Bollywood Dreams

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2:03Get free shipping on your order and 365 day returns now available in Canada and the UK too that is q-u-i-n-c-e.com slash search engine. The email at 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 we'd met via the internet,

3:05in 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 not a quest which began with a phone call to the emails author. Can you say your name and tell me where you are right now? Hey PJ, I'm Rasha 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 like 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

4:11have 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 a movie. And before you get into the most recent one, like just give me a number of 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 ventures. 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. Raja remembers as a kid thinking it was normal to have a garage filled with unsold hardware surplus.

5:12When 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 Raja'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. Raja 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,

6:20put your money into investments, don't chase wild ridiculous dreams. She was very clear that, hey, this is a waste of money. Raja 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 nest egg 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 Raja talks about his dad's newest venture, the Bollywood film he's

7:21named up, Raja 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 this even happen? Yes, 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. Raja had included this word document in his email to me. The file that began his father's journey into movie making. His titled Flower Valley Summary, summary slightly misspelled with an E. Flower Valley, though,

8:21is 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 involves a rebellious teenager and at one point a talking donkey. Raja'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? That's all fairly meta, and as pitches go, certainly very rough. And yet with nothing but that pitch, Raja'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,

9:24who quickly began submitting large payment requests to fund-set film. Raja 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 light 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? Raja 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.

10:25And 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. I normally do, and these are his exact words. I normally do projects that are 10 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

11:26with? Oh, absolutely. And what is the movie budget, like, in total? Somewhere 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 into. 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 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?

12:26Does he need to lead female character, your dad? I'm like, I don't know. This is not what I'm looking for. I'm not trying to help them make the movie. I'm just trying to see if it's a real movie. If Raja 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, what's that name? Chaya, Chaya, reached out to say that he was a Bollywood insider, and he might have some information for him. Raja, 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.

13:26The first two assistant directors do more work. Yeah, exactly. Still, Raja found this kid helpful. Even a third assistant director knew more about Bollywood than Raja 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 was it after that interaction that you decided to email search engine? Yeah, actually. I was pretty desperate. 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.

14:30If 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. The following conversation is brought to you by LabCore On Demand.

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16:32So you're, if not the person that I talked to the most, incognition for the person I talked to the most, is 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, the test results that I can tell whatever is wrong with me, what's your level of anxiety as just a person who 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. Congratulations. Thank you. I honestly am not sure what to think about now.

17:33I'm like totally unremarkable. I was convinced because I'm always tired. I was really convinced I was going to have low test 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. Rol's fantastic. Congratulations. You must have great genes. Definitely major and not nurture. 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.labcord.com slash search engine and use code search to save up to 15% on

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20:38Up front payment of $45 for three months, $90 for six months, or $180 for 12 months, plan required $15 per month equivalent, taxes and fees extra initial plan term only. Greater than 50 gigabytes may slow when network is busy, includes up to 20 gigs hotspot. Capable device required availability speed and coverage varies, cementMobile.com for details. 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.

21:39And 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 there 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

22:43tantrums on. This sounds like production. Yeah. Honkhar, a person who seemed to deserve his own story, but who today volunteered to appear in our business as a 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 bananza that I've been picturing. And 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, PJ, it has so many characters kind of going in and out, playing various different parts. That like being taken for the ride, getting forward is remarkably common. You know, just down the road where I live, I mean, I live in the part where like most of the production companies are.

23:45Like if I go and grab a coffee right now while I'm still on this podcast with you at the local cafe, I'll just see like some really shady guy trying to like meet another person and they wouldn't know who's trying to scam home. You're not there. They'll all talk like, oh yeah, we're going to make like this big Bollywood film and oh, I know this one. Oh yeah, that one I worked with that. 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? They'll 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 the uncle the full story of Raj's father, the amateur outsider who was now sending hundreds of thousands of dollars to India, that gave uncle real pause. He didn't want to comment specifically on Flower Valley or on its director, he'd never

24:46heard 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. Did I say? Did 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 Zav pointed me to this then ongoing legal battle. Netflix was tussling with a director named Carl Eric 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.

