Last year I traveled to Romania and Transylvania to shoot a commercial for Glad Odor Shield trash bags. There was a castle involved, and an animatronic skunk, and an “English king” (actually a Romanian actor) who couldn’t speak English. The spot sucked. Maybe you remember seeing it and thinking, “Jesus, that sucked.” It did, and I apologize for wasting those :30 of your life. It wasn’t really my fault, or maybe it was, who knows. Whatever. The Romanian actor sucked.
During our down time in Bucharest we met a Swedish arms dealer, several prostitutes, and a chain smoking English gentleman who I’m sure was Hemingway’s doppelganger. People in Romania smoke a TON of cigarettes. And when they’re not smoking cigarettes, they’re burning all kinds of shit on the side of the road, in what I can only believe is an attempt to provide more aromatic smoke for everyone’s enjoyment. The effects of communism and the disdain for it can still be felt.
Our host for the trip was Anna a 6′ tall, sexy, Romanian, super-kind 29 year old. During a conversation about how she came into production, she said that before the fall of Communism, no one did anything.
“There were no jobs, we simply looked for food.”
“What did you eat?”
“Nothing usually, we just looked for food. Some potato maybe.”
“What was the first thing you ate when Communism fell?”
“Pizza. I’ll never forget my first piece of pizza.”
The Romanian’s make an amazing pizza. I guess when you’ve been eating potatos for two hundred years, and then someone gives you a recipe and supplies to make pizza, you probably master that shit in a day. So they stuck with that. Today, there’s still not much else to eat. I guess they figured pizza was good enough to go with for at least another 200 years. I’m pretty sure there are quite a few diabetic American children who would agree. Later Anna would tell me that she and her sister had thyroid disease from eating wild apples that were covered in radiation from the fallout of Chernobyl.
“The government didn’t tell us anything. We didn’t know any better.”
So her generation embraced the idea that their government and the idea of communism sucked. The roots of democracy are evident in Bucharest’s beautiful street art. It would be great if America could “Just Undo It.”
Fed up with Communism? Bush got you down? tired of fighting the man? Throw your heart away in this handy blue container.
The stencil below is from Banksy, the most famous stencil artist in the world.
This guy fucked Lassie. I’m not sure what else there is to say.
Additional photos of this trip can be found here:
http://www.kodakgallery.com/BrowsePhotos.jsp?UV=224477091020_260738264209&collid=14612367809.258420893109.1212516051858&page=1
Tags: advertising, apple, arms, castle, cigarettes, commercial, communism, diabetes, dog, government, graffiti, hemingway, italy, king, pizza, politics, potato, prostitutes, radiation, romania, skunk, smoke, transylvania, weapons
