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Dan Kennedy (2:09)

Welcome to the Moth Podcast. I'm Dan Kennedy and thanks for tuning in to another episode this week. So do you ever look at someone and wonder how that person became who they are? Like what led them down the path to where they are today? Today on the podcast, we're going to take a closer look at the humble beginning that forever enshrined Moth storyteller Tony Buba in Silver Screen Magic or Silver Screen Horror, I should say. Tony shared this story at a Moth mainstage that we did in Pittsburgh late last year. The theme of the night was Voices Carried. Here's Tony Buba live at the moth.

Tony Buba (2:49)

It's fall 1976. I'm in my bedroom in my home. It's actually an attic that was converted into a bedroom. It's my parents house. It's in Braddock. Braddock, for those who don't know, it's a mill town right outside of Pittsburgh. So I'm here in this really small room. I mean the ceilings are low, the walls are angled and there's two windows which you can hardly, hardly let any air in. I'm 32, I'm just out of grad school and I didn't move back home. But I'm here in this bedroom with George Romero. George Night of the Living Dead Romero. George Romero was a hero for mine. I mean he had made the cult classic Night of the Living Dead. But George still hadn't broken into the mainstream. So for most people he was still George Romero in small case letters. Now George is a big guy, he's six four, he's six five. He's punched over. Every time he would raise his head, he'd bang it off the ceiling. Me, I fit fine. I mean to tell you the truth, when I first moved in that attic, I was growing fast. I thought I would be a six footer. I thought I was going to be the tallest booba ever. But the attic had changed all that. It was really like a goldfish bowl. I never got any bigger. So we're in the attic. What we're getting ready to do is shoot a scene for Martin, a vampire film. George is directing. My job, I'm the sound recordist. And the reason we're in the attic is because the budget for Martin is so low, it's so small. George couldn't afford any fees for location. So we're using my parents house. This scene, Martin is getting ready to get the steak driven into his heart. Everybody in the house is home. My mother, she's washing the blood out of the previous takes from the sheets. We only had two sets of sheets. I mean this is how low the budget was. My dad, he's sleeping on a couch. He had a hard shift in a meal, he's exhausted. My grandmother, she's chanting Hail Mary, full grace, blessed art thou, my sweeter. Bless the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. She's in her eighth hour of saying the rosary. My grandmother was the person in the family, you know, that had the. She had special powers. She could relieve the Malouk, the evil eye. Yeah, you know, the malouk, right. So we'd have, sometimes we'd have friends and neighbors lined up 10 deep to see her this night. She's saying the rosary because she's terrified. She's so afraid George is going to miss and really drive that stake through the actor's heart. So we're there waiting for a clean set of sheets. George is on a riff. George's conversations were. His pattern was like a beat neck. He'd be, man, this. This is cool. Go to the crib. This is hip. You wouldn't know it from the script of Martin, but George is a fun guy. So my mother, she brings up the set of sheets. We're ready to roll. George says, roll camera. Camera rolling. Roll sound. Now, this is pre digital. So the equipment I'm using is the portable deck. It weighs about 16 pounds. It has reel to reel tape and power. It use 12D cell batteries. It takes a while for it to get up to speed. So I have to say, camera rolling. Speed. George says, action. The actor, he gets the steak. It's slime, you know, Hammer slimes into the steak as it's going into Martin's heart. He says the lines. Nosferatu. I check my audio levels. It's perfect. Blood splatters all over the house. It's all over the room. The choreography is beautiful. George says, cut. Good for camera, Good for camera. Good for sound. Good for sound. George says, okay, then I think, let's call it a night break. Set. Thank you, everybody. This has really been cool. See everybody at 7am That's a wrap. I'm putting away the gear. I'm thinking, man, this is great. This is really cool. I'm just fresh out of grad school and I'm working on a feature film with George Romero. I mean, I was nervous because I didn't know if I could pull it off. I never really did that much audio before. So a little nervous. But I'm thinking, man, how did I get here? And I was thinking, well, you know, my grandfather, he was a shoemaker. He came from Italy in 1921. He had a shop on Braddock Avenue. He worked for eight years before he was able to have enough money to send for my mother, my grandmother and the rest of the family. We lived on Fifth street and we lived below the tracks, which back then you said our address. And they would say, oh, that's below the tracks. That was a big to do. But the street was wonderful. It was a mixture of. We had Polish, slavish African Americans. All the older folks had heavy accents. One of my grandmother's best friends was Mrs. Kalana. The Polish woman lived across the street. They would talk for hours. The thing is, Mrs. Kalana spoke Polish, my grandmother Italian. They never really understood each other. One time I said, mother. Hey, Mama. What did Mrs. Colonna say? She said, eh, no saatch. I said, no such. And no such dialect for I don't know. The evenings were also amazing, especially in the summer. You know, back then, we were all on our porches. Nobody had air conditioning. The windows would be open. My brother, he was much more studious than I was. He's up in the attic, he's playing a clarinet. And you would hear the sounds of the clarinet coming out of the window. Then down on 3rd Street, Herb Porter, he'd be playing the sax. The sound of the sax then would blend with my brother's clarinet. Then it would melt with the sounds on the street with the kids playing tag, the train whistle, the sirens and the din of the mill. I mean, it truly created a symphony worth of John Cage. After high school, my brother went directly to college. Me, I bounced around. I racked balls in a pool room. I was in the service. I was a plumber's helper. I worked in a factory. At 25, I decided to go to college and I became a filmmaker. In my first works, I mean, I started making films about where I came from, about the decline of the working class. And Braddock. And Braddock is a microcosm