Getting the story right

A Hollywood-inspired initiative hopes to ensure films and TV portray women, illnesses and other such things more accurately

Imagine you are writing a TV show. And a hospital sequence demands something around a kidney donation. What if you don’t understand its science or legality? It’s for creative folk like these that The Asian Center for Entertainment Education (ACEE) is launching The Third Eye later this week. The programme aims to educate scriptwriters and other creative people on “timely facts on health, gender, legal and social issues,” says ACEE Co-Founder Vinta Nanda.

“This will ensure that the storylines created for mainstream content across all media, which often dramatise fiction, can incorporate information with accuracy,” she adds.

Nanda, who was a prolific TV writer in the nineties, says: “I wrote 70 episodes of Tara, which had divorce. I couldn’t get relevant information. So, I just fictionalised it.”

Filmmaker Mahesh Bhatt, who is leading this initiative in India, says: “If a service like The Third Eye existed when I made Arth (1983), I would have made the film differently and created the other woman, played by Smita Patil, who suffered schizophrenia with the same sympathy which I had towards the wife.”

The idea is powerful, simply because what we see and hear on television and in films influences so much of how we think and react to other people and as a society. TV alone reaches 765 million people, so its power is phenomenal.

The Third Eye model is taken from Hollywood, Health, and Society (HH&S), which is also funding it here in India. HH&S is a programme at the USC Annenberg Norman Lear Center. Its funders have included, among others, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The topics on which it offers information and expert advice to writers include autism, obesity, road accidents and cancer, among others. Over 11 years, HH&S has supported Grey’s Anatomy, Mad Men and Desperate Housewives, among over 500 titles.

“In Hollywood, we are a free resource centre that tries to inspire writers,” says Chris Dzialo, programme specialist, HH&S. It works through workshops, story tours and road trips that help creative people on existing issues. There is information and expert advice available for free through a website, meetings and toll-free number. Also, there are interactions planned between writers from India and other parts of the world. The plan is to reach out to the entire Indian media and entertainment industry.