Arnada excels in digital flicks

Tony Ryanto, Contributor, Jakarta

If life begins at 40, Erwin Arnada, 39, feels secure in welcoming it because he has built a spectacular career for himself, being the executive producer of Jelangkung (Indonesian equivalent to the Ouija board), one of three Indonesian films each of which has been viewed by more than one million people.

The sequel, Tusuk Jelangkung (Pierce the Jelangkung), now showing in more than 20 movie theaters in Jakarta, Bandung and Surabaya, is fast becoming a cult movie among youngsters, notably high school and university students.

Chances are that Tusuk will go the way Jelangkung has gone -- having a total number of viewers in excess of one million. From March 29 to April 6, 2003, the film was seen by 220,000 people. This is fantastic by local standards because normally it is difficult for a film even to get 100,000 viewers in its entire run.

Back in 1989, Arnada was a young journalist at a weekly news magazine Editor. Then in 1990 he joined Monitor, a weekly TV tabloid led by Arswendo Atmowiloto, who is also a scriptwriter. The periodical was banned in 1991 for publishing the results of an opinion poll that ranked Prophet Muhammad lower in popularity than Arswendo -- something that angered Muslims. Arswendo was put in jail and Arnada joined Bintang Indonesia, also a weekly TV tabloid.

After leaving Bintang Indonesia to embark on Bintang Millenia, Arnada, who has been cooperating closely with MTV Indonesia for years, was invited to see a digitally processed movie titled Jelangkung.

Originally, Trans TV commissioned Rexinema, headed by Jose Poernomo, to make the film. Jelangkung was about to be telecast when Arnada suggested that it could be exhibited in movie theaters.

He contacted the 21 Group of cinemas and had the horror picture previewed. The digital film projector was so bulky it had to be installed at the entrance of the 12-seat screening room.

With the exception of Arnada, all who saw the film were of the view that Jelangkung was a mediocre film. Since it is a digital film, it could be shown in only one screen.

Says Arnada: "On the first day of screening, there were only 30 moviegoers. But on the third day, all tickets to the smallest of Pondok Indah's six cineplexes were sold out. A week after, crowds of queuing people broke a door pane and a girl sustained injuries after she fell down in the crush."

Ordinarily, tickets are sold 30 to 45 minutes before a film is screened but in the case of Jelangkung, exceptions were made. The box-office opened in the morning, at about 10 a.m. and tickets to all four shows were sold out before 1 p.m.

A second digital film was screened at Blok M Plaza. Still unable to accommodate the stream of moviegoers, the producers went to a Singapore lab and blew up Jelangkung to 35 mm film format. They ordered 14 prints. In the end, total viewers came to a mind-boggling 1.3 million people.

Jelangkung had the power to stay on at Pondok Indah for six months and during the first four months, Arnada was never absent distributing questionnaires, asking audiences whether they wanted to have a sequel. And if they did, what the story should be about.

Jose Poernomo and Rizal Mantovani, directors of Jelangkung, were invited to the U.S. and both have been asked by Michael Bay, director of Pearl Harbor, Armageddon and The Rock, to make a digital film (at a cost of US$10 million) in Bali, called The Well, a horror flick about an American backpacker's adventure on the holiday island, for his company, Platinum Dunes in cooperation with Roy Lee's (a South Korean American) Vertigo Entertainment.

Poernomo and Mantovani welcomed the proposal and the project financed by the U.S.-based Radar Pictures, which will also arrange the film's worldwide distribution, is currently under way.

So when Arnada asked the two to do a sequel, they were not prepared. But both did not object to Arnada using Jelangkung in the title. And so it was that Arnada found Dimas Djayadiningrat, an old MTV friend and a seasoned video clip director, willing to produce the sequel.

Arnada and Djayadiningrat wrote the story and the screenplay was written by Upi Avianto. While Jelangkung took Rp 350 million to make, Tusuk absorbed more than Rp 2 billion. There were 14 ghost sightings in the first film and 26 in the sequel.

"I am confident that during its entire run, which I think will take about four months, Tusuk will be capable of drawing more than one million moviegoers. More than 50 multiplexes are still waiting to screen it. And mind you, most youngsters see the film at least twice," Arnada says.

Looking happy but exhausted, the boyish-looking Arnada says he sleeps at 3 a.m. and goes to work at 9 a.m.. Like other hard- working executives, Arnada often skips meals.

Arnada says he was told the following anecdote: Producer Mira Lesmana is said to be the DreamWorks (major film company set up by Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen) of Indonesia, whereas I am the local Miramax (independent film company in the U.S., headed by the Weinstein brothers Bob and Harvey).

If Tusuk gathers more than one million viewers, it will be the fourth Indonesian picture to do so, the other two being Sherina and Ada Apa Dengan Cinta? (What's up with Cinta?), both produced by Mira Lesmana. So the score is even, or two-two.