SM Venkat Manickam

Not everyone wants to make big bets in their career, some just want to fulfill their desires by taking the minimum risk involved way and they are happy with that too- such is the way SM Venkat Manickam, the ‘Tamil Production Executive’ defines his choice of career. He says that what he does isn’t very exciting job as such but then who cares for it once you have a family to take care of and are being paid decently; plus you keep working with new people every now and then and every time, the possibility that your role would be different is a very highly probable event.

Venkat Manickam hails from a joint family from a small village in ‘Tamil Nadu’. The profession he currently is in did not come naturally to him. He was a small village guy who wanted to provide for his family. Nowhere does it mean that he had a not so good financial background, the thing was that Venkat Manickam wanted to be seen as responsible. Being the eldest child, of course, he had to set a case for the family’s other kids and hence career choices were important. But as they say, you never know what happens when. Venkat Manickam moved to Chennai for a job and here he got to know about the opportunity as a script handler in a production firm.

Venkat reminisces that it was a small production house, not so famous but the pay scale was decent and he thought of giving it a shot. This time he was just an assistant to the main production executive. Things started working and soon he found himself handling payment arrangements at the vendor end which later on moved to managing paychecks for the movie cast and crew. Post this there was no looking back and Venkat Manickam has since then undertaken several roles in the capacity of a production executive.

And he is a happy guy, in his own words “I have worked with some of the biggest production houses in the industry and sometimes I get job offers from the production houses belonging to other languages also; of course it will be a tough choice to make for me since the domain would be new and you have to learn the culture of the new people you are going to work with but as long as it is challenging, how does that even matter?” Venkat is a jovial nice person who would invite you to a coffee at home for sure! We want him to enjoy all that life has to offer for his future attempts.