Tahir Ashraf. Ruben Smith. “Trapped”.

Word is coming in of the mother of all chaotic clusterfucks in an industry where such a thing is not entirely uncommon. This one perpetrated by an actor/Director called Tahir Ashraf and Line Producer Ruben Smith and his company Omega Film Studios.

The story goes that Ashraf had himself an office block in Crawley which was going to be demolished and had the bright idea of using it to make a film before the bulldozers piled in. Scrabbling together at great speed, he and Ruben Smith hired cast, crew and kit and agreed rates, at which point numerous people gave up other work and jobs and signed up.

Which was where the many problems started because Ashraf didn’t actually have enough of what you might call real money to make the film (“Trapped”). So when the contracts arrived it was all promises for the future - deferred payments all round. This was clearly not going to cut it for hoary old veterans of the industry who’d seen these kinds of promises before and saw their pay for the job blowing away on a Bollywood wind (as so many do and have).

As contracts started to be renegotiated to remove some of the more wild-eyed clauses (including one where the freelancer was required to bear all risks of injury/dismemberment/death they might suffer while working on the film) the production suddenly went quiet.

When the dust settled, neither Tahir Ashraf nor Ruben Smith were anywhere to be found, leaving all and sundry in the dark, not knowing what was going on and with work to find to pay next month’s bills. Until one member of the crew found out that Ashraf had picked up some funding and, as a result, moved the production elsewhere and they both planned on hiring a new production team.

This left a large number of the original crew in the dark, up in the air and out of sorts, abandoned simply because they had had the temerity to ask for some pay for their work and not to be required to sign some half baked contract.

When asked, neither Ruben Smith (no stranger to offering less than the minimum wage on other productions) and Tahir Ashraf had nothing more to say but safe to say that this kind of behaviour is not the way to start a production and may well augur badly in terms of any crew who might be hired to actually make this thing. Watch out for this one then - and both individuals involved.

Ruben Smith, (Omega Film Studios), Tahir Ashrif: Freelancers Beware!