California Dreamin' (2007)

Interesting facts

California Dreamin' (endless) is a 2007 Romanian comedy drama film directed by Cristian Nemescu, who wrote it with Tudor Voican and Catherine Linstrum. Armand Assante plays a US Marine captain escorting a NATO radar shipment across Romania by train during the 1999 bombing of Yugoslavia, and Răzvan Vasilescu the village stationmaster who holds the train because it has no customs papers. Jamie Elman, Maria Dinulescu, Alexandru Mărgineanu and Ion Sapdaru co-star. The story was loosely drawn from an incident of June 1999 at Pielești, in Dolj County, where a stationmaster stopped a NATO train for want of a customs stamp.

Production

Nemescu graduated from the Bucharest film school in 2003. His medium-length Marilena de la P7, about a teenage boy in love with a prostitute, was shown at Critics' Week in Cannes in 2006. He said later that after film school he kept coming up with characters without a story to hold them. Somewhere near Mihai Bravu he had been struck by village girls thrilled that a few Americans had turned up.

The stationmaster was Florin Pătrăchioiu, at Pielești station in Dolj County. By his own account, on 3 June 1999 he held a twenty-wagon train carrying American troops and mobile radar equipment for four hours because the customs stamp was missing, despite calls from the Craiova customs directorate and a warning from the transport minister, Traian Băsescu, that he would lose his job.

Nemescu wrote the screenplay with his friend Tudor Voican; Catherine Linstrum is credited as co-writer. The project dates from 2004. State funding, the usual route for a young director, did not come through, and the film was only made in 2006 when a private company took it on.

Boncea sent the script to Armand Assante, who said he fell for it at the first reading. Assante had been to Romania several times before. He met Nemescu in Bulgaria, where he was shooting When Nietzsche Wept, shortly before the director left for Cannes with Marilena de la P7. Răzvan Vasilescu, one of the country's best-known stage and screen actors, was cast as Doiaru.

Pătrăchioiu came to the set, met Vasilescu and Assante, and was given a small part. He was upset the first time he saw the film, because Doiaru is written as a crook and he himself, he said, had never taken a leu from anyone. He also pointed out that the real commander had been a major named Jeff Thompson, and that he had served the American officers Russian vodka in his office. He was sorry the film was not shot at Pielești.

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