“I First Came To Romania At The Same Age My Father Fled To The West…”
John Florescu returned to Romania after an impressive career in the U.S. media. He worked as a journalist and produced programs for major broadcasting companies such as CBS, HBO, PBS, Discovery-Times, Disney, A&E Network, The History Channel, BBC, and The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.
His impressive résumé also includes serving as a producer for the renowned British journalist David Frost, communications director for the Democratic National Committee, and a member of the campaign teams for Democratic politicians Edward Kennedy, John Kerry, and Barack Obama.
In Romania, he founded the production company Chainsaw Films Production, through which he produced documentary films about key figures in Romanian history, including Marie – Heart of Romania (2018), The King’s War (2016), The Last King Behind the Iron Curtain (2021), the series Romanian Enigmas (2023-2024), and Ceaușescu – The Making and Unmaking of a Dictator (2024).
At the Union of Professional Journalists of Romania Excellence Gala 2024, John Florescu was awarded the Press from the Diaspora prize.
Lavinia Betea: Journalists and the public have recently recognized your impressive media activity on a globally significant topic—the latest U.S. presidential elections. Your documentary Trump vs. Harris: Is Europe Safe?, produced by you and aired on ProTV, along with your live appearances in Romanian television studios, where you gave interviews about the stakes of those elections and their implications for our continent and beyond, serve as a model of journalistic excellence and an example among the global elite in the field. Meanwhile, we have also witnessed the presidential campaign in Romania… In your expert opinion, how does the biography and personality of a U.S. president impact the average American citizen compared to Romania?
John Florescu: The personality of the president has always been a key factor in US voting preferences. Of course, the qualities of a potential leader are seen in a wider context: how on election day the voter judges the nation’s biggest problems; the record of the previously elected President, and the merits of the new opposing candidate.
With many Americans having judged that the USA in last two years had gone “off track” on domestic issues -inflation, high interest rates, illegal immigrants – and seeing a world in turmoil, such as in the Middle East, Ukraine and China, voters said it was time for a change. Moreover, the likeable Joe Biden seemed weak and in overdue for retirement. Even the Democrats core supporters, such as African American and Hispanic voters, had grown impatient with the President’s party. Voters wanted someone decisive and strong.
Looking back, Reagan came in 1980 after a weak Jimmy Carter Administration that had found itself in turmoil in the Iran crisis. American votes opened up to Reagan’s promise of a new dawn in America – a call not unlike Trump’s “Make America Great Again.” Earlier, in 1961, Kennedy came to the White House articulating bold ambitions. On his inauguration day, the youngest U.S. president ever, boldly declared: “Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty.” Kennedy’s 1961 message to the world was the opposite to that of President Trump’s a month ago. Americans swelled with pride as Kennedy promised to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade, an accomplishment the felled President would never live to see. For his part, President Trump wants to see an American flag planted on Mars.
By comparison, in Romania, the many political parties strike me as strikingly fluid, with simple voters largely incapable of defining the core values and the simple beliefs of the parties or their leaders. To an outsider, leading politicians seem to shift at will, or seek to create new parties. In 1990, I was a US-designated election observer in Romania and I felt that the voters had a very vague understanding of the individuals presenting themselves to the office of the Presidency. After all, in the so-called “dawn of democracy,” Romanians selected a senior politician of the dictator they had executed a year earlier.
In the USA, there are essentially two parties: Democrat and Republican. The strongest 3rd party challenge in the US was in 1992 when Ross Perot received 19% of vote – a feat not since achieved. National candidates rarely jump from one party to another, with the notable exception of Robert Kennedy Jr. who in 2024 switched from Democrat to “Independent” in the last election.
You have mentioned on previous occasions that you first came to Romania as a child in 1969. You accompanied your father, Professor Radu Florescu, who was part of the team of experts accompanying President Nixon on his visit to Bucharest—the first visit of an American president to a communist country. What impressions do you still have from that journey?
It was a shocking experience on the late morning of August 2, 1969 – with American astronauts just having landed on the moon – to see huge baby blue Air Force 1 touching down at Otopeni airport. The sun was bright, Nixon was smiling. The US President came to the podium with President Ceausescu. In the motorcade going to the city center, Nixon stopped and plunged into the crowds, American-style. He embraced the cheering, flag waving citizens, numbering almost one million. Being in the press bus, I saw Ceausescu’s uneasy body language as he trailed Nixon embracing his countrymen. In full display, one could grasp the difference in human language between the emissaries of democracy and dictatorship. H.R. Haldeman, Nixon’s Chief of staff, would later write in memoirs, “one of the best days of the boss’ life.”
Romania’s recent history is divided into two distinct eras: before 1989 and after. While living in the United States at the time, how did you perceive the pivotal events that marked this transition?
I was in Bucharest in late November 1989, just around the time Nadia Comaneci slipped over the border toward the West. Bucharest was tight; the city felt like a prison, police every block, evening street lights off. A few weeks later, on the day of the revolution, my father and I joined other Romanian-Americans who had gathered at the Kennedy Federal office building in downtown Boston to set fire to the collected speeches of Ceausescu. People greeted this historical moment with the hope Romania was to embark on a period of freedom and Western democracy.
At that moment, I did not know what to expect or what it meant for us. We never spoke Romanian at home because we thought we would never be able to go and live there. Many of my relatives suffered under the regime, some put in jail. A few weeks after the Ceausescu’s execution, my father went to Bucharest and read on Romanian TV a personal letter from Senator Edward Kennedy addressed to the Romanian people. As we all know, Romanian political life would turn out to be much more difficult than we all hoped that cold day.
When did you return to Romania? What led to your decision? What were your aspirations and projects upon your return?
I was first in Romania, age 13, in 1967 accompanying my father and family for a year-long visit sponsored by the Fulbright Foundation. Curiously, I first came at the same age my father left Romania, fleeing westward on one of the last Orient expresses from Brasov before Hitler opened hostilities. I then returned in the 1990s as my brothers and I had decided to open up media and advertising in companies in Romania. We opened a number of companies linked to two of the largest Western media groups WPP and Publicis. We were hiring young Romanians – some 500 – and they did not want to look back…back at their sad past. They wanted to get jobs, learn and make money. At that time, I was flying in and out of Romania while my younger brother Radu took the lead with our operations in Bucharest.
Through the documentaries produced by Chainsaw Films, the company you founded in Bucharest, you have managed to introduce major historical events, phenomena, and emblematic figures from Romania’s past into the programming of prestigious media institutions and, consequently, into the international circuit. What inspired you to embark on this historical project in the country of your roots? Was your father, historian Radu Florescu, an influence in this endeavor?
My father and mother were both educators. Educated under Oxford’s Hugh Trevor Roper, my father ended up as professor of Balkan studies at Boston College. My grandfather, also a Radu, with whom I Iived in New Hampshire, was a retired senior pre-war Romanian diplomat in Berlin, Washington and London. In my high school years, together with my father, I travelled in our Peugeot car back and forth 10 times (my job was taking photographs for his Dracula book and often changing flat tires!) between Paris to Bucharest! How could my curiosity of these lands and my family history going back in Romania some 600 years not intrigue me? Let’s face it, to my eyes, Romania was thrilling!
Later, in 1972, my father wrote a best-seller, In Search of Dracula, in the US on Vlad Tepes. He would quickly become a celebrity driven by the unique power of network American TV. He lectured and appeared on the David Frost show, one of America’s most celebrated interviewer. He wrote six books on the subject of Vlad Tepes and they were translated into 14 languages. Oddly enough, the In Search of Dracula book prompted thousands of Western tourists to visit Romania, even in the Ceausescu period. Visitors wanted to see his grave, and Dracula’s “real” castle which was mistakenly identified as Castle Bran. (There is no evidence Tepes even went there.) Several documentaries were made on my father’s work, in the UK, Sweden, Sweden, including one by me for History channel in the USA. Oddly, my father’s book, In Search of Dracula (1972) has never been translated into Romanian. Next year, the book will appear in Russian!
Years late, through my father’s curious Dracula-related connection to David Frost, I met David Frost and then, as time would have it, went to work for the British broadcaster in the Washington and Los Angeles for 20 years. I owe a debt of gratitude to Tepes for this round-about introduction to David Frost.
While in the US, I had produced some 150 programs for US television. They were mostly in the realm of interviews with world leaders and documentaries. I thought, why not do the same in Romania..on Romanian subjects? The idea of King Michael was my father’s. He said, ”Go see the King. He has an interesting story that few people know.”
“The King’s War” [in the UK, “The King Who Tricked Hitler”] would turn out to be the first documentary on the King. “Queen Marie: Heart of Romania” was also a first. On opening night, Professor Ioan Pop, the President of the Romanian Academy, generously called it “a film for the record.” The Ceausescu series was not the first, but I believe the most objective, which mattered a lot for a country that still, in some parts of life, exists under under the spell of Tovarasul.
In your documentaries, you have portrayed three legendary figures: Queen Marie, King Michael I, and Nicolae Ceaușescu. Which of these three personalities was the most challenging to approach. Why?
Ceausescu – because he was the most controversial of my historical subjects. In terms of impact on the nation of Romania today, he was the most significant and longest-lasting of the three.
Many despised Ceausescu, not without reason; some missed him because life in their view was simpler, better and affordable; and some admired him because he could actually do things- build roads, factories, casa de cultura, seaside resorts. Ceausescu’s diplomacy put Romania in the global spotlight. Assessments varied by age group – those in the more liberal 1970s were more forgiving than those in the 1980s. One senior bank executive once told me that lots of the bank’s younger employees “have socialist views…imagine in a bank!” Moreover, with young people now traveling and drawing comparisons to the West, there has been a deep frustration that Romania had not moved forward sufficiently in 30 plus years since the revolution.
I chose to do the film on Ceausescu because it had never had been done: a simple, objective life story – from birth in Scorniesti to death by execution on Christmas day 1989. The story was told from those who knew him well – from drivers to secretaries, office staff, Ministers, aides, doctors, diplomats, family members as well as victims of the regime. The broadcaster ProTV, which had backed my other films, and Banca Transilvania had stepped forward to make it happen, for which I am eternally grateful. The network and the bank enabled me to finish a kind of trilogy, “The King (Michael), The Queen (Marie) and the Dictator” covering more than 150 years of Romanian history. Those shows have now run in about 50 countries thanks largely to the History Channel and Amazon Prime. They also have travelled via the Romanian Foreign Ministry to about 60 countries.
Alongside those productions, I also managed to produce with the History channel a series with the esteemed actor Marcel Iures called “Marcel Iures Pressents Romanian Enigmas,” already with 9 episodess completed.
You have also developed a unique method of circulating your documentary productions—through nationwide tours featuring well-structured screenings and debates with various social groups, particularly teenagers and young audiences. What direct effects have you observed from this initiative?
All the work I have done on Romanian subjects are part of an on-going “National Educational Tour” which has travelled to some 150 cities and towns in every corner of the country, enabling citizens to learn their history due to the generosity of Romanian companies. Citizens in what I call ‘the second Romania” – those living in smaller towns – live in a different world, not much changed in 50 years. Maybe a bank, a pharmacy or a gas station to mark time. Those people were the most grateful to see what I had uncovered through my films. They feel forgotten and have few heroes among present day luminaries. They are very thankful, and it has been a joy to undertake this task with a team of colleagues who equally are proud of their significant contributions.
Before concluding with well-deserved thanks for your contributions to Romanian historiography and media, one last question—what is your next project?
The next project: soon to be announced!
