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  Intl. & NRI News |
| Silicon Valley engineers make a film of their own! |
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Intl. & NRI News |
| Silicon Valley engineers make a film of their own! |
By: Mike Cassidy
Source: San Jose Mercury News; July 22, 1999
THE NAATAK amateur theater group was getting good at putting on plays. Maybe too good. ``It was an extremely well-oiled machine,'' says Srikar Srinath, one of the troupe of Indian high-tech workers. Everybody knew exactly what to do and when to do it. Six plays in three years. Good crowds at community theaters. It became, well, boring.
Naatak wasn't about boring. It was a group looking for a challenge, a challenge different from engineering a work-around or conjuring up the high-tech gadget of the future.
``We thought we should make a film,'' says Sujit Saraf, 30, an engineer contracting at NASA, ``because we'd never made a film before.''
But, a film about what? The group followed some old advice: Write what you know. They figured, why not a film about engineers? Indian engineers. In Silicon Valley.
``Plus,'' says Srinath, 27, also an engineer, ``it meant we didn't really have to act.''
Srinath, Saraf, Lalitha Rajagopalan, a 27-year-old start-up marketeer, and Tony Sehgal, a 29-year-old beginning filmmaker, are talking around a table at Bhavika, something of an Indian fast-food joint in Sunnyvale. From the comfort of their corner table, the group's impulsive plunge into filmmaking seems quaint.
``None of us are (film) professionals,'' says Rajagopalan. ``We are Indian tech-geeks.''
They read up and talked strategy over lunches.
They started shooting ``Bugaboo'' in January. The work scenes were shot at Netscape in Mountain View, where a cast member worked. They couldn't afford extras.
``I would walk around Netscape,'' says Rajagopalan, ``and whoever was working in the cubicles, I'd beg them to walk by in the movie.''
They wrapped the 85-minute film after six weekends and $21,000.
It's the story of three engineers from India who find themselves doing almost too well. They're prosperous, successful and bored. One turns to his neighbor, a ``professional life randomizer,'' who offers prescriptions to turn the engineer's life upside down. (Run a red light. Introduce a bug into the code you're writing, etc.)
It's peppered with inside Indian jokes -- the bachelor who shops Costco for cases of garbanzo beans -- and Silicon Valley references -- the expectant parents who, while planning their child's Web page, register one set of domain names for a girl and another for a boy.
The new filmmakers are making the final edits and hope to screen the movie publicly later this month. Then, they'll pitch it to film festivals.
No one knows whether it will be a hit or a dud. The film world is very unpredictable. Just the way the friends at Naatak like it.
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 Intl. & NRI News |