Dispatch From The Front Lines: Nayan Padrai

In February, the WGAW announced their Feature Access Project honorees. One of them — Nayan Padrai — was generous enough to write up a first person dispatch on his experiences with his project Billion Dollar Raja:

I remember it very clearly. It was the Summer of 2011. I was hibernating for three months after the release of my first feature film “When Harry Tries to Marry”, a passion project that I co-wrote, produced, and directed. That film took ten years or so to get made, and I was determined that I’d bang out the next one within a year. (Or so I thought..) I was going to re-charge my batteries, and begin writing something new. (Big mistake on my part — I should have written the next script before I shot my first film.. More about that some other time.) Anyway, laying in bed, with nothing to watch — I didn’t have cable, as I had cut the cord to avoid the distractions of TV, while making my film. The only channel that worked on my rabbit ear antennas was C-SPAN. I was watching some Congressional testimony about the financial crisis. Then the phone rang.

It was my producing partner Sheetal Vyas, who had been trying to wake me up from my vegetative state. She had an idea. She thought we should work on a film about the largest insider trading case on Wall Street. (I thought I’d be making another romantic-comedy — this time for Universal or another big studio). Instead, Sheetal proceeded to tell me the story of Raj Rajaratnam, the billionaire hedge-fund manager, and former head of Galleon Group, the world’s largest technology hedge fund. Raj had been arrested and charged with masterminding a complex scheme to trade on inside information involving some of the world’s biggest companies. He got information through a network of friends in all the right places, the most notable of whom was Rajat Gupta, the former managing director of McKinsey & Co, and former board member of Goldman Sachs, Proctor & Gamble, and the parent company of American Airlines.

I was hesitant. This sounded great, but surely someone else would have been working on this I said. And I wasn’t sure that writing a screenplay about insider trading would be a natural follow-up to my romantic comedy film-making debut. Moreover, I was very uncomfortable with the idea of writing a script about people who are alive and still in the news on an almost daily basis.

Sheetal persisted and persuaded me to read some news articles. Like a Netflix marathon session of “House of Cards”, I began to read every news article on the case, and that quickly led to reading pretty much every single legal document filed in connection to the charges brought against Raj and others involved. And I was sold. The story is essentially about two men — one is David the other is Goliath. That dynamic set in the world of high stakes finance, involving a landmark case where the feds used wiretaps for the first time on Wall Street was irresistible.

We both agreed that we’d work on writing a story together, and I would write the script. I have this thing that I won’t write a script unless I know the title. I have to know the title, and often times, I write scripts just based on having a title in mind. I came up with “BILLION DOLLAR RAJA”. We both agreed that would work. We issued a press-release to plant our flag on this story, and coincidentally, that very day Rajat Gupta got arrested. We received coverage in Deadline, The Hollywood Reporter, Business Insider, CNBC, The Wall Street Journal, and many other news outlets. That PR boost helped greatly. Many people who knew the people involved surfaced and got in touch with us. The PR also helped us get some development funding from a family-office hedge fund. Basically, a friend from high school had seen one of my posts about the project on Facebook, and introduced us to a friend of hers who was interested in the case, and he happened to run his own fund. He cut us a development check.

Soon thereafter, I spent the next six months (ten to twelve hours a day) researching the case. I created a 145 page working chronology of everything that happened in the lives of people who were involved, and what went down when. Sheetal and I began talking to various people involved in prosecuting the case, journalists who covered the trial, and people who we knew that had insight into the world of Wall Street. It then took about two years to finish the numerous drafts of the script.

I have to give a shout out to Scott Myers and Go Into The Story because the blog is something that serves as daily motivation, and daily guilt (on days that I don’t write). GITS reminds me of the power of the written word, and the importance of putting in the work on a daily basis. The credits haven’t rolled yet, but I want to thank Scott and the GITS community anyway.

I was able to join the WGA through the independent film caucus, and applied to the WGA”s Feature Access Project. Fortunately, the script was selected as an honoree through a judging process. I am super excited about all the activities that are being planned by the Kim Myers (no relation to Scott — I think) and Tery Lopez, aided by D’Kwon Stackhouse of the Diversity team at the WGA. All the honorees have clicked really well, and we are a little team now. We even got to have dinner with Doug Atchison and Franklin Leonard of The Black List the day of the announcement, and that was so amazing. I am now a Co-Chair of the Asian American Writer’s Committee as well. The script has also been in the top ten uploaded scripts on The Black List website year to date.

We are now embarking on the quest to get the film made.

Visit 108 Production for more information.

You’ve heard that saying, “Where there’s a will, there’s a way.” Stories like Nayan’s prove that point.

Thanks, Nayan, for sharing with us your personal experience on Billion Dollar Raja and best of luck in getting the movie produced!

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