The email hit our inbox in February, the subject's line 11 words. Almost a short story on their own. My dad is making a Bollywood movie. Is he being scammed? The email was from a listener, his son, who'd recently learned that his father had been sending large amounts of money to a stranger in India, a director who had met via the Internet, in order to find a film that he dreamed up in a week. The film was set in India in 1780, but also in the present. And according to the email, it would quote, "heavily feature cauliflower." A tangle of facts, which would take us most of this year to a knot, a quest which began with a phone call to the email's author. "Can you say your name and tell me where you are right now?" "Hey PJ, I'm Russia, and I'm based out of State College, Pennsylvania." "Okay, so if you could just give me some context, like you're concerned about your dad, can you just give me a postcard image, like who is your dad, just tell me a little bit about your father?" "Yeah, so my dad moved to America from Mumbai in India about 50 years ago, and he came here with the classic American dream. He had a good education pharmacy. He started out as a pharmacist and brought his wife over, started a family, but he didn't have exactly a traditional path. Even before he was retired and before I was born, he was getting involved in all these side businesses. And the most recent thing is he sprung it on us during Thanksgiving and said, "Hey, next month, I'm going to India, and I'm going to start shooting the movies." And before we get into the most recent one, like just give me something like what are some of the side businesses? Like, in your email, you were describing the kind of width and breadth of your dad's entrepreneurial venture. I just want, if you could just tell me about some of them. "Oh, absolutely. So before I was born, he started a hardware business where he was competing against whole depot, where he was selling nuts, bolts, and screws." Or trying to, anyway, Roger remembers as a kid thinking it was normal to have a garage filled with unsold hardware surplus. When that business failed, his dad started looking for easier prey. He started eyeing kinkos. He had a photocopy business where he was just also in the garage, just trying to print off hundreds and thousands of copies, but he never had one customer. Kinkos also well-positioned to take on would-be disruptors like Roger's dad. However, other markets back in. The hair bleaching gel is a clear gel that women would put onto their face, onto any unwanted hair, just to bleach it, to make it less noticeable. He took over a basement and made his old laboratory, buying everything you can imagine from a chemistry set and setting that up. The gel product actually got stuck in R&D. Roger said he remembers once getting it on his own hat and it burning a lot. If his dad seemed undeterred by the failure of these businesses, the rest of the family felt differently. My mom has the extremely frugal, extremely conservative, put your money into savings, put your money into investments, don't chase wild ridiculous dreams. She was very clear that, hey, this is a waste of money. Her dad's doing another one of his dumb businesses and this is not going to go anywhere and it's not going to turn into something. So growing up, I always was a little hesitant and always a little frustrated with him trying these things where I said, yeah, this just could be another waste of money. That's how Roger felt back then. These days, he's an adult, a father of himself. His relationship with his own dad has evolved from one of periodic frustration to one of ambient concern because his dad's now in his 70s, retired a man living off the next day here and himself, no family money. He has what he has, which means if something were to go wrong, it could go very wrong. Which is why when Roger talks about his dad's newest venture, the Bollywood film he's streamed up, Roger sees how it's absurd, but he also worries about it. So give me like, start me at the beginning of just like one day you had a dad with a garage full of ideas. Another day you had a dad who was trying to make a Bollywood movie, you just like how did it even happen? Yeah, so my dad doesn't watch Bollywood movies. I've never heard from talk about Bollywood, I've never seen him watch a Bollywood movie in the background. It just sprung up really out of nowhere. He didn't have a fully baked idea, he didn't write a proper script, he just went into word and just started typing and if you look at it, it looks like his first draft. It doesn't look like he even reviewed it. Roger had included this word document in his email to me. The file that began his father's journey into movie making. This titled Flower Valley Summary, summary slightly misspelled with an E, Flower Valley though is the title of the film. In Hindi, it loosely translates to Lady with the Flowers, there's a dancer in the story who goes by that name. The plot summary is not tremendously easy to follow, I can tell you that it describes a time travel movie, which splits its action between India's present and India's past 250 years ago, that it involves a rebellious teenager and at one point a talking donkey. Roger's dad had also drafted a two-page script for what he calls a trailer, which is really just a movie scene. In that scene, a would-be movie producer shows up in the office of a Bollywood director to pitch him on his idea, a film called Flower Valley. The director even asks him, what kind of flower, a cauliflower? It's all fairly meta, and as pitches go, certainly very rough, and yet with nothing but that pitch, Roger's dad had somehow found a person in India who said he could turn his idea into a real film, supposedly a reputable Bollywood director, who quickly began submitting large payment requests to fund said film. Roger saw one of those requests. The request was coming from a regular Gmail email address. It wasn't tied to any production company, it was just like productions at gmail.com, so very suspicious if you take it at face value, it didn't seem very legit. Light Productions at gmail.com. Why would a reputable Bollywood director be using this sort of email address anybody could make about 90 seconds? Roger, curious about this so-called director, asks his dad to give him the guy's name. The director is Kamal Chandra, who if you go online and start googling him, there's one news report about one of his movies being very controversial. Other than that, I didn't see a lot of movies. I saw an IMDB page, I saw an Instagram, but not much information outside of that. And were you like, was it like, you were trying to find out if this was okay, or was it kind of like, you suspected it wasn't okay, and you were trying to find something to prove to your father that he ought to stop? I guess I was just trying to prove to myself that it was okay, but more so, hey, is this guy legit? Because for somebody who claims to be an established Bollywood director, to come to him and say, hey, something about your concept, something about your film just really, really captivated me, and I normally do, and these are his exact words. I normally do projects that are ten times the size, but your concept was so unique that I felt, I felt gravitated towards it, and I felt like I really wanted to produce it. It just, it just doesn't sit right with me. Did you worry at all that it was possible that this wasn't even Kamal Chandra? Like that was a real director, but that it wasn't the person your father was doing business with? Oh, absolutely. And what is the movie budget, like, in total? Around $300,000, $300,000, a lot of money for a person, a lot of money for your dad to send to a stranger, but wasn't enough money to make a real feature film? In India, the big hit films have multi-million dollar budgets, but it wasn't clear which part of the market Kamal Chandra worked in, what his films were normally budgeted for. So Raja started trying to better understand the world his dad had leapt in too. I've done some research I went on to Reddit, and I put a post out there asking people about the situation, asking about this director. No one really gave me any information outside of the film.
