Co-produce a Hollywood Movie – Online

Indian team creates a world’s first – a movie produced through a blog.

Mumbai (PRWEB) May 24, 2006 -- Shashanka Ghosh and Mahesh Murthy created a stir when they worked together at MTV Asia in 1992 and at Channel [v in 2000. Now they’re prepared to do it again, with a Hollywood movie they’re co-producing - entirely online.

Log on to www.betelnutkillers.com, and you can read the synopsis of the story they aim to produce – an over-the-top tale involving an Indian assassin who wants to go global, a family of Indian immigrants in the US who want to, quite literally, kill the competition, naked holy men, driving on the wrong side of the road, and more celluloid madness.

What’s even more unusual from this duo, who between them has credits for path-breaking music channel promos “Ear Cleaner” and Quickgun Murugan, apart from cult flick “Waisa Bhi Hota Hai Part 2” is that the entire movie is being produced online. Random people from around the world have come to the website and blog – they’ve decided they like the story – and they’ve signed up to invest anywhere from US$ 100 to US$ 2,000 and more to get credits on the big screen – and profit-sharing if the movie does well after its release.

“We’ll know by early 2007 how the movie’s done – but we think given the low cost – just about a million dollars and its international appeal, it could be a decent hit,” says Mahesh Murthy – who apart from co-producing the movie also runs Pinstorm – the search engine marketing firm that’s supporting the movie online. Shashanka Ghosh, co-writer and director of the movie has his take. “You can either call the idea inspired – or born from sheer desperation. Here we were, a couple of Indians in Bombay – and we wanted to make a Hollywood movie in English. And that meant the regular lot of producers in India had no idea what we were up to – and we were complete unknowns to the bigwigs in Hollywood. The more we kicked the idea around – and we’ve been doing so for eight years – the more we felt that the net was the place to go.”

Mahesh Murthy, who also has global online marketing credits on brands like Amazon and Yahoo behind him demurs when asked if this will set a trend going forward. “I really don’t know. But there are a lot of wonderful scripts – and I think this is one of them – that are looking for the right kind of funding support to get made. Everybody we narrated the story to seemed to love it. And a million dollars seems a lot – till we broke it down and said, hey, that’s like 5,000 people each putting in $200. And suddenly it seemed doable.”

So how much has the project raised so far? In the new spirit of transparency – every cost and revenue detail is listed on the site in real time – we saw that over US$14,000 had already come in – a little less than 2% of what the filmmakers hope to raise – in just a couple of weeks, with co-producers from as far apart as Singapore, US, Canada and India swiping their credit cards to get the movie made.

When do they plan to start shooting? “After the money comes in”, is Mahesh Murthy’s tongue-in-cheek response. Ghosh, the more sober one adds, “We hope to shoot in North America in fall of 2006 and we’re asking all our friends – and their friends – and their friends’ friends - to go to the net and swipe their cards.”

How much can an investor hope to make back? “We think 30% is our expectation of what a co-producer can earn – apart from of course credits on the screen and the pleasure of seeing a good idea come to life,” says Murthy.

For those of you interested in the story and more, here’s the address once again –

www.betelnutkillers.com.

For more information contact:

Carolina James Bajaj / Meenakshi Vijay

Pinstorm Technologies Limited - Mumbai

Contact No: +91 22 2640 6456 extn : 215

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