11/24/23
Newsletter #517
The Crack of Dawn
My long-time buddy, Gary Jones, created the special effects for many of my movies – like Lunatics: A Love Story and Alien Apocalypse, both of which have a lot of complicated FX – and was the 2nd unit director on several of my movies. Gary has also directed more feature movies than me, which I find slightly disturbing. Anyway, among his dozen or more films is Crocodile 2: Death Swamp, which was originally titled, Crocodile 2: Death Roll, which I think is much better, but nobody asked me.
Since the script for the film took place in Orange County, California, Gary and company naturally shot the film in Hyderabad, India. He had a scene at John Wayne Airport that he shot at the Hyderabad Airport. “How did it work?” I asked. Gary said, “Fine, except for the monkeys in the trees, and instead of motorized luggage trucks on the runway, they use ox carts.”
Gary shot the movie at Ramoji Film City in Hyderabad, which is the largest film studio in the world. It’s something like ten times the size of Universal Studios. Unlike American film studios, Ramoji has many, many big, standing sets, like this one (notice the people on the steps):
They build their sets very solidly, then they don’t tear them down, like we do here. They also have an enormous amount of sound stages, including one with a giant water tank and cement floor so they can shoot boats on lakes and swamps. Crocodile 2 was about a plane crashed in a crocodile-infested swamp, so this was just what they needed. Just as I’ve shot in Bulgaria and New Zealand because it was cheaper, because of an advantageous exchange rate, Gary shot in Hyderabad, India.
His adventures shooting the film are fascinating, but those are his stories to tell. I don’t enter this picture until Gary returned from India. He came over to my place in Santa Monica with a file he had put together about interesting aspects of India, of which there are many. Ostensibly, the idea was to come up with a story for a movie that could be shot in India, because he suspected that there might be a way to get our hands on some financing there (which we didn’t), but they certainly had plenty of facilities. Anyway, I was game. At that point Gary and I would try anything to procure the financing for a feature. Gary left me the file and I read it over the next few days. He had cut out many articles of interest from magazines and newspapers. Among the articles were several about a criminal named Veerappan (full name, Koose Munisamy Veerappan), who was the most wanted criminal in India, and was then (in 2001) still at large somewhere in the vast forests of the Tamil region (I didn’t know there were still vast forests in India). He had killed 184 people (mostly policemen and forest officers), and had poached between 2000 and 3000 elephants. But worst of all, at least to the Indians, Veerappan kidnapped southern India’s biggest movie star, Dr. Rajkumar . . .
(From Wikipedia):
Singanalluru Puttaswamaiah Muthuraj (24 April 1929 – 12 April 2006), better known by his stage name Dr. Rajkumar … Regarded as one of the greatest actors in the history of Indian cinema. (Now get this) His 35 movies have been remade 58 times in 9 languages by 34 actors making him the first actor whose movies were remade more than fifty times and the first actor whose movies were remade in nine languages.
Yes, Veerappan kidnapped Dr. Rajkumar and kept him prisoner in the forest for 108 days. Veerappan was finally paid 200 million rupees ($25 million in 2023 U.S. dollars) and he released Rajkumar unharmed. Veerappan also kidnapped and ransomed a number of politicians and policemen. In 1990 in the midst of all of his criminal escapades, he married a woman named, Muthulakshmi, who said that she married him because of his "notoriety and moustache."
Although we didn’t know it then, Veerappan would soon die of “ballistic trauma,” meaning that he was surrounded by the police and shot to death in Papparapatti, Dharmapuri, Tamil Nadu, India on October 18, 2004. Veerappan was 52 years old.
That was the story to tell, as far as I was concerned. Gary agreed, so we began work on a treatment (which is a 10-20 page prose version of the screenplay, and you can read it if you’d like – Jan (beckerfilms.com), which we cleverly named, Hyderabad. Well, some stories are difficult to think up and work out and others aren’t. Conceiving and fitting together the pieces of Hyderabad with Gary was a complete pleasure. We actually thought we had something good – think of that. Alas, Gary was never able to generate any interest in our story with the folks he knew in Hyderabad, so we never bothered writing the screenplay. But I’ve always liked the story we cooked up.
So I told this tale to my friend Mike yesterday. He seemed impressed (as he often is) that I knew such a foreign, oddball story. Still, he felt that it was important to remind me that “knowledge is not the same thing as intelligence,” and I agree. The folks who win (or even get on) Jeopardy are not necessarily intelligent; but they are incredibly knowledgeable. Without looking anything up, I’d suspect that intelligence is based on the ability to put together disparate bits of knowledge and come to a new, or perhaps worthwhile, conclusion, or something like that.
What I do seem to have the ability to do is to impress foreign Uber drivers. The other day I was picked up by an Indian Uber driver. I asked, “Where are you from?” I’m always amused when I get an answer like this. He replied, “East Detroit.” I continued, “No, originally?” He said, “India.” I asked, “Where in India?” Sighing with a deep, sad, weariness, “Southern India, not New Delhi or Mumbai. Not Bollywood. We don’t speak the same language as them.” I of course asked, “Near Hyderabad?” It’s a shot in the dark because I really don’t know shit about India, other than the tiny bit that I read to write that treatment.
For the first time, the Uber driver smiled. “Yes, not far from Hyderabad [he pronounced the A, which many people don’t]. Rajahmundry, near the coast.” I asked, “Have you ever been to Ramoji Film City?” He was overjoyed, “Yes, I have! It’s fantastic!” Now I couldn’t stop showing off. “So, you speak Tamil?” He was elated, “Yes! The province is Tamil Nadu.”
Well, anyway. That took me three days to write.