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 3 of 4)

In all, 71 episodes of the series ran, until the contract expired at the end of 1981. What started as a runaway hit during a protracted era of openness became the last flicker of light in a period that soon went almost completely dark. By the end of the 1980s, Romanian TV was down to a measly two hours a day, four on weekends. News was a brief daily tool to nurture Ceausescu's cult of personality (he was a keen student of North Korea's Kim Il Sung), and viewers could count themselves lucky to see a horribly truncated Yugoslav "western" on Saturday nights.

But the series lived on in the popular imagination, and occasionally via illegal homemade aerials, which allowed TV-starved citizens to tap into the programming of nearby Bulgaria, Russia, and Yugoslavia. (Crowds would gather outside of the office of Bulgarian Airlines every morning, waiting for employees to post a TV schedule on the window.) Occasionally, some bureaucrat would slip up and allow other brief, tantalizing glimpses of Western culture.

"Dallas, it was an experience, but don't forget the music," filmmaker Puiu says. "In 1983 or so, a counselor of Ceausescu decided to open a disco inside the National Theater, near
the Intercontinental Hotel. The disco was great, with TV screens everywhere, and they showed the British Top 10 video clips of Duran Duran, Depeche Mode. We had never experienced such a thing. It was like going West. It was so packed, it was very hard to get in. Inside you could drink vodka with Pepsi Cola, that you couldn't find anywhere. It was crazy. It was the West. They decided to close it soon after--perhaps a political decision. But after we experienced this, it was impossible not to dream of the West."

By December 1989, when almost all of the communist Eastern Bloc had given way to largely peaceful democratic revolutions, Ceausescu's continued throttling of the airwaves became too much to bear. "Television for the Romanian people was some kind of Bastille, the symbol of the Communist power," Bulai remembers. "This is the reason why in the days that followed the people wanted to take over two buildings: the former Communist Party building, and the television building." The Romanian Revolution began in earnest when Ceausescu made the mistake of appearing on live TV to speak about the violent crackdown on political protesters in Timisoara, allowing the whole country to see his panicked expression when an angry crowd howled for his blood. Days later, Romanian TV broadcast images of the Ceausescus' bullet-ridden carcasses.

One of the first programs the newly liberated state television broadcast was the pilot episode of Dallas. This time with the sex scene left in.

Nicole Kidman Rides Ceausescu's Bus

Ceausescu's bus is not exactly how you'd picture it. Unlike his monstrous Parliament--reportedly the second largest building in the world, in which you can almost feel the blood of the labor-camp dead trying to seep out of the pure white marble--there is no megalomania immediately evident in this souped-up silver bullet of a vehicle. The appliances and doorways are brightly colored and even charmingly retro-modern, like a '70s Romanian twist on Jetsons-era science fiction, and even the securitate cabin seems tasteful.

Of course, there have been some add-ons since the dictator died, most noticeably a ring of clown lights around three large new mirrors in the main room, over a shelf crowded with hair gel, powders, and grooming tools. After years serving as a mobile home for Europe's worst tyrant of the 1980s, this bus is now the main make-up trailer for Castel Film Studios, one of two production companies that in the last decade have helped transform Romania from an audio-visual wasteland into a preferred destination for Hollywood's "runaway production." Elizabeth Hurley's autograph decorates one wall, and Nicole Kidman got her nose powdered here during the shoot for Cold Mountain. "When we heard this was going to be auctioned," Castel Marketing Director Bogdan Moncea says with a wolfish grin, "we just had to get it."

Castel, founded in 1992, has 200 full-time English-speaking employees, six soundstages (including what Moncea claims is the second largest in Europe), special-effects facilities, and a big chunk of forest to play with on the outskirts of Bucharest. Besides Cold Mountain--which saved $20-30 million on an $80 million budget by shooting in Romania, according to statements by director Anthony Minghella--Castel has midwifed Seed of Chucky, two forthcoming Wesley Snipes pictures, and more than 100 other feature films, ranging from straight-to-video Dracula pics to French talkers starring Gerard Depardieu. The studio also produces 130 commercials a year, mostly for European companies; watching the Euro 2004 soccer tournament, Romanians could notice that generic Euro-wide commercials for deodorants and yogurts were all using Bucharest backdrops for spots that had to be dubbed back into the local language.

"Romania is interesting for several reasons," Moncea says. "A very obvious one would be cost saving. The labor here is very inexpensive compared to other countries, including the Czech Republic or Hungary. It's around 30, 35 percent cheaper than the Czech Republic, or even more now, and I expect this gap to increase a little bit more. And locations here are really wonderful. Many of the natural beauty was preserved in Romania. You'll find huge forests untouched, like 100 years ago, like 200 years ago, or fields, or even cities, medieval cities. You should go to see Timisoara, for instance: That's a medieval city still inhabited, people inside, not like a museum like you find in Germany or elsewhere."

And Castel's not the only game in town. MediaPro Pictures, the film wing of the powerful post-Communist media conglomerate MediaPro, which owns newspapers, news wires, television stations, and more, bought out most of Romania's state film studio, Buftea, in 1998, and has since produced such films as Cave, Madhouse, and Costa-Gavras' Amen. The latter production used Ceausescu's Parliament as a stand-in for the Vatican; the Romanian government has even kept some of the decorations from the movie intact, since they invariably improve upon the original. Everywhere you look, the dictator's once-immovable legacy is being defaced and beautified by the leading edge of global popular culture.

Romania's sudden incursion into the global film industry is significant enough to have the previous recipients of Hollywood's bargain-hunting wanderlust scrambling for state subsidies. "Will [Toronto] Film Biz Get Groove Back?" asked a March 2005 Toronto Star headline to a story that fretted about Romanian influence. "Not now, but in five, maybe 10 years, if the government does not get involved, countries like Romania could compete with Prague for big movies," Stillking Films' Matthew Stillman told The Prague Post in January. Romania's many advantages also include the fact that, unlike the Visegrad countries and the Baltics, it is not yet a member of the European Union, and therefore has less restrictive labor and environmental laws.

"Romania is scheduled to join the E.U. in 2007; personally, I think that's optimistic at the moment," Moncea says. "Even after that, Romania will still be very competitive in terms of prices. So arguably, we still have about, maybe five, seven years [of] opportunities, big opportunities here in Romania, to develop this sector, and I think we will."

Shooting J.R., Once and for All

As I ride a hot, diesel-puking bus from downtown Bucharest to the MediaPro lot, all this talk of competition and modernity seems far-fetched at best. Single donkey carts hauling sad lumps of hay are enough to snaggle traffic for miles along the two ill-maintained lanes. Drivers who combine the hot-blooded temperament of southern Italians with the shabby engineering of southeastern Europe and the inexperience of American college students (most Romanians have learned to drive in the last 15 years) careen violently to and fro over heavily congested roads with bunker-sized craters. Roadside Gypsy encampments wait for traffic to die down before hauling their clear-cut forest wood to the next village via 1840s-style covered wagons.