As the number of Smile Train surgeries continued to grow, we knew we needed to keep spreading the word about our work as far and wide as possible. We were placing hundreds of Smile Train ads in newspapers and magazines every month, and sending out tens of millions of direct-mail letters every year. The metrics were simple: the more people we reached, the more donations we would receive, and the more surgeries we could fund, bringing us ever closer to our goal of eliminating the problem of unrepaired clefts forever.
But I was impatient. I didn’t want to wait another ten or twenty years to reach that goal. I wanted to get there as soon as possible.
So how could we reach more people? The thought dogged me; kept me awake at night. Our successes had taught me that when people learned about our cause, they responded with a lot of enthusiasm. Newspapers and mailings were powerful, but we needed something that would have even more of an impact.
Then it hit me: What if we made a feature film about clefts? A movie would be ten times more powerful than our ads or our direct mail. And what a story we had to tell. With the right director, we could make an emotional, compelling movie that would tug on heartstrings around the world. A blockbuster film about clefts could help attract tens of millions of donors enabling us to solve the problem of clefts in years rather than decades.
So I wrote to all the biggest movie stars, producers, and studios in Hollywood and told them about my brilliant idea. I was certain I could get a foot in the door, and, once I got a meeting or two, I was confident I could sell Hollywood on this idea. I was mistaken. All of my letters were met with a resounding silence. No interest, no response, no meetings.
Eventually someone called me back: one of the most respected and successful talent agents in the business. He had handled all the biggest stars including Robert De Niro and Morgan Freeman. I couldn’t have been happier when the phone rang and his assistant told me he was waiting on the line.
“Brian, what the hell do you think you’re doing?” he asked me right off the bat. “Making a movie is serious business. You’re just a little charity. You could never make a movie that anyone would ever want to watch!”
I admit; I was taken aback. But even so, I calmly explained to him that our “little charity” was raising more than $100 million a year and we had partners and programs in more than eighty-five countries. Silence. Then he spoke up again. This time he asked: “How the hell do you raise that much money?”
I laughed and we had a good talk, but clearly his main reason for calling was to try and save me from wasting a lot of money and a lot of time. I was undeterred. I wasn’t ready to give up just yet.
Not long after, I flew out to Hollywood and had a couple of meetings that went absolutely nowhere. The last straw was a meeting a screenwriter who told me if I gave her $25,000 she would write a script and George Clooney would play me in the movie. Obviously, I wasn’t doing a very good job of communicating what we were trying to accomplish. I came back to New York with my tail between my legs but as stubborn as ever.
Throughout my career, whenever I’ve been faced with a seemingly intractable problem, I’ve always taken a step back, and then approached things from another direction. I did the same here. I called a staff meeting with my team in New York. Even at this point, we were still a small and streamlined group—only forty of us funding hundreds of thousands of surgeries each year. I told the staff that Hollywood didn’t seem to appreciate my great idea, so it was time to go to plan B. Instead of producing a feature film about clefts, we would produce a documentary about clefts and try to win an Academy Award. That would certainly get a lot of publicity for our cause!
There was actually some logic behind this idea. About ten years earlier a mission-based charity called Interplast had won an Oscar for a short documentary about their work in Vietnam, which included cleft surgery. I was working with Operation Smile at the time and was fascinated by how they had been able to accomplish this. The very next day after they won their Oscars, I called their offices and asked if they could send me a copy of the movie. If I’m being honest, I thought the film was okay but not a great movie by any means. I felt really confident we could do a better job and might even get our own shot at winning an Oscar.
My team did a great good job of humoring me initially, but before long there started to be rumblings of dissent. Producing a movie? Trying to win an Oscar? This was insane! We were a surgical charity. We needed to keep our nose to the grindstone, raise money, and deliver surgeries. A movie was just going to be a big distraction, not to mention a big waste of time and money.
But I was more determined than ever, so we put together a list of ten documentary directors working today who had won and/or been nominated for an Academy Award. Then we sent each of them letters telling them about our plan to try to win an Oscar for a documentary about clefts and asking if they might be interested. Surprisingly, seven out of the ten responded positively. Five of them submitted proposals, including a very talented director named Megan Mylan. We gave Megan the following brief: find a child with a cleft and show how difficult his or her life is, follow that child through surgery, and show how it transforms that child’s life.
Then we sent Megan to G. S. Memorial Hospital in Varanasi, India, which at the time was performing almost 4,000 cleft surgeries a year, more than any other Smile Train partner hospital in the world.
This was how Megan met a phenomenal little girl named Pinki Sonkar.
Pinki was born with a cleft in a remote village of Rampur Dahaba in northern India. Megan’s film follows five-year-old Pinki and her father as they leave their home and travel to Varanasi for treatment at G. S. Memorial. The story is simple—the film is only forty minutes long, and it doesn’t have a single word of English—but it’s an extraordinarily moving portrayal of the transformative powers of surgery and the very difficult lives of children and their families in this poverty-stricken region.
In the film, our partner surgeon at G. S. Memorial in Varanasi, Dr. Subodh Singh, performs Pinki’s surgery.
“Everything went fine, absolutely fine,” Dr. Subodh tells Pinki’s father, after completing her operation. “There is nothing to worry about.”
