First-time screenwriters Dan Hernandez and Benji Samit sell The Harvard Zombie Massacre to producer Warren Zide. The premise:
Story centers on a scenario in which Harvard is overrun by the undead and America’s most brilliant minds fend off America’s most brilliant zombies.
Hollywood has had a long history of zombie movies, as this website attests. And now the zombies are going Ivy League. Well, at least it wasn’t my alma mater Yale!
Yale is being saved for the attack of the aliens. It’s “What if smart people can’t leave campus” with “War Of The Worlds”. M. Night is on it.
Okay, Tom, so your post inspired me to Google “Harvard zombie,” and this is what I came up with.
Exceedingly strange because it’s a Harvard Divinity School dude.
I can assure you that we had no zombies at YDS. Lots of Episcopalians and Methodists, but no zombies.
Wow. A blog on sharks versus zombies by a divinity school grad. You divinity schoolers are worse than lawyers at wanting to change careers.
Tom said, “You divinity schoolers are worse than lawyers at wanting to change careers.”
It might interest you to know that former Senators John Danforth (Missouri) and Gary Hart (Colorado), as well as current Representative David Price (North Carolina) are all YDS grads.
And I’m not the only YDS grad to end up screenwriting: Charles Randolph is also an alum.
Also, my good friend Rick Duffield created and exec produced the Peabody Award-winning TV series Wishbone is a YDS grad.
Here’s an example of div school ‘humor’:
Q: What’s a Frisbeetyrian?
A: A Frisbeetyrian is someone who believes that when you die, your soul lands on a roof and stays there forever.”
Now you know why I put italics around ‘humor.’
‘Humor’ is right. But honestly, I can’t imagine a background which could possibly match divinity school for encouraging soulful, thoughtful writing.
None other than Cecil B. DeMille asserted that all the great stories were in the Bible. Whether that’s true or not, certainly themes like redemption and reconciliation run rampant throughout cinematic history.
And then there’s the movie K-9. After its premiere, I completely flummoxed the producers when I told them that I had approached Jerry Lee, the dog, as a “Christ figure,” even to the point of dying (getting shot) and rising (recuperating), and the dog (Christ) ‘saving’ the cop (Dooley / Belushi) by humanizing his behavior.
You should have seen their jaws drop when they heard that!