the Living Dead premiered in 1968.

So there's another full circle moment coming around our program to go back to that, that work.

But yeah, it's really going to be a lot of fun.

And it's, it's it's developed into what I think is going to be a really fascinating retrospective with new dimensions that I think a lot of people, even diehard fans of George Romero's work, will not have been aware of.

That we're going to explore through music, using the symphony orchestra as the storytelling medium.

JIM: The compressed story of George's success.

He came to Pittsburgh to go to Carnegie Mellon University and before you know it, he was involved with the filmmaking community here that were making commercials, commercial films, sports films.

He got involved with Fred Rogers and made the picture picture segments for Mister Rogers Neighborhood.

And he met John Harrison here, who was working.

He was an announcer on WQED radio in its first year, and before you know it, those two were collaborating.

It was a whole community of Pittsburgh people.

Pasquale “Pat” Buba was the editor that worked on some of the original films, and he had QED connections as well.

So give me your take on the early years of George Romero here in Pittsburgh.

CHRISTIAN: Well, yeah.

And we're going to explore that in the program.

You know, everything from Mr.

Rogers.

I'm trying to come up with a good tagline like, how do you get from Mister Rogers Neighborhood to the zombie apocalypse?

You have to stop at WQED or in Pittsburgh on the way.

So we will be exploring all that work.

John Harrison's work factors in very significantly because he and George ultimately became good friends.

Collaborators.

John is himself a successful writer, actually.

Now he's writing novels.

I've read all of them.

JIM: Half Dozen of them, CHRISTIAN: Yeah.

JIM: Scary stuff.

CHRISTIAN: They're pretty great.

And, recently he actually released a soundtrack to one of his novels, which is a lot of fun.

JIM: John working with Romero, also with Stephen King, involved in Creepshow.

And then he did Tales of the Dark Side, and he directed a film of both Creepshow after it was a television series Tales of the Dark Side was Netflix for 2 or 3 episodes and then became a movie.

And there are related records to all those things too.

All spinning from his friendship with George Romero, I think it's amazing.

CHRISTIAN: Yeah.

And what's really fun about it, you know, you've probably heard this story from John.

I'll tell it incorrectly, but we're sort of recreating this.

In terms of John the composer.

You know, John's a talented musician.

He's had a band.

And sometime around when they were creating Creepshow, John, I think was actually working as George's like, assistant director.

He was sort of learning filmmaking from George.

Creepshow would have been, what, 1982?

Something like that.

But John went out and bought himself this brand new prophet five synthesizer, like the hottest synthesizer you could buy from the late 70s through the early 80s, which now, you know all the hipsters are in love with because we have shows like Stranger Things and all this sort of nostalgic shows.

They're trying to recreate that interesting era of 80s horror.

And the story, as I recall, is that George and John were working together, and they would always get together and listen to to movie scores.

You know, George apparently had this huge collection of film film scores on vinyl, which you and I can relate to in our love for vinyl.

JIM: For sure.

CHRSTIAN: And John had purchased this prophet five and George looked at him and said, well, ho about you write the music for the movie?

And that aspect of the collaboration was born.

So what we're going to do is actually John has his original prophet five synthesizer still to this day that was used to create music for Day of the Dead, Tells From the Dark Side, Creepshow, a few others that he had lovingly restored.

He may have told you the story that in the restoration process, they found a dead mouse inside and cleaned them out.

And now it's working great, but a fun part of the program, developing this program is going to be taking all that work that John created on his prophet, almost exclusively on his prophet five and using the real deal, the prophet five, and then expanding it into the symphony orchestra to sort of pay homage to those original sounds.

But then, you know, give a little bit of a taste of what they could, could be for live orchestra, and they remain friends right up to the end.

And there are going to be some interesting aspects to the show as well, in unrealized projects that never got made that John wrote music for.

So I've had the pleasure, the the exclusive pleasure of peeking into John's vaults, his archive, shall we say, and hearing music that no one's ever heard that was intended for George Romero projects that never happened.

So there's going to be a whole aspect of the program where we explore those that material.

JIM: I want to ask you about George Romero's interest in opera and The Tales of Hoffmann, but you've written an overture for this event, which you've already had recorded in Budapest.

CHRISTIAN: That's right.

So a big part of it, any good symphony show needs to have an overture, of course.

And for a number of reasons.

You know what we really want to establish when the audience comes in is the orchestra is the star of the show.

We're here to explore what an orchestra can do and how it can carry carry the vibe.

So what I've done is I've created a short overture.

It's called Beyond the Living Dead.

It is dedicated to George.

And now Suzanne Romero, the founder of the George Romero Foundation.

