Boosted Egos and Busted Products

I am yet to recover from the shock and the ego rip er..trip that Kamal had in his Magnum Bogus! I have poured it out to a certain extent in my other blog (my own ego trip :-)). But in one of those undisturbed moments of reflection (you really do not want me to describe where that was...I will drop subtle clues), I was wondering what pushes a man to peddle crap as story and feel smug about it. Clearly I could not flush the damn movie out of my mind.

It was about 8 pm in the night, after dinner. The whole tamil play gang had gathered in a room to finalize on a play. There was a kernel of an idea for a play. We had run out of tamil scripts to do and had to perform our own stories. So in all earnest this team built the idea into a play. Then we tore it apart...ripped it literally. We wanted to see whether the play will stand our criticism. These were about 15 minds sitting and beating this idea to pieces. At the end of 2 hours we realized that the play as we had thought of it was actually not too sound. The team then went on to work and fixed it. 2 hours later we had a robust play. This play was good for the 21 year olds who thought of it and the 17 to 21 year olds who would watch it. We performed the play to as good a review a college audience can give us...a standing ovation! And it was accomplished for a budget of Rs 1500 only.

Granted this happened 16 years ago. Granted the 20 somethings have really not done much in theatre or movies since that time. However, I think the underlying point is that there is a process to idea generation. There is honesty in the team to ensure that whatever gets out of these discussion is a good product.

The discussion for this movie must have been on similar lines. But I guess the team that discussed it were so full of it that they really could not smell their own fart! Kamal actually had the guts to give himself a 9 out of 10 for the story teller. He felt that he is probably one of the best in the business. If that is the truth, I pity the business.

Isn't it true that more often than not when you let your ego take the better of you and think whatever you do people will lap it up irrespective of the quality, it has ended in a disaster! Met this company folks recently that thought they had an awesome product and lo and behold! When they took it to the market, no one bought it. Because, the people out there did not need it! And we had just forgotten to factor them in the whole design process.

I think in any of these individual driven companies or ideas, you need good counselors as mirrors or little pins if you will. Just to poke your inflated ego a little bit so that you are grounded and don'treally don't fly away!