25:47They weren't. But this has gone on for years. Tens of millions of dollars squandered by a company as sophisticated as Netflix. Maybe 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, worry to 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. The question, the one to answer here, was this. Was Raj's father being taken advantage of? That's what Raju 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?

26:49Oh, my name? Oh, Ranjit Gilleskuss. And I know that you're retired, but I was wondering if you tell me what your profession was before. Oh yeah. Oh, I'm so loved for life history. Okay. No, it's not reality. Raju, from the 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 not really.

27:52Your son told me that in your years as a pharmacist, you were also a real entrepreneur. Yeah. I tell you the score, it is a successful business and my attend the score is 100 to zero. Wait, 100 to zero, more successful businesses or more attempts? No, I'm unsuccessful. I'm a little clumsy businessman. Ranjit, the self-described clumsy businessman, told me how he'd been inspired to punch 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. And one fateful day, Ranjit 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.

28:54I'm like, you expect it, 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's going to happen once you know the genre. Yes, I said no, I think 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. For two at his leave for Ranjit, this idea also happened to strike. At about the same time, he'd come into some easy money. I had little luck on the stock market. I was watching stock for Meta or what is Facebook then.

29:54Yes. 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 rate 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 of Kamalchandra? Just a quote-unquote. Cold call. How did you find this number at a cold column? There were the movies to you. My brother called and said, do you have any movie director who had experience in moviemaking? So this guy answered. Wait, so how did you, but sorry, how did you find the number for a studio?

30:56Like how did you take that studio? 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. You so you get his number, you called calling. He picks up and you say, you're a director. Yeah, it's I have an idea for a movie. I have money for the movie. Will you make it? He asked me for the budget. Then he said that budget is a little low. But if you send me the script, I'll check it. It could be done. A week later, Rungis said the director told him it could be done. For an initial budget of $200,000, he told Rungis to expect a 10% overage 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.

31:57It 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. Rungis 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 formal agreement, just a hand check. Just a hand check, not a contract. Yeah. And who is he? Like tell me about him. Tell me what he's done before this. Who is Kamal Chandra? Well, it is 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. Like the last film he directed,

32:59our area, Batka Zero is 2026. Have you gotten to watch some of the movies that he made before this? Oh, no. Why didn't you watch them? No idea. Something about Runjuts, you should know is that like every artist in 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, Runjuts possesses a great deal of trust. Trust the world will want the things he imagines. And trust the people he's chosen to help him or who they say they are. Runjuts 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 Runjuts' vision. This film that existed for now, only in Runjuts mind. As for the large amounts of money, Runjuts would soon be sending.

34:02He 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 camera. The main part of that was a little worried about. For actors, they were only assigned about $20,000. It's like how can you get an actor for $20,000? So I raised it to $40,000. I see, because it felt like they were under-budgeting 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, you need to do that. He wasn't being then. I had to respect their skills. So you're looking at the budget, and instead of thinking like, they better not be spending my money too much, you're thinking,

35:03these poor guys, they're not paying the actors enough, they'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. ...was Flavagaster, actually. I never thought it would be this giant. Were you having fun? Oh, yeah. More fun than working in a pharmacy. Yeah, I'm addicted to it. In fact, I'm not really. A little bit addicted to it. Yeah. 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 Kamalchandra happened last November.

36:05They'd 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 Madya Pradesh, a pretty rural state in India, where their numbers had swelled to around 100. There were lots of extras. They'd 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 it 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 a cut together version of the movie?

37:07I think that's the beginning of June. Oh, that's a little stringy 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 into... And up to it. Yeah. I'm actually going to be in India in July, I think. July? I think, yeah, I think you'll be welcome. It will 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. You will see. After the break, the search engine. Kush Bollywood.

