Liberal Hollywood Exporting Film Industry Jobs

Filmmakers Are Swept Away by Romania
By John Horn
Times Staff Writer

Along the route to MediaPro Studios, packs of feral dogs wander unpaved streets, children as young as 7 beg for handouts, and some government buildings still bear the bullet scars of the 1989 revolution. But for a growing cadre of Hollywood producers, the drive is becoming as familiar as a trip to the Universal Studios back lot.

Poverty is visible almost everywhere in Romania, where the average gross monthly salary is $339 and horse-drawn carts are affordable transportation. Although economists see a struggling nation, movie producers see an opportunity.

And when the film business began offering steady employment with the promise of good money, onetime medical student Ionut Lupulescu was just one of many who signed on.

Lupulescu's summer job as a low-level video assistant on 2003's "Cold Mountain" turned into a full-time career that paid him $11,000 in 2004. This year, the 24-year-old worked on "Catacombs," a low-budget thriller put together by Los Angeles' Twisted Pictures, which found the economics of the Romanian movie industry equally seductive. By traveling 6,500 miles, producer Greg Hoffman of Twisted Pictures was able to fill two sound stages with tunnels so intricate that even the "Catacombs" construction crew — a few dozen carpenters eager to work for $20 a day — would get lost in them.

Those tunnels are a visible testament to a profound and seemingly irreversible shift in the American movie business. The film industry has increasingly become a gypsy caravan with producers scouring the globe in search of countries with sufficient infrastructure to accommodate movie crews, yet undeveloped enough to offer Third World wages.

Until just a few years back, Hollywood's flight to distant lands was a modest exodus at most. In 1990, a mere 44 American movies were filmed in foreign lands for economic savings.

By the end of the decade, the figure had more than doubled, and now production abroad has become a way of life. In one recent week, 20th Century Fox films were in various stages of production in the Czech Republic, Canada, Hungary, Morocco, the Dominican Republic, France and Britain.

For the big studios, making movies overseas is no different than Nike stitching shoes in Vietnam.

As long as the finished product looks the same, it doesn't really matter where the goods were manufactured, which is part of Romania's appeal.

The watershed moment in Hollywood's march east came with "Cold Mountain," a Civil War story set in the hills of North Carolina but filmed in Romania. It was the first major mainstream American movie to be shot here.

"Without the savings that Romania offered, 'Cold Mountain' absolutely would not have gotten made," said producer Albert Berger. He estimated that the country's affordable labor trimmed more than $20 million from the film's budget, which he said would have exceeded $100 million had the movie been shot entirely in the United States.

Funny you don't hear all of those Liberals in Hollywood complaining about the exporting of jobs in the film industry. They have no problem whining about "manufacturing jobs" going overseas. They readily lament the misery supposedly caused by the "Bush Economy" sending jobs "overseas." During the campaign the Left couldn't beat that drum enough. Strange how silent they are on this issue.

Full Story: Film Industry Hypocrisy

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