of what I could Google on the internet. Some funny things did happen, though. I started getting DMs from people about, hey, did he finish casting the movie? Does he need a lead female character, your dad? I'm like, I don't know. This is not what I'm looking for. This is, I'm not trying to help them make the movie. I'm just trying to see if it's a real movie. - If Roger was worried that the internet had opened a door between his father and people desperate for his father's money, this was not helping. The fact that even in his Reddit post asking if the director was legit had itself summoned people looking for work in Bollywood. However, the Reddit post did produce one intriguing result. A stranger, WhatsApp name Chaya Chaya, reached out to say that he was a Bollywood insider and he might have some information for him. Roger, of course, is nothing about Bollywood. Excitedly responded, curious to learn about his new source. How well placed in the industry was he? - He admitted to being a third assistant director and when I asked him what a third assistant director does, he said, not much really, something more like a production assistant. - The first two assistant directors do more work. - Yeah, exactly. - Still, Roger found this kid helpful. Even a third assistant director knew more about Bollywood than Roger did. So he shared everything he had with Chaya Chaya, who in turn told him that from his experience of Bollywood, none of this looked good. - He said there's a lot of red flags. He even suggested telling my dad to pull out, but the wheels were really set in motion. Things were moving ahead very quickly. So it's more, okay, at this point, what can we do to contain this? What can we do to make sure that my dad isn't going to just walk away dead broke from this? - And is that, was it after that interaction that you decided to email search engine? - Yeah, actually, I was pretty desperate. And so for us, what do you want us to try to find out? - I guess I would love for you to help find out if this project is really happening. If the person who claims that he is Kamal Chandra, the director, if that's really him, at this point, I just care that there is a product. Whatever my dad has paid for, it becomes something. - Okay, we're going to find out. We're going to learn more. After a short break, our investigation begins. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) - The following conversation is brought to you by LabCore on demand. We're all self-proclaimed experts about something. Our jobs, our friends, our favorite places to eat, to interlives of the stars of reality television, but are we as knowledgeable about our own health? LabCore on demand provides a convenient way to access health testing and insights. You can take control of your health with convenient health testing through LabCore on demand. I recently took a general LabCore on demand test to find out what exactly is going on inside my own body, which is an unnerving mystery to me. I did a very expansive test because I very much wanted to know, essentially why I always feel like I'm two hours short of the amount of sleep I would have preferred. And to be honest, the process was shockingly easy. I brought the test online, picked a nearby LabCore location for sample collection. There's a ton of them. I was able to get an appointment next morning, bike over, was in and out in about 15 minutes. And then, early next week, I got notified by email when my results were ready, so I could find out what was going on inside my own body. And I shared my results with our show's editor. So you're, if not the person that I talked to the most in contingent for the person I talked to the most has that true or not true? Absolutely. And what percentage on the pie chart of our conversations are about real or imagined health issues that I have diagnosed myself with? I mean, honestly, I think the percentage has gone down over the years, so it might have been higher, it's definitely higher. And now I would say it's about 20%. So if I told you that I just got like a fairly like full panel of the dancers also I can tell whatever is wrong with me, what's your level of anxiety as just a person has to have a conversation with me? As a person who's also in my 40s and thinking about my cholesterol, yada yada, I'm curious what you learned. Okay, you ready? Yeah. Here's what's very crazy. You're healthy. Totally healthy. (laughing) Congratulations. Thank you. I honestly am not sure what to think about now. I'm like totally unremarkable. I was convinced, 'cause I'm always tired, I was really convinced I was gonna have low testosterone and I didn't. Or iron deficiency or something like that. Well, I was convinced low testosterone, and then when I talked to my doctor, she was like, you're, you're paying too much time on the internet, the internet is trying to convince everybody that low testosterone. She said you have anxiety. Okay, I'm only surprised because I think I have thoughts about eating habits. Dude, Michael S. Raul's fantastic. Congratulations. You must have great genes. It's definitely nature and not nurture. (laughing) If you have questions about your overall health, lab core on demand is a trusted way to get insights that can power you forward. Just visit the website and choose from a suite of more than 100 lab tests, including micronutrient, cortisol, fitness, testosterone, and more. From there, visit the lab core location closest to you to get tested. It takes only days to receive reliable, easy to understand results from lab doctors' trust. Ready to start knowing yourself? Visit ondemand.labcore.com/searchengine and use code search to save up to 15% on select tests. That's ondemand.labcore.com/searchengine and use code search. Know yourself. (upbeat music) Welcome back to the show. Bollywood. We cannot proceed further into our story without a primer on this world that Raja was chasing his father into. So Bollywood, as you might already know, gets a name from Bombay, which is what many people who live there used to call the city. When Americans hear the word Bollywood, they think of a genre. We think of a Bollywood movie as big and emotional with song and dance and over the top fighting scenes. And while the word Bollywood