Greg Mottola is proof that you never forget your first movie job. Or the recipe for zombie vomit.

The writer-director of "Adventureland" has Pittsburgh filmmaker Tony Buba (and director George Romero) to thank for both. Buba helped Mottola land a two-week gig with "Day of the Dead."

And yes, he can recite the freaky formula: "I remember it was Elmer's glue, food dye and Rice Krispies, and then we would dip big rags into this bucket and throw them as hard as we could against the wall so it would look like a zombie had been there."

No ghouls gambol through "Adventureland," although it was filmed at Kennywood in fall 2007 around Phantom Fright Nights and there is a gag about regurgitation.

"Adventureland," based on Mottola's experiences working at the Long Island amusement park of the same name, is set in Pittsburgh in 1987.

Ronald Reagan is president and college graduate James Brennan (played by Jesse Eisenberg) thought he'd be touring Europe with his friends instead of sporting a "Games, Games, Games, Games, Games" T-shirt at a rundown park.

In the decades since Mottola worked there, the real Adventureland had been sold, cleaned up and made more family-friendly. When he started looking for a location to serve as the main backdrop, the national historic landmark in West Mifflin was perfect -- if a little too tidy and attractive.

"We were a low-budget film trying to create 20 years ago. So many of the parks we investigated had changed so much and had so much corporate signage and things that we wouldn't have had the budget to hide or replace," Mottola said in a recent phone call.

"Kennywood was mostly a matter of making it look less quaint and nice than it is, which is easier to do than the reverse."

Mottola, a graduate of Carnegie Mellon University who met Buba at Pittsburgh Filmmakers, once feared his movie might be anachronistic. But plenty of filmgoers will relate to cash-strapped James, who has to move back home with his parents.

So, just how autobiographical is the script?

"It's such a mishmash of things that happened to me, composites of people I've known. Some people are very much directly based on a specific person."

Still, he took artistic license. "I wasn't lucky enough to meet someone as cool and lovely as Kristen Stewart, but I do have early girlfriends that she is based on."

Yes, before Stewart became the besotted Bella from "Twilight," she played Adventureland employee Em Lewin. "Twilight" director Catherine Hardwicke came to Pittsburgh to meet with Stewart but Mottola had no inkling that a blockbuster would be born.

"I think Catherine Hardwicke's really a good filmmaker, and I knew her movies but I thought of them as slightly bigger indie-style films. Not tiny movies but not culture phenomenon movies. So when Kristen came to the set and said, 'Oh yeah, I got that movie, the vampire movie,' I was oh, great, she's got her next movie lined up."

She was very low key about it, and it was months later when Mottola was editing "Adventureland" that he started to realize the importance of that announcement.

"I started to read about it. Oh, it's from a series of books. Oh, the world is obsessed with this. Oh, I now know hundreds of people who have read those books."

When "Adventureland" screened at the Sundance Film Festival, strangers trailed after Stewart on the main street and bellowed "Bella!"

Until "Adventureland," Mottola had been known as the director of the hit "Superbad," writer-director of "The Daytrippers" and director of episodes of TV's "Undeclared" and "Arrested Development."

He had decided to write a movie about young love, told in a naturalistic, slice-of-life messy relationship way, when he began sharing yarns about Adventureland.

"I was telling a bunch of stories about working in an amusement park to some writer friends when I was working on Judd Apatow's TV show, 'Undeclared,' and they're a tough crowd and they were laughing. I thought, 'Oh, maybe there's something funny in that world.' "

Besides, he liked the amusement park as a metaphorical place, "one of those awful environments if you're working there where you're getting paid very little, it's endlessly boring and it's torture at times hearing the same songs over and over again."

And yet, he continues, "The sun can go down, a good song can come on to the speakers, an attractive woman might be smiling at you or flirting with you and she's framed by twinkling lights and I think those kinds of environments, everybody can be a sucker for them."

They can go from awful to awesome with the speed of the Thunderbolt.

"I do like the kind of theatrical artifice of carnivals and amusement parks, and I've always liked them in songs of people like Bruce Springsteen or Tom Waits. So, once I melded my first-love story into that world, I started then picking from people I knew from that time in my life."

For Mottola, who studied with Sidney Lumet, David Mamet and George Roy Hill during grad school at Columbia University, Pittsburgh was interlaced with some painful personal memories.

"I have alopecia and my hair fell out when I was in college, and it was a time when it wasn't cool to shave your head. I didn't handle it so well. I was kind of a mopey, introverted person for a period of my college life."

He found solace in music by The Replacements, Husker Du, Jesus and Mary Chain, and the Smiths and burrowed deeper in films, particularly the masterpieces by Truffaut, Bergman and others not readily available in the Long Island suburbs of his youth.

"It cemented my desire to make movies. There was no turning back. It was in Pittsburgh that I made the decision that that's what I had to do with my life."

Mottola's musical memories fed the "Adventureland" soundtrack, cobbled together with much time and little money. The slow process of editing and scoring the movie worked to the director's advantage, with the INXS song "Don't Change" added right before Sundance.

"Just to put it into perspective. On 'Superbad,' we had one Van Halen song, 'Panama,' which cost almost as much as our entire music budget in 'Adventureland.'"

Mottola, spending some of his "Superbad" capital, personally wrote letters or approached musicians about their songs.

"Like Neil Finn, who wrote 'Don't Dream It's Over' ... we just couldn't afford what they were asking for it. I basically begged for mercy and he was kind enough to talk to the record company." And getting the go-ahead to use Lou Reed's name (which factors into one character's subplot) and songs opened other doors.

In addition to his early gig on "Day of the Dead," Mottola was an extra on the 1986 comedy "Gung Ho," starring Michael Keaton as an auto worker in a fictitious town outside of Pittsburgh. "[Director] Ron Howard told me where to stand one day and I bumped into Michael Keaton and the shot's in the movie," Mottola says.

Proving life comes full circle, Mottola told Howard's daughter, Paige Howard, where to stand and sit as she made her feature film debut in "Adventureland." She is a park employee named Sue O'Malley and you can't miss her red hair.

The CMU grad says a lot of companies offered to back "Adventureland" if he made it contemporary. They worried it would be difficult to market; young moviegoers might think it's not their generation and older ones don't flock to the theater as faithfully.

"I just refused. I was very stubborn. I wanted it to be about my past and I wanted people to hear 'Rock Me Amadeus' four times in the movie."

Just as he had, day after day, in Adventureland.