Producers Guild to launch a website?

"We are planning to launch our own website where all our film content will be uploaded and even PRs of respective production houses will not share teasers, trailers and news to other websites," says a leading producer and adds, "Reviews on websites are damaging the opening collections in overseas market as well as collections in the two Telugu states due to few amateurish reviewers.

Hence, the owners of 80-odd websites must take a call. They have to choose between film content and advertisement or only reviews,"

Producers Guild, formerly known as Associated Telugu Producers LLP, which boast of all the top producers like Suresh Babu, Allu Aravind, Dil Raju, UV Creations, Sravanthi Ravi Kishore, Damodar Prasad and others have mooted a panel to study the pros and cons of the decision since they don't want to gag the media, but want to weed out a few rouge websites.

"It is true that discussions on streamlining the web media is on but nothing is fixed yet. However, we would like to make it clear that we have no plans to gag media, since both filmmakers and media need each other.

But our only intention is to weed out rogue websites and those websites will be identified by a panel which includes friends from the media," says Teja, producer and director.

Another producer adds, curtailing websites has become more of a necessity than choice, since they are damaging the reputation of the film industry with 'false or fake news' and indulging in character assassination of top celebrities.

"Many of the producers believe that some rogue websites are trying to malign the image of Telugu film industry with fake news items and targeting top celebrities in the garb of gossips which has to be curtailed,". Another top-notch producer alleges that select websites are indulging in 'caste-bias' too.

"Some websites raise the collection figures of the film of a star belonging to a particular caste very high, while running down even a blockbuster of heroes belonging to some other caste, which is nothing but a narrow-minded approach and not journalism at all," he adds.

Another producer, who is in the panel adds, "A website writes a negative story and mails the link to the actor concerned which is nothing but blackmailing.

It never happened before. We have been tolerating their false articles and biased box office figures for years and so, the time has come to put an end to false and misleading online reporting."

It looks like the producers and film scribes are going to be at loggerheards very soon.