He wired $300,000 to make a Bollywood film. What he bought wasn't a movie — it was the feeling of being respected.
The son assumed his father had wired $300,000 to a scammer in India. A reporter spent a full day on a Mumbai set and found the old man knew exactly what he was buying: a room where everyone had to listen to him.
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The family had long since written it off as wasted money
Raja's mother is extremely frugal: money goes into savings, into investments, not into absurd dreams. She put it plainly back then — your father is at another stupid business, it won't work, it won't become anything. Raja grew up hearing this, and he has always been ambivalent and irritated by his father's repeated schemes. But now that he's an adult and a father himself, the relationship has shifted from "periodic irritation" to "constant worry": his father is in his seventies, spending his own retirement savings, with no family fortune as a backstop, and if it goes wrong it will go very wrong. So he can see how absurd the whole thing is while genuinely worrying. This thread runs through the whole piece — the real risk isn't "how much gets scammed away," it's that this is retirement money.
The script was a Word draft he banged out
Ranjit doesn't watch Bollywood and had never talked about Bollywood; the whole thing "sprung up really out of nowhere." He watched an Indian film, found it too formulaic — "I think I can improve on it" — and opened his computer and started typing. The document was titled Flower Volley Summary, with Summary misspelled. Flower Volley roughly means "the woman holding flowers" in Hindi; the story is half set in present-day India and half 250 years ago, with a rebellious teenager and a talking donkey. He also wrote a two-page "trailer" script: a would-be producer bursts into a Bollywood director's office to pitch Flower Volley, and the director asks "What flower? Cauliflower?" — and a few months later he did almost exactly the same thing himself, with the receiving email address lightproductions at gmail.com.
In Bollywood, getting fleeced is routine
PJ found a real insider as a guide: journalist-turned-screenwriter Ankur Paduk. He says the industry is enormous, and the shady edge has never gone away — the area he lives in is exactly where production companies cluster, and stepping out for a coffee you'll see a "shady guy" pitching a big project and name-dropping, and being strung along and cheated is "remarkably common," usually costing a lot of time, wasting a lot of money, and returning almost nothing, let alone a film you're proud of. He's worried, but he never once uses the word "scam," because that would be accusing motive, accusing strangers he's never met. PJ's friends in the American film industry react the same way: producers wiring money into a director's account and never getting it back is far too common in the movie business.
The film money came from one well-timed buy
Ranjit is not a man with family money. His project was funded by a stroke of luck: he watched Meta (then still called Facebook) stock, saw it fall below $100, borrowed from his broker to buy 1,000 shares, and then watched it run past $600. He sold part of it to fund the film, pulling together roughly $300,000 in all. Before that, his entrepreneurial record was grim: a hardware business lost to Home Depot, a garage copy shop with not a single customer, a depilatory bleaching gel stuck in development that also burned his son's hand. He laughs about it himself: "I'm a little clumsy businessman." When PJ pressed him on whether 100 to 0 was a success or a failure, he answered: the unsuccessful kind of 100.
There was not a shred of faking on set
In July, PJ and editor Shruti flew to Mumbai. The original plan was to see the finished film; because of delays they went straight to the set instead. At the rough location in Bular Gardens they saw a fake temple, a fake police station, stray dogs fighting over food, and extras eating boxed lunches; a crew of about 50 shot the same scene over and over in wide, medium and close-up, first spraying to kill one cloud of flies, then finishing before the next cloud arrived. PJ says they were "not even remotely half-assing it" — doing this thing without a single discount. Director Kamal Chandra showed up in a baseball cap, his face matching IMDb — and the theory that "this whole thing is an elaborate catfishing operation" collapsed on the spot.
What he bought was a room where everyone obeyed him
Ranjit says it plainly himself: "I was commanding the respect from everybody here." The translator Jarna sees the same thing: everyone on set knows him and goes along with him, because he's the one paying. Ranjit also knows this respect is conditional — the moment they sense he's running out of money, they'll drop him like a hot potato; but he isn't worried, he says he has enough. He also says his wife has no idea he fed 50 people today, "she doesn't know that you're walking in a room where 50 people are answering to you." After decades as a pharmacist, the most exciting thing in his life was an armed robbery; now, in his seventies, in another country, he has this kind of power for the first time.
The director saw another version of himself in him
Kamal Chandra came out of IIT Kanpur and also has an MBA, and was on a different path. While waiting for his final grades, he signed up for a months-long film workshop, which he says changed his life, and so he gave up those respectable degrees to study film. He says that at their first meeting the project didn't seem concrete at all, that only at the second did he start working out in his head how to shoot it, and that in the end he turned Ranjit's idea into a proper script; what he liked was how the story mixes "logical and illogical," and that surreal quality felt very Indian to him. His core explanation: "I fulfilled my dream. So I felt that it was my duty to help him fulfill his." He adds that the two of them argued often, because Ranjit is emotionally attached to the story and genuinely gets upset at every change.
Not a scam, but don't bet on him breaking even
Kamal's line on the film's fate is that every film has its own future, luck and destiny; good films don't always succeed and bad films don't always fail, just as every person has their own fate. PJ's conclusion: Raja's worst fears were unfounded, his father was not taken advantage of, and he knew exactly what he was buying and why. But as for the director's assurance that he'd "make the money back," PJ says he wouldn't bet on it. He closes this way: a trip to the cinema 50 years ago sent Ranjit down the path to being a pharmacist — that was a generation's dream, but not his; once he'd made money and his kids had grown up, he went home again, to be someone else. That day he paid the executive producer $10,000 — a crew of 50, the location and the food, the cost of a single day.
In their own words · checked verbatim
being taken for a ride, getting fooled is remarkably common.
Ankur Paduk18:39
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.
Ankur Paduk19:44
Maybe, in film, the line between an artist and a scam artist was a little blurrier than it was elsewhere.
PJ Vogt20:48
The actual question here was quieter and, frankly, maybe a little more sad. Was Raja's father, a man in his mid-70s, being taken advantage of?
PJ Vogt21:48
I don't like to exploit them just because they want it. So my attitude was different. I said, you know, they are human beings, and I had to respect their skill.
Ranjit Kaliskar30:07
If they have a little hint and I'm running out of money, they will dump me like a hot potato.
Ranjit Kaliskar48:42
I fulfilled my dream. So I felt that it was my duty to help him fulfill his.
Kamal Chandra58:18
I really do believe that Raja'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.
PJ Vogt1:03:22
Figures
| Meta (Facebook) stock trade | Bought 1,000 shares when it fell below $100, rode it past $600 | 24:50 |
| Number of auditions | 300 | 31:07 |
| Shooting schedule for the whole film | Three weeks | 31:07 |
| Crew size on the Mumbai set | About 50 | 42:22 |
| Films India produces per year | Twice as many as the US | 16:28 |
| Amount Netflix paid director Carl Erik Rinsch | $55 million | 20:48 |
Glossary
- IIT
- India's hardest engineering schools to get into, compared in difficulty to Harvard and Yale.
- third assistant director
- A junior role on an Indian film crew; the interviewee jokes it's basically the same as a production assistant.
- catfishing
- Using a fake identity to build a relationship with someone online in order to defraud them.
How to listen
People with an older relative who suddenly sinks money into a strange venture; and anyone doing cross-border collaboration who wants to tell "unreliable" apart from "not made for you."
The LabCorp ad segment from 13:24 to 16:28 can be skipped.