How Meryl Streep and day-old pizza inspired George A Romero: “That was the pits”
The godfather of the zombie movie and one of the greatest actors in history don’t have a great deal in common, but Meryl Streep inadvertently inspired George A Romero in a very unique way after they briefly passed like ships in the night.
As far as influence goes, there haven’t been many to make a mark on horror quite like Romero. His feature-length directorial debut Night of the Living Dead may have been a low-budget schlocker in conception, but it ended up becoming one of the most important films of its era.
In addition to ending its theatrical run as one of the most profitable independent movies ever made, Romero unwittingly wrote the rulebook for onscreen zombies. Every horde of the shuffling undead to have appeared in film or television ever since owes him at least a small debut of gratitude, while a rights snafu has also seen Night of the Living Dead appear in more movies than any other movie.
His signature franchise may have defined him, with Romero continually returning to the zombie world in the seminal Dawn of the Dead, Day of the Dead, Land of the Dead, Diary of the Dead, and Survival of the Dead, but he was more than a one-trick pony. Well, he was, but only in terms of genre.
Romero may have largely stuck to horror for the duration of his career, but the sci-fi stylings of The Crazies, the cult madness of Creepshow, and an impressive change of pace in the action-packed drama Knightriders made it clear there were more strings to his bow than a constant hankering for brains.
At the height of his popularity, Romero even found himself being courted by major studios, coming close to mounting a remake of The Mummy almost a decade before Stephen Sommers and Brendan Fraser got there. While he didn’t clarify whether or not that was the project she was eying, he did reveal to Filmmaker Magazine that he came close to casting Streep in one of his features.
Describing it as his strangest experience in Hollywood, the studio brass thought the legendary performer was past her sell-by date as a viable lead, dismissing her in such an off-handed fashion that Romero remembered the quote and incorporated it into one of his later screenplays.
“I was trying to get a film financed and it was one of those projects that had become star-dependent, and Meryl Streep had semi-agreed to do it,” he shared. “This executive said, ‘Meryl Streep? Yesterday’s pizza’. So i used that line in Bruiser, because that was the worst line I’d ever heard. That was the pits.”
For context, Bruiser was released in 2000, and it was Romero’s first new release in seven years. That means he’d been holding onto that unforgettable description of a top-drawer actor for a long time, and that executive couldn’t have been more wrong, seeing as Streep remains at the top of her game to this day.
