Amaze on Prime video: PLOTT A LOTT GOTT

Inviting us at 12 noon for lunch at a 5-star hotel was unusual. The practice is to invite you at 12 or 12.30 pm, and serve you lunch at any time between 3 and 5 pm. Oh, the price you pay for being a journalist! Proceedings begin at around 2 pm, and last for about 1- ½ –2 hours. Lunch dare not be served before the proceedings begin, or while they are on, because savvy organisers believe that starved journalists would wait, while ‘lunched’ ones might give them the slip. So, it is best that they are made to wait, to earn their lunch. There is no such thing as….

Amazon Prime Video broke the tradition on 19^th March. They actually served the buffet lunch at 12 noon, and it was on till about 1.20 pm, when the Press Conference was to begin. As it transpired, there was no Press Conference at all. Yes, proceedings did begin in the ball-room, at 1.20 pm. On your seats was a goodies bag, containing mainly nuts and a lemon beverage. As you sat through, you understood the reasons for the early lunch. They were going to keep you at the Grand Hyatt, Santa Cruz East, till 8 pm. The reason? A countless number of forthcoming series and movies, on their OTT platform, were being introduced, along with the makers and the casts. Amazon Prime Video’s top brass came down from the US of A, including Mike Hopkins, Senior Vice President at Prime Video & Amazon MGM Studios, and makers and stars came from across India, especially the South.

Pardon my whining, but specialised compères are a diminishing lot. First, singers took over their jobs in the 70s and 80s, compèring their shows themselves. Then TV personalities turned compères in the 90s. This was followed by film-stars grabbing microphones. And these days, it is the likes of multi-millionaire producer-director Karan Johar, who usurp the MCdom. Imagine, compère Karan kept going till 5.15 pm at least (that is when I left; later accounts informed me that the show went on till 8 pm), introducing series after series, including a few of his own, Dharmatic Productions ventures, that are going to be streamed on Amazon Prime Video (APV). And in the audience was RJ Rohini, who has done a very good job of anchoring APV events in the past. I am not even mentioning that I am a compère of long standing myself.

One wonders why did APV let loose a barrage of shows, with first looks and teams, in photo-op after photo op? Were they trying go ‘one-up’ on the competition? Are they going to dispense with individual show gigs henceforth? Did they believe that journalists would enjoy watching this spectacle unfold for seven hours, and being told time and again and again, to applaud the group and the next and the next, on stage? Did they also believe that the scribes would write about each individual show, in some detail, given there were so many of them (the shows, not the journalists)? Only the APV head honchos can answer these questions. I gave it a decent five hours, and, at the cost of attracting the ire of the PR agency, just had to leave at 5.15 pm, exactly five hours after I had arrived, because I could not sit through the regimen any more, without any fallout.

Fallout? Yes, that is what one of their prime shows is called, and it is helmed by Jonathan Nolan, and no prizes for guessing that he is Christopher ‘Oppenheimer’ Nolan’s brother. Based on one of the greatest video game series of all time, Fallout is the story of haves and have-nots in a world in which there’s almost nothing left to have. The series begins in the present day, when a nuclear bomb sets off the apocalypse. Two-hundred and nineteen years after the apocalypse, the gentle denizens of luxury fallout shelters, called Vaults, which are sealed off from the world outside, are forced to return to the irradiated hell-scape their ancestors left behind—and are shocked to discover an incredibly complex, gleefully weird, and highly violent universe waiting for them.

Ella Purnell is Lucy, an optimistic Vault-dweller, with an all-American can-do spirit. Asked whether she had done her stunts herself, she confessed, “I have a wonderful body double who has done a fantastic job.” Her peaceful and idealistic nature is tested when she is married to a man who turns out to be an infiltrator, and forced to get out to the surface, to rescue her father, who is taken captive by them. Aaron Moten is Maximus, a young, black soldier who rises to the rank of squire in the militaristic faction called Brotherhood of Steel. He will do anything to further the Brotherhood’s goals of bringing law and order to the wasteland. Walton Goggins is the Ghoul, a morally ambiguous bounty hunter, who holds within him a 200-year history of the post-nuclear world. (You must appreciate his incredible prosthetic). Also in the cast is Sarita Choudhury, who made her debut in Mississippi Masala. Sarita Catherine Louise Choudhury is a British actress, and the daughter of an Indian Bengali father and a British mother.

British-American Jonathan Nolan is an Executive Producer on the film, which is produced by Amazon MGM Studios and Kilter Films. Jonathan’s short story, Memento Mori (Latin for ‘remember you will die’) was used by Christopher, as the basis for the screenplay for the critically acclaimed film, Memento. He has also co-written the screenplays for The Prestige and The Dark Knight, with his brother. Jonathan recently created the CBS drama Person of Interest. He has also been credited under his nickname of Jonah.

Fallout will start streaming on April 11. We, ‘privileged’ journalists, were shown Episode 1 on the next day, March 20, at PVR Juhu, where the show began terribly late, delayed much longer than the length of the episode itself. Also, there was a very lengthy interaction between Jonathan, Ella and Sushant Sreeram, Country Director, APR India, who has assumed charge in this position in February 2023. Reviews are under embargo till April 11, but it can be said the show might interest followers of the game much more than ‘game-ignoramuses’. And I had some problems getting the continuity, missing out on some vital, short pieces of dialogue, but I think that might be strictly a personal thing.

Fallout was just the beginning. And when there is fallout, there is so much pick-up and checkout. APV is attacking the Over The Top (OTT) space with a vengeance, and India is their key player in this expansion, with alOTT to offer. Many of the abundant plOTTs are Indian, and there are alOTT of topnotch names associated with them: writers, directors, producers and actors. More about them coming up soon, in this column.

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My apologies to my readers. Due to website and network glitches, I was off the radar for a whole week. Things seem to have been sorted out now.