The Hungarian Connection(s).

 

(I) Some of you will remember that back in the Second Millennium, the Internet was a curiosity. Lots of journalists were writing about this new medium, and magazines were springing up, specializing in tidbits from The World Wide Web. One such magazine, based in Hungary, was called Internet Kalauz ("Guide"), and Andrea Wesselenyi was one of its top freelance writers. In 1998, Andrea was a member of Francis Ford Coppola's first writing workshop (workshop.lather.com), along with my wife-to-be and me. Anikó and I had not yet met in real life, but we had just finished writing a screenplay+book, and we were searching for ways to promote them. Andrea noticed our postings on the workshop's discussion board, and cleverly saw the possibility for an article about this online collaboration and love story. She exchanged a flurry of eMails with Anikó, and the resulting interview finally appeared in the 12/1999 issue of Internet Kalauz.

(II) During the summer of 2002, my new wife received an eMail from the production staff at Frei Dosszié (Dossier). They had seen her interview in Hungary's leading cyber-issues magazine, and wanted to tape a segment about us for an upcoming broadcast on "Sex & Love." To them, our transatlantic courtship sounded exotic.

I had never heard of Tamás Frei, the host, but Anikó was well-acquainted with his work. He began his career as a traveling reporter, visiting more than 100 countries, and later became Hungary's foremost war correspondent. Frei Dosszié is produced for one of the two commercial TV networks in Hungary, and the program's top episodes have aired in more than 25 countries. Tamás is a two-time Hungarian Pulitzer Prize winner and is one of Hungary's most famous and respected television personalities.

Tamás certainly impressed me: he speaks four languages fluently, and has interviewed Nobel Prize winner Nelson Mandela, Russian President Mikhail Gorbachev, German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, the Maharaja of Jaipur, computer mogul Bill Gates, Tom Hanks, Bruce Willis, Antonio Banderas, Sharon Stone, Danny DeVito, David Duchovny, David Copperfield, director Oliver Stone, tenor Luciano Pavarotti, and the entire cast of Desperate Housewives... among many others.

So a foreign celebrity was visiting our home. Our interviews didn't take very long to shoot, but we spent the next nine grueling hours with László Balassa, Frei's director of photography. László was in charge of shooting the segment's background footage and went to extraordinary lengths to get it. I vaguely remember him hanging outside the window of our car while taping some roller-coaster views on the hairpin mountain curves up in Angeles Crest. He was grinning madly and shouting, "Faster, faster!"

The segment aired in Hungary on November 4, 2002, and my Budapest in-laws had a *lot* to talk about for the next few months.