Tottering Tollywood finds a new guild
Nearly 50 active Tollywood producers have decided to start a separate producers’ guild that will take decisions to help Tollywood.
With no proper representation of Tollywood at the Chief Ministers’ Offices either in AP or Telangana, the Telugu Film Industry has been inactive from the last two years.
This was especially proved when, a few days ago, a notice regarding the election of the ‘Telugu Film Producer Council’ was pasted at its office in the Telugu Film Chamber building. A huge list comprising names of over thousand members was pasted in it, with a mention of the contestant names. Interestingly, not a single person in the contenders’ list was a known name as many of them in it are mostly inactive producers.
Breaking away
As was mentioned in these columns earlier, some of the active producers had started their own association separately. Suresh Babu, Allu Aravind, Dil Raju, Yarlagadda Supriya, B. V. S. N. Prasad and a few top producers decided to start the ‘Active Telugu Film Producers Guild’. “Only producers who make more than three films are allowed to be members in this guild. Initially, we simply a formed an ad hoc committee with 21 producers; now, 30 more have joined in. We don’t want to be in a council with more than thousand producers. If there is any kind of welfare benefits that come from the money we make, we will use it for the welfare of all the producers. But all day-to-day decisions will now be taken over by the active producers guild,which is very much in operation now,” says a source, who is one of the producers in the newly formed guild.
Directionless: a cause of concern
Presently, Tollywood lacks a proper system and leadership to raise their concerns with either of the Telugu chief ministers, Jagan Mohan Reddy or K. Chandrasekhar Rao.
“Whoever needs help in meeting the officials, needs to do so on an individual capacity,” added the producer. Though the elections for the ‘Telugu Film Producer Council’ is going to be held on Sunday, the ‘Active Telugu Film Producers Guild’ do not seem much interested in it, and many of the top producers want to skip it as they’ve started theirs afresh.