The Second Romanian Revolution Will Be Televised

The TV show Dallas helped overthrow Ceausescu. Now gangsta rap and pop culture are driving out corrupt post-Soviet thugs.

Matt Welch from the October 2005 issue

(Page 2 of 4)

J.R. vs. the Evil Empire

There are three things Romanians don't want to talk about with foreigners: vampires, orphans, and Dallas. A proud and insecure country, painfully aware of its own bad press, Romania has come to resent its clich�s--the child-slavery and prostitution rings; the stray dogs roaming through every large city (an artifact of Ceausescu's horrific late-'80s campaign of "systemization," in which historic neighborhoods all over the country containing priceless buildings and hundreds of thousands of residents were impulsively razed, forcing people to move suddenly into new lodging that frequently did not allow pets); the seemingly daily bizarro headlines ("Priest Unrepentant After Crucifying Nun") that wind up in places like Ananova.com and Yahoo!'s "Oddly Enough."

But like most clich�s, all these contain thick chunks of truth. There is a deep-rooted pre-Christian belief in some regions of this millenia-inhabited country that the dearly departed occasionally haunt and even kill their surviving family members, at least until their dead hearts are pulverized by a stake or perhaps cooked and eaten. (I once spent a weekend in a small southern Romanian village, where the locals at first denied vehemently that there was any such thing as vampire-type creatures...well, except for the neighbor's uncle, whose heart had to be burnt and drunk down with tea; and, oh yeah, the father of the gardener who comes here from time to time, etc.) Orphans, too, are in ample, glue-huffing evidence on the streets of Bucharest, and cross-border adoption politics (which find the U.S. and the European Union at bitter loggerheads) have been a persistent thorn in Romania's diplomatic side.

But unlike the undead and the unparented, Dallas actually played a tangible role in the overthrow of Ceausescu and the celebration that ensued. So much so that J.R. portrayer Larry Hagman has appeared in Romania frequently as a Stetson-wearing pitchman for the Russian petroleum company Lukoil ("The Choice of a True Texan"). "People from Bucharest come up to me on the street with tears in their eyes saying, 'J.R. saved our country,' " Hagman told People magazine in 2000. Media-savvy Romanians will still deny at first that they ever really paid attention to the nighttime soap, but after a few shots of tuica, the hair-singeing national plum brandy, they'll enthusiastically volunteer obscure story arcs from Season 3 or sing playground rhymes they invented about Bobby and Pam. Women lusted after the Ewing ladies' clothes and enormous kitchens, and men thrilled to the idea of having the freedom to make or break their own fortunes. "Whoever decided to show Dallas," award-winning 38-year-old film director Cristi Puiu tells my wife, "was an idiot who deeply misjudged the people."

The real story of how Dallas came to Romania has never really been told properly in English. According to Hagman, "Ceausescu had put three hours on TV--two were of political speeches, and one hour was an episode of Dallas--to show the corruptness of America. The people saw that and said, hey, why don't we have that? So they took him out and shot him." That's colorful and fun to believe, but it is not true.

In fact, the dictator's manipulation of television was a telling example of how even the most Stalinist of rulers can't rebottle the genie of popular culture once it's been let out--or, more precisely, in. Romania, many people are surprised to discover, wasn't always an audio-visual backwater. On the contrary: From around 1965 to 1980, "it was a Golden Age," says Alfred Bulai, deputy dean of the Political Science Faculty at the National School of Political Studies and Public Administration.

"After the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968," Bulai reports, "Ceausescu understood--correctly--that he could be an important person in this region." So the Romanian leader broke with Moscow, condemned the invasion, and became the West's favorite Eastern Bloc dictator, rewarded with a state visit from President Richard Nixon in 1969, most-favored nation trading status in 1972, and even an honorary knighthood from the Queen of England in 1978. As part of this lucrative arbitrage between world powers--a game Romania and neighboring Bulgaria have played for centuries--"we were very open to Western culture," Bulai says.

State television in this period became both a showpiece and an agent for change, easing restrictions on content, hiring young writers to create spools of original programming, and importing top-quality movies and series from the U.S., Great Britain, and France. Romanian teenagers studied abroad and came home to spread news about the various countercultural ferments around the world, and that attitude spread to the airwaves. "It was very dynamic, showing another mind, another way of thinking," Bulai says. "The public television was very fresh."

So fresh that in 1971 the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) ranked Romanian TV No. 6 on the entire European continent. "To be the sixth country in Europe by these criteria," says Ion Ionel, deputy chief of programming at Romanian TV, who was part of that new wave--"oh! It was very good to know!" Ionel is the man who brought Dallas to Romania at the tail end of this mini-glasnost and heroically kept it on the air even after Ceausescu slammed the window of opportunity shut.

The still-cherubic programmer came across the first few episodes of the series at an international trade show soon after its American debut on April 2, 1978, and was immediately smitten. "The public must see this TV!" he recalls thinking. "Finally, there's something thrilling, something beautiful!" The show's acidic take on Texas capitalism helped smooth it past Romanian TV's chief censor, but Ionel claims this didn't play a role in his own enthusiasm. So after a little creative editing of a hay-loft sex scene between Ray Krebbs and Lucy Ewing in the pilot episode, the first season of Dallas premiered in Romania on August 25, 1979. The country went nuts.

"People were very happy, because nowhere around the communist countries was there a series like this!" Ionel says. Streets would become totally deserted on Saturday evenings, when J.R. plotted his schemes. Women tried to style their hair like Sue Ellen (whose alcoholism was sometimes edited out, since it wasn't considered proper for ladies to drink). In a country where the waiting list for crappy Dacia cars stretched as long as 10 years if you didn't know the right person to bribe, the series offered what Bulai calls a "very nice image of the world."

With wild popularity came government suspicion. "Television was becoming powerful, and Ceausescu was paranoid about power," Bulai says. By the spring of 1980 a little birdie up in the censor's office warned Ionel that the ideologists thought the series "propagated a petit-bourgeois mentality" and were on the verge of pulling the plug. At the same time, Ceausescu became obsessed with the country's runaway debt to Western banks and started introducing draconian measures to keep Romanians from purchasing foreign-made products, down to raw materials. The TV schedule was rolled back to save scarce electricity, and international programming was deemed too expensive.

Ionel had to act fast to keep Dallas on the air. He and an accomplice inside Romanian TV came up with an elegant plan to take advantage of the new austerity: sign an absurdly long-term contract with the international distributors of the series, and then when Ceausescu's hammer inevitably fell, insist sadly that the precious hard currency had already been spent. They gambled that the dictator's mania to squeeze maximum value out of his dwindling foreign purchases would override his desire to keep capitalism out of Romanian living rooms.

First, though, Ionel had to convince Dallas' global sales rep to sign an extraordinary, nonstandard contract with a faraway country that was paying only around $400 to $500 an episode, without even being able to explain the reason why, for fear of being found out.

"I called every hour, 'Please send me the contract, now now now!' " Ionel recalls. "He was so, so, so, so, so--I don't find the word in English--so furious against me. 'I don't want to work with you, or with Romanian TV, because it's not the kind of normal partner!' " And indeed, the rep did break his relations with RTV and Ionel. But not before reluctantly signing a 40-episode extension. "A day or two days after this," Ionel says, "we got the order: 'Stop Dallas! Stop Dallas!' " But it was too late for the censors.