And what I did was I took music from Night of the Living Dead, which itself was stock music.

It was licensed from the high cue music library originally because they couldn't afford a composer or an orchestra.

So I listened to a bunch of those cues, and inspired by that, the character of that music.

I wrote my own theme and variations.

That's sort of an exploration of what could it have been in the style of like a, you know, 1950s movie score?

So it's a little campy.

It's it's a little bit of a parody.

It's a little bit of an homage.

But it is a new, original work to kick off the show.

And we did engage the Budapest Scoring Orchestra this summer to record it.

So we've got a great recording of that piece.

JIM: I love the video of the recording of the music.

That's fun.

CHRISTIAN: Yeah, they do great work.

You know, for a few extra bucks, you can have their guys run around in the orchestra with some cameras and capture it but it's it's an important piece I think, that shows the process, particularly in a recording studio because Budapest Scoring, you know, they, they record film and television scores, which is also sort of a harkening back to the beginning of my career, when that's what I did out in Los Angeles, was was working in a studio orchestra setting like that again for films like Star Wars and TV shows like The Simpsons and Family Guy.

So yes, our show will open with my new original overture, which is kind of a summary of everything that you will then hear in the program.

And it also sets the stage for another new original work that the George Foundation has commissioned me to write, which is the new original score for the long lost George Romero film, which we will screen in its entirety in the concert program.

JIM: And this was a very early effort that has never been seen before.

CHRISTIAN: Never been seen before.

It was it was recently rediscove a segment of it.

So it was a film anthology called Expostulations.

And as you pointed out, George moved to Pittsburgh to go to Carnegie Mellon, decided he wanted to become a filmmaker.

And when he and his buddies finished at CMU, they realized, well, we want to be filmmakers, but we've never made a movie, so we better do that first.

And they created they scratched their money together, and they created this anthology film, which was made up of like 4 or 5 little short films, that each of them took a crack at writing and shooting and producing, and they built sets and hired all their friends to be actors.

So the surviving segment is is this remarkable film shot on 16mm color film in 1962.

So it predates Night of the Living Dead by something like five years.

And again on color film.

And it was all captured in the streets of Pittsburgh.

What's even more remarkable about it is that it is a majority African-American cast.

So it's this interesting story shot in the Hill district in the early 1960s.

There are little segments where you catch glimpses of, like the Hurricane Club, which is no longer exists.

But, you know, that was the club where George Benson got his start as a as another Pittsburgh star, you know, young guitar playing George Benson in the 1960s.

So it's this amazing time capsule for Pittsburgh of on the ground footage.

And it's this sort of beautiful fairytale.

It's not a horror film, although it has that sort of funny, George Romero like, sinister edge to it, you know?

But it's been restored and we will we will screen the entire film.

And the George Romero Foundation has commissioned me to write a new original live score.

So we'll perform it with the Chamber Orchestra of Pittsburgh, live to picture.

And you're only the only way to see the film is going to be to come to the show.

JIM: A few more details about what's going to happen.

You're going to conduct.

You'll have the Chamber Orchestra OF Pittsburgh playing.

There will be some visuals.

CHRISTIAN: Yes.

So as I mentioned, we will screen this film Expostulations in it's entirety.

There are going to be a number of surprise VIP guests.

Some of them will will, come in on the screen.

So there will be some visuals, but mostly music.

We're really, you know, my whole angle on this is that the orchestra is the thing that inspired George.

So, you know, one of the great stories which we will explore in the in the concert program is a film that Romero saw as a young man called Tales of Hoffmann, which we know simply as an opera Jacques Offenbach I don't remember the year I should know that, but let's say late 19th century wrote this wonderful opera, this fantasy opera, Tales of Hoffmann, that The Archers, the famous filmmaking duo in the 1960s, adapted to a film which a lot of film scholars describe as being horror adjacent because the visuals are so wild and it's it's such a trip, you know, for lack of a better word to describe it.

And teenage George Romero went to see this film in the theater, and it blew him away.

And he is often captured on camera as saying that that was the film he saw as a young man that inspired him to want to become a filmmaker.

So of course we need to we need to pay homage to that film.

We will perform music from the opera in the program again, to set the stage, to say, you know, to invite the the concert goers into George Romero's brain and think, here's this young man listening to this opera, this fantasy opera, that inspires him to go into filmmaking.

So connect those dots if you can.

And then he invents the zombie film.

You know how we get there.

We'll try and explore with music as our storytelling medium.

JIM: This is a wonderful topic, and we could get deeply in the weeds if we're not careful.

Christian Kriegeskotte you're the best.

Thanks so much for coming by, QED again.

CHRISTIAN: Well, I appreciate it Jim, thank you.