With tears in his eyes, Pinki’s father thanks the doctor, bowing his head and pressing his palms together. And then we see Pinki, waking up from surgery, looking at her new face in the mirror. At five years old, Pinki can finally smile.
We called the film Smile Pinki, and its powerful simplicity connected with viewers immediately. It was well received on the film festival circuit, and then, early in 2009, we held our breath as the short list of films nominated for an Academy Award were announced in Los Angeles. Smile Pinki was on that list!
At that point, Smile Pinki really took off. Articles about the film were all over the newspapers and TV stations in India. Pinki, her father, and Subodh went on a national tour, speaking to thousands of viewers at screenings in five cities. Pinki’s photograph was on the cover of the Times of India almost every day in the buildup to the awards.
We invited Pinki, her father, and Dr. Subodh to come to the ceremony in Los Angeles that February. I remember, soon after they arrived, going up to the roof of our hotel to have lunch. Pinki, this little girl from a poor rural village in India, had just flown on an airplane for the first time; now she was taking her first ride in an elevator. Her eyes were wide as saucers as she tried to make sense of her surroundings. On the roof of hotel, at the poolside restaurant, Hollywood power brokers were sitting around tables eating lunches. Meanwhile, Pinki and her dad walked over to the shimmering swimming pool. Slowly they both bent down and scooped up a handful of the water, letting it flow through their fingers. Like all of us in our group that day, they were making sure that this world they’d found themselves in was real, and not just an illusion.
Later that night, our entire staff and a few of our biggest donors were all huddled in a private room at a hotel in Beverly Hills. We only had four tickets for the ceremony and those went to Pinki, her dad, Subodh, and Megan the director. There were about thirty of us in that hotel room, all holding hands in a circle around the big TV and waiting as the presenter said, “And the Oscar goes to . . . Smile Pinki!”
We all roared!
We cried, we hugged each other.
We had planned to have Pinki accompany Megan onto the stage to receive the statue that night—she would have been the youngest person ever to accept an Academy Award. But by then, Pinki was fast asleep on her dad’s shoulder, exhausted from jet lag and culture shock. So Megan accepted the award on her own.
After she walked off stage, my phone went berserk, as hundreds of friends, donors, partners, reporters, colleagues, and relatives started calling and texting to wish us congratulations. I called my children who were watching at home in New York with their babysitter. At the ages of eight, seven, and five they had special dispensation to stay up and watch the broadcast. And then I called my dad, who had been on the edge of his seat, waiting for the news. I was lucky Cricket was there with me to experience this moment; it was truly an out-of-body experience.
We set out to win an Oscar and we actually pulled it off. That win became a game-changer for Smile Train. In one moment, more than a billion people heard about the problem of clefts and the plight of children like Pinki.
After that, for a little while, it felt as if the whole world had gone Pinki crazy. Pinki went on CNN, ABC, Good Morning America, and all the other big media outlets in America. We delivered the film to the doorsteps of more than a million homes, and after licensing Smile Pinki to HBO, it was watched by millions more. The movie helped us raise tens of millions of dollars, but just as importantly, it exponentially raised awareness for the problem of clefts throughout the Western world. If you Google Smile Pinki, you’ll get more than 79,000 hits. Dr. Subodh now has his own page on IMDb. While the film is no longer airing on HBO, you can still watch Smile Pinki online; just search for the film’s title on vimeo.com.
The film’s impact in India was perhaps even more significant. After the Academy Awards were announced, a local newspaper reporter went to Pinki’s village.
“We are singing and dancing to celebrate this victory,” said one villager. “The whole village is celebrating! Pinki, the girl we always used to tease because of her cleft lip—today the whole country is calling her name with pride.”
After his adventures in Hollywood, Dr. Subodh returned to Varanasi, and in the month following the Academy Awards, he and our other partner surgeons there operated on an additional 1,500 children. Even in the smallest and most remote villages in India, word of Pinki’s story had spread. We gave India’s biggest TV network, Doordarshan, which reaches a staggering 900 million people, permission to broadcast Smile Pinki in perpetuity. The state-owned network started screening the film every other month, and each time it aired, we saw a spike in new patients. All across India, people were learning that clefts are a birth defect, not a curse—and that there is a way they can be fixed, free of charge.
Smile Pinki taught us a lot about what happens when patients share their success stories. When someone like Pinki goes home to her village, she doesn’t even really need to say a word; it’s all written on her face. Her birth defect has been fixed. A cure is possible, through surgery. This is so important, especially in communities when people really fear going to hospitals, because very often people who go to hospitals never come back. We were recognizing that our patients were the most powerful tool for education and communication that we had.
To this day, every time Dr. Subodh finishes operating on a child, he invites the family into his office. He explains how to care for the child post-surgery and then he says something that shocks the family:
“Now you must pay the bill.”
The family protests—after all, they’ve been told repeatedly that surgery will be free of charge!
Then Subodh smiles and says: “Please don’t worry, please. You must pay not with money, but by going back to your village and finding another child who is suffering, and telling him to come here, to me, for help.”
Of course, the family members immediately agree.
“You are our heroes,” Subodh says. “Find us more children with clefts.”
Good Reads: Before and After by Brian F. Mullaney, Co-Founder of Smile Train and WonderWork.
