Dan's Papers - December 14, 2007

How did you spend your Thanksgiving? Here at home in the Hamptons? At the apartment in Manhattan? Visiting relatives in Florida? When people asked me that question, I answered - we spent Thanksgiving in Bulgaria. Never before had we spent a Thanksgiving in Bulgaria. I'm not even sure where Bulgaria is. But that's where we spent it.

I loved answering this question with Bulgaria.

It had come about in an odd way. My girlfriend Chris has a son who graduated college this past June. And his first job after graduation is the amazing position as the personal assistant to Hollywood film producer Roger Corman, who is now 81 years old and the famous maker of a string of B horror movies and an occasional A horror movie. For example, he did Little Shop of Horrors, the original one in 1960, which featured the young Jack Nicholson as the lunatic patient of a local dentist. And he did Attack of the Crab Monsters and Supergator. And he's still working.

So, off young Scoop went this past July to Hollywood, where he took the desk just outside the great man's office, manned the telephone and did assistantly things for Mr. Corman, whatever that might be.

One of the things Mr. Corman asked Scoop to do was be on the set of his latest horror film. It is called Cyclops, it is taking place in Roman times so everybody was dressed up as tribunes, senators, emperors, soldiers and courtesans, it stars Eric Roberts and is under the direction of a man named Declan O'Brien. It is a made-for-TV film that had been pre-sold to the Sci-Fi Channel, was being powered through a 12-hour day 6 days a week 18-day production shoot, and there was lots for Scoop to do to help out. It was being shot in Bulgaria. Things are cheap in Bulgaria. And that's where Scoop would be on Thanksgiving.

For those family members who were not going to Bulgaria for Thanksgiving, a big pre-Thanksgiving dinner was held on Wednesday evening, November 21, in Manhattan at Chris' apartment. A dozen people showed up, including my kids and Chris' two other kids.

And then, on Thanksgiving Day, we were off. Late that day, while everybody in the States was having their traditional holiday feast, we were in an old, ratty Lufthansa 737 out on a runway at the Munich Airport, waiting to take off because of fog in Sofia two hours away.

"We don't have the technical equipment to land in thick fog," the German stewardess said over the PA. "We'll wait for an opening."

Forty-five minutes later, the word came through. There was an opening in the fog. And so we were going for it.

Our introduction to Bulgaria therefore consisted of an absolutely sunny and sparkling day at 30,000 feet from which we looked out the window at a ring of mountains surrounding what looked like a giant bed of cotton. There below us, if we had been able to see it, was the capital of the country, Sofia, sitting under this bed of cotton. The fog had closed back in. Oh well, we were going for it anyway. We entered the fog. Everything got dark. And then, an interminably long period of time later, BANG! There was a tremendous crash as the wheels slammed down onto the runway. And we were there.

Welcome to Bulgaria.

I think what got Chris to embark on this crusade to have us and her three kids together for Thanksgiving in Bulgaria was a particular photograph she had gotten in her email. It had come from Scoop. There he was, dressed as a Roman slave, twelve feet up in the air and nailed to a wooden cross, dying. At the bottom of the cross, kneeling, was a film crew dressed in coats, scarves and mittens, with cameras, microphone booms, reflectors and other moviemaking equipment. They were positioned there, like a football team posing for their portrait, with Scoop hanging forlornly above them. Scoop now had a small part in the movie. And here he was, getting his fifteen minutes.

A van from the movie crew met us at the airport and whisked us into downtown Sofia to our hotel where we dropped our bags. Then we headed straight to the movie studio, which was high up on a hill overlooking downtown Sofia. We were dropped off in front of an outdoor stage set of an ancient Roman city. It was foggy and drizzling and we walked through the mud of this fake city, past a dungeon, a marketplace, a jail, some Roman apartments and courtyards and then past some Roman guards with spears, helmets and shields, into the "coliseum" during a scene in progress. The Cyclops had chased some slaves - one of whom was Scoop - into a dungeon. He was nine feet tall, the Cyclops was. He was banging on the big wooden dungeon door, trying to get in to get the girl. But it was holding. "Okay, CUT!" shouted the director. "Let's do it again, people." The Cyclops stopped banging. And about a dozen people began rushing around, setting the scene up from the beginning again.

Scoop, in a frayed robe, came out of the dungeon, grinning from ear to ear. He, the director Declan O'Brien and several others came over to us. Declan held out a hand. "So this is your FAMILY," he smiled. "Glad to have you. When did you get in?"

We spent the next four days in and around Sofia, Bulgaria, which is a magnificent old 19th century city of about two million people. It snowed one day, it rained another, there was fog at one level or another every day, and we were concerned about getting back out because after we had landed the airport closed.

We spent our time trudging under umbrellas though the snowdrifts and rain, visiting churches and museums and synagogues and palaces, and I remembered this wonderful logical error I had made earlier as we pulled our luggage through the small airport upon our arrival.

