India West writer Lisa Tsering brings to our attention what she calls a disturbing series of e-mails from Willard Carroll, director of the upcoming film "Marigold." In the e-mails, Carroll speaks of “morally bankrupt journalists” and appears to threaten Tsering and another SAJAer, Aseem Chhabra, with a ban from most Hollywood movie screenings.
It all started when Chhabra wrote a Mumbai Mirror article about Bollywood stars Aishwarya Rai and Salman Khan, finding it difficult to shed their melodrama and awkward English dialog while performing in western films.
To support his point, Chhabra describes Khan’s performance in "Marigold," a movie about an American actress trying to make it in Bollywood.
Khan is very dull and he almost sleepwalks through the film. He suffers from the same flaw as Rai - the inability to match English dialogues with Bollywood acting.
In the reader comments that followed, Carroll (that's him on the left) added one terse posting: He pasted the first line of an email he had received from Chhabra that began, “I saw Marigold on Monday and enjoyed it,” and called this evidence of the reporter’s lack of professionalism.
But that was just the beginning.
Carroll then sent Chhabra an e-mail accusing the reporter of violating press rules by printing his opinion before the review date. “We'll make certain that you're on the no-screening list for as many studios as possible,” the director wrote in the email.
Chhabra explained to SAJAforum that he didn’t do anything wrong because his article is not a movie 
review, but simply a commentary on the ability of certain Bollywood stars to cross over. He wonders whether Carroll would have made the accusation if the opinion in his article had been a favorable one.
The exchange got a dose of masala after Tsering wrote a short comment on the Mumbai Mirror site defending Chhabra’s knowledge of films. Carroll shot her an email with what sounded like a veiled threat.
[Chhabra is] now banned from almost all US studio screenings. Perhaps you'd like to join him? There's plenty of room but, trust me, it's a lonely place.
Carroll then delivered a dramatic judgment on Chhabra’s and Tsering’s journalistic approaches, writing that "these heinous, cowardly actions ultimately do nothing more than reveal the window to a minority of sad, pathetic, frustrated, and morally bankrupt journalists' souls."
Neither journalist knows whether Carroll’s claims have any teeth. Chhabra and Tsering both report that the press invites are still coming through.
We invite Carroll to share his thoughts in the comments section below. Everyone else is invited to comment, too.
Earlier on SAJAforum:
