From the opening chapter of Guts, Cuts, & Gory: The Underground History of Moldavia Studios by Sheckleton Burke, Doubleday, 1996 (out of print):
Legend has it that socialite and heiress to the Moldavia fortune Isabella Moldavia, just nineteen years old at the time, met her future husband while accompanying her father, Rudolph Moldavia, on a business trip to Braşov in the summer of 1977. Lucien Heyward’s real name has never officially been known (though various sources, unconfirmed, report his birth name as either Drahoslav Pîrvulescu or Iorghu Groza).
Isabella, a tall, young woman with flowing dark hair and bright green eyes, was never entirely comfortable with her beauty or her family’s wealth, and was known to be mercurial and something of a rebel. She was charmed by Lucien’s overtures at a Transylvanian tochitură picnic, under the looming shadow of the landmark Liars Bridge. Lucien promised to write her, and after she returned to the United States, the two of them fell into a heated correspondence that continued for the remainder of that summer and into the following fall.
Ten months later, Isabella’s mother, Rosemary, died of influenza, and only a few weeks after that, Rudolph was dead of a stroke. Isabella inherited the family fortune as well as the estate, already on the National Register of Historic Places. (Her twin sister, Serafina, was killed in a tragic carousel accident at a beachside playground when the girls were seven.)
Isabella, lonely and restless, invited Lucien to visit the castle, and against the advice of her closest friends and relatives (of which she had few), a mere three months later they were married. The age difference sparked gossip in the society pages. Isabella was twenty years old. Lucien was fifty-three. A year later, Isabella gave birth to a son, Oren Jacob Heyward, who as a teenager would work his way up from kitchen lackey to grip to second A.D. on most of his father’s films made during the “golden years” of the studio’s output.
Lucien Heyward was already an infamous lothario and raconteur in Braşov before he met Isabella. His family owned a struggling movie theater chain, Cosmescu Cinemas (allegedly, a fruitless trip to Cairo to spearhead efforts to expand the chain to the Middle East inspired Moldavia’s first feature, The Curse of the Mummy’s Tongue), and Heyward had been making low-budget exploitation films since the age of thirty. Using an old Cine-Kodak camera, a gift from his father, and a cast of rough-and-tumble Romanian nonprofessional actors, many of them his own cousins, Heyward filmed in the basements, balconies, and lobbies of his family’s empty cinema houses. These early films linked gratuitous sex and alien invasion in uneasy ways. This led to local notoriety that grew beyond the borders of Braşov once Heyward’s opportunistic father sniffed the upside of controversy and allowed his son’s peculiar, ribald films to play as featurettes before every movie shown at a Cosmescu Cinema house.
In a bizarre turn of events, Heyward was hired by Romanian pharmaceutical company Terapia Ranbaxy to direct educational training films for the company’s employees, though Heyward always maintained grander ambitions. Many assumed he would take advantage of his sudden marriage to Isabella and his newfound U.S. citizenship to penetrate the gates of Hollywood at a time when exploitative horror films, many of which would go on to become classics of the genre, were on an upswing. Instead, Heyward did the opposite, shutting himself behind the gates of the Moldavia estate and building his own studio on its grounds. Heyward’s first feature under the Moldavia banner, Mummy’s Tongue, with its winking callback to an earlier era of Saturday-matinee serial films, put the studio on the map after Jamie Montana of Billington Pictures purchased the distribution rights. The film was a sleeper hit and gained Heyward a lucrative distribution deal with Columbia Pictures and a roaring reputation as an eccentric hermit auteur.
Made on a shoestring budget with a cast and crew of visiting Romanian relatives (and one Hungarian fugitive wanted for bank robbery), and shot entirely within the walls of the castle, the film remains among the most beloved of Moldavia’s output. After the film’s success, Heyward was able to write his own ticket, and ads placed in the trades led to an influx of top production staff longing for a change of pace from the grind of Los Angeles (and a chance to work with a self-exiled Hollywood outsider and enfant terrible whose phony name was on everyone’s lips). Many of the actors and below-the-line talent that came through the Moldavia gates during this period formed the core family of Moldavia Studios, and it is a testament to either Heyward’s raffish charm or cultish ability to inspire fascist loyalty that many never left.
Heyward quickly squandered the remainder of his wife’s fortune on the studio’s next dozen (and far less successful) features, including the disastrous, unwatchable, and overbudgeted Brain Breakfast, even though the camp value of some of these failures earned Rocky Horror–level cult followings. As Heyward began to embrace the underground, knowing he’d never achieve conventional mainstream success, his distribution deals with several Hollywood studios collapsed. But the director amassed a die-hard fan base and a loyal collective of mysterious Eastern European investors who would fund Moldavia’s features over the next several years. Heyward remained free to make what he wanted as he wanted at his own frenetic, ritualistic pace—for as long as he wanted to.
The deteriorating mental state of Isabella was something few were privy to. Five years after her marriage to Lucien, she had not been seen in public in some time. Mental illness had been a frequent scourge upon her family. Her father had been hospitalized for a supposed nervous breakdown three years before his death, and her mother spent an extended period of time in a psychiatric institution after she disappeared and was found days later wandering the woods around the estate, filthy and raving, her pockets full of acorns.
Despite the studio’s airtight privacy and policy of isolation, rumors still ran rampant through high society that Isabella was not well. In response, Heyward retreated even further behind Moldavia’s gates. He refused to grant interviews or speak with his own investors, and no outsiders were allowed on the grounds of the estate. The only connection Moldavia had with the outside world, in fact, was through its films (at an increased pace from two to four features a year) and the weekly food and supply trucks that would wind their way through the hills to the castle. They were required to stop and unload just inside the gates, while the rest of the estate was hidden behind an imposing blockade of fir trees.
Increasingly, Hunter Yates, the studio’s marketing wunderkind, a former Hollywood publicist who had weathered a scandal or two of his own, and Franklin Fletcher, a high-priced Manhattan corporate lawyer who escaped the world of mergers and acquisitions for the ghosts and ghouls of Moldavia, handled all communications and business dealings for the studio. Lucien Heyward continued to pump out overly stylized B-movies, some of which took on a sadder tone, further alienating the studio’s core audience, yet gaining new fans who were attracted to Moldavia’s shift into a melancholic brand of what noted film critic K. J. Stimpell called “haunted horror films.”
Heyward certainly seemed more and more like a haunted man. His breakneck pace, particularly when he churned out surprisingly sensitive and at times truly doleful horrors like Mama Has No Intestines Anymore and The Loneliness of a Long Distance Poltergeist, seemed infused more with loss and loneliness than the fun, pulpy monster mayhem the studio had built its reputation on. Heyward escaped his difficult life in Romania only to feel the need to escape his own breaking heart. . . .