literally describes movies made in Bombay with Hindi dialogue, it's a word we're using here to cover the entire Indian film industry, which exists throughout the country and makes movies in many languages. Taken as a whole, Indian film does not have the reach of American film, nothing does, but it's big. India releases more films per year than any country on earth, twice as many as we do. And like here, India's film industry is cutthroat, a perilous place for anybody, let alone an outsider. I learned all this from a phone call with a Bollywood insider, a real insider, not a third assistant director. A Bollywood journalist turned screenwriter named Ankur Padak. When we spoke, he was on set. How are you doing over there? Good, good. It's been a fairly predictable day, so quite okay. What happens in a predictable day? You know, like that is usually not a diet emergency where you're going on to set. And you know, firefighting stuff that you've not planned for, and actors are not throwing tantrums on. - This sounds like production. - Yeah. - Ankur, a person who seemed to deserve his own story, but who today volunteered to appear in our assistant guide. He told me that over the years as the industry scaled, Bollywood has just evolved well past the image in my head. That it includes all sorts of movie genres now. Realistic, gritty, indie, not just the sentimental song and dance bandanzas, I've been picturing. But surprisingly, he said, even as the industry has scaled way up over the years, it's retained a fair amount of seediness and its fringes. Like, it's such a vast industry feature. It has so many characters kind of going in and out, playing various different parts. That like being taken for the right, getting fooled is remarkably common. You know, just down the road where I live, I mean, I live in the part where most of the production companies are. Like, if I go and grab a coffee right now, while I'm still on this podcast with you at a local cafe, I'll just see some really shady guy trying to meet another person and they wouldn't know who's trying to scam home. You know, they'll all talk like, "Oh, yeah, we're gonna make this big Bollywood film." And, "Oh, I know this one." "Oh, yeah, that one I worked with." I mean, they'll all be name-dropping. They'll all be talking big. And it's very rare for something really serious to come out of it, right? You just end up spending a lot of time. I say, you'll waste a lot of money. And it's very, very, very likely that you won't see any return, let alone a profit or a reasonable film that you're proud of.
When I told Onker the full story of Raj's father, the amateur outsider who was now sending hundreds of thousands of dollars to India, that gave Onker real pause. He didn't want to comment specifically on Flower Valley or on its director. He'd never heard of Kamal Chandra. And though he was concerned, he did stop short of the word scam. It imputed motive. It accused people he hadn't met. I thought maybe he was just being polite or litigation averse. But when I'd repeat the story to my friends in the American film industry, they'd all have the same reaction. Didn't I say? The story of a movie producer pouring his money into a director's bank account and never getting that money back? How could you call that a scam? That was how much of the time the film industry worked. I thought they were being funny, but then my friend Zev pointed me to this then ongoing legal battle. Netflix was tussling with a director named Carl Erik Rinch. Netflix had given Rinch $55 million for his project, which Rinch had then spent on luxury cars, luxury watches, and not one but two luxury mattresses. Rinch then tried to claim that these were all just very expensive movie props. They weren't. But this had gone on for years. Tens of millions of dollars squandered by a company as sophisticated as Netflix. We in film, the line between an artist and a scam artist, was a little blurrier than it was elsewhere. A scammer movie. My question was wrong. So I kept the question in my pocket for weeks. I take it out, worried in my palm, chew on it, just trying to work it into a more correct shape. And then one day it returned to me, finally right. One question, the one to answer here was this, was Raj's father being taken advantage of. That's what Raj really wanted to know. The word scam was loud, SEO, something simple to click on. The actual question here was quieter and frankly, maybe a little more sad. Was Raj's father, a man in his mid 70s, being taken advantage of? Do you mind just starting with your, by telling me your name? Oh, my name, Oh, Ranjit Gileskar's. And I know that you're retired, but I was wondering if you tell me what your profession was before. Oh, yeah. Oh, I was a little full of life history. Okay. No, it's not really. I graduated from a pharmacy and took off from there from India and I'm here for more than 50 years. I worked for about 40 years in pharmacy section, then I got retired. And I had nothing else to do. So I explore a lot of things and one of that ended up with making a movie. This first conversation with Ranjit from his home in Florida happened this past spring. I've since spent much more time with this man. He has a way of speaking. I really enjoy. He's funny. It feels sometimes like there's something larger than life in him that he contains behind a curtain of warm self-effacement. Like when he tells you correctly that he has a colorful life history and then a beat later walks it back with a knot, really. Your son told me that in your years as a pharmacist, you were also a real entrepreneur. Yeah, but I'll tell you the score if it is a successful business and my attend the score is 100 to zero. Wait, 100 to zero. More successful businesses or more attacks? No, I'm not successful. I'm a little clumsy business man. Ranjit's the self-described clumsy businessman told me how he'd been inspired to plunge into this latest expensive venture, Bollywood filmmaking. Ranjit's, as his son already told us, not actually a huge Bollywood expert or even fan, but an enormous fan of long-shot entrepreneurship. At one fateful day, Ranjit's found himself watching an Indian movie when a thought occurred. The movie was competently made, sure, but also