bv

Sept 5, 1999

Bugaboo and  all that jazz Film: Bored Silicon Valley yuppies  say boo-hoo to an ordinary life  Gita Aravamudan

Life can get really mundane even for America's silicon yuppies who seemingly have it all. So what do these bored young techies do? They pool in their money, brains and talent and make a movie. Bugaboo, is a true blue Silicon Valley film, conceived, scripted, directed, acted and funded by the Valley denizens. The film, which is a randomised account of personal experiences, premiered at the Spangenberg Theatre in Palo Alto, California, on August 12. After the first screening before an audience of 500, Sanjay Rajagopalan, who along with Surjit Saraf conceived and scripted Bugaboo, said the feedback was very positive. "Almost everyone (even non-Indians) I talked to about the film identified with the characters. The comedy and the inside jokes worked very well," said Sanjay.

After long years in the US Surjit and Sanjay, both theatre buffs and Delhi IIT alumni, found themselves slipping into ordinariness. "At some point in our successful lives, it occurred to us that we were getting rewarded for being good boys. The kind who drank milk at night and woke up early to study. But now that we've achieved our goals, life became dull," said Surjit who was a consultant with NASA and is now back in IIT Delhi as assistant professor after eight years in the US.

They found a way out in theatre. Naatak, their successful amateur theatrical company, staged half a dozen contemporary plays over three years and threw up a pool of talent from among the Indians in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Predictably, ennui set in once more. That's when they turned to the movies. The amateurs chose their subject first. One close to their heart, something they knew and understood themselvesÑThe Indian engineers of Silicon Valley. It would be a piece of cake, they wouldn't really have to act and, besides it was topical, given the recent Bay Area boom.

They approached the Pygmy Mammoth Productions of Tony Sehgal, an American of Indian origin, who also doubled up as the director of photography.

Bugaboo was shot over six weekends with a rented 16mm camera. Surjit, 36, is the main actor, dialogue writer and director and he took three months to edit the film. The 82-minute film has been shot in 16mm colour entirely in the San Francisco Bay Area and its vicinityÑPalo Alto, Sunnyvale, Mountain View, Cupertino and Los Altos Hills. The Netscape offices in Mountain View, where a cast member worked, were used for the on-site locations. "I would walk around Netscape and beg whoever was working in the cubicles to walk by in the movie for we couldn't afford extras,'' said set designer Lalitha Rajagopalan.

At some point in our lives, it occurred to us that we were getting rewarded for being good boys. Now that we've achieved our goals, life became dull. --Surjit Saraf

Except for Surjit the rest of the team, including Sanjay, Tony Sehgal, set designer Bharathi Ramavarjula, Lalitha Rajagopalan, the six engineers who financed the $21,000 project and sound director Srikar Srinath, still lives and works in California.

The story revolves around Bapu (Surjit), a bored software engineer who wonders what would happen if some random disturbances were introduced in the seemingly calm, well-settled life of a Silicon Valley engineer. He seeks out Jeevan Ullas PhD, a "life randomiser".

Bapu has two friends with problems stereotypical of Indian bachelors in the US. One cannot consummate his marriage while the other has a white girlfriend and his mother is visiting him. The randomiser turns them upside down by injecting a bit of chaos into their well-ordered lives. He instructs these sober engineers from India to do unthinkable things like jumping a red light.

All these deviations punctuate the film until they finally lead to an unthinkable "grand deviance", which helps them discover simple solutions to seemingly complex problems in their lives.

The makers of the film make it clear that Bugaboo does not ridicule the achievements of Indian professionals in Silicon Valley. It is a light-hearted film which questions the worth of those achievements and "wonders aloud if Utopia is really quite dull". Much to their relief, their initial audience, mostly software engineers, was sufficiently tickled as well.

The young filmmakers have sent out feelers to distributors in India. If things work out, Bugaboo might hit the Indian screens too. Where, like Hyderabad Blues , it may create a special niche of its own.
 
 
 
 

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