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41:22it. To get your Matic, go to MaticRobots.com right now. Go to MaticRobots.com slash search engine to get a year of free Heppabags with your purchase today. That's a $96 value at no cost to you that's MaticRobots.com slash search engine. Welcome back to the show. This July I found myself in India on a plane to Mumbai with my editor Shruti. She'd been coordinating over the months with Rangesh. The original plan had been for us to come to watch and edit of the completed film, Flower Valley.

42:22But 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, bunker. The Bollywood journalist turned screenwriter, had told us that to know for sure whether Rangesh'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 Rangesh for a copy of the budget, he politely declined. So we were arriving in person, hoping to use our own eyes and common sense to answer our question. Was Rangesh, Raj's father, being taken advantage of? Our flight to Mumbai arrived exactly on time. Shruti and I walked out of the terminal. Okay, so we're looking for Rangesh who is wearing a light blue shirt. We scanned the crowded outdoor arrivals area, searching for our man. So he said that he's right next to the guy?

43:22There they are. I love him. I feel like we've been chasing a lot. Different meets someone 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. It was my own soon 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. Runga tells us it's where some people rent small, cheap lots to shoot in.

44:25Most of the studio there. There who would meet the director, Kamal Chandra. See him at work. So what time does the shooting start today? It's 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 Runga 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 Runga, who loved to make jokes in his own expense, was doing that again here. Does he like a parody of you because it's like the person saying what they want them

45:25to do? Me, I don't know. I wrote it. 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. He was a police officer. Runga explained 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, Runga retraces that path through various buildings where moments in his life had happened. All your consulate was close to that 50-year-old-years-old bag. I had an interview over there. When you were leaving? His journey to America had begun in that US consulate, but it had been a wandering kind of journey. It actually started this one day at the movies. Runga ended up a pharmacist, he says, all because of a plan to catch a film at a nearby theater. And the funny part is the way I got into this pharmacy college was there was a movie theater

46:31called 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 admission for pharmacy. Come on in. And then there was opportunity to come to US, a gymton, the world, and got there. I was starting to recognize the logic by which Runga sometimes ventured 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 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, Franchet? No, I don't have it. I'm quite a guy actually made me talk a lot.

47:34Look, can you imagine it. Just that Las 80s. This is so much. It's like a full audio visual inversion experience. Very max-mossed. 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

48:37will 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, Dauravie, 12 times denser than Manhattan. There are so many dreams here, you almost can't breathe. 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 Ankar, our Bollywood expert, who said that there were ways to make a film for 300k or less. A studio like this could save you some money.

49:40I ask Grungeith, are you paying for that catering? I'm supposed to at age 4. We get out of the car and stride towards the set with the flower of Olly Cruz using today. We're walking into the shooting place. Do they know who you are, Grungeith, when you walk in? Co-denoid. Of course they know who I am, Grungeith 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 Grungeith. When Grungeith passes, people step back respectfully. Grungeith is not nondescript here. How would you describe the building we're in, then here? But there's a bunch of like film lights whenever, and then there's a door on which says, director. 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.

50:40There's even, hung on the wall, one of those boards that claps shut when they yell action. The clapboard. I feel a moment of vertigo. We've come here to record a podcast about whether a movie is 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 if I can if I myself am fiction. And then Grungeith points and says, here's the real director. Hi. PJ. Hi. Hi. Come on. Nice to meet you. Hi. Hi. Kamal Chandra, the director. He looks the part baseball hat headphones wrapped around his neck. And I recognize his face from the IMDB page. And right away, we can rule out the theory that this has all been an elaborate cat fishing scam. How is shooting been today? We have shot one scene over here. This is the second scene. We'll start now. You don't even know Hindi. No Hindi. No. Kamal asks if I speak any Hindi at all.

51:41I say no. But fortunately, Jhanna, the Hindi interpreter, was here to help. If it's okay, we'll just follow you. We are taking a record of this scene. We can do lunchtime. He says we can talk at lunchtime. Although lunchtime proved to be a horizon, always in sight, never in reach. Across from the fake directors' desk, a love seat where the real director, Kamal Chandra will sit, 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 are spraying down the whole set with something that has this real chemical smell. That spray, that they're spraying everything down with. They're not flies. They're because of the rain, lots of flies. 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. Sound of the rain. Ramara.

