In the ‘70s and ‘80s Romania had two TV stations, TVR1 and TVR2, both run by the Government. TVR 1 broadcasted daily from 5PM to 11PM and from 8AM to 12AM on Saturdays and Sundays. TVR2’s schedule was even shorter.
Obviously, most of it was news: political, economical, agricultural and industrial reports, Romanians were kept abreast of Ceausescu’s travels and inspections throughout the country and treated to wonderfully long broadcasts on the Communist Party Congresses.
There were two movies a week, one on Wednesday night (The Wednesday Telecinemateca) and one on Saturday night. All the movies were either Romanian or old American classics, from the 30s to the 50s. As a rare treat, we’d get foreign films from France, Russia or Italy.
We also had two TV series a week, a Romanian one and an American or English one. For the longest time we watched Dallas. We had others before and after. But it feels like Dallas ate up the entire 80s decade.
The cinemas showed mostly Romanian, Russian, Chinese and Indian movies. We had the occasional American, French, and Italian movie. I remember loving comedies with Louis de Funes, French actor who was famous in Europe and not heard of in America. I loved the dramas and action movies with Alain Delon and Jean Paul Belmondo.
But the one movie that really marked my childhood was Star Wars. This was the movie that made me want to write Science Fiction. I have a list of books that pushed me to write certain types of stories. But in terms of movies, Star Wars was the definitive one.
So few North American movies showed in our cinemas that we thirsted for everything foreign, especially Western culture foreign. The more they forbade, the more we craved.
As a result, in the late ‘80s, everybody was buying video players on the black market. They were brought into the country by sailors and sold at three to four times their original price. The same sailors had a list of movies they brought back after each voyage and you could request them to copy some of them for a price.
I ended up with a collection of seven video tapes. I used to invite friends to my place to watch the same movies over and over again. I had four genre movies: Bladerunner, Alien, Mad Max III, and The Hunger; and three others: Staying Alive, Airplane and Breathless.
You could trade your tapes with someone else and see their movies. That’s how from ’87 to ’89 I got to see an impressive list of movies that I’d missed in the ‘70s and early ‘80s.
Before this, in the summer of 1982, I was twelve when I saw Conan the Barbarian at a cinema in Greece. After I returned home in the Fall, I shared the story of the movie in detail with all my friends. Not once, but several times. My story would last for four to five hours with detailed descriptions and fighting simulations, and my own interpretations of different plot points as well as my own version of the background story. My friends would tell their friends and soon I had an audience of dozens of kids listening mouth agape to my recount of the movie.
I saw that movie again a few years back and failed to see what I’d seen the first time, but again, take a kid famished for adventure and show him Conan the Barbarian and…
After the revolution in 1989, some Romanian TV stations began broadcasting all sorts of popular American and English TV series. Among them were the original Star Trek and Doctor Who series.
We were now in the ‘90s and the look and story telling of the new movies had changed dramatically from the ‘60s and ‘70s.
Star Trek and Doctor Who seen twenty to thirty years after their time just didn’t do it for me. Not only for me, but for most fans in Romania. Few of us have watched the new series, like The Next Generation. But we had never been real fans of these series. We had missed on all these cultural phenomenon because we made contact three decades too late.