of the industrial implosion. You know, those Marxist philosophy classes I took as an undergrad were starting to pay off. But making films in Pittsburgh back then was difficult. You really weren't respected. You know, the gatekeepers. I don't care whether they were in the art world or the commercial world. They thought, if you're in Pittsburgh, that means you're just not good enough to be in New York or Los Angeles. I sent my films out to New York City trying to get a screening, and I get a rejection postcard. Not even a rejection letter. A rejection postcard. And on it it said, your films might be of interest to the inhabitants of your region, but we'd be hard pressed to find an audience in here. So we're here with. With George making Martin. What we really want is for Romero to put Pittsburgh on the filmmaking radar. I mean, we're working for almost no pay, but we like George, we liked the script and we also respected the horror genre. And Martin was interesting because Martin played with the whole vampire myths. Was he a vampire or was he a psychopathic teenager? Was he 18 or was he 118? What I really liked about the script was that Martin was using the vampire as a metaphor for capitalism and how capitalism can suck the blood out of a community and just drain it towards death. So we're here and once again, you know, it's a low budget. We're under 25,000 for this project. We have a crew of five on the first day was like a pickup game. George says, you know, he's directing. Tony, what do you want to do? I'll do audio. I mean, I really didn't do it, but I chose audio then. George was amazing, you know, with low budget techniques. He'd say, man, we can't shoot a master shot, man. It'd take too much time. We're going in for the close ups, you know, to face the tight, move a little bit across the screen, go in on the eyes, because you have a close up of the eyes and it just panned across there. It looks like a train moving. And we did have a train shot. We had to shoot the actors on a train car with the train moving. Except there was nothing in the budget for that. So George says, you know what we'll do, man? We'll just have the train on the track. We'll have a light. We'll just have it rotate around the train with a crew member doing it. I said, george, is that going to work? He said, oh, yeah, man. Wait, man, you'll be cool. I'll lay some sound effects, man. You'll dig it. So, okay, then, you know, the other way, save money. The crew's in the film and a family. My mother's in it, my grandmother, my brother and I, we play drug dealers. We get killed, you know. But it was a hard shoot. Martin was really difficult. It was exhausting. We were working 12, 16 hours a day, six days a week. We're coming to the end of the shoot and the crew was tired. So it's one of the last days. We're shooting a scene. It's a quiet scene. It's critical for the film. And it's a scene where Martin makes love to the woman and he doesn't kill her. So they're talking. George says, cut. He says, oh, man, you guys just nailed it. That scene's amazing. Good for camera, good for camera, good for sound. I had no idea I fell asleep through the whole take. I. I looked down at the recorder. I saw the reels were spinning, but I didn't know if I had good sound or not. It is one of those moments. You ever do it when you. When you fall asleep? You're not sure you slept for 10 seconds, 30 seconds, five minutes. That's the way it was, you know, When I heard his voice say cut, that's when I woke up. So because it was not digital, I couldn't rewind it. So I look up to George and I said, good for sound. I mean. I mean, what was I going to say? Oh, no, George, I fell asleep through that whole take. I know. You said the mackers made so good for sound, George. Soon as I leave the set, I go down and see my grandmother said, mama, can you say a few rosaries for we're closing in. At the end of the shoot. Still no word on the audio. I'm more nervous than ever. My grandmother, she's in overtime saying the prayers. George disappears. He goes into the editing room. He's a compulsive guy. He goes into the editing room. We don't see him for weeks, months. Nobody's hearing from him. And I'm just getting more and more nervous. Finally get a phone call as a rough cuts ready. Get in my car, drive to Pittsburgh down Fort Pitt Boulevard. It's where the office was for the late image. Go into the basement. The other crew members are there. We're standing around. George comes in. I mean, George is a mess. His hair is disheveled. I swear his teeth are green. He's walking slowly. He looks like he hasn't seen the outdoors or shower in weeks. He looked like a zombie. George looks over to the crew. He gives us a thumbs up. Finally, I can breathe. He puts the reels up on the rack. We're looking at the movie. Oh, man, it was fun. It was strange. I'm saying, oh, there's Mama, there's my grandmother, there's my mother, there's my cousins. And well, I'll be good to hell. That train does look like it's moving. George is an effing genius. He's brilliant. Then there's a scene of me and my brother. I get shot in the head. The blood spurts out. I'm driving a Chevy Corvair. Low budget Chevy Corvair. I crash into a brother. I run him over. Finally the scene comes up that I was worried about. The quiet scene. The audio's perfect. I'm thinking, either my grandmother's prayers worked. I'm just a better audio man when I'm asleep, the film's over. It's great. I got to work on other Romero films, you know, dawn of the Dead and a few others. My brother edited some of them. And when I go to universities and I would teach or give A lecture. As soon as the students found out that I worked with George dawn of the Dead Romero, I had instant credibility. Forget about the Guggenheim fellowship I got or the Raga fellowship. I worked with George Romero. Now in all caps, as most of you know, I don't know if you know or not, but you know, George passed this year and so did my mom. I go to Braddock and I, you know, go down the street. I look at my house, I look up at the attic, and I think about my mother bringing us those sheets. And I think about George and what he did, what he did in that goldfish bowl of a room. He put Pittsburgh on the filmmaking radar. What George did was make that goldfish bowl of Pittsburgh so large that people like myself could grow as big as we possibly could do, could grow as far as our talent would take us. So I just want to say thank you, Mom. Thank you George and what George to say all of you out there, oh man. Thank you for listening. This has really been cool. That's a wrap.