52:42Silence, please. Silence. Do the second one. What is this? Where is it? Move, move, move. 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 bouncing. 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. The aristocrat announces that he is a producer and tells this 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.

53:43He 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, a cauliflower? It is so strange to watch this idea which has gone from runcheth's imagination through the internet, from Florida to India. And now to watch these actors doodifully 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 Kalskut, gives his notes. And they take it again. Over and over.

54:44Minutes to hours. So we've been here for about three hours now. They're definitely filming. A lot of takes. Close ups. They're in the scene when we walked in. It's just like not a very long scene, but there's like the wide shot, the medium shot, the post-ebs, 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-acting. The thing they're doing. It's totally crazy. The actors are locking in, finding new laughs in the dialogue. The scene's getting noticeably sharper. At one point, Rungus stands up to whisper a note to Kamal Chandra to his director to make sure the scene plays exactly as he intended it.

55:46At another point during a quick chai break, Rungus walks over and asks us, I was commanding the respect from everybody. Does it feel good to feel 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 a guy with the money. That's what it is. Even they have little hind and I'm running out of money. They will dump me like a hot potato. You worried about that at all? No. I had enough money. Jona jokes about Rungus' 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're knowing that person will be out. That's some command. At least one should have it in one lifetime.

56:48And this is my 15 minutes. Back home, does your family understand what's happening here? Does anybody understand? No. Absolutely no. My wife has no idea that I'm feeding 50 people here today. She doesn't know that you're walking in a room where 50 people are answering to you. That's the way it is. I'd come here wondering if Rungus 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, Rungus told me about how, in his decade 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 Rungus found himself at an age when many people rest, instead on a great adventure.

57:52I was starting to better understand what had brought Rungus here. But what about Kamal Chandra? He was clearly an actual director. Why was he working on this particular project? Action. Oh, you're going to fucking like I'm producing. When would we get to talk? We're smushed together, thigh to thigh on the left-seed. But it wasn't like I could sneak in a whispered question to Chandra while his scenes ran. So much that I wanted to. Somebody finally calls for a lunch break. I get excited. But only some of the crew filters out. Action. 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, Rungus. Seems to have gotten tired of you, he went to go nap in the car.

58:54I think he consumed his daily allotment of glamour today. So we're just hanging out, swatting at flies, waiting to see if we get to ask some hardy questions. While we waited, Jarna, the Hindi interpreter, had been on her own mini quest to try to learn more about the director. And she told us she picked up something intriguing. She was saying that the director is an IIT from Kampur, 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, it's 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. So we'd learned in India that the trailer for Chandra's new movie was out and it looked

59:56good. 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. Are we, 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 hands the cauliflower to the actor playing the director in the film and the new scene again. All right, go on. Action. 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. In the poster of the woman, the dancer holds the cauliflower towards the sky.

1:00:57Be 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 1000 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.

1:02:00I petitioned Shruti. 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 business. He's sorry we've had to wait this long. And then we dive in. Jarna are interpretive sitting next to us. I begin with the obvious question. I'm trying to say I'm like, this film flower valley, how did this happen? How did you end up shooting this movie? So Ranjithi, I contacted you. I'm a mere assistant. Here, finally, Kamal Chandra's recollection of events, which differed a bit from Rungis.

1:03:05Kamal says the way he remembers it. When Rungis first reached out, Kamal's assistant had taken the initial call. Only after had Kamal taken a meeting. And he'd 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.

1:04:05He said that despite the five decades Rungis had spent in America, the story was very surreal and felt to him fundamentally Indian. When I met Ranjith, I felt that this film was in his dream, which he had been working on for a long time. 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. Is this strange to...