there were things about it that bothered him. Something like you expected, okay, this is going to happen, there's a little bit villain and there'll be dancers and then we fight. Oh, I think the word you mean is, it's formulaic. It's like you know everything is going to happen once you know the genre. He is, I said nothing I can improve on it. So Ranjit cracked open his computer. At first he just started writing down the ways he'd improved the movie, his tweaks, but before long he found it was actually just designing his own Bollywood film from scratch. One he'd actually want to watch. Certainly weirder, certainly more tuned to his particular sense of humor. The resulting document was that so-called summary I'd seen, the story with the time traveling kid and the talking donkey. But seriously for Ranjit, this idea also happened to strike at about the same time he'd come into some easy money. I had a little luck on the stock market. I was watching stock for Meta or what is Facebook then. Yes. And it dipped to below $100. So what I did, I borrowed some money from a stock broker and bought thousands of them. Fortunately it shot up. I think there's something $600 and a plus. Oh wow. I sold some of them to finance this movie. So out of nowhere I could read about $300 plus thousand. Okay. So you've made your mind in the stock market. You have an idea for a Bollywood movie. You know what you wanted to be, but you've never made a film before. So how did you find people who were going to help you? How did you meet the director Kamal Chandra? Just a quote. A cold call. How did you find this number? A cold call? There was a movie studio, my brother called and said, "Do you have any movie director where it's experienced in movie making?" So this guy answered, "Wait, so how did you, but sorry, how did you find the number for a studio? How did you pick that studio?" Oh, if you go online and look for the movie studios in Mumbai and you get a bunch of them. Okay. So you went online. You found listings for movie studios in Mumbai. So you get his number, you called calling, he picks up, and you say, "You're a director. I have an idea for a movie. I have money for the movie. Will you make it?" Yeah. Then he asked me for the budget, then he said that budget is a little low. But if you send me the clip, I'll check it if it could be done. A week later, Runge's said the director told him, "It could be done." For an initial budget of $200,000, he told Runge's to expect a 10% over on that, but not more. Okay. The director, Kamal Chandra, also had notes about the actual story, like a critique. The movie couldn't just be jokes about cauliflower and the talking donkey, it would need more than that. It would need mystery, action. They agreed to add an attempted murder plot, and with that, a deal was struck. Runge's believed now that through a series of cold calls, he found himself a bonafide director, thousands of miles away. So he started to wire money. And we didn't even have far more leg to win, just a handshake. Just a handshake, not a contract. And who is he, like tell me about him, tell me what he's done before this. Who is Kamal Chandra? No, he's actually by profession, the engineer, but like me, he didn't go work as an engineer. He got into a movie industry, and after a few rough years, he became a director. He made by six movies. Okay. I'm actually looking him up right now. He has an IMDB page. He's done a bunch of music videos, and he's done some shorts, and he's done some features. He did the last film he directed. R-R-A-Y-B-A-T-C-Zero is 2026. Hmm. Have you gotten to watch some of the movies that he made before this? Oh, no. Why didn't you watch them? No, I didn't. Something about Runge's, you should know, is that like every artist and some madman, he is guided by a second sight. He sees the real world, but he also sees visions, things that don't yet exist but could. Those visions guide him sometimes. Also, Runge's possesses a great deal of trust. Trust the world will want the things he imagines, and trust that the people he's chosen to help him, or who they say they are. Runge didn't need to see all of Kamal Chandra's past work, because he felt connected to this man, who said that he too could see Runge's vision. This film that existed for now, only in Runge's mind. As for the large amounts of money, Runge's would soon be sending? He felt like he had a sense of where it would all go. The director's production company had sent him, after all, a line-by-line budget. The given full detail, how much will be used for actors, how much for the food, for the camera.
How can you get an actor for $20,000? So I raised it to $40,000. - I see, because it felt like they were underbudgeting for actors and obviously part of the quality of the movie's actors. - Yeah, because you know what happened? You know, actors are really hungry for the job. And I don't like to exploit them just because they wanted. So my attitude was different. I said, you know, they're human beings and I have to respect their skill. - So you're looking at the budget and instead of thinking like, they better not be spending my money too much, you're thinking these poor guys, like they're not paying the actors enough like they're, you're like, you're just thinking about the workers. - Yes. - Rungeth concerned about money, but not in the direction his son had worried. The audition tapes began to roll in. Tape after tape of would-be stars reading lines for these characters, Rungeth had imagined. - 300 people came in for casting, different roles. - Was it strange seeing this idea that had been in your head and then you have these actors who were- - Oh yeah, I was flabbergasted actually. I never thought it would be this giant. - Were you having fun? - Oh yeah. - More fun than working in a pharmacy. - Oh, yeah, I'm addicted to it. I'm not really. - A little bit addicted to it. - Rungeth, a little bit addicted. Told me he had already traveled to India three times in the last year for the project. Things were moving quickly. That cold call to director of Kamalchandra happened last November. They also met in person in Mumbai. And within just months, Kamalchandra had organized a shoot, a production with about 50 people. Well, 51. Rungeth had