Wednesday, July 16, 2008

Feed back from the first contact person

I met Mr Ravi Khemu , who is father of Kunal Khemu (Kalyug , Traffic signal , Dhol and Superstar).
He is also a medium scale producer , and actor . He has been in the industry for nearly two decades , and is very well connected in bolly wood .

I presented the Bollywood tourism Business plan to him .
And he told me it won't work .

His logic is as follows :

1. Producers spend lakhs of rupees in rent for places in studios , and film cities .
This is for the sole purpose of NOT having a crowd around .
2. They have to hire expensive and extensive security for keeping crowds away if present .
3. The only thing really worth showing on Indian movie shoots is the movie star .
So if there is a crowd of 50 people are hanging around the sets , waiting to meet the star and
the star spends even 20 min out of the 2 hours on the set , signing autographs , and posing for
photos , the producer looses money to the tune of 10 s of lakhs , which we can in no way hope
to reimburse .
4. The interaction between the stars and the crowd is inevitable , since there is very little else
the crowd will be interested in , and even the stars tend to be attention hungry .
The only person who loses out in the game is the producer , who also happens to be the person
who has to give us permission to come in in the first place.
5. The monetary value we offer to a producer is literally loose change for him .

This comes straight from the horse's mouth .
So i think we'll either have to really modify our approach or look for other avenues .

One positive thing that came out of the meeting is an alternative business plan :
In movie advertisement .

We would need to contact corporates and FMCG companies , figure out who'd be willing to advertise in a movie , negotiate which stars they want , and what price they are willing to pay , then connect them through to which ever production house is willing , and take our cut out of the deal .

awaiting your feed back .

1 comment:

Rohit said...

We are not talking crowds thronging the set jostling the actors. We are talking about 10 decent people silently watching movie action in place. Top studios like CNN let even tourists get inside ring view of live news studios, and are able to manage it.

However, we do need to incorporate these concerns with program design, and offer a value set for the producers like those people becoming brand ambassadors of the movie, put compliments on the movie set, praising the movie etc.

People will have concerns, but they have to be handled. Its only Day 1.