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INNOVATION
& DESIGN Home Page Architecture Brand Equity Auto Design Game Room SMALLBIZ Smart Answers Success Stories Today's Tip INVESTING Investing: Europe Annual Reports BW 50 S&P Picks & Pans Stock Screeners Free S&P Stock Report SCOREBOARDS Hot Growth 100 Mutual Funds Info Tech 100 S&P 500 B-SCHOOLS Undergrad Programs MBA Blogs MBA Profiles MBA Rankings Who's Hiring Grads | | APRIL 30, 2004
By Vivek Wadhwa Adding a Hunk of "Sex" Appeal For our movie to work, we needed a bankable star. In Sex and the City's Jason Lewis, we've found just the ticket Let's talk about sex -- Sex and the City, that is. Millions of viewers around the globe arranged their Sunday nights to reserve a space for the risqué show about the steamy, sometimes seamy, side of the Big Apple. But with the series finally heading for the big DVD shelf in the sky, the cast was looking to move on to different projects. The single life gets old, and how many weird drinks can someone quaff in one lifetime? All of which proved to be a very, very good thing for My Bollywood Bride. In this installment, I'm going to tell you how we managed to rope in a leading Sex and the City cast member, one of Hollywood's hottest rising stars, and how we learned that making movies is a cocktail of preparation, good timing, and old-fashioned luck. CASTING CALL. As a technology executive on sabbatical who is helping to produce a Hollywood movie in India's film capital, Bollywood, I'm learning that there are a lot of similarities between both worlds -- and some stark differences, too. To build a successful tech outfit, you need a team of superstar programmers, good managers, and seasoned sales and marketing executives. Recruiting top talent is very important, but you do get a second chance if you make the occasional bad hire. The movie business is different, more like a mission to Mars: You get only one chance to get it right. You can have a great script, but if you make mistakes and produce a mediocre film, it will crash at box office. It's that simple. There are simply no second chances. My partners in this venture were doing a great job on all the basics. Brad Listermann, ex-investment banker turned producer, his Bollywood movie star wife Kashmira Shah, and ex-Columbia Tri-Star International division President Duncan Clark had combined their talents and leveraged their extensive contacts to create tremendous momentum. We had a fabulous screenplay. We had the money to get the cameras rolling. We had top directors. Each one a key ingredient in a successful movie -- sort of like hiring a solid development staff for a big tech company. Now, it was time to hire our actors. SO FAR, SO GOOD. True, the quality of the end product will be a reflection of the director's talents. Making a high quality movie doesn't guarantee that people will want to see the finished product, however. That often depends on the actors. Audiences generally prefer faces with whom they are already familiar. To get attract large audiences, established and popular stars always help. Getting top actors isn't easy, however -- especially, if you are on a tight budget. And even with big name stars, success is never guaranteed unless you do everything else just right. Our film had created a lot of excitement in Bollywood, where very few Hollywood movies have been produced, and this made it easy to recruit Bollywood's best talent. We cast Sanjay Suri as a Bollywood hero in our film. Sanjay has starred in over a dozen films, including the critically acclaimed Pinjar, Plan, and Filhaal. We also signed up Bollywood's favorite bad boy, Gulshan Grover, to play our villain. He has starred in close to 200 films. Next, we enlisted Neha Dubey, who was known to Western audiences for her role in Monsoon Wedding. So with Kashmira, and our Indian cast, we were in great shape. That was the easy part, however. The role that proved the hardest to fill was Alex, who falls in love with a Bollywood actress visiting Los Angeles, and follows her back to the exotic world of the Subcontinent. We had already endured endless debates on whether we wanted Alex to be a bumbling Englishman in the Hugh Grant mold, or a young, honest, All American Tom Hanks-type. Since the original story was loosely based on Brad's real-life romance with Kashmira, I had always argued that Alex should be American -- a view Duncan countered by saying that a self-effacing Brit would appeal to all audiences. More importantly, he added, a British actor's fee would be easier on our budget.
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