been there too, traveling with the crew from Mumbai over to Madhya Pradesh, a pretty rural state in India where their numbers had swelled to around 100. There were lots of extras. They apparently shot this entire film in three weeks. Rungeth sent me a handful of iPhone photos he'd taken on set, but it was a little hard to tell when I was seeing. His son, whose question had sent us here, had worried that the film shoot itself wasn't real. I could tell something was really being shot, but what? What would exist at the end of all of this? When Rungeth's money was finally spent, Rungeth did not have this concern. He was sure there'd be a film at the end of this. And not just that, he was convinced that he would even make his money back. He said the director had guaranteed it. How soon are you going to be able to see like a cut together version of the movie? I think that's the end of it. In the beginning of June, they said they'll string it together, yeah. And is it in person? Are they going to send it? How does it? No, no, no, I'll be going this. You're going to go and get up to it. Yeah, I'm, I'm actually going to be in India in July, I think. July, I think, yeah, I think you'll be welcome. And it'll be more than a pleasure to host you. Only thing is it'll be a little rainy and hot. I don't mind raining and I don't mind heat. The only thing I mind is cold. I booked a ticket. [MUSIC] After the break, search engine goes bollywood. [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC] Welcome back to the show. [MUSIC] [MUSIC] This July, I found myself in India on a plane to Mumbai with my editor Shruti. She had been coordinating over the months with Ranjith. The original plan had been for us to come to watch and edit of the completed film, Flower Valley. But there'd been delays, the crew was still shooting, which had created an opportunity for us. We could actually go inspect the set, witness the shooting in person, watch this director at work. Honkhar, the bollywood journalist turned screenwriter, had told us that to know for sure whether Ranjith's money had been spent well or not, you'd really have to hire a film auditor to review the film's budget. But when we asked Ranjith for a copy of the budget, he politely declined. [MUSIC] So, we were arriving in person, hoping to use our own eyes and common sense to answer our question. [MUSIC] Was Ranjith, Raj's father, being taken advantage of? [MUSIC] Our flight to Mumbai arrived exactly on time. Check, check, check, check, check, look at that. Truthie and I walked out of the terminal. Okay, so we're looking for Ranjith, who is wearing a light blue shirt. He scanned the crowded outdoor arrivals area, searching for our man. So he said that he's right next to the guy. There they are. Hi, Ranjith. I've been up, we've been shooting a lot. Different meets in person and only then realize that you've been picturing them completely wrong. I don't know why, but I'd expect him to be flamboyant. Like, my imagination had cast him as a person in a Bollywood movie. But he was normal, nondescript. On screen, he would have been an extra. A pleasant man with a line of dialogue. Our Hindi interpreter, Charna Kanchandani, was there too. Very windy. Yeah, very windy. Oh, thankfully, thankfully. It was monsoon season. So, lots of rain, but also humidity, like I just never experienced. The air in front of my face felt like a hot, wet towel. Left on the floor of a steam room for a century or two. We hop in a car together, all four of us. We're driving from the airport towards an area called Mud. Ranjith tells us it's where some people rent small, cheap lots to shoot in. There, who would meet the director, Kamal Chandra. See him at work. So what time does the shooting start today? 9 o'clock. What is the scene that is being shot today? Okay, this is a parody of the character from 250 years back. He shows up in a director's office, movie director's office, and he dictates. I want this movie. This is how I want it. And he has outrageous demand for it. As Ranjith described the scene, I realized this was from that two-page script that his son had sent us in that email so many months ago. The scene where a movie producer with an idea for a film called Flower Valley throws money on the desk of a director and then starts telling him his increasingly strange ideas for the movie. I'd found the scene to be a bit meta, and I wondered if Ranjith, who loved to make jokes on his own expense, was doing that again here. I'm pretty sure he means yes, but like all artists, he's cagey when you ask him what things mean. He's happy enough to talk about his life, though. A life which had begun in the very city we were driving through. Mumbai. Ranjith explains to his born here, born in the son of a police officer, a family of modest means. The son whose life had followed an unusual path. As we make our way through the city's sluggish traffic, Ranjith retraces that path through various buildings where moments in his life had happened. When you were leaving, right? His journey to America had begun in that U.S. consulate, but it had been a wandering kind of journey. It actually started this one day at the movies. Ranjith ended up a pharmacist, he says, all because of a plan to catch a film at a nearby theatre. And the funny part is the way I got into this pharmacy college was there was a movie theater called Aurora. Me and my friend went there, and we went there a little too early. So my friend said, you know, there is a pharmacy college there. Why don't we go and see if we can apply? And I just put my application in there and I forgot about it. I get a call, okay, you got an admission for pharmacy, come on in. And then there was opportunity to come to U.S. I jumped on the board and got there. I was starting to recognize the logic by which Ranjith sometimes adventured through his life. There was a dreaminess to it. Like here, the way killing time before a movie had led to impulsively applying for pharmacy college, which had led him ultimately to this career in America. A career more lucrative than anybody at home would have imagined. So what were you going to say, Ranjith? No, I don't have it. I'm a quiet guy, actually, you made me talk a lot. It's just that heartbreaking.
