Spring Break
Slumdog Millionaire: unexpected surprise of 2008
MCT
Issue date: 1/13/09 Section: Features
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Don't worry. If you haven't yet seen this unexpectedly thrilling film about a Mumbai street urchin who is accused of cheating while a contestant on the Indian version of Millionaire, I'm not going to spoil it for you.
But if you have seen it, surely you'll agree there's something strange about the producers of the world's most profitable game show--who have always been fastidious about eliminating any appearance of impropriety--allowing a movie to depict even a suggestion of cheating and worse behind the scenes of any of the 100 versions it has licensed around the world since Millionaire launched in Great Britain in 1998.
I began by looking up a familiar name I had seen in the opening credits of Slumdog. It was Celador, one of the production companies behind the film and, as fans of the show might know, the name of the company that created Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.
It turns out that the principals in Celador sold the international rights to the "programme" in 2005. (Local versions have aired in more than 100 countries since the format's debut. Meredith Vieira hosts the American version.)
They then used the proceeds to focus on Celador's movie business.
In other words, if there's any backlash to the film's fictional depictions of Indian Millionaire, the producers couldn't care less--they don't own the Indian version anymore.
However, I did find that Slumdog Millionaire faced at least one formidable obstacle on the way to Oscar contention. Its future was in doubt at one point, and perhaps only a fortuitous phone call saved it from direct-to-DVD release.
But before we get to that, you may be wondering who came up with this cockamamie quiz-show-meets-Dickens-in-Mumbai hybrid anyway.
So did Danny Boyle, the Trainspotting producer who was approached in 2006 by Celador to direct it. As he recounted recently to The Hollywood Reporter, he had no interest in making a game-show movie.
But then Celador showed him the script, written by none other than The Full Monty screenwriter Simon Beaufoy, and Boyle was in.
Beaufoy, in turn, had adapted the book by former Indian diplomat and first-time novelist Vikas Swarup, called Q&A.
And just how did Swarup cook up the story of an uneducated go-fer at a Mumbai call center being accused of cheating on Millionaire?
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