Host: Dan Kennedy
Dan: [00:00:01] 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.
[cheers and applause]
The theme of the night was Voice is Carried. Here's Tony Buba, live at The Moth.
Tony: [00:00:41] 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 let any air in.
I'm 32, I'm just out of grad school. I didn't move back home, but here in this bedroom with George Romero. George Night of the Living Dead Romero. [audience chuckles] George Romero was a hero of 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 6’5”. He's punched over. Every time he would raise his head, he'd bang it off the ceiling. Me, I fit fine. [audience chuckles] 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 Buba ever. [audience chuckles] But the attic had changed all that. [audience laughter] It was really like a goldfish bowl. [audience chuckles] I never got any bigger. [audience chuckles]
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. [audience chuckles]
This scene, Martin is getting ready to get the stake driven into his heart. Everybody in your house is home. My mother, she's washing the blood out of the previous takes from the sheets. [audience laughter] We only had two sets of sheets. This is how low the budget was. [audience laughter] My dad, he's sleeping on a couch. He had a hard shift in the mill. He's exhausted. My grandmother, she's chanting, "Hail Mary, full of grace, blessed art thou my sweater. [audience laughter] Bless the fruit of thy womb, Jesus." She's in her eighth hour of saying the rosary. [audience laughter]
My grandmother was the person in the family that the only-- She had special powers. She could relieve the maluk, the evil eye. Yeah, the maluk, right? Sometimes we'd have friends and neighbors lined up 10 deep to see her. [audience chuckles] 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. It'd be, "Man, 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. [audience chuckles] 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 uses 12 D-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 stake. It's hammer slimes into the stake 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. [audience laughter]
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 07:00 AM. 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 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?
I was thinking, well, 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. 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. We had Polish, Slavic, African Americans. All the older folks had heavy accents.
One of my grandmother's best friends was Mrs. Kolana, the Polish woman living across the street. They would talk for hours. The thing is, Mrs. Kolana spoke Polish, my grandmother Italian. [audience laughter] They never really understood each other. [audience laughter] One time I said, "Hey, Mama, what did Mrs. Kolana say?" She said, "No such." I said, "No such?" And no such’s dialect. I don't know. [audience laughter]
The evenings were also amazing, especially in the summer. 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 remember. He's up in the attic. He's playing a clarinet. You would hear the sounds of the clarinet coming out of the window. Then down on Third 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 whistles, the sirens and the din of the mill. 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. And my first works, I started making films about where I came from, about the decline of the working class. And Braddock is a microcosm of the industrial implosion. Those Marxist philosophy classes I took as an undergrad were starting to pay off. [audience laughter]
But making films in Pittsburgh back then was difficult. You really weren't respected. 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. [audience chuckles] 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, [chuckles] we're here with George, making Martin. What we really want is for Romero to put Pittsburgh on the filmmaking radar. We're working for almost no pay, but we liked 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? [audience chuckles] Was he 18 or was he 118? [audience laughter] 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. [audience chuckles]
So, we're here. Once again, it's a low budget. We're under $25,000 for this project. We have a crew of five. On the first day, it was like a pickup game. George says, he's directing, :Tony, what do you want to do?" I'll do audio. I really didn't do it, but I chose audio.” [audience chuckles] George was amazing with low budget techniques. He'd say, "We can't shoot a master shot, man. It'd take too much time. We're going in for the close ups. You know, the 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."
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 that 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." [audience laughter] So, okay.
Then, the other way, save money. The crew's in the film and the family. [audience chuckles] My mother’s in it, my grandmother, my brother and I, we play drug dealers. We get killed. [audience laughter] 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 is 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. It's a scene where Martin makes love to the woman and he doesn't kill her. [audience chuckles] So, they're talking. George says, "Cut." He says, "Oh, man, you guys just nailed it. That seems amazing. Good for camera. Good for camera. Good for sound." [audience chuckles] I had no idea. I fell asleep through the whole take. [audience laughter]
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 was one of those moments. You ever do it when you fall asleep, you're not sure you slept for 10 seconds, 30 seconds, five minutes. That's the way it was. When I heard his voice say, "Cut," that's when I woke up. [audience laughter] So, because it was not digital, I couldn't rewind it. So, I look up to George and I said, "Good for sound." [audience laughter] I mean, what was I going to say? "Oh no, George, I fell asleep through that whole take. I know you said the masters made some.” So, good for sound, George.
As soon as I leave the set, I go down and see my grandmother. The momma can say a few rosaries for me. [audience laughter] 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. [audience chuckles] 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. I'm just getting more and more nervous.
Finally get a phone call. I said, "Rough cuts, ready?” Get in my car, drive to Pittsburgh, down on Fort Pitt Boulevard. That'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. [audience chuckles] He's walking slowly. He looks like he hasn't seen the outdoors or showered in weeks. He looked like a zombie. [audience chuckles]
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.” [audience chuckles] Well, I'll be good to hell, that train does look like it's moving. [audience laughter] George is an effing genius. [audience laughter] 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. [audience laughter] I crash into my brother and I ran him over. Finally, the scene comes up that I was worried about, the quiet scene. The audio is perfect. I'm thinking, either my grandmother's prayers worked, or I'm just a better audio man when I'm asleep. [audience laughter] 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. 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 Rockefeller. [audience laughter] I worked with GEORGE ROMERO, now in all caps. As most of you know, I don't know if you know or not, but George passed this year and so did my mom. I go to Braddock and I 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. [audience aww]
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. We 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. [audience laughter] That's a wrap.
[cheers and applause]
Moderator: [00:15:09] Tony Buba.
Dan: [00:15:12] That's Tony Buba. Tony is a filmmaker whose movies have screened all around the world, including the Sundance Film Festival, Toronto and Berlin. Tony's currently working on three new films, Thunder Over Braddock, Two Women From Tursi and Struggles In Steel, 20 years later and still struggling. He's also perfecting his grandmother's pizza dough recipe. You can find out more about Tony and his films and also see photos of him on set with George Romero by visiting our site, themoth.org.
If you are a Moth listener in the Pittsburgh area, come out and see us. The Moth Mainstage is returning to the Bayam Theater on Monday, September 17th. We're very excited to be coming back. And for tickets and more details on that, just visit the live events page on our site. And we're going to be back next Tuesday and also Friday with some more stories from you here on The Moth Podcast. Until then, as always, have a story-worthy week.
Mooj: [00:16:11] Dan Kennedy is the author of Loser Goes First, Rock On and American Spirit. He's also a regular host and storyteller with The Moth.
Dan: [00:16:19] Podcast production by Timothy Lou Ly. The Moth Podcast is presented by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange, helping make public radio more public at prx.org.