(upbeat music) - This is so much fucking good. (upbeat music) - He's like a full audio visual inversion experience. - Very Maxwell's. - Bombay is a city so overwhelming that when I try to reduce it to words, I can feel it slipping through them, but here's how it felt as an American. Take the hustle and honking cacophony of New York City. Mix it with the feeling LA offers, the anxiety of being in a city that's socially organized like the world's tallest pyramid, golden success beyond your wildest dreams for the people who fight to the narrow top, supported by an infinitely wide base at the bottom, packed with hustlers, strivers, people dreaming of a fantasy that all of them can see and most will never touch. That's the baseline feeling, but what amplifies it so strongly is the city's density. Some of the densest neighborhoods you can find anywhere on Earth, millions more residents to New York City, crammed onto a much smaller plot of land. One neighborhood, Darryl, 12 times denser than Manhattan. There are so many dreams here, you almost can't breathe. And now we've arrived at the gated entrance of a place called Boulard Gardens. There's a few little sets here, a fake temple, a fake police station. But it's pretty bare bones. I see lots of extras, many chowing down hungrily at a little table where food's been set up, I think some doll. And running between the legs of these extras, fighting over scraps, many stray dogs. I think about Ancar, our Bollywood expert, who said that there were ways to make a film for 300K or less. A studio lot like this, I think, could save you some money. I asked Grungis, are you paying for that catering? I'm supposed to at age four. We get out of the car and stride towards the set with the flower volley crews using today. I know we're walking into the shooting place. Do they know who you are, Grungis? When you walk in? Cool, they know. Of course they know who I am, Grungis says. And he's right, they do. As we walk into the small building where his scene is being shot, here's what I noticed. This big crew, maybe 50 people, running around with props and lights, with this hurried focus that only pauses for Rungis. When Rungis passes, people step back respectfully. Rungis is not nondescript here. How would you describe the building where and the interior? But there's a bunch of like film lights, whatever. And then there's a door on which says, "Director." Just to be clear, this is not director Kamal Chandra's office. This is a fake office of a fake director for the movie scene they're shooting. A big wooden desk behind it, fake looking posters that show diagrams for filming specific shots. There's even, hang on the wall, one of those boards that claps shut when the L action, the clapboard. I feel a moment of vertigo. We've come here to record a podcast about whether a movie's actually being filmed. And now we're on a set for a fake movie with a fake director inside of a possibly real movie. I wonder for a second if I myself am fiction. And then Rungis points and says, "Here's the real director." Hi. PJ, it's a nice to meet you. Say him, yes, say him. Hi. Come on. Nice to meet you. Say him, yes. At last, Kamal Chandra, the director. He looks the part, baseball hat, headphones wrapped around his neck. And I recognize his face from the IMDB page. Meaning, right away, we can rule out the theory that this has all been an elaborate cat-fishing scam. How has shooting been today? We have shot one scene over here. This is the second scene. Now we'll start. Kamal asks, if I speak any Hindi at all, I say now. But fortunately, Jharna, the Hindi interpreter, was here to help. If it's OK, we'll just follow you. We are taking for court for this scene. We can do lunchtime. He says we can talk at lunchtime. Although lunchtime would prove to be a horizon. Always in sight, never in reach. Across from the fake director's desk, a love seat where the real director, Kamal Chandra will set his monitor in front of him. He invites me to squeeze in beside. We're further crowded in by the three cameras. Prep for the scene begins. Crew members spraying down the whole set with something that has this real chemical smell. With that spray, they're spraying everything down with. Four flights. Because of the rain, lots of flights. The idea is to spray, kill a big cloud of flies, and then shoot quickly before the next cloud inevitably arrives. Kamal Chandra begins directing. Stand by. Sound? Silence. Kamal Chandra. Silence, please. Silence, silence. Where's the other one? Where is it? Where is it now? Mode, mode, mode. Action. The actor playing the Bollywood director sits alone in his office, his thick black glasses. As he closes his laptop, the door swings open. And we see this comic actor bounce in. Heavy set man with a big mustache, a dollop of Chris Farley to him. Dress in pink, wearing the clothes of a rich guy from another time. The aristocrat from 200 years past. Man, produce him. The aristocrat announces that he is a producer and tells his director that he not only has an idea for a movie, but also money to fund it. The director sees the cash and his attention sharpens on this strange man in front of him. What kind of movie does the producer want to make? The producer unspulls a series of increasingly outrageous ideas. He wants his 14-year-old nephew to be the star of the film. He wants the movie to have a talking donkey. He wants the title to be Flower Valley. The director asks, what kind of flower? Call of flower? Call of flower? Call of flower? What kind of idea? What kind of flower? It is so strange to watch this idea, which has gone from runch's imagination through the internet, from Florida to India. And now to watch these actors dutifully recreate it. It's like listening to a foreign orchestra play a tune that someone mindlessly hummed to themselves, while folding clothes. Extra narrowly strange. The director, Kamal Chandra, calls cut, gives his notes, and they take it again over and over. Minutes to hours. So we've been here for about three hours now. They're definitely filming. A lot of takes. Closed-ups. They're in the scene that they were in when we walked in, which is not a very long scene. But there's the wide shot, the medium shot, the close-ups, the reset things. I think the sort of like finance is a surprising thing. It's like they are not even remotely half-assing. They are like absolutely whole-ass. Like the day they die. It's totally crazy. Action! The actors are locking in, finding new laughs in the dialogue. The scene's getting noticeably sharper. At one point, Ranjith stands up to whisper a note to Kamal Chandra, to his director, to make sure the scene plays exactly as he intended it. At another point, during a quick chai break, Ranjith walks over and asks us, "I was commanding the respect from everybody here." Does it feel good to be like the producer on set? Our interpreter, Jarna, adds that she has also noticed this dynamic. You know, everybody knew him. Everybody was kind of deferring to him, because he's the guy with the money. That's what it is. Even they have a little hint, and I'm running out of money. They will dump me like a hot potato. Are you worried about that at all? No, I had enough money. Jarna jokes about Ranjith's power here. About how, not that he would, but if he wanted to, he could make anyone on set disappear. You see, you, that one, out. And you know me, that wasn't really out. That's some command. At least one should have it in one lifetime. And this is my 50 minutes. Back home, does your family understand what's happening here? Does anybody understand? No. Absolutely no. If my wife has no idea that I'm spreading 50 people here today, she doesn't know that you're walking in a room where 50 people are answering to you. [LAUGHTER] That's the way it is. I'd come here wondering if Ranjith was being taken advantage of. I had been thinking narrowly, just about money, but I hadn't had much of an understanding of what else could drive him. He commanded respect here. And more than that, Ranjith told me about how, in his decades as a pharmacist, the weeks that turned into years, counting pills for people over and over again. The most interesting thing that had ever happened to him was an armed robbery.
