Some shoots are truly cursed. I was peripherally involved in a film in Romania shortly after the Ceaușescus were overthrown. We were booked in a hotel some miles outside of Bucharest that had previously been the headquarters of the Securitate, which tells you pretty much everything you need to know about the amenities--sagging mattresses, no chairs, no towels, flies, cockroaches, inedible food, etc. The Romanian taxi we took from the airport had an opening in the floorboards so you could see the pavement whooshing by under your feet. As we drove up to the entrance we were greeted by a dead horse lying by the side of the road, a harbinger of what lay ahead. It remained there for the duration of our stay. It was summertime, hot, with no air conditioning, and the hotel dining room's open window was directly downwind from the decomposing horse. I had brought plastic hangers to do hand laundry in the sink, and whoever did room service stole them. The grim atmosphere was enhanced by the taciturn staff, some of whom seemed like they might have worked here during the hotel's previous incarnation as Securitate headquarters.
The film company ran into financial troubles, and nobody was being paid, so production hadn't even started when we arrived. The friendly English-speaking Romanian kids working on the film were all disgruntled former revolutionaries who were dreaming of getting out of Romania, which seemed futile given that they were all making somewhere around several hundred US dollars per month. They had fought in the revolution that had overthrown the Ceaușescus, but nothing changed--the second layer apparatchiks just stepped up to fill the power vacuum and things went on exactly as they had done before.
Since filming hadn't started I hitched a ride with an American crew member going to visit a prostitute in Bucharest so I could walk around and see a bit of the city. There was no way I was going for a country stroll where I would have to walk by the decomposing horse. The former Paris of the East, which Ceaușescu had done his best to obliterate with his truly monstrous presidential palace (putting Albert Speer to shame) had Soviet-style brutalist apartment blocks that gave off a pervasive miasma of depression. Nobody I encountered was even remotely happy.
The highlight of the trip was an excursion to Snagov island where Vlad the Impaler's head is buried (maybe). We were rowed across the lake by a black-clad old woman in a rowboat, a scene right out of a Bram Stoker novel. We walked around the little church and gazed across the water at the Ceaușescu's sprawling country estate on the other shore. The old woman rowed us back again, never speaking a word.
By that time escape was foremost in my mind as it was clear that the film wasn't going to happen. I could not stomach another day downwind of the dead horse, so I sprung for flier miles to get us out of there before I became as depressed as everyone else.
Film companies going bust on location is a time-honored Hollywood tradition. Whoever is there after the money has run out has to make it out on their own, or not. That is how bison got to Catalina Island, via a Western film that went belly up in the 1920's. But that is another story for another time ;-)
