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THE CHEESEBURGER MANIFESTO

By Ted NICOLAOU

ITA ENTERTAINMENT GROUP LIMITED - as PROD / FIN

Romance - Development 2024

An American Executive smuggles a million dollars as bribe money for Romanian officials weeks after the revolution to help set up an Auto Company. Unwittingly he gets caught up in his chauffeur's dream and falls in love with his revolutionary sister. This results in hilarious conflict!

- Year of production
- 2024
- Genres
- Romance, Comedy
- Countries
- UNITED KINGDOM, ROMANIA
- Languages
- ENGLISH, ROMANIAN
- Budget
- 5 - 10 M$
- Duration
- 110 mn
- Director(s)
- Ted NICOLAOU
- Writer(s)
- Ted NICOLAOU
- Producer(s)
- Martyn HALL (ITA Productions Limited), Vlad PAUNESCU (Castel Studios), Robert BERNACCHI
- Synopsis
- This Feature Film is a fish-out-of-water romantic comedy. An arrogant young executive for an American auto company smuggles a million dollars in bribe money to Romania weeks after the revolution to grease the wheels of the post-Communist bureaucracy. Unwittingly, he gets swept up in his Romanian chauffeur’s dream of owning his own business - the first American style hamburger joint in Eastern Europe and falls in love with his chauffeur’s sister, a firebrand of the opposition party and minor hero of the revolution, who's attracted to him, but offended by everything he stands for. The secret police, suspicious of his fraternizing with dissidents, mistakenly conclude that the burger joint is a front for an American-funded anti-government party, and brand him an enemy of the people. Back home, the SEC investigates the undeclared million, and his American cohorts let him take the fall. In a comedy of errors, he goes on the run, loses the million, and ends up disguised as a peasant, fleeing for his life across the wilds of Transylvania. From Armani suits to peasant rags, from Malibu to the post-Communist Twilight Zone – he journeys light years from home to rediscover the American Dream. JAKE ROBERTS has it all, the Malibu dream house and high-powered job. However, he kisses it all goodbye the day he leaves for Romania with the million dollars his colleagues at American Eagle Motors embezzled to bribe Minister of Trade RADU RADULESCU to put them first in line to buy cheap steel and auto plants. Jake is culture-shocked by the poverty and the sinister atmosphere that permeates the city, but most of all by the utter lack of western amenities such as free toilet paper one takes for granted in a democracy. Trade Minister, Radulescu, tours him around the broken-down auto plants, introduces him to the bizarre nightlife of the still-in-power party bosses, and wines and dines him in some of the worst restaurants on the planet, all the while trying to get his hands on the baksheesh in the high-tech briefcase that's constantly cuffed to Jake's wrist. Jake's only American contact in Bucharest is PETE PETERS of the U.S. Embassy, a lonely diplomat who's been stationed here so long he's having a nervous breakdown. Jake regards Pete suspiciously as Pete warns him about the futility of doing business here and his paranoid rants about the spies who watch their every move. Jake treats his state sponsored chauffeur MIHAI condescendingly at first; but Mihai is a passionate oddball who won't shut up, a former chemical engineer with a crazy dream of opening the first American-style burger joint in Romania – a happy place that "looks like a giant cheeseburger." The problem is, he’s never tasted a cheeseburger, only seen them on the old American TV shows whose dialogue has been dubbed into Communist propaganda. He begs Jake to teach him everything he knows about the cheeseburger. Impressed by Mihai’s entrepreneurial spirit – a ray of hope in the downtrodden city – and starving