But that life was over now, and Runjith found himself at an age when many people rest, instead on a great adventure. I was starting to better understand what had brought Runjith here, but what about Kamal Chandra? He was clearly an actual director. Why was he working on this particular project? Action! When would we get to talk? We're smushed together, die to thigh on a love scene. But it wasn't like I could sneak in a whispered question to Chandra while his scenes ran, as much as I wanted to. Somebody finally calls for a lunch break. I get excited, but only some of the crew filters out. Kamal Chandra and his actors, they keep shooting. I genuinely cannot tell if he's busy avoiding a conversation with me, or perhaps both. It's now been over four hours. We're still waiting for our Bollywood exclusive interview with the film's director, Runjith. It seems we've gotten tired because he went to go nap in the car. I think he consumed his daily allotment of clamor today. So we're just hanging out, swatting at flies, waiting to see if we get to ask some hardy questions. While we waited at Jarna, the Hindi interpreter, had been on her own mini quest to try to learn more about the director. And she picked up something intriguing. She was saying that the director is an IIT from Kanpur, IITN. They are the most educated and the most respected people over here. I have to explain. In America, an engineering school graduate like Kamal Chandra becoming a film director is not that remarkable. But in India, to get into IIT specifically is so difficult, like Harvard or Yale, dropping that opportunity for Bollywood is considered very weird. It just didn't map onto anybody's understanding of normal motivation or ambition. Also, we'd learned in India that the trailer for Chandra's new movie was out, and it looked good. Decent budget, like a normal indie movie. Something you'd watch on Netflix. Both facts just made our question more stark. Why was Kamal Chandra working on this particular project? It's 5pm now. The crew resets for a new scene. Lights are moving, cameras are moving, fly just slow into my eyes. The next shot is outside. It features finally the famous cauliflower. There's a man whose job it is to hold the cauliflower. He's a cauliflower grip. They have one on every set. We stand outside in the drizzle. The grip hints the cauliflower to the actor playing the director in the film and the new scene again. The actor looks at the cauliflower. First, a little scared. He sees a movie poster. The movie poster for the film, for a flower volley. And the poster of the woman, the dancer, holds the cauliflower towards the sky, be it typically. The actor playing the director now somehow understands this is the movie he's going to make. He triumphantly casts his cauliflower towards the sky and says in English to no one in particular. Lights, camera, action. Cut, says the real director, Kamal Chandra. They now have the first take. Of course, they want more. They shoot this scene now over and over. Reality, for me, has just become a CD that skips. With each take, I lose hope. I keep thinking I have no hope, but I keep finding little marginal additional percentages of hope to lose. I now understand that I have flown 15 hours and watched 1,000 takes of two scenes and that I will never interview Kamal Chandra. He is either a serious man who takes his work seriously or a tactical man who has figured out how to box me out. I petitioned truthy. Let's just get him on the phone and we're back in America. Like that'll happen. And then a miracle. He calls for a break. After 10 straight hours of working, Kamal Chandra says now we can talk. We go back inside, back into the fake director's office, and settle down on the couch. Ranjith, whose son's concern has sent me 8,000 miles from my home, is nowhere to be found. Kamal Chandra begins by apologizing. No, very busy. He's sorry we've had to wait this long. And then we dive in. Jarna are interpreting something next to us. I begin with the obvious question. I'm trying to understand this film, Flower Valley, how did this happen? How did you end up shooting this movie? So Ranjith has contacted me. He's my assistant. Here, finally, Kamal Chandra's recollection of events. Which differed a bit from Ranjith's. Kamal says the way he remembers it. When Ranjith first reached out, Kamal's assistant had taken the initial call. Only after had Kamal taken a meeting. And he left that first meeting feeling uncommitted. The project, he said, didn't feel at all concrete. But then they met again. And Kamal, without himself beginning to just work it out in his mind, how would you make this movie? Over the next months, he took Ranjith's nub of an idea and converted it into a proper screenplay. Why? I think the money, the idea that this story came with a paid-for budget must have helped. But Kamal Chandra insisted for him it was the story. He liked it, the time travel, the fact that it was told from a kid's perspective, and the dreaminess, the way it combined as Chandra put it, the logical and illogical, somehow the director related. He said that despite the five decades Ranjith had spent in America, the story's surrealness felt to him fundamentally Indian. When I met Ranjith, I felt that this film was in his dream. I don't know how many times he's been working on this. Kamal was saying here, when I met with Ranjith, I felt that this film was his dream, like an actual dream. Maybe he'd had it since childhood? I don't know how long he's been holding on to this. Kamal says, "Musing about the unknowable mind of his collaborator." I also can't know the inside of Kamal Chandra's mind. But I will say, when I remember how skeptical Ranjith's son was of the notion that a real director would take his dad's movie idea seriously, here it did seem like Kamal Chandra was taking the project seriously. It is strange to, you know, movies, they're like dreams. You know, you sit in the dark and you see these images, and the feeling of sitting in a movie theater, it's like you're having a dream with other people. Is it strange, like you're making this man's dream from far away, but that you also relate to? He pauses for a second and says, "Actually, my school is studying at the Exokton." He says, "You know, this is how I think about it." He says, "He studied mechanical engineering at a reputable college. He had an MBA." He been waiting on his end of school results. And in his downtime, he'd signed up for a month-long film workshop. He said that one workshop changed his entire life. He decided to drop it all, the prestigious degrees, and he began studying film instead. He'd been on a course for one life and gotten knocked off of it by this gust of a dream. Kamal says, "When he met Ranjit's G, he realized this person was really another version of himself." But one who discovered his dream late instead of early. Kamal says, "I fulfilled my dream, so I felt it was my duty to help him fulfill his." You saw yourself in him. You saw a different version of your life where you had not found what you loved as early. Yes, yes, we can say. One important thing. Here, Kamal adds, one thing you should know is that Ranjit and I argue constantly. He reminds me Ranjit is not a professional screenwriter and that he's quite emotionally attached to his story. Every change provokes real sadness. Kamal says he tells Ranjit what he tells every new producer. "You have to give your director some creatively way, or else the film won't work out." He says that he tells Ranjit's G, "If I'm going to make this dream real, I need to be able to speak to you honestly." "I have to fulfill my duty to tell you that I'm real." "Is this the wrong place?" None of this is the relationship I'd pictured between Kamal and the person he respectfully calls Ranjit's G. I try to explain to him how the story might look from the other side, from America. For someone in America, the story goes like this. It's like you have this retired man, he's made a little bit of money, he's decided he's going to make a movie. And he starts sending emails to people he doesn't know.
