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Kaante's identity crisis
Why is there no mention of the film's Hollywood crew in the US?
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Priya Ganapati in Mumbai
Kaante seems to be a film with an identity crisis.
Its vast pre-release publicity machine had rubbed in the fact that the film's USP is its all-American crew.
Kaante was shot in 35 days in Los Angeles over 12-hour shifts with a 400-member technical crew that had been almost completely drawn from Los Angeles.
Yet, when it came to the film's publicity in the US, all mention of the American crew went missing! The publicity material handed out at the film's New York premiere failed to credit all but one of the Americans involved in making the movie.
Except for Executive Producer Lawrence Mortoff, all credits from action to script writing went to Indians. Chief Production Executive
(India) was listed as Hussain Sheikh and while Action Director (India) was Biku Verma.
Their American counterparts went missing on the roll call. Here's the Kaante official web site.
This, despite the fact that Kaante features some of Hollywood's best and brightest. For instance, there is Sterling Moore, a 22-year-old sound recordist who is considered a wunderkind. Other crew members like Spiro Razatos, stunt director for movies like Training Day, Swordfish, Scream 3 and Face/Off; and George Merket, visual effects supervisor for blockbusters like Starship Troopers, As Good As It Gets, The Pelican Brief and Total Recall didn’t find their names on the promotional material handed out in the US.
Director Sanjay Gupta denies there has been any deliberate move to project the film as all-Indian among the US media. "I don't think there has been any strategy to leave out the American members in the credits given in the US," he says. "It was probably a mistake. Since I have not seen the publicity material given in the US, I don't know what you are talking about," he added.
Kaante's publicity managers in India say the discrepancy in the credit titles given out in US and India arise from an attempt to project the film as a Bollywood production. "It was not a Hollywood film. It was a Hindi film and so we wanted to showcase that," one publicity manager said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Sources revealed the film's script was largely written by American scriptwriters, yet the credits went to Sanjay Gupta and his team. "It was part of the deal we had with them. The Americans wrote the screenplay and dialogues. Fine-tuning it for Hindi audiences was done by Gupta. But the credit for the entire screenplay was to be given to the Indians," one source said.
DON'T MISS:
The Rediff Special on Kaante
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