Bollywood Dreams

[instrumental music plays]

[instrumental music plays]When I told Ankur the full story of Raja's father, the amateur outsider who was now sending hundreds of thousands of dollars to India, that gave Ankur real pause.

[Instrumental music] He didn't wanna comment specifically on Flower Valley or on its director.

He'd never heard 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.

Didn't I see? 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 Zev pointed me to this then ongoing legal battle.

Netflix was tussling with a director named Carl Erik Rinsch.

Netflix had given Rinsch fifty-five million dollars for his project, which Rinsch had then spent on luxury cars, luxury watches, and not one but two luxury mattresses.

Rinsch then tried to claim that these were all just very expensive movie props.

They weren't.

But this had 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 scam or a movie? My question was wrong.

So I kept the question in my pocket for weeks.

I take it out, worry it in 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 Raja's father being taken advantage of? That's what Raja 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 Raja's father, a man in his mid-seventies, being taken advantage of? Do you mind just starting with your-- by telling me your name?