SAVINI NEWS
By Mike Watt
This past September, at the Horrorfind Convention in Baltimore, Tom Savini, the master special effects artist from Creepshow, the actor from Knightriders and From Dusk 'Til Dawn, sees my wife and I and calls us over to his table. The three of us are all Pittsburgh natives in roughly the same field, and we've known each other for years. "Hey," he says, "you want to hear a wild story? This'll amaze you. This is the kind of story that gets you on 'Oprah'."
So this is what he tells us: "In 1967, I was dating a Jewish girl from Squirrel Hill. Her parents liked me until they found out that I was not Jewish. They were very strict Jewish people, Holocaust survivors, actually. So we were dating, and [I got her] pregnant. And then her parents, rather than face a scandal, sent her to a home for unwed mothers in Baltimore. And I fully expected that she was coming back with a baby girl, the child that was born. Her parents, however, made her give it up for adoption. That was their decision back then. I was a little shocked and upset in the beginning, having been raised Catholic, of course. She had named the girl "Gail Lynn", but came back without her. Now, I married this woman, had a son with her - my son, Lon, who's in the Navy. Life went on.
"Now, again, that was 35 years ago. Just a couple of weeks ago, I started getting phone calls from an adoption agency in Baltimore. The girl has grown up, and now she's looking for her birth parents. I gave them all the information, told my son, who was on his battleship in Pakistan, where he's stationed, and she came to visit here a couple of weeks ago. I met up with her at the Horrorfind convention in Baltimore. She's a 35 year old woman named Audrey that I've never met before, and she's my daughter. I fully expected that some day I'd be at a convention somewhere and a woman would walk up to me and say 'hi, I'm your daughter'. Or 'hi, I'm Gail Lynn'. The name 'Gail Lynn' has always been in the background of my mind. I knew she was out there. But I also knew that with the rules of adoption agencies that there was nothing I could do about it. You have to wait until the child wants to find you. And she was very successful in doing so. She spent a few days here in Pittsburgh a couple of weeks ago. At Horrorfind, I got her a room, we hung out there and she got to see what my life is like. The convention and fans, it was a whole new world for her. So my daughter has a child, a child from the past shows up. Lately the days have been very interesting."
Savini's upcoming projects include directing Death Island with Brinke Stevens and Debbie Rochon (www.renegadefilms.com), heading up The Tom Savini's Special Make-Up Effects Program (www.douglas-school.com) and the on-going haunted-house attraction TerrorMania! (www.terrormania.com)
Read the full story and learn about Tom's TerrorMania! at: The Pittsburgh Pulp
