DAY OF THE STINK!
Acting can often seem like a glamorous profession. Role playing in exotic locations, kissing beautiful and handsome people, and being paid big bucks. But it is not always this luxurious. Sometimes, actors suffer for their art. Dustin Hoffman, for example, is said to have gone without sleep for days in preparation for his role in ‘Marathon Man’, where he portrays a man who has been subjected to sleep deprivation.
And then there is poor Joe Pilato, the subject of this blog post. You probably won’t have heard of him if you are not a fan of George A. Romero movies. Romero was a film maker from Pittsburgh who made films like ‘The Crazies’, ‘Creepshow’ and ‘Monkey Shines’. But he is far and away most remembered for his ‘Dead’ movies- ‘Night Of The Living Dead’, ‘Dawn Of The Dead’ and ‘Day Of The Dead.
Once upon a time, zombies were associated with Haiti, Voodoo rituals and people brought back from the dead to be slaves devoid of free will. George Romero and his team almost single-handedly changed perceptions so that the word ‘Zombie’ would become synonymous with bloodthirsty ghouls with infectious bites that turn us into them, assuming they have not torn us apart and consumed our limbs and guts. ‘Return Of The Living Dead’, ‘World War Z’, all such films owe their existence to Romero and his crew.
As you might be able to tell from the description of a Romeran Zombie as being a bloodthirsty ghoul, these films tend to be pretty gory. This was certainly true of the one Joe Pilato had a major role in, which was ‘Day Of The Dead’. In his book, ‘Monster And Horror Movies’, Thomas G. Aylesworth described it as having ‘enough spilled guts and severed limbs to satisfy anyone”.
The task of bringing all this gut-spilling and limb-severing to the screen fell to the special make-up effects department, which was led by Tom Savini. Before he got into the movie business, Savini had been a photographer in the Vietnam War. One can well imagine that this gave him first-hand experience of real damage inflicted on human bodies, an insight that helped him develop what are some legitimately nauseating effects in ‘Day Of The Dead’.
Sometimes, though, you cannot substitute for the real thing. This seems to have been the case for those guts that get spilled in this movie. Those were real pigs intestines, and in the interest of budget constraints the same guts were used over and over again, going back into the refrigerator in order to keep them nice and fresh for next time.
Joe Pilato played Captain Rhodes, the film’s main villain. In a movie that has a pretty high gore content throughout, Rhodes’s death scene is a particularly gruesome one. Much of the film takes place on location in a limestone mine in Beaver Pennsylvania, where a bomb shelter had been constructed. The characters in ‘Day’ consist of a few scientists and civilians who are trying to eradicate the zombies or at least figure out how humanity can live with them, and military personnel who are supposed to be facilitating the needs of the scientists but who are growing increasingly rebellious as more and more of their men are killed while trying to round up zombies for the scientists to experiment with.
(Pilato as Rhodes)
At the film’s climax, everything descends into chaos. Zombies are let loose in the shelter. Rhodes and his men run for their lives but they are trapped and caught. Rhodes is wounded after being shot by ‘Bub’ (played by Howard Sherman) a normally benign zombie who Dr Loga’ (Richard Liberty) has been domesticating. ‘Bub’ shoots Rhodes in vengeance for his having murdered Dr Logan. Injured, Rhodes can no longer outrun the zombie hoards, and they drag him to the ground and tear him apart, eating his guts while he yells ‘Choke on em!’.
As I said earlier, the majority of this film took place in that limestone mine. But there were one or two other locations featured in it too. The movie opens in a zombie-infested town in Florida. These Florida scenes were shot right before the Rhodes death scene. Unfortunately for Joe Pilato, one of the film’s crew members did something that would make shooting this scene extremely uncomfortable for all involved.
As Tom Savini explained, “while we were in Florida, somebody unplugged the refrigerator”. The crew were away for weeks, and in all that time the pigs intestines lay in a non-operable freezer within an almost uncomfortably warm limestone mine….
Romero and his crew noticed something was up pretty quickly upon their return. “The stench was...we could smell it for blocks away”. The shoot, however, had to go on. There was no time to buy fresh pig guts; the putrid, rotting intestines they had to hand would have to do.
Pilato knew something was up when Savini and the effects team advised doing the scene on an empty stomach. “First thing they said was, ‘don’t eat anything!’”. That was certainly good advice. It often takes far, far longer to set-up and shoot a scene than it does for that scene to play out in the movie, and the Rhodes death scene plays out in minutes but took over four hours to film. During those four hours, Joe Pilato and the film crew were working in close proximity with putrid guts whose stench could be smelled from blocks away. According to Savini, “We had gas masks on, we had putty up our noses”.
Poor Joe Pilato could have no such protection as that would have been ‘out of character’ for the scene he was portraying. Still, at least he was somewhat protected from the full force of the sink, thanks to the guts being inside a fake body (Joe’s real body lay in a hole cut into the floor).
But then the actors playing the zombies ripped open the fake belly as they acted out the disembowelment and devouring of ‘Rhodes’. “When I did the inhale it just...crushed me”, recalls Pilato. “You can’t imagine how bad it stank”, was how Savini described it, and, frankly, who would want to?
If ever there was an anecdote that captures the unglamourous side of acting, Joe Pilato being up to his nose in rotten guts for four hours would be it. If you ever watch ‘Day Of The Dead’ after learning of this unfortunate incident, you may well find it adds to the nauseating way in which Rhodes meets his end. That is not just acting, that’s a guy who is really suffering!
Thanks to ‘Day Of The Dead’ for the images.