in another country to be like take my money and make the movie and I think most people would be very worried for him that somebody would be like yes yes and whatever and I think it's hard to imagine that you're a person with a career in a job you got to see on you were like I'm gonna help this person because I think it's the right thing to do actually we also get a lot of producers like Kamal said that from his point of view he meets with a lot of producers and he also has to worry about his real most producers just waste his time but runget he said after meeting him twice Kamal Chandra Katoel at least that he was unusually serious about making his movie and that while the budget was much less than the movie Kamal normally makes he tried to do his best and that he hopes when I see it I'll be impressed despite the low budget it's a nice sentiment but truthy has a final question for Kamal what is for you the goal for this film like what do you realistically what do you think is going to happen when it's finished in our industry in our line every film like he tells us in Hindi in my industry every film has a future a fortune luck it's not a given that great film succeed or that a bad film will fail but just like every person has a destiny he says every film does too Kamal says that for his part the team has worked very hard on the movie and at the very soon they'll have to leave it to its fate we've talked for about 30 minutes and his break is now over thank you so much thank you thank you it's 7 pm which means he has to get back to work there's still some daylight they're going to shoot a little more we go to the car to wake up runget but it turns out he's no longer there what do we do we lost now it turns into a different kind of story we finally find him we lost you where did you head oh no I didn't have it he had to take everyone would you pay everybody over the end of the day I'm okay so we should go I did turned out while we'd been recording runget had been settling the account with the executive producer he needed to take out $10,000 the cost for that entire day of work the 50 person crew the location the food we get in the car and we leave runget is clearly tired after the long day but if anything he feels even more confident about the movie he's making and would you make another movie if this were oh no this is it why not another one and to work how did you decide that oh I know it time to go and play with grandkids this is very interesting i fly home i think about what i'll say to runget's son to roger who'd wonder if his dad was spending all his money on a movie that didn't exist or wouldn't be made i tried to make sense of what i'd seen i really do believe that roger's worst fears thankfully were in the end unfounded his dad was not being taken advantage of he understood what he was buying and why he was buying it the promise that runget said commo chandra made to him that'll make all of his money back that feels bollywood to me the dream that could come true but which i myself would not personally bet on here in the end is what i do feel confident about about 50 years ago a trip to the movie theater sent runget on a path that led him to a successful life as an american pharmacist a dream for so many people in the place he grew up but not his dream and so when he'd made his money and his kids had grown up he went home one more time to be somebody else a bollywood producer and he took a very strange dream he'd had with a talking donkey a time traveling teenager and a symbolically important cauliflower and he spent a lot of money so that it could be projected on a wall for strangers and at some point it will be what happens after that is anybody's guess movies have their own fates people do too the life you're given the life you dream about and the rooms you can enter where they blend together until even you can't tell them apart so you know what i mean? so you know what i mean? that's a story for you this week stories like the one you just heard which take months of research international travel original music obviously cost much more time and money but we're able to do them thanks to the financial support we receive from our incognito mode subscribers the people who pay for an ad free version of the show with extra episodes next week on the incognito mode feed we have an interview with anchor pothach our bollywood expert i learned a ton from him but he also kept cracking me up it's a good conversation if you're not already a member and would like to support our show please head over to search engine.show or to sign up in apple podcasts i will say if you get the annual subscription on our website you can support us for less than five dollars a month thanks to everybody who has signed up and anybody who's considering it search engine is a presentation of Odyssey it was created by me pj vote and shruti pinimini who is also our show's editor Garrett Graham is our senior producer Emily Maltaire is our associate producer theme original composition and mixing by arman bazarian every week demand does magic but this week in particular apartment this music and for the special version of our theme this week we had vocals from arman bazarian and from phb bridgers back checking this week by natsumi agisaka kindie interpretation and translation by jarna conch and donny our production intern is payper du mont special thanks this week to superia drop it our executive producer is lia rees denes thanks to the rest of the team at Odyssey rob maranade craic cox erick donnelly collingayner more current josephina frances percourtney finesse tencati and hilary shuff if you have a question for the show please send it to us via email pj vote
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