During the darkest, most stifling years of the Balkan wars, one Serbian television broadcaster was able to shine through, if only by dint of its mindless programming.
Pink TV blithely ignored the wars of the day, the politics and anything else smacking of news.
It was hugely popular and grew into one of the region's largest and most lucrative media empires.
In today's more democratic Serbia, Pink Media Group and its energetic, youthful owner, Zeljko Mitrovic have reinvented themselves, gained a patina of respectability and started looking to expand into international movie production and other ventures.
The latest project is a 452,000-square-foot film studio complex boasting state-of-the-art sound stages and production facilities. Mitrovic hopes that the complex, 15 miles outside of Belgrade, will capture a share of the growing movie production taking place in Eastern Europe by offering top-quality venues and crews at lower-than-average prices.
"It will be one of the biggest in Europe, and I am sure people will come," Mitrovic said of the new complex.
He believes that Serbia could be the next great destination for film production, just as companies have flocked for years to the Czech Republic, Hungary and, more recently, Romania. But now that those countries are members of the European Union, Mitrovic said, their labor and other costs are going up. Serbia is still a great deal, he says.
Mitrovic, 40, spoke in a recent interview in the glass-and-chrome offices of Pink TV in downtown Belgrade. Dressed in a black suit and black shirt, with longish hair carefully disheveled, he appears part nouveau-riche gadabout, part hard-knuckle businessman.
Like Serbia itself, Mitrovic has some difficult baggage to shed as he becomes a global entrepreneur welcome, he hopes, in the salons of Hollywood and other filmmaking capitals.
A former rock guitarist who played gigs all over the former Yugoslavia, Mitrovic in the 1990s joined a leftist political party run by Mirjana Markovic, wife of the late dictator Slobodan Milosevic. His affiliation gave him favored status to acquire and build Pink TV, and he obligingly permitted the broadcaster to serve as a tool of the regime, primarily by eschewing serious programming.
An oft-repeated criticism of Pink TV during those years was that by focusing on tawdry music, telenovelas and other escapist material, it cynically allowed Serb viewers to ignore the horrors their government was committing.