"Our 737 is the only plane here," I noted cheerfully to the others. "Everybody else might have trouble flying back out, but we won't. Flying out is a whole lot easier than coming in for a landing. And our plane is here now."

I had completely forgotten that for planes to go out, they had to come in. And with the airport closed, nothing new was coming in. There was going to be a lot of pressure from irate passengers to get on this single plane over the next four days. So much for it being our plane.

Here are some things I learned about Bulgaria.

The city of Sofia, really the only big city in this entire country of just eight million people, is a throwback to another time. It's foggy and dusty, cobblestoned and fabulous, but pretty much what an old Western European city that we are all familiar with, untouched by World War II, looked like twenty-five years ago. Practically everybody smokes cigarettes. The young people wear black leather and jeans and have henna-dyed hair and sunglasses. They're supposed to be switching to the Euro - they joined the European Union ten months ago - but they're still using the Lev. And the Lev isn't worth much. You can eat a four-course meal for less than ten bucks. You can buy a scarf or some shoes for five bucks. You can take a taxi almost anywhere for two bucks.

The people are attractive, funny and not quite up to snuff as far as the global economy is concerned. There are old ladies with brooms sweeping the streets. There are trollys and streetcars. There are outdoor markets. I spent much of one morning going through an antique book market, another morning combing through old military gear from the Soviet and Nazi eras. The public buildings are beautifully maintained. But many of the more modern buildings, almost all of which were built by the Russians, are completely derelict, and either abandoned entirely or undergoing reconstruction under new private ownership.

One morning, with Scoop on the set and Chris and her two other kids going shopping, I set out with a laptop in search of a café to have a cappuccino and write an article for the paper.

On the street, I asked some people where a café was. They didn't understand me.

"Starbucks?" I asked. "Starbucks?"

One of them pointed down the street. "McDonald's," he said. When I protested, he pointed the other way. "KFC," he said.

I finally did find a café but the place was so filled with smoke that there was going to be no story written there. Also, everybody stared at me when I walked in. I wound up doing my writing in a comfortable overstuffed chair in the high Victorian lobby at the Grand Hotel Sofia where we were staying.

But where we really spent much of our time was out on the hillside at the film shoot. And for a long time, the Cyclops appeared to be winning.

As for the studio where the shoot was taking place, it was a vast affair, perhaps on 150 acres, consisting of many stage sets and sound studios, all built in the 1950s when the Soviet Union had Bulgaria under its heel. It was also infested with wild dogs, all of whom were very sweet and friendly.

At a party one night, I met with a Bulgarian in the film industry who was familiar with the studio where all this was being g.

"The studio in Sofia is exactly the same, made from the same set of plans, as film studios the Soviets built in Romania, Poland and outside of Moscow. You could shoot in one, or you could shoot in another. They were all the same. Mostly they made propaganda movies."

The Cyclops stage set had not been built for this film. It had been built for the making of the movie Spartacus five years ago. When that was over, they just left it to go to ruin, but then the BBC had come in and spruced it up and used it for something else in Rome, and now it had been leased out for Cyclops.

(Cyclops, of course, is a monster in Greek mythology while the Spartacus set was for a movie set in Rome. Corman, hearing about the set, decided this Cyclops would be the last descendant of the original band of Greek Cyclopses.)

We witnessed fight scenes between Roman soldiers and barbarians. We witnessed a rampage by the Cyclops in which he left a village street littered with dead Romans and body parts.

(I am a sort of spacey guy, and at one point I followed Chris through this Roman street on our way to somewhere else, not even noticing all the blood and gore and arms and legs scattered about.)

There were dressing trailers, an administration building, a lunch wagon outside the set where the taxis pulled up, and even people in other costumes from other films being made at this vast studio.

As for Scoop, he had a pretty decent-sized role in the movie, but was being beaten, stabbed, speared, branded and even in the end crucified because apparently Declan thought it would just be fun to do all that to him. As Scoop explained it, Corman had contacted Declan from Hollywood to say he was sending his young assistant over to Bulgaria and among other things he should work him into the film just for the experience of it.

"Declan has quite a sense of humor," Scoop told us. "So he did write me in, but then he had me pummeled and battered and ultimately killed - as in, so he wants me to put this kid in the movie, huh? I'll show him."

Declan came over and threw his arm around Scoop. He'd caught the tail end of this story. "But we love Scoop," he said. "He's a great kid."

But we already knew that.

And Declan put us in the film too. We had come all this way to see Scoop. That was the least he could do. And so we were in some crowd scenes. I got made up and my hair done and costumed to look like a prosperous Senator. Chris got made up to be a Senator's wife. And Pam and Ben became a lady in waiting and a Plebeian respectively. We sat in the stands in the Coliseum and watched the fights. And I have a line. Look for me when this premieres on Sci-Fi next November.