Step Right Up!
THERE’S NO SHORTAGE OF MOVIES SOLD ON THE premise that viewers want to have the bejesus scared out of them. George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968) and ensuing zombie cycle are classic examples. Romero’s The Amusement Park—completed in 1973, and recently rediscovered, restored, and screened at the Museum of Modern Art—is another one. Which is quite an accomplishment for an hour-long public service film about being nice to the elderly. Commissioned by the Lutheran Service Society of Western Pennsylvania and the Pitcairn-Crabbe Foundation (a charitable organization dedicated to supporting religious education and community-oriented projects), it was never released, reportedly because the producers were horrified by the results.
The backers might have been swayed by the appeal of using a local filmmaker. Though born and raised in the Bronx, Romero had moved to Pittsburgh to attend Carnegie Mellon University and liked it enough. (Roger Ebert’s widely syndicated 1969 review of was primarily about seeing it at a matinee, where it left a full house of unaccompanied children traumatized “with tears in their eyes.”) Perhaps the producers just liked the young man who’d chosen to put down roots in his adopted home rather than decamp to godless Hollywood.