1:05:06Movies, they're like dreams. 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 Exakton. 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'd 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

1:06:08himself. But one who discovered his dream late instead of early. Kamal says, I fulfilled my dream. So I felt that 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 see. 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 a 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.

1:07:15None 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 someone would be like, yes, and whatever. And I think it's hard to imagine that you're a person with a career and a job. You got to see him and you're like, I'm going to help this person because I think it's the right thing to do. Actually, we also get a lot of producers. Kamal said that from his point of view, he meets with a lot of producers. He also has to worry about his real. Most producers just waste his time.

1:08:16But 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 Shruti has a final question for Kamal. What is for you the goal for this film? Like, what are you realistically? What do you think is going to happen when it's finished? In my industry, every film has a future, a fortune, luck. It's not a given that a great film will succeed or that a bad film will fail. But just like every person has a destiny, he says every film does too.

1:09:19Kamal says that for his part, the team has worked very hard on the movie. And very soon, they'll have to leave it to its fate. We've talked for about 30 minutes, and his break is now over. It's 7pm, 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 Rengis, but it turns out he's no longer there. What did we do? We lost. Now it turns to do a different kind of story. We finally find him. We lost you, where did you head? I know I didn't have it. She had to take everyone. We were today everybody, over the end of the day. I'm not a good spot. I'm okay with such a way we should go. Turned out, while we'd been recording, Rengis 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.

1:10:21We get in the car, and we leave. Rengis 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? No, no. This is it? Why not another one? And two or... How did you decide that? Oh, I know it. Time to go and play with grandkids. That's a great answer. If I home, I think about what I'll say to Rengis' son, Tarraja, who'd wondered 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 Raja's worst fears, thankfully, were in the end unfounded. His dad was not being taken advantage of.

1:11:24He understood what he was buying and why he was buying it. The promise that Rengis said Kamal Chandra made to him, that he'll make all of his money back, that feels ballywood to me. A 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 Rengis 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 ballywood 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.

1:12:25And 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.

1:13:49The story of the movie 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, he costs much more time and money. But we're able to do them thanks to the financial support we received 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 Anker Potak, our ballywood 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 $5 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 Pinemini,

1:14:55who is also our show's editor. Garrett Graham is our senior producer, Emily Maltara is our associate producer. Theme, original composition, and mixing by Armand Bizarreon every week, demand does magic, but this week in particular, Armand, this music. And for the special version of our theme this week, we had vocals from Armand Bizarreon and from Phoebe Bridgers. Back checking this week by Natsumi Ajasaka. Hindi interpretation and translation by Jarna Kanchandani. Our production intern is Piper Dumont, special thanks this week to Supria Droga. Our executive producer is Leah Riessenis, thanks to the rest of the team at Odyssey. Rob Morandi, Craig Cox, Eric Donnelly, Colin Gainer, Mora Curran, Josephina Frances, Kirk Courtney, Vanessa Timcotti, and Hillary Schuff. If you have a question for the show, please send it to us via email pjvote85 at gmail.com. If you have a business and would like to advertise on our show, send requests to that email address as well, subject line advertising. Also, if you're looking for a cheaper way to support us, please consider rating and reviewing

1:15:56us on Apple podcasts or following us on Spotify. Those are the behaviors those platforms algorithms seem to enjoy. Thank you, as always, for listening. We'll see you next week. This episode of Surgeon Gen is brought to you by Smile Generation. Did you know your dentist might spot health issues before your doctor does? It's true. I used to think that mouse was just a standalone island containing teeth, but it turns out what happens in the mouth doesn't stay in the mouth. It actually impacts your heart, your brain, and your overall health. Smile generation takes a whole body approach to care, because oral health issues are linked to long-term conditions like heart disease, diabetes, and Alzheimer's. Carrying for your smile is really about caring for your whole self, and there's a unique kind of confidence that comes from playing the long game and being proactive. Regular dental exams and screenings can help detect potential health concerns early, since before you even noticed symptoms. Smile generations trusted dentist focused on modern, patient-focused care that helps you unlock a new level of confidence, so your health never holds

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